Woodbine Willie
by Mike Oettle
“I KNOW what
you’re thinking, here comes a bloody parson.” That’s how Geoffrey Studdert
Kennedy began at the smoking concert held at St Pol in northern France for the
men of the British 4th Army School and their guests in 1917.
Throughout his life he startled and often annoyed some of his listeners by such language, but for thousands of men and women of his day he was the only man who could make God and Jesus Christ real, expressing the most profound truths in language that could be understood and appreciated by the simple and uneducated.
Before
anyone accuses me of plagiarism, let me confess that the opening paragraphs of
this article is copied straight out of Saints of the Twentieth Century,
by Brother Kenneth of the Community of the Glorious Ascension. It has Kennedy
– also known as “Woodbine Willie”, because of his practice of passing a packet
of his favourite brand of smokes around – to a T.
Geoffrey
Anketell Studdert Kennedy was born in 1883 in Leeds (now in West Yorkshire),
where his father was vicar of St Mary’s, Quarry Hill. Perhaps the family’s
Irish origin says something about his bohemian character; at any rate, he
completed his education at Trinity College, Dublin, before becoming a teacher.
He did not stay at this profession long; certain now that he ought to be a
priest, he went to Ripon Hall theological college at Oxford, where he soon
showed that he was destined to be a preacher of considerable power. While a
curate in Rugby he discovered that if he did not preach at least twice on a
Sunday he was most unhappy. But an orthodox preacher he was not.
Geoffrey summed up his faith with the words: “I bet my life on Christ – Christ crucified.” Brother Kenneth records: “Once he was to tell a pious congregation with a beautiful and ancient parish church that sometimes he felt he would like to take a great sledgehammer and smash every stained glass window in the church, and then go out and celebrate the Eucharist in a field with a tea-cup and plate.”
And Geoffrey wrote: “Nobody worries about Christ as long as he can be kept shut up in churches. He is quite safe there. But there is always trouble if you try to let him out.”
Geoffrey was generosity itself. His landlady, knowing he would give anyone the shirt off his back, made him give her all his money and would dole it out to him. She once gave him an overcoat – which he also gave away.
In 1912 Geoffrey went to help his father at St Mary’s, and in 1914 he married.[1]
His father died, and the parish wanted him to stay on, but instead he was
offered three other livings. He took the poorest, St Paul’s, Worcester – after
asking his wife whether she would accept living in the vicarage.
The
outbreak of the First World War that same year changed everything. Geoffrey
exhorted all able-bodied men to volunteer and himself became an army chaplain
at the first opportunity. He was everything a chaplain should be – he won the
Military Cross for his (unarmed) action under fire in a first aid post – but
his war experience also made him see that war was not the way to build a
better world.
Of course, even in the army he remained unconventional. He once advised a new padre: “Take a box of fags in your haversack and a great deal of love in your heart.” Greatly loved and widely known, Geoffrey was appointed a royal chaplain when he left the army in 1919.
He was no longer drawn to parish work, and joined the Industrial Christian Fellowship, a body dedicated to Christian socialism and to lay evangelism on the factory floor and in the streets. He became vicar of a church in the City of London which required his attendance only on Sundays, and devoted himself to ICF work, travelling up and down England.
Geoffrey was an asthma sufferer all his life, and the strains he laid on his constitution through his travelling and his smoking must have shortened his life considerably. It is easy to look back now and say he should not have smoked, but it was not for another generation that medicine realised its dangers. Geoffrey used cigarettes (and his generosity with them and everything else) as a means of getting across to people, and did it with great success.
In March 1929, although he was sick, he went to Liverpool on one of his many engagements and died there on the 8th. As his body was being taken across the Mersey by ferry, somebody stepped forward and laid a packet of Woodbines on his coffin.
William Temple[2] wrote of him (and here I am again quoting
Brother Kenneth): “If to be a priest is to carry others on the heart and offer
them with self in the sacrifice of human nature – The Body and the Blood – to
God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ – then Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was
the finest priest I have ever known.”
