How Bishops of Durham benefitted from a drop of what they fancied

Many, from the King to the Archbishop of Canterbury, had called for prohibition. Henson was clearly a man who believed in a drop of what you fancy.

“Drunkenness is the enemy and not the reasonable and moderate consumption of alcohol which has ever formed the habit of self-respecting men in these latitudes,” he wrote.

“To cite total abstinence as a cure for national drunkenness is as reasonable as to offer celibacy as a cure for national impurity.”

Son of a strict Plymouth Brethren member, Hensley Henson was neither baptised nor allowed to go to school until he was 14. He was seen as a champion of the poor – often inviting miners to Auckland Castle – but opposed strikes, trades unions, Socialism and the Jarrow March.

After five years as dean – “at times colourful and occasionally controversial,” concedes a Cathedral history – he was appointed Bishop of Hereford in 1917.

“Like putting an armoured car in an orchard of apple trees,” said a critic, recalling – rather appropriately – that Herefordshire is where the cider apples grow.

He returned to Durham in 1920, bishop for 19 years, a man who appeared to make admirers and opponents with equal felicity.

Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of York, is said to have complained that a portrait made him look “pompous, proud and prelatical.”

“And to which of those epithets,” asked Henson, “does your grace take exception?” Lang became Archbishop of Canterbury; Henson never left Durham until his retirement in 1939, though he still kept in touch with old friends.

Gordon Batho, in the third volume of the excellent Durham Biographies series, recalled that the retired bishop had written to Cyril Allington, Durham’s dean in the 1940s, after hearing that Socialist leaders were to dine at the deanery. “He advised,” said Prof Batho, “of many ecclesiastical precedents for poisoning enemies.”

Henson’s Times letter, happily exhumed, claimed no place for total abstinence in the teachings of Christ or the practice of the church.

He died, aged 84, in 1947. In a wholly affectionate obituary in the Spectator, Canon A R Dolphin recalled an occasion when he and Henson had been walking on the Roman Wall.

At lunchtime they’d stopped for a picnic. “A bottle of wine and no women,” said the Bishop of Durham. “This is the very idea of bliss.”

THAT was January 4, 1916. On January 8, 2016 a front page story in The Times was headlined “Single drink is one too many, warn health chiefs.” The more things change the more they stay the same, as doubtless they observe in saloon bars everywhere.

HERBERT Hensley Henson hitherto has happenstanced once or twice in these columns, including the occasion on which he was invited to a Darlington football match by William Jordan, Vicar of St Cuthbert’s and former West Bromwich Albion centre forward.

Jordan, a Quakers’ director, had been called away. On returning, he asked his bishop – not known as a sportsman – how Darlington were getting on.

“I don’t know,” said Henson, “but to judge by all the shouting, I’d say that the so-and-so’s were winning.”

Perhaps the most enduring Henson story, however, concerns the day of the 1925 Durham Miners’ Gala. Pitmen, unimpressed by his anti-union attitudes and inflamed by a Ramsay MacDonald reference to him, sought to deposit the bishop in the Wear.

Alcohol, to which in those latitudes they were moderately given, may also have played a part. They picked the wrong man.

The church dignitary in gaiters, top hat and ecclesiastical apron wasn’t Henson, but James Welldon, the Dean of Durham and himself a bishop. Welldon and a companion were manhandled but were rescued by the constabulary and escaped in one of Brown’s boats.

Gordon Batho recalled the incident, and the belief that Henson himself had undergone a non-scriptural total immersion. “Bishop Welldon lost his hat, his umbrella and his dignity. Contrary to popular myth, Hensley Henson was unscathed.”

THE history quiz in the same edition of The Times sought the identity of the first man to escape from the Tower of London.

Blow me if that wasn’t another Bishop of Durham, and with a whiff of the barmaid’s tabard about that one, an’ all.

That Ranulf Flambard – Flambard was a nickname, meaning “fiery” – is said also to have been the Tower’s first inmate should not diminish his inescapable place in history.

Like Henson, Flambard was oft-controversial, variously described as a “malignant genius” and as a man of financial ruthlessness and low morals.

Holder of high offices of state under William Rufus, he was appointed Bishop of Durham – with all the power and privilege which then the see commanded – but after William’s death was imprisoned by Henry I on charges of embezzlement.

Friends, it’s said, smuggled a rope inside a flagon of wine. The guards drank the wine, perhaps not entirely in moderation, and soon fell into a drunken sleep. Flambard hot footed it down the rope, made good his escape in a carriage and spent the next five years in Normandy before returning to Durham.

History records that he oversaw the near-completion of the great cathedral, fortified the castle, cleared and levelled Palace Green – in front of the cathedral – and was behind the erection of Framwellgate Bridge, Durham’s first in stone.

Save for the demon drink, he might have rotted in the Tower – and the city of Durham could have been a very different place.

IRRESISTIBLE not to mention the history quiz clanger confessed in the Corrections and Clarifications corner of Saturday’s Times. “It was George VI who presented Malta with the George Cross in 1942 and not George IV, who died in 1830.”

Fairness therefore compels acknowledgment of an apparent typo in our own Events section, spotted by Anne Reynolds in High Grange, near Crook.

Promoting an orienteering-type event in Gateshead, we urged readers to “Grab their willies”, which Anne admits sounds interesting, but mightn’t be suitable for family entertainment.

It’s possible we meant wellies: boot on the other foot.

SOMEWHAT incredulously, even in the presently apocalyptic conditions, last week’s column noted that the Reeth and District Gazette was offering advice to Swaledale’s citizens on what to do if confronted by a crocodile. Stick your fingers in its eyes, apparently.

The incredulity was perhaps premature. At the dominoes the night before the column appeared, someone produced a tabloid with the banner headline “Crocodile spotted in York floods” and the sub-head “Authorities appeal for calm as panic grips.”

The Sunday Sport, the publication in question, seemed not overly keen to amplify the still small voice of calm. “Refugees returning to their saturated homes face the threat of being eaten WHOLE by the rampaging reptile,” it added.

The croc shock wasn’t the splash, as the inky trade appropriately calls it. That was “Drunken monkey hijacks bus.” It never rains...