Pauline Webb did not pull her punches at the 1957 Methodist Conference. “Young Christians are fighting mad,” she said, “but we sometimes face the dreadful frustration of having nothing to fight for.” She went on to criticise the welfare state for “smothering young people in comfort”.
Her words quickly roused reporters dozing in the summer heat. Stirred, they sharpened their pencils to focus on Webb, a feisty, diminutive young woman whose blue eyes flashed with conviction. “Angry Young Woman Startles Parsons”, one paper reported. David English, future editor of the Daily Mail, followed Webb for a week writing columns about her activities for the Daily Sketch. Two comedians wrote a skit based on her outburst. Webb was mortified. “They’ve made a fool of you,” the eminent Methodist Donald (later Lord) Soper said. “But at least you are a fool for Christ.”
The incident brought Webb into the public eye. Arguably she never left it. She became the first woman to present the Daily Service on BBC Radio 4 and the youngest vice-president of the Methodist Conference. A frugal woman, she worked 15-hour days and often supped on baked beans on toast, but never chased celebrity or status. Conviction alone drove her battle for the ordination of women and unity among Christians, as well as her passionate opposition to racism.
She was astonished to be chosen in 1979 as the first woman and non-Anglican to direct religious broadcasting overseas for the BBC World Service. “I could only think that it was my address book that had proved to be my best qualification,” she said. Few others could rustle up the telephone numbers of heads of the world churches, but Webb had met them after being elected — thanks to a meaty speech on mission — the first woman to be a vice-moderator of the World Council of Churches.
When Pope Paul VI made his groundbreaking visit to the council in Geneva, Webb was the only woman photographed praying with him. The image splashed on the front page of The Times on June 11, 1969, Webb’s shock of white hair standing out next to the sparse heads of male colleagues.
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Blest with a dry wit, she nonetheless resisted suggestions that she greet his holiness with the words: “Hello Paul, I’m Pauline.” When his minders tried to stop her entering the boat taking the pope across Lake Geneva, he insisted that she sit beside him, and they conversed, in broken French, on inter-church unity.
Those who heard Webb speak rarely forgot her. Off-the-cuff remarks, made in a clear voice with a northern accent, invariably electrified her audience. The day Methodists debated the ethics of retaining shares in the Midland Bank, which had loaned money to the apartheid regime in South Africa, one speaker suggested that keeping the shares might bring influence over the bank. “They said the same thing about the slave trade,” Webb replied.
Pauline Mary Webb was the youngest of the three daughters of Leonard, a Yoruba-speaking Methodist missionary, and his wife, Daisy. She was born at Wembley in north London, but her family later moved to Leicester, then Lancashire and Staffordshire. Grasping the idea of missionary life at a young age, she tried to run away to China. As a teenager, her matriculation exam was interrupted by the drone of doodlebugs. She noted on the exam paper: “We lost five minutes due to enemy activity.”
After obtaining a degree in English at King’s College London and committing to the Chrisitan faith in the college chapel, Webb taught English and religious studies in Twickenham. A prayer for a change was answered when the Methodist Church invited her to become its youth secretary. Next she took over the publications of the Methodist Missionary Society and was invited to script films on overseas missions. Webb protested that she had never travelled farther than the Isle of Wight. “We’ll soon remedy that,” replied her boss, who dispatched her to India to make a film about the United Church of South India — the fruit of a 30-year negotiation between India’s Methodists, Anglicans and other Christians.
When the boat she sailed in docked at Cape Town, Webb planned to take a coach up the mountain. Observing that the Indian passengers were being shepherded towards a separate coach, she refused to go. Furious, she staged a demonstration against apartheid there and then in the dock.
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Her adventures only increased once she arrived in India. Asleep on a train, she woke to hear missionaries shouting her name. They dragged her from her berth to dine with the local bishop. Seeing Webb arrive, the bishop’s wife remarked: “There was a time when Europeans in India always dressed for dinner, but I don’t remember anyone arriving in a nightie before.”
The trip to India left her with an indelible experience of poverty. Ever after she counted every penny she spent. Equally influential was a year spent on an ecumenical programme at the Union Theological Seminary in New York during the civil rights campaign.
In 1965 — desperate for the taste of English custard — she returned home to take up an appointment as the youngest vice-president of the Methodist Conference. She was 38. Her experiences in America inspired her and she was a vocal defender of a controversial programme run by the World Council of Churches to fight racism, which involved dispatching grants for humanitarian aid to the African National Congress and other armed groups. Such campaigns bore unexpected consequences. Invited to preach in South Africa, Webb was banned from entry at Johannesburg airport. Ordered to wait at a hotel, she sneaked out to visit a local pastor. Twenty years later, to her delight, she met Nelson Mandela.
Once proposed to by a university friend while recovering in hospital from a slipped disc, Webb never married, but enjoyed a wide circle of friends. Young ministers found her warmth sometimes tempered by gentle rebukes. When one criticised another as “an old woman”, Webb inquired: “And what’s wrong with being an old woman?”
During her tenure at the BBC, she introduced interfaith debates, and a religious version of Desert Island Discs, which featured Dame Judi Dench and, shortly before he was taken hostage in Lebanon, Terry Waite. Webb was baffled when an Indian schoolteacher demanded to know where the Bible referred to ice cream after he had apparently heard such a reference on the World Service. A chance remark from a sports presenter revealed the source of the query to be the following joke relayed during a Test match commentary: “Where is ice cream mentioned in the Bible? In the Lyons of Judah and the Walls of Jericho.”
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She felt that the nearest she came to an on-air disaster was the day of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation as prime minister. Unaware of the news, Webb had prepared a show to chime with America’s Thanksgiving. Then a producer burst into the studio begging her to reveal the title of the opening hymn. Her choice — Now thank we all our God — was swiftly substituted. She later wrote World Wide Webb, a memoir stuffed with accounts of her travels, which was the last of her many books.
She retired to a Methodist home for the elderly that she had opened years earlier in Muswell Hill, north London. There Methodism’s famous daughter could be found reading the diary of John Wesley, the co-founder of the denomination that inspired her work.
Pauline Mary Webb, Methodist leader and broadcaster, was born on June 28, 1927. She died on April 27, 2017, aged 89