When the former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie used to visit his friend Ronald Gordon in his last post as sub-dean of Christ Church, Oxford in the 1990s, he would tell the porter he had come to see “Miss Barr”.
The late Dorothy “Dolly” Barr was the formidable housekeeper who worked for Gordon, a former Bishop of Portsmouth, and who, in the late 1980s, became head of staff for Archbishop Runcie. She first joined him when he was vicar of St Peter’s in the slums of Spring Hill, Birmingham, in the 1960s and stayed with him right through his ministry, remaining his personal housekeeper when he had his own flat as bishop at Lambeth. This was the kind of loyalty that Gordon evoked. His life was one of music, friendship, service and the poetry of the liturgy.
A devout Anglo-Catholic, he served best in a collegiate environment, preferring to be an enabler rather than a leader. Friends recall visiting him when he was Bishop of Portsmouth and finding him huddled pensively around a small gas fire in a cavernous reception room, which dwarfed his beloved piano. He was stoical in the face of loneliness but Runcie heard his spirit cry out and invited him to his post at Lambeth with the words from II Timothy that Gordon liked to quote: “Do thy diligence to come before winter.”
Archibald Ronald McDonald Gordon was born in 1927, the oldest of three children of Sir Archibald Gordon, legal adviser at the British Embassy in Washington. Gordon was educated at Rugby School and went up to Balliol College Oxford as an organ scholar, after National Service in the RAF. He could have become a professional musician like his sister Alison, to whom he was close, but instead felt called to the Church. He trained at Ripon College, Cuddesdon and in 1959 moved to Spring Hill, in Birmingham where his first act was to cut the barbed wire from the vicarage gate. The Rev Nick Stacey, then chaplain to the Bishop of Birmingham, had set up a new ordination training scheme that would allow young men to experience something of “real life” before going to theological college. Gordon led the scheme, which saw people such as John Morrison, the future archdeacon of Oxford, spend a year making car parts in Lucas’s factory while living in the vast vicarage in Spring Hill and helping out on Sundays. Ordinands recall a lively traditionalist ministry which completely revitalised the moribund parish. In the vicarage was the piano that went everywhere with Gordon, around which the young men would gather in the evenings, singing music hall songs. Gordon’s party piece was to sit on the floor with his back to the piano, from which position he would play it with both hands crossed behind his head. The joy this brought and his time at Spring Hill, modelled the communal life that formed Gordon’s ministry from then onwards.
The curates who served under him included Michael Marshall, Christopher Hill, Martyn Jarrett and Martin Shaw, all future bishops. One of the servers at the late Victorian church, now owned by the New Testament Church of God, was of Jamaican origin and his father led a jazz band. It was typical of Gordon, and revolutionary for its time, that the band was invited into church and jazz music used to enliven the worship. He never married but was a diligent godfather to five young people who attended his funeral where the Bishop of Norwich, Graham James, chaplain to Runcie during Gordon’s time at Lambeth, described Gordon as “the very model of a servant bishop”.
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Like Runcie, Gordon belonged to a generation for whom the disciplines of devotional life were not paraded for admiration. At Lambeth, the team was often up before dawn to say the Divine Office. Such things were simply lived and rarely spoken of outside chapel. He could be adventurous; any who believed him cautious had clearly never experienced a ride in his car. In Who’s Who, he listed “refraining from giving advice” as a recreation, yet many still sought it. Rarely was his counsel needed as much as it was during the 1988 Lambeth Conference — one of the most challenging of the 20th century — when the Anglican Communion decided to ordain women priests. He also handled the transition from Runcie to his successor, George Carey.
A debate that took place at Lambeth in 1988 when Michael Ramsey died evokes the spirit of an era when grammar and theology dominated discussion. Questions arose about the inscription to be placed on Ramsey’s memorial tablet at Canterbury Cathedral. Gordon wanted some words from Irenaeus but there was a long dispute among staff at Lambeth over whether the translation should be “The glory of God is the living man” or “The glory of God is a living man”. Lady Ramsey was puzzled by the attention given to whether the definite or indefinite article should be used. Was Irenaeus referring to all of mankind, or just to Jesus? In the end, Gordon and his colleagues agreed the inscription should read: “The glory of God is the living man; and the life of man is the vision of God.”
While sub-dean of Christ Church Oxford, he ran the cathedral with great success. From 1992 he was president of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta and visited India often, successfully promoting music among children. During retirement in Abingdon, he served as an assistant bishop and would take Miss Barr, by then living in care and ill with Alzheimer’s, out for a pub lunch twice a week and to church every Sunday — even though she did not have a clue who he was.
The Right Rev Ronald Gordon, former Bishop of Portsmouth, was born on March 19, 1927. He died on August 8, 2015, aged 88