When The Rules About Health and Safety Were Rather Less Demanding

Published on: 27 May, 2018
Updated on: 29 May, 2018

By Dave Reading

Roof repairs to St Francis, Church, Buckingham Road, Westborough.

This was my dad, Ron Reading (right), and his friend Colin Hopper sometime in the early 1960s pictured on the roof of St Francis Church, Westborough.

The vicar, the Rev Roy Trevivian, had announced that he needed a spot of minor repairs done to the roof so two volunteers from the parish stepped forward. They didn’t need a safety harness, just a ladder and the tools to do the job. Different times.

Although my dad wasn’t a regular church-goer, he was always ready to support my mum, Wyn Reading, who had been converted to Christianity at a Billy Graham rally at Wembley in 1954.

From that point in the mid-1950s the local church became a central part of our lives. I was six at the time. While some people saw Billy Graham as a manipulative Yankee spellbinder, my mother and her friends rejoiced in having found a positive message to live by.

For the next 11 years, she was a live wire at St Francis, attending services twice every Sunday and getting involved in any social events that were going.

In the early 1960s, when famine tore through parts of Africa, a powerful sermon by the curate, the Rev Paul Barber, inspired her and her friends to reflect on their own relatively comfortable lives.

I remember our family eating a plain sandwich lunch instead of roast beef three Sundays in a row, and handing over the money we saved to War on Want.

My father remained an atheist until the end of his life – the stories narrated in the Bible were too far-fetched for such a practical man – but he accepted my mother’s religious enthusiasm with no complaints. When the church roof needed fixing he volunteered to lend a hand; when the old lady across the street couldn’t get to evensong, he was there to give her a lift.

Although I’m no longer a practising Christian, I remember many happy and interesting times at St Francis. Thankfully the old-style, grim-faced hell-and-damnation type of preaching was absent. At least there was an attempt to move with the times and accept that the world was changing.

When a local church-goer wrote a letter to the Surrey Advertiser expressing outrage that the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Rev George Reindorp, had been photographed dancing the twist at a local social event, Roy Trevivian was having none of it.

Here he is quoted by historian David Rose in his book The building of St Clare’s Church, Park Barn, Guildford: “I’m fed up to the teeth with ‘dignified’ Christianity which has ended up convincing 90 per cent of the population that Christianity has nothing to do with them. This J— character talks about the holy office of the bishop demanding a certain dignity. I wonder how much dignity of his kind he would have found in that stinking stable in Bethlehem; as he watched a little boy running about the streets of Nazareth with patches on His trousers, sleeping rough under the hedges of Palestine; and when He was a Man finally being spat on by a jeering mob of respectable persons.”

Roy Trevivian was much missed when he left the parish in 1964 to take a job as a radio producer in the BBC’s religious department.