Alan Ecclestone
by Tim Gorringe
 
Alan Ecclestone (1904-1992), was born in the Potteries in 1904 and educated at the local grammar school, from where he gained a scholarship to Cambridge in 1922 to read English and History. At School his English teacher had already introduced him to the Catholic Crusade, and from Cambridge he used to cycle to Thetford to Conrad Noel's services. After university he taught English for a year in Kings Lynn, and was then offered a post in English at Durham where he taught from 1927 to 1930. At the same time he began teaching courses for the W.E.A., a commitment he kept up for the rest of his working life. The ideals of the Catholic Crusade led him to give up what would surely have been a highly successful university career and become a priest. He served his title in Carlisle and then took on a curacy in Barrow in 1934. In the same year he married Delia Abraham, the most radical of the children of the Bishop of Derby, who shared both his faith and his politics. The couple had three children. In 1936 he obtained his first living in Frizington, a Cumbrian mining village where unemployment was high and poverty severe. Here he began to develop Crusade ideas, attempting to re-orient church life around a weekly meeting where every facet of human life was up for discussion. Through a networking leaflet called 'The Leap' he sought to extend this idea throughout the area. These activities brought him to the attention of the Bishop of Sheffield, Lesley Hunter, who asked him to come to Darnall, an inner city parish in the heart of the Sheffield steelmaking district . Ecclestone moved there in 1942, and stayed there for the rest of his working life, until 1969. Here he at once began what was by now called the 'Parish Meeting'. Politics, both national and local, was always high on the agenda, but so was art, literature, history and theology.
 
Disillusionment with the Attlee government led him to join the communist party in April 1948. He and his wife remained faithful party members throughout the traumas caused by the invasions of Hungary(1956) and Czechoslovakia(1968). Ecclestone became a well known Party speaker, headed a delegation to Tashkent in 1955, and campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the Soviet inspired Peace Conference. His activity here was instrumental in the choice of Sheffield as the venue for the second World Peace Conference in 1950, opened by a speech from Picasso. The hostility of the Labour government led to the refusal of visas for many delegates, including Shostakovitch, Pablo Neruda and Paul Robeson, and the conference shifted, after three days, to Warsaw, with Ecclestone in train. In the 1960s he stood six times as Communist candidate for Darnall ward, losing his deposit each time. This activity scandalized even progressive bishops like George Bell and made promotion, and even a change of parish, impossible. For most church people his stand seemed morally grotesque. Ecclestone always insisted, however, that the church was guilty of crimes equally as great as the Party, and believed that commitment to a person, place, calling or principle should not be lightly revoked. In the late sixties he was a prominent member of the Christian Marxist dialogue then taking place throughout Europe. He finally left the Party for the purely tactical reason that his vote might count. It was a decision he almost instantly regretted.
 
Throughout the years in Sheffield he continued to teach for the WEA, mostly in English and History, and no class ever failed. In the parish he was an innovator liturgically, anticipating many later developments in his services for marriage, baptism and the eucharist. After retirement in 1969 he settled down to write, and the first of his major books, Yes to God(1975), won the Collins Religious Book Prize. The book put the concept of prayer on to a completely new footing, understanding it as part of the fabric of our response to sexuality, art, literature and politics, and it remains one of the truly creative works of spirituality of the twentieth century. None of the later books had the same success, though The Night Sky of the Lord(1980), a book about Christian responses to the Holocaust, won appreciation especially from the Jewish community. These books and his earlier reputation made him a much sought after speaker at retreats and conferences.
 
Ecclestone died in London in on 14th December 1992 after a series of strokes and was buried in Gosforth. As the primary exemplar of the union of mystique and politique in twentieth century Anglicanism he remains a seminal figure but it is likely that he will be remembered chiefly for his work on prayer.
 
Timothy Gorringe is St Luke's Professor of Theological Studies at the University of Exeter and the author of Alan Ecclestone: Priest as Revolutionary (Cairns, 1994)