In an age of class and privilege the Anglican clergyman of 1914 was a bastion of the establishment. Locally, he enjoyed very considerable respect and even engendered a certain amount of awe. He ranked with the family doctor as being gentlemanly, useful in an emergency and reasonably well-known to the community at large. All this was equally true of the evangelical parson, noted for his emphasis on preaching the gospel and teaching the Bible, rather than administering the sacraments which, however, he did not neglect, but above all, he preached for conversion, whereby he not only looked for the salvation of the individual but also for the equipping of the church with a workforce for its further extension.

However, our evangelical incumbent of between fifty and seventy years ago was not a popular man outside his parish or outside the parameters of a clearly defined Evangelicalism, whose influence was also present in all the Free Churches. Generally speaking, Evangelicals at that time had little or no interest in the arts, politics, social life and feeding the hungry. Very much in command of his local church, the evangelical parson was head and shoulders above most members of his congregation – better educated, probably at one of the ancient universities, he only occasionally allowed a curate to preach the Word. There thus developed in Evangelical Anglicanism something of a ‘siege mentality’ and, due to their isolationism, its clergy were virtually ‘black-listed’ by their own Church.