THE BBC presented Sarah Mullally as a ground-breaker in its coverage of her installation as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the real ground-breaker in the Church of England was George Carey, the archbishop that Margaret Thatcher chose in 1990.
Church Times writer Madeleine Davies was one of the BBC commentators at the service in Canterbury Cathedral. She said of Archbishop Mullally: ‘She has a background that we might not expect of somebody being installed into this position. She went to a comprehensive school. She went to a polytechnic university rather than Oxbridge. She’s spoken about her dyslexia . . . I think that’s more of a break with tradition than the fact that she is a woman.’
Carey was the first Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation not to have been educated at Oxbridge. Born as the son of a porter in London’s East End in 1935, he left school at 15 to work as an office boy at the London Electricity Board. He went to a secondary-modern school having failed his 11-plus. He became a Christian at the age of 17 after friends invited him to a youth club at a local church.
He described his conversion on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1995, saying: ‘I can date it to May 1953 . . . a strong overwhelming feeling that I had discovered something deeply important.’
He did National Service in the RAF as a radio operator with a deployment in Iraq. After the RAF, he started pursuing a vocation to be ordained in the Church of England. Within 15 months he passed three A-levels and six O-levels, and won a place at King’s College, London, to study Theology. He came up against snobbery in the established Church of the 1950s, being told by a snooty cleric that he would never make it to ordination. But he was ordained in 1962, serving as a parish minister and theological educator. He became Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1987.
Since 2007 the Church has chosen its archbishop but in 1990 the Prime Minister made the appointment from two candidates submitted by the Crown Nominations Commission. The unsuccessful candidate was not disclosed but it is reasonable to believe that Mrs Thatcher chose Carey, an evangelical from a working-class background, in preference to the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood, an Oxbridge-educated theological liberal from an upper-middle-class background.
Born in 1962, Mullally grew up in the middle-class town of Woking in Surrey, the daughter of an electrical engineer. She was ordained in 2001 as an unsalaried minister while she was the Chief Nursing Officer for England, a role that involved her in regular contact with senior politicians in the then Labour Government led by Tony Blair. Her rise to the higher echelons of the Church was much faster than Carey’s. She became the suffragan Bishop of Crediton in Devon in 2015 and Bishop of London in 2018.
Writing in the Christian Century on March 24, the Catholic journalist Catherine Pepinster described ‘how a network of ordained women got Sarah Mullally to Canterbury’.
She said: ‘When Sarah Mullally is installed as the 106th archbishop of Canterbury on Wednesday [March 25], it is her gender that will likely be the most remarked upon part of her ascent to “first among equals” among Anglican bishops. However, Mullally’s sometimes twisting journey to Canterbury may never have been completed if it hadn’t been for an Anglican organisation called Leading Women. Little known but highly influential in British women’s incremental rise in church leadership, the group mentored women who had the potential to be bishops.’
Pepinster related that June Osborne, then Dean of Salisbury, launched Leading Women as a year-long mentoring programme in 2010 along with Lucy Winkett, Precentor at St Paul’s Cathedral; Keith Lamdin, Principal of Sarum College, Salisbury; and Jane Shaw, Dean of Divinity at New College, Oxford.
Mullally went on Leading Women in 2012. According to Pepinster: ‘By then, she was one of a team in Sutton, in London’s outer suburbs, leading three parishes. Two months after the Leading Women course, a vacancy arose for a canon treasurer at Salisbury Cathedral. Osborne encouraged Mullally to apply. It was her first step into church leadership, followed shortly by her appointment as Bishop of Crediton in 2015, which led to the highly prestigious see of London.’
Since Carey stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, the Church of England has been led by an Oxbridge academic in Rowan Williams, an Old Etonian oil executive in Justin Welby and now a female NHS executive in Sarah Mullally. Could any sensible person believe that an institution that has been so captured by middle-class neo-Marxists will ever again be led by a man from a working-class background?
George Carey was the true ground-breaker and, under God, Mrs Thatcher made it happen.
