“Being a worker priest alongside other people is a state of mind”

“Being a worker priest alongside other people is a state of mind, an attitude, a way of relating to people and I think that has stayed with me in all I’ve done. It’s been at the heart of it”.

My father Canon Tony Williamson spoke these words in an interview recorded just over five years ago. He did many interviews during his life, and this was his last; he died a couple of weeks later, on February 12 2019.  

I have reflected on these words as I’ve listened to and written down those of other worker priests. Since Tony’s death I’ve interviewed people in several countries who have been ordained and have chosen to work ‘alongside other people’. They often do manual work, or low paid, or insecure work, or all three. I’ve spoken, among others, with shop, canteen and café staff, a hairdresser, an ambulance worker, parcel handlers in logistics centres and a dairy farmer who milks 50 cows a day.  

I also thought of these words as I researched and wrote about the history of the worker priest movement, and in some cases the sacrifices priests have made for their beliefs.

Below, I’ve collected some of these words (you can click through on each entry to read more). Doing so has helped me grasp that being a worker priest today, as in the past, is indeed not just about what work you do but about how you do it. It is about the approach you take, the way you relate to people.

                                                           ************

“The kitchen is a world of its own - every place of work probably has its own rules. I like to work in the kitchen even if the tone is not exactly socially acceptable: I prefer someone to say to me ‘you f**king w**nker, work faster’, to tell me the truth, rather than wrap up the message in cotton wool”

Vuk prepares meals in a hospital canteen, takes out the rubbish, delivers food to the wards (Germany)

“I alternate between shifts from 6am to 2pm and 2pm to 10pm. I work every second Saturday, it’s hard work. This was getting too much for me, physically so I asked to reduce my hours. Recently I was given a permanent contract which I didn’t expect but am pleased about”.

Maria Jans-Wenstrup packages consumer goods at a parcel delivery centre (Germany)

“The course was the idea of Mervyn Stockwood, bishop of Southwark. The Church, he argued should get alongside those in society who (have) no inclination to go near the Church”. It was no coincidence that it was he who founded the course: he divided opinion like few others with his often flamboyant gestures and ideas and readiness to break with church traditions”.

Feature on the Southwark Ordination Course, founded in the early 1960s, the first such course aiming to train worker priests (UK)

“I often put the colour on (a customer’s hair), then have to wait 20 minutes. In this time I might write next Sunday’s intercessions or work on a sermon…I have hundreds times deeper conversations with scissors in my hand than in church”.

Anthea Mitchell is a full-time hairdresser with her own salon (UK)  

“Being a priest is not primarily about sacraments and preaching; it’s about how you deal with people. When people are low you can say something funny. Or I would offer ‘would you mind if I pray for you?’ People who didn’t believe in God appreciated it when I thought of them”.

Mark van Beeumen working in a Tesco’s supermarket, filling shelves and on the check-out (UK)

“I stumbled over legs, and voices in the dark asked all kinds of questions. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? Where have you come from?’ The cell was occupied by seven or eight Russians and Poles and three little French lads of eighteen or twenty. I sat on the ground like the rest and when in the darkness I explained that I didn’t know the reason for my arrest but ‘perhaps it was my activity as a Catholic’ I felt them all suddenly stop short”.

Feature including this extract from the diary of Henri Perrin, describing how he entered his prison cell in Leipzig in 1943 after being captured by the Gestapo.  He was one of a group of French worker priests who worked secretly among French forced labourers in factories Nazi Germany. Several died in concentration camps. Perrin survived.  

“Cleaning two or three houses a day is hard work. I realise I’m getting old. I worry I won’t be able to do this until retirement age…One (client who attended a service taken by Anne-Marieke) said: ‘Our cleaner is also a preacher!’. I’m missing the space in church to talk about faith in daily life”.

Anne-Marieke Koot cleans homes for a living (Netherlands)

“People came to me as (I was working as) a priest often at three key times: baptism, marriage and funerals. These were important moments but I felt the need to really share the daily lives of people I live among. It’s of course about trying to live like Jesus of Nazareth”.

Lionel Vandenbriele works for a private ambulance company transporting patients to hospital (France)

Lord Mayor's family helps out at Oxford town hall carols

Tony was Oxford Lord Mayor 40 years ago, 1982-83. This piece brings back to life an episode where he had the chance to involve his father in this civil office, by asking him to sing. The piece was published in the Oxford Mail with a family picture on December 19, 2022

The Oxford tradition of a Christmas carol concert hosted by the Lord Mayor in the Town Hall dates back many years.

The event 40 years ago was memorable as it came at the end of a turbulent year and featured a Lord Mayor who couldn’t sing.

He asked his dad and his daughter for help.

The Lord Mayor was the Rev Tony Williamson, a Labour councillor who had the unusual job as ‘worker priest’ in the Pressed Steel car plant in Cowley (now part of BMW’s Mini factory).

By 1982, when he became Lord Mayor, Mr Williamson had been driving a forklift truck in Pressed Steel for more than 20 years.

He was also a trade union leader there.

He was ordained in the Church of England, but chose this work over being a parish priest.

His year as Lord Mayor coincided with dramatic national and international events. At home, political tensions were running high. Unemployment had risen to more than three million for the first time since the 1930s, triggering national protests.

Internationally, the Falklands war, fought against Argentina in spring 1982, was still a fresh memory.

Several British sailors killed came from Oxfordshire.

The IRA, fighting for a united Ireland, stepped up attacks on British soil.

Bomb scares in Oxford were common - just a few days before the carol concert, Cornmarket Street was shut by such a scare.

Against this backdrop, the carol concert perhaps came as light relief. As usual, organisers expected the Lord Mayor to perform the part of the King when it came to singing Good King Wenceslas.

However, Mr Williamson said he couldn’t sing so he asked his father, the Rev Joseph Williamson, to step in. He asked his 22-year-old daughter, Ruth, to sing the part of the page.

Joseph Williamson, known as Father Joe, had a good voice. He had sung as a child, growing up in poverty in east London, entering the church choir and starting his path to priesthood.

He sang decades later as a priest, back in east London, campaigning on social justice issues, a role that led to his character featuring in the TV drama ‘Call the Midwife’.

But he was now 87.

He was keen to sing, but frail. Would his health hold up? He was sick on the morning of the concert, but was determined to perform.

Tony Williamson’s wife, Barbara, kept a diary of her year as Lady Mayoress. She noted: “When we reached Good King Wenceslas, Joe astonished everyone by the volume of his singing!”

The oldest King for many years at the Lord Mayor’s carols had sung his part.

•My thanks to Tony Williamson’s son, Hugh, for this article.

He is now writing a memoir about his father.

Faith in the Factories

it’s good to share the work of others. Here’s a thoughtful, finely crafted piece by writer Paul Walsh on the links between left-wing politics and faith, with a focus on worker priests. Its published in Tribune magazine, in the UK. Full disclosure - my father Tony Williamson is featured and I’m interviewed. You can read it here

Marching for Colonial Freedom: Race issues in Oxford – in the ‘60s and today

Update: The Oxford Mail and Oxford Times have both published this blog. The version in the Oxford Mail, published on 1 April 2021 is here

Sorting through my father’s papers at his home near Oxford,
I come across cuttings from the local paper, the Oxford Mail that give me a
jolt. They are about events in the city decades ago, in the 1960s. Yet there
are such strong parallels to today.

One of the moments of this summer in Oxford has been the
renewed protests on the city’s streets against the statue of Victorian
imperialist Cecil Rhodes outside Oriel College. Hundreds marched down the High
Street and sat outside the college entrance, a building funded a century ago by
Rhodes.  “Rhodes Must Fall” is the protesters’ battle cry.

Confronting Britain’s colonial past; Black Lives Matter; Windrush.
Themes of this spring, this summer. And of course, just a few months earlier:
Brexit, ‘take back control’; cuts to immigration.   

Parallels to Oxford in early 1962. The Conservative
government under prime minister Harald Macmillan had tabled the Commonwealth Immigration
Bill, to heavily limit immigration from the former colonies in the
Commonwealth. The Tories said it was necessary to protect jobs of British
people. Labour called the draft “cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation”.

People from many walks of life in Oxford opposed the Bill. Tens
of thousands of people from the Commonwealth had in the proceeding years settled
in Oxford, filling labour shortages in industry and the public sector, giving the
city a multicultural identity earlier than other places. Pressure groups were
emerging to promote racial integration and anti-racism.

Canon Tony Williamson, my father, was part of this movement.
He was a freshly elected Labour member of Oxford council, giving him a voice, a
platform, to speak out.

On Sunday 4th February 1962 those opposing the Bill, marching under the banner of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, processed through the town centre, ending outside St John’s College on St Giles.

My father spoke to the crowd. As the Oxford Mail reported: “Mr
Williamson, waving a copy of the Bill, told an audience of about 200 people: “We
have got to see that we get over this problem without making coloured people
scapegoats. We cannot build our council houses in Oxford because we have not
got enough labour. We have 3,000 jobs waiting and yet we say ‘No, you cannot
come in’”.

Despite this protest, and others across the country, this
battle was lost – the Bill became law in July that year. Race relations didn’t disappeared
from the political agenda, however.

Conflicts over race and racism were brewing in the 1960s and
early 1970s, also in Oxford. In one case that made national headlines, an
Indian man, Hans Raj Gupta, who worked on the Oxford buses, was the victim of a
racist attack outside his home, only months after he had been recognized as the
first Indian in Oxford to become bus inspector.

Dozens of anti-racism protesters were arrested for occupying
Annette’s hair salon on the Cowley Road, after staff refused to cut the hair of
Black and Asian customers. Dozens more were detained when Enoch Powell, the
far-right politician, came to speak at Oxford town hall.  And the offices of the Oxford Committee for
Racial Integration (OCRI), a pioneering anti-racist community organization set
up in 1965, were vandalized. OCRI warned of the rise of the “extreme right”.

Tony was chair of OCRI for two years in the late 1960s. Indeed,
this was the time in his career when he was most focused on anti-racism work.

One more example from his files.

In 1965 – again, according to the Oxford Mail - Tony played
a big part in overturning an evidently  racist decision by Oxford police that stirred
such a controversy that it reached the Home Office and House of Commons. Immigration
officers blocked Ghulam Shabir, a 15 year old Pakistani boy from entering the
UK to join family members in Oxford, based on a local police report that the
family was living in overcrowded conditions.

Tony was shocked by the immigration decision, called up Oxford
police and council officials and compiled facts on the case – leading to an abrupt
police climbdown, admitting their original report was untrue.

 “A dogged tracking back of the facts by Councillor the Rev A W Williamson”, as the Oxford Mail noted,
forced a retreat by the Home Office and a decision to allow Ghulam to re-apply
for an entry permit to the UK.

This week I visited the Oxford sites of the current and
historic struggles against racism. It was quiet outside Oriel, and later on my
stroll, also outside St John’s. A few tourists, but no protesters that day.  

Cecil Rhodes, Oriel College, Oxford

As I stood outside St John’s, I wondered about Tony’s mood
as he prepared to speak to the crowds on that Sunday afternoon. Was he nervous?
He was after all only 28 at the time and had only been a councillor for nine months.

St John’s College, Oxford

Tony told me racism was a problem in the car factory where
he worked, towards black and Asian colleagues, from managers and workers. Maybe
it was also a problem in Cowley, the largely working-class district where he
lived with my mother and sister. Did this motivate him to speak out? Or did he
sense the growing significance of questions of race in society, in the years, the
decades to come?

History has a long arc, connecting dots spread across decades
- and places only a few minutes apart on a summer walk through Oxford.

“I stumbled over legs, and voices in the dark asked all kinds of questions”: Tribute to Henri Perrin, French Worker Priest in NaziGermany

May 8th 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the end of Word War II. To mark this occasion, I’m posting a short tribute to Henri Perrin, a remarkable French worker priest who secretly helped French labourers
and others working in arms factories in Nazi Germany. Perrin landed in jail and
was eventually deported back to France where after the war he became a worker
priest alongside industrial labourers.

Perrin was one of a group of 26 Catholic priests who had
volunteered for a dangerous secret mission organized by the Catholic church in
France during the war. The mission was to give spiritual support to French people
brought as forced labourers by the Nazi regime to Germany to keep its factories
going.

I can’t squeeze into this short blog post answers to obvious
questions such as how this mission came about, what happened to the priests and
how it fits with the history of the French worker priest movement. I hope to
publish more on these aspects soon.

In the meantime: Before the coronavirus lockdown, I took the
train to Leipzig, to retrace the footsteps of Perrin, who lived there for nine
months between August 1943 to April 1944.  I visited the industrial site near what is now
Leipzig’s exhibition centre where Perrin worked in an engineering factory. I drank
coffee with the helpful staff at Leipzig’s forced labour documentation centre.

Cover of Perrin’s Autobiography

And I visited the Leipzig prison where Perrin was held for
four months after being captured for his priestly work. Some notes from this part
of my trip:

The four-storey prison block the city’s central police
station is over a century old. The walkways are narrow, sounds echo around the
enclosed atrium. The narrow cells, with heavy wooden doors and thick walls feel
claustrophobic.

A larger cell for groups of prisoners is at the end of
the first-floor walkway. The entrance area is caged in, to stop inmates
attacking the guards. “We use this for drunken football fans” a woman police
officer tells me.

Seventy-seven years ago such a cell in this prison was
used to imprison Henri Perrin, a Catholic priest from France caught by the
Gestapo on a secret mission in Nazi Germany. He described entering the cell in
December 1943 thus:

“I stumbled over legs, and voices in the dark asked all
kinds of questions – “Who are you? What are you here for? Where have you come
from?” The cell was occupied by seven or eight Russians and Poles and three
little French lads of eighteen or twenty…I sat on the ground like the rest and
when in the darkness I explained that I didn’t know the reason for my arrest,
but “perhaps it was my activity as a Catholic”, I felt them all suddenly stop
short”.

Perrin was 29 at the time. A photo shows him as rather
reserved. But his activities in the months preceding his capture were those of
a risk-taker. A risk-taker for his Christian faith.

On his first night in captivity he lived through the heaviest
wartime Allied bombing raid of the city, in which 1,800 people were killed.

Perrin survived prison, and was lucky to be deported back to
France in 1944. At least six of his fellow priests on their secret mission died
or were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

He recounted his experiences in Leipzig in his diary ‘Priest-Workman
in Germany’, published in 1947. This is in English, as is his autobiography
“Priest and Worker’, published in 1964.

Back in France, Perrin continued as a worker priest, among
other jobs helping build a major dam. Sadly he died very young, in 1954.

75 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, it’s good to
remember the small but important contribution Perrin and his fellow priests made
to this victory.

Working down the mine, in car factories, at the circus: Europe’s worker priest movement

May 1 is a day to celebrate international workers’ solidarity, and a good opportunity to post an interesting article by Urs Häner, a worker priest from Switzerland.

I met Urs last year at a European conference of worker priests. A thoughtful man with a long beard, Urs worked in a Lucerne-based printing company for 33 years. He studied theology and had planned to become a Catholic parish priest but changed his mind after meeting worker priests doing factory labour
in Germany. At the printing company, he worked for 13 years in the packing
department and later in the administration.  The company closed in 2018; Urs, at that point
chairman of the factory works council, an employee representative body, had to
negotiate with management over the redundancy terms for his 150 colleagues.

“I saw my role (in the works council) in particular as
bringing to the table the views of those without a voice” he told me (this article includes a profile and picture of Urs).

Urs’ article, in German, traces the recent history of two
strands of the European worker priests’ movement: The significance of the regular
gatherings of German-speaking worker priests, and the efforts among worker
priests from across Europe as a whole to share their experiences.

The German-speaking group, which meets every six months in a
village near Frankfurt, is called the ‘Arbeitergeschwister’, or the ‘Working
Brothers and Sisters’. The name is designed to enable many people to feel
welcome, Urs writes. The group includes people who are not priests but have “Christian
roots’. Many have, or have had manual jobs, including in car factories, in an umbrella
company and in supermarkets, or worked as miners, cleaners, taxi drivers or
even in the circus.

The sharing of experiences across Europe has included worker
priests and others from Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands,
and the UK. Urs attended his first such international meeting in Lyon in 1987.
These gatherings were more priestly, and therefore more male dominated, than
the German meetings, he notes. A highpoint was in 2001, when almost 500 people
came together for the international meeting in Strasbourg. Such a large
gathering has not happened since (the one I attended had around 30
participants).

Urs concludes that it’s not really about the numbers attending the meetings, but
about being consistent in the approach taken by worker priests, to be close to
and among working people. This applies, also, or perhaps especially, at times
of radical change such as now, when many people are facing great uncertainty
due to the corornavirus crisis – rising unemployment, millions of people on
short-time working and companies going into insolvency.

Thanks Urs for your valuable reflections.

Remembering Canon Tony Williamson: “The noise of machinery,the smell of oil”

My father Canon Tony Williamson, died on 12 February last
year. To mark the first anniversary of his death, I’m sharing an address he
gave many years ago, in 1961, three years after he became a worker priest in a car
factory in Oxford.

Tony travelled to London to give the speech, to the Southwark
Diocesan Conference on 2 November 1961.

Reading Tony in his own words brings to life in a vivid way
what it meant to him to be a worker priest. He was 28 years old at the time, full
of determination and passion for the path he thought best to live out his faith
in a way meaningful to him.

Many themes of his worker priest life were already present in
this early speech. He speaks about the “hard world” of factory work. “There is
the noise of machinery and the smell of oil, but the pressure of production is
the most devastating item” he says.  

He feels for the “youngsters operating fly-presses, just
pulling a handle all day” to make “those completely useless fins you see on the
back of many new cars”. It’s hardly surprising they let off steam at the
weekend, he says. “I have every sympathy with them if they go a little wild at
night”.

He shows his frustration with the “self-centred” Church, so preoccupied
with “narrow-minded” religious activities and so distant from the secular world
he is committed to being part of.

He explains to the audience his approach to being a worker
priest, an approach he would pursue for many more years. He says he was firmly established
as a manual worker, and had bought a house on a housing estate. “From this base
I (have) used my abilities as seemed best, partly in the church, partly as a
trade unionist and as a labour party secretary”.

In a later passage he answers a rhetorical question he poses
to himself, and to the - possibly startled -  audience. “Why in addition to being a priest
and manual worker should I be a socialist politician?”. He runs through several
reasons, then declares boldly: “I hope I have given you an idea of why I am a
socialist”.

He ends the address in this way: “My own conclusion is
simply that to live out the Christian faith and to explain the Christian faith
to others, we must put our faith into action in the life of the society, the
country and the world in which we live. This is one reason why I, for one, have
become a worker priest”.

Remembering Tony, and all he stood for.

*The attached address is a scan of the original Tony
delivered on 2 November 1961, complete with his hand-written edits.  

Hello, I Must be Going: Hugh Valentine Moves On

This weekend marks an important moment for Hugh Valentine.
Hugh is a worker priest in London, and on Sunday 26th January he is
leaving St James’s Piccadilly, the church where he has been a member of the clergy
for the last 27 years.

I have met Hugh once, last year, and enjoyed out meeting. I’ve
also enjoyed and have benefited from his writing, especially his clear explanations
of why he chose to be a worker priest and what it means to him. Here for
example is his post explaining his decision to leave St James’s, which includes
a thoughtful description of the case for being a worker priest.

I enjoyed reading Hugh’s last sermon at St James’s, delivered
last Sunday. It’s amusing in places, when he describes life over the decades at
the church. It’s a “sometimes-bonkers place” he writes. I’d love to visit.

Hugh says he is not resigning his orders but wants to become
a “feral priest of sorts – feral meaning a return to a wilder state after a
period of domestication”.

Good luck with that Hugh, and go well!

A Memorial in Berlin to Forced Labour

On the day after new year I visited the Documentation Centre on Nazi Forced Labour in the eastern part of Berlin, in the district of Schoeneweide.

The Centre is one of many memorials funded by the German government to record the abuses of the Nazi regime and honour its victims. It is housed in a former camp where 900 or more forced labourers lived between 1944 and 1945. They worked in nearby factories, forced to make armaments and other
things. They were brought from Poland, other countries in the east occupied by the Nazis, as well as from occupied countries in western Europe.

The camp was a series of low, stone-built, single-storey barracks with white-washed walls. The labourers had to live in cramped dormitories with poor hygiene and little protection from Allied bombing raids. Some
of the barracks are still standing and are accessible to visitors.

Visiting the Centre was a moving experience. The personal stories of individual forced labourers; the courage they showed to survive despite very harsh conditions including hunger and mistreatment; and the understanding I gathered of the scale of the brutality used by the Nazis in this, less well-known aspect of their regime’s work, all stay with me.

I visited the Centre as part of my research on worker priests.  Dozens of French priests volunteered to be forced labourers, to accompany their tens of thousands of compatriots forced to come to Germany. The priests sought to provide spiritual support and often suffered in their mission. Many were arrested due to their
work, and at least five were murdered in concentration camps.

A short Nazi propaganda film on display, sticks in my memory after the visit. A German labourer, Gerhard, and a Polish forced labourer, Bronia, are discovered to be having a relationship. Such relations were banned
by the Nazis. The couple, each dressed in rags, are shown being publicly humiliated, their heads being shaven in the town square. Many locals are gathered around to watch. Gerhard was later jailed, then sent to the army. Bronia was hanged for her “crime”.

 If you are in Berlin the Centre is worth a visit. Its website is here

The documentation centre, at dusk Foto: HW