Dick Sheppard (priest)

Hugh Richard Lawrie Sheppard.

Hugh Richard Lawrie "Dick" Sheppard (2 September 1880 – 31 October 1937) was an English Anglican priest, Dean of Canterbury and pacifist.^[1]

Sheppard was the younger son of Edgar Sheppard, a minor canon at Windsor, and Mary White. He was educated at Marlborough College and then (1901-4) Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He worked with the poor from Oxford House, Bethnal Green, and then for a year as secretary to Cosmo Lang, then Bishop of Stepney. He studied for the ministry at Cuddesdon College, and was ordained priest in 1908. Returning to work with the poor at Oxford House, he suffered in 1910 the first of what would prove to be recurrent breakdowns due to overwork.

With the onset of war, Sheppard spent some months as chaplain to a military hospital in France, before being sent home with exhaustion. Supported by Lang, he took the fashionable and high-profile living at St Martin-in-the-Fields, turning the church into an accessible social centre for all those in need. He married Alison Lennox, who had nursed him during his breakdowns, in 1915.

From 1924, when Sheppard provided the first service ever broadcast by the BBC, his broadcast sermons gave him national fame. However, another breakdown and acute asthma led to his resignation in 1926. Having become a pacifist, he articulated a vision of a non-institutional church in The Impatience of a Parson (1927). Sheppard was partly responsible for the annual Festival of Remembrance that takes place in the Albert Hall, London on the first Saturday in November before Remembrance Sunday. In November 1925 he wrote to The Times protesting against a proposed Charity Ball on Armistice Day. Following a nationwide response a solemn ceremony In Memory replaced the Ball^[2]. Such was its resonance with the public that it became an annual event that continues to this day.

Lang, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928, supported the appointment of Sheppard as Dean of Canterbury in 1929. Although his preaching attracted huge audiences, illness once again forced resignation in 1931.

Trying to develop a public political platform for pacifism, Sheppard in 1932, together with Herbert Gray and Maude Royden, proposed a Peace Army of unarmed peacemakers to stand between the Chinese and Japanese armies in Shanghai. More successfully, he issued a call for 'peace pledges' in 1934. He published We Say 'No' (1935), and formally established the Peace Pledge Union in 1936. In 1937 - the year of his death - his wife left him, and students elected him Rector of Glasgow University.

His funeral in St Paul's Cathedral drew huge crowds. He is buried in the cloisters at Canterbury Cathedral.^[3]

References

1. ^ Alan Wilkinson, Sheppard, Hugh Richard Lawrie (1880–1937), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2007 accessed 17 June 2009
2. ^ Roberts R. Ellis, 'H.R.L. Sheppard Life and Letters', John Murray, London 1942, p.145
3. ^ Brittain, Vera (1957). "5 section 14". Testament of Experience. Golanz. 

• Dick Sheppard by his friends (1938)
• R. E. Roberts, H. R. L. Sheppard (1942) ·
• C. S. Matthews, Dick Sheppard: man of peace (1948)
• C. Scott, Dick Sheppard (1977) · ·
• A. Wilkinson, Dissent or conform? War, peace and the English churches, 1900–1945 (1986)
• A. Hastings, A history of English Christianity, 1920–1990, 3rd edn (1991)

External links

• A brief history of the PPU
• Dick Sheppard Biography
• Links to Excerpts of Sheppard's Writings
• Memorial Page for Dick Sheppard
• Works by or about Dick Sheppard (priest) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Academic offices
Preceded by Iain Colquhoun	Rector of the University of Glasgow 1937—1938	Succeeded by Archibald Sinclair

Persondata
Name	Sheppard, High Richard Laurie
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	2 September 1880
Place of birth
Date of death	31 October 1937
Place of death