Abstract
Elsie Chamberlain deserves a paragraph in any history of the twentieth-century British Churches, despite not being mentioned in Kenneth Wolfe’s 1984 study of the Churches and the BBC. She was the first RAF woman chaplain, the first ordained woman on the BBC staff, and the first woman Chairman of the Congregational Union.
Alan Argent’s well-researched biography supplements the loyal but raw presentation of material by her daughter twenty years ago. Yet Elsie’s story also illustrates the subtle operation of patronage in mid-twentieth century nonconformity. She escaped from a dominating mother (for a time) to read Theology at King’s College, London, where she met her future husband, John Garrington, a strong high Anglican. After training ‘on the job’ with Muriel Paulden in Liverpool, Sidney Berry, Secretary of the Congregational Union, persuaded those concerned to approve Elsie’s application for ordination. At King’s she also met Margaret Stansgate, who persuaded her husband (Secretary of State for Air under Clement Attlee) to press for Elsie’s appointment as an RAF Chaplain; though her service was short-lived through ill-health. After six successful talks for Lift Up Your Hearts in 1946, helped by earlier experience at Speakers’ Corner, she joined the BBC as an Assistant Producer in 1950, and then worked full-time (1954-1967). As the first woman to lead The Daily Service her voice and style became familiar to millions of listeners. In 1956 she became the first woman Chairman of the Congregation Union when few women, ordained or not, held any national office. Elsie saw herself as a ‘disastrous’ chairman technically (surely not unique); yet she preached in a wide variety of churches around the country to great effect. Both the appointments at the BBC and the CUEW owed much to her ecumenical involvement in attending the first and second Assemblies of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and 1954 as first a visitor and then a delegate. Why should such an ecumenically committed person so keenly oppose the United Reformed Church in 1972? Apparently she feared the potential power of the Synods of the new Church (not justified by later experience); but, as some of us observed, a Presbyterian structure run by a majority of Congregationalists was never likely to be overwhelmingly ‘Presbyterian’. Elsie became a pillar of the new Congregational Federation, formed by the largest minority of those staying out, working tirelessly for it. Less surprising was her antagonism to bishops in the later 1970s unity discussions, given the patronising pomposity she suffered from Archbishop Fisher and Bishop Wand in the 1940s. Most interesting of all is Elsie’s attitude to traditional Congregational church order, especially the church meeting: she expected her churches to follow her lead, rather than vice versa; and was only saved by usually being right. Alan Argent exposes the paradoxes of her life, and is not uncritical where necessary. It is a fascinating story.