Allegations mar Huddleston anniversary

Trevor Huddleston was a crusader against poverty and white racism in South Africa and mentor to some of that continent’s best-known politicians and church leaders.

“No white man has done more than Father Trevor Huddleston in the fight against apartheid,” Nelson Mandela said soon after his release in February 1990 from Robben Island, where the first black president of South Africa had been imprisoned for 27 years.

Attention for apartheid

“If you could say that anyone single-handedly made apartheid a world issue, then that person was Trevor Huddleston,” added the Nobel Prize-winning Anglican cleric and internationally famous human rights activist, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Thousands of Africans are holding services to mark the 100th anniversary of Huddleston’s birth at Bedford in England (15 June, 1913). Christians in Britain, including members of the British Royal Family, attended a Thanksgiving Service on 29 June at London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields church.

Trevor Huddleston was the son of a high-ranking officer in the Britain-Indian Navy. He seemed destined for a military career, the law or banking after school at Lancing College, one of Britain’s most exclusive private schools, and three years at Oxford University.

But instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Huddleston joined the Anglican monastic order, the Community of the Resurrection in 1939.

In 1943, he was sent to work in the run down and ramshackle black township of Sophiatown on the edge of South Africa’s “city of gold” – Johannesburg.

A home in Sophiatown

In those days, Sophiatown was a heady mixture of poverty, nightclubs, gangsterism and jazz. Those who lived there rarely came across a friendly white face. It was there that Huddleston made his home for 13 years, before the South African Government decided to flatten the township and turn it into an all white suburb.

In 1955, Huddleston joined forced with Nelson Mandela and leading Jewish activists, including Ruth First and Helen Joseph, to defy an infamous act “legalized” under the country’s draconian apartheid regulations.

‘We allow characters like Trevor to be forgotten at our own peril’

The anti-racists lost the battle but won the war after Huddleston returned to England in 1956 and wrote a book that caused a sensation in America and Britain – Naught for Your Comfort (Collins, London, 1956).

For the first time, the human consequence of apartheid was placed under the international human rights microscope and most of the free world was horrified by what they read.

Friend to Nyerere

Back in England, Huddleston trained recruits at the Community of the Resurrection’s headquarters in Yorkshire (north England) but he was restless. His love for Africa was strong and in 1960 he was appointed Bishop of Masasi in Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania) where he became a friend of the Christian Socialist President Julius Nyerere.

In 1974, a glittering career as one of Britain’s best known and most respected leaders lay before him. He’d been appointed Bishop of Stepney. There was speculation he might one day be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion. But disaster struck.

Trevor Huddleston was accused by a local mother in the run-down East End of London of sexually harassing her two sons.

Although Huddleston denied the accusations, he told a senior police officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Amoss: “It’s all perfectly true. I have sat them on my lap and I have touched their bottoms and pinched them but there is nothing indecent. It was purely a mark of affection.”

Outrageously indiscreet

In his report, Amoss wrote: “He (Huddleston) has been outrageously indiscreet”.

In a book called Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, author Piers McGrandle said that after the accusation, Huddleston withdrew from public life for several months and suffered a mental breakdown. In 1978, he left Stepney to become Bishop of Mauritius and Archbishop of the Indian Ocean. Now, the fortnightly British magazine Private Eye has returned to the story during the month Anglicans are celebrating the life of an icon.

A report (Private Eye 14-27 June, 2013) comparing the way accusations of sexual abuse were handled in the 1970s with the way they are being handled now, said that a redacted version of the Scotland Yard file on Huddleston has been released by Britain’s National Archives.

It was released after a freedom of information request by the magazine. The file on Trevor Huddleston contains the report sent by the then-Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, to the Director of Public prosecutions into allegations made against Huddleston concerning incidents involving four boys at his Stepney home.

Gross indecency

The report proposed that Huddleston could be charged with four counts of gross indecency involving fondling the boys while they sat on his lap.

Private Eye said: “Because of Huddleston’s prominence and reputation, the DPP, Sir Norman Skelhorn, was asked for directions as to whether the bishop should be prosecuted. The report suggested the proposed charges ‘can be supported by the evidence contained’. Skelhorn decided not to prosecute.”

The Scotland Yard investigation was kept secret. Rumours that reached the British press were never published. The Huddleston file was previously ordered to remain closed until 2069. Trevor Huddleston died in 1998.

In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were interred at the Church of Christ the King on top of a hilltop overlooking Sophiatown. Whether Private Eye’s report will damage his legacy as a champion of human rights remains to be seen.

“We allow characters like Trevor to be forgotten at our own peril,” says Anglican Bishop of Wakefield, Stephen Platten. “Warts and all,” he said in an article published in The Times, “he was an inspiration to an entire generation.”