BISHOP’S PALACE

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 March 1943, Page 2

BISHOP’S PALACE

MISTAKEN FOR MUSEUM.

LONDON, December 1. Dr. Underhill, Bishop of Bath and Wells, once found two people wandering about what he described as his “rabbit warren” of a palace. He asked them what they were doing. They said they thought it was a museum. The Bishop told this story at the Church Assembly at Central Hall, Westminster, when bishops’ salaries were discussed. The assembly is dealing with the Episcopal, Endowments and Stipends measure, which would give power to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to take over episcopal houses. Dr. Underhill added that a girls school was using part of the Palace. “The moment the school goes,” he said, “I shall be bankrupt or will have to leave my house.” On the other hand the Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Lovett, described the palaces as “a sort of ecclesiastical No. 10, Downing Street.” He added: “If you reduce them to the size of an eight-roomed villa you will paralyse your bishop in the carrying on of his work.”

Mrs. Mildred Rawlinson, wife of Dr. Rawlinson, Bishop of Derby, said that hers was a comfortable house of 30 rooms, with a large garden and two cottages. Up till the war they were just able to afford to live in it. Now they found it “very stiff going.” The Bishop of London, Dr. Fisher, said that it was a matter of extreme financial anxiety to some bishops that the scheme should be got tnrough in 1943. Dr. Pickard-Cambridge, of Haslemere, who submitted the measure, said: “We heard the other day of someone denouncing bishops who go about proclaiming the blessedness of the poor when they are enjoying incomes of £3,000 to £15,000 a year. “I think that if it comes to a question of having money to spend on themselves and their amusements the bishops, as individuals, have not enough seriously to imperil their entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.” A resolution giving general approval to the measure was carried.