BISHOP’S BUSY DAY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LI, Issue 111, 11 April 1931, Page 9

BISHOP’S BUSY DAY.

LIFE AT FULHAM PALACE

DR INGRAM’S ACTIVITIES.

Big business men always complain that their work leaves them no home life. They would congratulate themselves, says a London writer, if they knew the trials besetting a bishop, who has to be a better business man than any of them if he is to hold his job. Dr Winnington Ingram, who has just celebrated his 73rd birthday, and has been Bishop of London for 30 years, has to observe day in day out a rigorous time-table of activities that would make many a business man turn pale. “The. Bishop is called at 6.30 every morning,” his chaplain said, “and when he is up and dressed he has his only quiet time of the day until eight o’clock, when there is celebration in the palace chapel. After tnat come matins and family prayers; the domestic staff of Fulham Palace attend, and it lasts until 8.50. “From then until nine o’clock the Bishop talks to the guests as they come down to breakfast. There is always a crowd, clergy and people passing through and staying the night as continuously as if it were an hotel. He goes through his private letters at breakfast. He answers them in his room for half an hour, and then comes to his study at 9.45, and for an hour deals with the enormous pile of diocesan correspondence that I have laid out for him. “As I go out at eleven o’clock the Bishop’s secretary goes in, and until luncheon they work hard. Appeals for help, applications for interviews, requests for advice, encouragement and activity in all possible matters —there is no end to them. “If there is a spare half-hour in the middle of the day th.e bishop pops out on to the tennis court outside the study window and plays a short, hard set. He plays a very fast game, and beats me hollow —as he does at golf and squash, although I am keen on games and he is 73. “At luncheon there are more guests. The bishop, though, eats terribly sparely, and he neither drinks nor smokes. “After luncheon comes a stream of interviews, meetings, official visits and reunions, with private visits to the sick and needy thrown in on the way. He has trained himself to read as he travels in his car, and most of his reading is done that way. He has no leisure until he goes to bed at half-past eleven or twelve, and even then he often sits up for an hour or more answering letters!”