Temple, William

(1881–1944)

   Archbishop and Theologian.

   Temple was the son of Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury between 1896 and 1902. He was educated at the University of Oxford, but his ordination was delayed because his views on the virgin birth of Jesus were not regarded as sufficiently sound. He rose steadily in the Anglican Church to become Bishop of Manchester in 1921, Archbishop of York in 1929 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. Concerned with social and economic questions, he was president of the Workers’ Education Association, an inaugurator of the ecumenical British Council of Churches and he chaired the Malvern Conference of 1941, which urged the economic and administrative reorganisation of the Church of England. Among his books were Nature, Man and God, the scholarly Readings in St John’s Gospel and Christianity and the Social Order. Despite his early death, he is generally regarded as the outstanding English Archbishop of the twentieth century – as Prime Minister Winston Churchill described him, he was a ‘sixpenny article in a penny bazaar’.

   F.A. Iremonger, William Temple (1948);

   J. Kent, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain (1992);

   A.M. Suggate, William Temple and Christian Social Ethics (1987).