The Sydney Family Album – 8 – Archbishop Howard Mowll

by Dr Mark Thompson

It really is rather hard to overplay the contribution of Howard Mowll to the shape and character of the contemporary Anglican Diocese of Sydney. His election as Archbishop in April 1933 was a critical moment in the diocese’s history, a decision for its evangelical heritage rather than the more eclectic theology others were advocating at the time. His tenure of the office during World War II and the equally critical post-war years set directions, embedded principles and fostered a new generation of leaders who enabled Sydney Anglicanism to remain unambiguously Protestant and evangelical while engaging seriously with the challenges of a new era. Among so many other things gifts to the diocese, he was the driving force behind the invitation to Billy Graham to come to Sydney in 1959, though Mowll died six months before the Crusade began.

Howard West Kilvinton Mowll was born on 2 February 1890 at Chaldercot, near Dover. His attended Dover College and then King’s School Canterbury. From there he went up to King’s College, Cambridge  in 1909. While there he served on the executive of the Cambridge Inter-collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) at the time of its great split from the Student Christian Movement (SCM) over the centrality of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice in the Christian message. He served as the president of the CICCU in 1911–12. After university he undertook theological training at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, in 1913–14 and then, after having been refused a licence by the Bishop of Ely, he served on the staff of Wycliffe College, Toronto first as tutor and then as Professor of History. Having been ordained deacon under the Colonial Clergy Act before he left for Canada on 21 September 1913, and as priest by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Randall Davidson) on 7 June 1914, he served as an army chaplain on the Western Front in 1918–19. Returning to Wycliffe College after the war, it was while in Toronto that he was invited to become assistant bishop of West China. He was consecrated in Westminster Abbey on 24 June 1922.

Mowll developed a reputation as a clear and convinced evangelical and an astonishingly effective missionary bishop. He encouraged indigenous leadership, consecrating two Chinese assistant bishops after he became the diocesan bishop in 1926. It was also during his time in China that Howard Mowll met and married Dorothy Martin, on 23 October 1924. He travelled much during this period as well. One particular trip would set in train the future course of his life and ministry: in August 1931 he visited Australia, spending two weeks in Sydney.

Upon the death of Archbishop John Charles Wright in February 1933, conservative evangelicals in Sydney sought out the man they had met just two years before as a possible successor. His reputation as a bishop, as a pastor, and as an uncompromising evangelical churchman commended him after what a number saw as a period of uncertainty. However, a group of prominent liberal evangelicals, among them Dean Talbot and Archdeacon Davies, the Principal of Moore College, preferred a candidate with more ‘liberality in scholarship’. What is particularly interesting is that these two men were at the time President and a Vice President of the Anglican Church League! (After the election they would both resign and form a new organisation, the Anglican Fellowship). Both sets of men considered the diocese to be at a crossroads. They knew this election would shape its future identity.

In the end Mowll was elected with a five to one majority by the Sydney Synod and arrived by boat on 1 March 1934. Surprisingly, he did not come to Sydney brim full of confidence in his own ability. He had written to Bishop Knox in England when he was first sounded out about the possibility of becoming Sydney’s archbishop:

… Australia is not England, and England is home to me. I know nothing of Australian problems and I have never had a city parish where the conditions of a big city have had to be tackled. I am not big enough intellectually really to give the lead in civic and church life which occasion would often demand, nor have I wrestled enough in ecclesiastical controversy to be all that much tried Evangelicals might look for. The eagerness to understand the problems of each parish and each clergyman and the desire to be friendly and to help them would hardly compensate for this. (Loane, Archbishop Mowll, p. 125)

At his farewell in Westminster  on 30 November 1933 he repeated the sentiment:

I beg for your prayers, for I feel so incompetent in face of that call which has come. (Loane, p. 129)

It is also reported that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, had told him that he ‘possessed neither the gifts nor the training which the see of Sydney required’ (Loane, p. 133).

This sense of inadequacy in the face of the challenge represented by the Diocese of Sydney might seem strange in the light of all that was accomplished during his time as Archbishop. Perhaps it explains in part the punishing schedule he embarked upon from the moment he arrived in Sydney. He set out to visit each Rural Deanery, personally interview every clergyman, and meet as many laypeople as he could. He instituted a lunch-time Bible Study in the Cathedral. He set about rejuvenating diocesan institutions and supporting church schools. In all of this he was aided by a prodigious memory for names and a genuine concern for individuals as well as structures and organisations.

Of particular importance is the way he took every opportunity to strengthen, promote and extend the work of Moore College. In 1935 upon the death of David John Davies, the College Principal (who incidentally continued the Oswestry connection, being born there in 1879), Mowll sought out Thomas Chatterton Hammond, Superintendent of the Irish Church Missions, then 58 years old, to provide clear and unambiguously theological leadership to the diocese as the new principal. Hammond was known as a fiercely intelligent teacher, writer and debater. Under Hammond the college moved into a new era of growth and influence and Hammond himself became one of the Archbishop’s most trusted advisors. As one account puts it, the College became ‘an important instrument in Archbishop Mowll’s evangelistic push into the post-war world’ (Judd & Cable, p. 234). Interestingly, Mowll would appoint the next two principals of Moore College as well: Marcus Loane upon T. C. Hammond’s retirement in 1953 and D. B. Knox, who took up office after the Archbishop’s death.

Mowll tirelessly supported and promoted the Home Mission Society, appointing Archdeacon R. B. Robinson as General Secretary in 1935 replacing the 75 year old Archdeacon William Charlton (Robinson was 47 at the time). In the wake of the Depression and with the dark clouds of war approaching, this agency of care and compassion would play a critical role. Yet Mowll was clear that the social welfare work of the Society was never to be severed from the evangelistic mission with which he hoped to energise the diocese: ’the Archbishop was emphatic that the fundamental duty of the Society was to provide living agents for the proclamation of the Gospel’ (Loane, p. 217).

Similarly, Mowll revived the local Church Missionary Society and maintained a vital interest in its work in Africa and Asia. His missionary heart led him to broader engagements with individual missionaries and with the Australian Board of Missions. He gave the 1947 Moorhouse Lectures in St Paul’s Cathedral Melbourne under the title ‘Seeing all the World’, again promoting the importance of Australia, once the beneficiary of a British interest in world mission, adopting its own priority of reaching the world for Christ.

His time as Archbishop of Sydney certainly had its challenges. The protest of the Memorialists who pined for the broader outlook of Wright and Davies and Talbot was met with a firm response which did not please everyone. In 1935 the Australian diocesan bishops severed the link between the Diocese of Sydney and the primacy with a vote of 13 to 12 for the Archbishop of Perth, a blow he felt keenly. However, before long it became obvious that their argument that he was still too young and still too new to Australia was in fact a cover for an ‘active dislike for the Evangelical convictions of the Archbishop, and hostility to the Evangelical character of the Diocese’ (Loane, p. 136). Thirteen years later he would be elected Primate unopposed.

World War II also brought its own challenges, but opportunities as well (e.g. setting up the Church of England National Emergency Fund, CENEF). Postwar growth led to new churches, building projects, and an increasingly mobilised lay membership.

The legacy in each of these areas would prove to be long-lasting but, as already mentioned, it was his tireless work in inviting and preparing for the visit of Billy Graham in the last years of his life which would bear more abundant fruit than even he could have imagined. The list of Christian leaders who were converted in that first Billy Graham Crusade in Sydney is astonishing, including Mowll’s successor five times removed, Peter Jensen. Though he didn’t live to see the Crusade — he died on 24 October 1958) — it cemented the evangelical direction Mowll had reestablished in the diocese.

Those who opposed Mowll’s theological convictions liked to paint him as intolerant and captive to the interests of a narrow party within the Sydney Diocese. Those who rejoiced in the rejuvenation of the diocese brought about by God through Mowll and those around him thought very differently. They praised his personal manner, his unfeigned interest in all those he met. The judgement of the Australian Church Record from 13 April 1933 was echoed by many through the years: ‘He’s gigantic; he’s magnetic; he’s courageous; and he’s humble’ — Mowll was six feet four inches in height.

Howard West Kilvinton Mowll was a giant of a man in more ways than one. At personal cost and with seemingly endless energy he gave himself to furthering the cause of Christ in England, Canada, China and Australia. A very great deal of the inheritance contemporary Sydney Anglicanism enjoys was established (or recovered) by this humble servant of God.

Sources for this post include the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Mowll by K. J. Cable, Stephen Judd and Kenneth Cable’s ‘Sydney Anglicans’ (Sydney: Anglican Information Office, 1987), and M. L. Loane’s biography simply entitled ‘Archbishop Mowll’ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1960).

Personal Postscript:

In 1983, in a secondhand book sale at Moore College, I purchased a copy of the Book of Common Prayer which contains inside the cover a plate which reads H. W. K. Mowll, Chaldercot, 1910. The ribbon was still in the page for the Ordering of Priests.

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Picture: Archbishop Howard Mowll, painted by Alfred G. Reynolds, 1958. On display at Mowll Village, Castle Hill in 2013.