1871-1919
CHAPTER ONE: EARLY YEARS AND INFLUENCES
Peter Green was born on 17th January 1871, the fourth child of Henry George and Elizabeth Sophia Green (née Saintsbury). His father was a lawyer in Southampton, a member of the High Anglican Clapton Set, whilst his mother belonged to the Evangelical Clapham Set, which included William Wilberforce, but she was also influenced by the Oxford Movement. Green was devoted to his mother, and owed his combination of Tractarian and Evangelical traits to her.
As a boy he worshipped with his family at the Anglo-Catholic St Michael’s Church in Southampton in the morning, but went with his aunt Josephine to St Peter’s in the evening where Evangelical preaching was the priority. This combination of the Catholic and Evangelical traditions was to be shown in Green’s attitudes after ordination and indeed throughout his ministry and is reflected in his writings. He did, however, break away from the family’s politics when he converted to Liberalism from Toryism at an early age as he thought it to be old fashioned. He remained a liberal in politics, but not in theology, throughout his life.
Another great influence, demonstrated in his writings, was his uncle George Saintsbury, Professor of English Literature at Reading and Edinburgh Universities. His uncle gave him a love of literature, especially Dickens and Thackeray, and Green used illustrations from literature throughout his books. A further influence was another uncle, Edward Peter Green, after whom he was named, who was a vicar in Bethnal Green, and from whom he learned of slum conditions. It was said that he inherited his father’s quick temper but although he has some sharp things to say in his writings those who still remember him today do so as someone who was full of fun.2
However, he would not regard his upbringing as crucial as he held the belief in the self-creating character by personal decisions and acts of will as will be seen later in the section on Christian ethics.
At the age of thirteen Green went to Cranleigh School after receiving private lessons including Greek and Latin at home. He appreciated his time there and recorded the help he received from the masters, especially one house master. He dedicated his Teaching for Lads3 to his house master, the Revd T. Layng, to whom he attributed the pleasure he had in engaging in work with his lads. However, he was hard in his attitudes to ex-public schoolboys and the professional classes concerning their Christian commitment. In his The Christian Man he stated, “The average middle class Englishman’s idol is good form and his old house master is his prophet”4 and he is highly critical of the poor standard of religious education and the teaching of the Bible in public schools.
Green left Cranleigh for St John’s College Cambridge as a Scholar to read mathematics. Whilst there he rowed for his college and undertook boxing. He was elected to be the President of the Cambridge Union, and his power of oratory, his debating ability and his love of controversy stem from that time. He had a keen wit as Sheen illustrated through an incident when he rounded on a businessman who tried to make a butt of Green. Later the man wrote to Green complaining he had made a fool of him. Green replied: “Dear Sir, You are mistaken. I merely drew attention to the fact.”5
He had a precise mind and hoped for intellectual success, but as he explained later he worked too hard up to the examinations and as a result was put in the 3rd class in his first Tripos. Subsequently, he transferred to the moral sciences and was awarded a 1st class in his second Tripos.6
He went straight from Cambridge to be ordained deacon on St Thomas’ Day 1894 to serve in the chapel of Lady Margaret in Walworth, his college’s mission to the South London slums with a strongly Anglo-Catholic ethos, then in the Diocese of Rochester, now in Southwark .There he exercised a ministry to the poor, and he recalled personalities and incidents in his writings including those saved from excessive drinking by conversion to the Christian faith. He fell out with his eccentric vicar, who on one occasion preached a sermon in the morning, which Green himself had submitted to preach in the evening!
After four years of this unhappy relationship the Bishop of Rochester, Dr E.S. Talbot, arranged for him to serve a further curacy at Leeds Parish Church, where he had been the vicar. In 1898 in central Leeds, Green experienced the miseries caused to families by drunkenness and street betting and this led him to despise drinking and gambling in all forms. As a result he published Betting and Gambling7 in 1924. He would be horrified by the excesses of today.
He left Leeds for Salford early in 1902. He was to stay for sixty years. H.E. Sheen, his biographer and one-time curate, quoted him as saying, “It had been snowing, it was foggy and it was going to rain – I loved Salford from that moment.”8 Green put his sentiments for Salford in an introduction to Charles P. Hampson’s Salford through the Ages when he wrote: “The first thing a visitor from the South has to learn is how beautiful even Blake’s dark satanic mills can look on a winter’s morning early or late on a winter’s afternoon – when lit up, the long rows of windows make the adjective dark the least appropriate one possible. Fine judges of beauty have spoken to me of the grace of full factory chimneys, slender columns of darkness against the pale lemon sky of early dawn or the richer tints of sunset. And even by the prosaic light of day there are many nooks and corners in old Salford for the man with an eye for beauty.”9
Green was instituted as rector of the Church of the Sacred Trinity on 20th January 1902. Sacred Trinity had been a chapel of ease to Manchester Cathedral and was Anglo-Catholic in character. The parish consisted of narrow streets of back to back houses. It was a generally depressed area. Martin Palmer in Sacred Trinity Salford 1635-1985 pointed out that Engels used notes about “Trinity Ward” in his book The Conditions of the Working Class. It was an area of poverty and high unemployment where “food-money was often spent on drink. Cottages near Chapel Street housed a family in each room.”10
However, through endowments of the Booth family, Sacred Trinity had a living worth £1,400 a year from which Green was able to pay two curates and a lady worker.
Sheen said Green maintained three guiding principles during his sixty years’ ministry in Salford. One, as he was a Tractarian, he was determined to teach sound Catholic doctrine; two, as he was “converted” and so a convinced evangelical, he would strive for conversions; and three, as he believed in the priesthood of all believers, he would train lay Christians to set to work for, and witness to the Christian faith.11 These proved to be strands in his Christian faith and life which he integrated into his writings, emphasising that God can be known, that the Fall included the universe as well as humanity, and that human actions are not wholly determined by heredity or the environment but by “the self governing ego, the thing that in me chooses.”12
He was pleased to have in his congregation Nurse Edith Cavell and Ronald Knox, the son of the Bishop of Manchester. It was here at Sacred Trinity he commenced his work with boys and men which was to gain him a national reputation, renting a railway arch and adapting it into a club, giving priority to Bible classes, and founding a Temperance Society. He contested the prevailing Lancashire custom that Sunday schools with Bible classes should be independent of the Church and its services. Green took the Bible classes himself, and integrated them into the life of the church as preparation for young people to be confirmed and adults to become regular worshipping members.
In 1904 Green opposed the proposal, supported by the Bishop, that Sacred Trinity should be demolished to allow the London and North Western Railway to extend its line. “Peter Green and others protested to Parliament that such a move would be detrimental to the spiritual welfare of the congregation”,13 and it was dropped.
In