by Julian Mann, TCW
THE BBC presented Sarah Mullally as a ground-breaker in its coverage of her installation as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the real ground-breaker in the Church of England was George Carey, the archbishop that Margaret Thatcher chose in 1990.
Church Times writer Madeleine Davies was one of the BBC commentators at the service in Canterbury Cathedral. She said of Archbishop Mullally: ‘She has a background that we might not expect of somebody being installed into this position. She went to a comprehensive school. She went to a polytechnic university rather than Oxbridge. She’s spoken about her dyslexia . . . I think that’s more of a break with tradition than the fact that she is a woman.’
Carey was the first Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation not to have been educated at Oxbridge. Born as the son of a porter in London’s East End in 1935, he left school at 15 to work as an office boy at the London Electricity Board. He went to a secondary-modern school having failed his 11-plus. He became a Christian at the age of 17 after friends invited him to a youth club at a local church.
He described his conversion on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1995, saying: ‘I can date it to May 1953 . . . a strong overwhelming feeling that I had discovered something deeply important.’
He did National Service in the RAF as a radio operator with a deployment in Iraq. After the RAF, he started pursuing a vocation to be ordained in the Church of England. Within 15 months he passed three A-levels and six O-levels, and won a place at King’s College, London, to study Theology. He came up against snobbery in the established Church of the 1950s, being told by a snooty cleric that he would never make it to ordination. But he was ordained in 1962, serving as a parish minister and theological educator. He became Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1987.