Obituary of Very Rev Brandon Jackson colourful but controversial dean of Lincoln Cathedral
Jackson, who at the height of the row called for the 1,000-year-old cathedral to be closed and exorcised of satanic influence, eventually retired in 1997 with a financial settlement. During his final service, which was attended by neither the bishop nor the sub-dean, he criticised the cathedral for its failure to take the Gospel message to the outside world. “As the millennium approaches, barely a word of mission or evangelism can be seen,” he thundered from the pulpit to applause from his supporters. “A city on a hill cannot hide, but the cathedral has not shone out in a secular time where millions of people do not attend church but are believers.”
The Very Rev Brandon Jackson obituary
Colourful but controversial dean of Lincoln Cathedral known for his evangelism, his alleged affair and his long feud with the sub-dean
Tuesday February 14 2023, 5.00pm, The Times
“There will be blood on the carpet at Lincoln before he’s finished,” declared Margaret Thatcher when voicing her approval of Brandon Jackson’s appointment as dean of the city’s cathedral in 1989. Alerted by local Tories to concerns in the diocese where she had been raised, the prime minister wanted a shake-up in the cathedral’s chapter, or governing body. Little did either of them know how prophetic her words would be.
Jackson, a charismatic but abrasive churchman once described as the “Norman Tebbit of the Anglican church”, had a reputation for rushing in where angels feared to tread. He arrived from the much smaller Bradford Cathedral in 1989 and immediately stumbled upon what he considered “a viper’s nest”, one that would have seemed incredible in one of Anthony Trollope’s 19th-century Barsetshire tales, though others compared it to the 1960s BBC comedy series All Gas and Gaiters.
He discovered that the previous year Rex Davis, Lincoln’s sub-dean, had visited his native Australia with the cathedral’s priceless copy of Magna Carta, accompanied by his wife and daughter. What had been intended as a fundraising project during the country’s bicentenary celebrations turned out to be a commercial failure, resulting in a loss to the cathedral of more than £56,000.
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