(4 of 6)
As an assistant curate (at £20 a year), Cyril Garbett went to the combined vicarage of Portsmouth and Southsea, which, under the name of Portsea, was the biggest vicarage in England. The shy, reserved youth had exchanged the quiet of the cloud-shadowed chalk downs for some of the toughest waterfront slums in Britain. As quietly and systematically as he had dug in the vicarage garden, young Cyril Garbett dug into the causes of slums and poverty, turned up the disturbing idea that no matter how much help the churches' spiritual program and social services may give, the roots of most social evils are economic. By 1909 Cyril Garbett had become Vicar of Portsea.
But the vicarage of Portsea was only his basic training in social problems. Soon Vicar Garbett was graduated to be Bishop of Southwark (pronounced Sutherk), the South London section which includes Lambeth, Bermondsey, Battersea, Tooting and Greenwich. Portsea was a British Hell's Kitchen. Southwark was the noxious central inferno. In this massive slum, hundreds of thousands of people lived in "the greatest area of unbroken poverty in Europe."
Expert In Rackets. Again Bishop Garbett resolutely dug in. A bachelor, he struggled with the malnutritive budgets of swarming slum families. He became an expert in the manipulations of loan sharks, mastered the ins & outs of rent piracy. Today the benign Archbishop of York probably knows more at first hand about rackets, gambling and liquor than any other man in England. He studied the problem of permanent unemployment as voluminously as and at much closer quarters than prolix Beatrice & Sidney Webb (Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain). Through the Church he encouraged interdenominational efforts to spread social service, free medical services, homes and nurseries for poor children, recreational clubs. Through the Church and the Government, he fought for slum clearance, boosted low-price housing projects, and the establishment of more parks, playgrounds and country camps for children. The influence of the quiet garden at Tongham lingered, in the resentful realism with which he described (In the Heart of South London) the stench, vermin, disease, crime, immorality in which his parishioners and their neighbors lived.
By 1932 Bishop Garbett had earned the right to drink a dish of tea without a ring of Southwark's grime within the cup. He was translated to the country Diocese of Winchester. In influence the Bishop of Winchester is second in the province of Canterbury. He becomes, automatically, Prelate of the Order of the Garter. In his diocese is the big port of Southampton, whose waterside slums, though less imperial than Portsea's, were still imposing.
"Hiking Bishop." And Winchester was a rest after Southwark. Sometimes the Bishop would take off a whole afternoon to discuss the problems of visiting vicars or to take tea with a County family. He might even snatch several days to dash off a treatise on What Is Man? At Winchester Bishop Garbett began his hikes about the rural parishes, for which he has become famous. Hiking, for an Anglican bishop, is still something of an episcopal innovation, and has given Dr. Garbett the nickname of "The Hiking Bishop."