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Clad in a purple cassock, with his square, flat, soft purple cap pulled well down on his balding head and his oaken pastoral crook in hand. Bishop Garbett would stride through the Hampshire countryside, to chat with field workers, pub keepers, cricketers, country doctors and school children. At each village, the forewarned vicar or curate would greet his Bishop, and together they would conduct an informal service on the green or at the war memorial. Sometimes his chaplain would accompany him. In more spacious Yorkshire, a chaplain always goes along.
Translation to York. Dr. Garbett was Bishop of Winchester at the time of the Malvern Conference. He was busy, happy, and nearing 70. But Dr. William Temple is an insistent man. Dr. Temple knew that Dr. Garbett is a first-rate administrator and that Portsea and Southwark had made him surprisingly wise in the ways of the world. He had long experience as a parish priest, which Dr. Temple lacks almost entirely. Though Dr. Garbett is progressive, he is cautious, farsighted and more of an old-fashioned "man of God"—a fact which new-fashioned Dr. Temple probably realized would be reassuring to those who consider the Archbishop of Canterbury a Karl Marx in a cassock.
So one day in June 1942, the expert on slum rents and rackets went to live in 13th-Century Bishopthorpe, the episcopal palace hidden three miles from York in vast grounds shaded with towering pines and surrounded by avenues of ancient limes and thickets of holly, carpeted in spring with daffodils, primroses, bluebells in a profusion unknown to the vicarage at Tongham.
£9,000 and Eleven Hens. Bishopthorpe is now managed by the Ecclesiastical Commission of the Church of England, which uses about half the Archbishop's annual allotment of £9,000 (about $36,000) to run the palace and keep up the grounds, gives the balance to Dr. Garbett for personal living and traveling expenses, staff salaries, taxes.
In this sumptuous archiepiscopal palace Dr. Garbett lives with his quiet, shy sister Elsie (who looks after the Archbishop, his eleven hens and two hives of bees), his staff and three London refugee families. After the war, most of Bishopthorpe will probably become a training college for clergy. Until that time, the Archbishop will be perfectly at home amid its temporal magnificence.
The paradox of Dr. Garbett's conservatism is that it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual radicalism. To U.S. observers, this fact made their archiepiscopal visitor a more dependable guide to England's present and future than some of his more strenuously progressive colleagues. For the Archbishop of York, even more than the Archbishop of Canterbury, is the key to the real meaning of Malvern.