Gonville ffrench-Beytagh
|
The Very Reverend Gonville ffrench-Beytagh |
|
|---|---|
| Dean of Johannesburg | |
| Church | Anglican |
| Province | Southern Africa |
| Diocese | Johannesburg |
| Orders | |
| Ordination | 1939 by Geoffrey Clayton |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
26 January 1913 Shanghai |
| Died | 10 May 1991 (aged 78) London |
The Very Revd Gonville Aubie ffrench-Beytagh (1912 - 1991), Anglican priest, was the Dean of Johannesburg and an anti-apartheid activist.
Gonville ffrench-Beytagh was born on 26 January 1913 in Shanghai, son of an Irish businessman and a South African mother. His mother and father separated when Gonville was a young boy, his mother left for South Africa with a "young highlander". He was sent to England with an aunt. He attended Monkton Combe School near Bath and then the Bristol Grammar School. His experience of school chapel, Sunday school, confirmation classes and summer camps made him determined never to attend church again. At age 17 he left England for New Zealand to learn agriculture at the Waitaki Boys' High School. He was expelled from Waitaki for misbehaviour. After a time in casual labour, a chance encounter with a distant relative persuaded him to travel to South Africa in 1932.
In South Africa he took odd jobs including an office job with in Johannesburg. He was still an irreverent agnostic, but at Toc H he soon became friends with Jonathan Graham, a religious brother in the Community of the Resurrection, Bishop Geoffrey Clayton of Johannesburg later Archbishop of Cape Town, and Alan Paton, author of Cry the Beloved Country. After a hospitalisation during which he was visited by Alan Paton he underwent a religious conversion on Christmas Eve in St Mary's Cathedral, Johannesburg, where the dean had locked the door to keep drunken revellers from the Midnight Mass:
It was a hot night and as the doors had been closed, the air was completely still. I knelt at the communion rail, and as I knelt there I felt a very strong cool breeze -- and that was all. I do not think that at the time I had any idea what the word "breath" or the word "wind" means to the Christian, or even that the Greek word for the Holy Spirit means breath. I did not even think of Jesus breathing the spirit on his disciples. All I know is that this breath, or wind, which I felt, had a meaning and a content for me which I have never been able to communicate to anyone else, and still cannot describe.
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