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Norman Wickham

Obituary of Canon Norman Wickham, clergyman; born 18 August, 1925, in Gloucestershire; died 18 April, 2007, in Edinburgh, aged 81.

Richard Holloway writes: Norman Wickham was one of the most respected and admired clergymen in Edinburgh, where he had ministered for the past 38 years.

He was born in 1925 in a Cotswold village in what he described as a humble home. Infancy narratives are a well-known trope of spiritual biography, and there is a particularly fine one in Norman's history. When he was four years old he went missing. His distressed parents found him in the churchyard, where he had been taking flowers from graves that had them and redistributing them to graves that had none, displaying a precocious grasp of the principles of New Testament socialism.

With a head of golden curls and a voice of perfect pitch, it was inevitable that he enrolled in the village church choir. The beauty of his voice never deserted him and he sang the litany at St Mary's Cathedral in Palmerston Place almost until his final weeks.

Norman joined the navy in 1943 and trained in communications, spending most of his time with the British Pacific Fleet on the battleship Duke of York, one of the first ships to sail into Hong Kong following the surrender of Japan.

Demobbed in 1946, he went to Kelham Theological College to prepare for the Anglican priesthood. Ordained in 1951, he went as a curate to Syston in Leicestershire for three years. After a brief first incumbency at St Gabriel's Leicester, in 1957 he became rector of All Saints Wingerworth, Chesterfield, in the diocese of Derby, where he remained for 12 years.

There was something of a religious revival in Britain in the 1950s and Norman told me he got 200 people to evensong every Sunday in that small Derbyshire town. Of course, that was before Sunday night TV. Sociologists reckon it was the Forsyte Saga on BBC TV in 1967 that finally killed off evensong in Britain.

But evensong was still pulling them in at St John's Princes Street in 1969, where Aeneas Mackintosh, a friend of Norman's from Kelham, had become rector. In those days there was a brief ecumenical experiment between St John's and the cathedral, and Norman came north to combine being a team priest at St John's with being vice-provost of the cathedral.

In 1979, Bishop Alastair Haggart prevailed on him to become rector of Christ Church Morningside, where he stayed for ten happy years until his retirement in 1988.

That is the bare skeleton of a long ministry, but how did he clothe it? Norman Wickham was a superb parish priest. There was a natural grace and kindness in him that was fortified by a generous understanding of the Christian Gospel. The many hundreds who came to his funeral in St Mary's Cathedral on 26 April could all bear witness to his sympathy and tender care of people in trouble and distress, as well as the beauty of his conduct of worship - that lovely voice again; but what I want specially to mention is his ministry as a preacher. This is the most public aspect of the priest's life, so it is sad that it is often poorly fulfilled. Many a hapless churchgoer has lost the will to live during the tedious maundering of preachers down the ages.

Well, Norman was a superb preacher who constantly studied to be a better one because he believed good preaching could be learned. Such was his reputation as a preacher that he was invited to teach on the subject. He distilled these courses into a document called Ten Commandments of Preaching. Here are some of them: Thou shalt be especially diligent about the beginning and the end; Thou shalt sound convinced; Thou shalt be faithful to the Gospel in its fullness and richness; Thou shalt be relevant to the human condition. Norman always was.

In 1987, a year before his retirement, he married Gwyneth on a snowy December day. He had known her a long time and she was the perfect match for him, equal in kindness, grace and humour. So the last 20 years were the happiest of his life.

Sadly, that life began to draw to a close on Easter Day. A friend took the sacrament to him at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. "Read me Mary Magdalene in the garden," he whispered, and began speaking it himself: "Jesus saith unto her, woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?"

Norman loved gardens, especially the one Gwyneth created at their home in Edinburgh. A friend advised them to plant an autumn flowering cherry in their front garden, because it would blossom beautifully throughout the winter. Norman loved it. It started to fade the day he went into hospital, but by then he was in another garden.

Full story at The Scotsman.