‘Clergy have gone to war with the military since time immemorial... in times of extremis our soldiers want chaplains there alongside them’
Reverend David Coulter brought down the curtain on his Army Chaplain General career on Saturday when he consecrated the new Royal Irish colours
AT a historic ceremony on the Titanic Slipways in Belfast at the weekend, new colours were presented to the 1st and 2nd battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment by its colonel-in-chief the Duke of York. It was the first time the event, which takes place every 25 years, was held in public here.
And for Rev Dr David Coulter, CB, OStJ, QHC, Chaplain General of the British Army, who consecrated the colours, there was a special significance to the ceremony taking place in his home town. A former R Irish officer himself, the occasion marked his last formal engagement before his retirement. Rev Coulter (61) was appointed Chaplain General in 2014.
Here he talks about his remarkable career, the “niggling call from God” that led him to resign his commission and to join the Church, how he views the “very troubling” rift between the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Church of Scotland — and what it is like ministering to soldiers on the front line.
QWhere did you grow up, and do you come from a forces’ background?
AI grew up in Dundonald. I went to Regent House School from I was four-and-a-half until I was 18, so my whole school career was there. My father George was a police officer and my mother Elizabeth, who was known as Betty, was a housewife and a part-time shop assistant in Belfast. They’re both dead now. I had one brother Adrian, who died 18 months ago at the age of 54. He developed cancer and died within five weeks. He was a teacher in Belfast.
I think growing up in the early Seventies with my dad being in the police I was very aware of the security situation we had then, and also I think I was very aware of the whole idea of service — that idea of serving your community. I was an air cadet at Regent House, so the idea of joining one of the services was something that I’d thought about.
My parents were both very religious. We grew up in Dundonald Presbyterian Church and that is where my Church background came from. I’m married to Grace, who is a teacher, and we have two sons, Andrew and Tom.
Andrew is a trainee teacher in London. He worked in the City but decided the City life’s not for him. He’s in the Army Reserves as a Trooper in the Royal Yeomanry in London. Thomas did agricultural business management at university and he’s now a grain trader.
QWhen did you join the Army?
AIn 1976 I went to Queen’s University sponsored by the military — as a cadet officer in the Royal Irish Rangers. I went to read economic and social history. Some of my friends were Church students at Union College in Belfast.
At the end of my first year I toyed with the idea of giving up my history degree and doing theology. But I was enjoying what I was doing, and because I was sponsored by the Army, changing degree courses would have been quite difficult in those days. So I decided to stick with it.
I spent the four years at Queen’s very involved with the Officer Training Corps, finished my degree and went off to Sandhurst after that. Col Tim Collins and I were direct contemporaries.
QAWhy did you resign your commission?
I left in 1985. I was a regular officer so my career could have gone on. I had a contract until I was 55. But this idea of going into the Church intervened and I decided to leave and go for the Church.
There had always been this niggling idea, this notion of giving up my military career, which I loved — and I did love every minute of being an Irish Ranger. Grace and I were married by this time.
My father was very religious but he felt I was being irresponsible giving up my career. My friends in the Rangers thought I was committing financial suicide as we had double income, no kids in those days.
But this niggling thing, this call from God to go into the Church would not go away. Once I was selected I had to resign my commission and go back to being a student for four years.
QAWhy did you choose to study at St Andrews?
When I was thinking of leaving the military and studying for the Church, a number of my chaplain friends suggested to me that I might consider studying in Scotland rather than back here in Northern Ireland, because it was a broader Church even in the early Eighties.
Also, I’d been living out of Northern Ireland for quite a long time. So I applied to the Church of Scotland and they accepted me. Then I had to pick one of the Scottish theological faculties. I decided Aberdeen in the mid-Eighties was too expensive because of oil which was booming. Glasgow was in the west of Scotland; I didn’t know it.
So it was going to be either Edinburgh or St Andrews. And when we went to St Andrews we just fell in love with it.
QYour decision must also have been a big step for Grace?
AAbsolutely. I think it was a huge change of lifestyle. She married an
Army officer and then suddenly she was married to a student. She constantly reminds me that I was a kept man when I was at university. We had a mortgage and it had to be in her name because I’d no money. But for the four years she taught and I studied. And I was eventually ordained on April 2, 1989. Having done the four years and been ordained into the Church of Scotland, I then had the option of staying on at university to do a research degree or to go to a parish. But I felt I wanted to go back to the Army, so I joined the Army as a chaplain. I did three years before going out to be a school chaplain for a couple of years.
QYou grew up in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and then became a minister in the Church of Scotland. You must be grieved by the current rift between them?
AYes. I think it’s something that is very sad. I think there has been a fracturing of relationships. Given the fact that the Church of Scotland is on the historic roots of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and given that I personally have a foot in both camps, I find it very troubling, really. The present Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Rev Dr Charles McMullen (above), was my late brother Adrian’s minister so I know him well. And his whole Moderatorial year is about “building relationships”. I just hope that through Charles’ grace and his will to bring people together that we may be able to find some way in which this troubled relationship can be put back together.
QYou were appointed Chaplain General in 2014. How would you describe the role of an Army chaplain?
AI would say to people that the greatest compliment that any chaplain is ever paid is when a soldier, a sailor or an airman or woman says: “Padre, can I have a word?” I think one of the things we do is that for every Army unit is that we try to ensure, whether regular or reservist, there is a chaplain embedded with that unit who knows the people.
Where they go, you go. What is a chaplain’s role? The chaplain’s role is to bring man to God and God to man. We have the unique opportunity to do that all over the world wherever soldiers go.
QBack in 2014 Lt Col Laurence Quinn hit the headlines when he called for Christianity to be ditched as the main religion of the Armed Forces and to be replaced by what he described as moral counsellors. What is your response to that?
AI met Laurence Quinn, a really nice man. I think he’d personally become very disillusioned with the Church and believes that there’s no place for faith or religion in the Armed Forces. I absolutely respect his views. But that is not the view of the Army today.
The executive committee of the Army board took a decision that we are still a Christian Army with a small ‘c’. Our soldiers are not always running to church. But in times of extremis they want chaplains to be alongside them.
I think that we are all spiritual be-
I find the fracturing of relationships in Presbyterian Church very troubling. I hope we may be able to find a way back
ings. We are people of body, mind and spirit. Some people exercise that spirituality by saying their prayers, going to church, reading their Bibles, being religious. And other people will decide: “No, no. Actually, I would rather walk on the beach and admire the sunset.” You know, it’s not a chaplain’s role to be judgmental.
If you said to me: “David, what is a soldier looking for in a chaplain?” I’d say: “They’re looking for somebody who is prayerful, who is professional and who has got a positive affect upon them and their family.”
QYou must have seen some terrible sights, and dealt with some very difficult situations?
AYes. But memory is very kind to us. I think we remember the good times more than the bad. One of the things that is clear to me after 30 years as a chaplain is that we are all indelibly marked by our operational experience. We remember people, places, situations. We remember the comradeship that helped us and perhaps those few words we spoke to someone when something awful had just happened.
I think that the chaplain’s role at the time of bereavement is no different than it is anywhere else. They can bring comfort with words when other people don’t have words to explain what’s going on.
QSo who is there for you? You provide support in the most harrowing of circumstances. It must take an awful lot out of you.
AI think it’s the people we work with. It’s our family, it’s our friends. I don’t think any of us have got what I’d call the divine right of pastoral care. You can be a friend or a support to anybody who’s religious or not religious.
I think it’s my other chaplaincy colleagues. As Chaplain General you have a staff chaplain and I’ve had some wonderful staff chaplains in my time. The staff chaplain provides a personal support to me.
My last staff chaplain was Rev Jim Francis, a Church of Scotland minister. My present staff chaplain is Fr Paschal Hanrahan from the west of Ireland, and they both bring completely different approaches but have both provided tremendous support to me.
QAAThere must have been some lighter moments too?
Yes, absolutely. I’ve been to some great places, met some wonderful people. For the millennium, 20 of us did a 2,000-mile run to mark 2,000 years of the Christian Church. We did 100 miles each. And we did 1,000 miles of it in the Sinai Desert and 1,000 miles around the Sea of Galilee. And that was fantastic. It was over a couple of weeks.
It was a really special trip. Another memory was, after one of the Iraq tours, taking a group of chaplains on their first post-operational tour, decompression retreat. We went to Rome for a week. And we went for an audience. There were some Catholics there but by no means all Catholic. That was great fun and a really good thing to do.
QWhen servicemen and women leave do you remain in contact?
You do, yes, because of the relationships you build up with people over the years, particularly if you’ve been on operations with them. As I say, you are indelibly marked by those experiences.
People ring you and say: “Padre, remember me from Belfast all those years ago? I’m getting remarried would you do my wedding? Or would you baptise one of my grandkids? Or we’re having our 25th wedding anniversary party, would you come to it?”
Those contacts will always continue. I think also our support to the veteran community is something that many, many chaplains continue to do. We could probably do a lot more for the veteran community. I regard it as part of the after-sales service.
QNorthern Ireland legacy issues must be a major cause for concern within the veteran community?
AI’m not well-placed to answer that. I’m not evading it, I’m just not sure. I think chaplains will always do what they can to support people — in good times and in bad times. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone who was concerned with this would seek the counsel of a chaplain or a minister to help them through that.
QAnother big issue for veterans is post-traumatic stress disorder. Do you think enough money and effort is being funnelled towards addressing that problem?
AI think we’re now much more alert to PTSD. In the military, we ensure that all chaplains, for example, are trained in mental health first aid. I genuinely believe that PTSD has always been there and always will be there.
I think a long way to mitigating the risk of that is to ensure that you’ve got people who are aware of the signs of PTSD and to get people help early.
So, more preventative measures rather than a cure is probably the answer. The more knowledge the military community, the more knowledge the wider community have on these things, the better for everybody.
QThe Army Chaplains’ Department was formed by Royal Warrant way back in 1796. How many Chaplain Generals have there been since?
AClergy have gone to war with the military from time immemorial. In the Old Testament they talk about priests on the battlefield. I’ve been hugely privileged to be the 24th Chaplain General, which seems as though there haven’t been very many of us. Largely because there was one chaplain who did nearly 30 years in the mid-19th century.
And then Bishop John Taylor Smith, who was Chaplain General in 1901, went all the way through the First World War and then into the 1920s before he retired.
And up until the Eighties they were always Anglicans. In the 1980s the decision was made — and passed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen — that this should be opened up. Rev Jim Harkness was the first non-Anglican Chaplain General.
He was also the first Church of Scotland Chaplain General and I’ve been privileged to be the second. And then very soon after that we had Rev Dr Victor Dobbin, an Irish Presbyterian.
QIs there a need for more women chaplains in the services?
AAbsolutely. And any women reading this who are ordained ministers or priests should come and see what we do. I think it’s a great ministry. We’ve never had more than five or six female ministers and there’s certainly scope to have many, many more.
QThey don’t have to have served in the Armed Forces?
ANo. All we expect is that people have to have been ordained. And we like a minimum of three years pastoral experience. They might be the only chaplain in South Sudan or in Estonia or wherever troops are deployed. So they need to have a proper level of formation and maturity so they can cope with the demands of being with soldiers.
QLooking back over your years as Chaplain General what’s the memory you will take with you?
AI’ve been hugely privileged to be Chaplain General from 2014 to 2018 so I’ve been lucky enough to have taken part in most of the major commemorative events for the First World War.
I suppose that the one that stands out in my mind particularly is the commemoration of the anniversary of the Somme in 2016 both at Thiepval with the Archbishop of Canterbury and then when the Royal Irish had its own commemoratiion at Sandhurst, which I shared with Fr Seamus Madigan, the Head Chaplain of the Irish Defence Forces. That was a very powerful service.
To be at that service remembering the Somme where the 36th Ulster Division and the 16th Irish Division fought alongside each other and to have a senior colleague from the Irish Defence Forces taking part in that service, and giving the blessing in Irish, that was really, really important.
QSaturday’s consecration of colours at Titanic Slipways was your last formal event.
AIt was very significant. It’s great that it was held in Belfast. It’s great it was held in such a high-profile place as the Titanic Quarter. That would have been unimaginable in 1976. And personally to finish with this... quite a day.
QWhat plans do you have for the future, post-retirement? Are you planning to take it easy?
ANo. I’m a driven soul. I need a reason to get up in the morning. My diary is full at the moment — I say yes to everything. I never get a better offer, I never take anything out.
I dread opening my diary and saying: “Great, I’m playing golf on Tuesday and nothing else.” So at the minute I’m busy job-hunting. If anybody has a nice job going, please let me know!
I’m applying for Church jobs and looking probably at a Church of Scotland parish somewhere.
Grace and I are ready for the next stage. We’ve been very lucky. We’ve had a fantastic time. Now it’s time to do something else.