The Very Reverend Wesley Carr
Controversial Dean of Westminster who led the Abbey’s clergy at Royal funerals but was criticised for his ruthless management style
THE VERY REVEREND WESLEY CARR, who has died aged 75, was Dean of Westminster from 1997 to 2006 and before that spent 10 years as Dean of Bristol.
During his time at Westminster he was responsible for two services of major national importance – the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales, in September 1997, and of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in 2002. Although very different, both in content and context, these services, seen by millions worldwide on television, were generally regarded as triumphs of liturgical skill and organisation, though the service for Princess Diana did not escape criticism.
Carr’s years at Westminster were, however, dogged by ill health. Almost immediately after his appointment had been announced Parkinson’s disease was diagnosed and, although several years passed before the symptoms became noticeable, its progress was relentless and led eventually to difficulty in walking. Then cancer of the vocal cords was diagnosed, this requiring several operations and long periods of absence for treatment, all leaving his voice seriously weakened.
He coped with these disabling afflictions with courageous tenacity. Inevitably some aspects of his ministry were affected adversely, but his acute mind remained clear and his patient endurance gave his leadership at the Abbey a special quality during his final years.
He was, though, a most controversial Dean and this was not because of his theological or political views but because of the style of his administration. A devotee of modern management methods, in which he deemed the Church to be singularly lacking, he appeared to regard it as his vocation to apply these techniques ruthlessly to any institution for which he had a degree of responsibility. The consequences were often divisive and destructive, and sometimes the cause of great unhappiness.
At the time of his retirement Carr said that he would be content if he were remembered for two main achievements at Westminster Abbey. The first related to what he described as “restoring the calm”. The number of visitors to the Abbey was reduced from about two million to one million annually through the imposition of a substantial admission charge. Visitors were admitted free on Sundays, but only for attendance at services, and the shrine of St Edward was reserved for prayer.
By these means the spiritual atmosphere of the Abbey was enhanced, but at the cost of excluding millions who were either unable or unwilling to pay for entry. This proved to be contentious.
The second claimed achievement was that he had “stamped out corruption and inefficiency in every department of the Abbey’s life”. This did not reflect well on the efforts or indeed the integrity of the distinguished and devout churchmen who had preceded him, and the harshness of his language was itself revealing.
The most widely publicised example of Carr’s reforming zeal became a national cause célèbre. In April 1998, some six months after the funeral of Princess Diana, Dr Martin Neary, the Abbey’s Organist and Master of the Choristers, who had been appointed LVO for his contribution to the service, was dismissed for his alleged mishandling of certain funds derived from the choir’s external engagements.
The failure, which also involved Neary’s wife, was administrative and involved lack of candour rather than deliberate dishonesty. There was a widely held view in the Church and far beyond that the matter might easily have been remedied informally. Instead, a violent storm of controversy erupted and kept the national and international media busy for several months.
Neary appealed against his dismissal to the Abbey’s Visitor, the Queen, who referred the case to the Lord Chancellor. He appointed a retired Law Lord, Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, to hear the appeal, and after a three-day hearing it was concluded that, while Neary had not been dishonest, the Dean and Chapter had been legally correct in their action, since loss of confidence was involved. Lord Jauncey added, however, that certain aspects of the procedure “must score gamma minus on the scale of natural justice”.
He also believed that had the Dean taken appropriate action a year earlier, when the problem first came to light, an open and frank discussion would have avoided gravely damaging publicity and produced an amicable settlement.
The legal costs of the exercise were enormous for all involved and Neary was assisted by the proceeds of a special concert at the Royal Festival Hall arranged by fellow musicians and supported by many other sympathisers, including Sir Edward Heath, a former prime minister, who described himself as incandescent with anger at the dismissal. A petition for Neary’s reinstatement, signed by the parents of all the choristers and 1,400 others, failed.
In the circumstances there seemed a certain irony in the fact that Carr’s widely acknowledged contribution to theology lay in the sphere of pastoralia. For more than 30 years he was involved in clergy training projects and consulted by bishops when engaged in the formulating of pastoral strategies.
He wrote several books on the subject, edited A Handbook of Pastoral Studies (1997) and The New Dictionary of Pastoral Studies (2002), and a volume of essays published in his honour by fellow-scholars, The Character of Wisdom (2004), testified to the high regard in which he was held by a number of bishops as well as academics.
Unlike books on pastoral work written by parish priests, Carr’s writings had a strong theological basis and also a distinctive theoretical element derived from the studies of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, with which for many years he was closely associated. This tended to make his own insights less accessible to ordinary pastors than they might otherwise have been, though it enabled him to collaborate closely with social work professionals.
Arthur Wesley Carr was born in south London on July 26 1941. His parents were Salvation Army officers and he won a scholarship to Dulwich College. While there he became an Anglican and felt drawn to Holy Orders. At Jesus College, Oxford, he read Classics, then went to Cambridge to read Theology at Jesus College and to prepare for ordination at Ridley Hall.
From 1967 to 1971 he was a curate at Luton Parish Church, then returned to Ridley Hall, first as tutor then as chaplain. But he and the recently appointed Principal did not get on and after two years the college council asked both of them to leave.
Carr then took up the Sir Henry Stephenson Research Fellowship at Sheffield University and completed a PHD, serving also as an honorary curate at Ranmoor Parish Church. In 1974 he was appointed chaplain of Chelmsford Cathedral and began a 13-year-long association with the cathedral and the diocese which included the posts of deputy director of the Centre for Research and Training, director of training in the diocese and finally Canon Residentiary of the cathedral.
Of his ability as an acute thinker and an interesting teacher there was never any doubt, and he made a considerable impact on theological education in Essex and beyond. He became an inspector of theological colleges. Then in 1982 the Provostship of the cathedral fell vacant and the Bishop of Chelmsford, John Trillo, filled this by appointing to it one of his archdeacons, the Ven John Moses.
Given the frailty of human nature, this was probably an unwise choice. Carr made no secret of his displeasure and, the two priests being of sharply differing personalities, the next five years found them at daggers drawn. The later presence of Carr at Westminster and Moses at St Paul’s did nothing to enhance relations between London’s two great churches.
Bishop Trillo was eventually driven by Carr’s attitudes to exclaim publicly: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”, and the answer came in 1987, when the Crown appointed him Dean of Bristol. From the outset he made it clear that the cathedral should not retain any of the vestiges of parish church life that he had experienced at Chelmsford, and the services of elderly guides and the like were quickly dispensed with.
Instead, he sought to strengthen relations with the wider community life of the city and served on the Bristol and District Health Authority for a year, then as a member of the Chamber of Commerce and Initiatives. Most unusually for an Anglican Dean, he was for 10 years acting chairman of Bristol’s Salvation Army Advisory Board, while beyond the city he was on the council of Lincoln Theological College, a governor of Dulwich College and an Honorary Fellow of New College, Edinburgh, where he undertook some teaching.
At the cathedral he broke new ground in securing sponsorship of the choir by Npower, but the world of cathedral music was shaken when he dismissed his distinguished organist, Malcolm Archer, and wrote to his fellow Deans explaining the reasons for his action. When the allegations against Archer proved to have been completely false he was soon appointed Organist of Wells Cathedral and crowned his career by becoming Organist of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Meanwhile, and for unrelated reasons, Carr secured the dismissal of the headmaster of the cathedral school, of which he was chairman of the governors. The chairman of the Headmasters’ Conference responded by declaring the Dean to have acted “unscrupulously” and the school’s membership of the HMC was suspended for the remaining four years of Carr’s time at Bristol.
Notwithstanding his accidentproneness, he had many admirers and was widely recognised as one of the most able Deans of his time. But his vision often appeared to be dark and narrow, tinged with aspects of Calvinism, and he tended to see things only in terms of black and white, with little room for compromise. His manner could seem abrupt.
Towards the end of his time at Westminster, he ventured to offer some suggestions for the planning of future Coronations. These, he believed, should start in the Palace of Westminster with the acclamation of the new monarch by the multi-faith leaders of the nation’s communities. This should be followed by the traditional Coronation service in the Abbey, after which the king or queen would move to St Margaret’s Church to receive the homage of representatives of the people. Then back to the Palace of Westminster for an inter-faith inauguration ceremony – all three sites to be linked by television.
On his retirement from Westminster he was appointed KCVO.
He is survived by his wife Natalie and by a daughter.
The Very Reverend Wesley Carr, born July 26 1941, died July 15 2017