Bernard Palmer
Turned the Church Times into necessary reading in vicarages
BERNARD PALMER, who has died aged 88, was managing director of the Church Times from 1957 to 1989 and, for the last 21 of those years, was the newspaper’s editor.
His great-grandfather, George Josiah Palmer, had founded the paper in 1863 as the organ of the Anglocatholic movement in the Church of England, and for more than a century it remained faithful to its origins. But Bernard Palmer disliked the sometimes vitriolic tone of the paper’s assaults on its enemies – evangelicals and liberals – and also recognised that Anglo-catholicism had become so reduced in size and influence that maintaining circulation demanded wider appeal.
Under his editorship space was found for news from all parts of the Church, and articles and reviews expressed a variety of opinion, political as well as ecclesiastical. The editorial stance remained strictly orthodox, however, with little sympathy for controversial theological exploration or over-liberal bishops.
With its circulation settled at about 40,000, the Church Times came to be recognised as the preeminent Church of England weekly, necessary reading in vicarages and episcopal palaces, if only for its details of clergy appointments. The letters columns continued to expose a rich vein of clerical eccentricity and the Church Times Cricket Cup, competed for by diocesan teams, often featured in the diary of important events in the church’s calendar.
Bernard Harold Michael Palmer, son of CH Palmer, proprietor and editor of the Church Times, was born at Hindhead, Surrey, on September 8 1929. He went to Eton as a King’s Scholar and then to King’s College, Cambridge. Feeling drawn to journalism and aware that, sooner or later, he would join the family company, he decided to seek experience on a secular paper.
In the meantime, however, awaiting call-up for National Service, he went to the Church Times office to work as a reporter. There he found himself working under Edward Heath, the future prime minister, who was spending 12 months as the paper’s news editor while seeking a parliamentary seat. Palmer described Heath as “a rather cold fish, unless you could get him on to music or sailing”. By the time he had completed his National Service, Palmer was urgently needed at the paper, where he remained for the next 37 years. He became managing director as well as editor in 1957 and chairman five years later.
Thanks to an extraordinarily cheap lease on the five-storey premises in Portugal Street, off the Strand, and Palmer’s skill in producing the paper economically, the problems that beset the religious press through falling circulations and reduced advertising revenue in the 1970s were overcome.
Palmer’s decision to retire in 1989 when he reached 60 was prompted by the arrival of new technology in newspaper production as well as by the expiry of the lease on the building. After receiving many offers for the company, he sold it to the trust responsible for the publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern.
Retirement set him free to write books and to display the scholarship, wit and attractive literary style which had been largely hidden during the years when he was engaged in the production of the Church Times.
Among these, Gadfly for God (1991) was a history of the paper; High and Mitred (1992) was a learned and entertaining study of prime ministers as bishop-makers, and A Class of their Own (1997) was a perceptive account of six public school headmasters who had become Archbishop of Canterbury. There were other volumes on the authors of detective stories.
Palmer was awarded a Lambeth Dlitt in 1988 and was appointed OBE in 1989. His wife Jane, whom he met when she was a Church Times reporter, predeceased him. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
Bernard Palmer, born September 8 1929, died December 7 2017