Former Braunston vicar appointed first female Dean of Hereford Cathedral
HER Majesty the Queen has confirmed the appointment of the Rev Canon Sarah Brown, a former vicar of the canalside village of Braunston, as the first female Dean of Hereford.
Sarah, who is currently Canon Missioner at Peterborough Cathedral, will take up her new role in the autumn.
Sarah was a late entrant to the priesthood, only commencing her studies in her thirties after a career in marketing before becoming ordained in 2008.
Her first major appointment was in 2011, when she became vicar of Braunston and surrounding churches, a post she held for several years. This ended after the Christmas Day service in 2017, when she was promoted to her present role at Peterborough Cathedral.
In her Braunston years, Sarah was soon noticed for her great energy and infectious enthusiasm, which won people over and greatly increased the size of her congregations. Comparisons were made to Dawn French playing Geraldine Granger in the TV programme The Vicar of Dibley, whom Sarah somewhat resembled in appearance, including a bob-cut hairdo.
But there was also a serious side to Sarah which did not make for TV sitcoms. She took Christ’s mission to the poor and downtrodden very seriously and was not afraid to do so publicly.
In particular she tended to a number of people within the canal community who had fallen from the mainstream of life and were living in rough conditions on their rundown boats and often on their own, with little outside contact.
She was not afraid to work with other Christian groups, including the Salvation Army.
Sarah also ministered to the ageing community of former working boatmen living in retirement in Braunston, including – when the time came – their funerals. In their childhood, many of these boatmen had attended the Sunday Schools arranged by the Salvation Army on its floating narrowboat chapel at Hawkesbury Junction on the canal north of Coventry.
Here the young learnt to sing hymns, the three family favourites of which were Abide With Me, The Old Rugged Cross and How Great Thou Art. At their funerals, the service invariably ended with Abide With Me, but the first hymn was usually one of the other two.
Sarah recalled how in one of the earliest boatman-funerals she presided over, the first hymn-choice was The Old Rugged Cross. The small and ageing congregation bellowed out the first verse and chorus, but thereafter was silent on the verses, leaving Sarah to sing out the remaining ones on her own, with the congregation then joining in the choruses. Afterwards she learnt that the congregation were illiterate and could no longer remember the other verses – as that generation of boatmen had never learnt to read and write.
In late June 2014, early on the Saturday morning before that year’s Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rally and Canal Festival, a special centenary service was held next to the newly restored Braunston Village War Memorial. This was to commemorate the 31 villagers of Braunston who had lost their lives in the First World War, seven of whom had been working boatmen.
Sarah presided over a very moving service, with musical accompaniment from Daventry Brass. The service included recitals of First World War poems from Prunella Scales, with Timothy West reading the names of the fallen with what information there was about them. As he concluded each name, a solitary bell was tolled from the village steeple by bellringer Peter Wenham.
Those in Braunston who knew and loved the Rev Sarah in her role as vicar believe there is still more to come for her in her promotion as a woman into the hierarchy of the Church of England.