John Dennis

Former Bishop of Ipswich

THE RT Rev John Dennis, who has died at 88, was the suffragan bishop of Knaresborough from 1979 to 1986 in the diocese of Ripon, before becoming Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

He had a long association with Yorkshire, punctuated by spells elsewhere, having originally arrived in the county to stay with his grandparents during the Blitz.

He returned at the start of his ecclesiastical career, after ordination and national service with the RAF, as curate of St Bartholomew’s in Armley, Leeds, from 1956–60.

The son of Hubert Ronald and Evelyn Dennis, he was educated at Rutlish School, Merton, a state grammar where his father taught biology and physics, and at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he gained a BA in 1954 and a MA five years later.

During his time in Knaresborough, he chaired a working party of the General Synod to consider whether children should start receiving Holy Communion after their

confirmation, as had been the Anglican tradition, or at a much younger age. It was already an old debate, having been instigated by the 1969 Ely Commission, and it continued long after 1976, when the Synod voted to maintain the status quo.

The findings by Dennis’s committee, which became known as the Knaresborough Report, recommended that regulations for admitting all baptised people to communion be drawn up, but it took another

14 years before they were formally approved.

Dennis retired from Suffolk in 1996 and went to live in Cambridge, then Winchester, serving as an honorary assistant bishop.

He and his wife, Dorothy, whom he met at Cambridge, married in 1956, during his time in Leeds. She predeceased him by six weeks.

They had two sons, the younger of whom is the comedian, Hugh Dennis.