Gareth Vaughan Bennett, also known as Garry Bennett (8 November 1929 – 7 December 1987), was a British Anglican priest and academic who committed suicide in the wake of media reactions to an anonymous preface he wrote for Crockford's Clerical Directory.
Life
Bennett was born at Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex into a "lower-middle-class family", son of Roy Charles Frederick Bennett and Kathleen Beryl (née Vaughan). Bennett's father was a London shipping clerk. Bennett was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, Southend High School for Boys and Christ's College, Cambridge. He trained for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge, and was ordained deacon in 1956 and priest in 1957. He served his title at St Mary the Virgin, Prittlewell (1956-1959). He also became a published historian, Fellow in Modern History at New College, Oxford and college chaplain and Dean of Divinity, canon of Chichester Cathedral and a member of the Church of England's General Synod and its standing committee. He was a well-known figure in ecclesiastical politics in England, latterly rather definedly on the conservative wing of the Anglo-Catholic movement, being a noted figure in the opposition to the ordination of women.
Crockford's Clerical Directory, published biennially by the Church of England, contains brief biographical details of every Anglican cleric in Britain and Ireland. It was traditional for its preface to be written anonymously and to take a slightly waspish, if detached and amused, look at events in the church since the previous edition. Bennett was asked to write the preface for the 1988 edition of the directory, which was published on 3 December 1987.
Bennett consciously took a different tack on the article and, from a conservative viewpoint, wrote a carefully constructed demolition of the hierarchy of the Church of England, which he himself described as "wicked". In it Bennett excoriated what he perceived as an intolerant liberal elite in the church, headed by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, a process which he felt would follow a trail already blazed by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and would lead inexorably to a steep decline in the fortunes of the church. Specifically, he argued that Runcie was guilty of cronyism, appointing to high office only those whom he had known through Westcott House (Bennett's own theological college) or Ripon College Cuddesdon theological colleges or else the Canterbury and St Albans dioceses.
While the explosive nature of the article in ecclesiastical circles might have been predicted, the secular press turned the issue into front-page news. The papers latched on to his criticisms of Runcie, yet the preface was far more critical of the liberal Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, and the Bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong. After a number of days of fevered speculation, it emerged that Bennett was the anonymous author and the last entries in his diary make clear that he was finding the attentions of the tabloid press increasingly difficult to cope with.
Between 5 December 1987, when he was last seen alive, and 7 December, when his body was found, Bennett killed himself at 15, Moody Road, Oxford. His death and the events which led up to it continue to divide those who take an interest in church matters. Conservative Anglo-Catholics and many others opposed to the ordination of women view Bennett as a martyr, hounded to his death by the machinations of the Church of England "spin machine" for saying something that everyone believed to be true. Liberals, while agreeing that his death was a tragedy, point to Bennett being not without his problems and having recently lost his mother, to whom he was particularly close.