Archbishop Alan Knight

 

Alan Knight was Bishop of Guyana from 1937 to 1979. ‘A robust Anglo-Catholic, he made the Church under his direction one of the great centres of traditional Catholic ritual and devotion in the Anglican Communion. A convinced Caribbeanist, he liked to say that the Anglican Province of the West Indies was a lesson to the West Indian States on how to create unity in diversity. There were times when his behaviour was almost Papal, and yet he saw himself as a dyed-in-wool democrat. He was never an easy man to categorise... but there were two areas in which he admitted no contradiction: his faith in God and his love of Guyana’ (Robert Moore). Those words are a summary of the man responsible in more than one sense for my own call to the Diocese of Guyana. This was linked to the Diocese being infected by his ‘robust Anglocatholicism’ with a momentum that was to reach after his passing into Guyana’s interior through his memorial, the Alan Knight Training Centre I came to serve in 1987. As an Anglocatholic myself, that call to train priests for Guyana for me linked to the Anglican Church there being then ‘one of the great centres of traditional Catholic ritual and devotion in the Anglican Communion’. 

What is Anglocatholicism? It holds that Catholicism is not to be equated to Roman Catholicism, important as that Creed is, nor is it to do with elaborate forms of worship i.e. "smells and bells" - Catholic worship can be grand or simple according to taste and occasion. To hold to the Catholic Faith is to hold to the mainstream of Christian belief as held in most centuries and over most of the world. Such Faith has a yearning after the "whole" and a disdain for what is partial, sectarian, parochial or one sided. Anglocatholics are concerned to witness to that broad stream of Christian believing that flows down through the Christian centuries of which the Anglican Church claims to be a part. On another analogy, the branch theory, the two Provinces of the Church of England and the Province of the Church in the West Indies stem from an Anglican branch of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ alongside the major Roman Catholic and Orthodox branches. Alan Knight was brought into such faith through his involvement as a young man in the flourishing parish of St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb. He was a server there, was confirmed in 1916 and at school wrote a book of devotion for the newly confirmed used at St Jude’s. 

After serving as a student teacher Alan Knight studied History and Law at Cambridge and prepared for the priesthood at Bishop’s College, Cheshunt. Derek Goodrich writes: ‘He celebrated his first Mass on May 31 1926 in the Church of SS Peter & Paul, Enfield… this was a great event in his life, and he would celebrate over 19,000 Masses in his Ministry, the daily Mass being at the heart of his spiritual life… Fr Knight remained at Enfield for three years and then had a call to work in West Africa where he was to live for nine years…serving as Headmaster of St Nicholas’ Grammar School at Cape Coast in the Gold Coast of West Africa, now known as Ghana… [where his fundraising from home] resulted in the Archbishop of Canterbury pronouncing him ‘the most successful beggar in the Church of England’, and deciding that a priest with his talents was needed in British Guiana as Bishop’. 

Within months of his becoming Bishop in 1937 Alan Knight encouraged the then Guiana Diocesan Association to produce ‘El Dorado’ magazine twice a year communicating current affairs of significance in the Diocese to UK parishes. Knight’s ministry emerged at the apex of the Anglocatholic revival and drew a succession of Tractarian or Anglocatholic priests across the Atlantic who in turn drew me to serve under his successor, native Guyanese Bishop Randolph George. I think of Allan Buik, Richard Cole, Brian Doolan, John Dorman, John Fowler, Derek Goodrich, Jack Holden, Ken Livesey, Donald Percy, Peter Peterken and Arthur Whitehead among close acquaintances of whom Frs Dorman and Goodrich are given special attention in my ‘Guyana Venture’ alongside my colleague Fr Allan Buik. All of us have been privileged to engage in the spiritual and ecclesial buoyancy of the Diocese linked decades back to Knight’s teaching, pastoral and administrative acumen.