William McCrossan (aka 'Liturgical William' of Bow)
William-Donan George McCrossan 24 February 1940-14 December 2002
William was something of an East End institution to those who knew him. The purpose of this page is to remember him, and to be thankful for him, and to convery a little about this firery, human soul for anyone who is interested.
The material below is taken from a series of 'epitaphs' brought together by his friend Fr John Rowe. Although that document names the contributors, I have used initials since I do not have permission to name them. The execeptions are contributions from Ken Leech, John Rowe and James Curry (who preached).
The material below is taken from a series of 'epitaphs' brought together by his friend Fr John Rowe. Although that document names the contributors, I have used initials since I do not have permission to name them. The execeptions are contributions from Ken Leech, John Rowe and James Curry (who preached).
- "William had many more friends than he probably realized. He had that wonderful gift of conversation, at the easeful level with whomever he met briefly, or on longer occasions. I shall always remember his laughter and ‘the pratty flowers’." BF, London
- "Sad news indeed……. William was a true one-off and I can't think of anyone I know even remotely like him. Intelligent, incisive and sometimes disarmingly honest, he made you question your sacred cows. A true loss to the world. DC, Co. Durham
- Sad news indeed. We thought of William as a true member of your [the Rowe] household, and therefore of ours. We shall miss his ascorbic wit and interesting conversation when we are with you……..Your Christmas will be darkened by William’s physical absence, but we will all remember him within the communion of saints – really a friend of God. C and M P, Vancouver
- I recall several friendly sessions (with William), most at your [the Rowe's] place, one or two at his place. He was rigorously logical in theology without being stuffy or domineering. I particularly recall his convincing me that before the Protestant Reformation there was no such thing as the ‘Roman’ Catholic Church. Certainly his faith upheld him in spite of grievous trials. May he enjoy being present to God, and may perpetual light shine upon him. DH, Toronto
- I have valued our brief encounters; he had a formidable ability to synthesize. Perhaps you will be able to gather his papers – there was much to reflect on in the discussion I had with him on the need to disestablish the English Church, and his paper on the liturgy. AP, Penarth
- I found William a great companion. We would be at ease together, talking or not. He was a challenging friend, stretching my mind but also making me laugh. His liturgical knowledge was phenomenal and it was reassuring to me that he prayed the daily Offices of the Church. But he also had a profound appreciation of people’s needs and problems. I for one feel it was a tragedy that he was not accepted for ordination, particularly at the time when the congregation of St Paul, Bow Common supported his application to the Bishop of Stepney. MMc, London
- Although I have had no contact with William since leaving St Margaret’s in 1994 I feel confident that he fulfilled his life in his own special way. The door never opened for him to be priested…but within his faith he was reconciled to that. We all leave our imprints on the lives of others, and I believe he, in the uniqueness of his God-given gifts, has left that legacy. KB, Milton Keynes
- William McCrossan, a Scot who had lived in East London for many years, was an immensely learned person with a remarkable depth of knowledge and understanding of liturgy. 'Liturgical William' was a key figure in creating and documenting the liturgical life of St Paul's, Bow Common, He was a mine of information on the history and meaning of liturgy, a pioneer in trying to create a more adequate lectionary for the Divine Office, and in restoring the place of the Office Hymn. I hope that some of his work may be preserved and made widely available. William will be greatly missed in the East End. Fr Ken Leech, Jubilee Newsletter, London
- Since receiving your sad news about William's death I have found my mind often turning to him. Although his direct contact with us was so brief he had made an impact out of proportion to that short time. He came round the parish for an hour or two with me, visiting people and I remember him talking with an elderly lady, much to her delight, about her days as a dish-washer in a restaurant. And I remember him surveying the books in the shelves of my room up at the church. He was full of knowledge of many of them, and full of approval of only some! He had an intense interest in the Church and in theology; it was his focus in a way which I think is rare outside the narrow company of the 'ordained'. It was all the more remarkable for the fact that over the years parts of the church had been less than affirming of him. He was no lightweight, and he required to be taken seriously. I remember the persistence of his questions and the scrutiny he gave to my answers. And I also remember his self-awareness and his humour. I very much enjoyed reading his essays and the articles which he later sent me. I shall be thinking of you and of his other friends when his Requiem Mass is held tomorrow. JM, Glasgow
- I felt a curious familiarity with you all – perhaps everyone who was verbally assaulted by William and survived long enough to go back for more must share something in common. I am glad that he knew some serenity in the last year or two. Like so many Scots in the middle and lowland shires he took everything so literally that everything became personal – the very absence of subtlety and reflective deviousness was both his strength as a truth teller... and his weakness as a healer. How marvellous then if he came to heal himself and so heal others. CB, Lowestoft
Sermon Preached at William's Funeral Mass
Monsignor James Curry
William McCrossan died on the 14th December, the commemoration of St John of the Cross. However, I don’t think William had much time for John of the Cross, or for the Carmelites, or for Religious in general!
William died on the 14th December. He was well prepared. He had been preparing for this moment. But when it came, it came like a thief in the night. William lived with the knowledge that it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. He prayed often with the psalmist, “Lord make us know the shortness of our lives that we may gain wisdom of heart. For man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek succour?” … Of Whom?
All of us live with death in our bodies. It is part of the human condition. The Christian however lives with the death of Christ in his body. In baptism he has died with Christ so that he might rise with him. It is to the Christ of God then, that we turn for succour. He alone is our hope.
Human nature is wounded and corrupted by sin, which makes us arrogant and forgetful of the law of God, and complacent in our presumption on God’s mercy. Man makes himself the measure of all things, and from this our own sinfulness flows. The irony of this is that man in his vanity declares his freedom from God only to end up serving a variety of idols of his own making: the State; Racialism; and Ideologies of some sort or another. He sells himself into slavery. God is not to be mocked in this way. William held fast to this belief; indeed, he became more convinced of it with each passing year. And he let everyone know it.
William echoed that noble and authentic way of speaking of God known in the Catholic tradition as the Via Negativa, the way of the negative: dwelling upon the awesomeness, the unknowability, and the majesty of the divine; where often silence was to be preferred to the clumsiness of words. Some may be tempted to say that such a view is akin to that of the Manichee, a despiser of the world and its joys, a death’s head at the feast, passing poetic sentences on millions of ordinary lives. Some would ask, is that view incapable of love? Could those who hold it not at least wish the rest of us joy, and not merely to make the best of it? No. They stand and look at the world with perfect clarity; they anatomise the world; unveil the skull beneath the skin. They call the Christian to be an existential germ in the body politic. Provoking, irritating the rest of us out of our easy complacency with the way the world is, our unconcern with how it should be.
It is not easy to enter into the sensibility of those for whom the consciousness of pain and failure, loss of simplicity, and single-heartedness is such a defining factor. It is easy to complain about their negativity or pessimism, or to explain it away. The truth is that most of us do not have the honesty to risk seeing the world in that way. If you look at your life and are left to wonder whether its apparent failure was all your fault, doubted the place you held in your family and your ability to love and be loved, then it seems to me you will have endured a spiritual and emotional desert most of us are spared. Such persons are acutely alive to our tendency to illusion and self-deception.
What are the Gospel and the [Christian] faith to say to such persons? They are above all a refuge for the sinful pilgrim and an assurance that the search for truth is not without purpose. Where then is consolation? There is to be no luxury of rest, no easy rejection of the world either. No, the word had been spoken, and has become flesh. Salvation is to be found in time, as time has itself been redeemed. But what can heal the pain of mortality, the anguish and despair of human beings, in what seems a senseless world, a world which seems no more than a vortex of destruction? To whom do we turn for succour? An answer comes! Face the truth, that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death and loss that no light of ecstasy can change. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion; to live without illusion is the first step to salvation; those who tread this path will be stripped of all, and this costs not less then everything.
Lazarus is commanded out of the grave, “Come back to tell all!”; and that command, the command of the Word made flesh, who wept for the dead man he loved, cannot be refused by one who knows he has risked exposure to a terrible, unanswerable truth. Is this not the experience of the Christian, who after dying with Christ in baptism, is condemned to go back to the world, a world unchanged from the one he had known before, pitiable and trivial, and now more alien then ever. Only through time is time redeemed. And here the starkness gives way to the gospel. God in Christ can only heal the world by acting in the worldliness of the world; in and through the experience of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sinfulness, our damnation, so as to bring to us his life and its fullness. The Catholic Christian knows that he cannot be saved without Christ or his Church; it cannot ultimately reject him, because of the pledge made at baptism. The Christian believes Christ is his saviour because he reconciles man to God. Man finds this relationship with God through the Church, which Christ called into being. In the resurrection of Christ the Christian finds the promise that he is destined to the life everlasting, to be fully realised at the day of Resurrection. God has borne all.
But it is not as easy as the preacher says. “Preaching is cheap if it fails to meet human beings at their darkest points”. “Listen: there is no discernible pattern or meaning in the world”, another voice says. But into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organise the chaos of the world, through systems and mythologies, and realise that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way, the only way in which love can begin, because only if we are honest about the world, can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is destruction and death, or there is the destruction and death that we take into ourselves, so as to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, and life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man. If we consent to making out of the chaos a network of compassion, of giving to others, then there is redemption and reconciliation in our own personal histories and that of the world. The pain does not go away, the horror will remain. Yet it is shot through with hope.
This reconciliation is costly, mortally hard. Our sole nourishment in this task is the blood and body of God’s costly love. Our prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action, all our responses to God, are not just our efforts, but God’s loving purpose worked out in us, in time and history.
The poet writes, “We only live, only suspire, / Consumed by either fire or fire.”
And the theologian answers, “No optimism, no activism will do, that does not grow out of the vision of the two fires, the unbearable violence and the unbearable compassion”. The Christian will be content with nothing else. Christians are baptised in the sign of the cross, and celebrate in the Eucharist the violent death of God until his coming again. That fire is for them the fire of the Holy Ghost, by whom and in whom Lazarus and all of us shall live evermore.
Monsignor James Curry
William McCrossan died on the 14th December, the commemoration of St John of the Cross. However, I don’t think William had much time for John of the Cross, or for the Carmelites, or for Religious in general!
William died on the 14th December. He was well prepared. He had been preparing for this moment. But when it came, it came like a thief in the night. William lived with the knowledge that it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. He prayed often with the psalmist, “Lord make us know the shortness of our lives that we may gain wisdom of heart. For man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek succour?” … Of Whom?
All of us live with death in our bodies. It is part of the human condition. The Christian however lives with the death of Christ in his body. In baptism he has died with Christ so that he might rise with him. It is to the Christ of God then, that we turn for succour. He alone is our hope.
Human nature is wounded and corrupted by sin, which makes us arrogant and forgetful of the law of God, and complacent in our presumption on God’s mercy. Man makes himself the measure of all things, and from this our own sinfulness flows. The irony of this is that man in his vanity declares his freedom from God only to end up serving a variety of idols of his own making: the State; Racialism; and Ideologies of some sort or another. He sells himself into slavery. God is not to be mocked in this way. William held fast to this belief; indeed, he became more convinced of it with each passing year. And he let everyone know it.
William echoed that noble and authentic way of speaking of God known in the Catholic tradition as the Via Negativa, the way of the negative: dwelling upon the awesomeness, the unknowability, and the majesty of the divine; where often silence was to be preferred to the clumsiness of words. Some may be tempted to say that such a view is akin to that of the Manichee, a despiser of the world and its joys, a death’s head at the feast, passing poetic sentences on millions of ordinary lives. Some would ask, is that view incapable of love? Could those who hold it not at least wish the rest of us joy, and not merely to make the best of it? No. They stand and look at the world with perfect clarity; they anatomise the world; unveil the skull beneath the skin. They call the Christian to be an existential germ in the body politic. Provoking, irritating the rest of us out of our easy complacency with the way the world is, our unconcern with how it should be.
It is not easy to enter into the sensibility of those for whom the consciousness of pain and failure, loss of simplicity, and single-heartedness is such a defining factor. It is easy to complain about their negativity or pessimism, or to explain it away. The truth is that most of us do not have the honesty to risk seeing the world in that way. If you look at your life and are left to wonder whether its apparent failure was all your fault, doubted the place you held in your family and your ability to love and be loved, then it seems to me you will have endured a spiritual and emotional desert most of us are spared. Such persons are acutely alive to our tendency to illusion and self-deception.
What are the Gospel and the [Christian] faith to say to such persons? They are above all a refuge for the sinful pilgrim and an assurance that the search for truth is not without purpose. Where then is consolation? There is to be no luxury of rest, no easy rejection of the world either. No, the word had been spoken, and has become flesh. Salvation is to be found in time, as time has itself been redeemed. But what can heal the pain of mortality, the anguish and despair of human beings, in what seems a senseless world, a world which seems no more than a vortex of destruction? To whom do we turn for succour? An answer comes! Face the truth, that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death and loss that no light of ecstasy can change. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion; to live without illusion is the first step to salvation; those who tread this path will be stripped of all, and this costs not less then everything.
Lazarus is commanded out of the grave, “Come back to tell all!”; and that command, the command of the Word made flesh, who wept for the dead man he loved, cannot be refused by one who knows he has risked exposure to a terrible, unanswerable truth. Is this not the experience of the Christian, who after dying with Christ in baptism, is condemned to go back to the world, a world unchanged from the one he had known before, pitiable and trivial, and now more alien then ever. Only through time is time redeemed. And here the starkness gives way to the gospel. God in Christ can only heal the world by acting in the worldliness of the world; in and through the experience of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sinfulness, our damnation, so as to bring to us his life and its fullness. The Catholic Christian knows that he cannot be saved without Christ or his Church; it cannot ultimately reject him, because of the pledge made at baptism. The Christian believes Christ is his saviour because he reconciles man to God. Man finds this relationship with God through the Church, which Christ called into being. In the resurrection of Christ the Christian finds the promise that he is destined to the life everlasting, to be fully realised at the day of Resurrection. God has borne all.
But it is not as easy as the preacher says. “Preaching is cheap if it fails to meet human beings at their darkest points”. “Listen: there is no discernible pattern or meaning in the world”, another voice says. But into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organise the chaos of the world, through systems and mythologies, and realise that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way, the only way in which love can begin, because only if we are honest about the world, can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is destruction and death, or there is the destruction and death that we take into ourselves, so as to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, and life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man. If we consent to making out of the chaos a network of compassion, of giving to others, then there is redemption and reconciliation in our own personal histories and that of the world. The pain does not go away, the horror will remain. Yet it is shot through with hope.
This reconciliation is costly, mortally hard. Our sole nourishment in this task is the blood and body of God’s costly love. Our prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action, all our responses to God, are not just our efforts, but God’s loving purpose worked out in us, in time and history.
The poet writes, “We only live, only suspire, / Consumed by either fire or fire.”
And the theologian answers, “No optimism, no activism will do, that does not grow out of the vision of the two fires, the unbearable violence and the unbearable compassion”. The Christian will be content with nothing else. Christians are baptised in the sign of the cross, and celebrate in the Eucharist the violent death of God until his coming again. That fire is for them the fire of the Holy Ghost, by whom and in whom Lazarus and all of us shall live evermore.
Spoken contributions at the reception following the Requiem
James Curry
As you know, William had definite views about his funeral service and we were in honour bound to carry them out to the letter. In some ways he had put very firm handcuffs on us, so we thought it was appropriate that we should meet afterwards and, perhaps over a glass of whisky and some wine, remember William in a different way. So we are going to ask a number of people to speak about the man they knew.
Before we do that I’d like to say a word about John Rowe and his family, to thank them for the role that they have played in bringing all this about – the funeral and this wake after it. You may know that it was John who discovered William’s body. When he found William he called his daughter Annette and together they recited the Office for the Dead before the emergency services appeared. John, Isabel, Annette and James, indeed the whole family, had been a great source of comfort and strength to William – indeed they have been his rock in many ways and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their friendship and loyalty to William over all these years. It wasn’t always easy but I know that he came to value and cherish what they had to offer him.
Linda R
I first met William in 1972 via St. Margaret's House. We became friendly, but fenced quite a lot, and our relationship did not blossom (as they say) for several years. In the autumn of 1975, I was living on my own; I hurt my back quite badly and was advised by my doctor to rest for several weeks. I cannot recall William's precise circumstances at that time, but he managed to turn up at my house, assess the situation, and immediately appoint himself chief butler and general factotum. William, and his typewriter, moved in.
Several days later I developed gastric 'flu' and was quite ill. William went up to central London and came back bearing gifts. I was given five booklets about the sacrament of penance and two about the visitation of the sick!
I soon got better, and William and I talked, and talked, and talked about anything and everything under the sun, and we carried on talking until he died. Over recent years we talked almost every day on the telephone: grammar, the state of the world, food, [and] the state of the Church were frequent topics and then there were often over-riding themes that he would discuss with Theresa, John, James and so we were drawn into an ongoing conversation, with William being the stimulant and catalyst that kept the thing going.
We all know that William wanted to be a priest and that he spent the whole of his young manhood pursuing this goal. The reality, of course, was that William was a bit player in an horrendous Comedy of Errors, where the principals were, for the most part but not exclusively, Monsters and Villains of pantomime proportions, and were themselves interwoven in a series of plots, sub-plots, and sub-texts that, had the whole saga been fiction, would have required an army of scriptwriters working for months to come up with such a tale. William was later to see the lambent wry humour in all of this, but initially he was very angry and the next few years were disconsolate and difficult for him.
He eventually found work with Theodore Goddard in the City and he came to enjoy city life and the people he met there. In May 1981 he put an end to his tortuous relationship with the Church of England and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He took the name Donan at that time. He remained at a distance from the Church and it was not until the mid 80s that he renewed his scholarly work and interest in the Church and the liturgy.
William had an acute eye and ear for detail and nuances, when he chose. A bus ride to Canning Town, for instance, could give him enough material to reflect upon and consider for days. He was fascinated by advertising and the fatuous language used. The Garnier advertisement, with its catch phrase "Because you're worth it!" gave him apoplexy and virtually rendered him speechless, which was some achievement. Another rich seam that he mined was the advertisements in The Tablet - he could fantasise for hours about the content of a degree in Spiritual Counselling and then become depressed because some people took such things seriously.
Over recent years William became reconciled to his poor health, reconciled to his relative poverty, and reconciled to the fact that the church had not offered him any formal recognition of his talents. He took real pleasure in his day-to-day life and the company of his friends and he enjoyed going back to his flat which he referred to as his Benedictine cell. He did indeed lead a religious life. He achieved a degree of contentment that many of us envied. This did not mean he was serene, far from it. He cared passionately about communicating the orthodox teaching of the Church, he cared about the proper role of clergy in doing this and in maintaining the tradition of the Church, but at the same time he was convinced that the institutional nature of the church begets folly and that the clerical profession begets corruption. He could see no way out of this log jam.
I would like to finish by telling you a story that I think encapsulates William as he was over the last few months. At the beginning of last year, Theresa and William each acquired mobile 'phones for use whilst travelling and for emergencies, etc. They both quickly learned how to send text messages and would remind one another of forthcoming saints days, etc. and send an extra antiphon or something such to one another. William was much taken with this and began sending all his friends who had mobile 'phones similar holy messages and aphorisms whenever he thought it appropriate. “Just think, my dear,” he said, “I'm sanctifying the airwaves”.
John Rowe
I hardly know what to say. But, first of all, about Theresa Fleming. I think that everyone would agree that Theresa was William’s closest friend - who would have been here - should have been here - but she is ill, seriously ill. That is why she is not here, to our great regret.
I’m very glad to say, however, that one of William’s relations is present, a cousin and childhood playmate, [RC], who has come down from Dunoon, where William spent most of his childhood. In a couple of days time Rena and James Bell intend to bury William’s ashes in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Dunoon. I am very glad that this has been arranged.
William came into our life just twenty-five years ago, that is, the life of my family. He barged in, as it were. There was always a storm, always a storm! I felt that there were grievances there that had to be brought out. One could have taken this as a case of extended adolescence but I learned to see something more in it than that, and I came to feel that William was an accusation against people like me, people who came from settled, happy backgrounds and undisturbed childhoods. Somehow, he hadn’t had that. Not only that, very often people that he met in the Church, notably the clergy, would make professions of love which he found rather more in the saying than in the doing.
I feel William suffered because he was a truth-teller. William was a truth-teller. He hated humbug in his very being (though, of course, he could be a bit of an ass himself) but, fundamentally, he hated humbug and he showed it up – and I thought he showed it up in me. I feel William was a man of God, not in the sense of a holy man but a man of God because he was an outsider. Somehow society had pushed him out, something in society had pushed him out and he was an outsider, and he had to live with that, and it wasn’t easy. But I think the outsider is a man of God because it is he whom God is with. I feel I had to learn that. My family had to learn it too, one way or another, as well as laugh at him.
What else can I say? For me William was a sign of contradiction. Despite my pretensions in coming as a middle-class person into a working-class area I felt that there was something in that which William could see through because he could see through pretence. So for that I honour him.
I feel that in losing William I have lost an arm.* William used to say, when he stubbed his toe, that God was punishing him. That could only have been for some misdemeanour. But I feel as if I am being punished as it were for a felony and I don’t know how I am going to manage.
* lost an eye, rather: William’s invaluable perspective on the world.
James B
In the Bayeux Tapestry Bishop Odin is depicted “encouraging his troops”. The encouragement was a sharp jab from his mace. William encouraged us, something of the overseer with a robust verbal prod for lesser mortals.
We met first at Lambeth Rectory in the autumn of 1973 to discuss whether or not he would join a group of young people (mostly in our twenties and thirties) trying to live a common life. Clearly William was not going to be easy: he had views and expectations, as indeed had the other householders. But, as my wife Lesley reminded me the other day “it was a done deal”. William was coming; he and I had hit it off (initially at least).
In some respects it was the attraction of opposites, in others it was of kindred spirits. Each of us was a beneficiary of the peculiar educational and social diet of Clydeside: we savoured the nuances, the snobbish attitudes, the fragile refinements of the petty bourgeoisie and, we also enjoyed the sharp and somewhat visceral Glasgow humour. Here I have to confess that my Glaswegian origins were for William a matter for contempt, he having enjoyed the seaside air of Dunoon, Argyll and the ‘auld decencies’ of an Episcopalian Rectory. Memories of the Campbells and other worthies kept us gossiping for a while - we recalled great names of the past, Kirk divines, transient dignitaries, and recollections of the historic and intrinsic Catholicism of Scotland: Bruce Marshall’s novels provided episodes and characters; though fictional, we knew them all. And we wondered aloud, What Next? Whither the Church today?
Theologically William was refreshing: a radical and blunt enquirer, yet in some ways free to travel to the thoughtful margins because of the rock-bottom certainties which he had found embodied in the Liturgy and expressed in the Prayer of the Divine Office. I can imagine a Guillemic sense of exasperation here, vexed if I’m being too ‘spiritual’. Yet, at the beginning of the Divine Office there is a text from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Every day, as long as this ‘today’ lasts, keep encouraging one another.” That summed up William for me - a stalwart encourager prodding the lesser brethren on the way, if not to perfection, then at least to an exact and proper performance of one’s duties: perhaps saying the Office (and his meticulous scholarship in the Liturgical Calendar was in itself a daily encouragement), or perhaps in cooking, or preparing a meal, or getting properly turned out for an occasion. Something of Keble’s ‘trivial round and common task’ comes to mind.
William challenged, exasperated, rarely deferred, though he could be sensitively courteous, particularly to the vulnerable. He himself knew suffering, yet he came back from afflictions, evictions, and some petty convictions (which caused him much merriment in retrospect). He had resilience, courage, and an enormous capacity to make one marvel at his inner strength. I shall miss our frequent conversations, our spats, the fraternal meals when he enjoyed being a guest or a host - perhaps he preferred the latter, for he gave generously at his board.
In recent years he was there for us all: perhaps a new-found equanimity, profound and touching. William, gritty, craggy, Cruachan - the great mountain of Argyll - friend (if I may presume). May he know God’s happiness.
Frater Confortiter, Brother of Encouragement, PAX!
Terry Mc
My name is Terry and I was William’s next-door neighbour for all the time that he lived in Devons Road. I was lucky to have such a neighbour. Considering what has happened, what we see nowadays, especially with the Council, the way they treat people like myself and William, they basically abandoned us to the market. One of the things he used to rage against was that the Council didn’t do anything. On one particular occasion, one morning, he said, “Do you see it?” And I couldn’t see what was there. He said, basically, “They’ve taken it!” As part of the deal which ensured that the open space we looked down upon from our balcony remained an open space, beside the church, they put garden benches and during the night somebody actually sawed away and took the garden seats, and William said “Why do they do this?!…I just said, “Like the mysteries of God there are some things which are illogical and which you simply have to accept. There are people that are like that”
I first got to know William, like John did, some twenty-five years ago and in all that time I had no cause to complain about a neighbour. But I will have now because on my other side they’ve moved in some squatters. For example they left their stereo on for two weeks. I was lucky to have William. I knew when he got up in the morning. First I’d smell the caffeine and then I’d smell the cooking. In a sense these are, like someone mentioned, encouraging things I remember him by.
Lately he had been suffering because as time went on he found it increasingly difficult to get up the stairs. I used to see him go up one set of stairs and then wait a while before going up the next. The morning that John found him I knew something was wrong because the curtains were drawn, and I knew what the outcome was going to be because I could see it coming. I knew he’d prepared for it with efficiency.
I’ll just finish, if I can. I’m a journalist and when I wrote an article I used to give it to William to get his thoughts, and we’d discuss it together. He used to do this and I appreciated the comeback and interchange.
I have brought a poem by Robert Frost which sums up the spirituality of this occasion and the feelings of all of us.
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God
James Curry - proposing the toast
William always insisted on people being called by their proper names (and by this he meant their title and surname) and yet he was always known simply as William. I shall miss when the phone rings and its William’s voice saying, “This is William!”
I think there was a kind of reconciliation towards the end of his life; something came right, came together. I do believe that the vocation he had was somehow fulfilled; there was a priestliness about him, and a faithfulness, to be seen there.
So…to the most cussed… awkward… Scottish man… who seemed to dignify Bow - his address in Bow seemed to have a sort of dignity by association with William, a sort of class, simply because he lived there.
To a great friend, eternal peace and…
Gang warily!!
James Curry
As you know, William had definite views about his funeral service and we were in honour bound to carry them out to the letter. In some ways he had put very firm handcuffs on us, so we thought it was appropriate that we should meet afterwards and, perhaps over a glass of whisky and some wine, remember William in a different way. So we are going to ask a number of people to speak about the man they knew.
Before we do that I’d like to say a word about John Rowe and his family, to thank them for the role that they have played in bringing all this about – the funeral and this wake after it. You may know that it was John who discovered William’s body. When he found William he called his daughter Annette and together they recited the Office for the Dead before the emergency services appeared. John, Isabel, Annette and James, indeed the whole family, had been a great source of comfort and strength to William – indeed they have been his rock in many ways and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their friendship and loyalty to William over all these years. It wasn’t always easy but I know that he came to value and cherish what they had to offer him.
Linda R
I first met William in 1972 via St. Margaret's House. We became friendly, but fenced quite a lot, and our relationship did not blossom (as they say) for several years. In the autumn of 1975, I was living on my own; I hurt my back quite badly and was advised by my doctor to rest for several weeks. I cannot recall William's precise circumstances at that time, but he managed to turn up at my house, assess the situation, and immediately appoint himself chief butler and general factotum. William, and his typewriter, moved in.
Several days later I developed gastric 'flu' and was quite ill. William went up to central London and came back bearing gifts. I was given five booklets about the sacrament of penance and two about the visitation of the sick!
I soon got better, and William and I talked, and talked, and talked about anything and everything under the sun, and we carried on talking until he died. Over recent years we talked almost every day on the telephone: grammar, the state of the world, food, [and] the state of the Church were frequent topics and then there were often over-riding themes that he would discuss with Theresa, John, James and so we were drawn into an ongoing conversation, with William being the stimulant and catalyst that kept the thing going.
We all know that William wanted to be a priest and that he spent the whole of his young manhood pursuing this goal. The reality, of course, was that William was a bit player in an horrendous Comedy of Errors, where the principals were, for the most part but not exclusively, Monsters and Villains of pantomime proportions, and were themselves interwoven in a series of plots, sub-plots, and sub-texts that, had the whole saga been fiction, would have required an army of scriptwriters working for months to come up with such a tale. William was later to see the lambent wry humour in all of this, but initially he was very angry and the next few years were disconsolate and difficult for him.
He eventually found work with Theodore Goddard in the City and he came to enjoy city life and the people he met there. In May 1981 he put an end to his tortuous relationship with the Church of England and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He took the name Donan at that time. He remained at a distance from the Church and it was not until the mid 80s that he renewed his scholarly work and interest in the Church and the liturgy.
William had an acute eye and ear for detail and nuances, when he chose. A bus ride to Canning Town, for instance, could give him enough material to reflect upon and consider for days. He was fascinated by advertising and the fatuous language used. The Garnier advertisement, with its catch phrase "Because you're worth it!" gave him apoplexy and virtually rendered him speechless, which was some achievement. Another rich seam that he mined was the advertisements in The Tablet - he could fantasise for hours about the content of a degree in Spiritual Counselling and then become depressed because some people took such things seriously.
Over recent years William became reconciled to his poor health, reconciled to his relative poverty, and reconciled to the fact that the church had not offered him any formal recognition of his talents. He took real pleasure in his day-to-day life and the company of his friends and he enjoyed going back to his flat which he referred to as his Benedictine cell. He did indeed lead a religious life. He achieved a degree of contentment that many of us envied. This did not mean he was serene, far from it. He cared passionately about communicating the orthodox teaching of the Church, he cared about the proper role of clergy in doing this and in maintaining the tradition of the Church, but at the same time he was convinced that the institutional nature of the church begets folly and that the clerical profession begets corruption. He could see no way out of this log jam.
I would like to finish by telling you a story that I think encapsulates William as he was over the last few months. At the beginning of last year, Theresa and William each acquired mobile 'phones for use whilst travelling and for emergencies, etc. They both quickly learned how to send text messages and would remind one another of forthcoming saints days, etc. and send an extra antiphon or something such to one another. William was much taken with this and began sending all his friends who had mobile 'phones similar holy messages and aphorisms whenever he thought it appropriate. “Just think, my dear,” he said, “I'm sanctifying the airwaves”.
John Rowe
I hardly know what to say. But, first of all, about Theresa Fleming. I think that everyone would agree that Theresa was William’s closest friend - who would have been here - should have been here - but she is ill, seriously ill. That is why she is not here, to our great regret.
I’m very glad to say, however, that one of William’s relations is present, a cousin and childhood playmate, [RC], who has come down from Dunoon, where William spent most of his childhood. In a couple of days time Rena and James Bell intend to bury William’s ashes in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Dunoon. I am very glad that this has been arranged.
William came into our life just twenty-five years ago, that is, the life of my family. He barged in, as it were. There was always a storm, always a storm! I felt that there were grievances there that had to be brought out. One could have taken this as a case of extended adolescence but I learned to see something more in it than that, and I came to feel that William was an accusation against people like me, people who came from settled, happy backgrounds and undisturbed childhoods. Somehow, he hadn’t had that. Not only that, very often people that he met in the Church, notably the clergy, would make professions of love which he found rather more in the saying than in the doing.
I feel William suffered because he was a truth-teller. William was a truth-teller. He hated humbug in his very being (though, of course, he could be a bit of an ass himself) but, fundamentally, he hated humbug and he showed it up – and I thought he showed it up in me. I feel William was a man of God, not in the sense of a holy man but a man of God because he was an outsider. Somehow society had pushed him out, something in society had pushed him out and he was an outsider, and he had to live with that, and it wasn’t easy. But I think the outsider is a man of God because it is he whom God is with. I feel I had to learn that. My family had to learn it too, one way or another, as well as laugh at him.
What else can I say? For me William was a sign of contradiction. Despite my pretensions in coming as a middle-class person into a working-class area I felt that there was something in that which William could see through because he could see through pretence. So for that I honour him.
I feel that in losing William I have lost an arm.* William used to say, when he stubbed his toe, that God was punishing him. That could only have been for some misdemeanour. But I feel as if I am being punished as it were for a felony and I don’t know how I am going to manage.
* lost an eye, rather: William’s invaluable perspective on the world.
James B
In the Bayeux Tapestry Bishop Odin is depicted “encouraging his troops”. The encouragement was a sharp jab from his mace. William encouraged us, something of the overseer with a robust verbal prod for lesser mortals.
We met first at Lambeth Rectory in the autumn of 1973 to discuss whether or not he would join a group of young people (mostly in our twenties and thirties) trying to live a common life. Clearly William was not going to be easy: he had views and expectations, as indeed had the other householders. But, as my wife Lesley reminded me the other day “it was a done deal”. William was coming; he and I had hit it off (initially at least).
In some respects it was the attraction of opposites, in others it was of kindred spirits. Each of us was a beneficiary of the peculiar educational and social diet of Clydeside: we savoured the nuances, the snobbish attitudes, the fragile refinements of the petty bourgeoisie and, we also enjoyed the sharp and somewhat visceral Glasgow humour. Here I have to confess that my Glaswegian origins were for William a matter for contempt, he having enjoyed the seaside air of Dunoon, Argyll and the ‘auld decencies’ of an Episcopalian Rectory. Memories of the Campbells and other worthies kept us gossiping for a while - we recalled great names of the past, Kirk divines, transient dignitaries, and recollections of the historic and intrinsic Catholicism of Scotland: Bruce Marshall’s novels provided episodes and characters; though fictional, we knew them all. And we wondered aloud, What Next? Whither the Church today?
Theologically William was refreshing: a radical and blunt enquirer, yet in some ways free to travel to the thoughtful margins because of the rock-bottom certainties which he had found embodied in the Liturgy and expressed in the Prayer of the Divine Office. I can imagine a Guillemic sense of exasperation here, vexed if I’m being too ‘spiritual’. Yet, at the beginning of the Divine Office there is a text from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Every day, as long as this ‘today’ lasts, keep encouraging one another.” That summed up William for me - a stalwart encourager prodding the lesser brethren on the way, if not to perfection, then at least to an exact and proper performance of one’s duties: perhaps saying the Office (and his meticulous scholarship in the Liturgical Calendar was in itself a daily encouragement), or perhaps in cooking, or preparing a meal, or getting properly turned out for an occasion. Something of Keble’s ‘trivial round and common task’ comes to mind.
William challenged, exasperated, rarely deferred, though he could be sensitively courteous, particularly to the vulnerable. He himself knew suffering, yet he came back from afflictions, evictions, and some petty convictions (which caused him much merriment in retrospect). He had resilience, courage, and an enormous capacity to make one marvel at his inner strength. I shall miss our frequent conversations, our spats, the fraternal meals when he enjoyed being a guest or a host - perhaps he preferred the latter, for he gave generously at his board.
In recent years he was there for us all: perhaps a new-found equanimity, profound and touching. William, gritty, craggy, Cruachan - the great mountain of Argyll - friend (if I may presume). May he know God’s happiness.
Frater Confortiter, Brother of Encouragement, PAX!
Terry Mc
My name is Terry and I was William’s next-door neighbour for all the time that he lived in Devons Road. I was lucky to have such a neighbour. Considering what has happened, what we see nowadays, especially with the Council, the way they treat people like myself and William, they basically abandoned us to the market. One of the things he used to rage against was that the Council didn’t do anything. On one particular occasion, one morning, he said, “Do you see it?” And I couldn’t see what was there. He said, basically, “They’ve taken it!” As part of the deal which ensured that the open space we looked down upon from our balcony remained an open space, beside the church, they put garden benches and during the night somebody actually sawed away and took the garden seats, and William said “Why do they do this?!…I just said, “Like the mysteries of God there are some things which are illogical and which you simply have to accept. There are people that are like that”
I first got to know William, like John did, some twenty-five years ago and in all that time I had no cause to complain about a neighbour. But I will have now because on my other side they’ve moved in some squatters. For example they left their stereo on for two weeks. I was lucky to have William. I knew when he got up in the morning. First I’d smell the caffeine and then I’d smell the cooking. In a sense these are, like someone mentioned, encouraging things I remember him by.
Lately he had been suffering because as time went on he found it increasingly difficult to get up the stairs. I used to see him go up one set of stairs and then wait a while before going up the next. The morning that John found him I knew something was wrong because the curtains were drawn, and I knew what the outcome was going to be because I could see it coming. I knew he’d prepared for it with efficiency.
I’ll just finish, if I can. I’m a journalist and when I wrote an article I used to give it to William to get his thoughts, and we’d discuss it together. He used to do this and I appreciated the comeback and interchange.
I have brought a poem by Robert Frost which sums up the spirituality of this occasion and the feelings of all of us.
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God
James Curry - proposing the toast
William always insisted on people being called by their proper names (and by this he meant their title and surname) and yet he was always known simply as William. I shall miss when the phone rings and its William’s voice saying, “This is William!”
I think there was a kind of reconciliation towards the end of his life; something came right, came together. I do believe that the vocation he had was somehow fulfilled; there was a priestliness about him, and a faithfulness, to be seen there.
So…to the most cussed… awkward… Scottish man… who seemed to dignify Bow - his address in Bow seemed to have a sort of dignity by association with William, a sort of class, simply because he lived there.
To a great friend, eternal peace and…
Gang warily!!
The Interment of the Ashes
James B
The journey to Dunoon for the Interment of the Ashes, on January 15, 2003, was amidst particularly inclement weather. Gales were blowing across Scotland and conditions in the Firth of Clyde were stormy to say the least. I decided therefore to take the longer, land route through Helensburgh and by the Gareloch and Arrochar to Dunoon. It meant not crossing by the Ferry from Gourock, a pity, for these were familiar waters to William on which he had spent many happy hours sailing with Canon Archibald Campbell in the yacht, Sheila. As I passed the Royal Naval Base at Faslane there was HMS Ark Royal being fitted out with stores and equipment for her journey to the Middle East. William always had a high regard for the Senior Service so it was perhaps not inappropriate that on his last journey to Dunoon he should, however briefly, be proximate to the largest warship in the Fleet, whatever reservations he may have had about its mission.
I arrived in Dunoon in a cold and blustery morning, and I had no sooner left my car when the heavens threw down the most tremendous hailstones which bounced off the pavements, and were stinging in their effect on one’s body. I sought the refuge and steamy comfort of a cafe, known to William, in Argyll Street. There I enjoyed a dish of coffee and the Herald, thus confirming my Glaswegian tastes. William would have preferred the Scotsman , it being the Edinburgh paper!
About one o'clock I met Rena Cairney, William's cousin, who lives in Dunoon. Rena treated me to a delightful lunch at the Argyll Hotel. We had been there together on William's last visit to Dunoon in the summer of 2001. It is a very decent establishment, with an oak- panelled bar overlooking the Firth of Clyde. There we enjoyed a home-made steak pie of which William would have approved.
After lunch we made our way up the winding hillside route towards the Bishop's Glen, to the Scottish Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity. In the Rectory there, and at the Church, William had spent happy years in his youth with Canon and Mrs Campbell.
The interment was not uneventful! When we arrived at the churchyard the hailstorm which had abated over lunch broke out with fresh ferocity. Then we discovered that the excavation for the casket had been dug at the wrong place. It was in a grave marked by a sundial (optimistic, I thought) and beside a beech tree. It was a pleasant enough place and had suggested itself to the Rector when he recalled a conversation with William about the sundial; but the occupants had been there since the nineteen thirties and had no connection with William. Our intention was that William's ashes be interred in or near the grave of the Campbells. That was not easy to find, given the adverse weather conditions, but the Rector ran backwards and forwards to the Rectory to find the records while Rena and I sheltered in the church porch - with the casket and the flowers.
The correct location was established, the grave clearly marked with a continental style, wooden crucifix with a little, inverted V, lead roof. The Rector dug a new resting place for the casket, and in a brief interlude in the storm we deposited William's remains there together with the herbs which Anne Creigh-Tyte gave to us for that purpose. The Interment Office was read by the Rector of Holy Trinity, Fr Hugh Lea, using the rite from the Alternative Services Book. It was not a time for Catholic misgivings! I put some earth on the casket. We had no sooner filled in the grave, replaced the turf and flattened it down with my feet (and I did it discreetly, carefully avoiding any suggestion of dancing!) when as we turned to go to the car there was a huge flash of lightning, and then there was thunder. William had an apocalyptic burial; there were mists swirling around the hillsides, off Holy Loch and the Firth of Clyde and with the hailstones and the wintry gloom it was eerily Gothic!
Afterwards we accepted the Rector's kind invitation to tea. Looking out of the Rectory window towards the Church he said, "Oh, look. It is the first time that I have seen the first new bloom of January on the red rhododendrons". William had been granted a bright, deep-red Rhododendron flower flourishing on a dark green background, and an electrical storm and hailstones, to welcome him home and to bid us farewell.
The plate on the casket had been inscribed:
William-Donan George McCrossan
24th February 1940 - 14th December 2002
“O night truly blessed!”
The quotation is from the Exultet, the Proclamation sung in the light of the Paschal Candle at the Vigil of Easter, to announce the Resurrection of Jesus from death.
On Friday, January 24, 2003, Lucy Ransom, on a school trip in Rome, entered the Basilica of St Peter and, in memory of William, who had known her from her birth, recited:
The Prayer of Commendation
Enter not into judgement with your servant William, O Lord, for in your sight no one can be justified unless you grant him forgiveness of all his sins. Therefore we pray that in passing judgement you will not let your sentence fall heavily upon one who is commended to you by the sincere prayer of faith. With the help of your grace, may he who in this life bore the imprint of the Holy Trinity be found worthy on the day of resurrection to be established in that bliss which knows no ending.
In Paradiso
Into paradise may the Angels lead you: at your coming may the martyrs receive you and bring you into the Holy City, Jerusalem. May the choirs of Angels receive you and, with Lazarus once poor, may you have eternal rest.
James B
The journey to Dunoon for the Interment of the Ashes, on January 15, 2003, was amidst particularly inclement weather. Gales were blowing across Scotland and conditions in the Firth of Clyde were stormy to say the least. I decided therefore to take the longer, land route through Helensburgh and by the Gareloch and Arrochar to Dunoon. It meant not crossing by the Ferry from Gourock, a pity, for these were familiar waters to William on which he had spent many happy hours sailing with Canon Archibald Campbell in the yacht, Sheila. As I passed the Royal Naval Base at Faslane there was HMS Ark Royal being fitted out with stores and equipment for her journey to the Middle East. William always had a high regard for the Senior Service so it was perhaps not inappropriate that on his last journey to Dunoon he should, however briefly, be proximate to the largest warship in the Fleet, whatever reservations he may have had about its mission.
I arrived in Dunoon in a cold and blustery morning, and I had no sooner left my car when the heavens threw down the most tremendous hailstones which bounced off the pavements, and were stinging in their effect on one’s body. I sought the refuge and steamy comfort of a cafe, known to William, in Argyll Street. There I enjoyed a dish of coffee and the Herald, thus confirming my Glaswegian tastes. William would have preferred the Scotsman , it being the Edinburgh paper!
About one o'clock I met Rena Cairney, William's cousin, who lives in Dunoon. Rena treated me to a delightful lunch at the Argyll Hotel. We had been there together on William's last visit to Dunoon in the summer of 2001. It is a very decent establishment, with an oak- panelled bar overlooking the Firth of Clyde. There we enjoyed a home-made steak pie of which William would have approved.
After lunch we made our way up the winding hillside route towards the Bishop's Glen, to the Scottish Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity. In the Rectory there, and at the Church, William had spent happy years in his youth with Canon and Mrs Campbell.
The interment was not uneventful! When we arrived at the churchyard the hailstorm which had abated over lunch broke out with fresh ferocity. Then we discovered that the excavation for the casket had been dug at the wrong place. It was in a grave marked by a sundial (optimistic, I thought) and beside a beech tree. It was a pleasant enough place and had suggested itself to the Rector when he recalled a conversation with William about the sundial; but the occupants had been there since the nineteen thirties and had no connection with William. Our intention was that William's ashes be interred in or near the grave of the Campbells. That was not easy to find, given the adverse weather conditions, but the Rector ran backwards and forwards to the Rectory to find the records while Rena and I sheltered in the church porch - with the casket and the flowers.
The correct location was established, the grave clearly marked with a continental style, wooden crucifix with a little, inverted V, lead roof. The Rector dug a new resting place for the casket, and in a brief interlude in the storm we deposited William's remains there together with the herbs which Anne Creigh-Tyte gave to us for that purpose. The Interment Office was read by the Rector of Holy Trinity, Fr Hugh Lea, using the rite from the Alternative Services Book. It was not a time for Catholic misgivings! I put some earth on the casket. We had no sooner filled in the grave, replaced the turf and flattened it down with my feet (and I did it discreetly, carefully avoiding any suggestion of dancing!) when as we turned to go to the car there was a huge flash of lightning, and then there was thunder. William had an apocalyptic burial; there were mists swirling around the hillsides, off Holy Loch and the Firth of Clyde and with the hailstones and the wintry gloom it was eerily Gothic!
Afterwards we accepted the Rector's kind invitation to tea. Looking out of the Rectory window towards the Church he said, "Oh, look. It is the first time that I have seen the first new bloom of January on the red rhododendrons". William had been granted a bright, deep-red Rhododendron flower flourishing on a dark green background, and an electrical storm and hailstones, to welcome him home and to bid us farewell.
The plate on the casket had been inscribed:
William-Donan George McCrossan
24th February 1940 - 14th December 2002
“O night truly blessed!”
The quotation is from the Exultet, the Proclamation sung in the light of the Paschal Candle at the Vigil of Easter, to announce the Resurrection of Jesus from death.
On Friday, January 24, 2003, Lucy Ransom, on a school trip in Rome, entered the Basilica of St Peter and, in memory of William, who had known her from her birth, recited:
The Prayer of Commendation
Enter not into judgement with your servant William, O Lord, for in your sight no one can be justified unless you grant him forgiveness of all his sins. Therefore we pray that in passing judgement you will not let your sentence fall heavily upon one who is commended to you by the sincere prayer of faith. With the help of your grace, may he who in this life bore the imprint of the Holy Trinity be found worthy on the day of resurrection to be established in that bliss which knows no ending.
In Paradiso
Into paradise may the Angels lead you: at your coming may the martyrs receive you and bring you into the Holy City, Jerusalem. May the choirs of Angels receive you and, with Lazarus once poor, may you have eternal rest.
A postscript
I very much wish I had known William better. We had a few conversations at John and Isabel Rowe's home. William invited me to a meal at his 'cell', and went to considerable effort in putting together a fine Scottish menu. At the time of knowing him, I was working (more than) full time in a demanding secular role in local government in addition to working as a priest (unpaid/NSM) in a London parish. Looking back, I wonder how I managed all that, and for so many years. The point I am trying to make is that I had virtually no free time, and no surplus engery if often seemed, for much else. I regret that now, and I regret not seeing more of William. I regard him as an unusual gem of a mind and person, a person of substance.
In addition, I lament the way that church 'authorities' treated and pigeon-holed him. These, and many other elements, became clearer to me when I came across lengthy autobiographical essays William had written in later life. He entrusted these to his great pal John Rowe, who had tried to deposit them with Tower Hamlets Archive. He - William - was judged as lacking an East End link, and the papers were refused. I have recently re-read them (2025). I dare hardly summarise what I beleive they record, for fear of not doing them or William justice. But I will make an attempt at the impression they make on me. A beginning in life that inflicted wounds, more than childhood tends to do for us all. A mind that evolved, displaying a sharp intelligence and great skill with language. A character full of self reproach and self criticism, humility and self deprecation, delightfully set against a perceptive critique of the times he lived through and those who peopled them. A man seeking emotional and physical tenderness, but never finding that in suficient or reciprocated ways to heal. A serious, thoughtful and uncompromising follower of Christ who found liturgy and clerical conduct that aimed to comfort congregants and relativise the gospels unattractive. God bless you William. HV
I very much wish I had known William better. We had a few conversations at John and Isabel Rowe's home. William invited me to a meal at his 'cell', and went to considerable effort in putting together a fine Scottish menu. At the time of knowing him, I was working (more than) full time in a demanding secular role in local government in addition to working as a priest (unpaid/NSM) in a London parish. Looking back, I wonder how I managed all that, and for so many years. The point I am trying to make is that I had virtually no free time, and no surplus engery if often seemed, for much else. I regret that now, and I regret not seeing more of William. I regard him as an unusual gem of a mind and person, a person of substance.
In addition, I lament the way that church 'authorities' treated and pigeon-holed him. These, and many other elements, became clearer to me when I came across lengthy autobiographical essays William had written in later life. He entrusted these to his great pal John Rowe, who had tried to deposit them with Tower Hamlets Archive. He - William - was judged as lacking an East End link, and the papers were refused. I have recently re-read them (2025). I dare hardly summarise what I beleive they record, for fear of not doing them or William justice. But I will make an attempt at the impression they make on me. A beginning in life that inflicted wounds, more than childhood tends to do for us all. A mind that evolved, displaying a sharp intelligence and great skill with language. A character full of self reproach and self criticism, humility and self deprecation, delightfully set against a perceptive critique of the times he lived through and those who peopled them. A man seeking emotional and physical tenderness, but never finding that in suficient or reciprocated ways to heal. A serious, thoughtful and uncompromising follower of Christ who found liturgy and clerical conduct that aimed to comfort congregants and relativise the gospels unattractive. God bless you William. HV
Holy Trinity Dunoon where William McCrossan's ashes are buried