STUDIED IN “GAOL”

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 213, 28 November 1927, Page 13

STUDIED IN “GAOL”

ANSWERING OVERSEAS CALL CHAT WITH WELSH CLERGYMAN It isn’t every clergyman who can say that he studied for the church in a After the war 300 divinity students studied in Knutsford Gaol, in England. It was turned into a college specially for their use. One of them, the Rev. H. WhitbyJames, arrived in New Zealand yesterday by the Athenic. He will take up work at Tinui, in the Wellington diocese, and is the first of the Knutsford Gaol people to answer the call overseas. Mr. Whitby James was senior curate at Tenby, Pembrokeshire. Wales “The gaol was a splendid place in which to study,” he said last evening during the course of a chat. “We were not. disturbed by noises next door, and one could study in ideal surroundings.” He said that many of the students were those who had broken off their studies to go to the war, and in the quiet of the gaol they were able to concentrate and so fit themselves more quickly for the university course Mr. Whitby-James said that the utterances of Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, have hurt many of the devout members of the Church of England. In England to-day there is conflict between the modernists and the high church people. He says that Bishop Barnes is a very fine man—a great thinker—but his utterances are not accepted by the man in the street.