Correspondents write:
THE Revd John Jacob, a former Team Rector of Sheffield, was raised in a Liverpool vicarage. He was born just two weeks after the end of the General Strike and was evacuated during the war with his younger brother to Bangor. His father, Lionel, saw his churches flattened in the Liverpool Blitz and became one of the last Vicars of St Luke’s on Bold Street.
John was called up, aged 18, to work in the mines as part of Ernest Bevin’s scheme to relieve the country’s acute energy crisis by mining coal. A month’s training at Cresswell mine, in Derbyshire, was followed by a fortnight shovelling coaldust out of the tubs once they had left the mine. John then worked in Heanor mine, living in a hostel that was a collection of Nissen huts, each of which held 12 men, and a half-hour’s bus journey away. His shift started at 7.45 a.m. and ended at 2.30 p.m.
Sometimes, John had to walk a mile underground to get to the day’s seam, but said that he was not especially worried by the work as there was little time to think. He also lost his pay once or twice when someone ahead of him in the queue on payday collected his weekly wages by using John’s name at the pay-office window. It is said that when he first returned home and rang the vicarage bell, his mother failed to recognise her own coaldust-infused son standing on the top step.
Later, looking back on his long life, he said that some of the people he knew best in life came from those days. It may be that John was one of the last surviving Bevin Boys.
From Heanor mine, John went up to Selwyn College, Cambridge — a vast cultural leap — and was ordained deacon in 1952, joining his father and older brother, Bernard, as a clerk in holy orders. He served in Maltby, Intake (in Doncaster), Sheffield, and then Waddington; in Lincolnshire, John’s vocation took him to mining and poor urban communities.
John served his parishes during the 1960s and ’70s, and was a devotee of new management practices described in Peter Rudge’s Ministry and Management (1968), and an enthusiastic subscriber to the growing ecumenical movement which flowered during this time.
He arrived on Sheffield’s Manor Estate in the mid-1960s and remained there until 1982, having developed and led a team ministry. His achievement was to bring large parishes together during a time of acute social change. There were difficult challenges to face, and John’s skill was in bringing traditional church congregations to engage with the communities in which they were set: here, tough council estates comprising low-grade inter-war housing. John was a very good listener, whose gentle, but determined, nature took people with him. New pathways opened as a result.
Not every idea went smoothly. John saw through the reordering of one church — in the teeth of great opposition — by reversing its polarity from east to west, which lasted nearly three years; but it was then restored when it was discovered that the altar and altar rail had become too cramped. Win or lose, the message was more important than the messenger and, despite setbacks, John had made congregations think and look for ways of responding incarnationally.
John’s final parish was Waddington, in Lincolnshire, a perverse and curious irony, as his pacifism had brought him to the home of RAF Waddington. It was a place where polar opposites came together and John was entirely happy.
It was in Maltby that John fell in love with the Vicar’s daughter, Jean Challen. They married in 1955. Decades later, they went to live in Manormead, in Surrey, where they had previously visited her own parents in retirement.
Jean died in 2005, and John lived alone at Manormead until meeting and falling in love with Brenda. When he was 92, they were married; it was a late and fruitful flowering that lasted six years.
In total, John lived at Manormead for 20 years and occasionally attended the Friends’ Meeting House in Farnham and also explored Roman Catholic meditation. He leaves three daughters, Elizabeth, Nichola, and Katherine, and seven grandchildren.
The Revd John Jacob died on 10 April, aged 98.
