Leigh Hatts writes:
CANON Peter Huxham had a long and remarkably effective ministry largely in his home town of Poole up to a few weeks before his death.
The family home to return to, and where he died, was Salterns House, overlooking Poole Harbour. The early 19th-century building in Lilliput features in the 1937 autobiography The Crystal Cabinet by the novelist Mary Butts, whose family built the Church of the Holy Angels near by. There, she experienced “superb liturgy”. Peter’s vocation was fostered by the Vicar, Marshall Sargent, father of the artist Rachel Sargent.
Peter’s garage-owner father was sceptical about his son’s wish to be ordained, but, when visiting the Morris factory at Cowley, took him to St Stephen’s House. In 1961, after three years at Worcester College, Oxford, he was accepted at “Staggers”, as he always called it. He recalled the Principal’s sister saying that, as he and other new students had been brought up without servants, she would show them how to serve at table. His contemporaries were Bishops David Hope, Alan Chesters, and Richard Hawkins.
Peter served his title at Gillingham, in Dorset, where he made a life-long friendship with a future Dean of Canterbury, Robert Willis. Soon after, he married Jane Molland, one of the first women to read theology at St Hugh’s, Oxford.
They began their shared ministry at Leeds, and, after three years, Peter accepted an invitation to return home, to be Vicar of St Osmund’s, Parkstone, in Poole. The church is a landmark Byzantine-style building with an interior inspired by San Clemente in Rome. (St Osmund’s is now St Dunstan’s Orthodox church.) The parish was later amalgamated with St Peter’s, Parkstone, which embraces Brownsea Island, in Poole Harbour. The Harvest Festival at St Mary’s, Brownsea, was one of biggest festivals of the year.
Curates received a thorough training from Peter. Martin Inman recalled the years he spent there as among the most rewarding of his ministry and the happiest of his life. Peter and Jane could be said to run a model parish with adherence to the liturgical year, at the same time visiting parishioners, distributing a magazine (edited by Jane), and running clubs. Robert Baden-Powell had been married at St Peter’s, and its Scout group was strong. Among the young Scouts was Stephen Lake, now Bishop of Salisbury, whose vocation Peter encouraged.
At St Stephen’s House, there had been the opportunity of a part-time placement at Littlemore Hospital, working with its American chaplain, Andrew Mepham, a doctor and psychiatrist. He provided a training that had such an effect that, after 22 years back in Poole, Peter suddenly moved to be Co-ordinating Chaplain to the Taunton and Somerset Hospitals. One attraction of Somerset was that it was there that he had first encountered worship when staying with his grandmother. It is where he is now buried.
On retirement in 2003, he inherited Salterns House, from where he provided cover at Holy Angels. Later, he also spent an increasing amount of time helping at St Stephen’s, Bournemouth. This once popular Anglo-Catholic church, a miniature version by John Loughborough Pearson of Truro Cathedral, had fallen on hard times, being then part of a dysfunctional town parish and without its own priest. Peter described himself as sacristan and groundsman, although he was quietly assiduous in visiting the sick and housebound. So distressed was he at seeing a beleaguered church, that he publicly criticised the Bishop of Winchester Dr Tim Dakin for vetoing clergy willing to be appointed there.
It was, therefore, with enormous joy that he welcomed the appointment of Stephen Lake as Bishop of his own Salisbury diocese. He was both celebrant and preacher at St Peter’s for Peter’s funeral Mass, at which every seat was taken. “It’s all Peter’s fault,” the Bishop said. Appropriately, his crosier is fashioned from a Parkstone Scout stave.
Canon Peter Huxham died on 26 December, aged 87. He is survived by his wife, Jane, four sons, and eight grandchildren.
