Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Chichester, Ecumenist, & Advocate for Justice
October 3 · d. 1958
also known as George Kennedy Allen Bell
George Bell was the Anglican Bishop of Chichester who, almost alone among his church's leaders, stood against his own government's obliteration bombing of German cities in the Second World War. He was the closest English friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a rescuer of refugees from Hitler's Germany, and a founding architect of the modern ecumenical movement. His refusal to be silent very likely cost him the See of Canterbury. He died in 1958.
George Bell was an English clergyman, born in 1883, who spent his life trying to hold the whole Church of Christ together across the lines that divided it, and who paid for it. He rose quickly: Dean of Canterbury, where he invited the poets and playwrights back into the cathedral and commissioned T. S. Eliot to write Murder in the Cathedral, and in 1929 Bishop of Chichester, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
It was Germany that made him. When Hitler came to power, Bell saw at once what most of England was slow to see. He befriended the young German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and through him took up the cause of the Confessing Church, the Christians who refused to bend their faith to the Nazi state. When the persecution of the Jews began, Bell opened England to those who fled it, finding homes and work and safety for refugees while much of the world looked away. Once, in the middle of the war, Bonhoeffer risked his life to slip across to neutral Sweden and meet Bell in secret, carrying word of the German resistance that was plotting to kill Hitler. It was the last time the two friends met.
Then came the speech. By 1944 the Royal Air Force was bombing German cities not to hit factories but to burn whole towns and the people in them, and calling it victory. To question it in wartime was to be called a traitor to one's own airmen. Bell rose in the House of Lords and questioned it anyway. He did not deny that a nation at war may strike its enemy's war machine; but there must be, he said, a fair balance between the means and the end, and this had lost all balance. "The policy is obliteration, openly acknowledged. That is not a justifiable act of war," he told the Lords in February 1944. He was answered with anger and swept aside. Eight months later the See of Canterbury fell vacant, and the man many thought the finest bishop in England was passed over. He almost certainly knew it would cost him that, and he said it anyway.
Bonhoeffer was hanged by the SS a month before the war ended. Before he died he gave a fellow prisoner a message to carry to his English friend: that with Bell he still believed in a Christian brotherhood that rises above all the nations' quarrels, and that their victory was certain. Bell lived to hear those words, and to spend his last years building the World Council of Churches, the visible sign of the one Church he had never stopped believing in. He had lost Canterbury and kept his conscience, and he trusted, as his friend had, that the God who is not bound by frontiers or by graves would have the last word.
How we know George Bell is the way we know any modern public man: from a vast and well-kept documentary record. His own papers fill the archive at Lambeth Palace Library, his wartime speeches stand verbatim in Hansard, the official record of Parliament, and his letters, sermons, and books survive in print. The standard modern life is Andrew Chandler's George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (Eerdmans, 2016), candid about both the greatness and the controversies.
Bell was born on Hayling Island, off the Hampshire coast, on 4 February 1883, the son of a clergyman, and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. Ordained in 1907, he served a curacy among the industrial poor of Leeds, became chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson in 1914, was Dean of Canterbury from 1924, and Bishop of Chichester from 1929 until his death on 3 October 1958. That his 1944 stand against area bombing cost him Canterbury when William Temple died later that year is the widely held judgment of historians, though it cannot be proved: the appointment was the Prime Minister's, and Churchill left no reasons. His friendship with Bonhoeffer, and the message Bonhoeffer sent from his death cell through the released prisoner S. Payne Best, are documented in Payne Best's memoir The Venlo Incident (1950) and across the Bonhoeffer scholarship.
One chapter of Bell's afterlife is recent and painful, and must be set down plainly. In 2015, decades after his death, the Church of England announced that it had settled a civil claim by a woman, known as "Carol," who alleged that Bell had sexually abused her as a child in the 1940s and 1950s; the diocese apologized and named him. Because Bell had been dead since 1958, he could not answer the charge, and no court ever tried it. The naming provoked a public dispute, and the Church commissioned an independent review by Lord Carlile, published in December 2017. Carlile did not rule on whether the allegation was true or false; his remit was the Church's process, which he found seriously deficient, criticizing a "rush to judgment" and the failure to weigh the interests of a man who could not defend himself. Fresh information was later passed to the Sussex police, who closed the matter in 2018, and a further Church review by Timothy Briden in 2019 found subsequent allegations unfounded. The claim itself has never been proved and never disproved: Bell's defenders hold his reputation vindicated, while the woman's account was never withdrawn. The honest report is that the matter is contested, that the Church's handling of it was found wanting, and that the wider testimony of his life stands in the public record independent of it.
George Bell is commemorated on 3 October, the day of his death, in the calendar of the Church of England and in the Anglican Church in North America, which keeps him among its worthies of the faith. He is buried in Chichester Cathedral, where his memory is honored. His name is bound above all to two legacies: the ecumenical movement, for he was the first chairman of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches at its founding in 1948 and a president of it until his death, and the Christian conscience against total war, for which the 1944 speech remains the great English text. He was also a patron of the arts in the service of the Church, the man who brought Eliot to Canterbury, and himself a hymn-writer, author of "Christ is the King! O friends, rejoice." Bonhoeffer scholars keep his memory too, as the friend who received the martyr's last word.
Primary sources. Bell's short book Christianity and World Order (Penguin, 1940) set out his case for a just international order before the worst of the bombing began, and his decisive speech against area bombing stands verbatim in the House of Lords Hansard for 9 February 1944. His papers are held at Lambeth Palace Library.
Principal biography. Andrew Chandler's George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Eerdmans, 2016) is the authoritative modern life, thoroughly archival and fair-minded about the controversies; it is the one book to put in a serious reader's hand.
Further reading. Ronald C. D. Jasper's older official biography, George Bell: Bishop of Chichester (Oxford, 1967), remains valuable for its closeness to the sources, though it is out of print and best found through a library. For the friendship at the heart of the story, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen's Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945 is the standard modern life of the friend.
Online resources. Bell's 1944 speech is freely available in full at Wikisource and in the UK Parliament's historic Hansard.
Almighty God, we give you thanks for the ministry of George Bell, who labored that the Church of Jesus Christ might be one: Grant that we, instructed by his teaching and example, and knit together in unity by your Spirit, may ever stand firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Bonhoeffer /ˈbɒnhɜːfər/
Readings for an Ecumenist
Ezekiel 34:11–16Psalm 133Ephesians 3:14–21John 17:10–26