John North: One woman army of Alcatraz

ANNE Williams, 58, was licensed last Thursday as "community missioner" on the pre-war Ford Estate in Sunderland, an area so beset with problems that there's even an iron bar across the clergy house manhole cover to prevent (or at least to deter) its misappropriation.

Four nights later, the kids set light to what remained of the already vandal-wrecked church hall.

She barely smiles - unusually, for she laughs a great deal - at the suggestion of a baptism of fire. "It has been a warm welcome in every other sense of the word," she insists.

"There were a lot of people about, as well as the police and fire brigade, and it gave me the chance to get to meet them. I would dearly love to have been able to take the children somewhere where we could have had some fun, a focal point for the community, but they did for the hall a long time ago. What I need is a millionaire."

As well as being the Church Army's oldest ever trainee officer, sent alone to the front line, she is also one of the Church of England's leading lay people and a vociferous opponent of women priests.

Now the divorcee is officially Sister Anne, uniformed but far from uniform. If time alone will tell if ever there was such a devoted sister, few have been more likely.

Two weeks ago she was chairing a high profile debate at General Synod - the Church's parliament - unsuccessfully proposing an end to pay differentials between parish priests and senior clergy. On Tuesday afternoon she led a meeting for a handful of women at the Church of the Good Shepherd on the Ford Estate, where every street begins with the letter F and some of the language does, too. Most streets have several steel shuttered houses, long abandoned.

Good shepherdess? "Someone once told me that God doesn't ask you to do anything he doesn't give you the ability to do. There's something about the way I was trained as a Church Army officer that told me there was a need here."

It's what the Church Army calls cutting-edge ministry, and the learning curve's so sharp she could do herself a mischief. "I trust God and I still sleep at night," she says. "I'm pretty sure I'll be proved right."

The clergy house had been empty for two years - the estate wasn't what might be termed Ford popular - before she moved in. All but the smallest windows remain steel shuttered because no one can find the keys; the smallest are steel barred, instead.

"Welcome to Alcatraz," she says.

Framed on the book case is her evangelist's commission from the Archbishop of Canterbury - "Apt and meet for your learning and godly conversation to exercise this office" - on the table a couple of theological works and an open A-Z.

A male priest from a neighbouring Anglo-Catholic parish will lead services in which, still a lay person, she can only assist. About 20 attended her first service on Sunday at the heavily fortified church.

"What was the priority, to put a priest in or to put an evangelist in who could be alongside people at their times of need, help them to cope and show them something of Jesus?

"I'll start by walking the streets, getting to know people, finding out what the real issues are on the Ford Estate."

She was born in Shotton Colliery, moved as a child to Horden, left the A J Dawson Grammar School in Wingate with four O-levels - "girls weren't encouraged to further education in those days, just to marry and have children" - separated after a few years of marriage, followed her father as churchwarden at Horden but for a decade, made the 60 mile round trip for the Anglo-Catholic extravaganza that is worship at St James the Great in Darlington.

Until Church Army college in Sheffield, where she was asked to cram a three year course into 18 months, she was assistant bursar at Durham High School for Girls and would have retired at 60.

Now she's on a five year Church Army contract, but expects to work longer. "Church Army sisters don't really retire," she says. "There's always something for them to do."

A general synod member since 1990, she helped lead the opposition to the ordination of women as priests and was devastated when a 1992 vote allowed it. In an interview four years later, she claimed to have cried all the way home, on the train from London to Durham.

All the way? "Yes, all the way. There were some people opposite partying and that just seemed to make it worse.

"The Church of England was the church into which I was born and in some ways, it felt like the door was being closed in my face. It was almost like a bereavement, I was almost being told to go away and I didn't want to."

The 1996 piece also mentioned that her purse held a card which read: "In the event of accident or emergency when a priest is needed, please call a male priest."

Even now, though she has women friends who are priests, she declines even to attend their services. "It would be disrespectful, I would feel that I couldn't take part," she says.

For ten years she has also been national vice-chairman of Forward in Faith, an umbrella organisation for church groups opposed to women priests. "Women's ordination was a gut feeling, I just feel it was wrong, that we couldn't let it happen.

"I've been called heretic more times than I can remember, but I'm delighted to be a heretic. The word 'bitch' came in once, but I'm fairly thick skinned about it."

Her vocation to the Church Army appeared suddenly, unexpectedly, when she was 55 - "I hadn't even given it a thought, someone else must have been doing the thinking for me" - and was thoroughly, psychologically tested. "They wanted to know all about my life, how I'd coped with my broken marriage and about my theological knowledge, which was less than I believed it was.

"Going back to college was a bit of a shock 40-odd years after leaving school, but in a way I feel cheated only having 18 months, I enjoyed it so much."

Outside where the sun shines, a little lad is cycling on the pavement in an Arsenal shirt with "Vieira 4" on the back, suggesting that the Ford Estate may itself be a broad church. Sister Anne looks forward to its challenge.

At her licensing service - she will spend 50 per cent of her time on Durham diocesan mission duty - the Old Testament reading began with an exhortation to be bold and courageous; the New Testament reading was the bit from St Matthew about not worrying about tomorrow because today has quite enough problems of its own.

Sister Anne insists that her daughter, who lives in Wakefield, is more worried about the task than she is. "I'm not the sort of person who feels daunted by things. It's a funny thing but I feel comfortable here. It's taken a long time, but I think it's finally where I'm meant to be."

Striking a chord with the music hall maestros

THE last but one column had a ring of old time music hall about it - Jimmy James, Eli Woods and the indelibly querulous Fred Emney, appearing at Billingham Forum in 1976 in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.

The show really was direct from Broadway, the title coincidental, the co-star Phil Silvers as the slave Pseudolus. Les Jobson, Forum theatre director at the time, remembers it well.

"Fred was a strange guy, let's just say he didn't suffer fools gladly," he recalls. "A Funny Thing Happened wasn't really his scene. He lived in Bognor Regis and for some reason kept wanting to go back there."

Right to cue, both of us rehearse George VI's supposed parting shot on the dubious delights of Bognor.

Phil Silvers, says Les, also found A Funny Thing Happened rather less than diverting. "He got irritated because people over here only remembered him as Bilko; in America he was a big star of the shows.

"On top of that, he didn't really get on with Fred. Phil was a brash American, Fred the quintessential old Englishman."

Emney left the show early, replaced by the equally aged Arnold Ridley, seconded from Dad's Army.

Les himself now lives in Richmond, spends happy nights at the Georgian Theatre and in December will direct Walking Happy ("Hobson's Choice to music") for the town's amateur operatic society.

Fred Emney, having seen Billingham, died unhappily shortly afterwards.

ANOTHER upshot - another encore, perhaps - in a letter from a lady in Weardale offering free to a good home an autograph book overflowing with the great names of music hall.

Jimmy James, Albert Modley, Jimmy Clitheroe and Peter Sellers are all there. "My family haven't heard of half of them," she says.

Coincidentally also in Weardale, we may have found not a good home but a perfect one. The story can await some other telling.

The original writer, however, also wonders what happened to Margaret Burton, a renowned singer 50 years ago who lived three doors from her in Pannal, Harrogate.

Burton appeared in a London Palladium pantomime with Sellers, Shirley Eaton and Max Bygraves. "Her voice filled the entire theatre without a microphone," she recalls.

Margaret married Arnold Moseley, though neither name is firing up the search engines. Anyone able to add another note to the music hall?

STAN Coates in Guisborough recalls that Jimmy James began as a double act in Stockton with his great uncle, Jimmy Howells. Perhaps inevitably, they were known as the Two Jimmies.

A proud former pupil of Coatham school in Redcar, Stan has also discovered that Robert Stopford - Bishop of London from 1961-73 and of Fulham and Peterborough before that - was also an old boy.

Stopford, described as "a very mild and polite man", was nonetheless once moved to irritation at a bishops' conference being addressed by Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Fisher's style was magisterial, headmasterly. Stopford interrupted. "Excuse me, sir," he said. "we're all headmasters now".

A NOTE from Dirk van der Werff in Hartlepool reports the death at 64 of a more recent talent, Hartlepool born actor George Mallaby.

A signwriter until emigrating to Australia in 1957, he had starred in Aussie television series like The Box, The Prisoner and, inevitably, Neighbours but had suffered long term ill health.

"To be honest this has come about through too much drinking and living life too hard," he said after a heart attack in the early 80s. After a bypass, he returned to sign writing and then, gradually, to television.

Terence Donovan described George as an Australian icon. "He was a very good actor, and a great deal of fun to be with."

...and finally, last week's column on Durham Big Meeting had cause to mention Brusselton, the historic hamlet near Shildon which was on the route of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

After consulting the Echo style book we spelt it Brussleton, thus invoking the wrath of the doughty Marjorie Howes in Shildon.

"It's Brusselton," she insists. "I even had to tell the county council off about it, and they came and changed all the signs."

The ordnance survey supports her. Brusselton, oh el, it will henceforth remain.