Super Cooper

AT MUCH the same time as the starting pistol fired on the Great North Run, and with seemingly as many in church as there were teeming over the Tyne Bridge, Canon Richard Cooper crossed the finishing line on Sunday after 38 years of full-time ministry.

He had run a straight race.

They may never, irreverently, have called him Super Cooper, nor even Dick – only his splendid wife Janet dared do that – but the guy was very special, nonetheless.

The bells which ring over Richmond peal with awfully mixed feelings, the column finds itself crowded behind a pillar. The customarily myopic report may be even more shrouded than usual.

He remains, among other things, a chaplain to the Queen – one of 30 scarlet-robed clerics periodically summoned to the royal palaces. Her Majesty has heard enough sermons to separate the cheat from the waff, an’ all.

Hugely popular, effortlessly charismatic and the man you’d always want to take your funeral, Richard’s been rector of Richmond for the past 11 years – the 47th incumbent in almost 1,000 years.

At 63, he’s taking a step back. Two days earlier there’d been a big party – “a bit like a royal command performance,”

he says, appropriately.

Sunday was also Harvest Festival, the crowning of the year, and an equally appropriate time, he tells his congregation, to say goodbye.

“It’s a time for recognising that there is no point in staying longer, that what has been has been and what can be done has been done.”

He also recalls, for it wouldn’t be a Trooper Cooper sermon without an anecdote, that his worst harvest experience was at the nearby village church in Caldwell.

The organist hadn’t turned up.

They asked if he could do that, too, and – of course – he was a dab hand.

The taties for the harvest supper hadn’t boiled and they asked if he could preach a bit longer. He did.

Though the harvest is all around him, he talks, too, of his failures.

“There are people I have disappointed, people I have abandoned and people I have let down. There are people who might be here today but for me.

I am simply sorry that it happened.”

There is much evidence, nonetheless, that many more have safely been gathered in. The winter storms must wait.

HE was brought up in a Christian family, thought about becoming a lawyer, decided against – “the people who had a spark about them were the Christians”

– and trained for the priesthood at Mirfield college in west Yorkshire.

After a couple of curacies, he was priest-in-charge of Knaresborough, then of Croft, Middleton Tyas and neighbouring places before moving in 1990 to be vicar of Aldborough with Boroughbridge.

We’d first met him at Croft, where he christened the younger bairn, 25 years ago. The older boy, coming up three, pedalled his tractor down the centre aisle. Richard remembered all that they say about suffering little children, and thought it an admirable exercise.

“The warmth, the regard, the respect and the affection in which he is held are remarkable,” says Dennis Stedman, one of the churchwardens, at the end of Sunday’s service.

He touches, too, upon Richard’s way with funerals, his parting gestures, and it calls to mind the death in 1999 of Keith Petty, who’d been a colourful barman at the Black Lion and who made pickled onions that could have blasted Barton quarry away.

As ever, Richard had done his homework. Keith’s onions, he said, were booby trapped. “You’d have expected it from a Sapper, but not a REME man.”

The observation may particularly have been appropriate because St Mary’s in Richmond is the Green Howards’ regimental chapel, because Richard has developed strong links with the military and because he will continue two days a week as a chaplain at Catterick Garrison.

The Green Howards, for whom there are weekly prayers, have just been deployed to Afghanistan.

Afterwards, he recalls always telling his curates that what the church calls occasional offices are its shop window. “It’s a huge opportunity to say something about the church and what it stands for.”

Dennis talks also about the rector’s love of music, of his ability to inspire and to cajole, of his work in the community, his powerful sermons – “beginning gently, then hitting us with the punchline” – and of his lasting legacy.

“I’m really touched,” says Richard.

“but it’s hard to recognise the person you’re talking about.”.

IT’S the sort of farewell service for which probably he’d have wished, musically magnificent and liturgically enriching. “The thing I will miss most about Richmond is the worship, it’s very fine,” he says.

“It’s something that is dignified without being stuffy, but it’s not trying to be chummy and matey with God.”

He and Janet are moving up to Redmire, in Wensleydale, his retirement seemingly sorted. As well as the military chaplaincy and the royal summonses, he has a bike to ride and some fish to catch, pints to drink and people to meet, new membership of the Dales Croquet Club.

“What a rich pastime for a retired clergyman,” he muses and turns his mind back to Trollope.

The cheque which helped mark his going will buy an organ – “so I can play my favourite hymns over and over again.”

The town council gave him a specially made shepherd’s crook. “It was wonderful,” says Richard. “I’ve always said that I wasn’t a chaplain to the congregation but a vicar for the whole community.”

He could also contemplate writing a book on being a parish priest relevant for the 21st century. They mightn’t call it Super Cooper, but everyone would know fine well what was meant.