Biography -- Gonville ffrench-Baytagh

Gonville ffrench-Beytagh was born on 26 January 1913 in Shanghai, the son of an Irish businessman and a South African mother. He derived from two aristocratic Irish families.

Gonville was sent to an English boarding school at a young age when his parents separated. His experience of school Christianity made him determined never to attend a church ever again. He left England for New Zealand at the age of 17 but was soon expelled.

He became a down-and-out. After sleeping rough and doing casual labour, a chance encounter with a distant relative in late 1932 brought him to South Africa. He took odd jobs but was still an irreverent agnostic. He was mugged and beaten savagely while returning from a riotous party and was left with a broken jaw. He was visited in Johannesburg General Hospital by Alan Paton (author of Cry the Beloved Country) and was soon befriended by a brother in the Community of the Resurrection.

He attended Midnight Mass to placate his new friends and underwent a profound religious experience. He later wrote,

It was a hot night and as the doors had been closed, the air was completely still. I knelt at the communion rail, and as I knelt there I felt a very strong cool breeze—and that was all. I do not think that at the time I had any idea what the word ‘breath’ or the word ‘wind’ means to the Christian, or even that the Greek word for the ‘Holy Spirit’ means ‘breath’. I did not even think of Jesus breathing the spirit on his disciples. All I know is that this breath, or wind, which I felt, had a meaning and a content for me which I have never been able to communicate to anyone else, and still cannot describe.

A year after this experience, Gonville went to ordination college. It was 1936 and he was 24. He compared the experience to a prison. But he persevered and was ordained a deacon in 1938 and priest in 1939.

He served in several parishes and became a canon at Johannesburg Cathedral. He had no political consciousness until, many years later, he first made contacts outside white society. He said, ‘The utter nonsensicality of racial discrimination really hit me.’ He grew disillusioned with the stealthy encroachment of apartheid.

He was promoted often. His passport was confiscated in 1965 after agitating for freedom. He became a prominent opponent of apartheid, condemning it as ‘blasphemous against God and man.’ As Dean, he opened his cathedral’s doors to black worshippers; the police used dogs to chase him up the cathedral steps and beat him with a rhino-whip. But Gonville continued the protest. He arranged an international network of aid to support the education and healthcare needs of black South Africans.

At Christmas 1970, he preached that the ‘South African way of life’ was really the ‘South African way of death.’ He was arrested, placed in solitary confinement, and interrogated brutally. He was found guilty as a terrorist and jailed although the charges were clearly invented. His conviction was intended as a warning to his Anglican colleagues.

Gonville appealed against his conviction. The charges were upheld but the sentence commuted to deportation. He left for London that same day. In some respects the sentence was a mistake because, from England, he attained international prominence for his uncompromising resistance to apartheid.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey recognised his prophetic voice and made him rector of a London parish with no resident parishioners (!) and, thereafter, he had space and resources to focus on writing and spiritual direction. He retired in 1986 and died in 1991.

Gonville’s gifts as a speaker and spiritual counsellor were in great demand. He also had eccentricities and weaknesses, and suffered crippling depression, which he concealed with courage and wrote about frankly in his last books Out of the Depths and Encountering Darkness. His legacies include the peaceful transition in South Africa with a truly Christian Church at its centre; and the way he inspired so many to live and work for the Kingdom of God.