2 weeks Ago By The Telegraph
The Very Revd Robert Willis, who has died at the age of 77, was perhaps the last of the old-fashioned Church of England deans whose preferment to senior roles was based on the content of their character and a track record of competence, rather than on a series of training courses deemed essential by the archiepiscopal apparatchiks at Lambeth Palace. Well-spoken, scholarly and urbane, Willis was Dean of Canterbury from 2001 to 2022. George Carey was Archbishop at the time of his installation, but he was soon succeeded by Rowan Williams – who shared many of Willis’s own outward qualities.
As custodian of the senior cathedral in England and the de facto mother church of the Anglican Communion, Willis first came to worldwide attention at Dr Williams’s enthronement in 2003. As primus inter pares of the chapter, the body of senior clergy responsibly for the day-to-day running of the cathedral, Willis gave the canons considerable space and encouragement to pursue their own briefs. He expected them to observe the discipline of attending Matins and Evensong each day, however, which he saw as a means of honouring and perpetuating the Benedictine tradition in which the community had originally been founded.
Willis was loyal to his colleagues, but also to the CofE; he would frown, literally, at public muttering if he thought it smacked of sedition. He was elected to the General Synod in 1995, and chaired its Deans’ Conference. As Dean of Canterbury, and also as Chairman of Governors of The King’s School next door, he was wise enough to know when to act and when to let things be; he preferred to iron out difficulties gently, rather than engage in drama.
Out and about in the precincts at Canterbury, Willis made a point of greeting colleagues, schoolchildren and tourists alike. Although personally modest he was proud of the cathedral and its work, and his efforts in ensuring the smooth running of the 2008 Lambeth Conference drew particular approbation. It was a close-run thing: at the time the Anglican Communion was tearing itself apart over matters of sexuality and the gathering seemed likely to be ill-tempered at best; at worst it presaged serious schism.
Willis, who had a knack for finding just the right words for any occasion, made sure that, above all, his diverse guests felt at home. One evening one of the canons encountered two African bishops looking up at the cathedral, with all its parapets, crocketing and tracery. “This is our cathedral,” they said.
That was what Willis had told the gathered assembly, and they believed him. The conference was not the disaster that had been feared; Dr Williams later reflected that “if there has been a hero, it has been the Cathedral.” A fine preacher with a profound facility of language, Willis did not confine himself to the pulpit.
He penned graces for special occasions and wrote hymns that found their way into the latest editions of Hymns Ancient & Modern and The English Hymnal; ever reflective, he sat down each evening to write an entry in his journal. Willis’s commitment to prayer came to the fore during the national lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. He delivered short reflections from the Deanery garden, in the company of his cats, Tiger and Leo, and the various fowl who also lived there; they were soon being watched all over the world.
By the time of his retirement there were nearly a thousand broadcasts, which had been watched by several million people. After Leo disappeared under his cassock one morning, with the cathedral bells ringing in the background, Willis became an unlikely internet sensation when someone created a mischievous video, still available on YouTube, of a thumping boîte de nuit inside the skirt – complete with glitterball and packed with dancing felines. An accomplished pianist, a lover of opera and a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music, Willis cherished the choral tradition that Canterbury maintained.
He rarely travelled without a recording of the cathedral choir singing the evening psalms, surreptitiously made for him over several months by a chorister parent, and occasionally thought out loud that nowhere sang them better. Willis keenly felt the charism of Canterbury Cathedral as an historic holy place: where Thomas Becket’s blood had been shed and where John Paul II had prayed next to Robert Runcie. Above all, he was attuned to the deep, quiet rhythm of a building in which prayer had been offered for centuries.
It fell to his successor to introduce disco parties in the nave after the cathedral’s finances were ravaged by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Robert Andrew Willis was born on May 17 1947, to Thomas Willis and his wife, Vera. Educated first at Kingswood Grammar School, near Bristol, after undergraduate work at Warwick University he considered a career as a diplomat before settling on ordination instead.
While training for Anglican ministry at Cuddesdon Theological College, Willis studied theology at Worcester College, Oxford; he was made deacon in 1972 and ordained to the priesthood a year later, serving his curacy at St Chad’s, Shrewsbury. He moved to Salisbury Cathedral as a Vicar Choral in 1975, and from 1978 served as chaplain to Cranborne Chase School, a well-heeled girls’ boarding school in rural Wiltshire; it closed in 1990. While there he was also Rector of Tisbury, then Vicar of Sherborne and a Prebendary of Salisbury; he became Dean of Hereford in 1992.
Willis retired from Canterbury in 2022 with the title of Dean Emeritus. Justin Welby – the second archbishop whose enthronement he oversaw – called him “one of the most exceptional deans of the post-war period”. He allowed him to stay on for the canonically permitted five years after the usual retirement age of 70, but Willis was saddened that he was not able to remain in post for longer.
Willis was well-regarded in the county; the then-Lord Lieutenant, Viscount De L’Isle, nominated him a Deputy Lieutenant of Kent, and he was a regular guest of the De L’Isles at Penshurst Place. Archbishop Williams awarded Willis the Cross of St Augustine, and he was a Knight of the Order of St John, which he had served as a chaplain since 1991. Canterbury gave him the Freedom of the City and the University of Kent made him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law.
Across the pond, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale made him an honorary Doctor of Divinity; had Archbishop Welby not mothballed his own degrees Willis would surely have been made a Lambeth Doctor of Divinity as well. In retirement he became a Resident Fellow at Berkeley, where he died suddenly from heart failure on October 22. He is survived by his civil partner, Fletcher Banner, the driving force behind his prodigious online ministry to what they called their “Garden Congregation”.
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