The ideal model of a parish minister

WELL into the twentieth century, the interior of Glasgow Cathedral retained an atmosphere of Victorian gloom. The painted Munich Glass windows in the quire were in poor condition and let in little light, the nave was unfurnished and the magnificent lower church unlit. One visitor complained that there was not even a sign to indicate the whereabouts of the tomb of St Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint.

Things are very different today. Each year over 400,000 visitors from all over the world come to see the Cathedral, where they can be shown round by the volunteer guides or take an audio tour, and the building’s collection of modern stained glass is reputed to be the finest in Great Britain.

The transformation of Glasgow Cathedral was largely the achievement of one man, Dr Nevile Davidson, the minister between 1935 and 1967, who not only had a vision of how the building could be remodelled but provided the leadership necessary to carry it out over a 25-year period.

It was a role that Nevile Davidson was born to. A personification of Kipling’s oft-quoted line about walking with kings and not losing the common touch, his aristocratic pedigree and innate dignity enabled him to secure the financial support of the wealthy and influential, yet for much of his life he was content to live in a Glasgow tenement and was, as one of his former assistant ministers put it, “as well-known in the slums of Townhead as in the princely mansions of Pollokshields.”

Nevile Davidson was the son of a Free Church minister who came from a humble Aberdeenshire farming background and married Constance Agnew, daughter of Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw Castle, Wigtownshire. After graduating from Edinburgh University, Nevile followed his father into the ministry of what had then become the United Free church and, after the 1929 reunion, the Church of Scotland. His first ministry was at St Mary’s, Aberdeen between 1925 and 1932, followed by two years at St Enoch’s, Dundee. He then received a surprise invitation to Glasgow Cathedral which he regarded as “a call I could not refuse”.

It was the right decision, for the remaining 32 years of his full-time ministry were spent there. After only a few months as minister, he founded a Society of Friends with the aim of restoring the Cathedral to its former glory, and he soon used his contacts and his charm to bring on board the Lord Provost and other civic dignitaries, as well as prominent businessmen and financial backers such as Sir John Stirling-Maxwell. By the beginning of World War II several new windows had been installed; post-war, the programme resumed and by the early 1960s the glazing of the quire and its furnishings had been transformed

Yet to Davidson the beautification of the sanctuary was not only a matter of aesthetics but a means of evangelism. He argued that many people worshipped through the eye as well as through the ear and that if the building’s beauty was restored then “naturally it would be full”. To achieve that aim, he was willing to adopt surprisingly innovative methods: the Depression of the 1930s saw a series of ‘services for the man in the street’, conducted in a simpler format with music provided by an orchestra made up of unemployed men, and on one occasion he even conducted a church service at Butlin’s holiday camp in Ayr. Nevile Davidson was also a key figure in supporting the invitation to evangelist Billy Graham to conduct his All Scotland Crusade in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall in 1955, an initiative vigorously opposed by his prominent contemporary George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community, who believed a mass evangelistic campaign would undermine the church’s efforts to reach out at parish level.

Davidson’s involvement might seem surprising as he was by instinct a High Churchman and a prominent representative of what has been termed the ‘Scoto-Catholic’ camp within the Church of Scotland, believing that services should be dignified, much use should be made of choral music and Communion should be celebrated more frequently. As church historian Alec Cheyne wryly noted, the ‘Scoto-Catholics’ were ‘by no means averse to a little pomp and circumstance’ and Nevile Davidson was certainly in his element at royal occasions and commemorative services in the Cathedral with their associated rituals and processions.

All this might suggest a somewhat aloof and even pompous figure, but those who got to know him formed a different impression of Davidson, who in his youth had been nicknamed ‘Nevile the Devil’ for his daring exploits in riding his bicycle along the top of a wall. The lighter side of the dignified cleric is revealed in his personal diaries which his wife Peggy deposited in the National Library of Scotland after his death and which form a major source of a new book entitled Nevile Davidson: a Life to Be Lived. Though the Davidsons had no children, he particularly enjoyed the company of the young, and get-togethers, quiz nights and Hallowe’en parties for youth groups were regular occurrences at his Hill Street home or in the Cathedral halls. Once, a group of students living in the flat beneath him came to warn him that they were going to have a party and things might be a bit noisy. Of course, they added, jokingly, he could always come and join them. So he did!

The culmination of Nevile Davidson’s career was his appointment as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1962 and in that year he undertook a world tour representing the Church of Scotland covering 32,000 miles and involving a total of forty different flights. Soon afterwards, he suggested to his Kirk Session that it might be time to spend the last few years of his ministry in a quiet country parish, but they persuaded him to stay on at the Cathedral until 1967.

1962 Life & Work Cover

Nevile Davidson and Her Majesty The Queen

That year he left the Cathedral to live in a house in the village of West Barns, near Dunbar, East Lothian, not far from where he spent his childhood. But Davidson never really retired. As he once told a journalist: “I can only really retire once I am called home.” His remaining years were spent on endless meetings as he continued to play a key role in the Church’s Church and Nation committee and, above all, in inter-church relations, at one stage feeling so optimistic about church unity that he considered a reunion of the main Protestant denominations achievable by 1980.

That never came about, but Nevile Davidson’s patient work did much to lower what he called “the centuries-old barbed-wire barrier between Protestant and Catholic”. There can be few prominent clerics who have so genuinely embodied the notion of a “broad churchman” and his ability to work with those of different theological persuasions to present a united witness to the world surely has something to teach the church of today.

In the words of the Rev David Beckett of the Church Service Society, “he was for many of my generation the ideal model of a parish minister.”

“Nevile Davidson: A Life to Be Lived” by Andrew G Ralston is published by Wipf & Stock. For details of availability, see www.glasgowcathedral.org

This article appears in the March 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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