The devil does not always have the best tunes. In South Africa the names of Sophiatown, the Community of the Resurrection and Huddleston ring with godly virtue, while the devil was left with ugly Afrikaans sounds such as apartheid, Verwoerd and the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk. There was no doubting which side was God's. And when Trevor Huddleston spoke, however firmly, he sounded almost the caricature of the kindly, cultivated English vicar who might join you for tea on the lawn after croquet. Tall, pale and sweet-faced, he seemed an unlikely champion of poor, black South Africa against the bully boys of the South African police.

He was not the only white Christian cleric to take on the apartheid state. The names of Michael Scott, Denis Hurley and John Collins are also in the annals of the struggle for African freedom, but Bishop Huddleston is probably the best known. His integrity, passion and urgency converted many in middle England and elsewhere to shun that bottle of Cape wine or leave those Outspan oranges on the supermarket shelf as a gesture against apartheid.

 

It was an achievement well recognised by the African National Congress. Trevor Huddleston was awarded the ANC's highest honour, and in 1991, at the ANC's first conference after the release of Nelson Mandela, he was invited to make the opening speech. These honours he valued more highly than the knighthood Britain awarded to him last year.

Conversion in the hopfields

He came from a religious family (the family tree includes a Roman Catholic priest who helped Charles II escape after the battle of Worcester in 1651). His formal education was at an English private school and Oxford, and he became a radical while working as a student among London's poor, picking hops in Kent. He was ordained an Anglican priest and joined the Community of the Resurrection, a monastic order, which in 1943 sent him to its mission in Sophiatown, a black suburb of Johannesburg.

He spent 13 years in South Africa, spanning the National Party's election in 1948 and its implementation of all the deadly bureaucratic regulations of apartheid. But he said he awoke to its realities only when he witnessed the forced removal of black families from Sophiatown, and found his life's cause.

 

In 1956, the year of the publication of his book denouncing apartheid, “Naught For Your Comfort”, he was withdrawn from South Africa by his monastic community. He said later that the decision strained his vow of obedience almost to breaking point. His superiors feared he would be arrested, though an imprisoned Father Huddleston might have been a better Christian witness than an exiled one.

After a spell in Britain he returned to Africa as Bishop of Masasi in Tanzania, just as it became independent. He became friends with its first president, Julius Nyerere, and a supporter of his policy of “African socialism”. Back in London in 1968, he was appointed Bishop of Stepney and then Archbishop of the Indian Ocean. But his cause remained South Africa. He was made president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and preached against apartheid and just as vehemently against the indifference of the rest of the world towards it. The Christian church was far too comfortable and conservative for him, and his militant attitude was more in tune with political groups than with his co-religionists. The Anti-Apartheid Movement was almost exclusively of the left; its language was Marxist and its tactics of sanctions and the isolation of South Africa were articles of faith.

Although Bishop Huddleston saw the evils of apartheid clearly enough, it may be that he did not see clearly how to end them. Who better, it might be thought, than an Anglican bishop to build a broad-based movement against racism in South Africa and elsewhere? But those of the centre and right who also opposed apartheid found their sincerity angrily questioned by Bishop Huddleston when they did not accept his view that the only way to end apartheid was by sanctions. Perhaps if he had been more patient and pragmatic he could have bridged the political divide in Britain and presided over a bigger and more effective anti-apartheid movement. Bishop Huddleston believed that the end of apartheid would come only through bloodshed and so, when history did eventually deliver apartheid's nemesis, it came as a surprise to him. He had even spoken against the contacts and dialogue which were to bring about a deal that delivered democracy to South Africa.

Trevor Huddleston often said he only wanted to live long enough to see the end of apartheid, and after an absence of 39 years he returned to South Africa and a hero's welcome. He had said he wanted to die and be buried there but he was impatient of what he considered the slow transformation of the new South Africa. Diabetes may have depressed him further. He returned to Britain and died in his community's very English home at Mirfield in Yorkshire.