EPISCOPAL SILVER JUBILEE FOR MGR. KING

Country Boy to Archbishop
ANOTHER U BETTE NEXT YEAR !
By E Percy
A SAYING is attributed to 82-years-old Archbishop John Henry King that he has tried to preside over his Portsmouth Diocese "with love and not with a big stick".
How successful he has been, thousands of Catholics who know him as prelate, priest and friend, can well testify,
BURSARY
He can be sure of their good wishes when on Monday next, July 15 he celebrates his silver jubilee as a bishop and of ready support for the fund being raised to mark the jubilee by endowing a bursary for the education of a priest.
It is typical of him that he has turned down fiat any suggestion that a personal gift should be made him.
Soon 25 years a bishop—and next year 60 years a priest; one jubilee follows another.
Some of the secret of his popularity lies in his simplicity, his ability to preserve his dignity without unnecessary airs—often he has seemed to resent pornposity—and his undoubted sincerity.
One thing gives him pride— his yeoman stock. He delights in talking of his early years on Wardour Estate in Wiltshire where his family farmed since the 18th century. His life as a priest has been spent in Hampshire but he is admittedly a "Moonraker"—nickname of a Wiltshire man derived from the fable of the smugglers who pretended to be raking in a stream for the moon when Excise men accused them of trying to retrieve some kegs of rum. His early education was received in a small school just inside the St. Anne's Gate of Salisbury Cathedral Close and it was followed by studies at St. Mary's, Woolhampton (now Douai Abbey) and at the English College, Rome.
WINCHESTER
Ordained in the Channel Islands in 1904, Archbishop King spent 19 years as secretary to the late Bishop Cotter of Portsmouth before coming to Winchester in 1920 as parish priest. Winchester has been his home ever since. Though the Bishop's House at Portsmouth, completely demolished in the war, has now been rebuilt, he has been loth to leave St. Peter's Presbytery, Winchester.
He became Canon of the Cathedral Chapter in 1924, later Vicar General of the Diocese, domestic prelate in 1933 and Auxiliary Bishop of Portsmouth in 1938. In June 1941 he succeeded Bishop Cotter as bishop.
For many years he acted as secretary to the Hierarchy in England. The Holy Father conferred on him the personal title of Archbishop to mark his golden jubilee in the priesthood in
November 1954. He was the second bishop in England and Wales to become an archbishop while ordinary of a suffragan See. The first was the late Archbishop Amigo of Southwark.
HISTORY
Archbishop King has read deeply the history of the Church in Hampshire which has always been a haven for the Faith and he is an acknowledged mine of information on the penal days.
A couple of years ago he accepted an invitation to speak in Winchester on the recusants of the area and for more than an hour he delighted a packed audience of historians with fact and anecdote, never once faltering over a name, never referring to a note, the whole delivered in an easy conversational way that marks one deeply learned in his subject.
In fact, he probably relies on an accurate memory—a facility that in another way makes it possible for him to greet folk in scattered parts of his large diocese by name and to be interested in their welfare,
VARIETY
No light task in these days to he a Bishop in a diocese -o diffuse in its population and varied in its types of employment, as is Portsmouth diocese which spreads over all Hampshire, Berkshire and includes the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands.
The variety is well illustrated by the fisherfolk and holiday caterers of Jersey, the soldiers of Aldershot, the dockers of Portsmouth and Southampton and the retired professional people of Bournemouth.
Around the diocese even to the distant Channel Islands the beloved Archbishop travels periodically to meet the priests and the people, the people who have a deep and genuine love for him,