Bishop Bell supporters take their case to Welby

A group of senior church figures, academics, lawyers and politicians have written to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, calling on him to apologise to the family of disgraced bishop George Bell and launch an investigation into the process that led to his “public denigration”, writes Rose Gamble.  

The campaigners, who include the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, the Revd Professor Martyn Percy, Desmond Browne QC, historian and Bell’s biographer Andrew Chandler and Labour MP Frank Field, argue that the Church of England failed to make adequate inquiries before issuing an apology and paying compensation for sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by Bishop Bell in the 1940s and 1950s. Bell was Bishop of Chichester from 1929 until his death in 1958.

In a statement summarising their own investigations, the George Bell Group said this week: “The valuable reputation of a great man, a rare example of self-sacrificing human goodness, has been carelessly destroyed on the basis of slender evidence, sloppily investigated.”

Last September, the Church of England paid £15,000 in compensation to a woman, known as “Carol”, who claimed that the bishop abused her when she was a child. She also received an apology from the current Bishop of Chichester, Mark Warner.

A Church of England spokesperson said: “The decision to settle the civil claim relating to the activities of Bishop Bell and make a formal apology was not taken lightly or without consideration of the impact on the reputation of George Bell.

“However in this case, as in others, the overriding goal was to search out the truth and issues of reputation cannot take priority over that. Any suggestion that the reputation of the Church, or its ministers, should take precedence over the search for the truth is fundamentally misplaced.”