Simon Bailey
Encyclopedia
Childhood
Simon Bailey was born in Halifax, West YorkshireHalifax, West Yorkshire
Halifax is a minster town, within the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire, England. It has an urban area population of 82,056 in the 2001 Census. It is well-known as a centre of England's woollen manufacture from the 15th century onward, originally dealing through the Halifax Piece...
, one of five children - Rosemary, Simon, Martin, Jacqueline, and Caroline - of the Reverend Walter Bailey. Walter was a Baptist minister who combined conservative evangelical theological convictions with social radicalism. He bought his first television in order to be able to watch the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
in 1965. He supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is an anti-nuclear organisation that advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom, international nuclear disarmament and tighter international arms regulation through agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...
and actually died while distributing leaflets for the Labour Party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
. The socialist historians E. P. Thompson
E. P. Thompson
Edward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class...
and Dorothy Thompson
Dorothy Thompson (historian)
Dorothy Katharine Gane Thompson was a social historian, a leading expert on the Chartist movement. She entered Girton College, Cambridge, in 1942. During the war, her work as an industrial draughtswoman for Royal Dutch Shell interrupted her formal education...
as well as J. B. Priestley
J. B. Priestley
John Boynton Priestley, OM , known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions , as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls...
were regular visitors to the family home in Halifax
Halifax, West Yorkshire
Halifax is a minster town, within the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire, England. It has an urban area population of 82,056 in the 2001 Census. It is well-known as a centre of England's woollen manufacture from the 15th century onward, originally dealing through the Halifax Piece...
.
The family moved first to Birkenhead
Birkenhead
Birkenhead is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. It is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the city of Liverpool...
and then to Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent , also called The Potteries is a city in Staffordshire, England, which forms a linear conurbation almost 12 miles long, with an area of . Together with the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme Stoke forms The Potteries Urban Area...
, following Walter as he was called to different churches. Eventually he became so idiosyncratic that he ran his own church from home.
Oxford
Simon Bailey continued his education at Regent's Park CollegeRegent's Park College, Oxford
Regent's Park College is a Permanent Private Hall in the University of Oxford, situated in central Oxford, just off St Giles.The College admits both undergraduate and graduate students to take Oxford degrees in a variety of Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects...
, the Baptist Permanent Private Hall
Permanent Private Hall
A Permanent Private Hall at the University of Oxford is an educational institution within the university. There are six Permanent Private Halls at Oxford, five of which admit undergraduates. They were founded by different Christian denominations....
of the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
, where he read English Language and Literature under John F. Kiteley (himself once the pupil of J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
).
Despite having chosen to study at the Baptist Regent's Park
Regent's Park College, Oxford
Regent's Park College is a Permanent Private Hall in the University of Oxford, situated in central Oxford, just off St Giles.The College admits both undergraduate and graduate students to take Oxford degrees in a variety of Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects...
, Simon Bailey was by now unhappy in the Baptist tradition. He received the sacrament of confirmation
Confirmation (Christian sacrament)
Confirmation is a rite of initiation in Christian churches, normally carried out through anointing and/or the laying on of hands and prayer for the purpose of bestowing the Gift of the Holy Spirit....
in the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
, embracing Anglicanism
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
as more "aesthetic and sensual".
Writing
Simon Bailey's one work of scholarship was his study, A Tactful God: Gregory DixGregory Dix
George Eglinton Alston Dix was an English monk and priest of Nashdom Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine community. He was a noted liturgical scholar whose work had particular influence on the reform of Anglican liturgy in the mid-20th century.-Life:Dix was born in Woolwich...
: Priest, Monk and Scholar (Leominster: Gracewing, 1995).
He also wrote pastoral works,
- Stations: places for pilgrims to pray (Sheffield: Cairns Publications, 1991)
- Still with God (London: Church House, 1986)
- Still with God: a new way of praying (London: National Society; Church House, 1993)
- The well within: parables for living and dying (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1996)
The biography, Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with AIDS (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997), by his sister Rosemary Bailey, contains extracts from his unpublished writings. These hint at considerable literary gifts and it is to be hoped that a full publication will appear eventually. He was particularly interested in the poetry of R. S. Thomas
R. S. Thomas
Ronald Stuart Thomas was a Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman, noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales...
and of John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, whose blindness Bailey identified with his own illnesses.
He acquired a significant collection of icon
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
s.
Dinnington
Simon Bailey was a sexually active gay man who contracted HIVHIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...
. He learned that he had the virus just as he took up the position of Rector of Dinnington
Dinnington
Dinnington is a town in rural South Yorkshire, England, and part of the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham. It is roughly equidistant from Sheffield, Rotherham and Worksop, and is located at an elevation of about 100 metres above sea level....
in South Yorkshire
South Yorkshire
South Yorkshire is a metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It has a population of 1.29 million. It consists of four metropolitan boroughs: Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, and City of Sheffield...
. When he became too unwell to conceal his condition from the people around him he informed the diocesan authorities and gradually introduced the news to his own parishioners. Though not the only Anglican priest at that time to be HIV
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...
-positive, and eventually to develop AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
, he was the first to stay in parish ministry, continuing to celebrate the Eucharist until only a few weeks before his death. One of the most remarkable features of his time at Dinnington
Dinnington
Dinnington is a town in rural South Yorkshire, England, and part of the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham. It is roughly equidistant from Sheffield, Rotherham and Worksop, and is located at an elevation of about 100 metres above sea level....
was the love and care that he received from his parishioners. The priest visibly dying among the people to whom he ministered was a powerful symbol of Christ
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
, evocative of the line, 'The wounded surgeon plies the steel', in East Coker by T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
.