Simon Phipps, says the cover of this slim but engaging volume, was ‘the last of his breed of Bishop’. One hopes not. Does Eton, the Guards and Cambridge now preclude preferment in the Anglican episcopacy?
This aside, what is the edification or entertainment in recollections by the great and the good of the varied life of the Right Reverend Simon Phipps MC? Could Eamonn Andrews have made an audience of millions feel better for having heard ‘Simon Phipps, This is Your Life’?
One hopes so. There would be nothing breathtaking, but the testimonies would mount, until by the end of the programme belted earl and rude mechanical alike could feel that his life would have been enriched by contact with Phipps, that, in the words of a fellow bishop at his memorial service, here was someone, like George Herbert, ‘little less than sainted’. They might even be moved to gush, as does one contributor, a fellow Westcott ordinand, ‘Love you, Simon!’
Eamonn Andrews’s first testifier would be the Olympian General Sir David Fraser, Phipps’s contemporary at Eton. He writes of the schoolboy’s ‘absolute sincerity’, and of his thespian qualities — ‘the best Lady Macbeth I have ever seen’. Professor John Bayley, who fagged for Phipps, might then come on to describe him as ‘a civilised man’, the perfect captain of house. The Duke of Devonshire might appear, to say that Phipps had been ‘an immensely brave officer’ (and there would be no doubting the duke’s credentials). Simon Phipps joined the Coldstream in 1940 and was with them in the slog across north Africa and through Italy; he was wounded twice, and decorated — as the citation reads — for ‘great heroism in action’.
But, Eamonn Andrews might then say, the story so far could be any number of men’s — fortunately.
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