The Dean of Winchester, the Very Revd Catherine Ogle, has announced that she will be retiring on 1 May 2025. The timing is interesting, as news of Ogle’s retirement emerged just hours before the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned over the John Smyth abuse scandal.
They walked out during the sermon
The congregation of Winchester Cathedral started making their feelings about Ogle clear earlier this year, by going on a kind of Holy Communion hunger strike during services. Deeply unhappy about the damage being done to the musical life of their beloved cathedral under the reign of the controversial Precentor Andrew Trenier and the weak (but steely beneath her friendly surface) Dean, some of them refused to go up to the altar for communion. Others didn’t wait till the breaking of the bread. They walked out during the sermon, if it was given by either Trenier or Ogle, having no desire to be preached at by clergy who they believed had behaved in what seemed like a shockingly un-Christian manner towards some of their music staff.
It’s hard to find out precisely what happened, as lips are sealed, but somehow the Dean and Precentor had made life so impossible for Dr Andrew Lumsden, the cathedral’s superb and long-standing director of music, that he had no choice but to ‘step down’ more than two years before his natural retirement age. The cathedral announced this to the public before the choristers knew anything about it.
When anyone asked Dr Lumsden what had caused him to step down, his reply was ‘I can’t say anything’, which suggested he’d agreed to confidentiality clauses in a settlement or a non-disclosure agreement. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced in 2021 that he was opposed to non-disclosure agreements and asked the Church of England to stop using them. The Dean has denied ever using them.
Before the Lumsden debacle, the cathedral had also made the assistant organist George Castle (another brilliant musician who’d dreamed of getting this kind of job since the age of 11) redundant in a clinical manner. He was paid off with statutory minimum redundancy pay at the same time as his baby was being born. ‘I was the one person singled out for redundancy, out of 115 staff,’ Castle told me, still mystified. He raised a list of grievances with the Dean about how badly he and the music department had been treated by Trenier, for example that there had been ‘a systematic failure of the management of the organisation to consider their pastoral and welfare responsibilities towards employees’. Every grievance was ‘not upheld’ by the Dean. Castle appealed. In her final judgment, Jean Ritchie KC, while not upholding the appeal in full, concluded that ‘the Precentor did behave inappropriately to the appellant on occasions in 2020’ and that ‘the appellant witnessed inappropriate behaviour to other members of the [music department]’. She recommended that an ‘apology from the cathedral would be appropriate’ and ‘the Dean should make every effort to ensure that the Precentor is not in future placed under too much stress and that he receives help to deal with stress so that he always behaves in the way in which he, and the cathedral, would wish’.
The Precentor under too much stress! What about the musicians, who were found in the judgment of Jean Ritchie to have been the recipients of ‘inappropriate behaviour’, and who suffered from stress brought on by being treated as semi-worthless and dispensable by the Precentor himself, who is alleged to have reminded them that ‘if you don’t like it, you can work somewhere else’, ‘you’re not real musicians’ and ‘good organists are ten a penny’?
In a separate grievance procedure, Trenier is alleged to have done things like interrupt choir rehearsals and throw irrelevant admin questions at Lumsden, to embarrass him in front of the choristers. He is also said to have made his innate dislike of choral music clear by playing on his phone during evensong (when he bothered to attend). ‘Psalms and the music are quite boring after all,’ was his retort when someone mentioned this. ‘And it’s better than doing it during the prayers.’
I asked Canon Trenier to respond to these allegations. He declined to comment. If these disparaging acts did take place, then it would call into question his whole way of working and his interactions with those who work under him. When the senior non-executive lay member of the chapter, Mark Byford, resigned in June (again, he didn’t say exactly why, but we surmise that he wanted to get out of the vipers’ nest), the Bishop of Winchester, Philip Mounstephen, started an external Bishop’s Review into the whole business, for which we await the outcome. The Dean sent me this message: ‘It would be inappropriate for us to comment on these allegations at this time [while they are being investigated in the Bishop’s Review]. We are fully committed to implementing the recommendations from the review, which is being led by ecclesiastical lawyer Patti Russell and the Very Revd Jane Hedges, former Dean of Norwich.’
Letters have been pouring in to him from people who have raised concerns about the direction of the cathedral and the void in its leadership. Why did the Dean, as head of the cathedral, not do more to keep her Precentor in check? For a cathedral choir to seemingly be attacked from the inside, by the very member of the Dean and Chapter whose job it is to promote and nurture it, is particularly perverse. Cathedrals seem to be going down a new dangerous route of appointing precentors who have ‘done exciting things in big parishes’ (Trenier came from being rector of Chingford) but have no understanding of the uniquely rich cultural tradition of cathedrals, whose standard of daily music is the envy of the world.
Catherine Ogle is evasive and self-pitying. She declined to speak to me in person, but said I could ask her questions by email. To my question ‘Were you surprised by the vigorous and widespread reaction to the news of Andrew Lumsden’s departure, despite the cathedral only announcing it as a positive and happy departure?’, she replied: ‘What has shocked and saddened me is the personal nature of some of the comments attacking me and by some of the misinformation and speculation that has been spread – particularly on social media.’ To my question ‘What could the cathedral have done better in terms of announcing the departure, both internally and externally?’, she replied: ‘On reflection we should have shared the news with some of our stakeholders before the news was made public, which I regret and recognise caused upset and confusion.’
She emphasised the cathedral’s ‘continued commitment to maintaining the highest musical standards’, but many fear they’re planning to curtail the tradition of subsidising the boy choristers, who all go to the Pilgrims’ School, which would chip away at the superbly high standards which come from having boarding choristers on site. The Dean said to me in one of her answers that there was soon going to be an ‘open meeting’ with chorister parents about this – a worrying sign.
At Lumsden’s leaving service in the cathedral in July, people resisted walking out during the Dean’s speech thanking him effusively for his years of service, because they wanted to stay to applaud Lumsden at the end. The applause lasted for almost five minutes. The uncomfortable, embarrassed look on the Dean’s face was something to behold. It will be interesting to time the duration of the applause at the end of her leaving service.
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