| Sources |
- [S6] SABIODIC, Volume 1.
Anglican clergyman and scholar, was educated at Trinity college, Dublin, where he obtained his B.A. in 1879, his B.D. in 1883, and his D.D. in 1921. He was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1880 and worked in Meath before his arrival in South Africa in 1881.
D. was first sent to help the people of the recently discovered diamond-fields at Kimberley, where a large and continually changing population of white diggers and considerable numbers of half-caste and Bantu labourers had created many new pastoral problems. He found that there were some 4,000 settlers who had been church-goers 'at home', but who had lapsed from the practice of religion under the conditions which obtained in Kimberley. Much of the town was merely a collection of corrugated-iron shanties which were moved haphazardly when it suited their owners, Some of D.'s most valuable work lay in building up and teaching in a school for Coloured children.
In 1887 he was invited by Bishop H. B. Bousfield,* of Pretoria, to take charge of Anglican Church work on the Witwatersrand, where it was thought that his experience in Kimberley would stand him in good stead. Here, again, D. had to work in a rapidly expanding, often rowdy area, using makeshift and temporary expedients. Almost up to the end of the century he was responsible for the whole Witwatersrand area and an Anglican population of very varied social classes.
D. is described by contemporaries as an impatient and masterful man, but also as kindly, generous and devoted. He was unable to agree with Bishop Bousfield about the policies which the Church ought to pursue on the Rand. The bishop was extremely conservative by nature and unwilling to believe that the industrial expansion of the Transvaal was anything more than a temporary phase. He saw little future for the Anglican Church in the Transvaal republic and was anxious to pay off the debts of the diocese rather than to expand the work and saddle the Church with further liabilities.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s D. and Bousfield were at loggerheads. Their violent controversy, which was partly personal, partly concerned with financial policy, and partly an expression of rivalry between Johannesburg and Pretoria, went twice to arbitration. D.'s success in the controversy meant that the Anglican Church was able to meet the challenge of twentieth-century expansion in the Transvaal with some confidence.
Compelled to leave Johannesburg during the Second Anglo-Boer War, D. enlisted as a military chaplain in 1900 after the occupation of Pretoria, arranged to be posted to the Rand, and then had himself dismissed from the service in order to get back to his work in Johannesburg, where he remained until his retirement in 1908. He was unmarried.
He spent the last fourteen years of his life in Durban and here he devoted himself to theological studies. His book, The resurrection of the flesh (London, 1921), for which he was awarded a D.D., is principally a study of Patristic teaching on the subject. His arguments against the proposed epiklesis in the revised Eucharistic liturgy of the Church of the Province of South Africa carried considerable weight with his fellow clergy and led to several modifications in the draft rite.
There is a portrait of him in Men of the times (Transvaal) (Johannesburg, 1905) and also in J. König's Seven builders of Johannesburg (Pretoria, 1950).
|
1854 - 1922 (68 years)
