TRINITY COLLEGE, CARMARTHEN

THANKSGIVING SERVICE FOR

CANON THOMAS HALLIWELL

This portrait was presented to Canon Halliwell on his retirement, and it now hangs in the College Ante-Chapel. it was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1965.

Presentation to Canon Halliwell on his retirement form the President of the Student Council

With Princess Margaret in 1957 after the opening of the new Women's Hostel - click photo to enlarge

Trinity College in the 1950s - click to enlarge

The visit of Archbishop Fisher

Archbishop Fisher congratulates Peter Cherry on a succesful production of the Zeal of the Thy House

Johnny Davies presents a silver salver to the Principal on behalf of the non academic staff

My Father concluded his personal journal with this quotation - from Dr Johnson

"In every life there are certain pauses and interruptions, which force consideration upon the careless, and seriousness upon the light; points of time when one course of action ends and another begins, and by the vicissitudes of fortune, or alteration of employment, change of place or loss of friendship, we are forced to say of something "this is the last." "

Thomas Morton Halliwell - 12th February 2005

SATURDAY, 7 MAY, 1983

The Address by the Most Reverend Derrick G. Childs

Archbishop of Wales

Proverbs 10 :13 The man of understanding, has wisdom on his lips.

Diar. 10 : 13 Yng ngwefusau y synhwyrol u ceir doethineb.

As we meet today to remember with honour and thanksgiving the personality, the career and the work of Thomas Halliwell no verse of Scripture seems to me to sum up better than those words, the quality and direction of his whole life. To savour their aptness we must remember that in their use in Scripture the English words understanding and "wisdom" and their Welsh equivalents are seen only in relation to God's will and purpose, his revealing of himself to the world through our Lord Jesus Christ, to men of faith. Understanding and wisdom are not just the garnering of knowledge or the accumulation of facts. There is always a practical reference an ability and skill to turn one's thoughts, one's awareness, into proper and eloquent action.

I remember my own awareness of this, in the man who had for so many years been my predecessor as Principal of this College, when, addressing the College from this pulpit for the first time, on the first morning of my first term in 1965, I spoke of words from Chapter 12 of St Paul's Letter to the Christians of Rome about a Christian's vocation - " your reasonable service,". ("eich rhesymol wasanaeth chwi"), and " the renewal of the mind" ("adnewyddiad eich meddwl") - as Tom Halliwell's legacy to those who followed him. The words are different from those of my text but the idea is the same. I still think he will be happy if we today identify that as the quality of his life's service. He reminded me in a letter i965 that his whole life, and that of his life's partner, had been bound up with this College, and with this Chapel at its heart, not just for 25 years of his Principalship, but ever since he had come here as Chaplain in 1927 - his interest and concern remained until he died.

"The College has been Much more than job of work. In a very real sense our life has been tied up in it possibly too much so, and yet I think it was necessary in view of all the challenges that had to be met."

The outline of Tom Halliwell's life is soon told. He was as old as this 20th Century and no-one who heard that soft gentle voice was left in any doubt about his northern origins. Meeting as he did in adolescence the violent overthrow of a whole social and mental framework caused by the first World War, he experienced that forerunner of all the traumatic changes which this Century was to know, and came to University in the immediate aftermath of war, graduating in English at Manchester in 1923. Ordained in 1925 after training at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, following a brief curacy in Aston in Birmingham he came to Carmarthen, as already noted, for a chaplaincy and Tutorship, which lasted from 1927 to 1931. Then for nine years he was Vicar successively to two parishes: in Wigan and Chorley, before coming back as Principal in the year after the beginning of another World War, in 1940

Whatever the circumstances might have been it could never have been an easy task to follow in the footsteps of a single-minded and determined man of the stature of Albert William Parry. He had been Principal for 31 years - from 1909 to 194), and, although he attracted more awe than love in a lifetime marked with intense domestic suffering, and the continual strain of responsibility, he was acknowledged by Tom Halliwell in the College's centenary booklet to have been the architect of its survival.

In 1940 the College, which had already taken its present name when this Chapel was dedicated in 1931, had 100 students - all male - and a staff of seven. When Canon Halliwell retired one generation later, mere statistics - a student body of 400 students (with rather more women than men), and an academic staff, of between:40 and 50, o not indicate the magnitude of the change he had wrought. Perhaps his memory of the turmoil of the world of his own youth enabled him to transform a College where the discipline was still Victorian, repressive and potentially explosive, for men returning from four or five years in world-wide combat in the Forces, into a community which was able to contain its strains and pour healing oil into its wounds.

Dean Parry had brought the College through many perilous waters, and Tom Halliwell was to know many storms and crises, but the tenacity of his struggle to preserve the College's identity and character, as well as its very existence, was to be sustained only at greater cost to his physical and spiritual well-being than he should have been asked to face.

Again, in a letter to me in 1965, Tom Halliwell spoke revealingly of the strain of responsibility which in the end he had to carry alone, because of the peculiarly exposed and lonely position of a Principal of a Voluntary College - and also of his own temperament and approach. The man who is able to make up his mind quickly and then go through with his decisions (he claimed) is saved a lot of anxiety and wear and tear. But, he wrote - "my temperament is very different, things are never as clear cut as they seem to more logical minds and life is always much larger than logic". There was the recollection of much anguish in those words.

Despite frequent ill-health - which was the constant concern of his family and friends, he maintained a resolute front to the world and the "powers that bell in the administering of Educational Institutions, which was the result not just of his northern doggedness and realism. Behind the struggle, in which he readily admitted the support of the warm friendships and the affinity of spirit within the Community

of the College,-which became known through Wales as "Y Coleg Cyfeillgar", there was always the conviction of the rightness of a Christian understanding of education, and a belief, reiterated more than once in his letters, that the school was in the 20th century the real arena for Christian evangelism, and also that ever-deepening and increasingly evident love for Wales, the land which adopted him, and whose University eventually honoured him with a doctorate because it recognised the quality of his service.

The gentleness of hid normal address belied the tenacity with which he fought for justice for his College as when, for example, he confronted in the University Faculty of Education a University College Principal, who had decided that the time had come for a lone Voluntary College, unsupported by the power of a local authority, or by understanding from the Church leaders of that day, could be erased from the educational map of Wales. There have been "excursions and alarums" since - and maybe threats will continue to come - but the fact that the College is 'still here to struggle for itself, and now with greater understanding and support, is almost wholly due to Tom Halliwell's courage. He prepared the ground well, and I always felt that his words to me - "We never cut down a tree without planting two in its stead!', had a deeper parabolic meaning than just the conservation of the beauty of the College campus.

Where was the secret of his strength, apart from that which he derived from the warmth of his home and the shared convictions in the College community?

I suspect he was not really happy in constant preoccupation with practical administrative tasks, but in it all he maintained a poise and integrity which proved the deep strength of his Christian faith, his pastoral concern, the breadth reading which renewed and informed his mind, and the fact that he was steeped in all the riches of a European culture stemming from its Christian Past

The range and variety of the theological books in the Library reflect his owns interests, rather than the piety and devotion, of his students, but the fruits of his reading, and his meditation upon it, were poured out, digested and systematised, not only in his teaching and conversation in College, but also in his preaching to generation after generation of students, from this pulpit. As a priest, his deep personal devotion, and his interest in philosophical theology, raised him above the party squabbles among the men of different approaches in, twentieth century Anglicanism. He earthed this approach to faith in seeking to establish and sustain a natural caring community, for there was nothing detached or esoteric, nothing dryly academic, about his understanding of the Gospels or his love of its Lord.

As he spoke of his deepest convictions and beliefs one never failed to remevnbc.1, that his initial discipline of study was English literature, and that his great loves in the world of literature were first, Shakespeare, and - increasingly in his later years - Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

It was Coleridge himself who wrote of "our myriad-minded Shakespeare", and went on to say: " He is of no age - nor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind. Again and again it was the great themes of Shakespearean drama, especially of tragedy which gave Tom Halliwell the pegs on which to hang his own teaching. But it was Coleridge who put into words a description which well fits Tom Halliwell's whole approach, when he wrote

Of that great eternal language, which thy God

Utters, Who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! He shall mould

Thy Spirit, and by giving make it ask.

"By giving make it ask" - Coleridge wrote "No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. But the converse is equally true - no man was ever yet a profound philosopher without being at the same time a great poet. And in Tom Halliwell's belief and teaching there was deep poetry. His portrait which hangs in the Council room in College captures much of his inner serenity, but we could not expect the painter to be able to capture the luminosity, the transparency the translucence, which was so unmistakable especially when, in later years, he was recovering from one of his recurrent crises in health. In no-one I have ever known was there so clear a sense that the veil between time and eternity was so very thin as to be no denser or closer than a spider's web. The-re was a deep mystical quality about him which was recognised and appreciated by his friends, even though they sometimes smiled at his preoccupation with angels one which he shared, by the way, with St Thomas Acquinas. His beliefs (to quote, Coleridge again) were "a total act of the soul .... the whole state of the mind"..

For one whose life had to be spent so much in the public eye, and in constant educational politics, Tom Halliwell was by nature a very private person, and the years of ret8irement, despite the fragility of his health, were years in which he enjoyed tom the full, the intimate joy and fellowship of his growing family. But right up to my very last letter from him, and my last brief conversation with him, after Archbishop Runcie's visit last September to the Cathedral Canon Halliwell had loved and served so well, his interest in and concern for this College, and the renewed hope for its future, remained as the context of concern for a greater family and fellowship.

So it is here in the place he loved, and where he gave so much of himself,, that we thank God on every remembrance of him, for his understanding of the ways of God, and the wisdom with which he sought to share that understanding and put it into practice.

Coleridge, a mentor about whom he wrote in his very last letter to the Times, wrote an epitaph for himself which encapsulated the stresses of his own life. Perhaps we can use it for Thomas Halliwell, Priest, Teacher, Friend and Guide, - as a prayer:

That he who many a year with toil and breath

Found death in life, may here find life in death.

May he rest in peace, and rise in Glory.