Canon Roger Arguile writes:
CHRISTOPHER STEAD, who died on 28 May, aged 95, was the last Ely Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University — a dinosaur, as he described himself. The chair was suppressed on his retirement.
This fact was a source of sadness to him, but also to the cathedral of which he was, ex officio, a canon. It broke a link between devotion and scholarship which Stead valued hugely. His name, he reminded the readers of his book Divine Substance, rhymed with Creed.
Brought up in Wimbledon, George Christopher Stead was educated at Marlborough, and went up to King’s, Cambridge, where he took a first in both Classics and Moral Philosophy, before going to do postgraduate study at Keble College, Oxford. After ordination training at Cuddesdon, he became a Fellow at King’s, Cambridge, in 1938, where he was to be a lecturer in divinity.
The supervension of the war, however, left the college largely without students. He spent 12 months in Newcastle as a curate, and then served the remainder of the war as an assistant master at Eton. He returned to King’s in 1944, when returning servicemen resumed or started their studies.
In his long chaplaincy at Keble which followed, he saw out several wardens, including the mercurial Austin Farrer, with whom, among others, he contributed to a collection of essays entitled Faith and Logic.
He did not share Farrer’s allegiance to Anglo-Catholicism, from which he distanced himself, but they shared a common command of philosophy.
Divine Substance was a long time coming and, though his pupils benefited from some of the thought that went into it, it was not published until after he had gone to Cambridge as Ely Professor. His output there included a work for non-specialists, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, and, on retirement, a book on the birth of the steam locomotive, a long-held passion.
As a tutor, Stead could be intimidating: he once chided a student for being several minutes early for his tutorial, and suggested to another group that they should leave out an essay on Gnosticism, on which he lectured, because they were bound to get it wrong. He was known to take tutorials while conducting a pupil along St Giles on his way to an appointment.
Nevertheless, he did not profess himself to be altogether a theologian, sending his pupils off in various directions for much of their time at Keble, and announcing on one occasion that Paul Tillich was one of the gaps in his reading. On the other hand, apparently encouraged by Farrer, he took on ordinands of indifferent aptitude such as myself, ignoring Oxford’s clearing-house system to send a spidery-written invitation to an interview that appeared to be a formality. I was not the only person to find him hard going: it was easier, on social occasions, to invite his view on some steam locomotive or other.
Our year at Keble decided to defy his lack of warmth, and took him out for a meal at a fairly riotous hostelry out of town. He proved to be a witty and charming guest, conversing, among other things, on the use of potting sheds as chapels and the merits of various freight locomotives.
He had married, very late, to Elizabeth Odom, and brought up his family of two boys and a girl in North Oxford, and then the Black Hostry at Ely. With them, he was able to indulge another long-held passion, that of sailing. He was, by all accounts, a warm family man. After retirement, he continued to work until ill-health, including increasing deafness, curtailed his activities, but he retained his considerable powers almost to the end.
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