
A great life came to its end last Tuesday. Twelve days after celebrating his silver wedding to Anne-Marie and eight days before his 108th birthday, Dr John Woodfield breathed his last. It is forty years since he finished his year fifty-three-year teaching career. Thirty-one of those years he spent teaching English Language and Literature, Homiletics and Fine Arts at Newbold College in Binfield. He was the oldest man in Wokingham.
When I was appointed Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at Newbold College in 1972, he was my first Head of Department. In church circles as I was growing up, the initials AJW had long been synonymous with scholarship. In the 70s, his literature classes tended to be small and the significance of the subject matter often dismissed as ‘worldly’ by others. ‘Theology was always at the top,’ he would say!
Always generous to me as a junior colleague, he invited me to help him defend the importance of 'our' subject matter against the fundamentalist Puritans who believed that the study of ‘literature’, especially Shakespeare and other ‘'fiction', should have no place in the training of Christian ministers. We had limited success but more than we might today! To the end of his life, Dr Woodfield remained undaunted in his belief that ‘all truth is God’s truth’ and that those who claim to believe in ‘the Word made flesh’ should use the most thoughtful and imaginative human words to speak about God.
But it wasn’t only beautiful words that mattered to AJW! Buildings and music and art of all kinds mattered too. Improving students’ cultural awareness was always high on his list of priorities. His Introduction to Fine Arts class became very popular. At that time Saturday night entertainment was often the leisure highlight of the week. With his friends Roy Scarr and Frank Wood, he produced popular literary and musical programmes of costumed entertainment. In days when a car-owning student was a rarity, he organised educational excursion days which gave students the opportunity to enjoy the cultural delights of places like Salisbury and Stratford, Warwick and Winchester.
In 2016 I accepted enthusiastically the invitation to write an article for the Newboldian to celebrate John’s 100th birthday. For me it was a delicious time of chatting to this great raconteur and mimic. I spent far more time than necessary ‘interviewing’ him in his tiny cottage on a historic street in Wokingham. ‘Don’t you think it’s a privilege to live where you can look out over that 15th century house?’ he asked me.
By then, he had stopped making furniture and doing wood-carving but he was still reading avidly and still painting sometimes and always ready to discuss what was going on in the world.Then, and until a few weeks ago, he was quick to quote Chaucer or Milton or Shakespeare. He and Anne-Marie read and discussed a poem every day. In his ‘den’ upstairs, he was writing his life story on the computer he had christened, ‘Legion’! It reminded him of the words of his mother, ‘‘There he goes again – those mad Woodfields always scribing.’
After those interviews, I compiled a document of verbatim fragments of him talking. I called it, ‘ Thoughts of AJW.’ Here are a couple:
On sermons...I had had a lifetime of going to church and hearing people produce words, words, words. ....It’s so easy to acquire a stock of truisms and just trot them out! It’s boring – if you multiply that by the number of people who are there suffering it – it’s a terrible thing. ‘Preaching should be a manifestation of the incarnate word from the written word by the spoken word!’ (his favourite quote from Bernard Manning')
On beauty in church life...I do love things religious: church music, stained glass windows, beautiful churches and what goes on in them. But I don’t like ... tables covered with green baize and a glass of water and someone going on for 40 minutes. They make what is beautiful prosaic. There’s no mystery....
By his words, in his art, in his teaching and preaching - and perhaps most of all in his genial kindness - John Woodfield made beautiful what so many make prosaic. And for that, I and so many others will always be thankful.
The picture was taken by Anne-Marie on my last visit to the Woodfields a couple of weeks ago on 21st August. My article about AJW for The Newboldian can be accessed here.
What a beautiful tribute. Thank you, Helen.