In 1966 Chadwick was put at the head of a commission to redefine parliament’s role in church affairs. In 1976 Selwyn became one of the first of Cambridge’s all-male colleges to accept women as students.Ĭhadwick began a two-year term as vice-chancellor of the university in 1969, a time of political turmoil and student protests, which he addressed with democratic reforms.Īfter retiring from the university in 1983, he was chancellor of the University of East Anglia from 1985 to 1994. At the time, the college had only junior status at the university, but under his leadership it flourished, becoming a constituent college in 1958, the same year he was appointed Dixie professor of ecclesiastical history. He became master of Selwyn College in 1956. In 1947, he was named dean of chapel at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, and in 1949 he married Ruth Hallward, who died this year.

After the Church of England ordained him a deacon in 1940 and a priest the next year, he served for two years as a curate in Huddersfield before becoming chaplain at Wellington College in Berkshire. Deeply influenced by his teacher, Martin Charlesworth, a Christian historian, and by the imprisonment of the theologian Martin Niemöller in Germany, he stayed an extra year to study theology, earning another first-class degree.Ĭhadwick enrolled in a theological college near Oxford to study for holy orders.

After attending Tonbridge School in Kent, he went to St John’s College in Cambridge to read classics and, just as important by his own account, to play rugby. William Owen Chadwick was born in 1916 in southeast London, where his father was a barrister. Chadwick was inspired not only by great doctrinal disputes but also by the day-to-day rounds of church life in rural outposts.Ĭharacteristically, he produced both The Victorian Church, a magisterial history published in two volumes, in 19, and Victorian Miniature (1961), an account of a feuding country squire and parson, each of whom kept a diary, which recalled the novels of Anthony Trollope.

Victorian Church by Owen Chadwick