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influence is very wide indeed among Christians of all Churches who wish to
know something of the spiritual riches of the Anglican tradition.
Many will know that Geoffrey was an intrepid traveller, and particularly
loved remote and exotic places. Being Bishop of the Diocese in Europe offered
him the chance to engage in this passion. During his episcopate he visited
every corner of the Diocese, from close to the Arctic Circle to the Sahara
desert. He knew its extent and took great joy in pointing out to other bishops
at the Lambeth Conference in 2008, when a giant map of the Communion was
th
on display, that the portion in red which covered 1/6 of the world’s land-mass,
which went from the Atlantic Ocean to Vladivostok, was actually his Diocese
in Europe. He loved to tell of the occasion when he was pulling out of the sta-
tion in the Mongolian town of Zamyn Üüd, heading south east on the railway
into China, when he sighed, “ah, now I am just leaving my diocese!”
Bishop Geoffrey, despite having had a public school education at
Winchester College and study at both Cambridge and Oxford, managed never
to participate in team sports. But team-building in the Diocese in Europe was
something to which he was totally committed. He took a meticulous interest in
the appointment of every single priest, for as chief pastor he felt that each
priest was an extension of his own cure of souls, and therefore he needed to
know them well. This was true of the women he appointed as well as the men,
even though he was himself opposed to the ordination of women as priests and
bishops, on the grounds that wider Catholic consent was not yet evident for
this development. He liked to think of the Diocese as a family and my own
relationship to him as his Suffragan was rather like younger brother to older
brother (which can be a complicated dynamic!) but one always marked by
fraternal love and deep mutual affection. It was within the framework of
friendship that Bishop Geoffrey sought to build up his people; emails, letters
(and he wrote many), telephone calls and skype meetings would have their
place, but for him there was no substitute for face to face meeting, for it could
be an encounter of friends. He always beamed with joy when standing at the
altars of his churches, celebrating the liturgy and sacraments with devotion,
inviting the faithful to enter ever more deeply into loving relationship with
God, the Holy Trinity.
Geoffrey entered this world on 13 February 1943, was ordained a priest
in 1969, was consecrated to serve as Bishop of Basingstoke in Winchester Dio-
cese in 1994 and was translated and enthroned as Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe
on All Saints Day in 2001. But Bishop Geoffrey would say that of all these
dates, the most significant was the day in a Hampshire church in 1943 when a

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