Rev R C Wynne
Priest-in-Charge 1946-50

Ronald Charles Wynne was born in July 1916 in Leatherhead, Surrey, where his father was a mechanical engineer. The family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, in 1919. After junior school, Ronald went on to Malvern College, Worcestershire. When he was 17, he was taken to hospital with a severely poisoned ankle, needing three operations in two weeks. He was desperately ill, but as he later recounted, he felt God helped him to heal and from that time his religious belief grew.

From Malvern, he went to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to read history. He intended to move to Lincoln Theological College after graduating from Cambridge, but the Principal advised him not to go there straight from university. Instead, he should either spend some years in business or do a short service job overseas. So, on 23rd August 1929, the 23-year-old Ronald boarded the SS Maloja en route from London to Bombay.

The Society of St Francis had asked him to go to their sister society near Poona in India. The Christa Prema Seva Sangha was a creative ashram community. This Society ran a hostel for Indian students attending Poona University. His job was to be the Warden, keeping the peace between the various students from different Indian religions and castes. After two years in Poona, unable to return to Britain at that stage of the war that had been declared the month after he had left England, he spent a year in theological training at Bishop’s College, Calcutta. In 1942, Imperial Japanese forces attacked Calcutta, sinking thirty ships in its harbour. and  Wynne’s college was evacuated to a centre in the foothills of the Himalayas. Then, the Bishop of Colombo sent Ronald a telegram, asking him to come so he could ordain him as a deacon. It took him five days by train to reach Ceylon. On the 26th July 1942, he was made deacon at Christ Church, Jaffna, in the north of the island, before a Tamil congregation. The Bishop, his chaplain and Wynne were the only English people present. [Jaffna is now the headquarters of the Tamil Tigers.]

Ronald Wynne was ordained a priest on Trinity Sunday, 1943, together with a Tamil, a Singhalese, and a Dutch Burgher. He then led the parish of St Stephen’s, Trincomalee, until 1945. A challenging task ministering to three military units, as well as his own congregation, driven between jungle sites by an Army driver in a supplied truck. As the end of the war drew to a close, the scale of the parish work grew, and the Bishop engaged a very experienced priest who came to take over. Rev Wynne returned to England to become one of four curates in a large English parish.

At a Basingstoke PCC meeting in October 1945, the Parish Vicar announced that Rev N Cruttwell (Priest-in-Charge at All Saints')  would be leaving in the early months of the following year to take up missionary work in New Guinea. For once, All Saints did not have to wait long for a new Priest-in-Charge, for at the same meeting the Vicar announced that he had been able to secure the services of the Rev R C Wynne, who would join the staff in January.

In February 1950, Rev Wynne announced in the Parish Magazine: “After four happy years among you I shall be leaving the parish after Easter to go and assist the Vicar of Fleet.”  He concluded his farewell to All Saints' with these words: “As I write in my room at a Lakeland Hotel, I look up at the snowclad mountains 'from whence cometh my help'. You have no mountains to look at, but you have a church whose glory sets a high standard before us all. May God enable you to do what he appoints and bless you in the doing and fulfilling of it.” Rev Wynne served as Vicar of St Philip & St John's in Fleet until 1956, when he was invited to become Vicar of Lockerly and East Dean, about six miles north of Romsey.

It seems that Rev Wynne’s previous overseas experience had given him the desire to go abroad again. In 1961, he travelled on a banana boat to St Vincent in the Windward Islands of the West Indies. He was to serve as an assistant priest in the Cathedral Parish of Kingstown. As only about 1,00 names (about 5% of the population) were on the parish Electoral Roll, Rev Wynne surmised that some intensive visitation was needed. So he travelled on foot in the mountains and the outskirts of the city. The size of the Cathedral congregation grew. After eighteen months, Rev Wynne was appointed Rector of the Cathedral. Together with his sister, Eleanor, who had come out to join him in the West Indies, Rev Wynne returned to England in January 1967. They took up residence in a house in Minchinhampton, near Stroud in Gloucestershire.

However, Rev Ronald's work overseas was not over, and in 1968, he moved to Botswana, initially based in Francistown. He found his “mission field” some 500 miles into the interior among an uprooted people, a community of the Hambukushu people, some 6000 of them, who had fled from the oppression and violence of colonial Angola, and, with the assistance of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Health Organisation, had settled at a place called Etsha in the Okavanga Basin. He spent six years living among the Hambukushu, giving them primary health care, compiling an adult literacy primer, and starting adult literacy classes in response to their request. Rev Ronald studied their language and began to compile an English-Mbukushu dictionary. His work with the Hambukushu led, in 1977, to a three-month visitation of the 13 villages of Etsha whose congregations he was able to baptise in the pools of the Okavango River.

Rev Wynne returned to his home in Minchinhampton in October 1982, leaving his Botswanan parish in the hands of a team of priests sponsored by the World Council of Churches. He recorded the story of his time in Botswana in a book, "The Pool That Never Dries Up". He continued as a practising priest at his home parish, assisting with services, even after suffering from a broken femur after a fall in 2002. He passed away in July 2007.