29th April 1936 – 22nd February 2025
Funeral at Christ Church, High Harrogate,
Friday 21 March 2025
Sermon by the Rt Revd David Wilbourne
‘Come, Lord, work upon us, set us on fire and clasp us close,
be fragrant to us, draw us to thy love, let us run to thee.’
On Trinity Sunday 17 June 1962, six-year-old me watched Christopher, a young man in a York Minster full of old men, ordained with my dad – both destined for curacies in East Hull. My dad returned from dry clergy training conferences cheered by this shy young man who did a skit, casting the senior staff as shady car dealers, trading in dodgy parishes rather than motors.
Leslie Stanbridge, later Archdeacon of York, headed up training, a role model for Christopher: hard-working, enthusiastic, energetic, thinking nothing of taking junior clergy on the gruelling 40 mile Lyke Wake walk across the NY Moors. Christopher was a keen sportsman, cricket, tennis, hockey at university level, once wearing his hockey kit beneath his robes at a wedding at Coatham, match-fit. Even so it took him a fair few days to recover from the good archdeacon’s Lyke Wake breeze.
I was never sure if Christopher was really shy. After reading Maths at Cambridge, the Maths App is always running, distracting you. The Theology App was always running in Christopher’s head too, up to date, widely read, a deep and serious thinker. Whatever, Hull benefitted greatly from clergy like Christopher, King’s College Choir School, Marlborough, Cambridge & Oxford, who simply rolled their sleeves up and engaged with all, even scoring a century for the local cricket team in Sutton.
When St Nicholas, West Hull had to be demolished because of subsidence, the diocese was all for carving up the parish.
Christopher, newly vicar, stood his ground, raising the money for a new church by launching a catering company staffed by church ladies who did cut-price wedding receptions. It was hardly French cuisine, just ham salads and pickled onions, with the ladies for ever pickling in the church hall. The portly waitresses packed into Christopher’s car, food to boot, the suspension shot. Yet a homely, even Eucharistic hospitality. It wasn’t just fundraising. Christopher alternated sleepless nights as a new father of twins with sleepless nights as a Samaritan, as well as funding beds for tramps at the Salvation Army Hostel.
Christopher quietly exercised his right as a Registrar in the Established Church to remarry folk whose previous marriages had sadly failed. He’d really set his face against Church practice or prejudice – in East Hull we wouldn’t even let divorcees receive Communion.
There was shame attached back then to conceiving before wedlock but not for Christopher, welcoming all who sought God’s blessing. No censure, no judgement: any lewd comments Chris stamped on. But once the bride wasn’t just enceinte but very pregnant, panting-between-the-vows pregnant. ‘That was a close shave,’ Christopher quipped to Louis, his verger.
Christopher was a vicarage child, his father John Christopher Vicar of Chatteris in the Cambridge Fens for 35 years. He knew & loved the C of E inside out, an enthusiast for the Book of Common Prayer, mean between two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and too much easiness in admitting any variation from it. This relaxed him and gave him the nerve to take risks, to be a 100 Hymns for Today sing-we-a-song-of-high-revolt guy.
A strong advocate for the ministry of women, Christopher’s ministry at Coatham and Scarborough was inclusive, shaping St Martin’s, too prone to be a pre-Raphaelite mausoleum, into a joyful and flourishing house of the living God.
Caroline Lester: I’ve very happy memories of the Hawthorns. The children took part in school productions at Raincliffe, including Pirates of Penzance. I taught Helen piano, staying on for supper after our lesson. Such a welcoming family: their kindness made such a difference to me when I was new to Scarborough.’
Christopher became a great and caring Rural Dean of Scarborough ably assisted by solicitor Richard Grunwell, lay chair of Synod.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, still fondly remembered. He was a popular Rotary president, chaplain to the summer shows, dropping in and out of the Futurist on the foreshore, caring for every cast, the highest and the lowest. How tickled Ken Dodd was to have a quiet talk with Christopher.
He was also Chair of the House of Clergy in Diocesan Synod, bustling around with a bulging briefcase, always a smile.
No surprise when Archbishop John Habgood made you Archdeacon of Cleveland in 1991. John only ever appointed simply the best, better than all the rest.
Over to Gordon Bates, former Bishop of Whitby: ‘Chris was the perfect Archdeacon, much respected, always welcomed wherever; law-abiding but never rigid; traditional but open to new ideas; deeply spiritual but with a great sense of humour; serious in thought but with a lightness of touch.
And always greatly supported by Margaret who loved him, cared for him – and sometimes corrected him!
He made my job so much easier than it might have been, and much more fun than many people realised.’
Former Archbishop of York, David Hope, wrote: ‘Chris told it as it was – direct, straightforward and always full of common sense – no fancy stuff with Chris! If he thought you were wrong he would tell you so, but never in any hectoring way but always with that pastoral and priestly heart which pervaded the whole of his ministry. To quote the letter to the Hebrews, Chris “was faithful to God, merciful to man.”’
Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, coincided with Christopher at General Synod: ‘I did not know Chris well, but met him a few times and had a very high regard for him.’
At his final Archdeacon’s visitation in SS Peter & Paul Pickering, Christopher presented a bottle of expensive whiskey to an aged churchwarden, who sadly dropped it, smashing it on the heating grill.
The heating was on: we all enjoyed inhaling this gorgeous vapour, the only ever Visitation where we left church drunk on the spirit, the undoubted aim of Christopher’s life and ministry. But Christopher was so kind and tender with that churchwarden, the next day visiting him with a replacement bottle.
In a very hospitable retirement in Strensall then Haxby Christopher built an impressive record of helping out with services 40% are led by retired clergy – Christopher did 39% of them! He revived his boyhood interest for Philately, producing learned tracts for the GB Overprints Society on Stamps of the Levant. Despite this, your Christmas parties were the jolliest I’ve attended!
The greatest of them all is love. The jewel in the C of E’s crown is that for five centuries it has permitted clergy to marry, to root their ministry in the joys and sorrows of family life.
When Margaret taught in Scalby, her teenage pupils cottoned on that she was a vicar’s wife. A tad confused about clergy celibacy, they assumed their teacher’s relationship had no physical side.
‘Oh no, we’ve four children, including twins,’ Margaret responded with dark smile.
‘Ee, Miss, how could you – with a vicar!’
Late one night at St Nick’s you were nursing those twins when Christopher answered the door bell. ‘Tell them to go away,’ you yelled, assuming it was yet another tramp come to pester.
It wasn’t, it was Archbishop Donald Coggan who’d popped in on his way home, a lonely prelate enjoying a precious family moment at your hearth and home.
You are a woman in your own right, a simply wonderful wife. Christopher a wonderful husband, a loving and loved father to James, Richard, Andrew and Helen; grandfather to Emily, Charlotte, & Olivia, Becky, Katie & Jenny, Charles & Henry, Robert, Oliver & Jack, 11 in all: Grandad’s cricket team!
And Christopher was a wonderful son, caring for his aged parents. Christopher’s father, JC, complained that your home in Great Ayton was too small for an archdeacon, with no dining room, little realising that it’d been converted into his bedroom!
On sunny days you’d put JC out in the bath-chair in the garden, usually remembering to bring him in at dusk.
Annual family holidays were enjoyed beneath Wetherlam in the Lake District, helping on the sheep farm.
The diaries you kept of those 25 years would be a best seller: nearly all the Lakeland peaks climbed, golf courses marked by trees instead of holes, board games fiercely played into the small hours.
One cherished memory which says it all was Christopher trying to sing the Laughing Policeman with his children, never getting through it, because he kept doubling up with mirth.
Years later Christopher returned to Wetherlam with a heavy heart to take the funeral of the chief shepherd who died too soon, cancer contracted from carcinogenic sheep-dip.
Christopher strictly instructed me to avoid eulogies and preach the Gospel at his funeral, eternal life available now.
Yet Christopher, carrier of Christ, you embodied the Gospel, like St David you carried your church everywhere, as a body, which was life and brain and will, that did little and great things.
Once I decided that York Diocesan Synod needed sexing up, so asked the Senior Staff to be the different voices in the Easter Gospel, set on the Emmaus Road. Usually I do that with the Passion Gospel on Palm Sunday, and am quite picky about who I ask to play Jesus. Without a moment’s hesitation I asked Christopher to be Jesus: it simply seemed so right, no contest.
Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, ordinand, curate and vicar in Christopher’s patch, wrote this to him shortly before his death:
‘Every hand you have ever held; every story you have patiently listened to; every shy person you have noticed; every awkward character you have put up with; every idea planted; every dispute calmed; those hurriedly prepared sermons which nevertheless touched someone’s heart; a prayerful word of yours which became God’s word for them; times when you had nothing to say, feeling completely helpless. But you were there, and Christ was there too. Thank you.’
Trollope’s Barchester Towers ends with this description of Barchester’s saintly precentor, Mr Harding. It could equally apply to Christopher:
The author now leaves him in the hands of his readers. Not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as the perfect divine, but as a good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn.
My friends, I give you Christopher John Hawthorn.
Thank you God for gifting him to us
for one brief moment of eternity.
May he rest in your peace
and rise in your glory.
God save the King
and the Venerable Christopher Hawthorn!
© David Wilbourne 2025
The Commendation and Committal
After a lifetime of coming in and going out of church, Christopher now leaves church for the last time, his day on earth, a long day, has come to an end. Ours has not and it behoves us for Christopher to be our example for what remains of our day, that ‘Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do!’ Philippians 4:8-9
The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,
slow to anger and of great goodness.
As a father is tender towards his children,
so is the Lord tender to those that fear him.
For he knows of what we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are like the grass;
we flourish like a flower of the field;
when the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more.
But the merciful goodness of the Lord endures for ever and ever toward those that fear him and his righteousness upon their children’s children.
We have entrusted our brother Christopher to God’s mercy,
and we now commit his body to be cremated:
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:
in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our frail bodies that they may be conformed to his glorious body, who died, was buried, and rose again for us.
To him be glory for ever. Amen.
Christopher, unto God’s gracious mercy and protection,
we commit you; the Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you;
the Lord lift his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
Give rest, O Christ,
to thy servant with thy saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more;
neither sighing, but life everlasting.
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
