The Very Rev. Red

"There must be some way," mused London's Daily Mail last week, "of removing him from his high and ancient office." For the past five years, outraged churchgoers on both sides of the Atlantic have thought the same thought, as the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, dean of Canterbury Cathedral, cast one irresponsible political brickbat after another into the sanctified air surrounding his pulpit. Last week the best brains of Britain's church and state were doing their best to figure out a way to fire him.

It was no easy matter. The only grounds on which a clergyman of the Church of England may be fired are those of heresy or criminal conviction. But last week, 38 Tory backbenchers signed a motion in Parliament to ask the Queen herself to fire Johnson.

Thirteen Bob a Week. Johnson was picked for the deanery in 1931 by his friend, Laborite Ramsay MacDonald. When the "Red Dean" earned his first notoriety as a mere pink, nobody minded too much. Like a well-cast stock actor clothed in Episcopal gaiters, his shining pate tonsured by nature and surrounded by a chaplet of purest white hair, Dr. Johnson looked the very picture of pious benignity, and his mildly leftish pronouncements were not too unfashionable at the time. The dean let it be known that he had started life as a mill hand at 13 shillings a week. He never bothered to tell them that his father owned the factory he worked in or that he rested nightly from his labors in a large estate known as Upton Grange in Macclesfield.

Dr. Johnson's pink tinge grew rosier during the Spanish civil war and rosier still during World War II, but the Reds were then Britain's "brave Russian allies." The real wave of indignation against Johnson's pronouncements in favor of Soviet Russia reached its crest early last year when the Red Dean journeyed to Moscow to accept a Peace Prize from Stalin. Beaming with pride over his achievement, the dean met the wave of demands for his resignation with the announcement that he had deposited the prize money ($25,000 worth of rubles) in Moscow's Gosbank.

The Brains of Two Children. Last May the Red Dean took another trip--this time to Red China. He returned to Canterbury full of praise for the Communists and with what he said was "crushing evidence" that the allies were in fact conducting germ warfare in Korea. The evidence, shown to newsmen at a press conference, turned out to be 1) a massive scroll written entirely in Chinese, 2) a letter from a Chinese Anglican bishop who had not been to Korea, 3) the memory of a Chinese news broadcast during which two U.S. airmen had purportedly confessed to dropping germs. Had the dean actually seen anyone sick as a result of germ warfare? Well, no -- "but I saw the brains of two children who had died from encephalitis, an unusual disease for this time of the year."

He said that thousands of Chinese schoolchildren had been trained in anti-germ warfare: as soon as the alarm is given, the children spread over the countryside and gather up the germ-carrying insects with chopsticks. This was too much even for Britain's pink and gullible New Statesman and Nation, which had itself taken the germ charges seriously. Now it had to admit that they had been "laughed out of court" by the Red Dean's performance.

Actually, most Britons seemed agreed that the Red Dean is no longer a laughing matter. The question is what to do about him. Even though she is titular head of the established church, Queen Elizabeth is unlikely to break a centuries-old tradition by revoking the lifetime patent given by her grandfather, George V. "There can be little doubt," mourned the London Times, "that, if there were any lawful means of dispensing with his services, his ecclesiastical superiors would long since have adopted it."

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