Leading PM layman and educationalist, born on 1 September 1890 at Choppington, Northumberland. A local preacher from his teens, he studied at Magdalen and Mansfield Colleges, Oxford, intending to become a PM minister, but abandoned this in favour of service with the SCM as a travelling secretary (1914-1922). He was a conscientious objector in World War I. From 1922 to 1933 he taught at Selly Oak Colleges. His book The School in the Bush (1929) was the fruit of a travelling scholarship to Africa. In 1932 he was Vice-President of the last PM Conference. From 1931 to 1945 he was Professor of Education at Hull and published The School and the Church: the theory and practice of Christian Education under the Butler Act (1944). His Fernley Hartley Lecture Personal Experience and the Historic Faith (1939) won him a Cambridge BD. He was President of Cheshunt College, Cambridge, 1945-1959 - a surprising appointment for this dissenting theological college.
He was Vice-President of the Methodist Conference in 1947 and his Conference address was published as The Security of Church and State. His later published works were largely based on lecture series in Britain and America on educational, religious and philosophical themes and included the Hyslop Memorial Lecture, Ethics and the Technique of Persuasion (Cardiff, 1953), Natural Religion and Christian Theology (1956) and the Hibbert Lectures State and Church in a Free Society (Cambridge, 1958). He died on 10 June 1967.