Graham Chadwick

Graham Charles Chadwick (3 January 1923 – 28 October 2007) was a British Christian missionary in Lesotho (1953–1963; 1970–1976) and South Africa (1976–1982). On his election as Anglican Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman in 1976 he campaigned strongly against the racist apartheid policies of the South African government. As a result, he was expelled from South Africa in 1982 and returned to Britain. Afterwards he assisted in the dioceses of St Asaph's, Liverpool and Salisbury.

Early life Chadwick was born into the large family of a railway signalman. When he was only ten years old, his father died, and his mother took her children to Swansea. Chadwick was educated in Swansea at the Bishop Gore School.

When he left the school in 1939 at the age of sixteen, he was unsure of his vocation to ordination, and he spent the first three years of the Second World War maintaining station clocks on the railway line from Swansea to mid-Wales. In 1942 he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, and once his linguistic talents were identified, he was appointed a midshipman. Japanese language training at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London was followed by a posting to Sri Lanka and by an assignment as an intelligence officer to the Pacific theatre, where he served on and and lost a close friend in a Japanese kamikaze attack. After V-J Day he was involved in the interrogation of Japanese war criminals being held in Australian POW camps. He left the navy with the rank of sub-lieutenant.

Early ministry in Swansea and Lesotho Even on leaving school he had felt a call to Holy Orders,

Return to Britain In 1963 Chadwick returned to Britain, taking up a position as chaplain at University College of Swansea (then part of the federal University of Wales) for five years. Here he strongly influenced many students, amongst them one Rowan Williams.

He then undertook a sabbatical year at Queen's College, Birmingham, where he studied clinical psychology.

Chadwick was soon involved in a schools boycott. When many black African pupils refused to attend schools in protest against the compulsory teaching of Afrikaans, he and the rest of the diocesan clergy encouraged students to complete their education, but also began to speak out against Apartheid. The South African Police accused clergy of maintaining links with the South African Students' Organisation, and six clergy and diocesan youth workers were arrested. One of the youth workers, Phakamile Mabija, a member of the Anglican Nomads Educational Group, was arrested for allegedly vandalising public transport in Galeshewe. Chadwick was then out of the country so it was Thomas Stanage, Dean of Kimberley, who was first informed that Mabija had died after apparently falling from the seventh-floor of the police station. On his return Chadwick protested against the death (particularly after the inquest proved to be a whitewash) and against the continued detention of his clergy. He planted wooden crosses outside his cathedral for each day the detention continued, and encouraged the ringing of church bells in protest. Once the clergy were released, the Chadwicks were placed under police surveillance, responding by taking regular cups of tea out to the policemen watching their house. He was also heavily involved in the l'Arche communities. but no source lists them all. They include English, Japanese, Sesotho, Setswana, Afrikaans, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.