Stuart Yarworth Blanch, Baron Blanch, (2 February 1918 – 3 June 1994) was an Anglican priest, bishop and archbishop. Little interested in religion in his youth, he became a committed Christian at the age of 21, while serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He was ordained as a priest in 1949, and spent three years as a curate and five years as a vicar in and around Oxford where he had studied for the priesthood. He was vice principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford from 1957 to 1960, the founding head of Rochester Theological College from 1960 to 1966, Bishop of Liverpool from 1966 to 1975, and Archbishop of York from 1975 to 1983. Blanch was evangelical in outlook, but gained the trust of high church Anglicans, and also of Roman Catholics and nonconformists. He was well known as a lecturer and published ten books, most of them scholarly and theological. Life and career Early years Blanch was born at Viney Hill Farm, Blakeney, Gloucestershire in the Forest of Dean, the youngest of three sons of a farmer, William Edwin Blanch, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Yarworth. William Blanch was killed in a shooting accident in 1923 and his widow and youngest child moved to London, where the two older sons were already living. Blanch attended Alleyn's School, Dulwich, winning a scholarship after the first year. His mother could not afford to pay for him to go to a university, and after leaving school at the age of 18 he started work. He would have preferred to become a journalist, but found that "journalism in particular was hard to get into without contacts." He gained employment in the office of the Law Fire Insurance Society Ltd in Chancery Lane at a salary of £90 a year. He said later, "The job taught me a great deal, not just about administration – how to write letters and so on – but how to deal with people from all walks of life." On the outbreak of the Second World War Blanch enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He was on guard duty at Christmas at the RAF depot in Heaton Park (not, he later said, "a prospect to quicken the pulse or engender much seasonal cheer"), and for lack of anything else to read he read the New Testament thoroughly for the first time in his life, and