he been alive when the Church of England voted positively on the issue and the first ordination of women as priests took place in England in 1994. For all the polarisation between them that the media reports suggested, Bennett and Robert Runcie knew each other and Bennett was one of a number of clergy and lay people whose skills Runcie, when at Canterbury, used in drafting speeches and sermons, as Runcie's main biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, indicates. Carpenter, working from Bennett's diaries, noted that Bennett had become frustrated at his lack of preferment and this may have contributed to the tone of his preface. Runcie himself said of Bennett that there was nothing in what he wrote which he had not previously "said to his face". From Carpenter's portrait, Bennett emerges on the one hand as a distinguished academic and cleric, but on the other as a reclusive lonely man who could not cope with the spotlight when it fell upon him. Writings Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes. Published by Adam & Charles Black, 1966. Edited by Bennett and J. D. Walsh. To the Church of England. Churchman Publishing Ltd., 1988. The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury Bishop of Rochester. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. xvii, 335 p., [5] leaves of plates: ill.; 23 cm. Tradition and Change in the Church. London [England]: Association for the Apostolic Ministry, [1988?]. [8] p. ; 21 cm. "This Report was authorised for publication by AAM by the late Canon Gareth Bennett..." White Kennett 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough: A Study in the Political and Ecclesiastical History of the Early Eighteenth Century. London : S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1957. xii, 290 p. References Sources By Sex Divided: Church of England and Women Priests, Jonathan Petre, Zondervan, 1995. That Fateful Preface, New Directions, January 2006. An Unhappy Anniversary, New Directions, December 1997. 1929 births 1987 suicides People educated at Royal Grammar School, Guildford 20th-century English Anglican priests Fellows of New College, Oxford English Anglo-Catholics Chaplains of New College, Oxford People educated at Southend High School for Boys Alumni of Westcott House, Cambridge Anglo-Catholic clergy Ordination of women in the Anglican Communion Anglican scholars Suicides in Oxford