supply of detective stories read in bed at night and, as a family man, notably Saturday afternoons ‘sacred to the weekly visit to the cinema with Mrs Wand'. With the Bishop of Fulham Basil Batty, he supported the early ecumenical movement. He was the first Chairman of the Executive body of the British Council of Churches, attending the 1948 foundation of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam. Seretse Khama affair On 25 September 1948, Seretse Khama, a 27-year-old black African man, and Ruth Williams, a 24-year-old white English woman, went to the Anglican St George's Church in Campden Hill, London, to get married. Half an hour before the service their vicar, the Reverend Leonard Patterson, under severe pressure from various parties opposed to the inter-racial marriage, told the couple he was not willing to perform at the ceremony. Khama, who was heir to the kingship of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, and Williams, who was a London insurance clerk, pleaded with Patterson to change his mind, but instead he took them to the nearby St Mary Abbots church in Kensington to meet Wand, who, as Bishop of London, was performing an ordination. There they attempted to gain Wand's consent to be married in the Church of England. However, Wand refused such permission without even speaking to the couple himself, sending the Archdeacon of Middlesex with a message that read: "Get in touch with the Colonial Office. When they agree to the wedding, I will". Although senior officials at the Colonial Office had no say over whether the couple could get married in a church, or indeed anywhere else, they had made it known through various back channels that they were opposed to the union, not only because they found it distasteful but because they believed that, given Khama's royal status, it would create political difficulties with apartheid South Africa, a neighbouring state to Bechuanaland. Wand's refusal to sanction a church ceremony forced Khama and Williams to get married in a civil service four days later, at Kensington Registry Office in London. Latter years After resigning as bishop, Wand was appointed minor canon and later Canon Treasurer of St Paul's Cathedral, London, until 1969 and edited The Church Quarterly Review. A wide-ranging and facile historian, he wrote forty-five books, among them a History of the Modern Church (1930), History of the Early Church (1937), White of Carpentaria (1949), Anglicanism in