Meet the Reverend Will Newman, chaplain of Hong Kong’s St John’s Cathedral and Stanley Prison

I WAS BORN in Worcester (in England’s West Midlands) in 1961. Dad was a priest there. On the morning I was born, the postman brought a letter containing a job offer for dad as the principal of a mission school in India. So, when I was six months old, the family headed off to India. India was a big part of my parents’ lives. My mother was born there; dad went out as a missionary. They’d met in India.

I HAVE TWO older sisters and a younger brother, so my brother was born in India. We were initially in the city of Nagpur, then dad moved to be the priest of a little town up in the hills in Central India. There was a small pool there, which we called the “fairy pool”, down in the ravines. I have this early memory of dad holding me, I’m lying flat on his hand and I’m splashing and kicking. Before I was five, we returned to England, to the Welsh border near Monmouth and dad was the vicar of four tiny parishes with a total population of 500 people. It was a happy childhood.

IN 1973, dad decided that he wanted to become a Roman Catholic and leave the Anglican Church. My parents bought a house in Monmouth and dad went back to teaching, which is what he’d done as a young man. I didn’t enjoy secondary school. I was a bit picked on and a bit withdrawn. I got my head down and worked. I did well, but it wasn’t a happy time. That all changed when I went to university at Durham. I was studying the subject I love: history. At Durham, I was able to really be myself. Dot (Newman’s wife, Theadora Whittington) and I met at Durham. We were in the same college. She was studying theology. I used to play the clarinet and I was looking for a pianist and somebody said there’s a girl playing the piano down in the practice room and that was when I first met Dot. So, it was music that brought us together and music that we still love, singing together in the Cecilian Singers and in the St John’s Cathedral Evensong Choir.

AFTER I GRADUATED, I went to teach in India for a year at a Christian school in Kashmir. It was fun but I had no idea what I was doing, teaching English to 12- and 13-year-old boys. I don’t think they learned very much from me but I had a great time climbing the mountains. It did, however, make me realise that I wanted to be a teacher. One thing that’s important before we get too far on in this story is that from the age of 17 to 25, every summer, I used to work on a sheep farm. The sheep are important because they link in with Christianity and being a shepherd to the sheep. That was in south Wales, at a farm on top of a hill, 200 acres, which is nine or 10 fields. It is one of the things that I sometimes talk about in my sermons when we get to Bible readings that are about the shepherds and sheep. One of my jobs was to walk around the field to check the ditch and make sure that none of the sheep had fallen into it. Learning to look after the sheep, all of that is stuff that Jesus would have known. I did that every year.

I DID CARE WORK and after that a PGCE (postgraduate certificate in education) at Bristol University. From there, I applied to teach English with the VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). In 1986, I went and taught English for two years in a town 100 miles (161km) away from Kunming, in Yunnan province, teaching in a teacher-training college. This was when China was just opening up and everyone wanted to practise their English and find out more about the outside world. The students were wonderful. They were five years younger than me. I realised I didn’t want to teach forever so I applied for a job at VSO in London. Then, in 1990, a job came up in the VSO China office in Beijing. I asked Dot to marry me, she said yes and we were married 30 days later. She handed her notice in; she was a barrister. I was part of the management team of the VSO programme, looking after the volunteers in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou and Hunan. We had nearly four years in Beijing. Dot was studying art with a teacher called Liu Dawei (a professor at the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art).

IN MY 20s, Christianity was not terribly important to me. In Beijing, we were looking for an English-language church service. We had made friends with an Englishwoman, Sandy, who taught at the British Council, and is Catholic. She said there was a German priest who said mass in her apartment. Father Arnold Sprenger would go directly to anything in the Bible readings that was difficult and he would talk about it in a way that made sense, and that made me think there’s something important here. Then Dot’s Uncle Charles, who at that time was a professor of economics at Newcastle University, was invited out to give some lectures, and he stayed with us for a few days. One evening, he and I were talking, and he said, “Have you ever thought of becoming a priest?” It was not something that I had thought about at all. But that planted a seed. We left Beijing a year later and went back to London. Then our two boys, Robin and Francis, were born.

I WENT TO STUDY in a seminary in Cambridge for two years. Then I was curate for three years in a market town near Colchester, in southeast England. There, I saw the advert for this job. I came here in 2004 to look after St Stephen’s Chapel, Stanley; to be the parish priest here, to be part of the cathedral team and contribute to the life of the cathedral, and to be the school chaplain at St Stephen’s College as well as the prison chaplain in Stanley Prison. Our sons were eight and 10 at the time. They went to Chinese International School. Robin later went off to Imperial College in London and is a patent examiner near Cardiff. Francis is fluent in Mandarin and is doing a PhD at Harvard in the history of science in the late Qing dynasty.

AS PRISON CHAPLAIN, I can go into Stanley Prison any time, but throughout the month, we have regular visits. I go with volunteers to take service and to talk to the guys on long-term and life sentences. I’ve known some of them for more than 20 years. We stayed in touch with one or two after they finished their prison terms. Some of them we’ve helped to find jobs, which is a difficult thing. I’m the main man on interfaith at St John’s Cathedral. So, I have a very good relationship with the chief imam, Imam Arshad, at Kowloon Mosque. And with both rabbis at the two synagogues (on Hong Kong Island).

WE ARE MOST FORTUNATE to live in a 1930s bungalow (designated for the school chaplain). It’s one of five on the school campus and it has a garden and looks out over the South China Sea. The principal lives in a similar bungalow. Dot is an artist. She’s written and illustrated children’s books that have been published here. She also does fine art; pictures of Hong Kong festivals and street scenes. St Stephen’s Chapel is a beautiful little church and is 76 years old. The first service here was in March 1950. It was dedicated to the memory of those who suffered and died in Stanley during the second world war. We have a stained-glass window which has a picture of the internees in the prison camp and a lovely smaller picture of children sitting on the steps, waving and smiling and laughing. That’s on the day the war ended and the camp was liberated.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity