This is the talk I (Diederick Santer) gave about my dad, Mark Santer, at his funeral on Wednesday 4th September.
I’m speaking about Mark, on behalf of the family - his siblings, his children and stepchildren, his many grandchildren. Talking to them, and to many of his friends and colleagues over the last few days, some common themes around his very best qualities quickly emerged. I will do my very best to summarise but most of all to celebrate the person whom we all loved so much.
Dad Loved People. He wanted to hear their stories, what they were about. He loved making the connections - seeing how people’s lives fitted into history and geography.
Visiting him during recent stints in hospital, we would always hear from him the biographical details of the various nursing staff - their nation of birth, where they lived now, their qualifications and aspirations.
Our mother, Henriette, always said that one of the most attractive qualities in a person is that they take an interest. She had horror stories of her life as a clergy wife in the 60s and 70s when many never looked beyond that label, and never asked a question or found out that she was an accomplished clinical psychologist with a professional life of her own.
So perhaps this is one of the reasons she was attracted to this young academic from Cambridge, whom she met at a conference for young Christians in East Germany - his curiosity, his enthusiasm for people.
He would accumulate knowledge and have a view on most things. In the days before Wikipedia, this was incredibly useful to us! He knew something about most things, a lot about a lot… and next to nothing about popular culture, sport or science. (Miriam reminded me that once in her teens when he was berating her for her lack of knowledge about the classics, she asked him some questions about the periodic table, and it became clear he didn’t actually know what it was.) His grandchildren loved that too - the fact that he could give a pithy precis on almost any historical, literary or political question.
But he was not a snob about popular culture. He loved TV and one of our best co-views in recent years was Gogglebox. He wasn’t interested in the programmes the Boxers were viewing, but he loved their accents, their idiomatic quirks. Again, it was this delight in people - their differences, their habits. For the same reason, he didn’t hate his time doing National Service and although he didn’t care for the drills and the shouting, he enjoyed the people and the roles he was given (including helping illiterate soldiers write letters home, and acting as a kind of advocate at court martials for young men in trouble).
We saw it when he first started as Bishop of Kensington in 1981. Once he’d registered the phone number (BT asked him whether “The Bishop of Kensington” was a pub), he was off and away in his patch that spread from central London out west to beyond Heathrow. I was 11, and my sisters were in their early teens, and we went to every kind of C of E parish that ever existed - Anglo Catholic smells & bells in Chelsea where it felt closer to 1890 than 1980, vibrant Caribbean congregations in North Kensington, the happy and the extremely clappy further west, and plenty of liberal Anglicans in between. My sisters and I found it intolerable. He might have become a self-confessed expert in sausage rolls, but we soon found a local church to stick with on a Sunday morning while he delighted in the diversity, the range, the colour, the glorious broad church.
He loved a do - a family do, a work do, a room to work, a speech to give, and many of us share the memory of his laughter and delight at an occasion, whether hosting at Westcott House, Camden Hill Square, Bishop’s Croft, or his home with Sabine in King’s Heath. He delighted in people.
This delight in people manifested as pride. All of his children and step-children and grandchildren, and many of his friends and students and colleagues, enjoyed his enthusiasm and pride. Whether it was an interesting job, a piece of school work, a surprising experience.. he wanted to understand it, celebrate it, and tell other people about it.
His brother Paul, Mark’s Birthday Brother, born 14 years to the day after he was born, shared with us a postcard, kept for 65 years. Dated 14th July 1959 - Mark was 22 and Paul was 8 - Dad writes to his little brother congratulating him on winning a place in the choir at King’s College Cambridge. It was a huge achievement by the young Paul (it still is, Uncle Paul!), and an admission into Mark’s own Cambridge world. “Dear Paul, I really am pleased that you have got into King’s choir. They’ll work you hard, you know. Well done. Love Mark.”
This is classic Dad, I think. A warm congratulation closely linked to some warning or advice. Many of us that have felt that over the years - well done, but don’t get comfortable!
We were proud of our Dad throughout his life - taking on difficult challenges in Kensington and Birmingham, speaking truth to power when it mattered, working hard to support his clergy and diocese, coping with the loss of our mother when he was only 57, then building a new life with Sabine. His late brother John, the horse racing journalist, was very proud of him too, creating a minor tabloid sensation when it emerged he’d placed a £10 bet on his brother becoming the next Archbishop of Canterbury. That was a tenner Uncle John never saw again, I’m relieved to say. But perhaps we were most proud when, at 85, he moved to a new town, and made a whole new set of friends, both in the community at Horizons, where he lived, but also here at St Aldhelm’s. He was delighted to find Father Pip, Mother Robyn, the congregation here, and a new spiritual home. Once again, finding delight in people; curious, enthusiastic and kind.
Our dad’s thirst for knowledge began at school - those A levels in Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek, and despite his lack of coordination, a determination to master the organ. It was a thirst for travel too. Right through his retirement he and Sabine, with her brother Steffen and wife Susanne, made a handsome foursome, travelling Europe, hunting out new culture and new experiences, making fresh connections. It was clear to all of us, his children and stepchildren, how much fun they had - gales of laughter in cafes in beautiful European cities (leading to choking on occasion, I am told).
Dad’s enthusiasm for knowledge, and his desire to share it, is I think a common memory. So many of us had that conversation which would suddenly compel him to dash into another room, to come back a second later with a book, a quote, a translation, or a photo to share.
He learnt languages quickly - he mastered Dutch even before he started his few months as a student in Utrecht. Perhaps this was another quality which enamoured him to our mother. It certainly stood him in good stead with his parents and sisters-in-law, and even this year you could hear him chatting in Dutch on the phone with Rita and Ans in Holland.
When his grandson Dan was studying history, and started asking questions about American politics, he was stunned to learn that his grandfather had met Bill Clinton. And the Queen (several times; “you again?” she said the last time she saw him), plus numerous popes, politicians, presidents, princes and PMs. We all remember the time Archbishop Desmond Tutu came to stay at Bishop’s Croft!
Mark’s sister Clare said to me that she thought he was in some ways ahead of his time. He certainly embraced tech - he was the most avid computer and iPhone user, and seemed unbothered by ordering things online or via an app.
In the 80s, when the church - and certainly the government and the press - were struggling to embrace people who demonstrated any kind of difference, he spent much time at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and at London Lighthouse, two institutions on his patch caring for people with HIV and AIDS. He seemed utterly unbothered about what we used to call “openly gay” priests in his diocese.
He recognised, in both of his bishop roles, the importance of relations with other faiths. Not just through his work with Arcic, and his great friendship with Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, but with other non-Christian faiths. He recognised that there was a third space between the traditionally sacred and the secular, and it existed in those other faiths in Birmingham and elsewhere.
Dad’s last few years were a challenge for him. The accident he had in early 2021, the loss of Sabine just a couple of months later, the slow recovery from the accident and that bereavement, and the realisation that staying in his beautiful house in Kings Heath, among all his wonderful friends, would be impossible, all made for a very tough period.
But once he and Hendrika had packed up his house, he embraced his new life in Poole, and made new friends at his gorgeous new flat at Horizons with its incredible view and kind staff. The medical conditions may have piled on, but his mind remained as sharp as ever. He stayed active with his friends old and new, his children and his grandchildren - Miriam was out and about with him pretty much every Saturday - and he worked hard to keep as much mobility as he could. He actually sort of liked the medical appointments - a chance to meet new people and ask them questions! And one of us would nearly always accompany him, which he liked too. With assistance of lifts from John and others, he became a part of the community here, even covering the odd service, and delivering his last sermon on this spot this Easter Sunday.
Being so mentally switched on and being so aware of his own physical decline could not have been easy. Although he strived for quality of life, he became increasingly aware that he did not have long. He faced the discomfort, the hospital admissions, and the loss of autonomy with stoic good humour and a lack of fear. He had no fear because he was ready. He was ready because he had faith. Even on his last morning, as his breathing became laboured, and Father Pip delivered a final communion, he was calm, faithful and ready. Pretty much his last words were the ‘amens’ at the end of each prayer, and one of his last actions was to cross himself at the blessing.
We will all miss him so much - but what a life and what a dad! What love, what faith, what joy.
Diederick
5th September 2024
