John Bickersteth
Bishop of Bath and Wells; Bishop of Warrington (1921-2018)
John Monier Bickersteth (6 September 1921 – 29 January 2018) was an English Anglican clergyman who served as the Bishop of Bath and Wells from 1975 to 1986, and Clerk of the Closet from 1979 to 1989.
Bickersteth descended from a clerical family over several generations; in total six family members have been Church of England Bishops. His father was the Rev. Canon Edward Monier Bickersteth , and his mother, Inez Katharine Jelf Bickersteth, was a friend of the actress Sybil Thorndike. His uncle was Julian Bickersteth and his great-great-grandfather was Charles James Blomfield.
Educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, he trained for ordination at Wells Theological College and was ordained deacon in 1950 and priest in 1951. He began his career with a curacy at St Matthew Moorfields Bristol (1950–54). He was then Incumbent of St John the Evangelist, Hurst Green, Oxted (1954–62). After a spell as Vicar of St Stephen's Church, Chatham he ascended to the Episcopate in 1970 as Suffragan Bishop of Warrington, and after five years was further promoted to Bath. From 1979 he was Clerk of the Closet for a decade.
“John Bickersteth” enters the record as bishop of Bath and Wells; Bishop of Warrington (1921-2018). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Bickersteth and Bishop can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6221832. VIAF identifies the subject as 247184649. The Library of Congress control number is nr91034060. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 2018, 1975 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Bickersteth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.