Dick Sheppard (priest)
Dean of Canterbury; British Anglican pacifist priest (1880–1937)
Hugh Richard Lawrie Sheppard (2 September 1880 – 31 October 1937) was an English Anglican priest, Dean of Canterbury and Christian pacifist.
Early life and education
Sheppard was the younger son of Edgar Sheppard, a minor canon at the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor, and Mary White. Born at the Cloisters in Windsor, he was educated at Marlborough College and then (1901–1904) Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He worked with the poor from the Anglo-Catholic Oxford House, Bethnal Green and then for a year as secretary to Cosmo Lang, then Bishop of Stepney.
He volunteered to serve in the Second Boer War: however, an injury sustained while en route to the railway station rendered him permanently disabled and unable to serve.
Career
He studied for the ministry at Cuddesdon College and was ordained priest in 1908. Returning to work with the poor at Oxford House, in 1910 he suffered the first of what would prove to be recurrent breakdowns due to overwork.
With the onset of war, Sheppard spent some months as chaplain to a military hospital in France, before being sent home with exhaustion. He had joined the chaplaincy soon after war was declared. Bishop Gwynne, who became deputy chaplain-general on the Western Front, wrote of Sheppard, 'He is a man of real magnetic power and has left his living of St Martin's-in-the-Fields to come out with the Australian hospital'.
The public source identifies “Dick Sheppard (priest)” as dean of Canterbury; British Anglican pacifist priest (1880–1937). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dick, Sheppard and priest.
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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 Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5273364. VIAF identifies the subject as 10688832. The Library of Congress control number is no97003505. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1880, 1937, 1901 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dick Sheppard (priest)” 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.