Tubby Clayton

A former Director of TOC H, Ken Prideaux-Brune, wrote a personal memoir of Tubby Clayton in 1983. It is entitled 'A Living Witness'. The extract below is from the introduction to that book, and gives a factual outline of Tubby's life and work. We are grateful to him for his kind permission to reproduce it here.

Philip Thomas Byard Clayton, known universally, and for obvious reasons, as Tubby, was born in Queensland on 12 December 1885 . Two years later his parents returned to England and, as Tubby used to relate, ‘I decided to accompany them'. He was educated at St Paul 's School in London and at Exeter College , Oxford , where he took a First Class Degree in Theology. In 1910 he went as a curate to St Mary's Portsea, where he remained until, early in 1915, he went to France as an Army Chaplain. It was during the War that his real life's work began. In December 1915 he opened Talbot House in Poperinge, the club just behind the lines in Flanders which became known to thousands of soldiers, who found there a touch of home and a brief respite from the horrors of war, by the nickname of TOC H (TH in the army signallers' code of those days).

During the War, some hundreds of men committed themselves, should they survive, to ordination and Tubby's first task after the War was at the Ordination Test School , established in a disused gaol at Knutsford, Cheshire , where these men were prepared for Theological College . He was the main inspiration behind this venture and was, for a short time, a member of the teaching staff. Already, however, he was planning for the rebirth of TOC H. This was not to be an ex-service organisation but an attempt to preserve and to hand on to succeeding generations the special atmosphere which had characterised Talbot House in Poperinge, an atmosphere of deep, but light hearted fellowship, of friendships which made all the barriers that normally keep people apart seem totally irrelevant.

In 1922, with the new Movement still in its infancy, he was asked by Archbishop Davidson to become the Vicar of All Hallows by the Tower and to bring new life to this ancient and then somewhat moribund church. At first this looked like a distraction from his real work but in fact All Hallows gave him a base, enabled him to distance himself from the day to day administration of TOC H and gave him the freedom to act as a roving ambassador for the Movement. He was the Vicar of All Hallows for the next 40 years and Tower Hill was his home for the rest of his life. During the '20s he travelled the world, renewing wartime friendships and launching TOC H throughout what was then the Empire. But Tower Hill was not neglected. Quite early in his time there he began formulating and discussing plans to beautify the area and to create open space. These bore fruit in the formal establishment in 1932, of the Tower Hill Improvement Trust.
Towards the end of 1932 he sailed for West Africa where he had his first contact with leper colonies. He was deeply moved by this experience. Within six months he had inspired 50 people to volunteer for five years' unpaid work with lepers and had raised £25,000 for the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association (later to become the large and successful charity known as LEPRA ).

At the start of the Second World War, he established a TOC H Club at the naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Then in 1941 he was appointed Chaplain to the Anglo-Iranian Line and he spent much of the rest of the war at sea with the tanker fleet.

In 1940 All Hallows Church was bombed and his first priority after the war was its rebuilding, a task which required all his energy and powers of persuasion. This involved further travel to obtain gifts of materials at a time when none were available in Britain . While in America in 1947 he also launched, almost, one suspects, by accident, the Winant Volunteers scheme, named for his friend John Gilbert Winant, America 's wartime ambassador to Britain . This has brought groups of American students to Britain each summer since, for work in youth clubs and on summer camps and playschemes. In 1959 this became an exchange programme, the British groups being named Clayton Volunteers in honour of Tubby. For more details visit www.wcva.dircon.co.uk

In 1962 Tubby resigned as Vicar of the newly rebuilt All Hallows but remained on Tower Hill, active in both TOC H and the Winant and Clayton Volunteers, until his death, just after his 87th birthday, in December 1972