Mervyn Stockwood

In 1959, at the suggestion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, appointed Stockwood to the Diocese of Southwark.[4] Under him, Southwark became one of the best known dioceses in the Church of England. Stockwood encouraged both the radical and conservative wings of the church. On the one hand he encouraged priests wearing jeans in public, marches against racism and the training of worker priests in the Southwark Ordination Course, yet he was also the first Church of England diocesan bishop to preach at the National Pilgrimage to the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, of which he later became an honorary guardian. Stockwood however did not hesitate to send the police to close an Anglo-Catholic church in Carshalton.[5] Under his diocesan chancellor, Garth Moore, a number of trials of clergy followed, usually followed by a service of deposition from their holy orders in the cathedral.

During the 1960s the term "South Bank religion" was connected with Stockwood's diocese and those in his circle espousing a more liberal theology.[6] He was liberal in his view of the morality of homosexual relationships, favoured homosexual law reform and included homosexual couples among the guests at his dinner parties. On at least one occasion he blessed a homosexual relationship, but Stockwood himself said he was celibate.[6] He somewhat incongruously, however, in his Sermons from Great St. Mary's,[7] preached in Cambridge, did not hesitate to cast a slur on the characters of kings James I and Richard II whom he associated with this tendency.

Stockwood was adept at making unusual and radical, but usually highly successful, appointments. John Robinson was appointed as his suffragan at Woolwich in 1959.[4] Later Stockwood chose David Sheppard as Bishop of Woolwich in 1969 (after John Robinson's return to Cambridge), Hugh Montefiore as Bishop of Kingston in 1970, Michael Marshall to Woolwich in 1975 and Keith Sutton to Kingston in 1978.

Stockwood appeared on the BBC chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning on 9 November 1979, with Christian broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, arguing that the film Monty Python's Life of Brian was blasphemous. He told John Cleese and Michael Palin at the end of the discussion that they would "get [their] thirty pieces of silver".[8]