I was born in 1986, one year before my grandad left Charlotte Chapel. So my experience of him being the pastor of a local church is sleeping through most of his sermons during my first year of life (something I later learned that not many other people did during his preaching!).
My earliest memories are predominantly of my Granny. In their flat in Spottiswoode Street me and the rest of the cousins would swarm around her for Winnie the Pooh stories, the greatest Yorkshire puddings in the world, Vienetta ice-cream, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Annie, and Pinocchio on VHS tapes recorded from the telly. She gave the greatest hugs, the sloppiest kisses, and was painstakingly thorough at drying in between your toes and in your ears after a bath.
Grandad, or ‘Mr Prime’ as everyone else seemed to call him, was often away, or grafting in his study at the end of the corridor. He’d ‘retired’ as pastor of a local church, but was still dogged as a pastor-teacher to folk across the globe. In those early days I remember the way Granny called for him with a ‘Cooey!’ when we came back into the flat. When he emerged he was always wearing a shirt and tie and had smart shoes on. And I vividly remember sneaking into his study when he was out, obliterating his pencils with his big rotating pencil sharpener bolted to the massive bookcase, and finding all the best hiding places underneath his huge desks (Auntie Cilla showed all of the grandkids the best places to hide!).
What we were subconsciously observing as grandchildren in those years was the absolute centrality of the gospel in their home, the consequent single-minded passion of our grandad for Christ’s flock and for lost sheep, and the behind-the-scenes joyful help and sacrifices of our granny for that ministry. To us Granny was ‘Granny’. But in many ways Grandad, even to us, was still ‘Mr Prime’. He pastored us, as his family, faithfully. But faithfulness to his calling also included a much bigger sheep-pen, and a much more scattered flock.
Though, as we grew up, all the grandchildren gradually but unanimously came to realise and appreciate the privilege of having ‘Mr Prime’, as he was to everyone else, as ‘Grandad’ to us. And I would say that as, in the Lord’s grace, all eight of us grandchildren professed faith in Christ, and particularly since Granny went to be with Christ, the inimitable ‘Mr Prime’ increasingly became the intimate ‘Grandad’. I’m not saying the transformation was as dramatic as his namesake Optimus Prime (he wouldn’t know who that was!). He still wore a shirt and tie, and I never plucked up the courage to call him ‘wee-Deek’ to his face. But I think what we became more conscious of, as grown-up grandkids, was our own personal experience of what many others had experienced: what it was like to be cared for, taught by and prayed for by this under-shepherd of the Great Shepherd.
He’d write to us, phone us, email us, video-call us, take us out for breakfast, have us round to his flat, and without fail, every single time, fix our gaze on Jesus, and speak of the sweetness of His name. He was like a sponge that had absorbed the entirety of the Scriptures, and it just poured out of him wherever he moved. And, without exception, every visit or conversation would end with the words: ‘Just a sentence prayer’. And then he’d approach the throne of grace.
In him we saw someone infinitely thankful for God’s grace in the Lord Jesus. And from that good news, and through his union with Christ by faith, we witnessed first-hand the imitation of Jesus in his character, a model of integrity in his home, and an incessant passion to make Jesus known to those who did not yet know Him. He has been to us a fount of godly, practical counsel that has no doubt steered all of our paths in ways that we are conscious of, as much as his prayers have kept us in ways that we are unconscious of.
And so from ‘Mr Prime’ came ‘Grandad,’ full of faith and full of fun. Who would always say when you answered the phone to him (long before video-calls!), ‘Oh, I very much like that top you’re wearing!’ And who convinced us he had a mischievous twin brother who was always to blame for any of Grandad’s own mischievousness. And who always expressed light-hearted disappointment that none of us grandchildren followed in his footsteps to study at Cambridge.
There will be many across the globe, and many already in heaven, who considered him to be a spiritual father in the faith, and deeply mourned his passing on the 28th of March. And they can have him as ‘Mr Prime’. But as his grandkids, we’re claiming special rights on him as ‘our Grandad’. And we’re praying on for his great-grandchildren, who all loved him like mad, that they would share his sweet Saviour and his sincere faith.
