Susan Dowell [Ben Dowell]

IT was a delight to catch up with Susan Dowell this week.

Many will remember her as the wife of Graham, the vicar of Hampstead Parish Church from 1974 to 1987, when they both lived in Church Row.

She campaigned for the ordination of women, protested in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1980 and wrote books on faith and feminism.

The couple were arrested during protests against the arms trade outside the Ministry of Defence on Ash Wednesday in 1987 and 1988. The church played host to meetings of the World Disarmament Movement.

Now 80, Ms Dowell told me: “Some people in the church didn’t like it and us using the church rooms. It wasn’t CND, it was about the arms trade and that had fuelled all kinds of wars… we were keeping a war going because it was making us rich.

“But then there was the impact of feminism on all of this. And so there was this question of whether women would be ordained or whether the Church of England lag behind as always.”

She co-authored a book – The Dispossessed Daughters of Eve: Faith and Feminism – and said she had felt perplexed about feminist literature that “was quite clear that religion was women’s enemy”, adding: “If you want to be a free woman you get out of patriarchal religion, which gave a problem to women like me who were part of the church.”

It was a divisive issue at the time.

She recalls some who were happy for it to be a tool of oppression. “It was misused by men who wanted to keep women in order. Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, was for nuclear weapons and against the advancement of women, so he was not a laugh a minute.”

Ms Dowell was part of a group who took banners hidden under cloaks to St Paul’s Cathedral to disrupt an ordination service.

“We unfurled these banners saying ‘ordain women now’, and we were quickly hustled out by vergers,” she said.

“We flung the banner over the statue of Queen Anne and then we stood in a line. We had all these nice people, like bishops, coming and talking to us and we’d say ‘don’t just stand there talking to us, stand alongside us or bog off.’ Some did, some said how disgusting we were.”

Later on a tour to talk about her book, she found some remembered the protests with differing levels of affection.

“Some people would say ‘Well, we like you, but not those awful women who were at St Paul’s.’ And we would have to say ‘Look, there is something you should maybe know…” she explains

More protests followed, including at Southwark Cathedral and, eventually by 1992, the campaign had proved a success.

And I’m happy to report that Ms Dowell has a woman vicar at her church in Shropshire.