#15511, Walter Ruthven PYM

Walter was the son of Alexander (Gentleman and JP) and Eliza Elizabeth Pym.  He was a brother to Margaret Lucy Packe; Elizabeth Matilda Pym; Mary Pym; Alexander Pym; Francis St John Pym and 5 others

The Right Rev. Walter Ruthven Pym, DD was the third and eldest surviving son of Mrs Alexander Pym JP of Brickhill House, Beds and grandson of Mrs Francis Pym of Hasell Hall, Beds who married a daughter of the seventh Lord Leven and Melville.  His mother was a daughter of Sir Albert Pell and granddaughter of the twelfth Lord St. John.

He was ordained deacon in 1880 and priest in 1881 by Dr Fraser, Bishop of Manchester, and was  licensed to Lytham.  In 1882 the Bishop placed him in charge of St. John, Miles Platting and in 1883 Mr Pym was appointed to the vicarage of Wentworth and to the private chaplaincy of Lord Fitzwilliam.  After being for some years vicar of St Andrew, Sharrow, where he was a member of the Sheffield School Board, re was nominated in 1893 by the Archbishop of York to the important incumbency of Rotherham, where he was rural dean, being also elected by the clergy in 1895 as proctor in Convocation for the archdeaconry of Sheffield.

He left England in 1898 after his consecration in Westminster Abbey as Bishop of Mauritius in succession to Dr Walsh who had become assistant bishop and subsequently suffragan in the diocese of Canterbury.  The climate, the circumstances, and the scattered conditions of the diocese of Mauritius make the bishopric one of considerable difficulty and in 1903, after the retirement through continued ill-health, of Bishop Macarthur, Dr Pym accepted from the Secretary of State for India the offer of translation to the See of Bombay.

Ecclesiastically he had been known as a moderate and vigorous Evangelical, but few were prepared for the strong attitude he was to take up as against some extreme practices prevalent in the Bombay diocese, where much of the most vigorous educational and missionary work is carried on by the Society of St John the Evangelist and the Wantage Sisterhood.  Rather more than 12 months ago he gave his primary charge to the diocese, in which he emphatically condemned a number of practices in vogue, the point on which he chiefly insisted being "children's Eucharists" and celebrations without the requisite number of communicants.

The matter which, perhaps, caused most comment was the emphasis laid by the Bishop on the report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Disorders, which, whatever it may lead to in the way of legislation or canonical enactment, was still merely a report and applied to the Provinces of Canterbury and York.  Many of his clergy protested against this charge; and, though for a time there was hope of a settlement, High Churchmen in England intervened in support of those who were thus attacked by the Bishop, and in the end he formally inhibited two, of whom one was the respacted heas of the Cowley Fathers' Mission in the diocese.

The Bishop then paid a visit to England, and the two clergy appealed to the Court of the Metropolitan, who first withdrew the inhibitions ad interim, and afterwards settled the matter by a "compromise" of which the deatails are not yet fully known, but which seem to hav reversed the action of the Bishop as far as "children's Eucharists" are concerned.

He leaves a family of six sons and two daughters.

Extracted from The Times of 3rd March 1908.