Randall Davidson(1848–1930)

Randall Thomas Davidson was born in Edinburgh on 7 April 1848, eldest of seven children of a Leith timber merchant, raised in the Scottish-Episcopalian world of Edinburgh. He was schooled at Harrow and went up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1867 to read classics, taking his degree in 1871.

He was ordained deacon by Archibald Campbell Tait, then Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1874, and priest in 1875. After a curacy at Dartford he was appointed Tait's resident chaplain at Lambeth Palace in 1877. The next twenty-six years, through three successive Archbishops of Canterbury, were a continuous administrative-and-political apprenticeship at the political centre of the Church of England. He married Tait's daughter Edith in 1878, a marriage of fifty-two years.

He was appointed Dean of Windsor in 1883, Bishop of Rochester in 1891, and translated to Winchester in 1895, the English bishopric below Canterbury, which brought him into the inner circle of the Edwardian episcopal establishment.

He took the see of Canterbury in 1903 and held it for twenty-five years, to 1928, the longest single Archbishopric of Canterbury since the Reformation. He served across the reigns of Edward VII and George V, the First World War and the Irish independence settlement. He wrote the prayers for the coronations of Edward VII (1902) and George V (1911), took a moderate ecumenical line through the Irish settlement of 1919 to 1923, and did the senior pastoral work of the First World War: he visited the Western Front in 1916, conducted communion at the advanced-aid stations of the Somme, and wrote the Lambeth-Palace pastoral letters that ran across the whole Anglican communion through the war.

He retired in 1928 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Davidson of Lambeth, the first Archbishop of Canterbury to take a peerage on retirement. He died at Chiswick on 25 May 1930, eighty-two years old, and is buried in the cloister garth at Canterbury Cathedral. The Davidson name, the patronymic of David and one of the foundational Scottish-Borders surnames, he carried from a Leith timber-merchant household into the longest single Archbishopric of Canterbury since the Reformation.