Joyce Bennett, who has died aged 92, was a revolutionary figure in church circles. By all accounts an unassuming and modest woman, she was nevertheless the first English woman to be ordained as a priest in the Anglican communion. Her ordination came in Hong Kong – where she was principal of St Catharine’s girls’ school– in December 1971, nearly a quarter of a century before the Church of England followed where she had led and allowed women to officiate. While the church has appointed its first female bishops only within the past few months, about a third of all its clergy are now women.
Bennett was born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, the daughter of Frank Bennett, a butcher, and his wife, Mary, and went to Burlington school, Westminster (now Burlington Danes academy, west London). Second world war evacuation took her to Milham Ford school, Oxford, where she was head girl. The city was also the wartime home of Westfield College, University of London, where she gained a history degree. In 1949 she was selected by the evangelical Church Mission Society to go to Hong Kong, where English was widely spoken, because she feared, mistakenly she would not be able to master Chinese.
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