William Macquarie COWPER

COWPER, WILLIAM MACQUARIE (b. Sydney, NSW, 3 July 1810; d. Sydney, NSW, 14 June 1902). First Anglican dean of Sydney.

Macquarie Cowper was the son of Chaplain William Cowper (q.v.), and his second wife Ann (née Barrell). He was known as 'Macquarie' as a young man at the instance of his godmother, wife of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and later as 'William', following the death of his mother, who had preferred that name. Cowper was brought up within the evangelical tradition that had marked the chaplaincy to NSW since 1788 and remained faithful to it throughout a very long life and a ministry that lasted for almost seventy years. He lived to see evangelical churchmanship firmly established within the diocese of Sydney by the end of the nineteenth century, despite its decline elsewhere.

Cowper was educated by his father, whose evangelical faith he shared with filial piety. Aged sixteen, he then studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, returning to Australia following graduation, ordination and marriage (to Margaret Burroughs), all in 1835. His evangelical commitment was strengthened by a two-year curacy at Dartmouth, and remained steadfast in a twenty year term as chaplain to the Australian Agricultural Company at Stroud NSW. He gave loyal support to William Tyrrell, who arrived as bp of Newcastle in 1848, though he did not share the latter's high churchmanship. Following his first wife's death in 1854 (he remarried in 1868), Cowper returned to Sydney, where W G Broughton, a High Churchman, had been succeeded as bishop by the evangelical, Frederic Barker (q.v.). He brought with him three students who had been studying with him at Stroud. These now formed the nucleus of Barker's new Moore Theological College, of which Cowper served for a few months as acting principal in 1856 before establishing the congregation of St John's Bishopthorpe in the Glebe.

On his father's death in 1858, W M Cowper was appointed not only archdeacon, but dean of Sydney as well, despite his brief experience in an urban ministry. It was a plain mark of the confidence Barker had in his capacity, his loyalty and the evangelical churchmanship that he shared with his father, whom Barker had regarded as 'a choice spirit and a faithful ally' (Diary of Jane Barker, 30 May 1855).

Cowper's position as dean remained nominal for a decade until the completion of St Andrew's Cathedral in 1868, although it took some time to work out relationships between the new dean and the incumbent of the wooden temporary cathedral, who resented the newcomer. As sole archdeacon until 1882, he was the bishop's chief lieutenant in the long period of church development until Barker's death in 1882, during which the number of clergy and church buildings doubled. He and Barker shared similar views on the principal issues of the day: the establishment of synodical government, the establishment of new dioceses, the recruitment of clergy, the work of the Church Society (later the Home Mission Society), the importance of church schools, the extension of the Sunday school movement. In the four decades following his appointment, he administered the diocese for a total of eleven years during two vacancies of the see and several prolonged absences of the diocesan. He administered the affairs of a rapidly growing diocese capably, and was also able to deal effectively with state authorities in civic issues.

Following Barker's death, he wrote the official biography, Episcopate of the Right Reverend Frederic Barker, D.D., Bishop of Sydney and Metropolitan of Australia, an affectionate yet judicious tribute that also reveals much of Cowper's own thinking. Apart from this and his autobiography, written as a nonagenarian, he published little other than the occasional sermon. Cowper's preaching reflected his long background in a rural chaplaincy; he was more at home preaching to a regular congregation than to visitors who attended the many special services of a cathedral. However, he shared his father's love of church music, and enjoyed establishing the cathedral style of liturgy in St Andrew's. He supported Bp Barry's initiative in 1885 to establish a choir school to strengthen the cathedral's choral tradition. The tension between dean and bishop, so often the case in Anglican affairs, was not present in Cowper's relationships.

As dean, he was ordinary of the cathedral parish, which contained some of Sydney's worst slums. Cowper interested himself in the lot of the slum dwellers as well as the proper conduct of the cathedral services. His social concern arose not from contact with Christian Socialism, then gaining ground in Australia as in Britain, but rather from the same evangelical conscience that had made his father a significant figure in the development of philanthropy in NSW in the first half of the century.

For more than forty years Cowper made a significant contribution to the evangelical tradition in the diocese of Sydney. He was an able administrator a diligent pastor a man of genuine spirituality a loyal second in command. His steadfastness in service to five diocesans (Broughton, Tyrrell, Barker, Barry and Saumarez Smith) earned him respect throughout the Anglican church. In his closing years Cowper the first Australian born clergyman was the Church's unquestioned patriarch.

ADB 3; M L Loane, Hewn from the Rock (Sydney, 1976)

STUART BRAGA