William John George MANN

MANN, WILLIAM JOHN GEORGE (b. Hunter Valley, NSW, 2 Sept 1859; d. Sydney, NSW, 1949). Barrister.

William Mann's father came to Australia from Broad Hempson, Devonshire in 1834 to settle as a wheat farmer at Down Park. On leaving school William Mann entered a country solicitor's office at the age of 14. In 1876 he went to the University of Sydney (BA 1880, MA 1882). In the same year he was called to the Bar.

Man was elected in 1904 to the Anglican Synod of the Diocese of Sydney by the Standing Committee, rather than as a parish representative. He remained a member for 45 years and of its Standing Committee for 38 years, of Provincial Synod for 33 years and General Synod for 34 years. He soon became one of the most influential laymen in the diocese, indeed in the national church, in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a man without humour or colour: the Rev A J A Fraser remembers him as a man whose approach was 'not attractive, it was always aggresive (sic), and was not popular'. But Mann cared little for popularity, and Fraser concedes that Mann was 'nearly always on the winning side' in Synod. (A J A Fraser, I Remember, I Remember, Sydney 1977, 113)

Mann's legal career was not particularly notable and it was the Anglican church and its affairs which absorbed much of his time and attention. In the 1920s and the 1930s, together with Canon Langford Smith (q.v.), Mann led the opposition to the various draft constitutions for the Church of England in Australia which were placed before the dioceses by the General Synod in 1921, the Constitutional Convention in 1926 and the various amendments forwarded by the Continuation Committee of the 1932 Convention. He was uncompromising in his advocacy of the inherent dangers of the constitution and, whereas Langford Smith emphasised the doctrinal issues in dispute, Mann continually raised the bogey that the Sydney diocese risked the disenfranchisement of its property unless unanimity throughout Australia was reached. The arguments against the various drafts of the constitution which had a doctrinal basis, or involved issues of Anglican order and authority were powerfully presented by others, but the property issue was particularly comprehensible to the laymen of the Sydney synod and it was to them that Mann obviously appealed to protect the property rights of that evangelical diocese.

Mann was an executive member, vice president and chairman of committees of the Anglican Church League, the emerging church political party in Sydney, from as early as 1914. For most of the 1930s he was, in his own terms 'only a passenger' until he resigned on 21 July 1938. He thus saw the ACL grow to assume unrivalled dominance of the Anglican church in Sydney. What prompted him to stay on was undoubtedly the defection of Dean Talbot (q.v.) and Canon D J Davies (q.v.) and their establishment of the rival Anglican Fellowship. This was a time of uncertainty and crisis for his cherished party; by the time he departed in 1938 the ACL had regained its dominance. In the same year, Archbishop Mowll (q.v.) recognised Mann's service and achievements in appointing him as chancellor of the diocese, a position he held until his death in 1949.

Corish Papers, Moore College Library; Memorial Plaque in Chapter House, Sydney

STEPHEN JUDD