The new Archbishop.

Habemus Manning, but which Manning

I noticed that , within minutes of Sarah Mullally being designated the next Archbishop of Canterbury, someone removed a telling sentence from her Wikipedia entry.

Until this morning (3rd October 2025), the entry told us, “Born Sarah Elisabeth Bowser on 26 March 1962, the younger of two daughters, she was educated at Winston Churchill Comprehensive School, Woking, Surrey, then at Woking Sixth Form College. Through her mother’s family, the Manning family, she is related to Cardinal Manning. Her maternal uncle was the comic, Bernard Manning.”

These words have now been removed. A pity. Relationships and kinships are often eloquent. Someone in the press office at Church House was old enough to remember Bernard Manning’s mother-in-law jokes, with which, one hopes, he kept Christmas dinners with the infant Sarah in a roar.

When I was younger, and even sillier, than I am now, I wrote a weekly column in the Evening Standard, London’s daily newspaper. One of the running jokes was a pretence that I had found kinship between two famous people who were not (of course) in real life related at all.

One of the more satisfactory claims made in the column was that George Carey, the evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury - rather cruelly nicknamed Mr Blobby - was the brother of Professor John Carey, the waspish, brilliant, but atheistical Eng Lit Professor at Oxford.

This claim scored a bulls’ eye, since BOTH men evidently felt it was damaging to their “image” to have been (entirely falsely) linked . They both pompously wrote to the newspaper to explain that they were not brothers, in fact not of the same family at all.

Another joke - which seemed funny at the time - produced a fascinating footnote to history. A new English paperback version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf had just been published . The literary agents dealing with the publication were Curtis Brown. I “innocently” wondered