My father, who died earlier this year at the ripe old age of 90, had a life that was as varied as it was long.
He served in the Italian campaign in the Second World War, then became an Anglican clergyman, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and subsequently dean of St John’s Cathedral, Hong Kong. For 21 years he was principal of Morley College, an institute of adult education, in London, and finally director of a large charitable foundation. In his retirement he returned to his first love, church history, completing a project on Restoration church courts that he had put aside 30 years previously and ending his career with seven entries on Restoration Anglican divines for the Dictionary of National Biography, which was published in his 81st year. (“Not my period” he would always declare stoutly when asked a question about a historical event that fell outside the late 17th century, although in fact he wrote what is still a standard history of the movement for Christian unity.)
At the age of 85 he was awarded the rare degree of doctor of divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a ceremony at Lambeth Palace at which Rowan Williams preached a fire-breathing sermon on the threat of secularism, little knowing that my father had long ceased to be a believer.
Notice that English colloquialism, ‘more [college] fellows than you can shake a stick at‘. I was born in the UK but grew up abroad and when I first heard the phrase in my 20s I was astonished. I now find that I use it myself. Alas that Dr Till lost his faith, but Cambridge in the 1950s was (a) the haunt of Communist spies who had not been outed; and (b) its theology was driven largely by a very liberal school of thought, influenced, I think, by Tillich a great deal in seeking correlation between doctrine and secular concepts. When Penguin published Objections to Christian Belief (1963) it was written and edited entirely by Cambridge dons.
Terry Tee, I grew up in Texas and live in South Carolina and I have used that phrase all my life. Maybe it came from England originally, but it is very common in the South.