The Revd Basil C. Daniell: Vicar of Fareham Through the Second World War

The Revd Basil C. Daniell served as Vicar of Fareham from 1938 to 1952, leading St Peter & St Paul through the Second World War and the difficult years that followed. The parish’s own historical list of vicars confirms his fourteen-year incumbency.

Daniell had already spent many years in ministry around Portsmouth before coming to Fareham. He was educated at Hertford College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1917 and MA in 1919. He was ordained deacon in 1918 and priest in 1919. Much of his early ministry was spent at St Peter’s, Southsea, where he served from 1918 until 1934. He then became Rector of Farlington before moving to Fareham in June 1938.

That timing meant he arrived only a little over a year before Britain entered the Second World War.

For Fareham, war was especially immediate. Portsmouth was one of the Royal Navy’s principal bases, and the whole area around Portsmouth Harbour was strategically important. Naval establishments, dockyards, military sites and nearby airfields made south Hampshire a major target for enemy bombing. Families in Fareham lived with air-raid warnings, blackouts, rationing, the movement of servicemen and the constant possibility of bad news from overseas.

Parish ministry in those years would have involved far more than ordinary Sunday worship. Clergy were dealing with bereavement, separation, fear, evacuees, servicemen passing through the area and families trying to maintain normal life under wartime conditions.

Daniell also belonged to the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, an Anglican religious community for priests and laymen committed to disciplined prayer, fellowship and pastoral ministry. He entered probation with the Oratory in 1945 and later made his profession. An account of the Oratory remembers him as a wise and compassionate priest, deeply devoted to his people and uninterested in personal advancement.

That gives an unusually personal glimpse of the man behind the parish records.

Church life continued through the war and afterwards. In 1947, for example, Daniell conducted a service for a Portsmouth District meeting of the Winchester and Portsmouth Diocesan Guild of Church Bell Ringers at Fareham, showing the continuing importance of the church as a gathering place for the wider Anglican community.

The years after 1945 brought another kind of challenge. Britain was exhausted by war. Rationing continued, housing shortages were severe, families were rebuilding their lives, and society was changing rapidly. The welfare state was being created, new housing developments were expanding towns such as Fareham, and the social position of the Church of England was beginning to shift.

Daniell remained Vicar of Fareham until 1952. He then became sub-warden to the Community of St John Baptist at Clewer, later serving in the Slough area before retiring. He died in January 1971.

His fourteen years at St Peter & St Paul covered one of the most demanding periods in the parish’s modern history. Basil Daniell arrived as Europe moved towards war and left as Britain was beginning to build a very different post-war society.

The surviving description of him as a quiet, compassionate priest devoted to his people seems particularly fitting for a ministry carried out through years when Fareham needed precisely that kind of steady pastoral presence.