‘Bishop of St Pancras’ Funeral Service.

Archbishop Anthony Earl-Williams

A COLOURFUL character of the Camden Conservative group who served the party for more than 50 years and devoted his life to the old Roman Catholic church has died aged 74.

Anthony Earl-Williams told the New Journal earlier this year how he held Sunday Latin masses for his neighbours as the “Bishop of St Pancras” in a chapel set up in the front room of his home in Dunboyne Road Estate, Gospel Oak.

He twice stood for election to Camden Council and, while there had been disagreements with some of the party’s organisers over the years, he proudly acted as chairman of Gospel Oak Conservatives right up until his death.

His religious rank also was a source of fascination, which he tried to explain in his last interview in March.

“I am actually a Roman Catholic Bishop, the Bishop of St Pancras, believe it or not,” Mr Earl-Williams said.

“It is all to do with the route that traditional Catholics took when the mass became said in the vernacular, in other words in the normal language: English, Welsh, Italian, Spanish, whatever. But because a lot of traditional Catholics were brought up with the old Latin mass, we weren’t preprepared to let it go.”

He added: “People do come here to mass on Sundays. They tend to be elderly Irish ladies who want the old Latin. They also come here because I give them a nice lunch.”

A death notice posted by the Old Catholic Church in Swindon said that Mr Earl-Williams’ “grace is well recognised within the Old Catholic movement” and said he had been “leading the Old Catholic Church”.

Bernadette Starkey, a Conservative member and friend of Mr Earl-Williams from Gospel Oak, described him as “flamboyant” and “passionate about politics” and “always there for people especially newcomers to the Conservative Party”.

She added: “Many years ago he took over the committee for Gospel Oak ward and ever since I have always helped with leafleting and local elections.

“Anthony had a marvellous memory, often talking of events dating back to Geoffrey Finsberg [the Hampstead MP 1970-1992] as though it was yesterday. He will be sadly missed, especially as a link to an important past era.”

Born in Wales, Mr Earl-Williams worked for most of his life as a modern languages teacher, and became the chairman of the Young Conservatives in the Labour stronghold of Ebbw Vale.

His mother was an English woman who had been living in Bohemia, Czechoslov­akia, but returned ahead of the Nazi invasion.

She met his father, Harold James-Williams, at Salisbury railway station.

Mr Earl-Williams had shown us an ornate clock given to his grandparents by the Welsh miners of Abertillery as a wedding gift in 1902, describing his grandfather as “not a miner, but a minor coal owner”.

Looking around his home, he had said: “I’ve got so much stuff, I just don’t know what is going to happen. When I go, I am having a high mass in Latin at St Silas. The church is going to get everything, and my friend Philip Seeley. By God, they will have a terrible time clearing this out as I have plenty of stuff. I am worth more dead than alive.”

Mr Seeley said he was due to give the eulogy at his friend’s funeral at Silas Church in Kentish Town at 10am this morning (Thursday).

Mr Seeley said: “Anthony’s own understanding of human nature, and awareness of himself, added intensity to his spiritual calling: hugely aware of the need for constant forgiveness, constant redemption and constant renewal in spirit.”

Mr Earl-Williams said he had lived with an old German countess in Kensington after coming to London from Wales to attend a Catholic school in Holland Park that he was almost thrown out of “for being gay”.

He told the New Journal this year how he inherited some of her money after her death and was able to buy a flat in Parliament Hill, Hampstead.

He recalled the “best days of his life” in and around Hampstead Heath, meeting men of a similar persuasion at a time when they were not so free to do so.

In 1978, he stood in the Camden council election as the Conservative candidate for Gospel Oak, coming fourth with 523 votes – Labour’s Tessa Jowell was elected along with Ron Heffernan.

He wrote a book, The Pendragon Legacy, “about prostitution, Anglo-Catholicism and the Conservative Party” in Hampstead and had spent the final years of his life reading and writing poetry, and brushing up on his Welsh.