The Rt. Rev. Edward Hamilton West

Fifth Bishop of Florida

The Right Reverend Edward Hamilton West served the Diocese of Florida as its chaplain in charge of students work at the University of Florida from 1936 until 1941, as its bishop-coadjutor from 1948 until 1956 and as its diocesan from then until his retirement on December 31, 1974. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and educated at Birmingham-Southern College and Virginia Theological Seminary. After graduating from the seminary he became a deacon and then a priest in Idaho where one of his assignments was to be in charge of the student work at the state university. His bishop told bishop Juhan, the Bishop of Florida, that Mr. West was "the best qualified man for student work" he knew.

Bishop Juhan had been well impressed with Hamilton West when he was a college boy and had a leader in the Province of Sewanee's Young People's Division. Now the Bishop of Florida brought the young priest to Gainesville to take charge of the student work there. In the next five years Mr. West counseled students, encouraged some to seek Holy Orders, sent more out to nearby missions to learn to be lay readers and built the Chapel of the Incarnation just across from the university campus. His chaplaincy was one of the most successful ever at the University of Florida.

From Gainesville, the Reverend Mr. West went to Augusta in 1941 to be the rector of St. Paul's Church, but in April 1948, he was elected bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of Florida. He was consecrated on October 4 and served as coadjutor for the next eight years. Then, on February 1, 1956 when Bishop Juhan retired, the Right Reverend Hamilton West became the fifth Bishop of Florida.

Bishop West was the Diocese of Florida during troubled time. That had been true for other Bishops of Florida, too, but there were difference. Their difficulties for the most part had been caused by wars, depressions, a terrible epidemic, the Big Freeze and the Jacksonville fire. Those were matters that caused great trouble for the diocese, but trouble the diocese could face as a unit with its people standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The difficulties the diocese faced during Bishop West's episcopate tended instead to be divisive and to cause deep and sometimes angry differences of opinion among the people of the diocese. There was the wear in Vietnam, the civil rights struggle of the 1960's and 70's, the controversy over racial segregation, or integration, within the church, the "Martin Luther King demonstration" in St. Augustine and the trying and testing of the proposed new Book of Common Prayer. These were disputed issues, and some of them bitterly disputed within the diocese, but in all of them Bishop West gave full, firm and courageous support on the side principles and policies of his church.

There was progress, too, in the diocese despite all disagreements. Indeed the accomplishments of the diocese under Bishop West's leadership was impressive, and its success important. Fifteen missions became parishes, seventeen new missions were founded. The clergy staff grew from fifty-eight in 1956 to seventy-four in 19700. The diocese gave up eighteen of its clergy, nine of its parishes and thirteen of its missions to help create a new diocese, the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast. That made the Diocese of Florida a more urban diocese that it had been, and Bishop West asked it to try "to bring Christ to the cities and the cities to Christ. The diocese, with its cathedral taking the lead, undertook to rehabilitate one of the worst slum areas in Jacksonville. More than a hundred dilapidated houses were renovated; new apartment buildings and houses constructed and rented or sold at prices poor people could pay; a health center provided medical attention "to those who had been overlooked in the past"; children's daycare center were established in Jacksonville and Gainesville; a counseling service and meals-on-wheels were organized for older, handicapped and homebound people in Jacksonville.

Another of the cathedral's projects during Bishop West's episcopate was building and operating a splendid Episcopal High School in Jacksonville. But most important of all the cathedral's good works were the three high-rise apartments buildings it built in Jacksonville to house eight hundred elderly people of most incomes. Intended to be more than just places for people to live, these buildings were to be a "retirement community," complete with recreational and health facilities. Their apartments were occupied as fast as the buildings were completed.

So impressed with the retirement center and the high school was a layman who had been a member of the church's national council that he wrote a letter of congratulations and appreciation to Bishop West and the dean of the cathedral. He said that he had sat in on "endless discussions" at the national level about the church's duty to do something for the aged and the young and "you two gentlemen, with the least discussion I ever saw, have actually done something ... I only wish more of the leaders in our church would use you as an example." Bishop West, however, may have been more proud of some other achievements; writing to the diocese one day after his retirement began, he said, "together we have rebuilt after the Second World War, constructively ridden the crest of the population explosion of "the fifties," steered a steady course as we tried to be Christian in our race relations, studied our liturgies and helped prepare for the coming Book of Common Prayer and on our knees prayed our way through the election of the new Bishop." He had given this diocese good leadership in a troubled time.