My brother Alan Tanner, who has died aged 90, was a priest for 60 years, all of them in the London diocese, 55 in the City. When his last church, St Botolph without Bishopsgate, was badly damaged by IRA bombs in 1992 and 1993, he likened it to the damage done to his childhood church, St Stephen’s, Poplar, east London, during the blitz. He carried on conducting services while retrieving the remains of his office, which had been sucked out of the vestry windows and spread over the churchyard.
His spiritual home was St Paul’s Cathedral, where he had been deaconed and priested, became a prebendary and, when he retired, performed pastoral duties.
For 27 years Alan was the preacher and deputy master of the Charterhouse community, a brotherhood of retired men in Smithfield. Many a time, in the middle of winter, he would set off in the night with a vacuum flask, if a brother needed care. He said it was like a bereavement when he retired.
But a great part of his life was devoted to the welfare of those haemophiliacs like his son Mark, who had been treated with blood contaminated with hepatitis and HIV. Mark was diagnosed with haemophilia even though there was no family history of the disease, and managed to lead a normal, independent life until he received contaminated blood. Alan was chairman of the World Federation of Hemophilia (WFH) and the Haemophilia Society at that time, and was friend and confidant to Frank Schnabel, the WFH founder, who was one of the first to die after receiving contaminated blood.
Alan then found himself conducting the funerals of most of the executive committee of the society while watching his own son consumed by the disease. Mark died in 1998. Alan showed enormous support to all those in a similar situation and threw himself behind the campaign for recognition of this tragedy; he was appointed OBE.
Our maternal grandfather was a master mariner from Riga, Latvia, who married a farmer’s daughter he met in Swansea. His ship later sailed into Poplar Docks, and there the family settled. Alan was born in Poplar, one of five children of William Tanner, an estate agent, who had served in the Royal Artillery during the first world war, and his wife, Alex. Our mother’s tenacity and drive during the stark days of the depression saw her boys win scholarships to the Coopers’ Company’s school.
During the second world war Alan was evacuated with the Coopers’ school to Frome, Somerset, eventually becoming head boy and captain of the school. After reading physics at Cambridge he was commissioned in the Royal Navy and met Tess Garfitt, who was in the Wrens. They met up again when he was at Oxford in 1945 reading theology, and were married in 1955. A keen sportsman, Alan played cricket and rugby, boxed, swam, fenced and rowed.
Tess died in 2013. Alan is survived by his children, Mary-Ann, Becky and T-T, and grandchildren, Emily, Lucy, Tabby and Milo, and by our sister Joan and me.
