Tim Hollis, who has died aged 93, was an exciting uncle. A torpedo boat commander, worker priest at a Sheffield steelworks and CND marcher, in 1977 he became the first general secretary of the L’Arche community in the UK, which helps able and disabled people to live together in shared homes. He served as curate and vicar in Crawley new town, West Sussex, and in rural Suffolk, but was too independent-minded to seek higher office. He was a listener, steeped in faith, devoted to parishioners, gentle, clever, mischievous, fun.
He was born in Leeds, one of five children of Emmeline (nee Simpson) and Arthur Hollis, respectively a nurse and a surveyor, who courted through the first world war, during which she served in France, and he in the Royal Flying Corps, for a while in captivity, after his plane was shot down. Arthur persuaded a Yorkshire prep school to take Tim and his twin Chris, who were both relatively small, as one boy. They were returned after falling through a ceiling at the decrepit mansion in the course of a robust Hollis game.
Tim went to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth aged 13 and served worldwide before specialising in 1951 in torpedo boats, notably HMS Gay Archer, which he revisited more than 60 years later after her restoration. But his faith took him into the church in 1954, away from the navy though never from the sea. Long voyages in yachts with mates were always part of his life.
After training at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, Tim was ordained in 1958 and his first parish was Oatlands, near Weybridge, Surrey. Later, in Suffolk, he served the parish of Sotterley, near Beccles, and was also in charge of the Wrentham group of four other parishes.
He plotted with other ex-naval friends to set up a L’Arche community on a barge in London, but practicalities intervened. Practicalities in his own life were often dealt with by his wife, Marion (nee Devereux), whom he married in 1958. Surprisingly for a warm communicator whose sermons were a delight, he never used computers and left them to her.
He was good at catching rabbits in churchyards, though, and running a minibus for isolated parishioners, with his children towed behind on a sledge when snow fell. He and Marion were a team and in later years worked together at L’Arche, at the heart of the communities, in Kent, the Highlands, Liverpool, London and Bognor Regis, even after his retirement as general secretary in 1993. Tim loved the work, and never visited a L’Arche without organising an impromptu football match.
Marion died in 2018. Tim is survived by their daughters, Jenny and Lucy, and son, John, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He walked and talked with them all, imitated birdcalls (of which he was a master) and gave a great-granddaughter a hard time at Swingball within two weeks of his death. He took his own life, not in despair but fed up with the trials of old age, unwilling to burden his family and wanting to be with Marion.
