Hake , Andrew Augustus Gordon , b 1925 , clergyman and sociologist

Hake , Andrew Augustus Gordon , b 1925 , clergyman and sociologist

Andrew Augustus Gordon Hake was born in Bristol in 1925. After leaving Marlborough College, where he was at school, and having completed his army service, he read Theology at Cambridge University and Wells Theological College. He was ordained in Bristol in 1951 and served his first curacy in a housing estate until 1954, whereupon he took up an appointment as Assistant to the Industrial Adviser to the Bishop of Bristol.

In April 1957, he moved to Nairobi to take up the post of Industrial Adviser to the Christian Council of Kenya (which later became the National Christian Council of Kenya). During this time, he was active among the local churches as well as in urban and industrial work. The work was financed by Janet Lacey, initially through the British Council of Churches' Inter-Church Aid and later through Christian Aid. He was accorded an award from the Ford Foundation, which financed the research and writing of his book African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-help City, which was published in 1977. During the course of his work, he also wrote Who Controls Industry?, the report of a working party, serviced by Hake, which addresses the issues of public versus private control of industry. The work was published anonymously in 1968. In 1958 he married Jean Besgrove, who was working as a CMS missionary in Nairobi. In June 1969, Hake and his family returned to the UK, where, after a year's study leave, he took up a post with the Swindon Borough Council as Community Development Officer, whilst remaining a non-stipendiary Priest in the Bristol diocese. During this time, he was also a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Urban Priority Areas, which produced the Faith in the City report, published in 1985.