'Our Padre': a future archbishop as First World War army chaplain

Archbishop Howard Mowll’s experience as chaplain with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front during 1918–19 remains one of the least explored aspects of his life and legacy. This is due in part to a lack of extant sources and in part to Mowll’s biographer (Anglican Primate and Sir) Marcus Loane devoting only one page of his biography to Mowll’s chaplaincy role. In recent years, however, an efflorescence of scholarship on Anglican chaplaincy has provided new background information with which to better reconstruct and contextualise Mowll’s chaplaincy experience. Although a major difficulty with any study of Mowll is the fact that his private papers were destroyed after his death, a modest cache of new extant sources has recently come to light, notably Mowll’s Royal Army Chaplains Department (RAChD) recruitment documents. Taken together, these new extant sources shed further light on this little-known phase of Mowll’s life and, in turn, its impact on his character and ministry.