Fr Ian Turnbull Ker, the leading scholar on the life and work of St John Henry Newman, died on 5 November. He was a brilliant writer and biographer, as well as a parish priest, and published over twenty books on Newman and his theology. His John Henry Newman has long been regarded as the definitive account of the most recent saint of the Anglosphere; his scholarly biography of GK Chesterton is also widely admired. Like both men, Ker was a convert from Anglicanism.
Ker was born in Naini Tal, India on 30 August 1942; he was the son of Charles Murray Ker of the Indian Civil Service and his wife Joan May Knox, a relative of Ronald Knox. In 1947 he and his parents and his two sisters left India after independence was declared. Moving to England, they settled in Wimbledon. Ker remembered, as a boy, entering the enormous Sacred Heart Church in Edge Hill, Wimbledon, and being impressed by the Mass being celebrated there. The then-normative Tridentine Rite was very unlike the middle-of-the-road Church of England services his family attended.
