The Reverend Robert Gustavus Coulson was the Rector of St Mary’s Church, Stansted, Kent, in the 1950s. He was the founder of the Fellowship of Contemplative Prayer. He was born on the 10th October 1899 and died on December 2nd 1996, aged 96. Robert was born to British parents in St Petersburg, Russia, where they owned property. When the Russian Revolution came in 1917, the family were forced out of the country, losing all their property in Russia and an estate in Estonia.

Coulson had already been educated in this country, first at St Cyprian’s preparatory school and subsequently at Tonbridge School. On leaving school, he went to Sandhurst and in 1918, at the age of nineteen, was commissioned into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He served in Russia and went to Murmansk with a small British unit, where he took part in ‘a merciless winter campaign’ in which he was slightly wounded. He later served in India and Germany, partly in Army Intelligence, as he was fluent in both Russian and German.

In 1928, he married Pamela Perry, and they subsequently had two daughters. One of the daughters, Pamela Elizabeth Coulson, married Michael Wellington Stapleton-Cotton, 5th Viscount Combermere of Bhurtpore. From 4 February 1961, her married name became Stapleton-Cotton, and after her marriage, she was styled as Viscountess Combermere of Bhurtpore.

When he left the Army in 1930, he helped to organise clubs for the unemployed in London. He was also writing a book, The Uneasy Triangle, which was published in 1931 and described his experiences in Germany after 1918. This work served as a basis for planning the British occupation of Germany after the Second World War. Coulson also collaborated with B.T. Reynolds to publish ‘Human Needs in Modern Society’.

In 1938, Coulson was one of a group sent by the Foreign Office to Czechoslovakia to “supervise and observe” the takeover by Hitler of the Sudetenland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was given a staff job at the War Office in the Army Welfare Directorate. Although he was not at this time a conventional Christian, he was invited by Archbishop William Temple to serve on the Archbishop’s Commission on Evangelism, and asked by the chairman, Bishop Christopher Chavasse of Rochester, to help with its report ‘Towards the Conversion of England’. The bishop suggested he be ordained, and he subsequently trained at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. On completing training, he was appointed Rector of Stansted with Fairseat, a position he held until 1961. He was much involved in inter-faith work and represented the Christian viewpoint at the meetings of the World Congress of Faiths (founded by Sir Francis Younghusband). It has not been possible to establish the date range for Coulson’s time at St Mary’s Church; however, he arranged a tenancy agreement when he left the area in 1961.

Rev. Coulson became increasingly interested in the contemplative approach to religion and, in 1946, founded the Fellowship of Contemplative Prayer, which now has branches throughout Britain and in the United States, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland. He retired from parochial work in 1961 and wrote three books, ‘Into God’, ‘The Threefold Reality’ and ‘I Am’, all concerned with the practice of contemplation in ordinary working lives.

The Fellowship of Contemplative Prayer (FCP) is a loose-knit association of individuals and small groups who follow the way of prayer taught by the founder, Robert Coulson. The founder was an Anglican priest who commended a simple yet profound method of prayer. The Fellowship has approximately 500 members from many denominations in the United Kingdom, most of whom belong to the 100 or so prayer groups across the country. Fellowship members are also to be found in Ireland, in the U.S.A., South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

In 1994, long-term Fairseat resident Grisell Pasteur remembered Rev Coulson as follows: “Canon Williams stayed until 1950, when he retired and went to live at Cliffe. Mr Bob Coulson came to take his place, along with his wife and two grown daughters. They also lived in The Rectory in Stansted. They stayed with us for ten years. Mr Coulson was a great walker. He used to walk around the parish very regularly; in fact, he walked up Stansted Hill every morning. I saw him recently; he’s now 94, so I suspect that all that walking did him a lot of good!

He was followed by Mr Blowey, who was a retired soldier, as was Mr Coulson, come to that.
I wouldn’t have called him [Rev Coulson] evangelical in the sense it’s used now. His real leaning was towards meditation and mystical experiences – in fact, sometimes after one of his sermons, you didn’t really know whether you were in heaven or earth! (interjection by Adrien Sturgeon…or whether the sermon had finished or you were now praying…)

He wrote a number of books on the subject, of which I have two. He didn’t have another parish after he left here, but he would go and take retreats and meditation groups all over the place. I think some people found his sermons quite difficult to understand. I find it quite difficult to read his books, come to that. He was a very sincere man, and he was much loved by everybody, whether they came to church or not, very much loved, and his wife too – she was a charming person.”

Robert Coulson died on December 2nd 1995, aged 96, and was survived by two daughters.