David Hand

The Most Reverend Geoffrey David Hand KBE GCL (11 May 1918 – 6 April 2006) was an Australian-born Papua New Guinean Anglican bishop. He was the first Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea. Childhood and education Hand was born a British subject in 1918 in Clermont, Queensland, Australia, where his English father, the Reverend William Thomas Hand, was the rector of Clermont. He had two older brothers, Peter and Eustace, both of whom also became priests. When he was four, the family returned to England, with his father taking up a country parish in Tatterford, Norfolk. Hand grew up there and was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, where he was an organ scholar, from 1932 to 1937, and then at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1941, where he received a BA degree in history. An Anglo-Catholic, he then trained for ordination into the Church of England at Cuddesdon, from 1941 to 1942. Career Ordained a deacon in 1942, Hand became a curate at Heckmondwike in Yorkshire in the north of England and was ordained a priest in 1943. He stayed at Heckmondwike until 1946, when he decided to move to Papua New Guinea, inspired by the life and death of the Reverend Vivian Redlich, a missionary killed there by the Japanese during the Second World War. Hand arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1946 and spent sixty of his eighty-seven years there. When was consecrated bishop (to serve as coadjutor bishop of New Guinea) on 29 June 1950 at Ss Peter and Paul Cathedral, Dogura, he was the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion, aged 32.