Victor Whitsey

The ex-Bishop of Chester (retired 2019), Peter Forster, and the ex-Archbishop of the Province of York (retired 2020), John Sentamu, accepted the allegations and issued an apology.

In 2016–17 Cheshire Constabulary conducted a 13-month investigation called Operation Coverage to investigate allegations that Victor Whitsey had sexually abused persons who were under the age of consent. In October 2017 the force announced that five male and eight female witnesses had alleged they were victims, and that were Whitsey still alive he would have been interviewed in connection with 10 of those 13 allegations.

He was then consecrated as a bishop on 1 November 1971. His first bishopric was as suffragan bishop of Hertford within the Diocese of St Albans (1971 -1974). On 22 January 1974 he was appointed as Bishop of Chester, and he remained as bishop until his resignation on 31 December 1981.

On leaving Langley St Aidan he was appointed as Vicar of Langley All Saints and Martyrs, and then on 1 January 1968 he left Manchester Diocese and returned to Blackburn to become the Vicar of Downham St Leonard. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph stated that he suffered a breakdown in his health in 1968, and that was why he moved to the rural parish of Downham, "where he spent the next three years recuperating."

He remained in that post for four years, and on 1 January 1955, he was appointed to the position of a vicar at Halliwell (St Paul) in the Diocese of Manchester. Five years later, on 1 January 1960, he became the curate in charge at Langley St Aidan, again in the Diocese of Manchester, and he remained in this post until 19 October 1964. He was also an honorary canon of Manchester Cathedral appointed on 1 January 1963 and remained in this post until 1 January 1968.

The Diocese of Manchester, where Whitsey officiated from 1955 to 1968 is to its north, as is Blackburn, where he officiated from 1950 to the end of 1954, and then again from 1968 to November 1971.

Hubert Victor Whitsey (21 November 1916 – 25 December 1987) was a Church of England bishop. He was Bishop of Hertford 1971–74 and Bishop of Chester 1974–81.

He was born on 21 November 1916 in Blackburn. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Blackburn and, after war service (in the Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel), at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. After Oxford, he attended Westcott House, Cambridge for theological studies. He was ordained as a deacon on 18 December 1949 and appointed a curate in Chorley (St Laurence) in the Diocese of Blackburn. He was ordained as a priest on 1 January 1950, and was appointed as a perpetual curate in Farrington St Paul, in the Diocese of Blackburn a year later on 1 January 1951.