The Right Reverend John Sperry The son of a shoe manufacturer, John Reginald Sperry was born in Leicester on May 2 1924, and went to Melbourne Road School before joining the Co-Op as a counter assistant and delivery boy. At 16 he became an evangelical Christian, and was already interested in missionary work when he joined the Royal Navy. He served as an Asdic operator in the destroyer Verdun on coastal patrols and Atlantic convoys, then in the minesweeper Hare in the Far East. When peace returned Sperry studied at Emmanuel Bible College, Birkenhead, and then at King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in Winnipeg, then set off for St Andrew's mission at Coppermine. He was wearing a spotless trench coat and dog-collar when a drunk was carried on board the plane and dumped beside him. The man was sick over him, then tried to light a cigarette but kept dropping his matches through a hole in the cabin floor - Sperry desperately squirted a fire extinguisher to prevent the fuel tanks catching alight. He was prevented from completing his journey by a week of bad weather, during which he stayed with a trapper, and subsisted on black bear stew. On finally reaching Coppermine, he witnessed the arrival of the annual supply ship. Two years later Jack Sperry married Betty Maclaren, a state registered nurse whom he had met at Emmanuel College. One of the many surprises they encountered was the Inuits" belief that they must have been pledged to each other since childhood. The couple had a son and daughter; but the loss of another daughter after 10 days enabled them to share the suffering that was common in Inuit life. After 19 years at Coppermine, Sperry spent four years as rector of St John's, Fort Smith. Then, from 1974 to 1990, he served as the third Bishop of the Arctic, based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Its cathedral, St Jude's, which takes the shape of an igloo, was 1,400 miles away at Frobisher Bay. The appointment brought him some novel experiences such as driving a car and gardening. He also took steps to ensure that new priests had the Inuit language training they needed to address their flocks, even claiming that he had once found some sermon notes which, due to mistranslations, suggested that Jesus was married and had sold eggs in the market place. Sperry, who in 2001 published a memoir, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church, welcomed the technological advances that meant he could travel by snowmobile instead of with dog teams, and also the increased number of people in the north and the arrival of representative government. He also accepted the changing of long-established place names such as Coppermine to Kugluktuk. But he was a critic of the social liberalism that seeped up from southern Canada. While accepting women priests, he and his conservative parishioners remained strongly critical of abortion and extramarital sex, and created controversy in 2005 when the diocese banned the employment of "homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals." On retiring to Yellowknife, Jack Sperry became chaplain to a local hospital, to the Canadian Rangers (who keep watch on the country's northern frontier) and to the Royal Canadian Legion. He was delighted to be appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2002 and, a week before his death, to be awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal. The Rt Rev John Sperry, born May 2 1924, died February 11 2012