Bishops of Monmouth
Charles Green
Gilbert Cunningham Joyce
Alfred Monahan
Alfred Morris
Eryl Thomas
Derrick Childs
Clifford Wright
Rowan Williams
Dominic Walker
Gilbert Cunningham Joyce succeeded Charles Green as Bishop of Monmouth. Joyce, the Archdeacon of St David's had formerly been a Principal of St David's College, Lampeter. He proved to be a scholarly bishop with wide intellectual interests. He was a humble man of prayer and deep spirituality. Where Charles Green had failed to secure a cathedral establishment to his own satisfaction and entertained dreams of Trollopian splendour on Ridgeway, Gilbert Joyce settled for the quiet close at St Woolos with ten canons at work in their parishes with responsibility for separate areas of work within the diocese.
The Economic circumstances of the diocese during Gilbert Joyce's time as bishop made it difficult to plan imaginatively for the future. The homogeneity of the diocese was assisted by the stability of the clerical manpower and the large number of priests who remained in the diocese for most of their lives. In 1933 nearly half the 131 incumbents of the diocese, like the bishop, were over sixty years of age and only two of them were under forty, yet seventy-seven of those incumbents were still in the same benefice ten years later. Twenty five years later, the clergymen of 1958 were younger and fitter with less than a third of them over sixty and seven incumbents in their thirties. By that date more than a quarter of them had been students at St David's College, Lampeter when the bishop, Edwin Morris, had been a professor there and many others had studied at Lampeter earlier or later. In fact there was a long tradition of Lampeter-trained priests serving in the diocese and that went back to the beginning.
Even so, the diocese never found it easy to recruit assistant curates and the world of assistant curates before the war was still unstable when there were forty-four of them and they were two-a-penny and had to serve for ten years.