[5] He was at school at Dulwich College, and was 18 when he joined the City of London Yeomanry and the Army Cyclist Corps.
[6] In 1922, he completed a Bachelor of Divinity degree at King's College, London, and was ordained and served in Lancashire as a curate and Vicar of St Mark's, Heyside.
Nevertheless, his reputation as 'one of the ablest and most clearheaded men in administration and finance' was emphasised by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, who was the key figure in the appointment process, and Bradfield was offered the bishopric of Bath and Wells.
The occasion was one of the first major outside broadcasts, and Bradfield's distinctive spectacles and dark hair can be seen to the Queen's left, with Michael Ramsey of Durham, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, to her right.
Unusually for a Bishop of a major diocese in England in the 1949s and 1950s, Bradfield was not from a middle-class family nor had an Oxbridge degree.