About the Fund’s history in the thirty-five years from Darwell Stone’s death in 1941 to 1976, when its current records begin, very little is known.
In the post-war period the Church of England took over the cost of training ordinands. Candidates no longer needed to look to Cleaver for grants towards their fees and living costs, so the Fund concentrated instead on giving books to ordinands, as permitted by Mrs Swinburne’s Will.
A scheme under the Charities Act 1960, made by the Minister of Education on 8 October 1963, empowered the Trustees to give grants additionally to clergy of any church of the Anglican Communion ‘to enable them to pursue their studies in theology or related subjects in such manner as the Trustees may approve’.
A further scheme, made by the Secretary of State for Education and Science on 13 September 1966, empowered the Trustees to give grants not just to Church of England ordinands but to ordinands of any church in the Anglican Communion.
The Chairman for some of this period was the Revd Austin Farrer (1904-1968), who was Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1960 until his death in 1968.
Correspondence in the Church Union papers at Pusey House indicates that the pattern of a Church Union staff member being employed as Clerk to the Cleaver Trustees had continued. From 1964 to 1972 the Clerk was a Miss Stubbs. In that year the Church Union took over the clerkship, with Miss Stubbs continuing nominally as the Clerk and taking the minutes and the administration undertaken in the Church Union office under her supervision. As General Secretary of the Church Union from 1975, Lt Gen. Sir Geoffrey Evans acted as Clerk to the Cleaver Trustees.
In 1972 there were discussions in progress about a possible ‘closer link-up’ with the Anglo-Catholic Ordination Candidates Fund (ACOCF), which was also administered by the Church Union, but these came to nothing.