|
Back to WELCOME and INDEX |
Back to 1. WHAT WE DO |
Back to 1.7 PUBLICATIONS, NEWSLETTER, MAGAZINE |
|
|
Back to WELCOME and INDEX |
Back to 1. WHAT WE DO |
Back to 1.7 PUBLICATIONS, NEWSLETTER, MAGAZINE |
No 164 - 2001
4 PRE-VATICAN II CATHOLIC: THE CASE OF OLIVER WELCH
This is a shortened version of an article published in the Downside Review of July 2001, written by Professor Adrian Hastings (OD 43/46). We are grateful to the editor of the Downside Review for permission to reproduce it.
IT is a commonplace that in the pre-Vatican II era, at least until after the Second World War, the English Catholic laity were, apart from a handful of converts, neither very intellectual nor very progressive.
The Catholic middle class was small and tended to a safe conservatism, at once religious and political. Catholic academics, if they did obtain a university degree, tended to return to work in specifically Catholic institutions, such as the Benedictine and Jesuit schools. Oliver Welch is interesting as someone who was of this class, but had a notably free and liberal mind, and gained an excellent Oxford First; yet he nevertheless spent his life in a strongly Catholic environment shaped by the Benedictine monasteries of Downside, Stanbrook and Douai. He remained there, one feels, not just on grounds of employment, but also on grounds of enduring spiritual affinity, his attraction lying precisely in a combination of liberalism and traditional loyalties. He was fortified in this by a lifelong devotion to his sister, at once a modern artist and a traditionalist nun. Without her, he would have been very different Oliver John Grindon Welch was born in Kidderminster on the 23rd October 1902, into a devotedly Catholic family, the fourth and last child of John and Grace Welch. His elder brother Alan died at the age of seven in 1906, which left him with two elder sisters, Eileen, born in 1894, and Mary, in 1896, both of whom undoubtedly adored their beautiful and ever-so-bright young brother. Eileen entered the Benedictine monastery of Stanbrook in 1915, taking the name of Werburg, after a formidable Saxon nun saint, by which time Oliver, then thirteen, had already forged links with the Benedictines, being settled very happily in the school at Downside.
He did well at school, and soon those who met him were remarking upon his intelligence, his artistic ability and his attractive personality. By the time he was seventeen his future had become the subject of a lively correspondence between Dame Laurentia McLachlan, then Sub-Prioress at Stanbrook, and her friend Sydney Cockerell, the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Cockerell was naturally anxious for him to study at Cambridge, but Oliver himself, while rejecting suggestions that he might join the Ditchling community, toyed for a time with the idea of a career as a master-printer. In the end, however, he decided to stay on for a further year at Downside and try for an Oxford history scholarship. He did not get the Balliol scholarship, but tied with the boy who did. Three months later he won a History Exhibition (and was later made a `Postmaster’) at Merton College. From the letters of the scholar-nun and the academic, we learn a good deal about Oliver, his precocious ability, infectious enthusiasm, good looks, his shifting interest between art and history which would continue all his life, and a certain sense of tension between a Catholic and a general culture.
Studying history at Oxford was almost certainly the most intellectually decisive experience in his life and an Oxford historian was what he most wanted to be, but the environs of a Benedictine monastery were no less decisive for his spiritual formation, while Arts and Crafts left their mark on his personal culture, the beauty of his handwriting and the vibrancy of his clothes.
In 1924 Oliver gained a First in History, and with it an Oxford fellowship seemed the obvious future. In October he sat for an All Souls Fellowship and very nearly won it, ending as runner-up to Richard Pares, who later became Professor of History at Edinburgh University. Oliver was so near winning that he felt buoyed up rather than discouraged by the nearness of his miss, and wrote to Weburg that December: "I have been asked to try again next October, and unless my guardian angel does something unexpected in the meantime, I shall do so. ......... I am becoming more and more sure that my vocation is to be an historian - an historian in the real sense, not merely a researcher and scholar."
A year later, however, things were turning out differently. In the 1925 All Souls Fellowship election A.L. Rowse was indisputably the winner. Oliver was unlucky to have had to face, two years running, such outstanding competitors. Other fellowships too appear to have been applied for unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, a girl had appeared on the horizon: Doris Pratten. By May1926 Oliver had a post as history master at the Oratory School in Caversham, near Reading, and in August he married Doris, who came to be called Elizabeth, in Bristol’s pro-cathedral. Their first child, Julian, was born the next year. The demands of schoolmastering and the family would shape the rest of his life, the art of writing history like the art of master-printer left, at first a little sadly, somewhat aside.
Oliver taught at the Oratory School from 1926 to 1941. As a rather specially dressed young teacher, with his little beard, artistic appearance, apparently eccentric interests but severe insistence that essays be written and books read, he enjoyed the amused respect he tended to generate. In 1941, the Oratory school was evacuated to Downside and its staff dismissed. After teaching briefly at Bradfield, Oliver moved in 1943 to Douai school - back into the Benedictine orbit - where he remained until retirement in 1968.
In those days, Douai was a small and undistinguished school, no rival to its more famous Benedictine brothers, Downside and Ampleforth. It had been ruled-over since 1915 in a fatherly Benedictine manner by Dom Ignatius Rice, tall and dignified, a friend of G.K. Chesterton and a fine cricketer, now in his sixties a revered and patriarchal figure. The boys were still taught almost entirely by monks. Standards were acceptable but not high, for Ignatius had simply no desire to emulate the academic achievement of the major public schools. In 1943 there was only one other full-time lay master, a single man who lived inside the school and taught Latin. There was no lay community to belong to and no staff room, but when later more laymen were appointed, Oliver became a most willing guide and mentor, though he remained, as a teacher, head and shoulders above his colleagues. But he found Douai "the warmest and most welcoming of places. For me it was so the moment I joined the staff." Such remained his recollection thirty-three years later.
Geographically, his world now centred on Bucklebury Common, or later, on Blackford Farm near Newbury. Elizabeth enjoyed riding a horse and the running of a small farm, devoted to livestock, goats, cattle and pigs. She was an animal person. Oliver was decidedly not. For him animals were "to be admired or tolerated - according to which animal was in question - but from a distance." But he did become quite a competent gardener. What home life shared with school life was the visual image of the aesthete: the goatee beard and curling locks, the pepper and salt sports jackets, mustard waistcoats, cavalry twill trousers and suede boots, shared too his elegant handwriting - as meticulously formed in commenting upon a schoolboy’s essay as in penning a Christmas letter to his sister.
If Oliver was anything, he was a scholmaster. Teaching history to the upper school proved the perfect metier for his blend of succinct wide-ranging overview, enriched with attractive vignette and a sense of artistry, an historical imaginativeness needing to be shared with young minds rather than buried in the minutiae of archival research. His basic method was the old-fashioned lecture: exposition of some major development, laced with examples and the provision of enough time to take notes. The exposition was exceptionally clear and very lively. Everything was interesting and much was unexpected, both the analysis of large developments and the inserted illustrations of incidents and people. Oliver lectured five days a week to the sixth form across a twelve week term and a three term year. His cycle of lectures lasted at least two years. This means that he had well over three hundred well-prepared lectures on offer, and probably a good deal more, a remarkable achievement in itself. And his repertoire was a wide one , ranging across English and European history. He invariably wore his academic gown in class and, if there was sufficient space, walked up and down as he talked, his beard stuck out in front, a pillar of confidence-creating enlightenment. I never listened to anyone at Oxford who lectured as well.
With his more senior pupils, his lectures were supplemented by a more tutorial approach in which the writing and evaluation of lengthy essays became a central element. The enormous benefit of this system lay in the care and precision with which he read and responded to all you said. He simply forced you to read more widely, think harder and write more clearly next time. Doubtless, large numbers of boys, who never thought of becoming professional historians, were marked for life in their thinking by the incisive but always kindly intellectual guidance they received from Oliver and, probably, from no one else. They wrote numerous letters to his children after his death to say so, recalling the influence he had had on them forty or fifty years before.
At the start of his teaching career, Oliver wrote in a letter to his sister of his 'plans for the creation of an intellectual atmosphere' in school, perhaps not too easy an enterprise in a small boarding school at that time. In fact, it was not until the Douai Sixth Form began to grow in numbers after the war that he was able to establish a new intellectual society for senior boys, the Thirteen. Oliver was its founder and President, Henry Mayr-Harting, now Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, its first Secretary. For the rest of his time at Douai the society’s thirteen members, representing the school’s academic elite, met eleven times a year to discuss the problems of the world Papers were given by outside speakers as well as by the members themselves. At his last meeting before retirement, Oliver himself gave a paper on 'History - the dangerous subject'. Even though he once remarked: 'I don’t like writing textbooks', he did in fact write two textbooks himself, The Middle Ages (1935), part of a multi-volume Outline of European History, published by Victor Gollancz, and Great Britain 1485 - 1714 (1946), part of the Ashley Series. Oliver recognised as he wrote it that the second of these was 'unblushingly a Catholic history written for Catholic schools.' In truth it is singularly unpartisan, a profoundly fair account, especially of the English Reformation in all its complexities, and probably represents the one point at which Oliver actually exercised a considerable influence on the wider Catholic community. His first major piece of historical writing, Mirabeau, A Study of a Democratic Monarchist, was published in the course of 1950, when he was forty-eight. It was a very readable and entertaining biography, full of the bizarre situations and internal contradictions of his subject, but short on exploration of the central dilemmas of the Revolution, which really held the authors’ interest He planned to write further studies on this period of history, but nothing more ever came. Instead, he became interested in the unique collection of material on the Revolution in the Douai Abbey archives, known as the Turner Collection, now on loan to the Reading University Library. His plan to catalogue and card-index it was, as he told his sister, a 'whale of a job', and occupied his spare time for many years.
In his later years. Oliver was fond of saying that he was just a simple schoolmaster. But simple was not the right word. Wonderful would be better. Teaching was what he really enjoyed; writing had come to bore him. The trouble with schoolmastering, even as outstanding as Oliver’s, is that it is seldom publicly recognised. While the boys he taught treasured his legacy for life, the school he taught in seems hardly to have noticed his particular genius. But he was not one to be aggreived by an apparent lack of recognition; he lacked personal ambition, and possessed a natural humility.
He once wrote to a former pupil: 'What matters most in this world is to have a good wife and a satisfying job, in that order.' If he had the latter it was largely because he also had the former and, with Elizabeth, he had his children and his grandchildren, the garden, the rootedness of their tiny farm to complement the history and the art. Elizabeth died in 1980 but Oliver was able to live on at Blackford Farm looked after by Julian and his family. His commitment to his faith and his Church had always been robust but unfussed. Neither he nor his sister Werburg had ever been ecclesiastical conservatives. He in particular was fully conscious of the heavy and unnecessary burden Catholicism had carried ever since the Council of Trent. When the Second Vatican Council at last arrived he was enthusiastic - unlike so many upper-class English Catholics of his generation. 'It is quite clear,' he wrote, 'that the post-Tridentine epoch is over, and good riddance , say I.' Yet there remained a touchingly traditional simplicity in the unchanging core of his belief.
Werburg died on 1 February 1990 and Oliver followed exactly two months later, on 1 April. He had, in a way, followed her all his life, sharing the faith and enthusiasms of his Benedictine artist sister more profoundly than pupils and friends can ever have realised. Now that she was gone, he went as well.‡
Index
Douai Society Dinner, May 18 2001 Extracts from a speech by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB
Fr Adrian Hastings 1929 - 2001
Indian Interfaith Encounters by Fr Peter Bowe OSB
Impressions of El Salvador January 2002 by Fr Alexander Austin OSB
Music at Douai March 2001 - February 2002 by Fr Oliver Holt OSB
St Mary's Parish Studley by Fr Paul Gunter OSB
New Mass Setting: Roxanna Panufik's Douai Missa Brevis by John Rowntree
Go to index of Douai Newsletter.