Peter Galliver
Gracewing 2019
The story of post-reformation Catholic education in England is a fascinating one. The most interesting material in Peter Galliver’s book is not so much that relating to its title as the account it gives of the principles of Catholic education as they developed in the various continental schools of the exiled English Catholic diaspora at Paris, Douai and St Omers in France and Lamspringe in Germany. Their return to England at the turn of the nineteenth century brought an approach to school organisation and curriculum very different, as they had developed, from the great schools of England, which are the constant reference point of Galliver’s narrative. The schools that settled at Stonyhurst, Downside and Ampleforth, and those that grew at Ware, Oscott, Bath and Birmingham, trace their stories through the great events that mark their rise after the cautious return of Catholic groups at the end of the eighteenth century, Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 and particularly important for Galliver’s story, the lifting of the exclusion of Roman Catholics from the universities at Oxford and Cambridge in 1871.
This is a story that has all the competitive drama of a rugby match. In one team are the old Catholics of England, concentrated in the Lancastrian north, before Irish immigration and the influx of ultramontane extravagance, protective of their small aristocratic remnant and their discreet ways and resistant to too much displacement of the old order.In another team are the Jesuits and in another the Benedictines, each fighting for the winning cup. The bishops are there trying to referee the game and keep control, constantly calling time for the mission, the priority of parish and seminary over school. In the case of the Benedictines these tensions were (and perhaps still are) internalised: monastery v school, school v parish, school v seminary, monastery autonomy v episcopal authority.
In the foreground of this scrum are the star players. The maverick Peter Augustine Baines, Lampringe and Ampleforth boy, mascot for Ampleforth until he is promoted as episcopal vicar in the west of England, whereupon he sets about seducing Ampleforth teachers and pupils away to help build his project at Prior Park. The corpulent Cardinal Wiseman, referred to irreverently by his chaplain as “his Immense”, favouring the fortunes of Oscott. Bishop Hedley, key player in getting the Oxbridge barriers to Catholics lifted. The splendid buccaneering old Catholic Lancastrian Bishop Ullathorne, descendent of St Thomas More, famous for reminding his opponents that he was teaching the catechism “with the mitre on [his] head while Manning were still an ‘eretic”, Newman’s great defender. John Henry Newman himself setting up the Oratory School at Birmingham with a curriculum hinting at the principles of the Idea of a University, managing the fallout from his disastrous appointment of the Old Wykehamist convert Father Nicholas Darnell as its first headmaster.Cardinal Henry Edward Manning with ambitions to open a school in Kensington.
The rugby pitches at Ampleforth are fine ones and they have nurtured star headmasters: in living memory the scholarly Patrick Barry, the charismatic liberal Dominic Milroy, the curmudgeonly but brave Leo Chamberlain, so sympatheticallyeulogised at his funeral last year by his sage successor,Gabriel Everitt, in the words of Psalm 22, save me from the mouth of the lion. The rise of Ampleforth onto the national scene at the beginning of the twentieth century was a competitive response to get its pupils scholarships at Oxbridge and into the corridors of national influence. Abbot Edmund Matthews performed much of the spadework of persuading the monastic community, always replete with competing opinions, to invest in the school as its major project, while keeping the mission going in the parishes. The mega star on the pitch in Galliver’s tale is Father Paul Nevill, headmaster from 1924 to 1939. Nevill was from a southern old Catholic family. His obituary records that “Val Nevill arrived as a new boy at Ampleforth in the year 1890, wearing the regulation Eton suit and, to give it glamour, a red tie.” He was a happy and talkative child, to whom gossip was meat: he could never tell a lie but neither could he easily keep a secret. It was Nevill, with all his aristocratic and influential connections, to whom his class and manners were acceptable, who was determined to raise Ampleforth into company with the ancient English schools, the flagship of which was Eton College. He set about making it a school attractive both to the old Catholic families and the new English Catholic elite. Key to this project was the alignment of the curriculum with that of the traditional public schools, with its emphasis on the study of the classical language, literature and history, and the organisation of the school into Houses on the collegiate model. Out of this culture would come an affinity with Oxbridge academic and social mores that would secure a Catholic presence in the English establishment,unambiguously loyal to the Crown, in all varieties of leadership.
It worked. Ampleforth overtook Stonyhurst and became the pre-eminent school of the English Catholic establishment.
This book surveys this history with admirable scholarly detail. The bibliography contains new titles for those who have research interests in this branch of English monastic history. It is a book that looks back with judicious and readable clarity. I spotted only two minor typographical errors, one of which brought a frisson of pleasure: in both the text and the index the name “Convey” is conferred upon Father Adrian Convery, a misprint rather fitting to that delightful former Guest Master in whom the odours of sanctity and pipe tobacco perfectly coalesced.
But what of the sub-title and its relation to the present and the future – The Emergence of Ampleforth College as ‘the Catholic Eton’? As far as Paul Nevill was motivated by social ambition for the school, the sobriquet is explicable. But surely that is where it stops. Eton is and always has been a very different place from Ampleforth. A good way to trace the history of change in the English establishment is to examine the changing clientele of Eton. A royal foundation now on the edge of London, it is the litmus test of such change. At one time it is the badge of the Protestant aristocracy and landed gentry, prosperous or down-at-heel; at another the new plutocracy; at another (the present time) the celebrity class. Galliver records in the opening pages of his book that there has been a significant abandonment of Ampleforth for the ancient schools of the south, including Eton, with their Catholic chaplains to keep them honest. Perhaps Nevill’sambitions have come back to bite! The money for the exorbitant fees now charged by Eton and Ampleforth is made in London and the south-east, or in China or Russia, far from Yorkshire. Modern parents want to see their children play their games on weekends, and north Yorkshire is too far to drive from home.
The serene monastic valley of Ampleforth has little in common with the streetscape of Eton. The monastic bell tolling the hours at Ampleforth has long since faded from the foundation by King Henry VI of the College of Our Lady [of the Assumption] of Eton beside Windsor. How many Etonians would know who or what Our Lady of the Assumption is? You cannot imagine any Head Master of Eton explaining to parents, as one Headmaster of Ampleforth reputedly did, that “here we prepare our boys for death”. You might just imagine that happening at Winchester (at which Peter Galliver now teaches), with its contemplative cloisters and tradition of scholarly understatement, but not at Eton. No, Ampleforth is not the Catholic Eton and never really was. It was dubbed so only because at one moment in its history English class required it so in order to serve its purposes, and if the sobriquet survives it is only as a thoughtless soundbite, unhelpful to its future.
Ampleforth College for nearly two hundred years enjoyed the rich benefits of monastic learning and monastic teachers. Tempus fugit. Now there are lay Heads, no monk housemasters, fewer Catholics, gentry or not, than in the days in which the sobriquet was conferred. Ampleforth has had more than its fair share of troubles in recent years. There have been sins and errors as there are in the history of any institution. It is, I sense, at a crossroads in its history, when tough decisions have to be taken. Whatever happens, Ampleforth has the depth and wisdom of Benedictine discipline, learning and prayer as its historic resource, capable of reinterpretation and renewal. That resource will assist and sustain it far more reliably than any sobriquet.
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