The fate of Sydenham, like many other areas of the UK, was changed forever in the nineteenth century by the arrival of a railway station. This revolutionary development came just a few years into Queen Victoria’s reign and transformed the peaceful area, which is now one of south London’s many bustling and interconnected urban centres. A full six miles south of the River Thames, two centuries ago it felt veritably remote.
The emerging rail network was just one of the changes sweeping London as the UK became the world’s first industrial society. Not everyone was happy about the transformation. ‘Before Sydenham became so much built over this was a very lovely spot,’ wrote Joseph Edwards, a resident of the area in 1866. ‘In those days no gas lamps lit the place at night, nor any drainage made the little stream offensive.’8
Edwards was irritated that sleepy Sydenham was not protected from change as huge population growth transformed London. His problems were far from over – a new neighbour soon arrived whose career choice irked him further. Frederick Reynolds, the son of a Gloucester ironmonger, was one of those incomers helping to reshape the city. A young businessman on the make, he viewed the industrial revolution as a path to riches, and modern advances as a source of wealth rather than irritation. Reynolds made his money as director of the London Electric Lighting Company, which expanded coverage of street lighting throughout the capital.
Reynolds arrived in Sydenham near the start of his career. Though it took several years for his new neighbour to make his money, Edwards no doubt fumed at his efforts. Firmly built with a thick, dark beard and a hairline already receding from the front, the budding entrepreneur made his home at Rothay House, a large, detached abode backing onto the London to Brighton train line. In 1871 he married Dora, a south Londoner from the nearby area of Gipsy Hill. She was two years his senior with mid-length dark hair and a slightly severe-looking face.
Rothay’s father, Frederick Reynolds, was the son of a Gloucester ironmonger and made a fortune installing London’s first electric streetlights. Frederick’s wife, Dora Reynolds, gave birth to their first child in the family home of Rothay House in 1872. Rothay preferred to use his middle name rather than his first name, Alfred.
A year later the pair, both in their twenties, had their first child. Alfred Rothay Reynolds was born in the family home on 17 September 1872. He was named Alfred after his maternal grandfather while his middle name stems from the name of the house. The story of how the house acquired this unusual name is lost, but it was taken up with enthusiasm by their firstborn. Alfred was used for formal occasions but most of the time the boy was called Rothay – or Roy, to members of his family.
He was born at a time of change for the country as well as London. In the 1870s the British Empire was approaching its zenith, with the pink ink of empire colouring large swathes of the world map. India had been part of the empire for fourteen years in 1872 and Queen Victoria still had almost three decades remaining on the throne.9 The great liberal politician William Gladstone had begun the first of his four spells as Prime Minister, while Benjamin Disraeli dominated for the Conservatives. Victorian Britain was the pre-eminent global power and the London of Reynolds’s birth was its beating heart.
Home life was comfortable throughout his childhood. Rothay House, which no longer stands, was in the affluent Peak Hill area of Sydenham. There was a lot of green space and it was peaceful by the standards of today’s traffic-filled world, even if residents such as Edwards were uncomfortable with the changes. By the time Reynolds was nine he had been joined by a sister and brother, Kathleen and Leslie, and two more would follow, Ronald and Marjorie. Four of the five siblings lived to old age, testament to the healthy upbringing Dora and Frederick could provide in an era when many childhoods were spent in employment rather than education. The home was staffed by three servants – a cook, housemaid and nurse – to help Dora with domestic matters.
The family was deeply religious. The children were brought up as devout Anglo-Catholics and Rothay felt the draw of faith keenly. Anglo-Catholicism is a branch of Christianity that grew in popularity in the nineteenth century and found followers such as the author T. S. Eliot in the twentieth. Its believers are Anglicans but, as the name indicates, their faith is closely based on traditions and practices that pre-date the Reformation. While a religious upbringing was far from uncommon at the time, Reynolds’s branch of faith was slightly unusual.
Rothay House may have provided a name for their firstborn, but the Reynolds parents deemed it insufficient to cope with the demands of their growing family. In 1883, the year Rothay turned eleven, the Reynolds moved to Blomfield House in Bromley, a district of south London to the southeast of Sydenham. Unlike Reynolds’s birthplace, the house in Bromley still stands.10 Long since converted into separate flats, it is a grand, though in some ways ramshackle, Victorian mansion and would have been a fitting home for a large family and its household staff. It had an important additional benefit: from the top floor of Blomfield House, Frederick observed neighbouring parts of London and assessed whether the streetlights he had helped install were working. On some nights his children would hear exasperated shouts from upstairs, quickly followed by a slamming door as their father left to address technical problems in other parts of the city.11
By 1892 Frederick’s business had installed 360 public street lamps and was providing current to many more, as well as about 16,000 lamps for private customers. A fundraising advert in the Pall Mall Gazette said additional shareholder investment would help the London Electric Lighting Company provide current to 150,000 more private lamps.12 It was a business on the up and proved the making of Frederick Reynolds. Later in life it led to political access and civic prestige. A photo exists of him standing outside Downing Street next to Herbert Asquith, Britain’s Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916. Frederick Reynolds was also appointed Justice of the Peace, a mark of his position as a respected elder citizen.
Frederick took a close interest in how his children were brought up. Rothay was a small, mild-mannered child with light brown hair. His education started with a governess who made a lasting impression – years later he recalled awkwardly learning to play the piano as a child while a patient governess named Miss Fuller counted time.13 Private tutors were employed when Reynolds was a little older, at the age of about eleven, to school him at home in the sciences and arts.14 At the age of fifteen Reynolds was briefly enrolled at Dulwich College, an illustrious all-male public school in south London with a history dating back to 1619. His attendance demonstrates the wealth his family had acquired by that point, which allowed Reynolds to be educated with children of the elite, some of whom would become leading figures of the age. The Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and the creator of Jeeves the Butler, P. G. Wodehouse, who edited the school magazine, were both in attendance there at a similar time.15 Another writer, Raymond Chandler, the author of thrillers and detective books, was educated at Dulwich a few years later. Reynolds studied an engineering curriculum focused on the sciences and learned thermodynamics from the working steam engine operated in the school’s basement.16
A flair for languages quickly emerged. Class lists reveal Reynolds was middling in all subjects except French, where he was ranked top of a class of twenty-three. He would remain a deft linguist throughout his life, speaking Russian, French, German, Polish and some Italian. His education in the classics also stayed with him – in a letter written years later he used an idiom from Greek mythology to describe how an awkward predicament had left him between Scylla and Charybdis.
Rothay pictured as a baby in the 1870s.
Rothay as a boy in the late 1870s.
Wodehouse remembered his time at Dulwich as ‘six years of unbroken bliss’, but for Reynolds it was not to last. He studied in the summer and Christmas terms of 1888 before leaving unexpectedly. No evidence survives to explain the sudden departure. Whatever caused it, Frederick does not seem to have maintained a grudge against England’s public school system. Ronald, a decade younger
than Rothay, was sent to Malvern College, a public school in Worcestershire, for four years at the end of the 1890s.17
Reynolds continued his education with tutor friends of his father. He was a studious child and the spell at Dulwich, though short, helped with his learning. The family was tightly knit and the siblings remained close throughout their lives; later in life the four surviving brothers and sisters lived together in a house in Cambridge. Reynolds’s great affection for his parents is evident from the poem he dedicated to them at the beginning of his first book, published years later. ‘To my Father and Mother,’ he wrote, followed by a sonnet which begins:
My gondola adventures to the sea.
I stand and hear the plash of falling spray
Grow fainter, as the high prow glides away
Upon the summer waves’ uncertainty
The romantic verse, which evoked a sense of seaborne adventure, is the sole surviving example of his own poetry. In it, Reynolds may have been harking back to an earlier voyage taken with his parents. Frederick and Dora took Rothay, Leslie and Kathleen on holiday to Dublin in 1894, travelling on a Royal Mail passenger steamship.18 Ronald and Marjorie were judged too young to make the trip. The Reynolds children were often taken on trips around Britain and to nearer parts of Europe, instilling a love of travel that led several of them to live abroad in later life.
Religion would prove central to the first important decisions Reynolds made in life. His interest in religious ideas from an early age led him to pursue theological studies and at the age of twenty he won a place to study divinity at Cambridge. He moved there in the autumn of 1892, beginning a connection with the university city that remained with him throughout his life. Reynolds studied at Pembroke, founded in 1347 and one of the university’s oldest colleges. Pembroke is home to the first college chapel built in Cambridge, which seems fitting given Reynolds’s choice of course.
Reynolds adjusted quickly to life in Cambridge and was inspired by its famed libraries and ancient lanes. The peaceful and relaxed environment of Pembroke College and its grounds was a perfect place in which to study and think about his future. His surroundings were striking: from the Sir Christopher Wren-designed chapel to the grand and imposing library, Reynolds got a taste for fine architecture that remained with him. Whether living among the onion domes of Tsarist Russia or the wide, Swastika-lined boulevards of Nazi Berlin, the tranquil squares of Cambridge were never far from his mind.
Among his teachers were two leading theological scholars, Henry Swete and Herbert Ryle. Swete was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1890 and was popular with students, delivering the best-attended lectures in the faculty. Despite internal opposition to his appointment initially, he served in the role for twenty-five years.19 Ryle was Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge before later becoming Dean of Westminster. He took on the latter position in 1911 when preparations were underway for the coronation of George V at Westminster Abbey. Serving in the role during the war, he was responsible for many special services to mark particular battles and events overseas.20
Both Ryle and Swete recommended Reynolds for his next move after Cambridge: a career in the church. His three years of religious study confirmed in his mind the decision. In light of his strong childhood faith, it was unlikely to have surprised his family. He turned twenty-three in 1895, the year he graduated, and wasted no time in pursuing his calling. In August he enrolled at the Clergy School in Leeds for nine months of ‘instruction in pastoral theology’ and ‘practical training in parochial work’.
During the process, fellows from his old college, Pembroke, wrote a letter to the Lord Bishop of Durham to testify to Reynolds’s learning and suitability for a life in the church. They said he lived ‘piously, soberly and honestly’ while at Cambridge and had never held beliefs ‘contrary to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England’. Their support was absolute. ‘We believe him to be a person worthy to be admitted to the sacred office of deacon.’21
Notions of unity and support for the weak lay at the heart of Reynolds’s belief. A letter he wrote later in life provides a clue to this. He used a passage on religion written by one of his ancestors in the eighteenth century to explain his faith to others. ‘My children,’ the excerpt begins:
I entreat you to live in unity and love with one another and help one another if it is needed. If any of you should be poor in this world and God should give any of you riches, you that are strong, help those that are weak. Stick close as a family and the God of Heaven will bless you.22
His training for the deaconship in Leeds culminated in his ordination at a special service at Durham Cathedral held in May 1896.23 As Reynolds listened to a sermon in the grand surroundings of the cathedral, his religious path was mapped out. He would spend the next year as curate of St Hilda’s, a parish in the northern city of Darlington, the last stage before he could be ordained a priest. He lived a humble existence, surviving on a stipend of one hundred pounds for the year, no more than £7,000 in today’s money. He was ordained as a priest in another service at Durham in 1897 at the age of just twenty-four. Reynolds was young, but appears to have had no doubts about his future.
On the last day of August in 1897 Reynolds was sitting at his desk in Darlington. The young curate was struggling over a letter he was writing to a clergyman in another part of the country. He had never met Reverend John Green but had heard about his plans to form a community of monks who would go into the world to help the poor and lost souls of society find meaning in a religious life. Green, a Cistercian monk in Gloucestershire, was searching for young men who might be interested in helping him with this work, and had contacted Reynolds via a mutual friend.
Reynolds’s letter to Green survives today deep inside a battered chest of documents held in the archives at Douai Abbey in Berkshire. The letter provides some insights into his views at the time. After brief pleasantries, he addresses the subject at hand. ‘I hardly think that the work you write of will suit me,’ he writes sharply. ‘To begin with I could not leave my work here easily until next spring or summer, of course you want someone earlier.’24 But timing was the least of Reynolds’s obstacles to the plan. He agreed that the Christian faith could help to cure social ills, but did not think Green was being radical enough. ‘I feel very strongly that the religious life is absolutely necessary to restore England to Christ, but I feel that what is wanted at the present time is not an adaptation of monastic life, but the old life as we have it set out in the rule of St Benedict and nothing short of that. At least that is what I should like for myself.’
Reynolds was a purist. ‘My own belief is that men must become religious, that is the first and greatest part of their life, and then work will grow out of their life,’ he wrote. ‘They must come together to lead a particular life and not to do a particular work.’ Having so forcefully expressed his opinions, he remembers he is writing to a man he has not met before. ‘Will you forgive an entire stranger for writing to you in such a fashion as I have done?’ concludes the missive, written by hand over three small pages. ‘Kindly treat this letter in confidence.’
Still a month shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Reynolds was confident enough to write such letters to far more experienced figures in the Christian community. Green’s plan was not for him, but his reference to wanting to live the ‘old life’ shows how he was already looking beyond his work as a curate at St Hilda’s.
He remained at Darlington another year until moving in 1898 to the parish of St Alban’s in Sneinton, Nottingham, again as a curate. During this period both churches were involved in controversies over ‘high’ Anglicanism.25 Reynolds, brought up an Anglo-Catholic, was used to religious practices with which some Church of England congregations were not comfortable. The young curate may not have played a leading role in the controversy, but he was unable to cure the tension. It was the clearest harbinger yet of his future conversion to Catholicism.
The controversies echoed a similar situation
that occurred around the same time in the family home in Bromley, which Reynolds had left behind. In 1896, Dorothy Mousley, the orphaned daughter of Frederick Reynolds’s sister, Polly, went to live with the Reynolds family. During her studies she became greatly attracted by Roman Catholicism and wrote to a Franciscan friar to seek advice. At this point Frederick, afraid his daughters would be swayed by such views, sent Dorothy to a family in Wales to cure her of her ‘popish leanings’.26 Though Frederick brought his children up as Anglo-Catholics, indicating some sympathy with the church of Rome, he firmly wished them to remain within the Anglican church. But the damage, as Frederick saw it, was done. All five of his children later converted to Catholicism. Leslie and Ronald, both of whom were active in Catholic social work in London, took the step in 1904, while Rothay and his sisters followed at intervals in subsequent years.27
Reynolds grew increasingly restive during his time as a curate with the two northern churches. His slim build and Cambridge-bred aura of intelligence belied a restless nature and a constant search for new opportunities. He was a young man utterly committed to his faith, which he viewed as the ‘first and greatest part’ of his life, and his correspondence with Green demonstrates how he was not afraid to speak out. But he found the narrow, procedural debate over Church of England practices incredibly stifling. It was just a distraction getting in the way of the real purpose of religion as he saw it: the transformation of society from the ground up. His idea to achieve this was a rebirth of monasticism, with men coming together to live the simple life as set out by Benedict, an Italian saint born in the fifth century. The debates within Christianity before and after the reformation would disappear, Reynolds thought, if the religion reverted to its early roots.
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