English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  BASIL HUME: THE ENGLISH CARDINAL

  The only time I met Basil Hume was at a wedding rehearsal in a South Kensington flat. I was the best man, and the newly elected Abbot of Ampleforth was putting us through our paces. He had been housemaster to the bride’s brothers at the school attached to the Abbey, and they had been star pupils, one a great rugger player and the other a scholarly altar boy. As Basil finished pushing us this way and that in the sitting room of Alexandra Court, surroundings rather too fully furnished for fleshing out the moves in a nuptial Mass, I became aware of an overwhelming aura emanating from the gaunt Benedictine, at that moment, I think, discussing the prospects of next year’s Ampleforth First XV. Even in my unregenerate state I recognized the unmistakable odour of sanctity, but not that alone. There was also present an equally unmistakable schoolmasterly aroma, but perhaps more potent than either of these – or so it seemed in the midst of this voluble Scots-Peruvian family – was the cool dew of Englishness that he exuded.

  Hume was always unashamedly what he was, never pretended to be less or to be other. He confessed quite readily that the eight years he spent as housemaster of St Bede’s were the happiest of his life. When he met the BBC war correspondent Kate Adie in Rome, and complimented her on her hat, and she said lamely that she never normally wore hats but when in Rome . . . he interrupted her: ‘Oh no my dear, you must never feel that. Always remember that you are English, it’s a very proud thing to be’. Yet like many super-Englishmen, he was himself scarcely of English descent. His mother, Mimi, was a French girl who had fled from Lille with her family to escape the advancing German army and fell in love, at the age of eighteen, with a 35-year-old Border Scot, Dr William Hume, who was billeted next door to them in the Pas de Calais while working in the British military hospital at Boulogne. They were married in the Pyrenees, because Mimi’s father was serving as military attaché at the Spanish Court. After producing two daughters, Mimi prayed that her next child should be a boy, and at her confessor’s suggestion promised that, if her wish were granted, she would do her best to see that he became a priest – all a common enough story in a Catholic royalist family, but not exactly in the English tradition. By the age of sixteen, George, as he was christened, was already flirting with the Dominicans. And in September 1941, just turned eighteen, he became a novice at Ampleforth, taking the monastic name of Basil.

  Thus from the time he entered the school in 1933 to the moment he resigned as abbot to become Archbishop of Westminster in 1976, Ampleforth was the only world he knew, apart from a brief curacy in the local village and his years studying at Oxford and in Belgium. No more cloistered preparation for the leadership of Britain’s Roman Catholics could be imagined. He had not been a bishop, he had not travelled much, he had minimal experience of parish work. Yet in the eyes of the world he was a triumphant success, conveying to Catholics, Protestants and nonbelievers alike an image of the Christian vocation unrivalled in England in the twentieth century. Above all, he managed almost instinctively to complete the integration of the Catholic Church into English life. It is easy now to forget how bleak and rigid the separation between the Churches used to be. Sir William Hume, as he became, never darkened the door of a Catholic church after the baptism of his elder daughter, preferring the golf course for his Sunday communion. The first Anglican service Basil ever attended was his father’s funeral in 1960. Anthony Howard, the son of a Church of England clergyman, cannot recall a Roman Catholic priest ever crossing the threshold of any vicarage or rectory his family lived in. And to an earlier generation, it would have seemed extraordinary, too, that an outsider such as Howard, who describes himself as ‘a wistful agnostic’ and who is best known as a political columnist and former editor of the New Statesman, should have been invited by Hume’s literary executors to write Hume’s life.

  But it was a perceptive decision, for what made Hume such a memorable primate was not his theological originality (of which he claimed to have none) or even his pastoral energies, though these were creditable enough. What imprinted him on the map was his graceful negotiation of the relations between faith and country. And even if the secret of Hume’s charm remains elusive, Howard is an alert and knowledgable guide to the political and ecclesiastical background to this crucial dimension of Hume’s twenty-three years at Westminster. Encounters between local loyalties and the supranational claims of the universal Church are always pregnant with the possibilities of misunderstanding, suspicion and open conflict; but nowhere more so than in England, even when the twilight of faith might seem reason enough for the Churches to huddle together for warmth. Even Hume’s near-perfect pitch let him down once, when he incautiously talked in an interview with the Tablet of his hopes for ‘the conversion of England’ after what he saw as a precipitate decision by the Church of England to ordain women. This let loose some triumphal effusions from overexcited Catholic commentators and even one or two counterblasts from intemperate Protestants (including me). Hume rushed to explain that he had been misinterpreted and the row was soon forgotten, as both the hopes and the fears proved to be exaggerated.

  Howard chronicles Hume’s long reign with clarity and concision, disentangling the story of the cardinal’s sustained and successful campaign to establish that the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven had been the victims of miscarriages of justice, and of his patient efforts to allow Mgr Bruce Kent to continue leading CND. Howard is particularly good on the machinations which brought a shy schoolmaster-monk to Westminster, to the great surprise of the general public but not of insiders. For it was an outrageously Establishment coup. The campaign for Hume was started off by articles in the Sunday Times and the Economist, the latter by the magazine’s editor, Andrew Knight, an old Ampleforth pupil. The Duke of Norfolk and other assorted patrician recusants put their muscle behind Basil, some of their palms no doubt having felt the smack of his ferula, a curious whalebone instrument of punishment at St Bede’s. When the Apostolic Delegate, Bruno Heim, was trying urgently to get in touch with Hume to tell him the news of his elevation, he could call on his next-door neighbour who happened to be not only Hume’s brother-in-law, but also secretary to the cabinet. Most extraordinary of all, Mgr Heim liked to claim in later years that the appointment was clinched when he called on the Archbishop of Canterbury, who told him that the Abbot of Ampleforth was the only man for the job – a meeting, as Howard says, inconceivable at any other time since the Reformation.

  Thus Hume was both the product and the symbol of a great rapprochement. He was surfing a wave, but nobody could have surfed it better. Yet this was not how he himself looked back on his time. He always felt that he was overestimated, and lamented that he had failed to pass on a healthy and happy Church to his successor. As in other Churches in Britain and in Catholic communities elsewhere in Europe, attendance at Mass fell rapidly and the number of vocations dwindled to vanishing point. Only the ordination of women, which was such a setback to hopes of ecumenical progress, helped to bolster the Anglican priesthood. Hume himself had no strong objection to women priests: ‘I personally, if the authorities of my Church agreed to the ordination of women, would have no problem with that. But I am a man under authority’. He did chafe under that authority, however loyally he upheld it. He was particularly disheartened by the Pope’s rejection of the Liverpool National Pastoral Congress, the brainchild of Archbishop Derek Worlock, to conservative Catholics the object of unrelenting suspicion and loathing. The Easter People, as its report was entitled, expressed in public for the first time the views of 2000 Catholic clergy and laity, views which turned out to be startlingly open and tolerant on most of the vexed issues of the day, from birth control to the reception of non-Catholics at Mass. Hume personally presented a copy to John Paul II at Castel Gandolfo, only to see the Holy Father wave it away impatiently without reading it. Hume’s tussles with the future Pope Benedict XVI on the subject of homosexuality were no more productive. Here I think Howard’s treatment is a little bland, giving the impression that Hume
was speaking for a united English Catholic community against an implacable Roman Curia. The truth is that there was a war on inside English Catholicism too, and Howard underplays the hostility of conservative Catholics, especially in the media, who made up in ferocity what they lacked in numbers.

  But what impressed people about Hume was not his public pronouncements on matters of doctrine or discipline, which tended to be both rare and guarded. What caught and held the attention was his unfeigned humility, his willingness to admit he was wrong, and his limitless capacity to forgive. He even made a firm friend of his contemporary, later a senior courtier, who had in 1941 accused him of cowardice for becoming a monk rather than joining up, and at the end of hostilities wrote to him saying, ‘You can come out now – it’s quite safe’. Nor could Hume be dismissed as an Establishment sycophant. Long after Margaret Thatcher had left Number 10, when he was driving past Downing Street he would chant ‘Maggie Out! Maggie Out!’ Above all, he conveyed a sense of human fragility, an unguarded vulnerability, which both made people feel that he was like them and so could speak to them, and also reminded them of what they took to be the original spirit of the Church.

  This appearance of fragility was deceptive. Basil Hume was more robust than he looked or than he felt himself to be. In his early years as a monk he had experienced what is known as ‘aridity’, a sense of God’s absence. He willingly admitted that he would like to have been married and, when asked whether he often thought about it, he answered ‘Yes, every day’. Yet in the long run his vocation seems to have been as strong as his wiry physique, and his will fully adequate to the demands made on it. Howard sums up by saying that Cardinal Hume’s two great achievements were ‘to identify English Catholicism with English culture’ and ‘to symbolise Christian values in an increasingly sceptical society’. This is true enough, but it is perhaps a little tamely phrased. For the frisson that Basil Hume generated was more unnerving than Anthony Howard conveys. He was the witness, not only or not so much to the truth of the religion he happened to be born into, as to a possibility of life that seemed no longer available, and his voice was like the whistle of a train that stopped running years ago but which you can sometimes hear at night on the far side of the valley.

  THE RED DEAN

  In his prime, Dr Hewlett Johnson was one of the most famous men in the world. Almost from the moment he was made Dean of Canterbury in 1931, he became instantly recognizable everywhere as the Red Dean. His faith in the Communist Party, and in Stalin in particular, was unshakable. Purges and famines, executions and persecutions passed him by. Though he never saw the need actually to join the Party, he remained a tankie to the last, until he was finally winkled out of the deanery in 1963, when he was pushing ninety.

  The only occasion in his whole life when he admitted to experiencing doubt was in the early 1890s, when he was an engineering student at Owens College, the forerunner of Manchester University. He had retained the biblical certainties of childhood, and was knocked sideways by a lecture given by Professor Dawkins, the eminent Darwinian: ‘I turned from the lecture room with a passive face and a calm voice. But within there was tumult and utter darkness. The evolution theory was true – of this I was convinced. And it made the story of Genesis and the Bible false.’

  We have barely recovered from this delicious coincidence of surname – the Dawkins in question was the geologist and palaeontologist Sir William Boyd Dawkins, not a direct ancestor, if ancestor at all, of the present carrier of the Darwin meme – before Johnson has recovered from his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence never flags, his melodious voice booms on, wowing sympathetic audiences all over the world. In 1946, already into his seventies, he gave a prizefighter’s salute to a crowd of 30,000 inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing Paul Robeson and Dean Acheson. An awestruck young Alistair Cooke reported in the Guardian that ‘he looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too.

  Never one to underestimate his own impact, he reported to his second wife, Nowell, that a colleague had said he was ‘one of three English public men who could command the greatest audiences everywhere.’ ‘I know it is true,’ he added, while dutifully sharing the credit between the Almighty and the Communist cause. He recorded in his autobiography that when he and the Marxist scientist J. D. Bernal were in an exuberant crowd at the World Peace Conference in Rome in 1959, Bernal turned to him and said: ‘Did you hear that, dean? They are shouting: “An honest priest, he should be our Pope.”’ It’s a thought that might well have crossed the dean’s own mind, feeling as strongly as he did about the imperfections of the Catholic Church, certainly as compared with the unimpeachable performance of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the CPs of China and Cuba too.

  His self-assurance was anchored in a happy family, where untroubled faith went hand in hand with an untroubled income from Johnson’s Wire Works of Manchester. The firm was founded in 1791 and continues to this day as AstenJohnson, exporting papermaking machinery to fifty-six countries. Hewlett, born in 1874, felt quite at home with the paternalism which could flourish within a firm that remained in the hands of a single family, though he deplored ‘the harder and less human atmosphere’ which came with technological change. He didn’t disdain the Johnson’s dividends he received, or the settlement from his first wife’s father which came to him on her death.

  During the General Strike, his sympathies were of course with the miners, though one of his uncles, Alfred Hewlett, was chairman of the Mining Owners’ Federation and another, William Hewlett, was chairman of the Wigan Coal Company. I am not sure whether the Hewlett brothers were included in Lord Birkenhead’s celebrated comment that ‘it would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not had frequent occasion to meet the owners.’

  In 1952, when many capitalists were still strapped after the war, Johnson owned four flats and three garages in Canterbury, two properties in the nearby village of Charing, two more in South-east London and a holiday home in North Wales, where Nowell and their two daughters had taken refuge during the war. He also possessed a nicely spread portfolio, which included holdings not only in Johnson’s Wire Works but in Lonrho, not yet unmasked as the unacceptable face of capitalism. The prize money of £10,000 (perhaps £200,000 in today’s money) from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake.

  John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed the rest of him are easier to track. But it was politics rather than saintliness which got him the deanery, through the rare coincidence of a Labour prime minister in the shape of Ramsay MacDonald and a leftish archbishop of York, William Temple. This is an excellent biography, crisp, sometimes cutting, but never less than fair and always as sympathetic as humanly possible to its subject even in his most maddening moments. Aided by access to the dean’s archive, Butler brings out all Johnson’s good humour and generosity of spirit. In everything bar his politics, he was a rather traditional Anglican dean, broad in his theology, simple in his faith. He enjoyed food and wine and family life, gave his money away to anyone down on their luck, believed that his cathedral should be a place of light and beauty, filled it with flowers and revived the choir school. Left to himself, he would have introduced incense too. He was also the first prelate since Archbishop Baldwin in the twelfth century to argue that Canterbury should have its own university.

  He was a brave and restless man, exulting in travel, adventure and his own celebrity. When the Germans repeatedly bombed Canterbury, he strode about the debris with relish, writing to Nowell that ‘I would not have missed this for
anything . . . The Cathedral looks glorious without its windows.’ One is reminded of Churchill saying to Margot Asquith in the darkest days of the Great War that ‘I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me.’ On VE Day, the dean was in Moscow with Stalin. Two weeks later, he was among the first British observers to enter Auschwitz. He wrote about what he saw with a superb angry eloquence.

  But there is no doubt that Johnson was gullible. Butler does not mention the period in the 1930s when he strode up and down the country preaching that Major Douglas and Social Credit were destined to ‘win the world’, until he discovered that Douglas had come out for Franco. Like many egomaniacs, he was extremely interested in his own health, and always ready to swallow the latest dietary fad. He was convinced that a Romanian doctor called Anna Aslan had discovered a drug, Gerovital H3, which could reverse aging and restore hearing loss. The drug turned out to be nothing more mysterious than procaine hydrochloride, now better known as Novocain, the local anaesthetic used by dentists. But Johnson continued to swear by it until his death.

  After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets to the end of the line, please.’ And he toed that line all the way. Victor Gollancz, who published Johnson’s bestseller The Socialist Sixth of the World in 1939, tried to make Johnson add something critical about the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which had just been signed, but he merely blamed Finland and defended the pact as a regrettable but necessary expedient. After the war, he gave evidence in support of French communist journalists when they were sued by Victor Kravchenko for alleging that he had invented his stories of Christian churches being persecuted in the Soviet Union. In the same year, 1949, he sided with the Hungarian secret police when they arrested Cardinal Mindszenty on trumped-up charges of treason. Later on, he remained deaf to Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress and defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary.