Patrick Comerford
In recent days, I have been visiting a number of churches in the Rugeley area that I first got to know when I was about 19 or 20. They include Saint Michael’s Church in Brereton and the now-closed Brereton Methodist Church; the old and new Saint Augustine’s Church, the ruins of the early mediaeval parish church, now known as the ‘Old Chancel’, and the early 19th century church across the street that replaced it in the 1820s; and Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Catholic Churchin Rugeley, with its many associations with the Wolseley family.
Some of my most cherished memories from those youthful days in the 1970s are of Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House in Armitage, where the Dominicans once had a priory, only ten minutes from Lichfield and five minutes from Brereton and Rugeley, and on the edges of Armitage village. My friends from Rugeley and Brereton often brought me there with them to the Folk Masses on Sundays.
So, when I was on the bus from Brereton to Lichfield last week, I hopped off near Armitage, went for a walk along the canal towpaths, and visited Hawkesyard Hall and Spode House.
Hawkesyard has been known over the generations by a variety of names, including Hawkesyard Hall, Armitage Park, Spode House and Hawkesyard Priory. The estate dates from the 13th century, and has links to the Rugeley family, the poet and author Nathaniel Lister, Josiah Spode the potter, and Sir Robert Peel – and even some tenuous links in the dim distant past through the Rugeley family with the Comberford family.
The story of the estate dates back to 1270 when the land was used for hunting. Simon de Rugeley commissioned the construction on Hawkesyard Hall in 1337. The first house owned by the Rugeley family was a moated manor closer to the River Trent, about half a mile west of Armitage Church.
Anne Comberford of Comberford, Tamworth and Wednesbury, who was a daughter of William Comberford, and was born in 1609. In 1634, she married Benjamin Rugeley of Dunstall in Tatenhill, a younger brother of Colonel Simon Rugeley, a key leader of the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.
Benjamin Rugeley was a younger son of Richard Rugeley (1564-1623) of Shenstone and his wife Mary Rugeley, daughter and co-heir of Thomas Rugeley (1539-1623) of Hawkesyard. Benjamin’s father, Richard Rugeley, died at Hawkesyard in 1623 and was buried in Mavesyn Ridware.
Benjamin’s eldest brother, Colonel Simon Rugeley of Shenstone and Tatenhill (1598-1666), was a member of the parliamentary committee at Stafford. He inherited Hawkesyard but sold it to Sir Richard Skeffington of Fisherwick, whose family eventually acquired Comberford Hall. The original Hawkesyard Hall lay in ruins by 1660, and was pulled down in 1665.
The estate was bought in 1759 by Nathaniel Lister (1725-1793), poet and author. Lister renamed the Hawkesyard estate as Armitage Park in 1760, and in 1761 in Lichfield Cathedral he married Martha Fletcher, a Lichfield heiress and daughter of John Fletcher, Senior Proctor of the Diocese of Lichfield. They rebuilt the house in its present location as a Gothic-style mansion in red-brick stuccoed with ashlar and standing on the sandstone hill above the site of the original hall.
Lister also bought a house on Beacon Street in Lichfield in 1780, and in 1791 he acquired the lease on Erasmus Darwin’s house beside the Cathedral Close. When he died in 1793, Armitage Park was inherited by his son, John Fletcher Lister.
Mary Spode, widow of the potter Josiah Spode III, bought the estate in 1839 for her six-year-old son Josiah Spode IV (1823-1893), great-grandson of Josiah Spode and the fourth generation of the pottery dynasty but the first not to work in the family business.
The hall was altered and extended, and the cast-iron orangery was added, as well manicured gardens, statues and other buildings. Cellars and six underground tunnels were cut out of the rock by Richard Benton to allow the estate workers to move quickly around the locality, and two tunnels were said to lead to Lichfield and Armitage.
When the Spode family lived there, the hall was known as Spode House and Josiah Spode was appointed High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1850. Mary died in 1860, and Josiah’s wife Helen died eight years later. Both are buried at Saint John the Baptist Church, Armitage, where Josiah was the organ player and warden. Josiah Spode of Hawkesyard also gave a new organ to Lichfield Cathedral that was installed in 1860 to complement the restoration of the quire by Sir George Gilbert Scott.
Despite these links with Lichfield Cathedral and Saint John’s Church, Armitage, Josiah Spode became a Roman Catholic in 1885, along with his niece Helen Gulson who lived with him at Hawkesyard. At the beginning of Lent 1886, they attended a parish retreat at Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Catholic Churchin Rugeley given by Father Pius Cavanagh. Father Pius soon became in Gulson’s words ‘our best friend and advisor’. Towards the end of 1888, both Josiah Spode and Helen Gulson were clothed as tertiaries by Father Pius in their private chapel, becoming lay Dominicans.
WhenJosiah Spode died in 1893, he asked that Helen should continue to live at Hawkesyard until she died, after which the estate would pass to the English Dominican Order.
However, Helen decided to move out of the hall in 1894 and into Gulson House on the estate, and work on the new priory and church began immediately. Some accounts say her decision was inspired by an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the grounds of the estate, and that the altar of the new priory church of Saint Thomas Aquinas was placed over the site of her vision.
The Dominicans built a new priory within the grounds in 1898, and the priory church was designed by the architect Edward Goldie (1856-1921). Josiah Spode and Helen Gulson were buried in a small chapel within the priory church, and outside in the gardens simple concrete crosses marked the graves of the Dominican community.
The priory was home to a community of nuns until the early 20th century. The convent then became a priory, and the Dominican monks or friars ran a boarding school for young aspiring Dominicans and a theological college.
I knew Hawkesyard Priory and Spode House well in my late teens and early 20s, when the Philosophical Enquiry Group was still meeting there with Father Columba Ryan and involved the Limerick-born philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001). At the time, the Folk Masses in the priory chapel were popular with many of my friends from Rugeley, Brereton and Lichfield.
The friars there in those heady days in the early 1970s included Father Conrad Pepler (1908-1993), the founding warden of Spode House, where he ran the first Catholic conference centre in England. We did not know then that it was he who provided a Catholic funeral in Cambridge in 1951 for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a mentor to both Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband Peter Geach.
The Dominicans at Spode in the early 1970s also included Father Columba Ryan (1916-2009), philosopher, university chaplain and peace activist, who took part in many CND marches and protests in London. He was also the bursar at the Hawkesyard Priory, and in the 1950s and 1960s he set up the Philosophical Enquiry Group at Spode in 1954.
He was born Patrick Ryan, a son of the Cork-born diplomat Sir Andrew Ryan (1876-1949), the last dragoman in Constantinople (1907-1921). He joined the Dominicans at Woodchester Priory, Gloucestershire, in 1935, took the name Columba, was ordained in 25 July 1941, and completed his DPhil at Oxford in 1946.
He was one of the friars who was on the Peace Pilgrimage to Vézelay in Burgundy, selecting ‘30 strong men’ to carry a heavy wooden cross across France in thanksgiving for the end of World War II. On his return he was instrumental in founding Student Cross, the annual Holy Week pilgrimage to Walsingham.
Father Columba was teaching philosophy at Hawkesyard Priory when he set up the Philosophical Enquiry Group in 1954. This annual meeting for Catholic philosophers continued to take place at Spode House for 20 years, until 1974.
Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach were among the first philosophers invited to those gatherings at Spode House. They remained leading figures of the group for the 20 years it lasted. They were Wittgenstein’s literary executors and were buried beside him in Cambridge. Other participants the Philosophical Enquiry Group included Sir Anthony Kenny of Oxford and Father Herbert McCabe (1926-2001), editor of New Blackriars. Father Columba had been the novice master of Herbert McCabe, who is attributed with once saying, ‘If you don’t love, you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.’
Father Columba remained true to his values and joined the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in London on 15 February 2003 in protest at the invasion of Iraq. He continued preaching until shortly before he died at Saint Dominic’s Priory at Haverstock Hill, London, on 4 August 2009, aged 93. It was then the Feast of Saint Dominic, and it was the church in which he had been baptised as an infant; he had just celebrated 68 years of priesthood. His brother John Ryan (1921-2009), who had created the character of Captain Pugwash for the Eagle in 1950, had died two weeks earlier on 22 July 2009 at 88.
Meanwhile, the priory and conference centre at Spode House had closed and the last Dominicans moved out in 1988. When they left Hawkesyard, the hall had fallen into disrepair and had been boarded up. Still, in June 1998, the choristers of Lichfield Cathedral, directed by Andrew Lumsden made a recording, Begone Dull Care (Lammas Records, LAMM 107D), in Hawkesyard Priory.
Hawkesyard was bought in 1999 by Relaine Estates Ltd which was determined to return the building and the estate. The company returned to the original name of Hawkesyard and set about restoring the building, partly relying on photographs from the collection at Shugborough Hall, the seat of the Earls of Lichfield, halfway between Rugeley and Stafford.
The transformation of the hall and other buildings was completed in 2007. The former priory building has been a nursing home since 1989, and the grounds have been turned into Saint Thomas’s Priory Golf Club. Hawkesyard Estate is now a popular venue for civil weddings, golf, conferences, and for three successive years it was the home of the Wolseley National Car Rally.
After visiting Hawkesyard estate, I lingered for a while by the canal towpath, sipping a glass of wine in the April sunshine at the Ash Tree, before continuing on the bus journey to Lichfield, for lunch at the Hedgehog and Evening Prayer in Lichfield Cathedral.
I remember a lengthy lunch in the Hedgehog in Lichfield a few years ago, when some of us recalled so many of our friends who loved Hawkesyard, the folk masses there and the extended Sunday afternoons that inevitably followed.
We talked that afternoon about the underground tunnels at Hawkesyard, including the tunnels said to lead to Lichfield and Armitage. We never seemed to wander down to the canal, as far as I recall. But was I really the one who was so fearless to lead a group of us through those unexplored tunnels and vaults? And are the tunnels still there?
