Thame was once the home of William Butler Yeats and has a large number of old timber framed buildings

William Butler Yeats once lived at Cuttle Brook House in Thame, where his son Senator Michael was born in 1921 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

I caught the bus to Thame from Aylesbury recently, mainly because I wanted to see Saint Mary’s Church, which I had glimpsed from the bus before, an impressive sight looking across Church Meadow and the grounds of Thame Cricket Club.

But I had also heard of its connections with the poet William Butler Yeats and a peculiar link with Evelyn Waugh, and on previous bus journeys I had noticed a larger number of timber framed pubs and other buildings, many dating back to the 15th century, including the old almshouses.

Thame is a market town in south Oxfordshire, about 21 km (13 miles) east of Oxford and 16 km (10 miles) south-west of Aylesbury It takes its name from the River Thame o the north side of the town, marking the county boundary of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The town has population of about 12,000.

The Tithe Barn was once the Court Barn belonging to the now demolished Manorial Court House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Thame dates from the Anglo-Saxon era and appears in the Domesday Book as belonging to the Bishop of Lincoln.

Thame Abbey was founded by the Cistercians in 1138, the parish church of Saint Mary the Virgin dates from the 13th century, and the nearby Prebendal House was there by 1234.

The Tithe Barn in front of the church gate is a long low building where a brick base supports a timber frame with herring-bone brick filling and was used for the storage of the church dues or tithes. It was called the Court Barn in the 15th century and belonged to the now demolished Court House, where the manorial court was held.

The Bird Cage dates from the 14th century and was first built as the Market House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Bird Cage pub on the High Street is a picturesque double-jettied pub that dates from the 14th century. It was built originally as the Market House with an open lower storey. It sits at the centre of the old market place and would have dominated the view from the western entrance to the town. It has been as an inn since the 16th century.

The Six Bells, despite its mock-Tudor exterior, has a 15th century timber-frame structure. It faces the former almshouses and Church Road leading up to Saint Mary’s Church.

The Thatch pub, also on High Street, dates from ca 1550 and is made up from a charming group of cottages. It was developed into a tea room many years ago, and became a popular restaurant and hotel, yet managed to preserve its 16th century origins. It became more popular in 2007 as the prize in the television programme ‘The Restaurant’.

The almshouses were founded by Richard Quatremain in 1447 and re-founded by John Williams in 1559 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

In Tudor times, a prominent local magnate and courtier, John Williams, 1st Baron Williams of Thame, became the lord of the Manor of Thame, and the long-time links with the Bishops of Lincoln and Lincoln Cathedral came to an end. His tomb dominates the chancel of Saint Mary’s Church.

Williams re-founded the almshouses on Church Road, originally a foundation of Richard Quatremain in 1447, when he founded the chantry or guild of Saint Christopher.

Williams re-founded the almshouses in 1559 for five poor men and one poor woman. They are now privately owned and have turned their backs to Church Road. Opposite the almshouses is an attractive row of 18th century cottages.

Williams died in 1559, and his will established the local grammar school, built in 1569-1571 next to the almshouses. The school moved to Oxford Road in 1880 and in 1971 it became a comprehensive school, now known as Lord Williams’s School.

The Grammar School was endowed by John Williams and built in 1569-1571 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

During the English Civil War in the 1640s, Thame was occupied in turn by Royalists and by the Parliamentarians.

The Old Nag’s Head, a High Street pub with a timber frame west elevation dating from the 15th century, was known as the King’s Head until, during the Civil War, a supporter of Charles I was hanged from the sign by Parliamentary soldiers.

After the Battle of Chalgrove Field in 1643, Colonel John Hampden, who had attended the grammar school, died of his wounds at the house of Ezekiel Browne, later to become the Greyhound Inn.

A royalist was hanged by Parliamentarians at the the King’s Head, now the Old Nag’s Head (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The bare-knuckle prize-fighter James Figg was born in Thame in 1684 and had his early prize fights in the former Greyhound Inn on High Street. He had become the world’s first boxing champion by 1719, winning many fights in his booth at Marylebone Fields, London. The Greyhound Inn was renamed the James Figg in his honour in the 21st century.

Many of the buildings in the boat-shaped High Street were re-faced in the 18th century with modern façades built of locally produced salt glazed bricks. Lancastrian Cottage at No 22 Upper High Street is a reminder of what lies behind many of the grand façades in the town.

When John Wesley preached in Thame in the late 18th century, the congregation was so large that the floor of the building gave way, and the crowd fell to the lower floor.

The Town Hall was built in 1888 and is the third on the site (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

There has been a Market Hall on the site of Thame Town Hall since 1509, and the present Town Hall is the third building on this site. It was built in 1888, funded by public subscriptions to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1887.

The Victorian bandstand behind the former almshouses is a legacy of a grand ballroom from the 19th century.

The War Memorial in the Memorial Gardens was unveiled by the former Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1921.

The Six Bells, faces the former almshouses, has its Tudor exterior, but has a 15th century timber-frame structure (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) lived for a short time at Cuttle Brook House, 42 High Street, a good example of an 18th century town house. The poet returned to Ireland, became an Irish senator in 1922, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. His son, the late Senator Michael Yeats (1921-1973), was born in Cuttle Brook House on 22 August 1921.

Another resident of Thame with literary association from that time was the writer John Fothergill (1876-1957), who owned and managed the Spread Eagle Hotel in 1922-1931. Evelyn Waugh, who was a regular visitor, described Fothergill as ‘Oxford's only civilising influence’ and named the Spread Eagle in Brideshead Revisited.

A small hoard of late mediaeval coins and rings found near the Prebendal House and beside the River Thame in 1940, including an ornate ecclesiastical ring with a small reliquary and a cross with two horizontal sections, similar to the Cross of Lorraine. Thame Town Council has incorporated the cross into the town emblem.

The Greyhound Inn on High Street has been renamed after James Figg (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees and his wife Dwina Murphy-Gibb lived in Prebendal House in Thame until he died in 2012. His brother Andy Gibb also lived in Prebendal House before he died in 1988.

The Robin Gibb Gallery opened in Thame Museum in 2022. The museum was originally built as the town’s county court house in 1861, and it was bought by Thame Town Council in 2005 to house Thame Museum.

Thame has featured many times as a location in episodes of the Midsomer Murders television drama series as the fictional town of Causton. The Tuesday market still takes place in the High Street, as do the annual fairs, rooted in medieval tradition.
I also visited Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church and some of the other church buildings in Thame – but more about these in the days to come, hopefully.

The Main Street in Thame, a market town on the boundary of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Anne’s, Soho, the London church that rose from the ashes after the Blitz and lengthy closure

Saint Anne’s Church, Soho, and Saint Anne’s Gardens, a public park that opens onto the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street, London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

In my recent self-guided ‘church crawling’ tour of half a dozen or so churches and chapels in Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia, Soho and Mayfair, one of the churches I visited was Saint Anne’s Church in Soho, including the remaining tower of the original church facing onto Wardour Street and the modern church facing onto Dean Street.

Saint Anne’s was known in the past for its musical traditions and its literary associations with writers and poets, including Dorothy L Sayers, Rose Macaulay, Iris Murdoch, TS Eliot and John Betjeman. The church is also associated with the homeless charity Centrepoint and was known in the past for its radical and innovative priests, exemplified in the life and ministry of the late Kenneth Leech.

Although the church was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, the church community survived through the post-war decades and the church was rebuilt in the 1990s. Parts of the churchyard around the west end with the surviving tower are Saint Anne’s Gardens, a public park that opens onto the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street.

The first certain reference to the church is in the minutes of a meeting of the vestry of Saint Martin in the Fields, in August 1676. A few months earlier, in April, the foundation stone had been laid of a new church in the parish, which was in 1685 to become the church of the parish of Saint James, Westminster.

No grant of the site by the Crown to an individual or corporate body seems to be recorded and its appropriation to church use seems to have been effected simply by an Act of Parliament in 1678 that authorised the establishment of the parish and stated the boundaries of the church and churchyard site. Later, the parish would give rise to two new churches, dedicated to Saint Thomas and Saint Peter, but they became part of the same parish again in 1945.

Saint Anne’s Church, Soho, was consecrated by Bishop Henry Compton of London in 1686 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Anne’s Church in Soho was consecrated on 21 March 1686, the Sunday before Lady Day, by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, as the parish church of the parish of Saint Anne Within the Liberty of Westminster, created from part of the parish of Saint Martin in the Fields. The ceremony was interrupted by dinner and was followed by the consecration of an additional cemetery for the parish of Saint Martin’s on the site of a former Greek church.

The parish was dedicated to Saint Anne because Compton had been tutor to Princess Anne, who later became Queen Anne. Construction began in 1677 on a plot that was then in the countryside and known as Soho Fields.

It seems the original church was designed by William Talman, an architect who worked under Sir Christopher Wren. Saint Anne’s was a basilica, having a nave of five bays terminated by an eastern apse, serving as a chancel, and flanked by north and south aisles containing galleries that were linked by a gallery across the west end of the nave.

The interior was 64 ft wide, the nave was 31 ft clear, and 78 ft long, excluding the chancel apse which added a further 18 ft. The chancel apse was flanked by vestibules with staircases to the galleries, that were also reached by open staircases at the west end of each aisle.

A square tower projected centrally from the west front, but the church remained without a spire for 32 years. The church tower was only completed in 1718, with the addition of a timber spire.

Saint Anne’s House at 57 Dean Street was first occupied ca 1705 by the parish watch-house, and later also by the parish fire-engine-house and vestry-room.

Inside the present modern chapel at Saint Anne’s Church in Soho (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

In its early years, the church had a fashionable congregation, including the Prince of Wales, later George II, and the actress Hester Davenport, who was buried in the churchyard in 1717.

The tower had become unstable by 1800 and the new tower was completed by 1801, its bell chamber’s Portland stonework by March 1803, and its copper cupola by May 1803. The tower’s ground floor room of the tower became the parish vestry room, and was later used as a robing room for the clergy.

Canon Nugent Wade (1809-1893), who was the Rector of Saint Anne’s in 1845-1891, was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, and was ordained deacon (1832) and priest (1833) in Saint Fethlimidh’s Cathedral, Kilmore, Co Cavan. Before coming to Soho, Wade was the Anglican chaplain in Elsinore.

AW Blomfield rearranged the interior for Wade in 1866. Although Wade faced opposition in Saint Anne’s for his ‘Puseyite’ sympathies, he made Saint Anne’s a gathering place for the new generation of Anglo-Catholics in central London. He founded the Saint Barnabas House of Charity in Soho, which ministered to prostitutes, and Saint Mary’s Crown Street, an Anglo-Catholic centre in a slum district within the parish of Soho.

The Revd Basil Graham Bourchier (1881-1934) was the Rector of Saint Anne’s in 1930-1933. During World War I, while he was a chaplain with the Red Cross in Belgium, he was arrested by the Germans as a spy. But his death sentence was commuted, he escaped, and became an army chaplain.

Bourchier was a flamboyant preacher and was satirised as the Revd Cyril Boom Bagshaw in ASM Hutchinson’s If winter comes (1921) and as a ‘totally preposterous parson in Evelyn Waugh’s A little learning (1964). He resigned before being enfolded in a major scandal about his sexuality and his inappropriate relationships with choirboys. Little Dean Street in Soho was renamed Bourchier Street in 1937.

The complex at Saint Anne’s has survived the Blitz and proposals for demolition (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Revd Gilbert Shuldham Shaw (1886-1967), who was the Vicar of Saint Anne’s from 1940, was another Dublin-born priest at Saint Anne’s. He had been baptised by his mother’s uncle, William Conyngham Plunket, Archbishop of Dublin. With his successor Patrick McLaughlin, he is thought to be part of the inspiration for Rose Macaulay’s character of Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg in The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

During World War II, the whole church, apart from the tower, was burned out in the Blitz on the night of 24 September 1940, and the tower was left derelict. Saint Thomas’s, Regent Street, and the adjoining Saint Anne’s House in the Upper Room, later known as the ‘Allen Room’, were used for worship from then on, although Saint Thomas’s has since been demolished.

After the war, Jacques Groag proposed in 1945 keeping the ruins as a war memorial, but by 1949 it was assumed that the church would not be rebuilt. The remains of the east wall were the only significant parts left standing, and they were demolished in 1953. The site was deconsecrated and prepared for sale, and the parish was amalgamated with those of Saint Thomas’s Church, Regent Street, and Saint Peter’s Church, Great Windmill Street, creating the Parish of Saint Anne with Saint Thomas and Saint Peter, centred on Saint Thomas’s.

Dorothy L Sayers was a longtime churchwarden of the parish … her ashes were buried at the base of the tower in 1957 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Despite having no building, from 1941 to 1958, the Saint Anne Society under Patrick McLaughlin encouraged links with the literary world, and the members included Father Gilbert Shaw, JC Winnington-Ingram, Charles Williams, Agatha Christie, TS Eliot, Father Max Petitpierre, Dom Gregory Dix, Arnold Bennett, CS Lewis, Rose Macaulay and Dorothy L Sayers. Others who contributed from time to time included John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, Lord David Cecil, Rebecca West and Christopher Dawson.

Even when there was no church building, the church community remained active in those post-war years, and the tower was used as a chapel for a time in the 1950s. The novelist Dorothy L Sayers was a longtime churchwarden of the parish and member of the Saint Anne’s Society. Her ashes were buried in the base of the tower in 1957.

Father Patrick McLaughlin (1909-1988) was the Rector Saint Anne’s in 1953-1962. He introduced the ‘basilican mode’, in which the priest faces the congregation instead of facing the altar with his back to the congregation. This liturgical innovation was widely adopted in the Church of England some 20 years later. Patrick McLaughlin became a Roman Catholic in 1962.

Saint Anne’s has a long history of being socially inclusive and engaged, exemplified in the life and ministry of Kenneth Leech (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Anne’s has a long history of being socially inclusive and engaged with its diverse and ever-changing community. The Revd Dr Kenneth Leech (1939-2015), who was a curate at Saint Anne’s in 1967-1971, was a priest in the Anglo-Catholic tradition and a socialist, and a leading advocate of contextual theology.

At the heart of his faith was what he called ‘subversive orthodoxy’: the indissoluble union of contemplative spirituality, sacramental worship, orthodox doctrine and social action. He argued that this conjunction of faith and the quest for justice, which points to the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth, is the essential mark of the Christian life and underlies scripture, the teachings of the Church Fathers and the Christian mystical tradition.

He founded the homeless charity Centrepoint in the basement of Saint Anne’s House in December 1969, and it was based at the church until 2023.

The entrance to Saint Anne’s on Dean Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

After many years as a bomb site and car park, the present building was created in 1991 thanks to the tenacity of members of local community. By selling part of the site to build social housing and provide commercial properties, funds were raised to create the community hall and the simple but attractive chapel that extends into the hall on Sundays.

Princess Anne laid the foundation stone of the new complex on 12 March 1990, and it was opened and rededicated on Saint Anne’s Day, 26 July 1991. The new church complex is not an actual reconstruction of the old church and can be varied from a large to a small space. It is set within a community centre and is a community focus.

The tower, which had been partly restored in 1979 by the Soho Society, was fully restored when the whole church was rebuilt in 1990-1991 and is now a Grade II* listed building.

The prize-winning entrance was designed by Lina Viluma and Sherief al Rifa’i and was dedicated in 1996 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the rebuilding of the church, a redesigned entrance on Dean Street, featuring the name of Saint Anne’s in neon lights, was dedicated by the Bishop of London in December 2016 and it ensures the church remains a visible presence in the community.

The new entrance was designed by two UAL London students, Lina Viluma and Sherief al Rifa’i. Their redesign of the entrance won the President’s Award for alterations to a church building in the 2017 Church Architecture Awards. The judges said their design made ‘a dynamic and inviting entrance to the church’.

Saint Anne’s is a thriving church community today and a venue for many local community and charitable events. It also houses the Soho Society, and the anti-homophobic bullying charity Diversity Role Models.

Saint Anne’s also has had its own community coffee shop, Sacred Grounds, since January 2024, on the very site where Centrepoint was founded in 1969.

A double espresso in Sacred Grounds, where Centrepoint was founded in 1969 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Saint Anne’s was once famous for its high musical standards. The church received an organ in 1699 from the Dowager-Queen’s Chapel in Saint James’s Palace. The first organist Dr William Croft wrote the tune ‘Saint Anne’ in 1708, a tune still used for the hymn ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’.

During Wade’s half century at Saint Anne’s, the choir under Sir Joseph Barnby revived the interest in Bach in England, starting with the Christmas Oratorio and Crescendo to the Mathew Passion. Barnby, who was the organist in 1871-1888, introduced the first performance in Britain of Bach’s ‘Saint John Passion’. The first religious service with music broadcast by radio came from Saint Anne’s in the 1920s.

The churchyard, Saint Anne’s Gardens, was leased to Westminster City Council in 1894, having been closed to burials 40 years earlier. It is believed that up to 60,000 bodies are still buried there, and this explains why the ground is so high above the entrance on Wardour Street.

The curious monument to King Theodore of Corsica, who reigned for eight months in 1766 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

One of the few surviving monuments in the churchyard is a curious tablet to King Theodore of Corsica, who reigned briefly from March to November in 1766. It includes a crown in an oval panel above an inscription composed by Horace Walpole. The biography of the soi-disanting was published by Percy Fitzgerald in 1890.

King Theodore’s wife Catalina Sarsfield was the daughter of David Sarsfield of Kilmallock, Co Limerick, a younger brother of Dominick Sarsfield, 4th Viscount Sarsfield, and his French-born wife, Marie d’Athboy. She is sometimes mistakenly said to have been the daughter of Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan, and Lady Honora Burke, but she was part of a different branch of the Sarsfield family.

Below this monument is a stone commemorating the burial in the churchyard of William Hazlitt (1830).

The Revd Simon Buckley has been the Rector of Saint Anne’s, Soho, since 2013, and is a former assistant priest. Previously, he was a professional puppeteer, and worked with the Muppets and the original Spitting Image. The Revd Martha Pennel has been the curate of Saint Anne’s since 2023

• The main service in Saint Anne’s is the Sunday Eucharist at 11am, celebrated with ‘a relaxed dignity’. The regular weekday services include Holy Communion on Tuesday at 1:05 pm and Morning Prayer on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursday at 8:30 am and Evening Prayer at 4:30 pm on Wednesdays. Other services range from Christmas Carol Services and the liturgies of Holy Week, to Prayers at Pride and Soho Parish Sundays.

‘Lord Have Mercy’ … time for prayer in Saint Anne’s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

An insight into how Gormanston Castle has seen many changes over the centuries

Gormanston Castle ... home of the Preston family for 600 years until it was sold to the Franciscan order (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

On Saturday afternoon [1 October 2016], I was part of a small group of people associated with Gormanston College, Co Meath, who were brought on a private tour of Gormanston Castle by Father Ulic Troy, the Rector of Gormanston, following a lecture by the local historian, Brendan Matthews.

As a schoolboy in Gormanston the 1960s, I had been in the castle a few times, and while I never got beyond the ground floor, I was able to admire the great hall and many of the once elegant rooms in the Gothic fantasy built at the end of the 18th century by the Preston family who hold the title of Viscount Gormanston and who lived there from the 14th century.

Gormanston, Co Meath, lies off the M1 between Drogheda and Balbriggan, about 30 km north of Dublin, near the mouth of the River Delvin and close to the border of Co Meath and Co Dublin.

The group of passage graves on either side of the mouth of river Delvin known as the Bremore and Gormanston group is believed by most experts on the passage grave culture in Ireland to mark the arrival of that culture from the Iberian peninsula and to be the precursor of later developments such as the Newgrange cluster.

The Gormanston area is rich in artefacts from the neolithic and later periods. When a gas pipeline was being built between Britain and Ireland, a seven-metre prehistoric dugout was found just offshore at Gormanston strand. Unlike other ancient Irish boats, the Gormanston boat seems to have been of outrigger construction.

Brendan Matthews spoke of how mythology associates the area the stories of Cuchalainn and Emer, and how he had slain 100 men at the river crossing on the Delvin while he was escaping from her father’s fortress at Lusk. Legend also associates the site with the first landings of Saint Patrick.

The first Anglo-Norman lords of the area were the powerful de St Amand family. Alemricus de St Amand bought the land confiscated from the O’Gorman family ca 1230, and his family built the Bridgefoot bridge over the River Devlin that separates Meath and Dublin.

From the 14th century, Gormanston Castle was the seat of the Preston family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

From the 14th century, Gormanston Castle was the seat of the Preston family, a wealthy merchant family who took their name from Preston in Lancashire, and who first arrived in Ireland in the 14th century.

The earliest Preston of note, Roger de Preston, was appointed a judge in the reign of Edward III. he followed his brothers, William and Richard, to Ireland. His son, Sir Robert de Preston, was knighted in 1361, and became the first Lord Gormanston after he bought the Manor of Gormanston in Co Dublin and Co Meath from Almeric de St Amand. Robert de Preston also owned an estate at Carberry, Co Kildare, which was his main residence. He became Lord High Chancellor of Ireland and died in 1396.

His descendent, Sir Robert Preston, was appointed Deputy to Sir John Dynham, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Deputy to Richard, Duke of York, the son of Edward IV. He was given the title of Viscount Gormanston in 1478, making this the premier or oldest title of viscount in the Irish Peerage.

When he died in 1503, his son William Preston succeeded as 2nd Viscount Gormanston. He was Deputy to the Lord Treasurer, Sir James Butler, and was appointed Lord Justice of Ireland in 1525.

His eldest son, Jenico Preston, who became 3rd Viscount Gormanston, married Lady Catherine FitzGerald, daughter of Gerald FitzGerald, 9th Earl of Kildare. The FitzGerald family was almost completely wiped out after the Kildare rebellion led by Lady Catherine’s brother, ‘Silken’ Thomas FitzGerald. ‘Silken’ Thomas and seven of Catherine’s uncles were executed in the Tower of London. Shortly afterwards Jenico Preston voted in Parliament for the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, which declared Henry VIII King of Ireland.

Jenico Preston was succeeded by his son Christopher Preston as 4th Viscount Gormanston. Christopher’s second son, Thomas, was made 1st Viscount Tara. When Thomas Preston, 3rd Viscount Tara, was killed by Sir Francis Blundell the title died with him.

Following the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, Jenico Preston, 5th Viscount Gormanston received additional estates. He married Margaret, daughter of Nicholas St Lawrence, 8th Baron Howth. He died in 1630 and his titles and estates passed to his son, Nicholas Preston, 6th Viscount Gormanston.

In the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Preston family supported Charles I and then the Gaelic lords supported them. At the Catholic Confederation in 1642, Nicholas Preston, 6th Viscount Gormanston, was commander of the Catholic forces and his uncle, Thomas Preston, 1st Viscount Tara, was a Confederate general.

Cromwell’s Avenue is said to mark his route from the shore to the doors of Gormanston Manor (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Nicholas died during the war and was succeeded by his son, Jenico Preston as 7th Viscount Gormanston. When the Royalist and Confederate forces were defeated by the Cromwell’s forces, Jenico went into exile with Charles II and his lands were confiscated.

Legend associates the mouth of the River Devlin with the first landing of Oliver Cromwell, and the line of trees known as Cromwell’s Avenue is said to mark his route from the shore to the doors of Gormanston Manor, demanding its surrender, before marching on to Drogheda in 1649.

The Yew Tree Walk at Gormanston, leading from the castle to the monks’ graveyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

After the restoration of Charles II, Jenico Preston, 7th Viscount Gormanston, returned to Ireland and recovered his lands. The Yew Tree Walk, which is over 300 years old, probably dates from around this time. Local legend and popular tales given currency in my days by schoolboys say Lord Gormanston created this sculpted yew walk as a triangular-shaped cloister in the late 17th century to appease his daughter and to persuade not to become a nun.

In 1690, the 7th viscount supported King James II and fought at the Battle of the Boyne and defended the city of Limerick.

Jenico died in Limerick on 17 March 1691; a month later, on 16 April 1691, he was posthumously declared a traitor. He was indicted for high treason and his lands were forfeited. He had been married twice and had one daughter, Mary, but had no sons. After his death, the title passed to his nephew, Jenico Preston, who used the title of 8th Viscount Gormanston, although this title was not officially recognised.

Like his uncle, this Jenico had no sons and the now outlawed title was passed to his brother, Anthony Preston, 9th Viscount Gormanston, who recovered the family’s possession of the majority of the Gormanston estate under provisions in the Treaty of Limerick. The largest portion of the Gormanston estate papers relate to actions taken against the 9th viscount for money he owed to various parties, including one case about money he borrowed from his uncle and cousin by marriage.

This Anthony Preston married his cousin, Mary Preston, daughter of Jenico, the 7th viscount. Their son Jenico, unofficially inherited the family title as 10th Viscount Gormanston in 1716.

Jenico married Thomasine, daughter of John Barnewall, 11th Baron Trimlestown, and their eldest son, Anthony became 11th Viscount in 1757.

Anthony married Henrietta Robinson from Denston Hall, Suffolk. She was known in the family as Harriot and she signed legal documents by that name. The family papers show the marriage was acrimonious and the couple separated. They moved into separate houses and her husband was given custody of their son Jenico Preston.

When Anthony died in England in 1786, Harriot tried to abduct their 11-year-old son, who had become the 12th Viscount, in order to bring him to England and raise him as a Protestant. Instead, the Preston family secretly sent the child to Liège in Belgium and a custody battle ensued, and Anthony’s brother, John Preston, became the legal guardian of the young viscount.

The Preston family eventually succeeded in having Jenico Preston returned to Gormanston and he remained a Roman Catholic. It said that the Catholic Mass was celebrated in the chapel at Gormanston Castle throughout the Penal Times.

In the former dining room in Gormanston Castle, built in 1790-1820 on the site of the first castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

In 1800, the titles were officially restored to the Preston family and and the 12th Viscount took his seat in the Irish House of Lords on 2 August 1800. Meanwhile, the present Gormanston Castle was built ca 1790-1820 on the site of the castle first built in 1372. At the same time, the family also built Whitewood House, near Nobber, Co Meath.

The 12th viscount also built Silverstream House at Stamullen, Co Meath, for his youngest son, Thomas Preston, ca 1840. Like his father, this Jenico Preston was an active campaigner for Catholic Emancipation. He died in 1860.

In 1794, he married Margaret Southwell, daughter of Thomas, 2nd Viscount Southwell and Sophia (née Walsh). Their eldest son, Edward Preston, became the 13th Viscount Gormanston and was given a seat in the British House of Lords when he was given a new title of Baron Gormanston in 1868. At different times, he was Sheriff of Co Meath and Co Dublin. He married Lucretia, daughter of William Jerningham and their eldest son Jenico Preston, an army officer, succeeded as the 14th Viscount Gormanston.

The 14th viscount was the Governor of various colonies including Tasmania, British Guiana and the Leeward Islands. He also fought in the Indian Mutiny as a lieutenant in the 60th Rifles. Back in Ireland, he was a Commissioner for National Education, High Sheriff of Co Meath and Co Dublin, a Justice for the Peace a Deputy Lieutenant. In 1870, the first authentic game of polo in Ireland was played on Gormanston Strand involving members of the 9th Lancers, who stationed nearby.

He married Ismay Louisa Bellew, daughter of the 1st Baron Bellew, in 1861. She died in 1875 and in 1878 he married his second wife, Georgina Jane Connellan from Co Kilkenny. She carved the large oak piece on the chimney breast in the Great Hall, decorated with the coats-of-arms of the families who were intermarried with the Prestons of Gormanston. The shield immediately above the Gormanston coat-of-arms is flanked with her initials, ‘GG.’

Georgina Gormanston carved the large oak piece in the Great Hall with the coats-of-arms of families who intermarried with the Prestons of Gormanston (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

In 1883, the Gormanston estate totalled almost 11,000 acres, of which almost 10,000 acres were in Co Meath, generating an annual income of £9,364. But with the passage of several Irish Land Acts, the 14th viscount was forced to divide up the estate and to sign over land to the tenants.

When the 14th viscount died in 1907, the castle and titles passed to his son, also Jenico Preston, as 15th Viscount Gormanston. He too was a Justice for the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for Co Meath. During World War I, he was a captain in the Royal Irish Fusiliers.

In 1911, this Jenico Preston married Eileen Butler, daughter of General Sir William Butler of Bansha Castle, Co Tipperary. Her mother, Elizabeth Butler (née Thompson), was the famous military painter, Lady Butler. Lady Butler is one of the few female painters to achieve fame for history paintings. She specialised in painting battle scenes, including the Crimean War and the Battle of Waterloo. Her better-known works include The Roll Call, bought by Queen Victoria, The Defence of Rorke’s Drift, and Scotland Forever!, showing the Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo and now in Leeds Art Gallery.

During the Irish Civil War, many of her paintings, including a set of water-colours painted in Palestine, were transferred to her daughter in Gormanston Castle for safe keeping. She died at Gormanston Castle in 1933, shortly before her 87th birthday. Lest anyone think Lady Butler was glorifying war in her paintings, in her autobiography in 1922 she wrote about her military paintings: ‘I never painted for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism.’ She died at Gormanston Castle in 1933.

Meanwhile, Jenico and Eileen were the parents of three sons. The estate dwindled away after the Irish Free State Land Act was imposed in 1923. When the 15th viscount died in 1925, his eldest son, Jenico Preston, succeeded as the 16th viscount at the age of 14. The estate papers, from the early 20th century up to 1931, show the precarious financial state of the Gormanston estate and discuss its possible sale.

The 16th viscount was educated at Downside and had a military career. He was a second lieutenant in World War II and was killed in action at Dunkirk on 9 June 1940. His only child, also Jenico Preston, was born on 19 November 1939 and inherited the title when he was only a few months old. He is the present and 16th Viscount Gormanston, and now lives in London.

The coat of arms of Lord Gormanston carved by Georgina Gormanston in the great hall includes a fox as the crest and as a supporter (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The coat of arms of Lord Gormanston carved by Georgina Gormanston in the great hall includes a fox as the crest and as one of the supporters. According to legend, when the head of the family is in his final hours, the foxes of Co Meath, except for nursing vixens, make their way to the door of Gormanston Castle to keep vigil until he has died, in thanksgiving for the deliverance and protection from marauding predators of a vixen and her young by an earlier Lord Gormanston in the 17th century. They are said to have made their appearance on the castle lawns prior to the deaths of the 12th, 13th and 14th viscounts.

Gormanston Castle was built by the Preston family in 1790-1820 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Gormanston Castle, which was built by the Preston family in 1790-1820, is an impressive, three-storey castellated building with a quadrangular plan and with a tower at each corner except the north-west corner. The central part of the frontage is flanked by two narrow castellated towers on either side of the entrance.

Gormanston Castle remained the seat of the Preston family until 1947.The writer Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, planned to buy the castle until he read in the Evening Mail of Billy Butlin’s plans to build a holiday resort at the nearby beach at Mosney.

Waugh did not feel ‘entirely at ease in the role of nouveau riche invader of an historic property.’ But the Irish aristocracy still had a few surprises for this English writer. When he visited Gormanston Castle, he said: ‘It’s sad to think of this place changing hands after so many centuries.’ He claims a worker replied: ‘Ach, his lordship never came to this place but to kill somebody.’

Waugh described Gormanston as ‘a fine, solid, grim, square, half-finished block with tower and turrets.’ In his diaries, he continues:

‘The ground floor rooms were large and had fine traces of Regency decoration. Pictures by Lady Butler were everywhere. There were countless bedrooms, many uninhabitable, squalid plumbing, vast attics. On the whole I liked the house; the grounds were dreary with no features except some fine box alleys. The chapel unlicensed and Mrs O’Connor evasive about getting it put to use again.’ Pamela O’Connor was the widowed Lady Gormanston, and had married Maurice O’Connor after her first husband was killed in the war.

The castle was valued at £13,000, with another £5,000 needed for repairs. Waugh authorised his agent to put in a bid.

However, on learning that Sir Billy Butlin (1899-1980) was planning to open a holiday camp at Mosney on the beach beside Gormanston, he promptly changed his mind. He explains in his Diaries: ‘On boarding the ship [for England] I bought a local evening paper and read that Butlin had acquired a stretch of property at Gormanston and was planning a holiday camp there. This announcement made us change all our intentions. It came just in time for us, disastrously for Mrs O’Connor.’

The castle and the estate were then sold the Franciscans, who opened Gormanston College in 1954. My brother arrived at Gormanston as a schoolboy in 1959, and I followed in the 1960s.

Since 2015, the school has been managed by Meath VEC under Franciscan trusteeship and is now a co-educational day school. The sports facilities and accommodation is separately managed by a new company, Gormanston Park, which plans to reopen the refurbished swimming pool to the general community.

In the autumn countryside of Co Meath outside the gates of Gormanston Castle and Gormanston College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The Gormanston family papers were originally deposited on loan to the National Library in 1964, and were bought in 2002. The majority of the papers comprises estate papers including title deeds, leases and agreements dating back to the early 17th century. Earlier documents relating to the estate from the 12th century are in the Gormanston Register, also housed in the National Library. They also include architectural drawings of Gormanston Castle and Whitewood House.

At the end of my visit to Gormanston Castle on Saturday, I walked through the Yew Tree Walk that leads down to the graveyard, where several of the priests and some former students are buried, including one boy who died at the age of 15 during my final year at school, and I then walked out the main gates into the autumn countryside, through fields that were once part of the vast Gormanston estate, where the trees and the fields are changing colour.

Today is the feastday of Saint Francis of Assisi [4 October 2016]. Times have changed for the Preston family at Gormanston in the past century, and now they are changing for the Franciscans at Gormanston too.

In the graveyard at Gormanston (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The underbelly of the establishment unleashes ugly scenes on the streets

In Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ Anthony Blanche recalls how the Bullingdon Club tried to ‘put him in Mercury,’ the fountain in the centre of Tom Quad at Christ Church, Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was recalling earlier this week how the English writer Evelyn Waugh once planned to buy Gormanston Castle and estate in Co Meath.

Waugh withdrew his bid when he read about Sir Billy Butlin’s plan to build a holiday camp at Mosney, on the coast near Gormanston, and I wondered how Waugh’s innate snobbery had changed my life: the Franciscans stepped it, bought Gormanston Castle from the young Lord Gormanston’s widowed mother, and set up the school that both my brother and I were sent to.

Gormanston Castle might have been the ideal setting for some pre-war Irish version of Brideshead Revivisited, and one of his novels – Decline and Fall (1928) – is set in a boarding school in a castle in north Wales.

Waugh was a social satirist but also an incurable snob. Yet in both these novels he is at his best when he describes the boorish behaviour of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford and its members.

In Decline and Fall, the Bullingdon Club is satirised by Waugh as the Bollinger Club – after the brand of champagne – where it plays a pivotal role in the plot, as the mild-mannered hero is blamed for the Bollinger Club’s destructive rampage through his college and is sent down.

Decline and Fall was Waugh’s first published novel and with characteristic black humour it lampoons many elements of British society in the 1920s.

The title alludes to both Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the German philosopher Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926), which argued that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse.

The novel tells the story of Paul Pennyfeather, a modest and unassuming theology undergraduate at Oxford who falls victim to the drunken antics of the Bollinger Club and is then sent down for indecent exposure after running without his trousers through the grounds of Scone College, which may represent Balliol College.

As he leaves, the porter says: “I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir ... that’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

The porter’s expectations are realised. Having lost his inheritance too, Pennyfeather is forced to take a job teaching at Llanabba Castle, a minor public school in Wales. There he becomes private tutor to one of the boys, Peter, and falls in love with Peter’s mother, the Hon Margot Beste-Chetwynde (pronounced ‘Beast Chained’).

But her income comes from high-class brothels, and he is arrested on the morning of their wedding, and is jailed for seven years for trafficking in prostitution. Pennyfeather fakes his own death, escapes and is later sent off to Corfu on Margot’s yacht, “to decide on things.”

He then returns to Scone and Oxford, where he studies theology under his own name, but posing as the distant cousin of Paul Pennyfeather who was sent down. The novel ends as it started, with Pennyfeather sitting in his room listening to the distant shouts on a night when the Bollinger Club is meeting. There, Peter Beste-Chetwynde, now Earl of Pastmaster, is a student at Scone and a member of the Club. He drinks himself to death, telling Pennyfeather he should never have gotten caught up with his family.

There are distasteful scenes of racism, running to four or five pages or more, where Waugh has fun at the expense of the racists, but uses language that is frightening when we hear it on the streets in recent days after last week’s British referendum.

The late Tom Driberg, who was at school in Lancing with Evelyn Waugh, claims Waugh’s description of the Bollinger Club is a “mild account of the night of any Bullingdon Club dinner in Christ Church. Such a profusion of glass I never saw until the height of the Blitz. On such nights, any undergraduate who was believed to have ‘artistic’ talents was an automatic target.”

Waugh names the Bullingdon Club in Brideshead Revisited. In talking to Charles Ryder, Anthony Blanche recalls how the Bullingdon tried to “put him in Mercury” in Tom Quad one evening. Mercury is a large fountain in the centre of the Quad at Christ Church.

Blanche describes the members in their tails as looking “like a lot of most disorderly footmen,” and goes on to say: "Do you know, I went round to call on Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening’s adventures might amuse him.” This may indicate that Sebastian was not a member of the Bullingdon, although the 1981 television adaptation shows Lord Sebastian Flyte vomiting through the window of Charles Ryder’s college rooms while wearing the Bullingdon tails

The 2008 film adaptation also shows Sebastian in Bullingdon Club tails in this scene, as his friends behind him chant: “Buller, Buller, Buller!”

The Bullingdon Club was founded in 1780 as a sporting club, dedicated to cricket, hunting and horse-racing, but club dinners soon became its principal activity. The Wisden Cricketer says the Bullingdon is “ostensibly one of the two original Oxford University cricket teams, but it actually used cricket merely as a respectable front for the mischievous, destructive or self-indulgent tendencies of its members.” The future Poet Laureate John Betjeman wrote in 1938 that “quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting.”

The Bullingdon Club is an unofficial and exclusive all-male dining club at Oxford, similar to the Pitt Club in Cambridge. It is known for privileged members, grand banquets and boisterous rituals, such as vandalising or trashing restaurants and college rooms, and a tradition of paying on-the-spot for damages.

The University of Oxford gives the club no official recognition, and many local restaurants refuse to host its events. But many former members have become part of the British political establishment, including David Cameron, Michael Gove, George Osborne and Boris Johnson.

David Cameron and Boris Johnson in a 1987 photograph at Brasenose College of the Bullingdon Club

A 1987 photograph of then members of the Bullingdon Club, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, was revealed in 2007. Since then, the copyright owners have tried to block all use the picture.

The photograph was taken in 1987 at Brasenose College, where Cameron was an undergraduate. Included in the photograph are: 1, The Hon Edward Sebastian Grigg, the heir to Lord Altrincham of Tormarton and later chairman of Credit Suisse; 2, David Cameron; 3, Ralph Perry Robinson, a former child actor – at Oxford he paraded round dressed as a monk calling for virgins to be sacrificed; he now lives in Wiltshire, where he makes furniture; 4, Ewen Fergusson, son of Sir Ewen Fergusson, the British ambassador in France, and now at City law firm Herbert Smith; 5, Matthew Benson, heir to the Earl of Wemyss and March; 6, Sebastian James, the son of Lord Northbourne, a landowner in Kent; 7, Jonathan Ford of the Financial Times and Morgan Grenfell; 8, Boris Johnson; and 9, Harry Eastwood, investment fund consultant.

In an interview with Andrew Marr of the BBC, Cameron said the 1987 photograph was an embarrassment. It was withdrawn from circulation when the Oxford-based company Gillman and Soame, which owns the copyright, was persuaded to withhold further permission to use it.

A similar photograph taken in 1988, with Cameron in the centre of the group, was found by the student newspaper Versa among over a dozen or so photographs of the club from 1950 to 2010 hanging on the wall of the tailor said to have made the members’ suits. This find led to other past members being named.

George Osborne with seven other members of the Bullingdon Club in 1992

Another photograph from 1992 shows eight other famous figures: 1, the Chancellor George Osborne; 2, the journalist Harry Mount, a second cousin of David Cameron and author of The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson; 3, Chris Coleridge, son of Lloyds’ chairman David Coleridge, and brother of Conde Nast managing director Nicholas Coleridge; 4, Baron Lupus von Maltzahn, a German aristocrat and managing consultant; 5, the late Hon Mark Petre; 6, the Sydney millionaire Peter Holmes à Court; 7, Nat Rothschild, who set up a racy student paper with Harry Mount; and 8, Jason Gissing, chairman of Ocado supermarkets.

In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens said the photograph had been doctored and that some people had been removed.

Two figures on the left of Peter Holmes à Court (6) and Nat Rothschild (7) were blacked out before the photograph was released, leading to allegations about two members of the Bullingdon Club whose identities were being protected.

The speculation included Michael Gove, the Education Secretary and the leading ‘Leave’ campaigner in Cameron’s cabinet; Cameron’s Arts Minister, Edward Vaizey; Cameron’s Skills Minister, Nicholas Boles; and Steven Hilton, godfather to Cameron’s children and his former strategy guru.

These photographs could have embarrassed Cameron, Johnson, Osborne and Gove during the run-up to last week’s referendum. But as I reflect on the events of the last few weeks, it looks like Johnson and Gove engineered a Bullingdon Club coup against former members, gambling their careers with the future of Europe used as part of their game of roulette. I can just see Cameron as Sebastian Flyte vomiting out the window while wearing the Bullingdon tails, as his fellow club members Johnson and Gove stand behind him and chant mockingly: “Buller, Buller, Buller!”

Looking again at these photographs that the Bullers do not want us to see, alongside a re-reading of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, they reveal the ugly underbelly of the British political and social establishment that is closing ranks this week rather than taking responsibility for the horrors they have unleashed and the consequent rise in ugly expressions of naked racism on the streets.

Evelyn Waugh’s snobbery about Butlin’s decided where I was sent to school

Gormanston Castle, Co Meath … snobbery stopped Evelyn Waugh from buying it in 1946, and the Franciscans bought it a year later (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was writing recently about Evelyn Waugh’s brief plans to buy Gormanston Castle in the 1940s, and wondered where I would have been sent to school instead had he completed the sale.

After World War II, many former officers and members of British landed families tried to flee Attlee’s new taxes and settled in droves. Late in 1946, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) began looking at houses in Ireland in the hope of finding “Liberty, Diversity, Privacy.”

The writer Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh is best known for Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his World War II trilogy Sword of Honour (1952-1961).

During World War II he was an officer in the Royal Marines, when he took part in the Battle of Crete in 1941, and then in the Royal Horse Guards. After his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner broke down, he became a Roman Catholic in 1930. Father Martin D'Arcy (1888-1976), a Jesuit who had Irish parents and who was a lifelong friend of TS Eliot, persuaded Waugh “on firm intellectual convictions but little emotion" that “the Christian revelation was genuine.”

Waugh claimed his great-grandmother, Theodosia Mahon, was from Strokestown, Co Roscommon, but did little work on exploring his Irish ancestry.

He considered Ireland “beautiful” and “Christian,” while England showed more and more “ugliness of mind.” Buoyed by the success of Brideshead Revisited (1945), he first considered buying Gormanston Castle, the ancestral home of the Preston family and of Jenico Nicholas Dudley Preston, the 17th Viscount Gormanston and 4th Baron Gormanston, who was then just a boy of six and whose father, Jenico William Preston, 16th Viscount Gormanston (1914–1940), had been killed at Dunkirk in 1940 during World War II.

Young Lord Gormanston was a great-grandson of the celebrated Victorian artist Elizabeth Thompson (1846-1933), aka Lady Elizabeth Butler. She specialised in painting battle scenes, including the Crimean War and the Battle of Waterloo. Her better-known works include The Roll Call, bought by Queen Victoria, The Defence of Rorke's Drift, and Scotland Forever!, showing the Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo and now in Leeds Art Gallery. During the Irish Civil War, many of her paintings, including a set of water-colours painted in Palestine, were transferred to her daughter in Gormanston Castle for safe keeping. She died at Gormanston Castle in 1933, shortly before her 87th birthday.

Waugh did not feel “entirely at ease in the role of nouveau riche invader of an historic property.” But the Irish aristocracy still had a few surprises for this English writer. When he visited Gormanston Castle, he said: “It’s sad to think of this place changing hands after so many centuries.” He claims a worker replied: “Ach, his lordship never came to this place but to kill somebody.”

Waugh described Gormanston as “a fine, solid, grim, square, half-finished block with tower and turrets.” In his diaries, Waugh continues:

“The ground floor rooms were large and had fine traces of Regency decoration. Pictures by Lady Butler were everywhere. There were countless bedrooms, many uninhabitable, squalid plumbing, vast attics. On the whole I liked the house; the grounds were dreary with no features except some fine box alleys. The chapel unlicensed and Mrs O’Connor evasive about getting it put to use again.” Pamela O’Connor was the widowed Lady Gormanston, and had married Maurice O’Connor after her first husband was killed in the war.

The centuries-old Yew Walks in Gormanston … Evelyn Waugh describes them as fine box alleys (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The castle was valued at £13,000, with another £5,000 needed for repairs. Waugh authorised his agent to put in a bid.

However, on learning that Sir Billy Butlin (1899-1980) was planning to open a holiday camp at Mosney on the beach beside Gormanston, he promptly changed his mind. He explains in his Diaries: “On boarding the ship [for England] I bought a local evening paper and read that Butlin had acquired a stretch of property at Gormanston and was planning a holiday camp there. This announcement made us change all our intentions. It came just in time for us, disastrously for Mrs O’Connor.”

Nevertheless, Ireland still seemed attractive, and Waugh also considered buying Lisnavagh, Lord Rathdonnell’s “early Victorian baronial pile” near Rathvilly, Co Carlow. Eventually, he decided that the Roman Catholic Church in England needed him more than Ireland did.

Waugh was premature in predicting the outcome for Mrs O’Connor. There was at least one other bidder, and Gormanston Castle and the surrounding estate were bought by the Franciscans in 1947, just after Waugh’s visit.

The school buildings at Gormanston were built in the 1950s after the Franciscans bought Gormanston Castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Franciscans have been there ever since. A preparatory school for the college in Multyfarnham was opened in the castle in 1954, and new plans resulted in building a new college and the transfer of the Multyfarnham College to Gormanston.

My brother arrived at Gormanston as a schoolboy in 1959, and I followed in the 1960s.

As for Lord Gormanston, when he went to school he was sent to the Benedictines at Downside School in Somerset, which had provided the Franciscans with one of the models for running Gormanston. As schoolboys, we revelled in his every escapade as it was chronicled in the English press.

Despite Waugh’s snobbery, Butlin’s holiday camp opened in Mosney in July 1948 by the Labour leader, William Norton, and it finally closed in the early 1980s.

Evelyn Waugh set one of his novels – Decline and Fall (1928) – in a boarding school. It is based in part on his schooldays at Lancing College, his undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales.

In 1949, he explained that his decision to become a Roman Catholic followed his realisation that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God.” But his traditionalist stance led him to strongly oppose Church reforms, especially the changes introduced by Vatican II, including the vernacular Mass. He disliked the welfare state, the culture of the post-war world and the decline of the country house.

Fifty years ago, on Easter Day, 10 April 1966, after attending a Latin Mass in a neighbouring village with members of his family, Waugh died of heart failure at his home in Combe Florey, Somerset. He was 62. He was buried at the Anglican churchyard in Combe Florey. A Requiem Mass in Latin was celebrated in Westminster Cathedral on 21 April 1966.

I sometimes wonder to this day where my brother and I would have been sent to school if Evelyn Waugh had not been such a snob about Butlin’s and had bought Gormanston Castle 70 years ago.

Inside the chapel at Gormanston (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Newman’s beatification recalls debates between Anglicans and Vatican

Cardinal Newman’s bust in University Church, Dublin ... he is to be beatified by Pope Benedict during his visit to England (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Patrick Comerford

Pope Benedict XVI visits England and Scotland next month [September 2010] for the first official Papal visit to Britain. The four-day visit begins with a meeting with Queen Elizabeth in Scotland, but for many Roman Catholics the high point of the visit is the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) on 19 September.

Because of diplomatic sensitivities during the Falklands War, Pope John Paul II’s six-day visit to England in 1982 was described as a pastoral visit. But next month’s visit is a “papal visit with the status of a state visit.” Pope Benedict is to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace and to pray with Church leaders in Westminster Abbey. Other events on the programme include an interfaith gathering in London, an address to civic leaders in Westminster Hall, and a prayer vigil in Hyde Park.

Police planning security for the visit are anticipating protests by groups on many issues, including contraception, abortion, gay rights and paedophilia. British Government officials have also taken legal advice on a threat by some groups to seek an arrest warrant for the Pope, accusing him of failing to act over cases of child abuse.

A puzzling decree

Newman as a young don in Oxford ... a copy of a well-known image in University Church Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

For many Anglicans, two points will set the agenda for this visit: the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, which is the first step before canonisation or public recognition as a saint; and the differences with Rome over Pope Benedict’s puzzling decree last year, Anglicanorum Coetibus, setting out new structures to receive disaffected groups of Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has told the BBC that he was “disappointed” that the Vatican gave him only two weeks’ notice of its decision to set up “personal ordinariates” to accommodate Anglicans who want to become Roman Catholics while retaining many Anglican traditions.

At the time, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the Vatican announcement had put “many Anglicans, myself included … in an awkward position.” The Times of London went further and described the apostolic constitution as “a direct challenge to the unity of the Anglican Communion.” Interest in the Vatican decree has increased since last month’s debate in the General Synod on provisions for those who continue to object to the consecration of women as bishops.

Leading Tractarian

Tom Tower and the Quad at Christ Church Oxford, where Newman was ordained (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The focus on John Henry Newman is of interest both for Anglicans and for many people in Ireland. Newman was one of the most influential figures in English Church life in the 19th century. He came from an evangelical background in the Church of England, studied at Trinity College Oxford, and became a Fellow of Oriel College Oxford in 1822. He was ordained deacon in Christ Church, Oxford, in 1824, priest in 1825, and became Vicar of the University Church (Saint Mary’s) in Oxford in 1828.

In 1832, Newman went on a holiday in Italy with his friend Richard Hurrell Froude (1801-1836) of Oriel College and his father. He left them in Rome as he travelled on to Sicily, but there he became gravely ill with a fever. When he recovered, the weather delayed his return to England and he was forced to stay on board his ship for a further three weeks. During those weeks, he wrote one of his best-known and best-loved poems, Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. The poem shows his sense of complete uncertainty and disorientation, and reveals his sense of groping in the darkness, pleading with God to lead and guide him.

The University Church of Saint Mary, where Newman was Vicar during his days in Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

On the Sunday he returned to Oxford, 14 July 1833, Newman heard John Keble (1792-1866), Professor of Poetry at Oxford, preach his famous Assize sermon in Newman’s own church. Keble’s sermon was an attack on state interference in church affairs, prompted by government moves to reform the diocesan structures of the Church of Ireland, and is now seen as the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Meanwhile, Newman was gaining a reputation as a poet and his edited collection, Lyra Apostolica, including Lead, kindly light, was published in 1836.

Alongside Edward Pusey and John Keble, Newman became one of the leading lights of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement, and was the principal author of the Tracts for the Times, writing 27 of the tracts. In a seminal exposition of Anglicanism in his Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), Newman maintained that the essential points of Anglicanism are its doctrine, its sacramental system and its legitimate claims to be the Catholic Church in England. However, he reached a turning point in 1841 with Tract 90, in which he tried to reconcile the 39 Articles with the decrees of the Council of Trent and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Newman was censured by the university and was silenced by the Bishop of Oxford. He resigned from Saint Mary’s in 1843, and after considerable hesitation became a Roman Catholic in 1845. He defended this decision in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Five years later, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was officially founded in England and Wales. Newman founded the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in Birmingham, and remained at the Oratory in Birmingham for the rest of his life – apart from a few short years in Dublin.

Four years in Ireland

Saint Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham … Newman regarded Pugin as “intolerant” and “a bigot” and despised his Gothic style of church architecture (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

At the time of Newman’s conversion, English Catholicism was going through a traumatic transition. Until the early 19th century, it was dominated by the old landed recusant families – the sort of families who later figured in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted. But English Catholicism was changing with the increasing influx of poor Irish immigrants, and Birmingham became the heart of the Irish slums in the English Midlands. Saint Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham was designed by AWN Pugin, who also designed Saint Aidan’s Cathedral, Enniscorthy, and Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Killarney, around the same time. But Pugin had strong disagreements and debates with Newman, who regarded the great architect of the Gothic revival as “a man of genius” but “intolerant” and “a bigot.”

Newman House, Dublin, where Newman was Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

In 1854, Newman moved to Dublin, and for four years he was rector of the newly-founded but short-lived Catholic University of Ireland. His plans for a university were frustrated, yet his stay in Ireland saw him publish his The Idea of a University. His college chapel survives as the University Church on Saint Stephen’s Green, beside Newman House, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the former site of Wesley College.

University Church, Dublin, built by Pollen for Newman (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

The church was designed by John Hungerford Pollen, who was invited to Dublin by Newman as Professor of Fine Art. Newman rejected Pugin’s Gothic style, seeing in it echoes of the pagan forests of Northern Europe; but he also associated the classical style with his Anglican past and Greek and Roman paganism. And so he favoured the Byzantine style for his university church. Pollen’s design is the only successful Byzantine-style church in Ireland, and shows the influence of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.

The interior of University Church, Dublin ... Byzantine architecture inspired Newman’s vision and Pollen’s design for University Church, Dublin

Practical organisation was not among Newman’s gifts, and after four unhappy years in Dublin he returned to Birmingham. Little did he know that his efforts to establish a university in Ireland would eventually bear fruit in University College Dublin. The Literary and Historical Society (L&H), which he founded, remains one of the best-known university debating societies in Ireland.

Creative criticism

Back in England, a controversy in 1863 and 1864 involving the Anglican social reformer, Charles Kingsley, led to Newman publishing his Apologia pro vita sua, earning his place as one the greatest Catholic thinkers of his time. His other great works include The Dream of Gerontius (1865) and the Grammar of Assent (1870).

Newman was not uncritical of his new Church. His opposition to the Pope’s retention of temporal powers led to a breach in his friendship with Henry Manning (1801-1892), another former evangelical Anglican and subsequent Tractarian who had been Archdeacon of Chichester and then became Archbishop of Westminster in 1865 and a cardinal in 1875. Yet Newman retained many Anglican friends throughout his life, including Richard Church, Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, and a nephew of Sir Richard Church, the Cork-born liberator of Greece.

A copy of the portrait of Newman as a cardinal, by Sir John Everett Milais, in University Church Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Although never a bishop, Newman was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 at the suggestion of the Duke of Norfolk. When he died on 27 February 1891, he was buried in Rednall Hill in Birmingham in the same grave as his lifelong friend, Ambrose St John, who lived with Newman as his companion for 32 years. To thwart attempts to make a cult of his remains, Newman ordered that he should be buried in a rich compost so that his corpse would decompose rapidly. When his body was exhumed two years ago in an attempt to retrieve relics, nothing was found except the brass plate and handles of his coffin.

‘Battle for Newman’s legacy’

Newman’s coat-of-arms as a cardinal (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Was Newman a pious Anglo-Catholic who prefigured those who are thinking of moving to Rome today? Or was he essentially an Anglican who continued to resist Papal encroachments on the Church and on the conscience of the individual? What has been called the “battle for Newman’s legacy” has taken on new intensity in recent months with John Cornwell’s book, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: the reluctant saint.

When Pope Benedict addressed the bishops of England and Wales earlier this year, he claimed Newman as a faithful supporter of the papal magesterium and pontifical dogmas on many issues, and as an opponent of Catholic dissent. However, John Cornwell says that Newman was a dissident when it came to papal authority, infallibility, the downgrading of the laity and the primacy of papal dogma over individual conscience.

“I shall drink to the Pope if you please,” Newman once wrote, “… still to conscience first and the Pope afterwards.” He once wrote of the ageing Pope Pius IX: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know fact, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

Cornwell has not questioned whether Newman ought to be considered for sainthood. But he challenges the criteria on which the Vatican has found a miracle in the healing of Jack Sullivan, an elderly deacon and former court official in Massachusetts. It is ironic that Newman himself, in his own words, would have been a reluctant saint, for he once remarked that he had “no tendency to be one.”

Meanwhile, the choice of music for Newman’s beatification next month includes his hymn Praise to the Holiest in the height, as well as Firmly I Believe, both from his poem The Dream of Gerontius, and both of which are in the Irish Church Hymnal of the Church of Ireland (hymns 108 and 320). A third, well-loved Newman hymn, Lead, kindly light (Hymn 653), shows how he was never a man for easy answers or the ready acceptance of imposed dogma and authority.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay was first published in the August edition of the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough),br />