Fr Boniface Hunt was born in 1924 in Crowborough, Sussex. He delighted in the assocation of Crowborough and nearby Ashdown Forest with Christopher Robin country; he would relate the topography of the Pooh books to their real life counterparts. His father ran a prep school but Bruce went to St Ronan's in Worthing. Then, unlike his brothers, he went to Winchester, where Dr Seymour Spencer, a contemporary, remembered him as 'entirely enemyless & utterly unassuming: dim in the nicest sense of the term.' At Winchester his lifelong interests were aroused, love of the German language, love of clear thinking, which he found in the challenge of Mathematics, and which, with his ability, lead naturally to a Scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge; and lastly - this was all consuming - his search for God.
Always devoutly religious, he moved in his Anglican days from the evangelical to the liberal, but never to the Anglo-Catholic position. For him at this time (like other Wykehamists) the bread and wine of communion were symbolically representative of Christ's body and blood, never those actual substances.
But all this had to be worked out against the background of the Second World War. Temperamentally and conscientiously he objected to fighting; but not selfishly. He wanted to usc his talents for others. He offered himself for tests of unknown drugs. He joined the Friends Ambulance Unit in 1943 as an ambulance driver. In the troubled conditions of peace in Germany in 45/46, when typhus epidemics threatened and Russian behaviour was uncertain, he took lorry convoys into the Russian zone to move displaced people to the West. Fr Barnabas Sandeman supervised this work in his job with the Control Commission in Germany and they met at this time. Germany was a bleak experience and initially he felt bleak inside; but just as summer covered the ruined cities with foliage and flowers, so too Germany became different, attractive and alive. This perhaps explains his choice of Boniface as a religious name; St Boniface was the English apostle of Germany.
In 1946, among mature ex-service men and a few schoolboys, Boniface went up to Cambridge to read Moral Philosophy and came under the personal influence of Wittgenstein. But a more far reaching influence was Catholicism; he was received into the Church in 1948. He was devoted to the Catholic Chaplain Monsignor Alfred Gilbey and to Fisher House. He regularly went to meetings of the Aquinas Society at Blackfriars where Fr Thomas Gilbey OP spoke on various aspects of St Thomas's teaching. He was drawn to the intellectual apostolate of the Dominicans. Sadly the challenge of the Dominican noviciate was too much strain on him, and he left before profession, his only momento a lifelong devotion to the Rosary. In the desert period which followed, as he came to terms with his own failure to accomplish his altruistic ideals, he worked at C.G. Teale's prep school at Whispers, Wadhurst, Sussex and had a term or two at Ladycross, Seaford where Fr Felix Stephens remembers his gentle paternal care and his inability to come to terms with the famous Grande-Dame 'Dot' - Mrs Anthony Roper, certainly one of the more formidable prep school headmasters' wives. To small boys he might appear remote but he had a shrewd estimate of their abilities. A chance meeting with Fr Barnabas suggested he try his vocation with the Benedictines at Ampleforth; he was clothed in September 1954 and simply professed the following year.
In contrast to his nephew James Hunt, the racing car driver, Boniface liked to do things slowly. As a curate on the parishes he used a bicycle which, he explained, enabled him to stop for apparently casual chats with parishioners. His only prescribed run as an Ampleforth novice cost him half a day in bed to recover (possibly an early sign of the heart disease which in his final years was to leave him with little energy to do anything).
He expressed his poverty by abstemiousness; he did not smoke or drink. He wrote notes on scraps of used paper in two or three directions, a characteristic both endearing and enraging. His was a private character, chatty, but difficult to know. He was always ready to see the humorous side of things (especially human vanity) but gently; and he had an immense fund of stories, never actually scandalous, but always true, and unerring in their perception of human frailty. His theological training was combined with teaching in the school. He was an acquistion to the Mathematics Department for he had been a pupil of C.V. Durrell, and at this period Durrell's textbooks were used at all levels of teaching. (But what would Durrell have thought of him teaching Religious Instruction?). He was ordained priest in July 1961. Teaching and other duties, the Bookshop, assistant monastic librarian, continued until 1964, when it was clear that this demanding work was too much for him, and the Abbot wisely moved him to teach at Gilling where there was less challenge. At Gilling he did a lot of fact finding on the various periods of the building's growth. An American guided by him said 'Gee, it was fascinating. But I did not expect to go round on my hands and knees peering beneath loose floorboards to see how ceilings had been lowered, nor to investigate the mediaeval plumbing system'.
In 1964 Boniface took on the Gilling parish, and this encouraged his interest in ecumenical theology. In 1969 he asked to do full-time parochial work; and for fourteen years he had curacies in three Lancashire parishes Leyland, Lostock Hall 1976 and St Benedict's Warrington 1981. People discovered his altruistic kindness and loved him. He enjoyed parish visiting and had a curious and valuable knack of remembering the tangled web of relationships in families. In the aftermath of Vatican II when its theology was not understood, and even erroneously taught, he searched out the answers to difficulties in moral theology and liturgy. He worked too in the field of ecumenical reunion. He was Chairman of the Easingwold & District Ministers Fraternal, of the Leyland Churches Fellowship, and of the South Ribble Council of Churches. He was on the Executive of the Warrington Council of Churches. Reunion he felt was a matter of importance - too intense to allow the papering of the cracks of disharmony, particularly over authority and the transformation of the Eucharistic elements. The pain from the proscription of intercommunion was 'tiny compared with the mental pain of seeing sin and suffering in the world today', a pain all Christians could share, an evil all denominations could unite to fight.
By 1982 his strength was waning. A serious heart operation left him an unwilling invalid. In the Abbey, he waited for death, resting a lot, reading Victorian novels. He died 17 April 1984.
DOM BRUCE BONIFACE HUNT 17 Apr 1984
1924 29 Jun born Crowborough Sussex
edc Winchester
1946-48 Cambridge Moral Science
1947 Received into Church
1954 19 Sept Habit at Ampleforth Abbot Byrne
1955 20 Sept Simple Vows " "
1956 13 Jan Tonsure " "
1958 20 Sept Solemn Vows " "
1959 11 May Minor Orders " "
1959 12 May Minor Orders " "
1959 19 Jul Subdeacon Bishop Brunner
1960 17 Jul Deacon " "
1961 23 Jul Priest " "
1964 Jan served Gilling Parish
1964 May Gilling Castle - Assistant
1969 Nov Leyland - Assistant
1976 Dec Lostock Hall - Assistant
1981 Sept Warrington St.Benedict's - Assistant
1982 3 Oct Into hospital for an operation on the muscles around the
heart
1983 Feb Returned to the Abbey for convalescence
1984 17 Apr died c 8.20 am