Obituary - Fr Louis d'Andria 1945

Fr Louis worked to the limit of his endurance. In September 1945 he had been appointed to be parish priest of St John's, Easingwold. One morning in mid-October after Mass at the Convent he was unable to complete the short walk back to the Priory, and was found collapsed on the roadside. On 24th October he was admitted into hospital in York. During the next fortnight he edified, amused and amazed the medical and nursing staff, - just by being himself. The nature of his illness involved him in frequent and increasingly distressing bouts of coughing. A day or so before he died, on one of these spasms passing away, he said to the nurse at his bedside: 'Nurse, it was a very bad cough that carried him off; and it was a very big coffin they carried him off in.' So with a jest on his lips on the 10th November 1945, Fr Louis without a trace of fear and enviably happy died just as he had lived.

Louis d'Andria was born on the 12th August, 1880. His mother was a Yorkshire woman and his father a Greek. It does not seem fanciful to suggest that from each of his parents Fr Louis inherited qualities which, enhanced and illumined by divine grace, went to make up his developed character. The common sense, the industry and the stability of Yorkshire seem to have acted as checks and balances on the attraction for the novel, the zest for knowledge, the delight in ideas and the volatility of the Greek temperament. Perhaps without extravagance it may be counted as one little instance of the wisdom that has inspired the Rule of St Benedict and is enshrined in the English Benedictine Constitutions and in the Ampleforth customary that Fr Louis, inherently an individualist and one whose temperament was not primarily adapted to the observance of rules and regulations, experienced no great difficulty in leading an edifying community life. An example of his earnestness in the performing of his religious duties may be found in this: he typed out the whole of the psalms, picking out in red ink the key words in each. From these sheets of typescript he recited the Divine Office. His nature was essentially simple and generous. His innate nobility of soul rendered any association of him with second-rate conduct or unkind comment quite inconceivable. He was incapable of anything approaching resentment or ill-feeling. In him the milk of human kindness flowed unskimmed and undiluted. There cannot possibly be anyone in the world who ever had anything to forgive Fr Louis for. To the humility of the truly learned was added the supernatural humility of the Christian. 'He was the gentlest man I ever knew' is the verdict of one who was in close touch with him for fifty years. 'He was a lesson to all of us in patience, understanding and faith' wrote his nurse from hospital.

In intellect Fr Louis was exceptionally gifted. He had an original mind and a capacious and retentive memory. He had also considerable dialectical skill and showed in his historical and political criticisms a quick and unerring faculty for detecting a sophism. His knowledge of history was encyclopaedic. He possessed also an immense and quite irrepressible sense of humour in which irony, in its classical forms, played the leading part. He delighted in humorous contrasts and in situations and stories that ended in a surprise, generally a bathos. This perhaps may be related to his philosophy of history, for he had no illusions about the inevitability of human progress or the perfectibility of human nature itself. Yet no man could ever be less of a cynic. He was rather quaint in his ways and whimsical. He was childlike in his detachment from the world of affairs. He possessed the childlike virtues and to the end made the mistakes of a child. He was childlike also in his defencelessness in the face of any harsh criticism.

From 1891 to 1897 Louis was at school at Ampleforth. It would be to no purpose to pretend that he fitted in with either the organised studies or the games. In the classrooms in those days, especially in the lower and middle Forms, there was a good deal of drudgery which Louis often led us in relieving. There ensued of course penal consequences for himself, but his masters never seemed able to be angry when giving him penances. They appeared to do it reluctantly and without, I think, any sort of hope of effecting a reform. Later on when in the Sixth Form Louis greatly regretted these diversionary activities, and marvelled at the selfishness that involved such a lack of consideration for his masters. All his time at school he was a great reader, and his companions owe much to the infectiousness of his intellectual interests. It was when in the Fifth Form he came under the inspiring guidance of the late Abbot Matthews, then his Classical and English master, that Louis seemed to come into his own. The discovery of Herodotus was a joy to him. He read the classics fairly easily but his proses suffered from his impatience with details of syntax. It was ideas, not in the abstract but as pulsating in brains of living men, that interested him, rather than the technique of their literary expression. Compulsory games were the rule. Louis did not object to cricket if the day was sunny and warm, because his own innings were never unduly prolonged, and he could lie on the slope and read. He was however a fairly good fast bowler. Football did not interest him at all. By the indulgence of a broadminded captain Louis was invariable made goal-keeper. The picture lingers of him leaning against one of the uprights, a rather gaunt figure enveloped in a large Inverness coat, in one pocket of which was a packet of biscuits and in the other a volume of Homer; and between the intervals of reading and eating he performed the functions of goal-keeper as well as all the circumstances permitted.

In 1897 he left school and was invited to enter on a business career. He had no interest in money making, and in eighteen months he had had sixteen jobs. Then he set out to travel. He is said to have been seen sitting on a packing case at the Southampton docks, a handbag his only luggage, reading a Greek play as he waited to embark for South Africa.

In 1909 he returned to Ampleforth and was clothed as a novice. On the 9th July, 1916 he was ordained priest. From 1914 to 1917 he read history at Oxford. He revelled in this but he was not a good examinee. The picture it interested him to draw would never fit into the frame of the question. This accounts for his obtaining only third class honours. From 1917 to 1925 he taught history at Ampleforth. One of his brethren who was at that time also on the history staff gives this account of Fr Louis:

He was too kind and too gentle to teach a class of boys. His own sense of humour was more contagious than he realised, and his powers of discipline were weak. Yet to the better boys who took him seriously he gave a real love of History. His classes on the whole were chaotic. A member of his Upper Third Greek History class describes the class as alternating between pandemonium and silent fascination at the way Fr Louis brought to life the old characters and the old times. He was however so absorbed in his subject that he was scarcely aware of the turmoil; and he was so enthusiastic about those boys who were interested that he seems to have felt the pandemonium worth while. He founded in the School the Historical Society and the "Mediaevalists." He ranged over the whole of History. Now he would be taking his boys through the period of Amenhotep in Ancient Egypt; and now be indicating the exact position of the kitchen at Ampleforth in the time of Bishop Baines. He was rather hurt when he had to give up his history teaching, for he felt that for this work he had a real vocation. I had an immense personal regard for him. It was a privilege to have known him. All knowledge was his province. He could tear the heart out of any book in an hour or two. Once during an epidemic of influenza Fr Louis, thinking he had caught it, took out of the library forty-three volumes and retired to bed. By 3 a.m. he had read fifteen of them, and then decided he had not influenza and so came down to Matins. I had the pleasure of introducing him to Professor Toynbee, a man of vast learning. Fr Louis had written me a letter about Toynbee's Study of History which I showed to Toynbee who expressed a wish to meet the writer. They met at lunch at one o'clock and commenced a conversation which was only broken off at 10.30 p.m. when they parted mutual friends and admirers. This talk was not without effect especially on the mediaeval period in Toynbee's monumental work. Sir Ernest Barker told me at Oxford that Fr Louis was then 'the most learned undergraduate in the University.'

While on the School Staff Fr Louis also lectured to the Juniors on Church History. One of them writes:

He did not build up for us a text-book knowledge which really we required for our examinations, but he was intensely interesting and we marvelled at the brilliance of his lectures. Without any reference to a book or a note he would trace throughout the centuries with a wealth of detail and dates the origin and history of a heresy or some line of thought in the Church.

After a few months at Brindle, Fr Louis was sent as assistant priest to Dowlais. His superior, personally the kindest and most considerate of men, was an ascetic, a saintly characteristic that in this case was not without its influence on the menu and on the general domestic dispositions in the Priory. No one ever heard a complaint from Fr Louis of what, undoubtedly was a severe régime. Only once did he make reference to it. He had been reading in the newspapers about the strike at Dartmoor among the convicts provoked by the quality of the prison-porridge, and commented: 'I don't see what they have to complain about, they're not at Dowlais.'

He was at Dowlais for four years dispensing the mysteries of God to the poor Irish and Welsh steel-workers. Only those who have some knowledge of the severity of their work and of the conditions under which human life was sustained at Dowlais, the housing and so on, will fully appreciate the significance of the following extract from a letter written by a former member of Fr Louis's Boys' Club, now a priest in, the Archdiocese of Cardiff:

It is not easy to appraise Fr Louis. He was so big. It always seemed to me an anomaly that a man of such stature should be an assistant priest in a working-class parish. Yet he was thoroughly at home, and fitted in, perfectly in every milieu... no one ever felt ill-at-ease or out of place in his company or presence.

For more than four years he guided the Young Men's Society and ruled the St Benedict Boys' Guild. His guidance was always sure and kindly, firm and just, and always accepted.

St Benedict's Boys' Guild especially flourished under his rule. Here he was amazing. He contrived to make the smallest things assume great import, and evoked an enthusiasm and loyalty that was deep and lasting. Boys of those happy days who are now men, and of whom many have fought in the war just ended, speak of Fr Louis in terms of something deeper than admiration. In general the boys upon whom Fr Louis made so deep an impression are evidence in themselves of his great qualities as a priest and a friend.

In 1930 Fr Louis was moved to St Peter's, Liverpool. Census book in hand, he plunged into the labyrinth of back streets and sordid squares, immensely interested in the people of his district. In his outlook on life and the world he reminded his rector of Chesterton: 'A district to the ordinary person just sordid and squalid and dull was to Fr Louis aglow with life and colour and full of history.' His kindly interest in the poor and his own quaint fashion of approach to them won for him a welcome everywhere.

As a recreation he delved into the old history of Liverpool and got together a collection of photographs and maps and plans which later he presented to the Picton Library.

In 1941 he was back in South Wales as parish priest in Abergavenny. Here he met with unexpected difficulties, but as always gave of his best with enthusiasm; and, though now no longer young, was indefatigable in visiting the homes of his flock. In 1945 he was transferred to Easingwold; but his life's work was then over.

His contemporaries and friends, and all who knew him were his friends, remember him in their prayers with gratitude and affection. They may find some consolation for their loss in the manner in which he died. May his gentle soul rest in peace.

LOUIS D'ANDRIA

Details from the Abbey Necrology