Obituary - Fr Sylvester Fryer 1963

Percy Peter Fryer was born in Manchester on 27th September 1884. Brought up on strict evangelical lines he was educated at Woodhouse Grove School, where he decided to take up art as a career. Some part of his youth was spent in St Louis, Missouri and in the West Indies, where he volunteered as a nurse during a cholera epidemic, and he entered the profession of journalism as a caricaturist, working on the Manchester Guardian until he became political caricaturist to the Daily News in London, and in between times he did a good deal of reporting. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he enlisted in the London Scottish and was soon commissioned in the Special Reserve battalion of the Manchester Regiment, with which he served in France for the greater part of the war, being wounded and rather badly gassed.

After the war he did not return to journalism, but taught for a time in an art school in Bournemouth and then took a partnership in a fruit farm on the edge of the New Forest. While there, through a fortuitous but fortunate acquaintance with the Cistercian Convent at Stapehill, he made contact with Catholicism, was instructed at Downside and received into the Church in 1922. An introduction to Abbot Smith led him to Ampleforth and he came on a week-end visit to remain, as he put it, for the next twenty-four years. He received the habit in April 1923, was solemnly professed in 1928, and ordained priest in July 1930. In the meantime during an epidemic of influenza in 1925 his devoted nursing of his brethren led to a breakdown of his own health and he contracted the diabetes which remained with him for the rest of his life. Characteristically he refused to be beaten and made a study of the disease which enabled him to live a very full life and to become something of an expert on its treatment.

During his time at Ampleforth his principal work was to teach art, but he also gave lectures on art to the Sixth Form, taught English, hand-writing and Religious Instruction, and he will be remembered for the vigour of his instruction in those subjects by many an Old Boy who never went near the Art Room. But it is in the department of Art that he made his greatest impact on the School. When he began to teach, this subject was known as 'Extra Drawing' and was taught by a master who visited Ampleforth once a week for the purpose, aided by such gifted amateurs as Fr Maurus Powell and Fr Raphael Williams. Under Fr Sylvester it developed into a very important part of the school's cultural activities with an Art Room equipped not only for drawing and painting, but also for modelling in clay and leather-work, where boys spent many hours working along their own lines under his inspiration. The output of work was prolific, some of it being of sufficiently high quality to win awards in art and craft shows.

The Art Room thus became an integral part of Fr Paul's conducted tours of the school, and so impressed one visiting headmaster that he insisted in 'borrowing' Fr Sylvester for the interviewing and choosing of an art master for his own school.

Several of Fr Sylvester's pupils have since made their mark in the world of Art, whether with pictures on the line in the Royal Academy, or membership of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters or in commercial art in various forms.

By way of spare time occupation he took over and transformed the orchards, acted for some time as headmaster's secretary, and after his ordination he gave many retreats and was always ready to produce sermons for special occasions.

In 1946 he gave up his work in the school and went to work in our parishes, first at Brownedge, then at Leyland and finally at St Peter's, Liverpool. This was for him a welcome change, as it gave much fuller scope to his apostolic zeal. Argue, obsecra, increpa might describe his approach to souls, always tempered by real understanding of and sympathy for human weakness. He was most assiduous in visiting his district as long as his health permitted, and was especially successful with the men of the parish. He also greatly extended his work of giving retreats and preaching in other churches. At length, however, failing health compelled his retirement to Ampleforth in 1958.

To end on a more personal note, he had a genius for companionship. Friendship in the narrower sense he reserved for comparatively few people, but in any gathering he was always 'gayest of the gay', and was at his best when he could give rein to his great gift of humour and his powers as a raconteur.

Fr Sylvester was, in three ways, easily the most remarkable man I have known: he was intensely English, he was astonishingly many-sided, and all this many-sidedness was blended, fused and directed by his vocation as a monk of St Benedict.

He was English to his finger-tips, with the directness of a Lancashire-man and the subtlety of mind which might be expected of a man who had been in his day one of the leading English cartoonists. He was, too, very much of the 'Englishman in his humours' and, like Dr Johnson, he talked to win. To argue with Fr Sylvester was like facing a gale of wind on the slopes of the Pennines, challenging, disconcerting, and intensely invigorating. Sometimes too it was intensely irritating. Yet it was never, like so much argument, a waste of time - very much to the contrary.

Closely connected with his Englishry was his many-sidedness and the breadth of his experience. It was not only that he had known the remarkable circle that centred round Scott of the Manchester Guardian, that he had travelled in America, and been part of the intellectual, literary and journalistic life of London before 1914. Nor was it only that he was a remarkably well-read man, in the old sense of the phrase, and a man who revelled in apt quotation or allusion. He had also, and indeed especially, his experience as a soldier; perhaps, one suspects, the most decisive influence in his life. Somebody once said of Dickens that he had the impetus of a mob. And to know Fr Sylvester was in a sense to meet a crowd of Englishmen; Phil May, Dr Johnson, Mr Standfast, something of William Morris, a dash of Pope at his most acidulated, a touch of Pistol and Bardolph - one could draw out the list a big way further. And all this fascinating complexity was braced and directed by his vocation as a monk.

Finally, and not so obviously, there was his capacity, indeed his talent for the admiration of personality. It appeared in particular in his admiration for Fr Paul. Indeed it was not so much that he admired him; he gloried in him. And so he verbally cartooned him. Some of the best 'Paul stories' were of his craftsmanship. And right at the end of his life, one had only to turn the talk to Fr Paul for Fr Sylvester's face to light up with delighted reminiscence.

If you look at something every day for ten years, you may be in grave danger of seeing it.

Such was the kind of remark which those of us who were fortunate enough to frequent the Art Room in Fr Sylvester's time were constantly apt to hear. 'Beautiful piece of virgin paper' he would say, as he put it on your desk '....never be so beautiful again.'But we were indeed fortunate. In Fr Sylvester we had a direct and one-time professional link with the great tradition of English illustrators and press artists and his able and witty draughtsmanship echoed the era of Charles Keene and Phil May. Besides all this he was able to implant in us enough basic knowledge of such fundamentals as design, perspective and good lettering to last a lifetime. Fr Sylvester had little use for time-wasters, nor much for those who were out of tune with his teaching, but those of us who survived his wit and profited from his encouragement and enthusiasm will not easily forget our debt to him.'

My clearest mental picture of Fr Sylvester shows him hurrying down the long passage to or from the Monastery with his habit wrapped round his thin form, the flaps of his hood tied in front, face weather-beaten, books under one arm, not looking to right or left. Social Credit was one of his interests while I was in the school, and although I was in his class, I remember little of the theory, but much of the scorn that he poured on his opponents. Our interest was always held, we were never bored, and we were for that hour in the hands of the most forceful personality at Ampleforth in those days. There was much humour too, if somewhat caustic at times, and I can remember his comments as clearly after thirty years as if it were yesterday.

His sermons were above the average of the community of that time from the point of view of holding our interest and attention.

Fr Sylvester was one of those who made a lasting impression on me and whose appearance, voice and manner remain vivid after thirty years.

Finally The Ampleforth Journal owes him a great debt because he took over the business side of its production at a time when it was somewhat precarious, and with his Fleet Street experience was able to turn it into a sound financial proposition.

SYLVESTER FRYER

Details from the Abbey Necrology