Abbot William Price died in St Raphael's Hospital, Edinburgh, early in the morning of 2nd January, in his 72nd year. Though his health had been giving some anxiety he had ended the term at Gilling in apparently good strength and spirit. He then went, as so often at Christmas, for a short while to stay with Sir James McEwan, to say mass for his family. When unexpected signs of heart failure developed he was moved into hospital where he died, with great peace and serenity, with Father Abbot at his bedside. The loss to his monastic family, and to the whole congregation, is very great. His obituary will be published in the next number of the Journal, but affection demands a word without delay.
When he entered the Community in 1933 he was already a man of distinction. He entered a closely knit Community, almost all Ampleforth men in origin, and still strongly North Country. He was a man from a different tradition, a larger world. It is doubtful whether the Community, still basically clinging to the traditions so well described by Father Paul in Ampleforth and its Origins, understood the distinction of the man who was joining them. He himself cannot have been untouched by the knowledge of success and the habits of independence. But gone with unparaded ease was the eye glass, gone the small comforts of the world where he moved with such ease - the evening drink, the Chinese boy to tie his laces - and his brethren were largely unconscious of the strength of character which made the transition so apparently smooth. He instantly belonged to the Community, but always had something distinctive to give it. That note of distinction, which he gave to everything he did and every group he joined, was never lost but never divisive.
With distinction there was gentleness and sympathy. It is inevitable, since he came to succeed Father Paul as Headmaster in 1954, that we should think of him mostly as Father Paul's successor. He was more than that, but that was his hardest challenge. He met it with such gentleness and modesty that it almost succeeds in obscuring his achievement. He had a gift for self effacement. But nothing can obscure his work for us. When the history of Ampleforth in the middle of this century comes to be set in its true perspective it may well be seen that his influence was crucial.
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Anyone who goes along the corridor of the Lower Building on the way to the Library or the Theatre looks up at Derek Clarke's portrait of Fr Paul and receives for some seconds of his advance the full force of its imperious gaze. What were Fr William's feelings as he approached that presence, challenging so many comparisons, recalling so many memories? He had not himself known Fr Paul from the schoolboy's point of view and so cannot have felt the reverential awe of a boy before the ultimate authority of his world. But he had known him since his undergraduate days and had served many years under him as a master in the school; the searching gaze of the portrait, in some ways an exaggeration of the kindly glance of the original, must have arrested his attention. When the picture was shown at the Portrait Painters' Exhibition it was said that it killed everything else within range: it must certainly have provoked memories and reflections in the mind of a successor and admirer.
William Price first visited us in 1920, as an undergraduate of that first generation that had known the War, a generation that at times seemed too sober and experienced for confinement in statu pupillari, yet capable of deploying more than an undergraduate's rowdiness in expression of festivity or dissent - not that Fr William was ever given to extremes of behaviour or opinion.
What he found here was a modest institution, not half its present size: there were about 30 monks in the house and not many more than 200 boys, including the 40 in the Preparatory School. There was nothing east of the Square, nothing south of the Brook - no Gilling, no Lakes, no farm on the other side of the valley. The place was still dimly lit by gas, and there was no bus service on the road. Most of the first generations of monks to receive a university education were still in their thirties; the Headmaster had not yet been ten years a member of the Headmasters' Conference; university scholarships were still a recent and unfamiliar achievement.
But the English Congregation was in the full youth and vigour of its Second Spring; new life was arising through the restoration of the abbeys by the Holy See, the return to the Universities, the revival of the Liturgy. Dom David Knowles has written of a parallel situation at about the same: 'In retrospect, it is strange that neither Bishop nor Butler realized that within a few years of the triumph of 1900 a new and permanent slant had been given to the life, not only of Downside but of the whole Congregation, by the rapid and unceasing transformation of the chief monastic schools from small, uneconomic, outmoded domestic enterprises into large, fashionable, profit-making, demanding public schools' (Foreword to Abercrombie: Life of Edmund Bishop, 1959).
This describes, from the point of view of a not wholly sympathetic onlooker, the development that began here too in the second decade of the century; and anyone who knew the full vigour of Abbot Edmund and Abbot Herbert, of Fr Ambrose Byrne, Fr Placid Dolan and Fr Paul Nevill, Fr Sebastian Lambert, Fr Stephen Marwood and Fr Bernard McElligott, will understand what an engaging community it was that was then girding itself to pile Pelion upon Ossa, under the rule, perhaps more charismatic than constructive, of Abbot Oswald Smith: by no means in agreement with one another, but enthusiastic for an almost unattainable (and quite unquestioned) educational and apostolic ideal; linked with the outer world only by the trap that met the trains at Gilling station; hard-working, yet strangely leisured, cultured yet not muscle-bound with scholarship, well read yet wholly insular, deeply Christian but unperplexed about the social status of the conmunity, the social aspirations of the school or their economic and educational relations with the society of the time; men of prayer, but in a tradition only slowly on the move from the Mechlin chant and devotions of the nineteenth century to the plainsong and polyphony, the sacrificial stone altars, the intellectual and aesthetic standards of the early liturgical movement in this country.
The undergraduate who came upon all this at the age of twenty-one was the second son of Sir Charles Price, a member of an ancient family originally from Cardiganshire but resident for three generations at Haverfordwest. Sir Charles was Conservative M.P. for Pembrokeshire from 1924 to 1929, defeating no less an adversary than Major Gwilym Lloyd George; a lawyer of note and a member of the Forestry Commission. On his mother's side too there was a Welsh connection, and a Catholic tradition through which the Mass was not entirely unfamiliar to him as a boy.
His life offers so many points of comparison with that of Fr Augustine Baker over three hundred years before that it is perhaps worth while to note the coincidences: his Welsh origin and training in the law, his education at Oxford and return to the old faith, his great services to the Congregation and especially to the nuns, even his father's public service and interest in forestry are a reflection of his predecessor; for Fr Leander Prichard records of William Baker, justice of the Peace and Sheriff of Monmouthshire, that 'he sowed some growndes in the lordships of Abergavenny, which may now be seen tall oaks. He planted and grafted all manner of choise fruit in his own orchards, and drew in others by his example and admonission to do the like. For before his time our country knew no fruit but crabbs, and the apple called jennet'. He was however entirely free from the eccentricities and controversies that distinguished his great predecessor.
Fr William had been educated at Radley, where he went as a scholar from a Preparatory School founded by a remarkable Old Radleian called Roper Spyers; Mr Spyers had had a varied career as a barrister, an actor and a theological student at Cuddesdon before he founded this school, to which he gave the name of 'Wallop' in memory of his home in Hampshire where the Wallops abound. At Radley perhaps William owed most to his history tutor, Walter Smale who remained his close friend and gave him his strong historical interest; and the High Church liturgical tradition of the school did something to smooth his way on the path to Rome.
It was as a boy at Radley that he first saw Oxford, though only an Oxford evacuated by the War; for in the First War, in this point too so unlike the second, the junior numbers of the University consisted almost only of women (still second-class citizens of the University) and representatives of the Third World (still mostly members of the British Empire). In one of those delightful and brilliant speeches that so often provided the best entertainment, and much more than entertainment, at the Oxford Dinners at York, he once gave an amusing and moving description of that first visit; those autumnal stones had clearly said more to him in the glory of the springtime than can ordinarily be conveyed to a boy in the middle school. And yet the occasion of the visit was no more than a swimming test at the Merton Baths - blattaria illa balnea - which had to be passed before he could take up rowing.
From Radley he received a commission in the Queen's Royal Regiment, in which his father also served, and saw the last and most disorganized months of the fighting; a copy of Marcus Aurelius that he had taken with him proved less readable and less of a support than he had hoped. After the collapse of the German spring offensive and the surrender at Compigne, he served for some months in the occupation of the Rhine Bridgehead at Cologne, quartered at the Hotel Zur Ewigen Lampe and slowly becoming aware of the economic consequences of the peace, on which he formed views that were later to be unpopular among his fellow undergraduates at Oxford.
When he went up to Corpus in 1919 he found it an intimate society of some eighty undergraduates under the genial and energetic presidency of the Aristotelian, Thomas Case, who was then facing defeat in his two great university battles - each of them a Thirty Year War - one for the exclusion of women and the other for the retention of compulsory Greek. Under these auspices and tutored by R. B. Mowat he read for a Second in Modern History and thereafter for a First in the School of Jurisprudence.
Many of his undergraduate friends were to be friends of a lifetime, or at least of a large part of it: W. A. Pantin and Hugh Montgomery, Guy Sich, Darrell Blackburn, Vere Somerset and especially Christopher Williams, known to junior members of Corpus as 'Price's Jesuit', but in fact a monk at Ampleforth and the means of Fr William's introduction to St Benet's Hall. Br Christopher's family in Monmouthshire was already known to him at home, and as three of the brothers were monks of Ampleforth it was natural that he should soon make a stay there as their guest.
Meanwhile Fr William was storing his capacious memory with the wide and perceptive reading that so often surprised with an apt quotation remembered verbatim - or sometimes slightly improved - after an interval of decades. This was the background that made him capable of vivid historical presentation, for history was to him a matter of real people, not of impersonal tendencies and waves. In his lawyer's mood, when struggling to express the inexpressible in the draft of some statement or agreement, or when insisting to the ignorant that 'the plural does not import the singular', he sometimes seemed to bury himself in subordinate clauses and to lose the vision of the whole. But he had an historian's sympathetic understanding of the past, a barrister's power of marshalling his ideas and a Celtic magic in the use of words. 'What lights of learning hath Wales sent forth for your schools,' wrote Ben Jonson to James I, 'what industrious students of your laws, what able ministers of your justice'; and so, in the case of Fr William too, an after-dinner speech or a sermon to the school, a paper read to a Sixth Form society, or even a speech for the prosecution in a mock trial before the Senior Debating Society - any of these might astonish with its insight and its brilliance, without ever losing itself in mere virtuosity or wit.
During these years at Corpus he received instruction from Fr Martindale, then at the height of his apostolate at Campion Hall in St Giles, and was received into the Church at Ampleforth; for the tradition of his family and school were favourable to his return to the faith; and indeed in his suspicion of enthusiasm he made rather the impression of one who had always been there than of one in any need of return. He was already much attracted to monastic life, but deferring to his father's hopes he was called to the Bar in 1923 and served for two years on the South Wales Circuit.
In 1926 he took up an appointment as Assistant Legal Adviser, and later as a Director, of the British American Tobacco Company in China, and served for seven years in Shanghai, travelling much in the interior and acquiring a wide and varied experience of men and cities. A man who has appeared successfully in the Mixed Court, with its mysterious oriental ways, who was awarded a decoration as an officer in the Shanghai Volunteers, and who rendered the important service of establishing the Foreign Club at Moukden in Manchuria, the headquarters of the 'Old' Marshal Chang Tso-lin, on a sound footing as an incorporated company owning the land on which it was built, has not only acquired experience: he has shown a courage and determination of an unusual degree. These, moreover, were the days of the Marshals and War Lords, marching and counter-marching across that flat, dusty and interminable landscape, of capture by bandits and of anxious waiting for ransom by foreign missionaries and officials. But he saw much more than this, as is shown by his friendship with learned Chinese colleagues and his collection of Chinese ceramics. Indeed his deep regard for Chinese culture made these years a notable enrichment for him, from his first sight of the junks sailing on the China Sea, of a fisherman at work with his cormorant, or of the Forbidden City of Peking, to such details of daily life as the proper management of 'squeeze' and the relations of a foreign householder with his Number One Boy.
The social life of the foreign community, too, was more than an education in itself: the China ponies and the race-meetings (for riding was his great recreation at this time), the artificial society of men and women emancipated from the sanctions of home, the casual and inconsequent drifting through a round of pointless pleasures - it was a certain emptiness in all this that brought back the interest in monastic life felt so strongly ten years before.
So it was that he made application to Abbot Edmund Matthews and was clothed with Br Bede Burge in October 1933, some weeks late for the opening of the novitiate. The Novicemaster, Fr Laurence Buggins, a good deal put out by this unpunctuality and perhaps unaware that it was due only to consideration for his brother, whom he was inducting as his successor in the post of Legal Adviser, arranged that he, though the older man by a dozen years, should be clothed in the second place and so succeed to the less attractive positions and more laborious jobs for the first few years of his monastic life. But Br Bede was a man of remarkable, though often inarticulate, insight: at the last moment he pushed William forward, so that, unaware what was happening, he was given the first place; and it was Br Bede who rang the bells and lit the fires in the months to come.
However, it cannot always have been easy for this rather distinguished young man of thirty-four to live in the narrow circle and undistinguished circumstances of the novitiate, with its petty rules, its limited conversation and its unexciting tasks. Yet the shedding of professional cares and the company of men of undergraduate age sometimes brings a renewal of youth; and certainly Br William was at home from the afternoon of his arrival and slid into the stream of monastic life with astonishing ease: a delightful companion at manual labour, in a cross-country run or in the production of a Christmas pantomime; affectionate but reserved, observant yet always kindly (did he ever lose his temper?), witty but always at the service of others; short-sighted and slightly deaf; curiously clumsy in the management of such mechanical contrivances as a typewriter or a motor car, and willing to drive rapidly through a fog on the wrong side of the road on the ground that it was easier to see where one was going (what a loss to us all that more is not known of that occasion when he and Fr Hubert ran over a pig in Ireland), yet always a figure of such distinction that he never at any time felt a need to stand upon his dignity.
In his first two years he followed the novitiate studies, such as they were, helped others with their defective Latin and in his private reading studied especially Gratian's Decretum. In 1935, with no pause for serious theological study, he began the laborious work of teaching and administration that was to last until his death half a lifetime later. Through all these thirty-five years he maintained an astonishing industry, in spite of much ill health and many sleepless nights, in every sector of his work: Church History, Moral Theology and Canon Law in the monastery, Modern History in the school (he was Senior History Master for twenty-five years), and boxing in the gymnasium, to say nothing of innumerable papers read to school societies or tutorials for young monks in preparation for university work. There never was a harder worker among us, nor a more competent teacher, but administrative problems were sometimes intractable to him: he could forget appointments or confuse his statistics, and there was an embarrassing occasion when he took a boxing team to another school and found that the weights he had assigned to the boys were serious understatements. But all boys had the deepest respect for him (it is the first thing they mention in their reminiscences), there was never any doubt about discipline and it is impossible to recall anyone, young or old, who took a dislike to him. His kindness had literally no limits: thus he could win a warm response from improbable characters and stimulate thought in unaccustomed minds; he was so much more than a schoolmaster that no one could fail to respond.
In 1951, when Fr Columba became Prior, he took over St Wilfrid's House as Housemaster. He undertook this without enthusiasm at the age of fifty-two, but was in fact very happy for the seven terms that he spent there. His talks to the House were amusing - and most effective: the boys were constantly surprised to discover how little was missed by his apparently short-sighted glance, and his authority was never in question. And then in January 1954, on the death of Fr Paul, he became Headmaster and was to rule the school for almost eleven years.
Fr Edmund had ruled for twenty years and Fr Paul for thirty; they had made the school what it was: the house system, the buildings and the staff; the monitors, the library, the relations between masters and boys; the position of the school in the educational world, the ideal of 'liberty and responsibility for boys', of educating an ‚lite, of Englishry, of gentility and of Catholicity - all this had been conceived and brought to life on the foundation of a heart-felt traditional piety, of honourable and responsible conduct, of monastic austerity, simplicity and obedience. 'The day should begin with the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass or, if a long sleep has been granted, by a visit to the Blessed Sacrament whenever this is possible' - such is the first sentence of The School Rules, reprinted as lately as 1960. It was a wise and humane ideal, immensely fruitful as an apostolate; not everyone could give absolute assent to all its implications, but each was aware of the reservations of the other and all could co-operate within so wide a formula.
It needed no little courage to succeed to this empire at the age of fifty-four and in the first few weeks, overwhelmed by the labour of picking up the threads (and sorting out certain tangles), he had something of a trial of strength with certain of the older boys. But after this first engagement there was no question of his authority with either staff or boys. Yet he was most unobtrusive, and a prospecting parent once reported of his first visit to us that he had not met the Headmaster, but had been most kindly shown round by a delightful monk called Fr William.
So for nearly eleven years he ruled the school, increasing its numbers by over a hundred, withstanding the loss of staff caused by the foundation at St Louis, and in other respects following closely at first in Fr Paul's formula and tradition. Perhaps the Headmasters' Conference meant less to him than to his predecessor, for his experience was of a wider world; perhaps too he was more interested in the education of individual persons and less fascinated by the task of administering a large establishment; he lacked Fr Paul's imaginative gift for planning houses and furnishings, but he was more interested in humanity, in persons who would fit into no conceivable project or plan; hence the unexpected devotion of improbable characters that so often surprised his colleagues. His advice to boys, too, could take a surprising turn, as when he said as his parting counsel to a boy going to the University, 'Never stay alone with a woman when you are drunk'.
Shyness was a constant difficulty for him; at times it was a real embarrassment to parents and occasionally gave an odd harshness to his manner when addressing the school, for instance at Gormire. Perhaps this shyness also explains an uncharacteristic vehemence of advocacy into which he would occasionally fall in Chapter or in Council: a point of view would be so outrageously over-stated that the case was weakened, or the position was later abandoned with surprising equanimity and unconcern. Both masters and boys knew him too well to misunderstand his manner, but both were aware that a rapier might flash out if he thought it necessary. He had time for everybody, in spite of his long hours of work, and he was always able to relax in his room or in the calefactory over a paper, a conversation or an idle reverie. For many years he went for an hour's walk two or three times a week, but after he became Headmaster he was generally content with a tour of the houses and grounds, delivering letters, making the acquaintance of boys and observing the activities of the school.
What a solid and peaceful world it seems in retrospect! For it was only in the mid-sixties when his years of office came to an end that a new mood of permissiveness spread among generations of boys brought up in a different way. It is not easy to guess how he would have dealt with it, for it questioned some of his first assumptions. It must have been with some feeling of relief that he said in his Exhibition speech of 1964 how glad he was to hand over to a younger man, who could offer 'wise and imaginative answers to the problems of the times'.
In the same speech he listed a remarkable series of achievements for 'an interim Headmaster' who had held office for little more than ten years: the completion of the Abbey Church, the addition of two further houses to the school, the maintenance of academic standards, for five old boys had in that year been awarded First Class Honours in their Final Schools at Oxford or Cambridge.
But it must indeed have been with relief as well as with regret that he went off on a long holiday to his brother in Portugal and to the community at St Louis, before he returned to spend his last years as Headmaster of Gilling, where he deeply endeared himself - not too strong a word - to the boys, to their parents, and to the staff, who made new discoveries about one they already, as they thought, knew so well. No one could have guessed that he would show such tenderness and understanding for the eight-year-olds, or win such gratitude and admiration from their parents. He was happy there, in spite of recurrent ill health and occasional anxieties; he enjoyed the gardens, the entertainment of his brethren from the other side of the valley, his holidays with his sister in Pembrokeshire, his brother in Portugal or with Fr Hubert in Ireland. Retirement to the monastery was attractive to him, for he hoped to be given time (as he said) to make his soul; but he was somewhat fearful of unemployment and hesitant to abandon his charge, which however was to have come to an end in the year of his death.
He was a true monk, a vir Dei after St Benedict's heart; not given to long hours of prayer but giving absolute priority to the things of the spirit, 'an internal liver' in the central Benedictine tradition. As is recorded of Fr Baker too, 'he was a man of deep judgment, wise, of a sound head, without any crotchets... of a nature affable, courteous and faithfully constant to his friends... and every way grateful and acceptable to all people that knew him'. He was mistrustful of Enthusiasm, whether of the past or of the present, and would quote Bishop Butler's words to Wesley, 'Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing'. But he was most constant in the observance of the choir, of the customs of the house, of the common burden of work; and felt his absences from the public Office as a deprivation.
His contribution to the monastery and to the Congregation was immense. It was here that his skill in jurisprudence and understanding of finance did their greatest service: the incorporation of the Abbey as a Charitable Trust, the recent revision of the Constitutions or the drafting of a statement on temporalities at General Chapter were matters in which our debt to him is deep and abiding. He often saved us from imprudences and left many things a great deal better than he found them. When the Constitutions were criticized as 'legalistic', he would answer with a quotation - slightly improved - from A Man for all Seasons, 'The wind will blow very cold, Son Roper, when you have cut down all the laws of England'. For he had all St Thomas More's devotion to the idea of law and a deep understanding of its use in the service of freedom and of life.
In addition he was for thirty years a member of the Abbot's Council, for twenty the financial adviser at General Chapter, and at all times his wise advice was anxiously sought and generously given in the affairs of the monastery, the Congregation, the school and a host of friends and clients; he was particularly helpful to the nuns of the Congregation, and represented one of their houses at General Chapter. These services found fitting recognition in his nomination to the Cathedral Priory of Durham in 1964 and to the Abbacy of St Mary's, York, five years later.
His great reserve makes it difficult to write of his friends. There were many who loved him deeply and owed him much. His unusual experience of men and cities enabled him to see both sides of a question and to feel the tension between them; thus he wrote to a friend not three years ago, after a discussion in which that tension emerged, 'I hope I didn't seem too horribly worldly, cynical or Laodicean in my conversation. Of course, I do understand and do sympathize with your wish to work out a true philosophy of life: it is what we all have to do in our own way and in our own sphere. The difficulty is to reconcile the 'higgling of the market' with the spirit of the Beatitudes'.
In the last few months of his life his health had at times caused alarm, but no one felt any anxiety when he went, as so often before, to spend Christmas with his great friends the McEwens in Ayrshire. However in the last days of the year his heart showed signs of failure and he was moved into hospital, first at Duns and then at St Gabriel's Nursing Home in Edinburgh. Under the care of the nuns, in great peace and content and with Fr Abbot for two days by his bedside, his life slowly failed and he died on 2nd January in his 72nd year. May he share in full measure in the life of the Resurrection, for he fulfilled as few others St Benedict's injunction to the Abbot: sciat sibi oportere prodesse magis quam praeesse; semper superexaltet misericordiam judicio; et studeat plus amari quam timeri - he is to be of service to others rather than preside over them; let him always set mercy before justice; and let him try rather to be loved than to be feared.
DOM DUDLEY WILLIAM PRICE 2 January 1971 1899 19 Jul Born Shepperton Mx 1913 Educ Radley 1917 Army 1919-22 Scholar of Corpus Christi College Oxford 1st cl in Jurisprudence 2nd in History 1920 25 Jul Baptised at Ampleforth Abbey 1923 Called to the Bar 1924-33 Legel Repres & Director of Brit Amer Tobacco at Shanghai 1933 27 Oct Habit Ampleforth Abbot Matthews 1934 29 Oct Temporary Vows 1937 29 Oct Solemn Vows 1938 17 Jul Subdeacon 1939 23 Jul Deacon 1940 7 Jan Priest 1941 Councillor 1950 3 Mar Inspector Rei Familiaris 1951 Sep Housemaster of St Wilfrid's 1954 28 Jan Headmaster of the College, succeeding D Paul Nevill 1961 Re-elected Inspector Rei Familiaris 1964 Retired & visited St Louis Returned to assist D Hilary Barton 8 Apr Prior of Worcester 1965 Sep Headmaster of Gilling 1966 Economus 1969 Abbot of York 1971 2 Jan Died in Edinburgh 5 Jan Buried in Church Vault