Theodore Edward Delepine born 1 June 1918; educated Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, London, and Benedictine Priory, Lazcano, Spain. Clothed at Fort Augustus 1936; ordained 1943 then teaching at Carlekemp Prep School, North Berwick unti1 1955; then Assistant Bursar at Fort Augustus, and Bursar/Headmaster until 1994. Chaplain at Colwich 1994 — 2009; 2000 transferred Stability to Ampleforth Abbey.
Fr Edward was born on 1st June 1918 and baptised Theodore Edward. He was the sixth child of eight. His father was a Channel Islander; his mother came from St Gall in Switzerland. His father was a music teacher who, as Edward said, moved quite rapidly from post to post. Consequently, Edward's schooling was frequently interrupted by a change of school. When as a young teenager, he told his father he would like to become a Benedictine monk, his father sent him to a school in Lazcano, Spain, attached to a monastery, which was a dependent Priory of Belloc in South West France. Edward quickly came to the conclusion that he did not want to be a monk in either France or Spain, and as the Spanish Civil War grew more threatening he was hurriedly brought back to London. For a year he worked as an office-boy in the City. He still wished to be a monk, so he got in touch with Abbot Vonier of Buckfast who directed him to Fr Clement Tigar SJ at Osterley, because his education had been so interrupted. Fr Tigar sent him to Osterley's house in Fort Augustus. Shortly after, he applied to join the monastic community at Fort Augustus and was accepted. After such a disrupted youth it is not unlikely that he was appreciative of the quiet stability of life at Fort Augustus. However, disruption was not over. Edward was sent to study at Sant' Anselmo in 1938, and completed one year there. When war broke out in September 1939, he could not return to Sant' Anselmo and had to complete his studies at Fort Augustus. He was ordained in 1943. When the war ended, the Prep school, which had been evacuated from Canaan Lane in Edinburgh to Fort Augustus, was moved back south to the new site of Carlekemp at North Berwick. Edward went there as a young, newly ordained priest, starting his working life as a teacher of French. He also took responsibility for various activities such as choosing and showing the weekly film, stage managing and building sets for school plays, managing the boys' pocket-money.
After twelve years at Carlekemp, he returned to Fort Augustus to be assistant to the Bursar, and to continue his teaching of French, and his 'activities.' In 1968 he became the Bursar himself, and his teaching commitment was reduced. It was also a time when the economy of the country was shortly to go into hyper-inflation, and oil prices were to rise alarmingly. A monk takes three vows, which define the monastic life: they are obedience to the Abbot, stability in commitment to the community he joins, and conversatio morum which could be translated as a deliberate and conscientious commitment to follow the monastic way of life. It will be a surprise to no-one that these vows will usually tend to foster a regular and methodical way of life. No-one who knew Edward would deny that his way of life was regular, he was rarely absent from community acts — office, meals, recreation. A young monk of Pluscarden Abbey, Br Hugh Gilbert, who came with some of his brethren to Fort Augustus for his studies, and is now Bishop Hugh of Aberdeen, says that his abiding memory of Edward was his daily practice of walking up and down the terrace above Loch Ness saying his rosary. That is a typical example of the regular pattern which was his way of life. His approach also to its tasks and challenges was methodical, if sometimes idiosyncratic.
He was the bursar at Fort Augustus in two periods, totalling 23 years; a daunting task in a community which struggled continually to make ends meet - the burden of this struggle lying to a large extent on the shoulders of the bursar. When the school finally closed in 1993 and a new enterprise was started, Abbot Mark Dilworth engaged a layman with experience of that new kind of work, and Fr Edward retired at the age of 75 to be chaplain to the monastery of nuns at Colwich, where he served for a further 15 years, and then came, aged 90, to his final retirement at Ampleforth. The monastery at Fort Augustus finally closed in 1999, and Fr Edward, who was chaplain to the nuns at Colwich at that time, transferred his stability to Ampleforth.
He spent 77 years as a monk, the first 64 of them as a monk of St Benedict's Abbey at Fort Augustus, the last 13 as a monk of St Laurence's Abbey at Ampleforth. In his long life it was perhaps also a part of his regularity that he did not have any serious illnesses which disrupted the routine of his days and required some time in hospital. It was only when he had gone to be chaplain at Colwich and was already an elderly man that he had a serious illness and had to spend time in hospital. Then when he returned to Ampleforth in his 90s, he had an operation for cancer. Finally, three months before he died he developed Parkinson's disease.
In his later years, Fr Edward may have appeared rather reticent and other-worldly, but it was not difficult to uncover his quirky sense of humour and his gift as a raconteur when he was recalling the unusual circumstances of his pre-war monastic formation. He would, for instance, suddenly and quietly refer to his memories of being in the Piazza Venezia in Rome when Hitler and Mussolini were on the balcony, or to the complex and interesting circumstances surrounding his return to Scotland in the early months of the war. Later on, when he was holding simultaneously the posts of Headmaster and Bursar, he had a wry way of describing his reactions when the two posts came into conflict. He described this in tenns of an imaginary conversation with himself in which he would put forward the Headmaster's request wearing one hat, and then respond to the request wearing another. He had interesting views on many topics and kept in touch with outside events until the end of his life. The persevering normality of his monastic life and of his principal work as bursar through so many demanding years in a cash-strapped community reminds me of the sentence from the gospel: 'Your endurance will win you your lives;' and also of the words with which St Benedict concludes the Prologue to his Rule: 'Never swerving from the Lord's instructions, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom,' We pray that Fr Edward's regular and persevering commitment to his monastic vocation will be his entry to the Kingdom of Christ.
Francis Davidson OSB
Ampleforth Journal 118 (2014) 17-19