Fr Gregory Brusey was one of the five monks of St Benedict’s Abbey, Fort Augustus, who transferred their stability to St Laurence’s Abbey, Ampleforth, when Fort Augustus closed in 1999. Of the five, he had spent the longest at Fort Augustus, having gone to school there as a twelve year old schoolboy. When he moved to Ampleforth, he had lived for 75 years at Fort Augustus.
James Brusey was born in 1912 in London, where his family had moved from Grimsby. In 1924 he was sent to Fort Augustus to join the Abbey school, only recently re-opened by Abbot Macdonald. The young James’s uncle, Fr Ambrose Geoghegan, was already a priest in the community. At the end of his school days, he sought entry to the community, and was clothed in the habit, as Br Gregory, in September 1931. A few years later, as a Junior, he was sent to the community’s Priory in Edinburgh, St Andrew’s, Canaan Lane, both to help in the school, and also to study music at Edinburgh University. Br Gregory was a talented musician already, and he proved a good student also under Professor Tovey, who awarded him the Niecks Prize in the History of Music. He graduated Mus. B. in 1938. Shortly after he was sent to Budapest to study theology, and advance his musical skills on the organ at the conservatoire. He lived in the Abbey of Pannonhalma during his brief stay in Budapest: his study programme was cut short by the growing threat of war. He returned to Fort Augustus, hurrying back across Europe to avoid being caught in an occupied country. In 1941 he was ordained priest, and became a full-time teacher in the prep school, which had been evacuated to Fort Augustus.
When the prep school moved to Carlekemp, North Berwick, in 1945, Fr Gregory was one of the founding community, and continued to work there until its closure in 1979. Gregory taught RE, and instrumental music (piano and violin), and he coached games to generations of schoolboys. He was best able to relate to prep school boys, and they to him; they shared his taste in jokes, and they would delight to groan at the excruciating puns which featured in his stories; they shared his enthusiasm for football, especially as played by Arsenal, for fishing, and for sport in general. When the prep school closed, Gregory moved back to Fort Augustus, and became organist and choir master, and continued to teach piano in the school. In this instrumental role he made major and leading contributions to the joint presentations by the musicians of the Abbey School and Inverness Royal Academy of the operas, Cosi fan Tutte, Amahl and The Night Visitors, of the Requiem of Fauré and Mozart, and of Handel’s Messiah.
The regularity of his monastic observance was matched by his regularity in playing the piano; it was generally acknowledged during his later years at Fort Augustus that if a visitor asked for Fr Gregory, then if he could not be heard playing the piano or the organ, he was most probably in the church praying. Those two observances marked his days, like the regular beat of a metronome. And if Gregory lacked the interest and the skills to be an organiser or an administrator, then he undoubtedly had the priceless gift of seeing and appreciating the personal in events and situations. In his long life in school work he had known many boys; he remembered most of them, and kept in touch with very many. He liked people, and they in turn liked him. There was always in his manner an unassuming modesty which made him unthreatening and approachable.
He would have been totally astonished to know that at his death his obituary would appear in all the national newspapers. This was because of an event which he himself would probably have described as one of the least important things that happened to him in his long life. In the 70's he was walking with a musician friend in the monks’ garden at Fort Augustus, when they had a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. Fr Gregory allowed himself to be interviewed by a national newspaper about this sighting; and thereafter was a target for every national and foreign journalist in the area doing a story on the Monster. He had become to the media, the monk who confessed he had seen the Monster. For all his sincerity in the truth of his sighting, and his willingness to oblige his interviewers, he soon became tired of telling the story.
By the time he came to Ampleforth in January 1999, his deafness had become a major barrier to communication, and the arthritis in his hands had put a stop to his piano-playing. These painful changes were the accompaniment to the loss of his familiar surroundings at Fort Augustus, and the disbanding of the community he had made his home for all his long adult life. Gregory accepted all this with an equanimity of spirit which was a testimony to the monastic life he had led. He came to Matins as always on the day of his death, complained of feeling unwell shortly after and lay down on his bed. He died peacefully of a heart attack in mid morning while Fr Abbot, Fr Prior and his monastic brethren from Fort Augustus were praying by his bedside.
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