George Hume was born in Newcastle in 1923, the son of a Scottish Protestant Sir William Errington Hume, CMG, FRCP, a prominent heart physician and Marie Elisabeth (née Tisseyre). The eldest, his sister Madeleine, married Sir John Charles and then, as a widow, Sir John Hunt who was the then Secretary to the Cabinet of eventually four Prime Ministers. A second sister, Christine, married Christopher Westmacott who continued to live in Newcastle, and a third, Frances, married a Norwegian Colonel. His brother, John, married Patricia Hickey and lived and worked as a doctor in Sunderland. Every year at Westminster his family party was a precious and important highlight. His background was thus a fusion of the professional and medical establishment and the forceful character of a French mother imbued with flair and commanding style. His natural presence and his bilingual ease in English and French were obvious advantages as responsibilities were thrust upon him.
He joined the Abbey of St Laurence at Ampleforth after a successful career in the school where he was captain of the Rugby XV and already revealed leadership qualities: ‘He was always going to the top, and humbly so — his natural gifts took him there’, said one of his contemporaries and a life-long friend. And he developed a capacity for some stand-up comedy, a duo with his friend Fr Martin Haigh a highlight in which his later rendering of Churchillian oratory was realistic and which he said never again made him fear a public arena. In later years he and his contemporaries would meet for any anniversary they could find. But in 1940 there were other weightier considerations: to fight for king and country or join the monastery. The rigorous Ludovic Kennedy tied him down on this in a television interview in his early innocent days as Cardinal, an experience in which he found himself wanting. He joined the monastery in and around a group of entrants for the period 1939-41 who were talented, devoted and loyal, and who contributed beyond measure to the works of the community over the next fifty years.
After Oxford University where he read History at the Abbey’s St Benet’s Hall and played rugby for the Oxford 2nd XV Greyhounds, ‘packing down in the scrum alongside a future establishment high-flier’ he survived all four years of Theology at Fribourg University in Switzerland, his various companions wilting after one, two or three years in the stultifying rigour of the preVatican theological university system. All lectures in Latin — he described how it took him six months of evening homework and many a tear before ever he understood one lecture. And playing with a rugby ball while dressed in full monastic habit (because that was the rule) was an absurdity he could have done without. Visits to European monasteries, and colleagues at the University who became life-long friends, enlarged horizons, and one, Andrzej Deskur from Poland, also became Cardinal and colleague of the to-be Pope John Paul II who elevated him in 1985 as head of one of the Roman Curial Congregations.
Back at the Abbey in 1950 he was for thirteen years increasingly at the hub of monastery and school activity: 1st XV rugby coach, high-jump coach; Senior Modern Languages Master (a tribute to his French background despite the History degree) while teaching Modern European History at A level; joint Second Master with Fr Patrick Barry, a classicist whom he was later to appoint Headmaster; for several years he was curate in the Ampleforth Village Church, an experience he prized for he got to know the village, the families and all those who worked in and around the Abbey and College and forged the strongest of bonds. He was then Housemaster of St Bede’s House from 1955 to his election as Abbot in 1963; in the monastery he was elected to the Abbot’s Council, was Dogmatic Theology Professor to the junior monks, and the Community’s elected representative to the Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation, who elected him as the Magister Scholarum of the Congregation, responsible for the academic training and theological standards of the young student monis of the Congregation.
His European History teaching style was conventional, relying for its effect upon the charismatic character of the man as much as the scholarly detail of the presentation. They were the days of a semi-lecture approach interspersed with questions and answers which interrupted the flow and the occasional leitmotif which lessened the formal seriousness of the occasion. Even back in 1958 it is remembered that after the death of Pope Pius XII there was an orderly pincer movement to persuade Fr Basil to talk about the forthcoming papal election and potential candidates. The media had already settled on Archbishop (not yet Cardinal) Montini and there was a flurry of other Italian names bandied around. Fr Basil, a hand holding chalk up to his nose in a gesture of knowing something special, is said to have proclaimed as he wrote on the blackboard: ‘Ah, but I think they will choose an old man’ and he wrote the name Roncalli up on the board, the future John XXIII. Prescience or guesswork, it was effective.
Many of his boys in St Bede’s House have spoken of his authority and friendiy ease with all, the capacity to be in charge, known to be in charge, but always available for a chat between equals and usually late into the night. He trusted them and sought not to nit-pick. He turned many a blind eye. But he was ever watchful and shrewd, choosing the moment to intervene. When he did so with the House in general — say, once a term, he let it all out and for a few days among the boys themselves there was a searching reassessment of priorities; when he did so with an individual he was direct, eyeball to eyeball, yet in a manner which indicated love and concern and depth of interest in the individual and his future. For such a strong personality he delegated well, always wanting to watch others emerge, grow and test themselves in challenging circumstances: ‘There is in every boy a gift which I do not possess — I must encourage that’. As with any Housemaster he forged strong bonds with his Head Monitors and many remained the best of his friends thereafter. But he also had the capacity and judgement to spot the limits of such relationships. For example at Westminster he saw the necessity of withdrawing somewhat from any form of compromising situation as when his former head monitor Hugo Young emerged as an influential political journalist and later Chairman of the Scott Trust which owns The Guardian. Of course he retained warmth and delight in mixing and meeting, but such a developing distance saddened a man who relied more on his friends than perhaps the outside world would have been led to believe, but it was his judgement that it was right so to do.
And so, aged forty and at the end of Abbot Herbert Byrne’s unbending rule of twenty-four years, the variety of his school and monastic work, which he loved, came to an end and he was elected fourth Abbot of Ampleforth in April 1963.
Rather inevitably, the public perception of the man chosen by Pope Paul VI to go to Westminster as Archbishop in 1976 was that of an inexperienced monk/Abbot being dragged from his monastery to national prominence. It was less well known that in Paul VI there was a Pope who had a love of the Benedictine Order. It was probably true also that, after thirteen years of a period of incessant challenge both in society at large and in the monastery, Abbot Basil was due for a change. The wide diversity of the Abbot’s remit embraced not only the Abbey but also parishes in as many as six Dioceses. The work was personal and pastoral, administrative and financial, legal and educational as well as that most delicate of arts — a spiritual guide and teacher. He did not lack for experience in the wider world. True, unlike many of the Bishops themselves, he had not been part of the living day to day experience of Vatican II in the years 1962-5; and certainly he lacked the all-encompassing knowledge of Derek Worlock, whose experience in diocesan and international church affairs and his role at the Vatican Council singled him out as an outstanding and meticulous bureaucrat. In the event Derek Worlock was to be appointed to the other major Archdiocesan See at Liverpool where he contributed so much to the fight for survival and social justice for the people of that great city.
Six strands stand out in Basil Hume’s thirteen years as Abbot of Ampleforth, all of which need placing in the context of the Vatican Council and its repercussions: the Abbey’s Priory in St Louis, Missouri, USA; an Abbot’s Congress in Rome with its influences and ramifications; the abundance of the Abbey’s parish missions, not least a crushing long-running legal battle over a new church which collapsed like a pack of cards the weekend before its opening; relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church and other initiatives which broadened the scope of the Abbey’s work or ‘outreach’; the public school at Ampleforth in a period of growth and achievement both within and outside the valley; and finally the inner core of the spiritual leader whose Chapters (talks) to the brethren found a wider public in a collection later published under the title Searching for God.
By 1963 the Priory community at St Louis Missouri was eight years old. Started from the Abbey in response to St Louis businessmen’s request for a Catholic day school, some senior charismatic and very able men had been sent. Crucially, however, a decision had been taken, and not rescinded by Abbot Basil, to send aspiring members for the St Louis community to Ampleforth for novitiate and training. Culturally, this was to prove difficult; in addition, the setting up of such an important priory tested the men themselves. There were times when not a few wondered whether the challenge was too great. Finally Abbot Basil, tossing and turning at the danger of what he was proposing, took critical decisions concerning manpower. This caused much criticism among the business community at St Louis, on whose acceptance the whole experiment was dependent. It lanced the boil and in due course yielded, not merely a surviving but a flourishing community which became an Abbey in 1989 under Abbot Luke Righy, a founder member and, luckily, life-long friend and contemporary of Abbot Basil. But in the 1 960s the new priory still needed more from the Abbey, and his appointed prior Luke and Abbot Basil had many a discussion as to the relative merits of this monk or that monk to go to America. The decision was also quickly taken for the Priory to have its own novitiate and training within its own cultural and ever-developing monastic context. Nor was Abbot Basil ever unaware of the sensitive nature of the uprooting of monks of Ampleforth to the Priory of St Lonis for he had had to yield to the return of several from what had proved too much of a challenge at a difficult time, both in the Priory and in the ten years following upon Vatican II.
Without doubt a potent influence upon Abbot Basil was the 1967 Abbot’s Congress in Rome, a meeting of 240 Abbots, called together in the aftermath of Vatican II and which lasted a month. As a youngster in his early forties he was quartered at the top of the Benedictine house of studies Sant’ Anselmo, adjacent to an American Abbot Rembert Weakland. Not surprisingly over the weeks of the Congress talk and noise filtered down to the more senior and perhaps less bubbly older Abbots, hewn out of a different era. Perhaps the top floor was playing the role, a bit, of the senior sixth in an institutional boarding school. At any rate, within the context of a deeply moving and serious congress, there was something of a generation gap in age and religious experience. In the event the rowdy boys had their day: Abbot Rembert was elected Abbot Primate at that Congress and for ten years was a world influence upon the Benedictines before being appointed Archbishop of Milwaukee and suffering somewhat for his outspoken views in the Pontificate ofJohn Paul Ill, so different in religious outlook to Paul VI. For Abbot Basil the resulting influences were slower to mature.
With a close friend as Abbot Primate, and then and subsequently an occasional visitor to his Abbey, Abbot Basil was soon close to the Roman scene. When in the nature of things, the fall out from Vatican II hit monasteries too, all over the world, some rather distressingly, Abbot Basil was one of those to whom the Abbot Primate turned as troubleshooter. Discreetly he would disappear from the Abbey and out of sight of his country, returning wiser, more tired and challenged by the Visitation he had been undertaking. No doubt the listening in the monasteries, the advice and the decisions he had to take, as well as the reports to the Abbot Primate, were carefully measured and discreet though, when necessary, direct and pungent as was his wont.
One off-shoot of his relationship to the Abbot Primate was to send to Rome as Prior of the international Benedictine house one of his emerging bright advisers, Fr Dominic Milroy, who was eventually recalled by his successor Abbot (now Bishop) Ambrose Griffiths to be Headmaster of the College of Ampleforth, and who became himself Chairman of the influential Headmasters’ Conference of Independent Schools. Abbot Basil held the view that a monastery should not be afraid to release its best men for~the service of the wider Church upon request.
Closer to home, and in need of concern and review as everything else in the post-Vatican Church, was the Abbey’s pastoral outreach in twenty plus parishes, mainly north-west and from Cumbria to Cardiff. There were some pretty tough and experienced old campaiguers among the Abbey’s priests on parishes. Although it became common practice for young monks to start their careers in one of the Abbey Schools — the College, theJunior House or Gilling Castle, there were many in the early 1960s who had only briefly lived a conventual life in the monastery and, though supportive of the educational work of the Abbey, had little understanding of or interest in a public school and its doings; but all were committed absolutely to the mission of the conversion of England and their pastoral responsibilities. A young Abbot, a successful schoolmaster, and with Vatican II’s ideas, did not immediately mix with old stagers in the heart mainly of working class towns, with a few traditional and rural parishes by way of contrast. Abbot Basil sought to reduce the Abbey’s top heavy commitment and this brought him into often delicate and diplomatic negotiation with the Bishops of the day. He also sought — and in this he was way ahead of his time for the resulting yield of his ideas was only pushed through thirty years later — to get agreement by the brethren to live together where there were reasonably adjoining parishes. For this he chose the then expanding new town of Warrington in Cheshire where the Abbey had once had four parishes, reduced to three by his time. The suggestion to pool all the ten monks in one monastic family while serving the three inner town parishes was accepted in theory only; to any form of practical intent the blind eye was turned.
It was, in truth, too soon for such radical re-thinking, though monastic purists would point to the reasonable logic of monks in adjoining parishes, serving their people from one community monastic house. In time Abbot Basil came to see the force of the pragmatic and historically driven realism of varied works, the balance between the life of the conventus at the Abbey and the nature of pastoral care in parishes. Experience also taught him that not all monks were in fact either at home in, or able to live all their lives, cheek by jowl in close community — whatever the theory of the life chosen. Incongruous perhaps but he saw that it worked that way and that it was deeply embedded in the twentieth century history of the Abbey. When ensconced in Westminster he liked to accept invitations from Abbey parishes, always seeking permission of the local Ordinary (Bishop), and happy evenings were spent in the company of his brethren.
One parish problem carried grief and concern. A newly built and somewhat controversially desigued church at Garforth near Leeds collapsed the weekend before its opening. The pastoral care and consequences were obvious enough. What Abbot Basil had not bargained for was being drawn into litigation claim and counter claim, as well as a barrage of criticism, all of which took up time over his early years as Abbot. It was perhaps an inevitable entry into worldly matters as carried out by the worldly There were other such problems — parish schools no less, parish clubs and various properties. The opportunity to be involved in the state sector schools in several areas around the country was a not insignificant experience in readiness for a larger educational challenge at Westminster and in the national scene.
Indeed there was one influence upon him which had a profound effect upon his later career in Westminster. A Manchester Jewish Lord Mayor Alderman Leslie Lever had long taken an interest in the protection and development of Catholic education and he helped Abbot Basil find his way round the labyrinth of the Local Education Authorities. His friendship with Leslie Lever, and the latter’s occasional visits to the Abbey, was a foretaste of the friendship he was later to have with the Jewish Community, not least a Chief Rabbi —Jonathan Sacks.
Through the whole range of concerns that flooded across his desk Abbot Basil relied on a series of trusted advisers. Foremost among them was Fr William Price, whom he had relieved of his duties as Headmaster of the College, re-appointed him as an avuncular Headmaster of the prep school at Gilling Castle, a gifted lawyer and wise elder statesman. The Abbot was bereft when he died in January 1971. Within the monastery Fr Barnabas Sandeman, a clinically correct canon lawyer, was always on hand to deal with church matters; and Fr Robert Coverdale, his Bursar/Procurator and later Appeal Director, was a close business and financial adviser. Rather wisely, for one governing a large Abbey, Abbot Basil was not drawn in to the inner detailed workings of the English Benedictine Congregation, made up of twelve various Abbeys and Priories. These responsibilities were mainly and shrewdly carried out by Victor Farwell, Abbot of Worth Abbey in Sussex. But Abbot Basil left much of the Abbey work in this and on other fronts to the secretary whom he came to rely on, Fr Geoffrey Lynch.
Perhaps his most important, and certainly most prominent, appointment was that of his erstwhile former colleague and senior master Fr Patrick Barry as Headmaster of Ampleforth College. Though not unexpected this proved to be a brilliant appointment in terms of carrying the school through the difficult sixties and somewhat easier seventies and in reaching for success at every level, not least academic quality and musical achievement.
A large Benedictine Abbey and a risingly successful public school — the schools were in the process of being re—named independent schools — living not just adjacent but in and virtually within each other, has always been a test for the brethren. In the times of Abbot Basil this was an almost perfectly formed creative tension. Numerous monks were still available for school work and the competing demands were heavy. For Abbot Basil, as indeed all Abbots, his first priority for his brethren was the Opus Dei — the daily prayer in community, starting at an early hour, and the balance of life within the community itself. The balance was often a fine one and he himself often worried about where the line should be drawn. Frequently he found that monastic appointments were dependent upon school availability, the tail wagging the dog; but by the mid 1970s the evidence was of a community which had suffered somewhat less than might have been anticipated in the wake of the Vatican Council and the swinging sixties, and which was humming with activity while trying to keep its monastic quies. One example of expanding variety was the development of the Holy Week ceremonies away from the formal traditional Old Amplefordian Society, with its accustomed regulars of sixty to seventy, towards an open and energetic long weekend catering for 200 plus and in later years to 400 plus.
In addition, initiatives for school or Abbey came and went, one such being the presence in a local village for a dozen years or more of a Serbian Orthodox priest and family, the presence of a few Orthodox boys in the school, a vital and characteristic Orthodox liturgy locally and an ecumenical adventure linking school and monastery. Another, more lasting and one which has flourished in several directions subsequently, was his decision to open what came to be known as The Grange for visitors and Retreats. A house adjacent to the Abbey was adapted and enlarged to take about twenty-five for living accommodation and forty for day visits. Such an initiative is now commonplace. In the late 1960s it was radical and experimental. Abbot Basil was concerned to open the monastic doors to spirituality for the laity and for families and a consequence of this was a much greater family feel about the place, not least girls and women providing balance to the masculinity of the monastery and school. At the time he can hardly have been aware of the expansion of a scheme with such a small beginning. There was a further extension of this across the valley at Redcar Farmhouse where up to twentyfour inner-city children were welcomed to spend a week with teachers, and this led to greater interaction between, say, the Abbey and the parish schools across the Pennines.
As one looks back on this series of initiatives and developments of the work of the Community, two threads appear to give it all cohesion: Hospitality and Ecumenism. Gradually the Abbey was opening itself up to a range of influences beyond the school and the parishes.
Hospitality was at its core. Schoolchildren from the working class parishes, boys from the local borstals, groups and parties from the Diocese of Middlesbrough, old boys and their families, current and former parents and their friends and then later a whole range of English Christians — frequently there would be this range of mix on a summer’s weekend in the valley, all competing with the school to enter the Church for Mass on Sunday at 10. 00am.
And from being quite a closed Roman Catholic pre-Vatican II set-up, the Abbey by 1976 had become a place where ministers of other denominations wandered the cloisters and the calefactory with an ease and relaxation which said much for the transformation wrought by the openness and the hard work of the ecumenical dialogue. Based upon monthly meetings of a new group, the Ryedale Christian Council, there developed an ever-widening series of concentric circles, not least within the Archdiocese ofYork and the Diocese of Ripon. Donald Coggan, when Archbishop of York, came to the Abbey on more than one occasion before his transfer to Canterbury in 1974, and Michael Ramsay, when Archbishop of Canterbury came with Abbot Basil to the monks studying at St Benet’s Hall Oxford.
If there was one grouping which this new ‘out-reach’ did not reach, it was the emerging Catholic immigrant communities. It was not until Abbot Basil was in Westminster that his contact with such communities developed. The Abbey’s location in North Yorkshire and the nature of its educational tradition were in part responsible for this. But as significant a reason as any was the fact that the Abbey parishes were in traditional English working class towns and areas within towns, mainly across the Pennines, which were relatively untouched by the immigrant communities. This was true to an extent even within the Irish community for most of the Abbey parishes had been born out of the English counter-reformation rather than started as a result of Irish immigration. Yet Abbot Basil was able to forge a close relationship with Ireland and its people initially through links with the large Irish contingent who for much of the middle decades of the century sent their children to be educated at the College.
For Abbot Basil and Fr (later Abbot) Patrick the period of 1963-76 was one of adapting to changing cultural, social, religious and educational times, challenges sufficient to uproot an Abbey and College had there been serious misreadings of the sigus of the times. Almost entirely different in their thought process, approach to human relations and management skills, the Abbey benefited from the blend. It was not surprising that there was a group within the Catholic world and wider diaspora of Ampleforth which encouraged Fr Patrick Barry’s name for Westminster in succession to Cardinal Heenan. But Bruno Heim, the Apostolic Delegate – as he was then called – had other ideas and Abbot Basil left the Abbey for Westminster five Prime Ministers, and twenty-three years, ago when Harold Wilson was still in Downing Street and Margaret Thatcher merely a name. His first task on appointment, and even before ordination as Archbishop, was to sort out an immediate crisis over the Cathedral Choir School whose internationally renowned Choir the late Cardinal Heenan had indicated must cease for lack of funds. That decision was quickly reversed, Basil Hume having learnt so much from the importance of the Schola Cantorum founded at the College by Fr Patrick Barry in 1970. Cardinal Basil died in the wake of his Cathedral Choirmaster’s international achievement and recognition by the Established Church of Westminster Abbey appointing him as their Organist. It somehow tells an appropriate tale.
Cardinal Basil Hume’s legacy to the Roman Catholic community in England and Wales and to society at large has been and will be considered elsewhere. But what of Abbot Basil’s legacy to the monks of Ampleforth Abbey? It is summed up in the published book hewn from thirteen years of Chapters or talks to the Community on spirituality and the Rule of St Benedict: Searching for God. Herein was displayed teaching on the Rule adapted for the sigus of the times, firm in principles, ever sensitive, even empathetic to the vulnerability of young men joining a monastery and those of riper years seeking encouragement to persevere and gain new insights. There was warmth and human understanding in his pastoral care, a reaching out for the mystery of God to be unfolded, an awareness that crisis was often a means to enlargement of mind and dependence on the Will of God. There was nothing earnest or seriously solemn in all this, rather a quiet, self-effacing, even low key and simple approach to the things of God. It had something of the best of the English approach to religion in it, and ultimately Paul VI, who had once made a retreat at Downside Abbey, decided that this style should be tried out in the Archbishopric of Westminster. Others must judge the extent to which he was right.
Two portraits hint at the difference between his later years as Abbot and his first decade at Westminster. One is a portrait by Derek Clarke in the refectory at the Abbey commissioned in the early 1 1970s; the other by Michael Noakes painted in 1985 will soon find its way to Archbishop’s House from the next door Clergy House. Both reveal strong hands right over left. But in the profile the change is stark. The Westminster portrait shows firmness, strength, control and maturity, the face soft in texture and smooth lines. The Ampleforth one reveals a man tired with office, head slightly drooped to the left, melancholy, vulnerable and wounded (often words close to his heart), rather craggy in feature. Paradoxically it was being Abbot of Ampleforth for thirteen years at the most testing of times which wore him out; Westminster was almost a release, a new energy and different set of challenges, broader in range but less immediate, personal, yes, but with time to breathe and even have peace and quiet in his private chapel.
For Ampleforth Abbey and its wider community it was of course a privilege to feel and be part of his going away to Westminster, but life had to move on and the community continued to seek God in the monastic choir, community living, pastoral and educational care under successive Abbots: Ambrose Griffiths (1976-84 and now Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle); Patrick Barry (1984-97); and Timothy Wright (1997-). [text corr.]
George Basil HUME
1923 Mar 2 b. Newcastle
1933 - 1941 ed Ampleforth
1941 Sept 22 Habit at Ampleforth Abbot Byrne
1942 Jan 8 Tonsure Bishop Shine
Sept 23 Simple Vows Abbot Byrne
1945 Sept 23 Solemn Vows
1946 Jan 15
Apr 24 Minor Orders
1948 Jly 18 Subdeacon Bishop Brunner
1949 Jly 17 Deacon
1950 Jly 23 Priest
1944 - 1947 St Benet’s Hall Oxford History
1947 - 1951 Fribourg for Theology STL
1952 Sept Assistant Ampleforth village parish
1955 Sept Housemaster St Bede’s - Coach of 1st XV
1955 - 1963 Senior Modern Language Master
1955 - 1963 Professor of D. Theology.
1957 Apr Elected Delegate to Gen Chapter
Aug Appointed Magister Scholarum (again in 1961)
1963 Apr 17 Elected Abbot of Ampleforth
June 19 Blessed by Bishop Brunner
1967 Member of Confed. Commission de re monastica
1970 Chairman of Confed. Ecumenical Commission
1972 Chairman of Confed de re monastica
Member of Committee of GBA
On Bishops Commission for Religious (CMRS)
1976 Feb 17 Archbishop of Westminster
Mar 12 moves to Westminster
Mar 25 Consecrated Archbishop by Apostolic Delegate
1976 May 24 Appointed Cardinal by Paul VI
1999 Jun 17 Died
1999 Jun 25 Funeral - Westminster Cathedral