Everyone had to come to terms with two things about Fr Leonard Jackson: his skeletal constitution and his unwavering Lancastrian realism. 'Who is that monk', a visitor once asked me, 'looking as though he has just emerged from the desert?' As a boy and into old age he was always like that. In Lancashire-speak he was 'skin and bones'; people used to worry about it but only one attempt was made to change it. That was at the end of Hitler's war when everyone in the community was run down; but only three were thought to look fragile enough to be sent for investigation to eminent doctors, who in those days were known as 'specialists'. Two of them went to London and returned with doctor's orders for a complete rest and change. Fr Leonard went to an eminent physician in Liverpool and got from him nothing better than a reassurance that his health was fine and he could return to work, even though he did have a 'spare constitution'.
He was born in the heart of Lancashire at Newburgh in the parish of Parbold on 26 July 1918, and they baptised him 'Thomas'. Until shortly before his birth the family had lived at Lake House at Wrightington where his father, Robert Jackson, had been steward of the estate. Earlier at Wrightington the family had included, when they were boys, Leonard's uncle Cuthbert Jackson and also Edmund Matthews, after his parents had died. All three boys had been to school at Ampleforth. Cuthbert Jackson (later well known as the blind monk-priest of St Anne's Liverpool) and Edmund Matthews (later the second Abbot of Ampleforth) joined the monastery. As Leonard grew up both were familiar visitors to his home and Abbot Edmund frequently welcomed his father Robert to Ampleforth. When Gilling Castle came up for sale in 1929/30 it was Robert Jackson, as property surveyor, who assessed it for the community and he took Leonard as a small boy aged eleven to see the castle while he worked with the caretaker Skilbeck. Leonard was thus one of those who vividly remembered the glories of the Long Gallery and other details like the old Mass staircase to the garden. The family preserved the story that when the sale took place Robert Jackson was the 'under cover' bidder who carried the prize off for the community when everyone thought the Abbey was out of it because the Procurator (another Lancashire man, Fr Bede Turner) had dropped out.
Fr Leonard's father died suddenly in 1931 leaving him and his sister orphans. Of course Abbot Edmund came to the rescue and made sure that he stayed on at Ampleforth, where he had already started his schooling in the Junior House. In the Upper School he had four years in St Wilfrid's under Fr Clement Hesketh until he left in 1936. They were happy years when he was always in the solid centre of loyalty and commitment without ambitions for great athletic or academic achievements. Then his great decision came. 'At the start of the summer term of 1936 I had a quite casual meeting with my uncle, Fr Cuthbert (who was at Ampleforth for the Parish Fathers' retreat) on a bench in front of the Church.' As a result he asked Abbot Edmund to accept him into the novitiate and he was clothed in September 1936. There were three at the beginning of that novitiate and three at the end of it; and there were three through the years as Juniors to ordination: Damian Webb, Leonard Jackson and Kevin Mason. They were in truth very different from each other but somehow they were bonded together, as it seemed, indissolubly. They seemed to live with a high profile and senior monks were known to refer to them as 'the unholy trinity' - not for any dark reasons but simply because they were irrepressible; no-one could be with them for long without smiling or laughing and feeling better for it.
For Leonard things went smoothly until 1939. Then, when scarcely half way through his three years of simple vows, he had something quite new to face; it was not intended as a way of testing his vocation, but that is how it turned out. After the capitulation of Munich in 1938 the certainty that Hitler would plunge all Europe into war grew daily. The Government decided on a strange measure of conscription - perhaps as a warning, perhaps as an experiment. They suddenly called up to the armed forces everyone who was twenty-one; and in the monastery Leonard alone fell into that category. From the quiet of the monastery he was taken off to an army camp to be bawled at by NCO's. The thing had been pushed through Parliament too quickly for consideration of exemptions; so the army suddenly found itself with a lot of seminarians and young religious on its hands, for which it was quite unprepared. They reacted with characteristic efficiency and drafted all these young men into a single unit somewhere in the Midlands for non-combatant duties. Inevitably the unit came to be known to the profane rank and file as 'the bloody bishops'. There were plenty of jokes about it, but for Leonard it was no joke at all. He managed to keep cheerful on the surface, but deep down it was an experience of spiritual desolation, anxiety and re-assessment of his life in which all previous certainties seemed to be falling one by one into the melting pot. When full conscription came with the outbreak of war in September 1939 there was exemption for clerics and reserved occupations and then negotiations began for the release of those who had been trapped by the Twenty-first Birthday bill. Negotiations were prolonged. Promises were made and not fulfilled. Leonard waited in his Private's khaki uniform on a forgotten camp site in which he was not only non-combatant but also not wanted and not occupied. It was his life that was at stake, and so one day he went to a telephone box, rang the War Office, introduced himself as the Abbot of Ampleforth, denounced the inefficiency of the whole apparatus and demanded the immediate discharge of his young monk, Leonard Jackson. It worked. He was very soon back at Ampleforth thinking seriously about his vocation and finding that it had taken on a number of new perspectives.
There was plenty to stimulate his reflection in the unfolding scene all over Europe. By 1940 England was facing the evil of Nazism alone. Any purely rational assessment of an English monk's prospects at the time would have foreseen as a probable option for him a Nazi concentration camp - more hideous now than the original model created by Cecil for Feckenham and his fellow Catholic monks and priests at Wisbech in the fens. Already, while in the army, Leonard had been able to look into that abyss and into others as well. The war and conscription were not the only changes for him. His blind uncle and monastic model, Fr Cuthbert Jackson, had died in 1937. His Abbot, father figure, family friend Abbot Edmund, died on Good Friday in 1939. Abbot Herbert Byrne was elected. Coming from a parish he approached questions of formation and profession with typical caution and prescribed an extra year of probation for the three who were asking for solemn profession. None of them wavered. Leonard came to see the extra year as a godsend through which everything became crystal clear; it was with joy that in the end he made his Solemn Profession in September 1941.
When he got out of the army Leonard joined the others at Oxford. All three did a lot to enliven St Benet's Hall under the shadow of war. Leonard himself was active in the Geography Department of the University. His standing was shown when they elected him Secretary of the Geographical Society. After Oxford he returned in 1942 to Ampleforth and Theology under Fr Aelred Graham and Fr Dunstan Pozzi. It was wartime and he had to take on teaching and other work in the school as well. With the ending of Hitler's war he was ordained priest in July 1945.
During the next fifteen years of teaching in the school he acquired substantial new responsibilities, while among the boys he became a much-loved figure of wide and valued influence especially in the encouragement he gave to those who lacked confidence. He was in charge of Geography as Senior Master. He presided over a group of cinema operators, chosen often to give them an aim and opportunity, who provided weekly entertainment for the boys in those days before television. He was a valued chaplain to the whole domestic staff. He went to great lengths for them - even to the point of taking them in a bus over the Pennines to see the Lights of Blackpool in the season. To them and to the boys he was counsellor and friend. In the late fifties he followed Fr Robert as assistant to Fr Denis in St Thomas's as nightly warden of the sixth form in Romanes.
Then came a sudden and unexpected change in 1960. Our foundation in St Louis had been established for five years. The first graduation from the school took place in 1960. As Headmaster, Fr Timothy had acquired an impressive grasp on the complexities of American education and had made useful contacts with important Colleges throughout the States. He was well on the way to establishing the high reputation which the school would soon enjoy. Fr Thomas Loughlin was established in the new science wing and was also on the way to the acclaim he would achieve as teacher of the sciences. But they, and all the small community at St Louis were hard pressed and living intensely at a stretch. Fr Leonard was sent out to help in the school as Second Master. He was called on to deal with the discipline of the youth of the sixties in the Middle West and surprised them often by his quickness of thought and sense of humour. His new work included theatre productions and among his early pupils was Kevin Kline, who remembers Leonard's teaching and recognises that this monk had set him on the road to Broadway and Hollywood. Understandably it was an association of which Leonard was proud. His unpretentious common touch, his sense of humour, his inner Lancastrian toughness saw him through and won the respect of boys and parents. It was a surprise to many boys that one who looked so frail could not easily be pushed over.
His work there went beyond the school. There was a diocesan priest, Mgr Slattery, as pastor of the parish at the time with the Abbey Church, once it was built in 1961, as his parish Church. Fr Leonard was made associate pastor of what was already becoming a really large parish. Many of the parishioners still remember him with affection and appreciation for his homilies and pastoral understanding. In St Louis he learnt something from the charismatic movement, through which he reinforced and renewed what was already there. Fr Leonard's years at St Louis were certainly important for him and rewarding, but they were physically and spiritually demanding. When the time came for a change in 1971 he was fifty-three and ready for a move away from school life into fuller involvement in a Benedictine parish in Lancashire. As he moved across the Atlantic he had the memory of his blind uncle, Fr Cuthbert, at St Anne's Liverpool ever in mind. That example had initially drawn him to the monastery. Now after thirty-five years he was coming back to where his life had started.
The rest of Fr Leonard's life was devoted to following in his own way in the footsteps of his uncle among his own people whom he instinctively understood. He had five years as assistant at Lostock Hall, then ten years as parish priest at St Mary's Brownedge. It is difficult to do justice to his pastoral style. It was based not on high theology but on his gift of going right to the heart of parishioners' interests and anxieties so as to share them with understanding - an understanding from which humour was never far distant.
Here in Lancashire, as at St Louis, he developed a life-long interest in trains - real and model. Getting cheap tickets and exploring every mile of British Rail was his idea of creative relaxation. Even as old age advanced he kept touch with his eternal boyhood through his own model railway. He found time and space for his trains even at St Louis, and wherever he went there was some cellar or unwanted space where he could set them up and delight in marshalling and running his trains. Parables and cautionary tales about trains were common in his homilies. The homilies themselves were recognised as gems by the parishioners. He was given equipment to copy them on tapes and every week he used to make copies to send round to the sick and house-bound through the ministers of the eucharist on Sundays.
Ten years after his return from the United States in 1981 at St Mary's Brownedge Fr Leonard came back from leading a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in an exhausted state and then fell ill with infectious polyneuritis - an alarming form of paralysis. In hospital at Preston he recovered to the surprise of the doctors, but to Fr Leonard his recovery was quite easy to understand; it came from faith and prayer and there was nothing further to say. After that some noticed a gradual change but he kept going until 1986 when he was relieved to move to Grassendale. There he retired into continued activity as an assistant and again drew the parishioners to him by becoming part of their world. They didn't want to lose him on his final move in 1993 to Parbold - Parbold, the very parish of his birth. He didn't want to leave Grassendale, although you could not have suspected it from the cheerful alacrity with which he replied 'Yes, of course' when he was asked to make the move. Once settled in, however, he was again very happy and Parbold proved - among other things - the ideal site for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. This was a great event in 1995 impeccably organised by Fr Michael. It was a lovely day and the crowds came not only from Parbold but from Lostock Hall, Brownedge and Grassendale also and there were boys he had taught in the school at Ampleforth. Only a St Louis contingent was missing and of course Damian and Kevin, but Leonard was conscious of their presence. All that were there came because they loved him. They loved him because of the way he had brought Christ more vividly into their lives, because uniquely he could talk of God and prayer in ways they could understand, because he genuinely shared their concerns and enthusiasms and met them on their own level, because he understood them. The Church was packed. There was a marquee on the lawn in case it rained. But it didn't rain as they came from all directions in buses, cars and vans. The spirits of Fr Cuthbert Jackson and Abbot Edmund Matthews were not far away; this was their home territory and it was the celebration of a life given to God in quiet, unwavering generosity in the monastery and school at Ampleforth, among the people and boys of St Louis and in their own old Benedictine parishes of Lancashire. It was a day of great joy and thanksgiving.
Christ came to him in death kindly in three stages when at last his frail body, which against all expectations had endured for so long, succumbed to the demands still made on it. He fell ill of an aortic aneurism on 23 February in his eighty-first year. Then quite calmly (he had been waiting for this) he received the sacraments and commended himself into the hands of the Lord. Then came the final surrender as the hospital found they could do nothing more. Requiescat in Pace
My father, Robert Jackson, and family lived at Lake House, Wrightington, where he was the steward to Squire Gerard of Wrightington Hall. The family included his brother George, (Captain of the school 1886) who was later to become Fr Cuthbert Jackson OSB the 'blind priest' of St. Anne's, Edge Hill, Liverpool. Fr Edmund Matthews, later to become the second Abbot of Ampleforth, was also brought up with the Jackson family at Lake House. My grandparents, Thomas Clayton Jackson and his wife lived in The Hermitage, across the yard from Lake House. All the family, with the exception of Fr Cuthbert, are now buried in he cemetery at St. Joseph's Wrightington.
When the Squire 'went bust' (about 1917) my father lost his job and moved to Newburgh, Parbold, where I was born in 1918. Shortly after that we moved to Burscough, my father having got a job in the Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries, with an office in the Prudential Buildings, Dale Street, Liverpool, where he eventually became a Commissioner for the North West.
When Gilling Castle came up for sale Abbot Matthews asked my father (a qualified Surveyor) to survey it for the College. During the summer of 1929 he came up to Ampleforth to do this and brought me with him. I was still at prep school (Bishop Court, Freshfield) at the time. I remember the visit well; my father gave the Castle a thorough investigation and I went with him and thus saw it, especially the Long Gallery, in its original condition. His investigation excited some comments from Skilbeck (who was looking after the place) when he wanted to measure the water supply.
When the sale took place my father was deputed to bid 'under cover' on behalf of the college. After the Procurator, Fr Bede Turner, dropped out of the bidding the proceedings more or less collapsed leaving my father as the easy winner. Thus Gilling Castle came into our possession.
I entered the Junior House in 1930. A year later my father died on his way to work on Exchange Station, Liverpool; my mother had died some years previously thus leaving me and my sister orphans. We were kindly adopted by my aunt and uncle, a Bank Manager, from Hazel Grove, Stockport. Abbot Matthews, as a gesture of gratitude to the family decreed that I should continue at Ampleforth free of charge. Thus I passed through the school without paying a penny, though I was not aware of it at the time.
At the start of the summer term 1936 I had a quite casual meeting with my uncle, Fr Cuthbert, (who was at Ampleforth for the Parish Fathers Retreat) on a bench in front of the church. As a result of that meeting I eventually asked to see the Abbot and seek admission to the community. This was granted and I was clothed in September 1936.
Thomas Leonard JACKSON 1918 Jul 26 b. Newburgh Lancs 1930—1936 ed Ampleforth 1936 Sep 21 Habit at Ampleforth - Abbot Matthews 1937 Sep 22 Simple Vows - Abbot Matthews 1939 Jul 15 Military Service 1940 Sep 22 renewed simple vows 'ad annum' - Abbot Byrne 1941 Sep 20 Solemn Vows - Abbot Byrne 1941 Apr 9 Tonsure - Abbot Byrne 1943 Apr 14, 16 Minor Orders - Abbot Byrne 1943 Jul 18 Subdeacon - Bishop Shine 1944 Jul 23 Deacon - Bishop Shine 1945 Jul 22 Priest - Bishop Shine 1939-1942 St Benet's Hall Oxford Geography Senior Geography Master In charge of Cinema Chaplain of Domestic Staff 1960 Jul Appointed to St Louis Priory, Missouri Second Master St Louis Priory School 1971 Aug 25 Lostock Hall Assistant 1976 Jun 1 St Mary's Bamber Bridge PP 1986 Jul Retired as PP. Grassendale as Assistant 1993 Sep Assistant at Parbold 1999 Feb 21 Aortic aneurysm Feb 23 Died in Preston hospital