Miles Pattenden revisits the legacy of Mgr Alfred Gilbey, a quarter of a century after his death.
March 26 this year marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Alfred Newman Gilbey (1901–98), erstwhile Catholic chaplain at Cambridge University and, later, the saintliest resident of the Travellers Club on London’s Pall Mall. Many Herald readers will remember Gilbey as a dashing or eccentric Cambridge fixture (recollections vary according to taste). He was probably the last cleric for whom a close-fitting frock coat and wide-brimmed priest’s hat were wardrobe essentials.
Peter Gregory-Jones, author of a history of Cambridge’s chaplaincy, recalls him strolling down King’s Parade in the company of two acolytes in the mid-1970s. “He angled his tightly-furled umbrella more in the manner of an ancien régime cane than as an actual aid to walking”. Gregory-Jones found “nothing theatrical” in this “engaging and intriguing scene” – the older man’s mien spoke to him of “well-appointed libraries and secluded chapels”.
To other onlookers, however, Gilbey (who could surely then have laid claim to have been England’s best-known priest) seemed a man grounded in place but very much out of sympathy with the times. To some he seemed to channel the spirit of Father Brown, guided by emotional attachments to the Church as she had been before Vatican II and to the University when it was still a preserve of well-heeled social elites.
The historian’s problem when writing about Gilbey is that nearly everything that comes down to us about the man is hagiographical – and he certainly had many admirers who have been willing to write about him. Their reminiscences point not only to his personal charm, kindness and punctiliousness, but also to his quiet but austere piety.
A photograph of his old bedroom at Fisher House bears this out. It is spartan beyond measure with a hard wooden bed, small table, icon of the Virgin, a kneeler for prayer, and little else. It all stands in contrast to Fisher House’s rather more lavish guest quarters, known as “The Bishop’s Room”.
Gilbey’s life was one of service: to his friends and to Cambridge’s male Catholic students, for sure, but to God above all. He would rise early to say Mass each day before breakfast. Afternoons were for undergraduates: tea with sandwiches provided by his housekeeper, a rosary before dinner, and early to bed. “I’ll slip quietly away now, and leave you gentlemen to the serious drinking,” he would tell his guests.
Although known for the remarkable numbers he converted over the years, he claimed never to proselytise but merely to offer instruction to those willing to listen. And yet, Gilbey’s time at Cambridge did not end happily. A student revolution overthrew him in the winter of 1964, forcing his premature retirement.
The immediate cause had been his reluctance to embrace the increasingly co-educational nature of the university and its inevitable implications for Fisher House. But the wider issue was his reluctance to ride the winds of change in a more general sense. “I desire and intend to hand on the chaplaincy to my successor in the form in which I received it,” he had noted to the student president of the Fisher Society 10 years earlier. It was, in the end, to be his undoing.
Like the first chaplain, Mgr Edmund Nolan (1857–1931), Gilbey was a man of private means – he was famously ordained in his parents’ drawing room by Bishop Arthur Doubleday of Brentwood “under his own patrimony” – meaning that he retained his independence from the diocese and its coffers bore no responsibility for him.
Because he ran Fisher House out of his own funds he may have believed himself above the fray. Or maybe Gilbey, the lover of order and hierarchy, simply held a passionate conviction that the old, Edwardian ways were best and that concessions to modernity, once made, could not be controlled. Either way, it made no difference, and he left Cambridge for London.
He set up court first at the Athenaeum and later at the Travellers. His years there were as numerous as those he had passed in Cambridge and they were far from idle. He had a former broom cupboard converted into an oratory and he used it to exercise the personal dispensation granted to him by Cardinal Heenan to continue celebrating Mass in the Tridentine Rite.
Active and vigorous into his 90s, he eased gracefully into the grandeur and importance that came with extreme old age. An interview with John Mortimer in the Spectator on the occasion of his 90th birthday may even be one of the more revealing documents about his life. Witty and urbane in his ripostes – he jokes of his trepidation at eating “monkfish” – he is also asked to consider what life would have been like had he not been born a Catholic.
“Very different,” is the gist of his reply. He certainly does not seem convinced that he would have got to Heaven. But then the old pieties and certainties, like the port, reassert themselves.
“We could go on forever about this. The only salvation is through Christ, the Redeemer. But Almighty God isn’t bound by the Sacraments.”
Dr Miles Pattenden teaches at the Australian Catholic University. An annual Requiem Mass for Mgr Alfred Gilbey is celebrated at Fisher House in November.
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