“On an October evening in 1921, one of the last of Oxford’s Hansom cabs clattered down the High, crossed Magdalen Bridge and stopped at 223, Iffley Road. From it emerged Fr Leo O’Hea, mill-worker Tom Leyland and Jack Shaw, a sheet-metal worker from Bamber Bridge. When they were joined by Bill Smith, a Newport engine-driver, the Catholic Workers’ College was in being.”
So wrote JM Cleary in a history of the Catholic Social Guild published in 1961. Leyland was from Preston. Fr O’Hea was a Jesuit priest based in Oxford. How did they and Shaw come to be together in that cab? And what exactly did they and Smith think they were bringing into being?
The college was an offshoot of the Catholic Social Guild, whose purpose was to “promote the study of social questions among Catholics, assist in applying Catholic principles to the solution of actual social problems, and train men and women for active leadership in public life”. In what could almost be a Twitter version of Rerum Novarum, the great social encyclical issued by Leo XIII in 1891, the Guild’s monthly newspaper set down four planks of a social platform: “the maintenance and defence of the Christian Family; the establishment of a living wage as a universal minimum wage; partnership instead of class antagonism in industry; and the diffusion of property”.
The driving force behind the guild in those early years was Fr Charles Plater, head of the Jesuit house of studies at Oxford. The Guild ran study circles and lecture tours, mostly in working-class districts north of the River Trent. Books and pamphlets rolled off the presses, often in support of correspondence courses arranged and examined through the Guild.
There was also an annual summer school. At the event held in Oxford in 1920, 50 men and women – miners, postal workers, railwaymen, engineers, clerks, shopkeepers, men from the shipyards – assembled to hear lectures and write essays on ethics, the Middle Ages and the social questions of the day. By the time the meeting broke up, the creation of a Catholic Workers’ College was firmly on the cards.
Sadly, Fr Plater died in early 1921 at the age of 46. It fell to Fr O’Hea to build and run the new institution, which found a permanent home in a house on Walton Well Road in the Jericho district of Oxford. This new college gave residential university training to prepare the “frugal, well-behaved wage earners” dear to Leo XIII to become leaders of Catholic social action. As a later papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, had it: “The first and immediate apostles to the workers ought to be workers.”
So, how did these staunch working-class students feel when they landed in Oxford? And what exactly did they do when they got there? William Woodruff came in 1936. Born in the carding room of a cotton mill in Blackburn, he left school to become a grocer’s barrow boy and later became a “sand rat” in an iron foundry in London. His ambition in life was to be a Labour Member of Parliament. (In fact, he eventually became a professor of history.)
In his memoir, Nab End and Beyond, Woodruff recorded his first impressions as he walked from Oxford railway station to the college:
As I went along, I became conscious that I had reached a quieter, cleaner and more confident world. There were no crowds of noisy cloth-capped workers, no dirty gutters. I saw no beggars, no slums, no barrowboys, no screevers, no griddlers and no long procession of lorries. There was a light, expectant mood in the air. It was like being in a church.
For Woodruff, Oxford was love at first sight. But it was also the source of exhausting work of a wholly new kind. Fr O’Hea laid it on the line for him and his fellow students straightaway: “It will not be easy for you to change from using your hands to using your heads. You are going to have to learn to argue with pen and ink. The university will make no allowances for your deficiencies, whether in assimilating and analysing material or in reading and writing. There will be no factory hooters to tell you when to begin or stop. The university never stops.”
From 1926, students of the Catholic Workers’ College were officially regarded as “members of a Society or Institution in Oxford established for the purpose of higher study and approved by Convocation upon the recommendation of Hebdomadal Council”. All students could now take the university diploma in economics and political sciences.
The college was renamed Plater College in 1965. It continued in some form until closing its doors for good in 2005. The Plater Trust continues to make grants to organisations “pursuing the Plater vision in its modern context”.
Meanwhile, disciplina socialis catholica is about to witness a new flourishing at an English university. The Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary’s, Twickenham, is devoting part of its activity to Catholic social teaching. The first seminar series got underway last month.
Michael Duggan is a freelance writer
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