Stephen le la Bédoyère remembers his father Michael, who edited the Catholic Herald between 1934 and 1962, on the 50th anniversary of his death.
In 1951 our family moved to Wimbledon from the charming manor house that my father, Michael de la Bédoyère – who died on July 13, 1973 – had bought near Edenbridge at the start of the Second World War so that we would be safe from impending enemy action. It was a bad miscalculation, for in 1943 I was born to the sound of bombers criss-crossing the skies overhead.
As the youngest of five children I was to experience the gradual diminution of siblings, with the accompanying school holiday boredom, and I developed the habit of taking the train from Wimbledon to Blackfriars, and winding my way from there via the ruins of St Bride’s Church – now beautifully restored and well worth a visit – to the Catholic Herald office in a large building on the corner of Whitefriars Street and Fleet Street – opposite the massive Daily Telegraph building.
I was ever greeted with warmth and kindness in the editorial office, although my father was always quick to give me the keys to the door onto the roof where I could happily play until it was time to go home. Were the weather bad I could visit one of those little newsreel cinemas that abounded in central London in those days.
I’ve never forgotten the niceness of the staff: nice to each other and to their editor as well. I was immensely proud of my father, but I understood that the success of the newspaper was due to a happy and efficient collaboration of a number of generous and creative people united in purpose: to give an increasing readership a Catholic focus on the news and to encourage lay Catholics to contribute an expression of their own views, which Michael did and which the Herald continues to do so well.
Journalism was not Michael’s first choice of occupation. His father was a Franco-Irish nobleman who decided to make his life in England, and married a daughter of Bishop An-thony Thorold, of Rochester and Winchester. She discreetly became a Catholic after her father’s death, unlike her brother Algar who deeply hurt their evangelical father by poping at Oxford. Algar was influenced by the modernism of the Abbé Brémond and Baron von Hugel, which in turn influenced Michael.
The loss of his mother while he was at Stonyhurst may well have pushed a rather introverted Michael towards a Jesuit vocation, and it was only towards his ordination that Michael, sensitive to theological honesty, realised that his call might lie elsewhere. He married Catherine and they spent their first marital year in Minneapolis, where he taught philosophy at the University.
On their return to England Michael accepted a job as deputy editor of Algar’s Dublin Review; he was offered the editorship of the Catholic Herald, in succession to Charles Diamond, in 1934. He accepted, and would finally retire in 1962 as the Second Vatican Council was drawing to its close.
Editorial units must resemble waiting rooms at airports; some of the occupants are staff, others passing contributors. Secretaries being essential, I start there: with Christine Galvin, an old family friend who was both efficient and kind. Chris was followed by a number of others, and Michael found it possible to do some match-making. He introduced Chris to the young Scottish journalist, Andrew Boyle, well-known in later years as exposer of Anth-ony Blunt’s role as the fourth Cambridge Soviet spy, and they were married soon after.
Other matrimonial bureaux might eat their heart out. Another editor’s secretary, Miss Jean Joly de Lotbinière, was the grandaughter of one general and great-niece of another; when one of the old boys died Michael instantly and inadvertently produced an obituary for the other. Jean married his nephew, William Goodger, whose letter in the New Statesman seriously questioning Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter was something of a cause célèbre at the time, although Greene himself appreciated William’s comments.
Another contributor to the Herald was the novelist Barbara Lucas, granddaughter of poetess Alice Meynell. She and her husband Bernard were young friends of Greene and Michael, and it is to them that Greene owed Claudel’s concept of “sin also serves”, which underwrites so many of his later novels.
In those days the Catholic Herald felt the ire of Winston Churchill: Michael’s editorial on the Yalta agreement – in which he strongly criticised Churchill and Roosevelt’s kowtowing to Stalin – so infuriated the PM that he had to be reassured by his right-hand man, Sir Desmond Morton, that my father was totally loyal to Britain.
Among other staff were Bill Igoe, at one time deputy editor and theatre critic with a trenchant expression on his face, arts critic Iris Conlay, and Hugh Kay. The last was a big, blustery man with a nice smile who wrote a very fine appreciation of Michael when he died and had become a firm family friend.
Perhaps the greatest journalist on the Herald staff in those days was Douglas Hyde, the ex-communist convert and former news editor of the Daily Worker. As a small boy Douggie awed me by his patent goodness. He was a rather serious and generous West Country man with nonconformist roots and an idealist who as a young person had fallen into communism. After the Soviet rape of Eastern Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, he found a more sensible faith in Catholicism.
Also based in Wimbledon, he soon got to know Michael, and Sunday mornings after Mass at the great Jesuit Church of the Sacred Heart were followed by a short drive to a local park. My brother Simon and I played rounders with Douggie and Carole’s children Rowena and Jocelyn, while our fathers engaged each other in conversation and our mothers at home cooked Sunday lunch!
It is hard to think now after the many years that separate us from those days, that old age was a sad time for both Douggie and Michael: the dark struggle to climb away from his problems of faith haunted Douglas’s last years, while my father, after leaving the Herald, ran his own independent Catholic newsletter, Search, until he sadly fell victim to dementia.
In Douggie’s very readable narrative of his conversion – I Believe, published by Heinemann in 1951 – his observation about Michael de la Bédoyère when he joined the Catholic Herald staff, pace Churchill, was that “The editor prided himself that his paper was one of the last strongholds of free speech in Britain.” That commendation continues, I am sure, while my personal legacy from my father Michael is a love of the Christian virtue of freedom of spirit, which is so important to sustain happiness in a difficult world.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.