‘Belloc and Parliament’, Michael Hennessy - talk in London.

Mike Hennessy in reflective mode. Do I see a superficial resemblance?

The veteran Bellocian Mike Hennessy has agreed to give a talk on Belloc and his parliamentary career. Mike has researched Belloc's parliamentary speeches extensively and is well placed to do so as he works at the Palace of Westminster. We look forward to what promises to be a most entertaining evening. Here are the details:

‘Belloc and Parliament’

Michael Hennessy

(A meeting organised by the Belloc Society)

Tuesday the 27^th of November at 7.30pm

Venue: The Spying Room, The Morpeth Arms, Millbank, Pimlico (nearest tube Pimlico).

The Belloc Society is pleased to announce that Michael Hennessy will be giving a talk on Hilaire Belloc MP and his parliamentary contributions during the early part of the last century. Belloc was one of the great Catholic writers of the 20^th Century. 

If you would like to made aware of future meetings please send an e-mail message to hilaire.belloc.923@facebook.com or send a friend request to www.facebook.com/hilaire.belloc.923

Hilaire Belloc M.P. - Contribution to the Roman Catholic Disabilities Removal Bill, House of Commons, 14th May 1909.

MEMORANDUM 

The object of this Bill is to repeal certain penal enactments affecting only Roman Catholic religious communities of men in Great Britain and Ireland, and to place the members of those communities in the same position, in respect of the right to acquire property, as that now occupied by the members of all religious communities of women. 

There is but little real division of opinion in this House upon this measure, but I may be excused if I take a somewhat different attitude with regard to the Bill than any speaker has yet taken. That attitude is this: Were I asked as a member of the general public to attend a public meeting in favour of the Bill, I should attend such a meeting as a Catholic, and I should speak in favour of the Bill, but I should say that on the face of it, only on the face of it, it was a matter of title, and a matter to me somewhat indifferent. I am not at issue with the Noble Lord, who spoke so strongly with regard to the words in the oath of the King at the time of the Coronation. They are, to my point of view, a blasphemy, but they have an historical place; their presence in the ritual of the Coronation is, historically, perfectly easy to understand: It is the custom of things which have a strongly rooted historical origin to continue beyond the time in which they might be of practical use. Personally I confess that things of this sort do not greatly move me. If a judge does not wear his wig in hot weather it does not matter. At one time the wig conferred social position, and I should say the same with regard to the wearing of the sword. And in reference to this declaration, it is something like a historical relic, and it does not move me so strongly as many other matters concerning my faith.
In regard to the Lord Lieutenancy and the Lord Chancellorship, it does seem to me that in reference to the latter there is a hardship, because the Bar is a profession not only very much favoured by members of my community, but it is almost the only profession in which it is not even grievously handicapped. The House may not like to hear that, but it is the truth. It is quite possible in the near future some other man of eminence may rise to the position of Lord Russell of Killowen, and, owing to an historical accident, may find himself debarred from the highest legal position. As to the Lord Lieutenancy, I do not hold the same views. It is not an office to which many men aspire, and no one would like to say how many more years it is likely to last. Things are moving so fast with regard to Ireland ever since the land settlement. It is a mere technical matter, and if you did abolish it the first thing the English Government would do would be to send a kind of Catholic who, from what I know of Irishmen, would not be very popular. I think you had better have things as they are now. The Lord Lieutenancy is a very small matter, and only concerns a little group of very rich men. The Catholic Church in this society, as in every modern society, has to meet the forces against it with very different weapons than the repeal of ancient constitutions. My reasons for voting for this Bill, though I have been emphasising the unimportance of some of its details, are very grave ones. In the first place, for a reason which has become less popular and may sound a little doctrinaire, I do not see how a man, consistently democratic or liberal, can help voting for the Bill. If I heard of a community of two or three millions of people in England or Scotland, and if I heard that their opinions were permeating the social life of the community and there lay against it specific disabilities such as do still exist against those of my faith, I would vote, whether I was a member of the Communion or not, for the removal of those disabilities.

That is the spirit in which Mr. Gladstone acted, in which Mr. Asquith acted in former years, that is the spirit in which I would imagine John Bright would have acted. I could imagine no old name in the Liberals of the past in which this principle has not been accepted. I can imagine no man who would have repudiated the principle underlying this Bill. That is probably a small point as modern thought goes, but to me a very grave one.
I would just say, in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for the Cricklade Division, whom I have respected for many years, I can give him the origin of the phrase which he quoted. It was supposed to have come from a militant Catholic, who never said anything of the sort. I can further tell him what the doctrine of all Catholics is as to toleration, and must be, and I give it on no less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas. Where you have a united society holding one united philosophy, whether Catholic or not, there is a civic right to attempt to extinguish the beginning of changes which will disturb the old tradition of the State. That is the Catholic position, and it is the position in every land of Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy. The conception that you can take an existing minority—if it be any reasonable minority—oppress it and attempt to destroy it, when its established rights become a regular part of the State you will find repudiated by all Catholic authority whatsoever, and I will give you the best possible example. During those centuries in which the Church had control there was the small and intensely antagonistic body of the Jews, and in every Catholic country they were left their authority. Whether the duty has always acted upon, that is the principle upon which every Catholic is told to act.

The conception that the Catholic Church denies religious liberty is simply a conception drawn from the sixteenth century. Take the case of the Catholic priest as against the Huguenot at any time between the sixteenth century and the French Revolution. In England for the Catholic priest death was the penalty, and in France a much milder punishment for the Huguenot, and at last no punishment attached to the Huguenot party in France. The Jesuits do not differ from any other order, except that their organisation is a little more rigid, and as far as I know there is no female order corresponding to them. The Jesuit was at one time the light army endeavouring to reconquer for the faith parts of Europe that were lost. It was very largely successful in the German case; but the Jesuit to-day is an order in the Catholic Church precisely as the Dominican or Franciscan or any of the other orders.

The second reason that would cause me to vote for this Bill, quite apart from my religion, is that if there is one thing which should impress itself on the statesmanship of any responsible Englishman at the present moment it is the necessity in every point you possibly can of securing the support of Ireland. I do not believe that there is any Englishman with any knowledge, certainly not any responsible English statesman, with any knowledge of the perils in which England is likely to find herself in the near future, who does not think the support of the Irish race is a matter of supreme importance to England. That note is running through both political parties as strongly as it can at the present day. You have here a matter which, in a temporal sense, and as a matter of expediency, is entirely an Irish matter. Those Catholics resident in these islands who are not Irish are a mere handful. If the majority of them were not very wealthy, they would be an insignificant handful. It is the Irish race that forms the bulk or kernel of Catholic feeling throughout the Empire—in England as elsewhere. But you must remember that the oath to which objection is taken, the disabilities of religious orders, and all these points, on account of the Act of Union, apply to Ireland precisely as they apply to England. I would even go so far as to say that, if they did not apply to Ireland as they apply to England, those Members who have opposed the Bill, eloquent and excellent as many of their speeches and arguments have been, would have had a stronger case. If they could have spoken for a united Protestant nation there would have been much more force in what they said. If any man says that this is an attempt to destroy what is already dead, or that there are points in this Bill which need not be mentioned, because the restrictions attacked are already obsolete, I would ask him to remember what happened in London last autumn. There was then brought up against the Catholics a legal point, and a restriction was imposed with regard to the proposed procession in connection with the Eucharistic Congress. Whether it was wise or unwise, if you could do it in that vitally important instance, where you prevented the chief subject of our faith appearing publicly, you would be able to do it with regard to religious orders. I have seen the religious flame lit on two occasions, each time calling itself by a different name, and, under certain circumstances, nothing would be easier than to raise a popular outcry against the presence of the numerous religious orders which have taken refuge in these islands, and the prejudice already existing might leap into flame. If it did, I believe the most drastic provisions of these laws, which are now said to be obsolete, might be called into operation, precisely as similar provisions were enforced last autumn. On these grounds I shall vote for the Bill.

Source: Hansard

Hilaire Belloc M.P. - Contribution to the Education (England & Wales) Bill - House of Commons, July 1906.

*MR. BELLOC (Salford, S.) 

said that as the only Catholic Member in a largely populated district in South Lancashire where the Catholic vote was so large and tenacious, it would be unjust to his constituents and to some of his colleagues if he were to remain silent at the close of this debate, although it was with a certain amount of diffidence that after his remarks in Committee he rose to repeat them now on the merits of the Bill. The Catholics as a whole voted Radical at the last election, and in his opinion that general determination of the Catholic force on English politics was not likely to be easily disturbed. Speaking for himself and also for some of those whom he represented he said that they were at first, not only in sympathy with the beginning of the democratic feature which had been displayed, but they were in favour of the principles of the Bill. They knew the general temper of the English people, and although between the different sect of Protestants there were differences of opinion rather than differences of faith, they recognised that there was a national demand—he would not say mandate— for a final settlement of the education difficulty. The Catholics were, as were the Jews, an exception, and the Government had to meet them and no doubt they did all that they thought was fair to meet their claim. He entirely recognised that they did so, and from the Front Bench they had had no rancour, no spite, and not any considerable misunder-standing. Nevertheless, this Bill would leave this House that night for another place in a condition in which, he would not only say no Catholic could accede to it, but one in which no man who was pledged to maintain the Catholic schools could vote for it. He had not heard anyone explain why the chances of a Catholic child maintaining his religion should be favourable, if there were 5,000 people living in the place where it was born and unfavourable if there were only 4,999. It was a thing so illogical and false that he wondered how it came to be in the Bill at all. He was too young a Member to suggest what forces might have been at work — the English political Parties depended upon Party funds—but he would not insist. He would return to the clause as it now stood. Under it 25 per cent, of the Catholic schools were necessarily doomed. In the particular case of his own county two towns stood near to each other. The one, Protestant (even in the 16th century), would retain its Catholic schools; the other, with a strong Catholic tradition and a large Catholic population, would lose its schools. For the first had 12,000, the last under 5,000 population; nay, in the latter case a great Catholic landlord would be compelled to hand over rates not only for the support of the local Protestant school, but in order to make a school built largely out of his own money Protestant. It was possible that an act of otherwise incomprehensible folly had been committed as an incident of Party tactics. When the Bill went to the Lords no doubt a politician would say to himself, "We must give them something to bargain with. If we give them this they will let us have that." Catholics, however, did not understand those political tricks. All they would see was that one-quarter of the Catholic schools would be wiped out. And when that had permeated into the artisan constituencies of this country the promotion of the Bill would have seriously weakened the popular basis upon which the present Government stood. He did not think the position of the Liberal Party had been strengthened by the retention of such a principle as that in the Bill. If it was thought that it would be forgotten in the lapse of time hon. Members had a totally false impression of the nature of the faith of Catholics. Everywhere by that fatal error the Government had made enemies. The momentary distaste for Liberal policy would not, however, cause Catholics to throw themselves into the arms of the Conservative Party. There was a newer force arising in this country and it was already represented in the House. It was there that they would find the Catholic vote, which was not only a numerical but a moral force, represented in the future. In conclusion he must add that it was not alone as a Catholic that he expressed these views. Even if he did not hold his faith and if he wanted to represent those who sent him to Parliament he would condemn and vote against this Bill as it stood.

Source:

Hansard

Epitaph on the Politician Himself by Hilaire Belloc...

Caricature satirising the 'long-winded speech' of Whig politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1788).

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Another on the Same

This, the last ornament among the peers,
Bribed, bullied, swindled and blackmailed for years:
But Death’s what even Politicians fail
To bribe or swindle, bully or blackmail.

On Another Politician

The Politician, dead and turned to clay,
Will make a clout to keep the wind away.
I am not fond of draughts, and yet I doubt
If I could get myself to touch that clout.

On Yet Another

Fame to her darling Shifter glory gives;
And Shifter is immortal while he lives.

Epitaph Upon Himself

Lauda tu Ilarion audacem et splendidum,
Who was always beginning things and never ended ‘em.

The Measure of Literary Giants - An Interview with Joseph Pearce...

IgnatiusInsight.com: A few years ago you wrote Literary Converts, which is a series of biographical vignettes of late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century converts and their ties to one another. How is your new book, Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, different from that earlier book? What is the central focus, or goal, of Literary Giants, Literary Catholics?

Pearce: The earlier book was an integrated narrative history of the twentieth century, detailing the network of minds (and grace) that animated the Catholic Literary Revival. The new book discusses some of the key writers of this Revival in greater detail.

IgnatiusInsight.com: In the introduction you bring up two themes that you indicate inform the whole of the book: the conversion of culture and the evangelizing power of beauty. How do you think Literary Giants, Literary Catholics and your other books support and foster these two themes?

Pearce: It seems to me that our sick, decaying and wayward modern culture can be converted by the power of Reason (theology, philosophy, apologetics and catechetics), Love (the example of sanctity in action) and Beauty (the power of art, architecture, music, film and literature). Although these three areas of cultural engagement overlap, and indeed are united in Truth, they represent distinct approaches to changing the world in which we live. I see my vocation as a writer, speaker and teacher to be in the third of these areas. The awesome power of beauty to convert and evangelize the modern world needs to be unleashed through the employment of cultural apologetics: converting the culture with culture itself. I hope that my latest book will succeed in bringing souls to the truth by leading them through beauty to Beauty Himself.

IgnatiusInsight.com: Literary Giants, Literary Catholics has a strong apologetic quality. Is it your most overt work of apologetics, in the general sense of defending and explaining Catholicism?

Pearce: Many of my earlier works were biographies of major Catholic literary figures in which my role was to tell the story of their lives in an objective manner. In such books, as in such lives, the truth emerges from the lessons learned from the experience of the protagonists. In the new book I concentrate on the deep Christian content in the works of these writers. This has enabled me to explore the Catholic dimension in greater detail than was possible in the biographies. As such, it can be said to be more overtly a work of apologetics than my previous work.

IgnatiusInsight.com: One of the longest chapters is titled "Tradition and Conversion in Modern English Literature." What is the paradoxical relationship between the two and why is that relationship so important?

Pearce: We live in a world of chronological snobbery in which it is presumed superciliously that the present is always superior to the past purely because it is assumed that society is always progressing from an ignorant past to an "enlightened" future.

How anyone can believe such drivel after the horrors of the past century is astonishing. From the killing fields of World War One to the Holocaust of World War Two; from the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden to the Gulag Archipelago of Soviet Russia and the institutionalized murder of Mao's China; not to mention the mass infanticide of abortion; from any perspective the past century has been the bloodiest and most murderous in the whole of humanity's bloodstained history. Against this destructive "progressive" backdrop, we see the resurrection of Tradition: the power of the Past to make sense of the Present. The paradoxical relationship between Tradition and Conversion lies in the fact that conversion requires a rejection of post-Enlightenment "tradition" in order to embrace the older and authentic Tradition of Christendom. The paradox resides in the necessity of rejecting a lesser tradition to embrace a greater.

IgnatiusInsight.com: Several of the essays are on a topic you've written much about in other books, including two biographies: the Chesterbelloc. Although so closely identified with one another, Chesterton and Belloc were actually quite different in nearly every way, weren't they? What are some of the respective strengths and weaknesses of each man as author and apologist?

Pearce: The new book examines these two great writers at greater depth than was possible in either biography. It is true that Chesterton and Belloc differed in many ways. Chesterton lived almost exclusively in a world of ideas, dreaming of action; Belloc married the world of ideas with the world of action, from his travels in Europe and America to his turbulent years as a Member of Parliament. Chesterton's charity embraced the command to love our enemy; Belloc's bellicosity sometimes seemed to justify the desire of the "Sailor" in one of his poems that "all my enemies go to hell"! On the deepest level, however, Chesterton and Belloc were united in their robust defense of the Faith. I look at the complex relationship between these two great men in a chapter of Literary Giants, Literary Catholics entitled "The Chesterbelloc: Examining the Beauty of the Beast".


This interview was conducted with Joe Pearce on the 28th of June, 2005. Joe Pearce's blog can be found at:

http://www.staustinreview.com/ink_desk/

On a separate note the Hilaire Belloc Blog would like to congratulate Mr Pearce on his recent appointment:

'I am delighted to announce that I have accepted a new position with Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire (www.thomasmorecollege.edu). I have been appointed as a Visiting Fellow and as Writer-in-Residence and will commence teaching in the coming Fall semester. I have a long-standing friendship with, and admiration for, William Fahey, the College President, and Christopher Blum, the Dean, both of whom I have known since their days at Christendom College. I am truly delighted and very excited to be part of the same Faculty as these wonderfully learned and devoutly orthodox men. I'm also excited to be part of such a dynamic hub at the centre of the New Evangelization. Thomas More College is not only a Catholic liberal arts school of the first rank and highest order but is also associated with Crisis Magazine and Sophia Institute Press. I feel that I am entering into the very heart of all that is best in contemporary Catholicism and will be joining a band of culture warriors who are defending the Faith robustly against the rising tide of secular fundamentalism. I hope I prove worthy to fight in their ranks.

On a sadder note, my move to Thomas More College ends my eleven year association with Ave Maria University in Florida. I have deep respect for the Faculty at AMU and wish them every success in the future.'

Ars Taedica - James V. Schall S.J.

My young friend, Gregory Doolan, has a very excellent collection of Belloc books. He does not have, however, very many of Belloc's books of essays, none of the "On" books, for example, though he does have a couple of different collections of Belloc's shorter pieces. Normally, I hesitate to borrow a book I genuinely covet, but finally the other evening, without necessarily revealing this darker side of my own otherwise happy nature -- I figure ex-students should be smart enough to have already figured it out -- I did borrow Hilaire Belloc, Stories, Essays, and Poems (London: Dent, 1938). The book Mr. Doolan had was a 1957 hardback, an enlarged reprint copy, the Everyman's Library Edition, with an Introduction by J. B. Morton. On the title page, the book bears the name of "Francis Sample, Cathedral College." I have no idea where Cathedral College might be. Mr. Doolan must have found this collection in a used book store some place. If there is anything I like to see in ex-students of mine, besides their being aware of the darker sides of human nature, including my own, it is a diligence in haunting used book stores.

Two days after I borrowed this book, I took it with me to read on the Washington Metro returning to the Rosslyn Station across the Potomac from Georgetown. The first short piece I read was called "Mrs. Markham on the Police." It was really a funny account of a certain Mrs. Markham talking to her children. One of my Denver cousins in fact is a "Mrs. Markham", but bears no other similarity to this English lady explaining to her children why we have police, even though, in England, they only can use truncheons -- "No, my dear, we (English) do not give them (police) arms because we think it would be cruel and unjust. But we let them have a thick stick called a truncheon, with which they can hit people upon the head as hard as ever they like, to make them obey." You will understand the high metaphysical quality of Belloc's work by the next question Mrs. Markham's son Tommy asks her, "What do they do, Mamma, when, after the policemen have hit and hit and hit with their truncheons, and yet people will not obey?" -- a query worthy of an Augustine.

The second item I read was an essay entitled "The Art of Boring." I must confess almost breaking into tears on the Metro as I read it, so funny it was. I am very conscious of the outlandish effect on other absorbed Metro riders of an elderly gentleman bursting sporadically into laughter while reading an otherwise innocuous book. I still get what are called giggles when I think about it.

What made the essay doubly funny to me, as I read it, was its similarity of thesis to what is known as the Reverse Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, as you recall, states, more or less, that we rise to the level of our incompetence so that, in effect, every job is filled by an incompetent, a principle that, more than others I have seen, helps to explain our current political scene. However, let us suppose that, by manipulating this principle, you are shrewd enough to prevent yourself from rising to the level of your own incompetence. You simply want to stay at a level you are comfortable with. The way you do it is, on the occasion of your being considered to be Department Head or Associate Vice President or District Manager, you manage to do something so outlandish, like, say, suddenly cut off all your hair, or you begin to light your pipe with a sun glass  On observing your behaviour, the already incompetents in charge quietly pass you over.

Belloc's "Art of Boring" is not unmindful of and probably was inspired by the famous essay of the Roman Poet Horace on "The Bore" and on how difficult it is to get rid of him. This is where Belloc suggests that what he is talking about, in Latin, is "Ars Taedica" -- taedium means weariness or loathing, hence boring. What is at issue for Belloc is not whether you yourself are boring to others, but whether you can deliberately be boring to others, either to pay them back or to accomplish some other worthy purpose -- hence the similarity to the Reverse Peter Principle.

"The Art of Boring" is a handbook on how to go about boring other people. Belloc tells us that many books and essays are written complaining of bores, but he recalls none to tell us how to acquire this useful art. Many bores, of course, are unconscious of the quality of their ability to bore other people to death. But positively to choose to bore, you must practice and have some skill. There are rules for boring others.

First you have to recognize the signs that the phenomenon is present. "The first sign is an attention in the eye of the bored person to something trivial other than yourself." You will notice the genius of Belloc's writing when you try to ask whether the pronoun "yourself" here was deliberately intended to refer also to "something trivial." To make his point, Belloc remarks that "if while you are talking to him his eye is directed to a person aiming a gun at him, that is not a sign of boredom." On the other hand, if his eye is caught by a "little bird" or "a passing cloud", this is a sign that he is bored with you. Two other signs of boredom are 1) when the other keeps interspersing interjections that have nothing to do with what you are talking about, and 2) when the bored person suddenly begins to talk to someone else in the midst of your discourse with him.

Just as any topic can be made boring, so can any topic be made interesting. The trick is to know how to make something vitally interesting dull. One way is the monotonous tone of your voice. A second way is to bring in a lot of useless detail and to branch off into all directions. Belloc gives the following example of hesitating over a date as a brilliant way for someone who wants to bore another to proceed: "'It was in July 1921 -- no, now I come to think of it, it must have been 1920, because --' (then tell them why it must have been 1920). 'No, now I think of it, it must have been 1921' (then tell them why it was 1921) -- 'or was it 1922? Anyway, it was July, and the year doesn't matter; the whole point is the month.'" Belloc calls this simply "a capital beginning, especially the last words, which indicate to the bored one that you have deliberately wasted his time to no purpose."

We make the same boring approach with a name, or by introducing many superfluous words and adjectives. Moral and artistic digressions are also helpful in boring someone to death. Belloc's reasonings here are enormously amusing: "Stop in the middle of the thing and add to the agony by explaining that you don't mind a man's getting drunk, or that you do mind it, or that you have no objections to such building as you are describing, or what not: for your private opinions in art and morals are the most exquisitely boring things in he world and you can't bring them up too much." A particularly fine way to bore someone else, Belloc adds, is to forget the end of a story you are telling. You could also led your listener up to a major question and ask eloquently, "What do you think to be the answer?" Then you forget the answer.

Belloc addresses the case of people who are adept at recognizing our boringness so that they try to defend themselves against it. It takes considerable skill on the part of the borer to defeat this sort of counter-attack by the boree. Suppose the borer is speaking dryly and at length of Rio to the bored listener. The latter fights back by announcing that he too knows Rio. He then starts giving back what he knows to the borer. How does the one intending to bore deflect such a one approach? Two ways are open. One is to complain that you are being interrupted. The other is to wait till the other's knowledge of Rio is exhausted, then continue right on as before.

A skilled defender against a boring person can also try this: he can wait patiently till the borer (who, remember, is deliberately trying to bore) finishes his point. The bored man can wait a moment and then ask the bore to go on, as if he had not known the boring story was finished. The proper way to defend against this defence, Belloc thinks, is for the one inflicting the boring story simply to repeat it.

If the boree tries to walk away from the borer, it will often work, but this is a sign of defeat. The borer's proper response, and it takes a brave man to do this, is to follow the bored man walking away, corner him, and continue with the boring story as if nothing has happened.

Belloc gives two fine points about how to be boring. The first is to put long pauses into one's conversations and dare the other to break it. Just as the boree is about to interrupt, recommence the boring story. "The other way is talking half incomprehensibly, mumbling, and the rest of it -- then, when the boree impatiently asks you to repeat, do it still less clearly." This method, Belloc adds, "never fails."

In the end, Belloc thinks that this fine art of boring others (ars taedica) probably cannot be learned with rules and precepts. Then he adds, with exquisite irony in the light of all that he has said about names and dates, "perhaps I have written in vain." That is to say, in setting out deliberately to bore us with an essay on "the art of boring," he has in fact delighted us by reminding us how utterly boring we can be.

From Generally Speaking, November, 1997.

Schall on Belloc James V. Schall, S. J.

Shipley Mill Becomes the Belloc Memorial

A Thoroughly English Event


THE spirit of Hilaire Belloc himself seemed to preside over the opening last Saturday of the newly-restored Shipley Mill which is peculiarly appropriate memorial to a great Catholic writer.

"In she month of May in my own country all the woods are new," he once wrote. Not only were the woods new but the sky was blue, the sun shone and, most fortunate of all, a strong breeze kept the windmill which he had loved so well busily grinding barley throughout the proceedings.

As Mr. J. B. Morton, who for years was Belloc's friend, made the opening speech the shadow of the majestically turning sweeps moved rhythmically across the blossoming apple trees and surrounding pastures.
It was a light hearted, thoroughly English event. Belloc himself would have appreciated it to the full.

Some 300 to 400 of his friends—old and new—had gathered for the occasion. Some £800 (of which readers to my page 4 column donated a handsome part) had been raised by voluntary subscription and to this the West Sussex County Council had added a large sum to make possible the repair and restoration of the mill.

On the platform the brief opening ceremony was presided over by Belloc's son-in-law, Mr. Reginald Jebb, and Mr. Hilary Belloc, son of the poet and author, who had come over from America. The new plaque above the mill door reads  "Let this be a memorial to Hilaire Belloc who garnered a harvest of wisdom and sympathy for young and old." Edmond Warre, Belloc's old friend, had given the plaque and chosen the words for it.

The mill stands beside King's Land, Belloc's home for so many years. Henceforth it will have as its guardian the County Council and will be open to the public.

Unlike most modern memorials it is at once both beautiful and useful. And like so much of BelIoc's own written work, it looks back nostalgically to the past, adds a touch of romance to the present and is set against a background which is unchanging and unchangeable.


From the archive of the Catholic Herald 16th May 1958.

http://archive.catholicherald.co.uk/article/16th-may-1958/1/s-shipley-mill-becomes-the-belloc-memorial