Stonyhurst Memories by Jimmy Burns
Here follows some further Stonyhurst memories of my own prompted by my contemporary John Mulholland and his thoughtful memoir Ferulas and Thuribles– “Although we were all in it together, each individual journey was different.”
World Cup 1966 -my first year at Stonyhurst. As I write in one of my football books , La Premier League ( published last year in Spanish , English version due out towards the end of this year) I was in London and recall going to the Royal Garden Hotel and seeing Bobby Moore lead his team in celebration on the balcony with ecstatic crowds gathered in Kensington High Street.
Talking about football , we were the first year , as far as I recall, in which some of us asked that we could play football at school like most people we knew not privately boarding. Rugby monopolised our school’s sporting culture , defining character and physique . Our ‘subversive’ attitude also led to the creation of the alternative cricket team, open to all, played in jeans and t-shirt- the ‘bats and balls club.’
Travelling to Stonyhurst for our first term -long train journey from Euston arriving by night- far away away from my comfort zone (I went to a genial day Catholic prep school in London called St Philip’s (its eccentric founding headmaster Mr Tibbits and how he began teaching young WW2 evacuees later immortalised in a book by a Spectator journalist) , very far north , cold and isolated. My first glimpse, looking at the college in daylight from the Virgin statue , was to be in awe of the open countryside, and the fells beyond-a feeling of liberating borderless expanse unlike Ampleforth which I always found monastic, enclosed and somewhat claustrophobic. Later I had no doubt in my imagination as I ventured along the Tolkien walk from Hurst Green , that the surrounding landscape of the Ribble valley partly inspired Tolkien’s middle earth when he stayed renting a nearby cottage from an old lady, so he could write alone and undisturbed.
It was the former nun Lavinia Byrne who was guest speaker at the annual OS dinner when Fr Nick King was president- I remember a mad drive from London in David da Silva’s open-roofed car to get there, changing into our dinner jackets just beyond Longridge, and arriving just as the dinner got under way with a somewhat dishevelled entrance into the upper refectory.
Lavinia gave an inspiring after dinner talk. She too had been impressed by the sheer sense of space : Stonyhurst’s long avenue and the surrounding landscape, struck her as a perfect frame for the sweeping majesty of the buildings. Such space, she told us, was to be treasured, not in the negative sense of enforcing isolation from the rest of humankind, but in ensuring that its occupants remained receptive to and understanding of the challenges they faced.
Single College vs House system I always thought that the Ampleforth house system created silos whereas our single college system had us growing up together ‘under one roof’ and produced more of a collegiate ethos. With the evidence of hindsight , having boys living with monks accentuated Ampleforth’s culture of secrecy when it came to abuse.The Jays lived under the same roof as us, but were only too visible.
Women….well like you, John, I managed to tread into ‘forbidden territory’. My first school romance began meeting my wife Kidge, three years younger, during a holiday in London while in Syntax. We began an extended series of loving letters to each other when she was boarding at Ascot and later as London day girl in Queensgate. My relationship with Kidge proved more enduring, as things turned out, than the one perfumed letter I received from Michelle, a local lass I met briefly on Blackpool Pier on a day trip we made there and with whom I shared some candy sweets and hug -was it the summer of 69?
Somewhat more dramatic was the Saturday night David Gardner, Pete Nicholson, and I took two friends (as far as I can recall with permission from O-Halloran), who were on the Spanish immigrant male College catering and dish washing staff, to the Hurst Green village hall dance.
We started chatting up and dancing with some of the local girls until we started getting some threatening comments to piss off from the local non Stonyhurst boys after calling us ‘fucking toffs and dagoes’ . The three musketeers thought it best to make a quick exit with their Spanish mates. We were walking halfway down the avenue on a pitched black night when we realised that behind us there were a van and car with headlights blazing. As we started running across the rugby flats, the vehicles stopped and out tumbled four or five local thugs and a fight ensued. I remember being punched in the face and bleeding from my nose but the locals hadn’t counted on one of the Spaniards being a Galician welter-weight boxing champion He helped force our aggressors to retreat after hitting out with some heavy blows as David, Pete and I headed for the woods.
We returned to the college and got in without raising the alarm, thanks to the blind watchman or was it the Spaniards smuggling us in? I did go and see O’Halloran who I think was then play master in Grammar the next morning (or perhaps he called me in). I told him what had happened and suggested the College should press charges against our attackers.O’Halloran informed me that one of the attackers had ended up in Preston hospital as a result of the fight we had had. He suggested we should let the matter drop and so it ended there, with no one pressing charges.
Still on the subject of women…a key half term for me – I think it was in upper syntax- was spent with Kidge, at Jean Paul Blissett’s family house near London (his parents were away in Beirut). Mike Quinn was going out with Jean Paul’s sister Julia . Both were also there.
It was not much later that Julia got pregnant, and she and Mike became the youngest parents in our year. I think Mike told me that Julia was pregnant one day when we were having a smoke, hidden in the woods, near the cricket flats. I thought Mike, a real rocker and sportsman, behaved like a true gentleman, and both he and Julia remained married until he died many years later when I spent a memorable time with him as he faded heroically in his final days.
In the early months after baby Quinn was born, Julia and Mike would bring their first child, Emma, to see me and other school mates at my parents large flat in London, where my mother and father made them feel welcome, it became something of a second home, for the three of them.
The Hardwicks. Peter, the inspirational teacher of Shakespeare and Hopkins , leading a group of us on a memorable trip to stay overnight and watch a play in Stratford , Avon.He brought the best of us English students. The hospitality he and his wife Bridget offered me and other boys in our year at their cottage provided all the unconditional love and care we could possibly wish for. They both seemed imbued with the most essential of Ignatian spirituality-service to others, faith in action, and God in all things.
Fr Tony Richmond SJ . With his guitar and folks songs he had brought with him from a previous Jesuit role in the US, was an open window to the light. He empowered me once to organise the mass of my choosing in the Boy’s Chapel which he was happy to celebrate. And so I did, including r a sung rendition accompanied by guitar of Kum ba yah” (“Come by here”) , a reading from Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet, and a recording of the Sanctus from Missa Luba which featured prominently in the movie If..
Brendan McLaughlin. He came as a scholastic, and I think was with us in Lower Grammar and Grammar. He was hugely intelligent and eccentric, also radical and , only after he left the College , to study in Oxford, openly gay.
I felt he was a breath of fresh air and he was a good ally supporting my failed attempt to end corporal punishment when we were in Grammar with a short lived non-compliance campaign when some of us in our year refused to be beaten. We were forced into rendition after a terrifying speech Earle gave after calling us all into the ambulacrum. Holding a piece of rope which he began to hit himself on his hands and back, Earl suggested that we were just immature cowards, who had no idea what real punishment and pain was.
I didn’t go to the lakes with Brendan but I joined three friends from our year Louis Biggie, Andrew Wenner, and Chris Parsons when he led us on a short camping trip near a river somewhere. I remember returning to one of the tents after going for a walk on my own and feeling very disconcerted on finding Brendan and the other half naked giggling and tickling each other . I didn’t like what I saw, and I turned round and went for another walk.
Fr Earle SJ: The background to Earle’s departure as headmaster was protracted and far from transparent. My father, a leading Catholic publisher and OS, at one point went to a high-level source he had among the Jesuits in Farm Street and said that unless Earle was sacked he was prepared to go to the highest authority in Rome to issue a complaint of his total unsuitability to be a headmaster or to occupy any position of teaching responsibility.
It was only after I left Stonyhurst that I heard one of my two older brother David- we coincided at the college in my two years and with my oldest brother Tom in my year- that a friend from David’s year had once been called to Earle’s office, given a semipornographic magazine and told he should feel free to masturbate if he felt like it. The boy in question was severely traumatised by the event but nothing was widely known about it at the time,let alone was it acted upon.
Fr O’Halloran SJ
Perhaps I drew a lucky straw but I was among others that he respected and treated well although as you include in your book I was not best happy when he hit me with six ferulas fir a minor offence, and then extended it to nine after I had sworn on receiving the sixth.
I also don’t know what punishment he would have imposed had he found out what was perhaps among the least known and carefully limited in numbers subversion and which I had privileged knowledge of, and indeed was complicit in This involved JP Blissett , and his best similarly blond mate in the year who was inseparable (can’t remember his name), and I and a couple of others using for a while a secret hideaway we had unearthed behind some panelling near the wash room, just steps away from an office used by the rector where we squirrelled away biscuits and booze.
I was to keep in touch with O’Halloran over the years and we coincided after he left the College when he was at St Beano’s and later Farm Street.
It was while I was going through a troubled period in my married life that my news editor at the FT decided I should take leave of absence and sort myself out. I wrote to O’Halloran at the Jesuits retreat house of St Beano’s, where he was in charge then, and he kindly invited me down . From the moment I arrived he was refreshingly non overbearing and non-judgemental. He showed me to a room with a lovely view of the welsh hills, suggested that I should take my time if possible, in silence, reading certain readings from the Gospel and going for long walks on my own , in the steps of Hopkins.
It was on such walk , on a glorious mid-summer after noon, that I sat and mediated on the crest of a hill . Then to my amazement I glimpsed a Windhover and Hopkins’ poem, so beautifully part of my English curriculum at school , came immediately to mind.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
But then something similarly unexpected happened in the empty field below me. I watched a young farm lad with a girl step over a fence and stripping off before having sex.
I returned to my room at St Beano’s trying to discern what it all meant, but I felt there was something there about struggling with the concept of true enduring love that was not just about sex but which I could not grasp there and then , but would in time come to influence my reconciliation with my marriage and family.
I left St Beano’s after I had thrown a different kind of love -that of a parent should feel towards his or her children- into writing two short stories for our then young daughters . Then O’Halloran took me for a long drive across some beautiful countryside to place of pilgrimage since medieval times.
The fey, the flirtatious and the predatory
Those who did not have the good fortune of romancing a girl or boy in a consensual mutually respectful and enriching experience as we grew from childhood into adolescence and young manhood, struggled as best they could with the temptation to go beyond mere friendship.
I recall quite a lot of innocent consensual flirting between boys of our year, and between years. Some plays in which boys took on women roles produced their own fantasies, with identities and attractions lingering long after the make-up had been removed.
In our year one of my friends evidently enjoyed playing women , and on one occasion had a pretty open mind about sharing a bed , with the excuse that it was just a warm gesture. He was quite happy to come across as effeminate in a school that institutionally venerated the collective male mentality and success of the rugby highflyers.
A minority who had the courage to express the complexity of their sexuality, and were openly camp at school went on being so after leaving , but I only know two in our year -Edward Duke and Francis Butler openly declaring themselves as gay.
Edward became a successful actor after breaking as many rules as he could , and voluntarily courting expulsion, putting on a memorably defiant and very funny one-man farewell cabaret in the Academy room, brilliantly lampooning those prefects and teachers he felt deserved to be insulted and humiliated.
He was expelled at least a year before we left.
The last time I saw him alive was when we dined together after his brilliant one-man Jeeves show in Bath. He was the first and only school friend I knew to later die of AIDS after pursuing with abandon some of the rougher gay night spots of London and New York during the 1980’s.
His funeral at Farm Street was concelebrated by his good friend Stephen de Kerdrel, and Fr Bossy. The congregation was a mix of family friends , including rather stiff looking foreign office friends of his diplomat father , a good representation of his post-Stonyhurst friends- mainly gay actors- and a sampling of loyal OS friends . It was a very moving occasion.
Francis B. having survived the wild 80’s and been always a born entertainer, ran a very popular and lovely restaurant in the Costa del Sol before settling down with his long-term Spanish partner in Cadiz where he happily lives today.
Then there were those in our year less easy to define but who may have struggled with their sexuality in ways that remained hidden at school and perhaps haunted them beyond.
The closest I came to witnessing anything that struck me as rather shifty on the sexual front in all the time I was at the college, was watching one of our year openly masturbating in one of the side cubicles of the plunge and showing himself off knowing that he could be seen by those who were swimming at the time. Anecdotally, I later picked up stories of him propositioning other boys, usually in the woods. He was never a friend and I found him very unattractive. I could not even begin to imagine how , if at all, he struggled to contain his predatory instincts or how much of what he did was consensual. If he was ever caught in flagrante, or reported, it does not seem to have led to his expulsion or contained him.
With the evidence of hindsight, it is hard to believe but true, that we survived those years at school without the benefit of heathy and safety rules, counselling, and diversity and respect for sexual orientation being part of a school governance that might have avoided the emotional wreckage that some of our generation suffered.On the other hand thank God that some of us still managed to find true love.
I would write an article for The Tablet and late mention in my biography of Pope Francis of the police investigation into historic alleged sexual abuse by teachers at St Mary’s Hall and Stonyhurst in the years 1968-98 which led initially to nine teachers, among them Jesuits, being charged. Subsequent trials resulted in two convictions, one of which was quashed on appeal. The police stood accused of wasting time and money. And yet I and others of our year-and some of those who had taught us- while understanding the sense of loyalty from which such outrage sprang, felt that the situation required a great sense of humility and reparation.
Stonyhurst was just one of numerous abuse scandals that were destined to shake the institutional Catholic Church out of its complacency, making it more transparent and accountable.
Fr Bossy SJ
Thank God that Bossy eventually took over from Earle as headmaster. If occasionally prone to being Jesuitical in his mannerisms, I found Bossy wise and fair, as when our year hosted a party for a visiting convent girl school -was it not with Harrogate? I had a good time in the company of a warm and graceful girl, whose liberated mores belied the fact that she was a member of one of the more traditional Catholic families with enduring links with the College of which they were leading benefactors. We spent the best part of the evening cuddled up in my room, listening to Simon and Garfunkle. The next day Bossy announced to our year that the headmistress-a nun- had complained that Stonyhurst boys had been corrupting her girls with drugs.
It was of course something of an exaggeration as the culprits- I among them- were very few in number and only shared a joint or two by mutual consent. David Gardner, Peter Nicholson and I nonetheless went to Bossy and put our hands up. Bossy thanked us for showing courage and honesty in owning up and not blaming others. He let us off with a reprimand and a warning, but no beating, let alone expulsion. Bossy never raised the incident again with us
Reunion:
In the early stages of preparing our year’s belated 50th reunion-an assignment I later willingly handed over to Andrew Lubienski- I put forward the names of two Jesuits who I thought should join it. One was Fr Nick King SJ ,the other was Bossy, among the surviving Stonyhurst Jesuits I have known who have inspired me.
I myself pulled out of the ’71 reunion, partly because I felt I had already reached out to as many OS as I could in the pre-Covid year I was president of the Association and saw a good sample of our year at the Stonyhurst Association Dinner I hosted at the College ,and partly I thought it best to avoid a polemic with Stephen de Kerdrel who considered Pope Francis a heretic, and others of our year whose right wing politics I also disagreed with profoundly.
That said I kept some enduring friends from our year, and discovered good things in others I had spent less time with at school, part of a thread of formative memories, manoeuvring through our separate life experiences, deepening our humanity.
Feb 2024 JB
