1942 Sunday afternoon tea in the Manor House with Mrs. Sue Brady,
the same room where Evelyn and Laura Waugh were entertained by the Brady’s
and the monastic community in March, 1949.

With early plans already underway for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Portsmouth Abbey School, known in its first four decades as Portsmouth Priory School, we have the opportunity to make note of and explore some of the milestone events along the timeline of that centennial era. One of our more intriguing milestones was a visit made to Portsmouth Priory School seventy-five years ago this month, on March 20, 1949, by the English writer, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). He was 46 years old at the time – the all-boys school, at 23, was half his age. Much like the present-day academic schedule whereby the school is on its spring break in March, so too was the campus pretty much devoid of the student body at the time of Waugh’s visit, save for the faculty and staff families residing on campus. This explains the lack of factual reports or photographs which one might have expected to find afterwards in the school newspaper, the yearbook or other internal campus mouthpieces. The school’s 1949 yearbook, The Cowl (later renamed The Gregorian), makes no mention whatsoever of the lecture or the overnight campus visit made by Waugh and his second wife, Laura. The Providence College newspaper, coincidentally also known as The Cowl, printed a front-page item three days later, to which we shall refer below. Though largely hidden to our school annals, the visit loomed large in the memories of many in the monastic community.

Book on Waugh “and his Friends”

Portsmouth Priory was the final of 15 stops, most being major cities, on what has been called the “North American Tour, Part 2: The Lecture Tour,” which lasted about eight weeks. Waugh had visited the United States the previous year, traveling in 1948 without his wife and under the sponsorship of Life magazine, researching the Roman Catholic Church in America. According to Portsmouth’s Fr. Damian Kearney ’45, O.S.B., Waugh, “came to the Monastery/School to give a lecture in March 1949 on the topic, The Catholic Novel in England. This was a benefit lecture to parents and friends of the School to be given in Providence to raise money for a projected monastery and church” – both new edifices came to fruition for Portsmouth in 1960. The lecture was held in Providence’s Hope High School auditorium on Hope Street in the city’s East Side, one assumes because the Portsmouth campus at the time had no auditorium-style facility which could accommodate such an event. Much of what we know about the time spent at or near Portsmouth by the author, by then surely exhausted from his extended tour, comes from second-hand anecdotes collected after the fact by Fr. Damian. He remarked that, “No copy of this lecture exists at the School; he may have published it subsequently as an article in a magazine or in a collection of essays.” Nevertheless, in responding to a researcher in advance of a 2012 scholarly gathering on Waugh, Fr. Damian noted that: “Although I came to the monastery in early 1950, several of the monks gave me this information which was still quite recent.”

One highlight of the 2012 Evelyn Waugh Conference, held at Loyola Notre Dame University in Baltimore, was the exhibit, An Englishman in Catholic America, mounted in that school’s library. Portsmouth’s Head Librarian at the time, Roberta Stevens, included Fr. Damian’s notes on Waugh in the Spring 2013 newsletter of our own St. Thomas More Library, and they paint a compelling picture of some details of Waugh’s arrival. The stop before Portsmouth had been New York City and, having departed there on Saturday, March 19, according to Fr. Damian, “The Waugh’s were met at the train in Providence by one of the monks [Fr. Hilary Martin, according to Abbot Matthew Stark], who was surprised to find Mrs. Waugh carrying the suitcase and offered to take it from her, only to be told by the author that she always carried the luggage.” Fr. Damian continues: "I am quite certain that when the Waugh’s attended Mass [in the priory’s former chapel] the next day (a Sunday), he was not using an ear trumpet." Mention of this detail may be intended to gently refute a reference made by Sally Ryder Brady in her memoir, A Box of Darkness (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), that Waugh had “gone to Mass with his large ear trumpet.” Fr. Damian tells us that, “Mr. Waugh stayed in guest quarters in the Manor House, which served as the main building for administration, guest facilities and reception rooms. [T]he Assistant Headmaster was Mr. Francis Brady [1906-1955]. Mrs. Sue Brady served as the hostess and presided at teas given in one of the reception rooms on Sundays and special occasions such as the Waugh visit. At the tea Mr. Waugh was on his best behavior and was most cordial; a number of the monks were present as well as several lay faculty. Also present was Mrs. Waugh.” A frequently-republished iconic School photo survives of just such a Sunday afternoon tea in 1942 in the Manor House. This tea had occurred seven years earlier in the same room where the Waugh’s were entertained, and it conjures a vivid image of the Waugh gathering. The author, Sally Ryder Brady (1939- ), who later married into the Brady family, recalled that, although she “had barely heard of Evelyn Waugh or Brideshead Revisited,” her future in-laws were enamored of the fictional Flyte family and “knew the book almost as well as they knew their Gospels.” She went so far as to state that, in fact, “Upton, Buff, and Lib talked about Sebastian Flyte and Lady Marchmain the way they talked about the monks.”

Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox

Along with his own anecdotes, Fr. Damian sent to the Waugh Conference organizers two brief local newspaper items from the visit. The Providence Evening Bulletin on Monday, March 21, headlined their story with “Waugh Lauds Catholic Influence on British Writers,” while The Cowl out of Providence College on March 23 began with “Evelyn Waugh Cites Influence Of Church On Lives Of Authors.” Both articles named Gilbert K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Monsignor Ronald Knox as exemplars of English writing who, like himself, were converts to the Catholic faith. The Bulletin noted that, “Though these three writers differed essentially from each other, their conversion gave them a common denominator and a similar stimulus for their work.” Waugh explained that “there is no formal school of English Catholic writers though the group of these authors is frequently referred to by this designation because of the common influence upon their work.” Evidence for this may be seen in the publication, ten years after Waugh’s visit to Portsmouth, of The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, compiled by Waugh and published by Chapman & Hall in 1959, two years after Knox’s death.

Roberta (Bobbie) Stevens, now semi-retired but serving part-time as librarian for the monastery, also noted in the Spring 2013 library newsletter that Loyola Notre Dame University assembled, “a display of artifacts, documents, first editions, letters and photographs, as part of the Evelyn Waugh Conference” in 2012. One related curiosity from the conference, still in our collections here at Portsmouth, was a T-shirt created for participants at the Waugh conference – one had been sent on to Fr. Damian as a token of gratitude for his contributions. The back of the shirt, styled to evoke the listing of a rock band’s tour dates and cities, includes “Providence/Portsmouth Priory School” as the final stop. The design on the front of the shirt incorporates a curious self-portrait drawn by Waugh, signed “Au revoir E” on a sheet of stationery from the Plaza Hotel, apparently where he and his wife stayed for his two New York City lectures (February 2 and March 16). The latter lecture, held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, was a benefit for the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. There is a backstory here as well. In attendance at a dinner that evening hosted by Clare Boothe Luce, given in Waugh’s honor, was the English-American writer, Anne Fremantle (1909-2002). Her son, art historian Richard Fremantle, would soon attend Portsmouth Priory School, graduating in 1954. Waugh had referred to Mrs. Fremantle as “the smartest woman in America,” which may explain why he tasked her at one point with acquiring sleeping pills for his return to England. Without a prescription, she was able to obtain some tablets which he dismissed as worthless because they contained valerian, saying that its “only function is to attract cats.” Valerian root is an herb, “that has been used for centuries in people to combat anxiety, insomnia, and high blood pressure. It has a calming effect on the human nervous system. Valerian has the opposite effect on cats, often causing hyper-excitability similar to that seen in some cats when they are exposed to catnip.” (Thank you, CatHealth.com) The label carried a warning of a side effect in humans: skin eruptions. It so happens that Mr. Waugh swallowed the pills on his journey and, indeed, his skin erupted – thus the self-portrait (included on the T-shirt) in which we see Waugh "followed by a posse of all the ship's cats and absolutely covered in spots." While the Waugh T-shirt might be one of the oddest items in the school’s collections, it tangibly evokes one of the more interesting footnotes to our history, one which we are happy to revisit.
 

Back of conference T-shirt (Portsmouth Priory is last stop)

Self-portrait of spotted Waugh on conference T-shirt