There is an apocryphal tale of a meeting of headmasters at which the head of one public school, possibly Eton, declared, “At our school we prepare our boys for life,” only for a monk, the headmaster of a Catholic boarding school, to respond, “At ours, we prepare boys for death”.
The school in question is disputed, but one version holds that it was Ampleforth, and the monk a predecessor of Abbot Patrick Barry, the shy Benedictine who transformed the fortunes of the Yorkshire boarding school often referred to as a “Catholic Eton”.
So notable was Barry’s success that after nine years at the helm at Ampleforth, he became the first Roman Catholic to lead the Headmasters’ Conference, the association of leading independent schools.
However, he was viewed by his pupils with a degree of terror. His nickname was “the Black Mole” — an apparent reference to both his aloof demeanour and the colour of his habit.
Any boy foolhardy enough to subject Barry to a practical joke received a swift, withering riposte. He delivered searing lectures on the sin of self-pity which, he said, “sucks everything in like a sponge, and gives nothing out”. Edward Stourton, presenter of the Sunday programme on BBC Radio 4 who was a pupil at Ampleforth in the 1970s, recalled: “He had a knack of lowering his voice so that everyone strained to hear, and a great stillness spread over his audience of several hundred boisterous teenagers.”
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He never sought to impose himself. When Stourton was head monitor, one of his duties was an informal weekly meeting with Barry to discuss any problems that he had identified among the boys. “I often came empty handed. And since neither of us was good at small talk we often passed the time in companionable silence.”
On becoming headmaster in 1964, Barry realised that few of his pupils would — as he had done at 18 — enter the school monastery. Many, imbued with the anarchic spirit of the 1960s, questioned authority. Unfazed, Barry convened school forums at which the long-haired and the left-wing might vent their grievances.
Encouraged by Ampleforth’s abbot, Basil Hume, he also assembled a formidable teaching staff — with lay staff in junior roles — as the school’s focus shifted to academic achievement. The future of the church, he believed, depended on the laity.
“As a punishment, he instructed one boy to fetch The Times
Although a moderniser, he was, as a monk, accustomed to a spartan lifestyle. He did not rush to update the living quarters of his pupils. Up to 40 boys shared one set of lavatories. Heating was frugal: in cold weather boys found the towel at the end of their bed semi-frozen. Nonetheless, Barry’s watch was remarkably liberal: sixth formers could smoke — after 4 pm — if given parental permission.
Painfully shy, Barry was inscrutable: one boy expecting a punishment was asked to fetch a copy of The Times, read aloud the crossword clues and enter Barry’s answers. Within the allotted time span — 15 minutes — Barry had completed it. His scholarship was renowned, as was his stone-cutting. He was a master calligrapher and promoted the art among his brethren, who used calligraphy to pen even the most basic of messages.
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Noel St John Barry — he took the name Patrick in religious life — was born in 1917 in Wallasey, Merseyside, the son of an Irish doctor. He asked a Jesuit patient for advice on schooling: “Don’t send him to the J’s,” was the reply. “Try the Benedictines.” Originally Barry was intended for Downside until his mother objected to the clothing list. Each new boy — in the middle of the Depression — was required to have three tailor-made suits.
At the age of ten, he was duly dispatched to Ampleforth, where he was met at the door by his future mentor, the headmaster, Father Paul Nevill, who had introduced boarding houses.
Seven years later, Barry was told that his father had secured him a place at medical school in Liverpool. By then, Barry wished to become a priest; his father — after a letter to discourage him — acquiesced. He took a degree at Oxford in Classical Mods and Greats. Hopes of further study in theology were dashed by the outbreak of the Second World War. Summoned back to Ampleforth, he became librarian and later the head of classics. He was devastated by the death of Nevill in 1954. A psychiatrist later told him that he had been close to breakdown.
The youngest monk, he rallied to push the community to continue plans to build an abbey church and befriended the architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. To raise money for the project he also introduced the abbot to an American expert on fundraising. The abbot protested, “We are not engaged in selling ice cream or cornflakes, and whatever we do — if we do anything at all — to persuade our benefactors to give us money for the church, we want it to be respectable and decent.” However, one monk was duly coached in how to raise money and the church was completed in 1961.
Appointed headmaster three years later, Barry realised the school was entering a new era. When mothers expressed worries that the school was to blame for their sons’ rebellious behaviour, he agreed to visit parents in their homes to talk through their anxieties. The warmth he exhibited at these meetings contrasted sharply with his fearsome reputation.
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He also mellowed with age. Some Amplefordians found his levity as an older man almost “unnerving” given earlier memories. Fra’ Matthew Festing, the grand master of the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta, found Barry difficult to talk to at Ampleforth. He was “amazed to be selected by him as a monitor — one of the senior boys in the school. Later, when I was at Cambridge, he always visited me. I realised that underneath his rather forbidding exterior he took great interest in the boys that he had educated.”
Retiring in 1980 as headmaster, Barry was later twice appointed abbot of the monastic community, then the largest of Benedictines in England. Stepping down in 1997, he moved for several years to an offshoot of Ampleforth, the monastery of St Louis, Missouri.
From there, he was a regular visitor to Chile where he became a mentor of three lay-led co-educational day schools modelled on Ampleforth. Their founder was José Manuel Eguiguren, a founder of the lay Catholic Manquehue Apostolic Community. After suffering depression as a young man, he was inspired to open a Benedictine school but discovered that none existed in his own country. He was told about Ampleforth and flew to Yorkshire in 1981 to seek guidance. “We found men who were fiercely loyal to God and their brethren,” he said, “and gently tolerant of those among them who sometimes went astray.”
Barry, although courteous, was cautious, but he soon perceived that the faith of Ampleforth school-leavers increased after gap years at the schools in Santiago. He was intrigued by San Lorenzo, a state school in a poor area of the city and also by the mix of rich and poor pupils at a summer retreat in Patagonia. Here practical tasks — such as building houses — were combined with prayer and Lectio Divina, the Benedictine method of reading scripture. In his 80s, Barry decided to interview the members, writing an account of their activity, A Cloister in the World (2005). He also forged links for the Chileans with the Vatican, but discouraged them from ordaining priests in the movement, lest they become “clericalised”.
At the age of 91, he returned to Ampleforth, where a group of Manquehue Chileans are now in residence on a two-year placement. They recalled his unshakeable belief in prayer. Once, while in Chile, Barry “desperately wanted to see a condor so we took him up into the Andes,” said Eguiguren. “He prayed for a condor to appear and suddenly, when he was on the balcony of the chalet, eight huge condors appeared and circled about, so close you could see their eyes and make out the patterns on their feathers.”
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Abbot Patrick Barry, headmaster, was born on December 6, 1917. He died on February 21, 2016, aged 98