On the Fringe

Extract

‘I wouldn’t belong to this bunch of macaroni merchants for another second if it wasn’t the way of laying hold on Christ’. My own feelings about the Church are not exactly the same as those of Stanley Morison when he made this statement many years ago to Tom Burns, but something like this principle has enabled me to remain in the Church as the body of Christ, without feeling obliged to belong to the Catholic club, throughout my three score years and ten. Unlike Morison, I am not a convert, but Catholicism intervened effectively in my life only after childhood. And my first contacts were not with an Italian but with what appeared to be a very Irish and clerical institution.

For those inside and outside the Church in 1908 Catholicism in the West Riding town of Keighley was personified by the parish priest, Joseph Russell, a fine figure of a man who until his death in 1945 was always seen outside wearing a top hat (except on one occasion when he realised halfway up Highfield Lane that biretta and frock coat did not go together). After studies at Waterford and Maynooth, he soon made his mark in the Leeds diocese as preacher and administrator, a successful money-raiser who established four parishes from St Anne’s in Keighley and largely paid for their churches before they were cut off. He was very concerned tor the rights of the Church, reluctant to accept English curates, but on excellent terms with the Anglican rector and active on the local board of guardians.