Belloc’s Grandson, Dom Philip Jebb, RIP

Having just returned from this year’s rambunctious Chesterton Conference, I was pleased to receive an e-mail from Kirk Kramer, giving his own personal reminiscences of Hilaire Belloc’s grandson, Dom Philip Jebb, who entered into his eternal inheritance a few weeks ago.

I also had the honour and pleasure of meeting Dom Philip at Downside Abbey as part of my research for my biography of his grandfather. Apart from speaking with fondness and eloquence about Belloc, he offered some delightful anecdotes about the great convert poet, Siegfried Sassoon.

I’ve been meaning to write my own tribute to Dom Philip Jebb but my travel commitments have prevented me from doing so. As such, I’m grateful to Kirk for sending his own memories and also two obituaries from British newspapers, all of which I’m pleased to post below.

Kirk Kramer writes:

Belloc’s grandson Dom Philip Jebb, a monk of Downside Abbey in
England, died recently. In 1997 I travelled to Europe for the
priestly ordination of my fellow Oklahoman Rob Torczynski, an alumnus of
Pearson College who became a Carthusian monk. Before continuing on to
France to see Rob (Dom Marie-Robert) priested by Bishop Slattery at
his charterhouse near Bourg-en-Bresse, I spent several days in the UK,
including a week-end in the guesthouse at Downside. I had contacted
Dom Philip to make arrangements for my stay, and spent a fair bit of
time with him that week-end. I asked him about his grandfather, in
whose Sussex house Dom Philip spent his boyhood. Since they lived
under the same roof, Dom Philip knew him very well, and regarded him
with great affection.

Dom Philip had a particular apostolate to those who have lost a
spouse, and wrote a volume of meditations simply titled ‘Widowed.’ He
also edited a collection of essays by widows called ‘By Death Parted.’
In the ’80s, both books were published in America by the Benedictine
nuns of Petersham, Mass., but they are unfortunately now out of print.

I give two obituaries below; the one from ‘The Independent’ is much
more gracefully written.

Pray peace for the soul of Dom Philip Jebb.

The Independent
OBITUARIES
Dom Philip Jebb: Monk who became a leading figure in the Benedictine
order and was a perceptive counsellor to lay people
Wednesday 2 July 2014

Dom Philip Jebb was a leading figure in the Benedictine order of
monks, as a teacher, archivist, a perceptive counsellor to laymen and
religious alike, and a respected headmaster of Downside Abbey, in
Somerset.

Jebb took the helm at Downside at a fractious moment for one of
Britain’s longest-established Catholic public schools. It was a time
of pupil disturbances, with “flash mob” events such as a mass midnight
demonstration in the main courtyard to demand better school food.

Jebb re-established order by showing himself a strict but fair
disciplinarian, and earned a reputation for having a near-psychic feel
for where and when trouble was brewing. Even, it was said, an ability
to bilocate. This personal myth, his evident self-discipline, and a
fair, statesman-like approach to his pupils, combined to get the
school back on an even keel.

Jebb was of average height, but had penetrating eyes and an imposing
physical presence. He spoke, and preached, with a soft, cooing tenor
voice. And when something delighted him he would emit an expressive,
sighing “Aaaaah”, on a descending chromatic scale. But when order had
to be imposed, his voice could take on a withering, steely tone.

To his confrères in the monastery he seemed an indefatigable man of
action. He was a keen walker, fencer and canoeist (he once paddled the
length of the Grand Union Canal), and he had revelled in the country
around his childhood home in Sussex, collecting fossils and Roman
pottery. He later collected postcards on a grand scale and made
exquisite model clipper ships in a bottle from matchsticks and paper.

The timetable of a headmaster added to that of a monk, and providing
counsel to the sick or dying, was taxing even to a man of Jebb’s
stamina. His solution was to take a nap each afternoon, learning to go
instantly to sleep, and awaking refreshed 20 minutes later.

Anthony Jebb was born in 1932 at Spode House (now Hawkesyard Hall),
near Armitage in Staffordshire, which his parents, Rex Jebb and
Eleanor Belloc, had leased in 1928 from the Dominican Order, to run as
a Catholic prep school. “Ant” Jebb was the second son and third child
in a family of four children.

Their upbringing in a devout, high-minded household was as unworldly
as could be, but each of them achieved a personal renown. The eldest,
Marianne, became a nun, one of the Canonesses of St Augustine, of Our
Lady’s Priory, Haywards Heath, and a witty, much-loved headmistress of
its girls’ school. The eldest son, Philip (“Pip”), was one of the
leading private-client architects in Britain, equally adept at
creating new buildings and restoring old. The youngest, Julian, was an
ubiquitous figure in the literary world in London, producer of
imaginative arts documentaries for the BBC.

When Ant became a novice monk at Downside in 1950 he was asked to take
the name Brother Philip. He demurred, given that he had an elder
brother of the same name. But the novice master insisted that they
were in need of a Philip, guaranteeing a lifetime of confusion for the
whole family.

Rex Jebb was Ant’s first model of what a teacher, and an exemplary
Christian, could be. He was a classical scholar, softly spoken, with a
well-populated mind, and had won the MC for gallantry during the
Dardanelles campaign. He had owned a successful Anglican prep school,
Aldwick, near Crowborough in Sussex. When he married the daughter of
the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc in Westminster Cathedral in 1922,
he remained in the Protestant faith of his birth. Eleanor Jebb was a
strong-willed, mercurial figure, unburdened by exaggerated respect for
the clergy. When Rex Jebb eventually became a Catholic himself he felt
morally bound to give up the Anglican school and start a Catholic
establishment.

After the Jebbs gave up the school at Hawkesyard in 1935, they moved
to live with Belloc at King’s Land, near Horsham, in West Sussex. Here
there was a family chapel and a steady stream of visitors from the
Catholic world, among them leading preachers and writers of the day.

After being schooled at home, Jebb went in 1942 to Worth, the
preparatory school for Downside School, and to Downside proper in
1944. Like all his siblings, Jebb flowered intellectually in his early
twenties. He studied Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and
became a skilled solver of hidden meanings in Classical inscriptions,
and latterly an accomplished historian, archivist for the Benedictine
order and the driving force behind the building of the new monastic
library at Downside. Jebb was devoted to his siblings, his nephews,
nieces, Belloc cousins and the large wider family of Lucy Pollen, wife
of his brother Pip. His golden jubilee as a priest in 2006 was
celebrated by a large clan gathering at the monastery.

Jebb’s vivid accounts of his own experience of religion made him an
engaging preacher. And he was a willing public speaker outside the
church – his proudest moment in the latter sphere was his address to
the AGM of the Women’s Institute in the Albert Hall.

One of his most intriguing subjects was his engagement with
out-of-body experiences. He enjoyed walks at Downside, knowing that he
could pause in the fields, and take himself out of his body, and back,
at will. It was at these times of religious ecstasy – standing outside
himself – that he felt close to great good but also to great evil. One
day he went out as usual and lay down to pray. As he looked back at
his body he realised with horror that he could not get back in, and he
saw his body growing colder on the hillside. He eventually got back
in, but never sought an out-of-body experience again.

Jebb felt he learnt enormously from working with the sick (he took
groups to Lourdes as a chaplain to the Order of Malta). And he would
visit or telephone his ailing charges not once but regularly. He was
as constant and dogged as a counsellor as he was as a schoolmaster,
walker or archivist. When helping a dying parishioner, he told her of
having once received an unforgettable premonition of heaven, something
still so vivid that he wished he could change places with her. It was
an offer powerful in the extreme for its recipient both because it was
so surprising, and because he meant it.

Anthony Jebb, monk and teacher: born Hawkesyard, Staffordshire 14
August 1932; monk of Downside Abbey, as Dom Philip Jebb, 1950-2014;
Head Master, Downside School 1980-91; died Bath 8 June 2014.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/dom-philip-jebb-monk-who-became-a-leading-figure-in-the-benedictine-order-and-was-a-perceptive-counsellor-to-lay-people-9577069.html

London Telegraph
OBITUARIES
Dom Philip Jebb
Dom Philip was a charismatic headmaster of Downside who took a firm
line with schoolboy revolutionaries
July 22, 2014

Dom Philip Jebb, who has died aged 81, was a charismatic headmaster of
Downside School during the 1980s, when the spirit of student rebellion
ran strong and the school threatened to become ungovernable.

Many boys at Downside no longer went regularly to Mass; their hair
grew down their shoulders; they jibbed at school uniform, smoked in
their bedrooms and smouldered at any rules they considered oppressive.
The introduction of a school council with pupil representatives did
little to ease tension.

When Jebb took over in 1980, after serving as deputy head, there was
an immediate tightening of the rules and an inevitable reaction.
Several hundred pyjama-clad boys held a noisy late-night protest in
the quad, bawling abuse and ringing the school bell. But the
demonstration lasted only 10 minutes. There had always been rumbles of
protests about a new head, Jebb told the press, adding that there
would be no retribution.

But he showed an iron resolve when some boys, returning from lunch on
a day out, borrowed a digger they found on the side of road. It was a
time of fear about IRA terrorists, and one of the boys — the son of a
well-known actor — put on a thick Irish brogue when the police drove
up. Arriving back at school in a squad car, he and his companions
found the headmaster drumming his fingers on the arms of the throne in
the hall, waiting to dish out a fearsome dressing-down.

Jebb ended a four-year experiment with girl pupils, saying t
hat
unmarried monks were unsuited to coping with their problems. When
Labour made undefined threats against private schools, he warned that
the Downside community could return to the Continent, where it had
spent almost 200 years before being driven out by the French
Revolution.

Anthony Jebb, as he was baptised, was born in Staffordshire on August
14 1932, the son of a prep school master who took his wife and four
children to live with his father-in-law, the writer Hilaire Belloc, in
Sussex. The boy was close to his grandfather, who was frail, gruff and
frequently grumpy. On one occasion Belloc shouted from his bedroom
that he could not move, which brought in the family to discover that
he had inserted both feet into one trouser leg. Nevertheless he could
still demonstrate a remarkable store of knowledge, and his grandson
developed a fascination with the past, to the extent that he longed to
be a venerable old man [what an admirable ambition. One grows closer
to achieving it every day.]

In 1940 the rural peace of Sussex was disturbed by the Battle of
Britain being fought overhead. While his father made Molotov cocktails
to greet the expected German invaders, Ant scoured the night skies
with a telescope and found a severed hand beside a crashed German
bomber. On being sent to Downside, aged 10, he arrived at Bath station
just after it had been obliterated by a raid, and in his first year at
the school he found himself just yards from a cricket pavilion when a
training aircraft crashed nearby, killing nine boys. The incident
haunted him ever after, but he retained a high-spirited thirst for new
experience, once volunteering to box against a larger boy in the hope
of experiencing being knocked out.

On entering the monastery at 18, Ant took the religious name Philip
(that of his older brother, an architect), and plunged into the
discovery of prayer, ranging from delirious joy to black
depression.“This is marvellous,” an older monk told him. “I wish I
were with you in this.”

After ordination Jebb taught at Worth Priory for a year, then read
classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was an enthusiastic
archaeologist and as a good club fencer, became a member of “The
Cambridge Cutthroats” fencing team, whose team outfit featured a black
motorcycle jacket.

On returning to Downside he had hopes of a scholarly career, and
edited Missale de Lesnes, a mediaeval manuscript published by the
Henry Bradshaw Society; but he found that intense study brought on
severe migraines. Instead, he took on a local parish, taught Classics
and RE in the school, and ran the fencing club, which was to produce
the Olympic champion Richard Cohen.

Soon appointed a housemaster, he had a brush with the spirit world
when two boys playing with an Ouija board late at night suddenly felt
an atmosphere of evil. When they woke him he first thought they were
joking, but on learning that they were not, he burst into the room
shouting: “In the name of God begone!” From then on the boys involved
would not go to bed without a special blessing every night, and a
crucifix was placed on the wall of the room.

On stepping down as headmaster in 1991, Jebb was disappointed not to
be chosen as abbot; but he made a wise deputy as prior, was the
annalist for the English Benedictine Congregation and played a key
role in organising the new monastic library, including a wide-ranging
collection of postcards. “Never throw anything away,” he would say.
“Even laundry bills might be interesting one day.”

In addition he was a chaplain to the Order of Malta, which took pupils
to tend the sick at Lourdes, and an assistant chaplain to Shepton
Mallet military prison. He was much in demand as a profound and witty
preacher.

Though a reluctant author, Jebb wrote and contributed to works on
education, widowhood and grieving, and spent many hours on the phone
talking to the sorrowful and the bereaved.

Delighted to be appointed Cathedral Prior of Bath, a titular office
going back to the pre-Reformation Church, Jebb liked to tell new monks
on retreat that they were joining the most marvellous group of men
since the Twelve Apostles.

Dom Philip Jebb, born August 14 1932, died June 8 2014

——-

With a great fencing photo of Dom Philip ‘executing a horizontal
fleche against the future Olympian Richard Cohen’:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10983655/The-Very-Reverend-Dom-Philip-Jebb-obituary.html

from the website of his monastery:

http://www.downside.co.uk/Abbey/news/downside_abbey_news_detail.php?Dom-Philip-Jebb-RIP-114

http://www.downside.co.uk/cmsAdmin/uploads/Dom-Philip-Jebb1.pdf