IHS Press | Flee to the Fields

Reginald Jebb married Eleanor Belloc and was thus Hilaire Belloc’s son-in-law. Jebb was a committed Distributist, and he, along with Hilary Pepler – the founder of St. Dominic’s Press in the Ditchling community – bought G. K.’s Weekly in 1936, following the death of G. K. Chesterton. The paper was renamed The Weekly Review, and Jebb edited it for almost ten years. With his wife he penned the 1956 work A Testimony to Hilaire Belloc, which was published by Methuen and Company of London.

Herbert Shove was a Distributist, journalist, and Catholic Land Association Secretary. Born in Faversham, Kent, England, in the Canterbury parish, he lived as a child with his farming family on Queen Court Farm, in Ospringe. Shove joined the British Navy and served, as a Lieutenant Commander, as commander of Royal Navy Submarines C-2 (1915–1916) and E-29 (1915–1922) during World War I. During the latter assignment he was received into the Catholic Church by a Dominican Naval Chaplain. He was called up again during World War II for service organizing the defenses of the Port of London, and was promoted to Captain. He was later transferred to the Gold Coast where he suffered severely from the climate, such that he had to return to England where, shortly thereafter he died. He was recipient of the Distinguished Service Order and the Order of the British Empire.

During the inter-war years, Shove lived at Hallett’s Farm at Ditchling, where he worked alongside the others in the village community of craftsmen and artisans effectively founded by Hilary Pepler and Eric Gill. There, Shove was especially well-known for his “illicit still”! Somewhat of an ideal Distributist, he was considered an authority on such varied arts as silversmithing – which he learned from fellow Ditchling resident craftsman Dunstan Prudan – beekeeping, farming, and distilling. After the foundation of the Distributist League (specifically entitled the “League for the Defense of Liberty Through the Distribution of Property”), Shove collaborated with other well-known Distributists such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.

He devoted much of his mental energy to economic theory, the best expression of which can be found in his excellent book on the history of trade and manufacturing, The Fairy Ring of Commerce, which was published in 1930 by the Birmingham Branch of the Distributist League. According to Robbins, he and George Maxwell, a fellow Ditchling craftsman and Distributist persuaded Shove to commit to paper his engaging thesis on “the close and inevitable association between Industrialism and soil erosion with general exhaustion.” The book also discusses the rise of the wage system out of the cottage industries of rural England, stemming from the changes in England, going back to the Reformation, for the profit of the textile industries. It is by far the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the subject to come out of the Distributist circle, and the 1,000 copies printed were sold out, with a modest return coming back to author, financial guarantors, and the Birmingham branch: a modest success for the first and only foray by the English Distributists into full-length book publishing.

As an amateur farmer, Shove also collaborated with land-movement activists and Distributists like K. L. Kenrick, Fr. Vincent McNabb, and Harold Robbins; he served as Chairman of the South of England Catholic Land Association. As a senior spokesman for the aims of the land movement, he contributed an essay to its “manifesto,” Flee to the Fields, entitled “The Rise and Fall of Industrialism,” which was later printed in the American Review in the United States.

Fr. Brocard Sewell said that because of his beard Shove looked very much like William Morris. Records suggest that he died in hospital in 1950, at Mayday Hospital, Surrey.

Fr. Rope was a priest, scholar, and Distributist who strongly supported the ideals and practice of the Catholic land movement. He converted to Catholicism in 1907, and in 1911 was admitted to Beda College, Rome, established for converts wishing to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in the Lateran Basilica in February of 1915. Fr. Rope served as a parish priest for 22 years in areas such as Cheshire and Shropshire, until being named archivist at the Venerabile, the English seminary in Rome. Rope was a true scholar who was conversant in a dozen languages and continued to contribute quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary and its Supplements up until his death. He wrote extensively for G. K.’s Weekly, The Weekly Review, the Dublin Review, and the Catholic World; and he wrote 10 books, among which are Forgotten England and Other Musings, Pugin, Fisher and More, and Benedict XV, the Pope of Peace. Fr. Rope possessed a powerful devotion to St. Pius X, even before his conversion to the Faith.

The few readily available records dealing with Dr. McQuillan’s life and work provide the following limited information. He effectively pioneered the idea and the establishment of the Catholic land movement. Already a prominent Distributist in Glasgow, Scotland, he established the first of the Catholic Land Associations – the Scottish Catholic Land Association – in 1929. Additionally, he edited Land for the People, the quarterly organ of the Scottish Catholic Land Association, from its inception in January, 1930. The following year the journal became the organ of the entire Catholic land movement, which by that time comprised six different Associations. In 1934 the Scottish Association desired – though McQuillan did not – to make Land for the People again an organ of the Scottish Association only, providentially giving rise to the Cross and the Plough which was founded as the journal of the Catholic Land Associations of England and Wales, and edited by Harold Robbins. McQuillan suffered great ill-health towards the end of his life, yet without his energetic work, according to Robbins, nothing would have arisen.

Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P. Fr. McNabb, Irishman, Dominican theologian, preacher, Distributist, social critic, mystic, and man of action, was born in 1868 in Portaferry, County Down, Ireland, within a few miles of the rock that covers the bones of St. Patrick. On November 10, 1885, he joined the novitiate of the English Dominicans at Woodchester in Gloucestershire, England, and was ordained in 1891. After studies at the Louvain (where he obtained in 1894 the degree of lector in Sacred Theology), he was sent to England where he spent the remainder of his life. He received the Master of Sacred Theology degree in 1917, and for his work in the interests of Belgium during World War I, he was made a Chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Beligum (1919). Along with various official provincial capacities, he served as a Professor of Philosophy at Hawkesyard Priory, Prior of Holy Cross (Leicester), Woodchester (Gloucestershire), Hawkesyard (Staffordshire), and St. Dominic’s (London) Priories, and priory librarian. From 1929 to 1934 he lectured on the Summa of St. Thomas at the University of London Extension. As a theologian, Thomist, and social critic of 19^th- and 20^th-century England, he was perfectly suited to his role as de facto “chaplain” to the Distributist League and the Catholic land movement. Fr. McNabb is the author of numerous classics of spirituality and history; among his thirty books and numerous articles are Nazareth or Social Chaos, The Catholic Church and Philosophy, Church and Reunion: Some Thoughts on Christian Reunion, Craft of Prayer, Faith and Prayer, Francis Thompson & Other Essays (with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton), Geoffrey Chaucer: A Study in Genius & Ethics, God’s Good Cheer, Mysticism of St. Thomas Aquinas, New Testament Witness to Our Blessed Lady, Science of Prayer, St. Elizabeth of Portugal, and others. The greatest of his contemporaries felt him much greater than themselves. “He is,” Chesterton wrote, “one of the few great men I have met in my life.” Belloc wrote of him that “the greatness of his character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgment, was altogether separate from the world about him,” but “most remarkable” was his holiness, of which he said, “I have known, seen and felt [it] in person.” To this Fr. Ronald Knox would add, upon his death, that Fr. Vincent “gives you some idea of what a saint must be like.” And the English Dominican journal Blackfriars simply offered on the same occasion that he was “one who in modern times and in England most closely approached the life and ideal of the founder of the Order of Preachers.”

George Maxwell was a Catholic layman, Third Order Dominican, Distributist, peasant proprietor, and carpenter who embodied in his lifestyle the ideals and attitudes that the Distributist League and the Catholic land movement were attempting to propagate. Originally a coach-builder from Birmingham, England, he was induced by Fr. Vincent McNabb to join the community of craftsmen and Distributists in Ditchling, a village in Sussex, England, in 1922. Ditchling was “founded” by Eric Gill, Hilary Pepler, and Edward Johnston, originally from Hammersmith, who moved to the village from 1913 to 1916 for various reasons, but soon found themselves united in an effort of rural craftsmanship and communal life. Maxwell was a handy man, skilled as a carpenter, wheelwright, and loom-builder. When he came to Ditchling, he became a member of the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, established by Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler to foster Catholic craftsmanship in theory and especially in pratice; for the Guild, “the principle of individual human responsibility being a fundamental of Catholic doctrine, and this principle involving the principles of ownership, workmen should own their tools, their workshops, and the product of their work.” As one of the village’s most skilled carpenters, Maxwell built his own carpenter’s shop, in order to provide furniture and other objects for the community, as well as his own furniture for his home, the Ferrers.

During the 1930s he built his first loom, and in the aftermath of WWII he expanded this craft immensely, supplying art schools and workshops throughout England with looms. As an accomplished amateur builder, Maxwell built his own home at Ditchling and, along with the workshop for St. Dominic’s Press, several houses that belonged either to the Guild – incorporated for business purposes as the Spoil Bank Association, Ltd. – or members or supporters living at Ditchling. A good friend of Harold Robbins, whom he had known since 1919, he lived the Distributist ideal, working in his company while managing the land and livestock on his smallholding.

Guildsmen such as Maxwell were required to be Third Order Dominicans; guild members met twice a day to recite the psalms and hymns of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the Dominican rite, in the small chapel built near the workshops on the commons.

Maxwell was an extremely knowledgeable Thomist, and he knew many other major philosophers well, both ancient and modern. He was therefore considered to be Ditchling’s “resident philosopher” and one of the deepest thinkers among the Distributists. His house was in fact the “principal port of call” for the men of the Guild to argue and talk over their ideas. He held rigidly to what Michael Sewell (later Fr. Brocard Sewell) calls the “stricter” school of Distributism, thinking even Belloc and Chesterton heterodox on certain points. As an illustration of his intransigence it may be pointed out that later in his life he began to disapprove of some of Maritain’s philosophies, though the bulk of Distributist League members saw Maritain in the light in which St. Thomas saw Aristotle: as the philosopher.

Fr. Sewell relates in his memoirs that many of the younger Distributists who were faced with conscription for World War II consulted Maxwell for his assessment on a book on just war doctrine – which effectively implied the injustice of England’s participation in the war – by the well-known German Thomist, Fr. Francis Stratmann. Maxwell’s verdict was that he found Stratmann’s position unimpeachable; as an illustration of Maxwell’s sound grasp of the philosophy, others who shared his assessment of Stratmann’s work were the English Dominican Fr. Gerald Vann, O.P., Fr. Francis Drinkwater, and the well-known English Catholic writers Donald Attwater, E. I. Watkin, and Eric Gill.

Maxwell contributed frequently to G.K.’s Weekly and Cross and Plough, the English Catholic Land Association journal. As a supporter of the land movement he contributed an essay on craftsmanship to the important anthology Flee to the Fields. He died in 1957, leaving his son, John, to continue the work at his shop.

A Distributist, Catholic land movement activist, journalist, and editor, Harold Robbins (1888-1954) was born in Birmingham to a Protestant family, and converted to Catholicism in the early 1900s, after briefly declaring himself a socialist, as many non-Catholic social thinkers did who were attempting to find a way to distance themselves from the prevailing Manchester liberalism. His conversion is most likely due to, among other things, his having discovered the two most prominent English Catholic writers of his time – Belloc and Chesterton – and their appealing critique of both socialism, about which he was having doubts, and capitalism.

Robbins jumped into the Distributist movement early, attempting unsuccessfully to write for the two weeklies then espousing it, the Eye Witness and its successor the New Witness. After military service in the first world war he became involved in the “New Witness League,” founded in 1918 around the weekly for opposing corruption in politics. Robbins was made Chairman of the Birmingham branch, the most active branch of the league. The group’s work focused ideologically on Distributism and the opposition to the eugenicist policies then being pursued by the British Ministry of Health. Some of Robbins’s thinking on this topic is found in his An Examination of Eugenics (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd., 1930). In the spring of 1921 the league wound up its activities, and two years later the paper of the same name ceased publication.

In 1925 those collaborating on the New Witness gathered around a new paper, G.K.’s Weekly (to which Robbins contributed), begun in order to “promote and ensure the discussion of the real economic forces of the age under their real names,” as Chesterton put it. Partly as a natural outgrowth and partly due to its financial straits (which it was in until the demise of its founder in 1936), and the need for subscribers, a league was also formed around this weekly, “for the restoration of liberty by the distribution of property”; or, the Distributist League. Robbins led, as Chairman, the Birmingham Branch of the league from 1926 to 1933, the most active and aggressive branch among some two dozen extant around 1927. He was chiefly instrumental in founding, with Msgr. James Dey, Rector of Oscott College and later Ordinary to the British Armed Forces, the Midlands Catholic Land Association; Robbins was its Honorary Secretary during the years that it was active, 1931 to 1936. This effort translated into practice what Robbins felt was somewhat of an overemphasis on mere talk: it was, he said, a “working model of practical distributism.” He also edited the journal of the Catholic Land Associations of England and Wales, The Cross and the Plough, from 1934 to 1946, published by the Catholic Land Federation of England and Wales.

He co-authored with K. L. Kenrick in 1928 what came to be known as “the Birmingham Scheme,” a pamphlet entitled Unemployment: A Distributist Solution; his friendship with Kenrick, who was the other chief mover of the Birmingham branch of the league, spanned many years. Kenrick called Robbins the “real power house” of the movement in their area. In 1946 he wrote a short biography of GKC – and also a history of Distributist activism from 1920 to 1940 – dedicated to Kenrick and entitled The Last of the Realists, though it was not published until 1948, and then only serialized in The Cross and the Plough because of wartime restrictions on paper.

Robbins’s short but powerful magnum opus was published in 1938 as The Sun of Justice: An Essay on the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church; he expressed its thesis thus: “Social Justice is crucial to the future of the Faith. There are many ways to the Faith, but it is certain that the concept of Our Lord as the Sun of Justice is not only valid, but is the only way by which our disillusioned and despairing world will return to Him” (pp. 10–11). Dorothy Day (1897–1980) noted in a 1954 issue of her paper, The Catholic Worker, that Robbins’s Sun of Justice “contains the best thinking ever done on Distributism.”

One of the true lords of the English language, Belloc was not an Englishman by birth. His father was French, his mother was Irish; and when he married, his bride was an American. But he looked more like the traditional figure of John Bull than any Englishman could. He was born at La Celle, near Paris, on July 20, 1870. His father, Louis Swanton Belloc, was a well-known barrister in France. Bessie Rayner, his mother, was of Irish extraction.

Belloc studied at the Oratory School at Edgebaston, England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1893. In his third year he was the Blackenbury History Scholar and an honor student in the history schools. Between the Oratory School and Oxford, Belloc served in the French Army, where as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery he was stationed at Toul. It was from this spot that, years later, he was to set forth on the pilgrimage to St. Peter’s that furnished material for The Path to Rome, the book that many critics consider his best.

At Oxford Belloc became President of the debating society, the Oxford Union, and was known for his brilliance and high energy. His literary career followed his Oxford period immediately. He rapidly achieved success as a newspaper and magazine writer and as a light versifier. From then on a torrent of books, pamphlets, letters, etc., poured from his pen. It astonishes, not only in its bulk but in its diversity: French and British history, military strategy, satire, comic and serious verse, literary criticism, topography and travel, translations, religious, social, and political commentary, long-running controversies with such opponents as H. G. Wells and Dr. G. G. Coulton. His published books number one hundred and fifty-three. It is little wonder that A. P. Herbert described him as “the man who wrote a library.”

In 1903 Belloc became a British subject, and in 1906 was sent to Parliament by the South Salford constituency. His maiden speech in the House early in 1906 won him an immediate reputation as a brilliant orator. The same year he was the nominee of the British Bishops to the Catholic Education Council. Belloc remained in the House of Commons until 1910, but refused to serve a second term because, in his own words, he was “weary of the party system,” and thought he could attack politics better from without than from within. From that time on he devoted his entire efforts to writing and lecturing.

In 1911 Belloc founded the Eye Witness, which he edited with Cecil Chesterton (1879–1918), who with Belloc wrote their rousing condemnation of Parliamentary politics, The Party System. Together they scooped the notorious Marconi scandal in England in 1912. In the same year Chesterton took over the editorship of the Eye Witness, transforming it into the New Witness and editing it until his enlistment in 1916. At that point his brother G. K. assumed the editorial role for the paper, which he renamed G.K.’s Weekly in 1925. A year after G.K. died, in 1936, Belloc was persuaded by Hilary Pepler (1878–1951) to edit what was the successor to G. K.’s Weekly, called simply the Weekly Review. As was typical, Belloc soon found the editorship tedious, and passed it on to his son-in-law, Reginald Jebb (1884–1977).

Belloc was largely responsible for the conversion to the Faith of G. K. Chesterton. They went on to become numbered among England’s greatest writers and considered to be two of the most brilliant lay expounders of Catholic doctrine. The two were close friends and frequent collaborators, especially on G. K’s. Weekly, in which they waged many a valiant crusade together. Their journalistic collaboration also produced corresponding political movements, small but intense. The New Witness inspired and guided the Clean Government League, founded to unmask, combat, and eliminate government corruption. That League was also the inspiration for the later effort in 1926 to establish a New Witness League of sorts, which would take its inspiration from G. K.’s Weekly; it was this vision that flowered into the Distributist League that endured for some 13 years.

During World War I Belloc wrote detailed and authoritative war commentaries, each week filling much of the journal Land and Water, which was dedicated to covering the war. The Times paid high tribute to Belloc’s amazing powers in the field, drawing attention to his article that had appeared in London Magazine over two and a half years before the start of the war, “in which he predicted, with the most extraordinary accuracy, the proceedings of the Germans at Liege as they have happened at the opening of the present war.” The Times described his prediction as “one of the most astonishingly accurate prophecies of a great war in the history of journalism.”

Mr. Belloc visited the United States on many occasions. In 1937 he served as a visiting Professor of History at the Graduate School of Fordham University in New York; from these lectures came his book The Crisis of Civilization. He was decorated by Pope Pius XI with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1934 for his services to Catholicism as a writer. In the same year Oxford conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. Later he shared with the then British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the distinction of being the only persons to have their portraits hung in the National Portrait Gallery while they were alive.

Just four days before his eighty-third birthday, while dozing before the fireplace in his daughter’s home, he fell into the flames and was so badly burned that he died soon afterward in a hospital at Guildford, Surrey, on July 16, 1953.

Because of his antagonism to many British sacred cows and his free and caustic criticism of them, he was not a wholly popular man in England. Nor did his espousal of the Nationalist cause against the Communists during the Spanish civil war add to his popularity there. His refusal to tone down his views, and his contempt for the political, literary, and social establishments of the day, militated against recognition of him as a major writer and thinker. Neither was he helped by the range of his work; critics like to pigeon-hole a writer as poet, historian, playwright, or novelist, and they could not cope with his diversity, huge output, and overwhelming ebullience. They resented him. Even today, that fear and resentment is to be seen in the dismissive little articles and reviews, and the obsession with his alleged “fascism” which stems from his willingness to speak the truth as he saw it on topics which today are “untouchable.” But slowly the truth is emerging that Hilaire Belloc is among the great writers of English prose and that the best of his verse is of equally high quality. More importantly, he was a thinker of power, significance and – how rare these days – integrity. Where are the people today who would sacrifice the material rewards of public life and office as did Belloc when he demanded, in Parliament in 1908 and repeatedly thereafter, that the funds of political parties should be subject to audit?

Contrary to the lack of recognition which he received in some quarters during his lifetime, and despite his own prediction to the contrary, his place in English letters is secure.

Distributist, journalist, and Catholic Land Association collaborator, Kenrick was born in Denbighshire, Wales, in the early 1880s and became a schoolmaster, teaching in Birmingham. He was active in the circle around the New Witness and its corresponding league, and was one of the earliest thinkers and writers who worked out the doctrine of Distributism in the early 1920s, along with Fr. Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, and Fr. John McQuillan. He succeeded Brian Harley as Honorary Secretary of the Birmingham branch of the New Witness League – which had Harold Robbins, his chief collaborator, as its secretary – and served in the same post for the local branch of the Distributist League as well, which also numbered within its ranks others such as Father Austen Barker, O.P., along with Harley and Robbins.

With Robbins, Kenrick drafted in 1928 the pamphlet, Unemployment: A Distributist Solution, which ultimately became known as the “Birmingham Scheme.” It was a visionary and practical document, explaining how the massive unemployment of the late 1920s could be resolved by the training and settlement of unemployed folk on the land as smallholders. This proposal became a milestone for the Distributist movement insofar as it represented a coherent and clearly articulated proposal, bringing Distributist ideas into practical realization. Altogether some 20,000 copies of the pamphlet were distributed. Its cost figures were updated in 1932, and a copy was distributed to every Member of Parliament and selected members of the House of Lords, though it had no influence on government policies. It continued to be updated through at least 1935.

Kennrick was a regular contributor to G.K.’s Weekly, as he was to the New Witness earlier on; he was, according to Fr. Brocard Sewell, held in “very high regard” by G. K. Chesterton. The works he produced for the Distributist League include What is Distributism? which was published in 1926 by the Distributist League in London in a pamphlet which included Chesterton’s The Purpose of the League; and The War on the Weak, published in 1930. The latter was central to the League’s anti-eugenics campaign. Kenrick also contributed a chapter – “The Case for the Peasant” – to the important anthology Flee to the Fields, which served as a manifesto for the Catholic Land Associations in England and Wales, which Kenrick supported with fellow Distributists Herbert Shove, Fr. McNabb, and Robbins. The book’s importance can best be illustrated by comparing it to I’ll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the American Southern Agrarians, and Rural Roads to Security and the Manifesto on Rural Life, the equivalent works for the Catholic “land movement” – i.e., the National Catholic Rural Life Conference – in the United States.

In 1958 the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical Society published a short work Kenrick wrote for the centenary of the Society, subtitled “The records of the society and the story they tell.” Robbins records Chesterton summarizing Kenrick’s character and action thus in 1928: “Ah, Mr. Robbins, you have a great man at Birmingham.”

Harold Robbins, in The Last of the Realists, calls Mgr. Dey “the greatest figure thrown up in England by the land movement.” Ordained in 1894 and commissioned as an Army Chaplain in 1903, Dey (1869-1946) served in various posts with the British Armed Forces over the course of twenty-six years. In 1928 he was made a Domestic Prelate; the following year he was appointed Rector of Oscott College, a seminary founded in 1794 for the training of priests for England and Wales, and which was a symbol, during the 19^th century, of the renewal of English Catholic life. Thanks to his position as Rector of the College, all the major conferences of the Catholic land movement between 1930 and 1935 were held at Oscott. Dey had been a Distributist from his earliest years, and thus he did all he could to promote the Movement among the Catholic clergy. In 1935 he was made Bishop of Sebastopolis and Ordinary to His Majesty’s Armed Forces.