Hilary Pepler
A printer, puppeteer, journalist, and Distributist, Hilary Douglas Clarke Pepler was born of a Quaker farming family in Eastbourne, Sussex; in 1905 he settled in Hammersmith, beside the Thames, with his wife Clare, where he was surrounded with arts and crafts history, such as William Morris's Kelmscott House (May, his daughter, lived nearby). The calligrapher Edward Johnston was a close friend and neighbor; Eric and Mary Gill were also in town until 1907, when they left for Ditchling village, in Sussex. Pepler was employed by the London County Council from about 1907 to 1915, working in child care; during this time he wrote The Care Committee: the Child and the Parent and Justice and the Child. Through the Fabian Society in London he saw much of G.K. and Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. In pursuit of interests in hand-crafts and publishing, he co-founded the Hampshire House Workshops with the others of like mind in Hammersmith, providing Belgian refugee craftsmen with an opportunity to work at carpentry, embroidery, and shoemaking. The endeavor sprang from the Hampshire House Club for working men which he founded in 1907; the house was bought with help from Chesterton, Belloc, and others. Pepler's first publication was the 1915 The Devil's Devices (on machinery, and subtitled "Control versus Service") over the Hampshire House imprint, illustrated with woodcuts by Gill and calligraphically dedicated to G.K. Chesterton by Johnston. This collaboration with Gill resulted in Pepler's 1915 move to Ditchling village with his wife and three sons who were born in Hammersmith (Pepler's three daughters were born later in Ditchling): David, who would look after the family farm at Ditchling and marry Elizabeth Gill; Stephen, later Dominican priest (as Fr. Conrad) and author of Riches Despised, on the tension between industrialized man and the peasant faith of Christianity; and Mark, who was to take over Pepler's later publishing imprint in 1936.
The family moved into Gill's original house in Ditchling - Sopers - the Gills having by then moved into Hopkin's Crank on Ditchling Common. Pepler was baptized a Catholic by Fr. Vincent McNabb in 1916, after meeting the Dominican while visiting Hawkesyard Priory with Gill. Pepler then set up St. Dominic's Press, which, as a hand-press operation, incarnated for him the Distributist ideal which saw, with a primary attachment to the land, the art, economics, and philosophy united in primary hand-crafts. The Press produced some of the "liveliest and least pretentious pieces of hand-printing produced since the end of the fifteenth century" (Walters); his type was "worthy of ranking with William Morris' Kelmscott Gothic" (Hoehn). St. Dominic's produced over 200 books or pamphlets, including works by Fr. McNabb, Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain, many illustrated by Gill and the other wood engravers and calligraphers at Ditchling such as David Jones, Desmond Chute, and Philip Hagreen.
In 1918 Pepler moved from Ditchling village into Hallets on the common, where carpenters, weavers, and sculptors soon joined the original contingent - Gill, Pepler, and Johnston -to pursue the life of rural craftsmanship that the "founders" considered to be the Catholic temporal and social ideal; officially the group incorporated as the Guild of Ss. Joseph and Dominic in 1921. Most were Dominican tertiaries who recited the office together at fixed times daily; Fr. McNabb acted as spiritual director. During these years Gill and Pepler collaborated in editing an occasional journal called The Game: A Magazine, which appeared from 1916 to 1923. It carried many illustrations from then- or future members of the Ditchling community, including Philip Hagreen and Desmond Chute.
Later the Pepler's moved into Fragbarrow farm, still on the common, and Pepler's son David managed the small family farming operation there until he suffered an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1934. In 1924 Eric Gill left the guild and Ditchling due to a rupture with Pepler over various issues. The break grieved Pepler for a lifetime, but it was healed eventually through the efforts of Clare Pepler and Mary Gill who kept up correspondence and mutual understanding between the families; the marriage of Betty Gill to David before his death also helped resolve the breach. After the Gill's departure from Ditchling, Pepler and his family moved into their home on the commons.
Until 1936 Pepler continued his work with St. Dominic's Press; later he devoted himself to drama, as an author of mimes and an accomplished puppeteer. His mimed stations of the cross were performed in St. Paul, Minn., Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, Penn.; his The Field Is Won, a mime of the life of St. Thomas More, was produced at a London theatre for celebrations of the canonizations of St. Thomas and St. John Fisher; he produced mimed versions of well-known plays for the BBC; and he took puppets from his own theater to the international marionette show in Liége in 1930.
His other works include Plays for Puppets (1928), Pilate: A Passion Play (1928), In Petra (1923), Concerning Dragons (1921), Bethlehem: A Tableau of the Nativity for Presentation to Children (1927) and The Three Wise Men: A Nativity Play (1927).
Upon Chesterton's 1936 death, he secured directorship and co-editorship, with Reginald Jebb (Belloc's son-in-law), of the Weekly Review (published thenceforth by the Ditchling Press, successor to St. Dominic's and managed by Pepler's son Mark and Michael Sewell), in all but name the successor to G.K.'s Weekly, organ of the Distributist League, which Pepler supported in the '30s as its honorary secretary. When the Weekly Review came to an end in 1949, Pepler established a small journal, The Register, which he published until his death.
Others of his works of commentary and social and art criticism are The Hand Press and Pertinent and Impertinent. Towards the end of his life, he wrote the invaluable A Letter from Sussex: About My Friend Eric Gill (1950), giving an insider's view of what it was like to work with the talented, if difficult, artist. Pepler's last public activity was his production of his mime, The Passion of Our Lord, performed in London, at Albert Hall. Following Pepler's death, his requiem was offered in the guild chapel at Ditchling, and he was buried there in the ancient parish churchyard, near his son, David.
Stanley B. James wrote of Pepler's writing that its "austere beauty" cannot be denied. "It is entirely free, he continued, "from superfluous ornament and sentimentalism. The intellectual quality is high; the lines are packed almost too closely with thought."
