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Broadfield Revisited: Some Scottish Catholic Responses to Wealth, 1918–40
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
You do need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilization’, wrote G. K. Chesterton. ‘It does really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think Glasgow is a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved, and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion.’ The industrial dream suited the Scots. Here was a really romantic vista suited to a romantic people. On a visit in 1919, Eric Gill was far more pointed: ‘Love God and do what you will’ would never lead you to a life in Glasgow. On one of his many visits, Rev. Vincent McNabb, the Dominican, declared a walk through the Glasgow slums demonstrated the futility of the money standard of civilization. Only a return to the land could bring real wealth and contentment. In similar vein John Ruskin and his active local following in the city confidently awaited the collapse of industrialism. William Cassels, the President of the Glasgow Ruskin Society, championed these ideas in lectures, pamphlets, and reading guilds. Impressed by Rerum Novarum and associated with local Catholics in the Single Tax movement, he and a socialist friend had spent some time with Edward Carpenter’s communal land experiment. Glasgow, the Second City of the Empire and the epitome of the Victorian acquisitive society, had a remarkably prolific record in spawning alternative social visions. Catholics were to draw on these native experiences and their own traditions in founding the Scottish Land Colonisation Association. Rev. Professor John McQuillan was their inspiration. Their farm, Broadfield, Symington, Lanarkshire, was a practical statement about their attitudes to wealth.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1987
References
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15 For example, Land and Liberty, Oct. 1923, for general Catholic influence; Dec. 1923, May 1923 for McQuillan. The paper and its predecessor, Land Values carried considerable material from The Irish Weekly.
16 (London, 1925); Wright claimed to have supported the idea for forty years in a letter in L.F.T.P., April 1930. On MacLaren, Land Values, Dec. 1922.
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42 For example, L.F.T.P., Jan., April 1931; A. Diamant, Austrian Catholics and the First Republic: Democracy, Capitalism and the Social Order, 1918–34 (Princeton, 1960), esp. pp. 60–1, and R L. Camp, The Papal Ideology of Social Reform: A Study in Historical Development, 1878–1967 (Leiden, 1969), pp. 1–103.
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46 G.O., 17 June, 29 July, 19 Aug. 1933.
47 Letter in G.O., 29 July 1933.
48 G.K.’s Weekly, 14 Mar. 1935.
49 G.K.’s Weely, 2 July 1928.
50 G.O., 14, 28 Nov. 1931. J. D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, 1984), pp. 49. 134, 219.
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54 Land and Liberty, May 1925.
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60 G.K.’s Weekly, 23 Mar. 1933. He and McNabb were already familiar to them, 11 June, 18 June 1927, 28 Sept. 1929. Their reading included F. N. Blundell of the old Catholic Conservative gentry, A New Policy For Agriculture (London, 1931).
61 G.O., 29 Jan., 24 Dec. 1927.
62 L.F.T.P. July 1932; Glasgow Herald, 26 Feb., 27 April 1929; 30, 31 May 1930; 19, 28 Mar. 1932; Church of Scotland General Assembly Reports: Social Work (1931), p. 528; (1932), p. 481; (1933), p. 449.
63 S.C.D. (1932), p. 303.
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65 L.F.T.P., Jan. and April 1932. Rev. Daniel had sixteen men at work. That seems to have more in common with J. W. Scott, Self-Subsistence for lhe Unemployed (London, 1935). Canon Galbraith (1879–1960) served with H.L.I. in the First World War, later distinguished for great public service. S.C.D. (1961).
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73 G.K.’s Weekly, 20 Oct. 1929. Jesse Collings’ influence persisted, L.F.T.P., July 1932. Birmingham had also supported Henry George. See J. Collings, Land Reform (London, 1906).
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79 Letter from Rev. H. Bishop, President of the American body, Land for The People, April 1932, and R. P. Witte, Twenty Five Years Crusading: a History of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (Des Moines, 1948), pp. 80, 229–30. E. S. Schapiro, ‘Catholic Agrarian Thought and the New Deal’, CathHR 65 (1979), pp. 583–99. For similar earlier American Catholic notions, see T. W. Collens, Eden of Labour (New York, 1876) and R. C. Reinders, ‘T. Wharton Collens: Catholic and Christian Socialist’, CathHR 52 (1966), pp. 212–33.
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87 For example, G.K.’s Weekly, 19 July 1930, 16 May 1931.
88 Rev. John Crerand (1903–36), b. Donegal; at Cambuslang, 1927–36, S.C.D. 1938, pp. 390–1. G.O., 5 April 1940. The chapel was transferred to Biggar.
89 See J. S. Phillimore, New Witness, 24 Sept. 1920.
90 Rev. V. McNabb in G.K.’s Weekly, 28 Aug. 1926.
91 Abundance 1937–8. The Mitchell Library, Glasgow holds two copies.
92 For example, G.O., 3, 24 April 1937.
93 R. F. Russell, ‘The Revival of Scodand’, GJC’s Weekly, 9 April 1932. Scottish Catholics seem to have avoided English excesses. A Hastings, ‘Some Reflections on the English Catholicism of the late 1930’s’, pp. 107–25, in his ed., Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Emergence of Modem Catholicism (wheathampstead, 1977); A Scharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (New York, 1064), pp. 18–19; C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London, 1979), pp. 59, 201, 210; British Fascism, ed. K. Lunn and R. C. Thurlow (London, 1980), pp. 34–6, 103–6. G. C. Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918–1939 (London, 1978) for Presbyterian hostility.
94 For example, G.O., 4 Nov. 1939; 16 June 1939. He shared his impatience with the official Church with his host, Eric Gill, Christianity and the Machine Age (London, 1940) and Work and Property (London, 1932), p. 103. See H. Robbins, ‘The Secret Battle’, Tablet, 24 June 1939; G. C. Heseltine, ‘Feeding Ourselves’, English Review, 56 (1933), pp. 413–24. They were gready influenced by Viscount Lymington, Famine in England (London, 1938).
95 L.F.T.P., Oct. 1931, July 1932.
96 A.Spark (1883–1964) Min. of Blythswood-St. Matthews, Fasti Ecc. Scot. He had warmly preached in support of McQuillan, L.F.T.P., July 1930.
97 G.K.’s Weekly, 5 Nov. 1936.
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99 Their gende weekly articles in G.O. echoed H. Belloc, An Essay On The Restoration of Property (London, 1936).
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103 Fr. Archangel of Scotland (London, 1896), pp. 3–4, 41. He also wrote about a model Catholic settlement, A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 (London, 1924). The Glasgow Catholic cinema magnate Green had fourteen theatres. His family married into the Kemp Catholic cinema family: G.O., 10 June 1922, 27 June 1936, 22 Jan. 1938.
104 G.O., 23 April 1938.