Putting Downside back on the map

Ishall never forget my first encounter with Dom Antony Sutch. It was at a lunch honouring a veteran journalist in London's Canary Wharf. During the second course, a goodnatured debate began on the relative merits of Catholicism and Anglicanism. With a mischievous look, Dom Antony interrupted the discussion, proclaiming: "There are two things that I know about God. One that He is a he. Two that He is a Catholic." The conversation abruptly turned to other matters.
After the meal, Dorn Anthony produced a thick cigar from his Benedictine robes and smoked it with narrowed eyes. If it wasn't for his habit, he would have looked like a Texan millionaire, puffing away with skyscrapers gleaming behind him in the midday sun.
Dom Antony is now sitting in the more traditional setting of his headmaster's office at Downside School in Radstock, on the outskirts of Bath. The room is covered with mementos of his seven-and-a-half years as head of the prestigious independent school, sometimes called the "Catholic Eton". He invites me to sit on a long brown leather sofa with a small cushion embroidered with a quotation by Mark Twain: "If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven then I shall not go!"
Dom Antony will leave this office tomorrow to begin a new life outside the school. One of the reasons for his departure is written in his eyes, which are surrounded by dark insomniac rings.
"I'm losing energy," he says, rubbing his brow. "I've driven the school because I love it. I've got to the point now where what was a challenge is beginning to feel like a burden. And if you are feeling that, it is time to go." But there is another reason for Dorn Antony's retirement. This is the now famous phrase "geek culture", which the headmaster coined last year to describe the box-ticking bureaucrats who dominate education in Britain. Dom Antony's assault on the educational establishment made front-page news and spurred more than 1,000 people to write to him in support of his views, One 87-year-old former headmaster even sent him a five-pound note to found an "anti-geek society". In this newspaper, Dom Antony has continued his cogent critique of a system that he says values paperwork more than people, and targets more than talent.
"What I'm quite pleased about is that it's beginning to become a political issue," he remarks. "If one can keep up the pressure, I think it will become part of a platform."
To illustrate geek culture, Neil McLaughlan, Downside's head of English, explains that in order to get a class of 25 pupils through a GCSE in English literature he has to fill in 225 forms before a single essay has been marked.
This provokes Dom Antony to leap out of his seat, and deliver a passionate oration against the bureaucrats.
"In the eyes of the people prescribing education, the headmaster is a top manager. To me that is not
the case at all — it's a person who has time. Children need time. If a third of our time is being taken up by paperwork, that means a third of our time is not being given to children who need time.
"The answer is to somehow play the game but to be bigger than it. But it's just getting to the point where it is exhausting and you feel so demoralised."
om Antony's early life reads like a children's adventure novel. He belonged to what he jokingly describes as a "wandering Aramean family". His father, a banker to the Hashemite Kingdom and an honorary Bedouin sheikh, came from a pious Anglican family. His mother had defied her family to convert to Catholicism. Dom Antony was born in Amman, Jordan, and baptised in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The family lived in Cairo, Baghdad and Istanbul, buffeted from city to city by the vicissitudes of Middle Eastern politics.
Dom Antony's travels gave him an abiding respect for Arab hospitality: "I can remember one awful case when my mother was the only woman at this luncheon for about a hundred people in a great black Bedouin tent. She was seated next to the sheikh, which was a great honour, and he lent forward and plucked the eye out of a sheep and put it into a ball of rice and dipped into the grease. He flipped it into her mouth. I can see it now, my mother's facer Dom Antony was educated at a prep school in
young monk here, about a monk who went to the abbot and said: 'I've lost my faith. But I haven't lost the fact that I'm a gentleman. So having taken a vow, I will keep it as a gentleman.' I rather like that."
When Dom Antony became headmaster of Downside in 1985, his first aim was to bring back confidence to the school. "People call Downside the Catholic Eton and I get so angry about that," he explains. "It wasn't, it was a great Catholic school. I wanted to bring that back, but not in an arrogant way."
The opportunity to put the school back on the map came when Downside recorded a bestselling album of liturgical chants. An accompanying BBC documentary captured Dom Antony's ebullient character and helped to make him
ening." Dom Antony, meanwhile, is preparing to go on a retreat to discern his future. He also planning to begin work on an introduction to spirituality for the publisher Random House.
When he discusses this project, he reveals a side to his personality that is often unnoticed. Although he describes himself as "rather worldly and frivolous", he is preoccupied by how the
Church can recapture the English imagination. As a man who freely admits to struggling with the demands of Christian life, he wants others to know it is possible to be both a frail human being and a
follower of Christ.
"I feel the Church has really got a mission to comfort people," he says. "I know we have to pick up our cross daily and walk, but we are walking with
Christ and that must be a comfort of some sort. We've got to emphasise the pastoral side of the Church.
"People claim the Catholic Church is always banging on about sin and guilt. Well, we know our sins. What we need is the preaching of reconciliation.
"I don't know the mind of God sufficiently well, but I know that he's there to welcome the prodigal son."