A priest for 77 years - and still saying Mass
Mark Greaves meets Canon Reginald Fuller, ordained by Cardinal Bourne
28 November 2008

Canon Reginald Fuller at Nazareth House, north London, the day before his 100th birthday

Canon Reginald C Fuller was preparing a lecture one sunny afternoon when he realised a bomb was heading straight for him. "I was at my desk looking out of my window and it was coming at me in an absolutely straight line," he says. "As a futile attempt to save myself I dived under my desk."

The bomb shaved the edge of St Edmund's seminary in Ware, Hertfordshire, and flew on towards London. "That was life at the seminary," he reflects. "We never quite knew what was going to happen next."

Canon Fuller, who turned 100 in September, is a brilliant storyteller. He might be a little slow on his feet but his mind is energetic as anything and fizzes with stories.

He apologises for not producing a "polished torrent" - but, even if he forgets the occasional word or detail, he knows how to keep his audience gripped. He still knows the art of suspense.

During the war, he says, seminary life was far from peaceful - planes and bombs were often dropping out of the sky. One time, two Allied aircraft crashed into a nearby wood. Canon Fuller dashed out of his room - "I was good at this in wartime" - and cycled over to them. He discovered that one pilot was plastered on to the side of a tree. "He had jumped out of the aircraft, which was the worst thing he could have done. His body was travelling at 100 miles an hour - what could he do at that speed?"

The other pilots stayed in their aircraft and survived but were badly burnt. "They had to be literally covered in bandages - they had a slit for the eyes and that was all."

It is interesting that Canon Fuller doesn't seem to recall the horror of the event. It is almost as if he remembers the story but not the actual experience. "Did I get a shock out of it? Not that I recollect," he says. "But I must've done, I think." It did, after all, happen more than 60 years ago.

He recounts another occasion when a pilot tried to crash land on a cabbage field. "From above it looked as smooth as a billiard table. Unfortunately it was anything but. It was plain mud.

"I've never forgotten it, it was a terrifying thing. The two front wheels were immediately stuck in the mud" - and the plane flipped over, killing the pilot instantly.

"We dug his body out of the wreckage and we went through his clothes - not for the money, of course. I never forgot this really, he had a little wallet in his breast pocket and I took it out and there it was, the Sacred Heart on one side and the Blessed Virgin on the other."

On Friday September 12 Canon Fuller entered his 101st year, and received messages from both the Pope and the Queen. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor celebrated Mass to mark the occasion at Westminster Cathedral and praised his "great service to the Church". He has been a priest for 77 years and still concelebrates Mass most mornings.

His achievements stretch back to the first half of the 20th century. He was already an eminent scripture scholar before the end of the war; in 1940 he co-founded the Catholic Biblical Association (CBA) of Great Britain; in the 1960s he co-edited the first complete English translation of the Bible for Catholics (the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition).

I meet him at Nazareth House, a residential care home in north London where he has been staying since 2003. He explains that he was ordained by Cardinal Francis Bourne in Westminster Cathedral when he was only 22.

Months later in 1931 he went to study theology in Rome. He was not, it seems, that impressed. "Rome was useless," he says. "In those days it was just a very busy railway centre. But Naples - Naples was a vast improvement. I could go on til tomorrow morning with stories about Naples."

After the Second World War Canon Fuller became friends with the war hero and Catholic convert Leonard Cheshire. In fact, according to Canon Fuller's cousin, David Fulton, he was partly responsible for Cheshire's conversion. It's clear that Canon Fuller greatly admires the man - he has a photo of him and his wife, Sue Ryder, on his desk.

I ask him how they first met, but he is keen to begin the story earlier, when Leonard Cheshire was demobbed after the war. "He was completely at a loss, though he wouldn't show it." But he found purpose, Canon Fuller explains, when a relation left him a mansion in the country, which he then used to house terminally ill ex-soldiers. And that was how a worldwide disability charity first came into being.

Cheshire started to think about Catholicism when one of the ex-soldiers staying at the house asked to see a priest. The priest came and administered the last rites to the soldier, a lapsed Irish Catholic. "This is where Leonard comes in, you see. He was watching everything - he never missed a trick. He saw the priest off at the door, and - this was what you'd call the pregnant moment, he hadn't said a word up until now - he turned to the priest and said in a low, casual voice: 'Care to take me on?' "

Canon Fuller tells the story wonderfully, and I almost forget that he wasn't actually there. But I'm still eager to know how he first met Leonard Cheshire, and what part he played in Leonard's conversion. But, just when I think he's about to tell me, he finds that his memory fails him. "It's funny, you get these blanks," he says.

Instead, I ask if he could start right at the beginning. "Of my life? You really want that do you? That's a completely different thing you see. Well, I'll tell you all right."

Over the next hour or so Canon Fuller explains that his father was in the beer trade; that General Montgomery only pushed the Germans out of Monte Casino with the help of the Poles; and that you never know what bees are going to do next.

The idea of getting the full story begins to seem quite futile. I'm still bursting with questions when the nurse knocks on the door and calls for dinner.