Ditchling dreams bite the dust

In the debate that has followed the publication of Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill, the news that the community he founded at Ditchling (pictured above) is to close has passed almost without notice. Brocard Sewell 0 Carm, an associate of the principal players in the Ditchling experiment for many years, recalls it heyday and decline.
THE publication of Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill, the sculptor, wood-engraver and typographer, has coincided with news that the workshops at Ditchling which Gill set up are now in the process of closing down. It is the end of an era, perhaps the final defeat of the Distributist movement launched by Belloc and Chesterton in the 1920s, and of the various attempts to put distributism into practice: the Ditchling guild, the Catholic land movement, and such like.
The most successful of all these projects was the Guild of SS Joseph and Dominic at Ditchling, set up by Gill, which has had a run of 70 years. In its day it had a special place in the English Catholic revival. Now that that revival has waned, news of its closure is perhaps not surprising, however disappointing.
When in 1905 Eric Gill, a young and, as yet, little known calligrapher and stone-carver from Chichester settled in London's Hammersmith, among his neighbours was Douglas Pepler — to be known later after his conversion as Hilary Pepler — a social worker with the London County Council. The two men discovered in each other an affinity in ideas, and a strong friendship grew up between them and their families. Towards the end of 1907 Eric Gill moved his home and workshop from Hammersmith to Ditchling, in Sussex. Nine years later Pepler, who had meanwhile started a small publishing business, followed him. In London Pepler had learned the craft of printing by hand, without the aid of industrial methods, and once in Ditchling, he set up his Saint Dominic's Press, which was to become one of the famous private publishing houses or the era.
In 1919 Gill and Pepler moved from Ditchling village to the common, two miles to the north, where new workshops were built. Both recent converts, they were active propagandists for their Catholic-Distributist beliefs, giving lectures in London and elsewhere, and contributing to OK Chesterton's paper The New Witness.
Such activities attracted the attention of a skilled Birmingham artisan, George Maxwell and inspired him to move to Ditchling with his family, and his skills as a carpenter and builder. Later he was joined by Valentine Kil Bride, a young weaver from Bradford.
By now Gill had three or four assistants in his workshop, among them his apprentice Joseph Cribb and the young artists David Jones and Desmond Chute. Pepler likewise had three or four workers in the Press. Numbers at Ditchling made it possible to form an all-male organised fellowship, with common goals, set out in a "Statement of Aim", which was printed by Pepler.
Broadly speaking, this constitution was concerned with the promotion and maintenance of a high standard of craftsmanship in the workshops. The elimination of all machinery, and the maintenance of a "just" price for work done and products sold formed an integral part. The intellectual responsibility of the craftsmen was stressed. Each master craftsman had complete control in his workshop; but the workshops and the land they were built on, and most of the craftsmen's houses too, were owned collectively by the Guild, to which rent was paid.
For many years membership of the Guild was open only to Catholics, on the condition that they were or became, Dominican tertiaries. This nolicy was due, though indirectly, to the influence or Fr Vincent McNabb, who became a kind of informal guide and spiritual director to the new Guild, with the encouragement of the then prior provincial, Fr Bede. Jarrett.
A small chapel, of brick, with a weather-boarded west end, to allow for future enlargement, was built opposite the Saint Dominic's Press building. This was licensed for Mass, whenever a priest might be available; and indeed there were many clerical visitors, Dominicans and others. The guildsmen met there thrice daily to chant the day hours of the Little Office of Our Lady, according to the Dominican rite.
Another artist to join the Guild was Philip Hagreen, who died only last year, at the age of 97. As a young man Hagreen had begun to acquire a reputation as a portrait painter, but gave this up in favour of wood-engraving and ivory carving.
All went wrong in 1924 when Gill fell out with Pepler — the story may be read in Fiona MacCarthy's biography — and took his family and his workshop to Capel-y-ffin, in Breconshire. Ms MacCarthy believes that it was one of Gill's great errors to quarrel with Pepler. In rejecting the one person in the Guild who was his equal and who could see him as he was, he gave up the person who might have been able to help to curb, if not to prevent, his excesses.
The schism nearly wrecked the Guild, for Gill took with him not only his family, but also David Jones, 1.aurence Cribb (Joseph's brother), and Philip Hagreen and his family. (Hagreen was to return to Ditchling later.)
Pepler held on, and survived. Fr McNabb, who had not favoured the idea of migration to Wales, continued to hold Pepler in high esteem for his tenacity. His Saint Dominic's Press was the "core" of the Guild, as he was the Guild's outstanding personality.
ln 1933 the Guild gained an outstanding new member in Dunstan Pruden, a young silversmith from Hammersmith, who had been prominent in London Distributist circles. He was to become one of the finest goldsmiths and silversmiths in the kingdom. He had a particular love for France, and was a master of French cuisine.
In 1936 the other Guildsmen passed an official vote of censure on Pepler over his taking on a non-Catholic boy from the village as an apprentice, and also his installing in the Press of a small treadle-operated printingmachine of the "Arab" type, which was capable of being motorised, and in fact soon was.
The Saint Dominic's Press had been printing and publishing for 20 years, and Pepler thought he would now retire, so that he could concentrate on some of his other interests.
After the war the Guild gained another valuable member in Edgar Holloway, a distinguished cartographer, engraver, and designer. When Dunstan Pruden died, at an all too early age, his work-shop was carried on by his widow, the writer and art critic Winefride Wilson, the embargo on feminine membership of the Guild having been removed. Similarly, some years later, when Valentine KilBride died, the last of the epigones of the Guild of SS Joseph and Dominic, his workshop was continued by his daughter Jenny.
At some point, and I do not know why this should have been, it was decided, with only one voice of protest that the Guild should take on no more apprentices. From that point onwards its dissolution seemed to be only a matter of time.
It was a remarkable episode in the history of Catholicism in England.
Fiona MacCarthy talked to Peter Stanford about her biography of Eric Gill in the Catholic Herald of January 27