Brocard Sewell was a British Carmelite friar, Roman Catholic priest and literary figure. Also, he was a founder of St. Albert's Press.
Background
Brocard Sewell was born on July 30, 1912, into the Anglican hierarchy in Bangkok, where his father, Cecil Sewell, was a teacher. His mother, Ethel Sewell, died soon after his birth and he was sent back to Cornwall, where his maternal grandparents, Charles and Ethel Grylls, took him into their care. He was baptized by his paternal grandfather, who came from a long line of Anglican clergy connected with the Oxford Movement.
Brocard, then known as Michael Sewell, was a descendant of William Sewell, the Tractarian divine who founded Radley College.
Education
Brocard Sewell was educated at Weymouth College, a minor public school in Dorset, and left it when he was 16 years old. In his memoirs, "The Habit Of A Lifetime," he described his years of schooling as a hell of rain-drenched rugby pitches and swishing canes.
Career
Brocard Sewell, the Carmelite friar, was a scholar, theologian, printer and brilliant connoisseur of 1890s decadence. He will be fondly remembered as the friend and patron of young poets, whom he published in the Aylesford Review.
It was characteristic that Brocard Sewell experienced monastic life in three religious orders, having tried out the Dominicans and Austin Canons before settling down with the Carmelites at Aylesford in Kent.
Leaving the Weymouth College, Brocard Sewell found a niche as a general factotum in the London office of GK's Weekly, the paper founded by GK Chesterton, which was the official organ of the Distributist League. One of Sewell's weekly tasks was to collect copies of the new edition from the train at Euston and bring them back by taxi.
Working at GK's Weekly must have given Brocard Sewell his first taste of the joys of the small specialist enterprise - the little magazines and the private presses with which he has been so much associated. Surely, too, it was an early training in intransigence.
Brocard's connection with Hilary Pepler, Eric Gill and the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic dated back to his late schooldays when he answered an advertisement in GK's Weekly for the workshops at Ditchling Common, Sussex. After he left GK's, by now a Roman Catholic convert, he went back to Ditchling as a compositor and stayed for five years.
In that Catholic community, Brocard found an emotional haven and professional direction. All his life he continued his involvement with the printing crafts, working later as a compositor with Edward Walters, at Primrose Hill, and then as a printer and editorial controller of St. Albert's Press, at the Carmelite Priory, Aylesford, from 1955.
In the 1950s at Aylesford Brocard Sewell, whose religious name memorialized the 13th-century before the hermits of Mount Carmel, initiated the magazine.
The list of contributors to the Aylesford Review is remarkably eclectic, including Thomas Merton, John Gawsworth, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Henry Williamson. Even more impressive is the list of young writers the review published before they became well-known: DM Thomas, Angela Carter, Penelope Shuttle, and Frances and Michael Horowitz.
In the early 1960s, the Aylesford Review entered a more combative, overtly political phase, publishing articles on the Official Secrets Act, police corruption and the Profumo scandal. When asked how it was that these incendiarism issues drew no comment from his superiors, Brocard suggested that neither the prior nor the prior-general ever read the magazine.
They did, however, respond firmly to the letter he wrote to the Times in 1968 protesting at the papal report on birth control.
Brocard Sewell was suspended from preaching and hearing confessions in his diocese, and expelled from the Priory at Aylesford. He went into exile in Canada, teaching courses on the pre-Raphaelites and fin-de-siecle writers at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He then moved to Mount Carmel College.
Religion
During the 1960s, Brocard Sewell engaged in a high-profile controversy, speaking out against the Catholic Church's teachings on contraception, but seems in many other ways to have been critical of the modernizing of the Roman Catholic Church following Vatican II particularly with regard to the use of the vernacular in the Mass.
In his letter, which he wrote to the Times in 1968, in the first sentence had a Chestertonian ring: "Sir, The publication of the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae shows, if nothing else, that the Orthodox and other eastern churches are fully justified in their mistrust of the papal office as it has developed over the centuries since the great schism."
Politics
Brocard Sewell was a member of the British Union of Fascists.
Views
Brocard Sewell didn't condemn people in his evaluations, he could also be extremely objective in assessing the contributions of those of other points of view or lifestyle.
Also, Sewell was an opponent of nuclear weapons.
Quotations:
''Mosley was a very likable man and the finest orator of the twentieth century. He was a typical English aristocrat but a man with the common touch. And when he came into the room people stood up - he had enormous charisma.''
Personality
A small, owlish man in his brown habit, with a quizzical but imperturbable expression, Brocard Sewell was an unforgettable figure on the fringes of English literary life - he had the strange mix of innocence and sharp intelligence that seems to flourish more creatively in a religious order than in the outside world. The level of his tolerance of human oddity was part of his extraordinary charm.