Background
Witcutt was the son of a Staffordshire merchant tailor.
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William Witcutt
Edit Profilefolklorist author religious minister
Education
He studied law at the University of Birmingham, England, and around 1928 his interest in G. K. Chesterton"s anti-industrial theory of Distributism led him to become a prominent contributor to Chesterton"s G. K."s Weekly publication, where he was a strong critic of the theory of the Leisure State.
Career
His interest in Distributism continued into the 1930s, as evidence by his article "William Morris: distributist" in American Review in 1934 (II, pp 311–15), and he appears to have been a Distributist at least until around the outbreak of war in 1939. His 46-page pamphlet The Dying Lands: a fifty years" plan for the distressed areas appeared under the imprint of the Distributist League of London in 1937, and offered a radical agrarian solution to the problem of mass unemployment. On graduating he was sent to serve in a slum parish in nearby Birmingham.
He tells in his spiritual autobiography Return to Reality (1954), of how his lecture on The Reformation and the corrupt nature of many medieval Catholic priests inadvertently led to his being "banished" to serve in the most remote parts of the diocese.
He thus became a parish priest in the humble rural town and hinterlands of Leek in North Staffordshire, and then during the Second World War also served at Saint Annes, Wappenbury in Warwickshire. He then became a high-church Anglican curate in the working class area of East Ham, London, and later on served as the Rector of Foulness Island a short while after it had been badly affected by the great North Sea Flood.
