Extended review by Melvyn Morrow
December 2023
Firstly, to the brilliant title! To any reader not familiar with Stonyhurst College and the Jesuits – that would be just about every single person of the worldwide book buying public – the bewildering question must be what on earth ferulas and thuribles are. Exotic animals in a Lancashire zoo? In a way. Two dangerous drugs left over from the 1960’s? A metaphorical possibility. Science fiction planets? Warm. A new board game? Medieval north of England recipes? Sex toys? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
Secondly, to the published book itself. It’s just so beautiful to look at and handle. Impactful cover (sneakily clever, actually), glossy paper, classy binding, wonderful photographs… a technical work of art ensuring delight each time you pick it up and open it.
And the content? Honest, bizarre, intriguing, frightening, challenging, unbelievable, believable, funny, unsettling, reassuring and every page revelatory, surprising and best of all, immensely readable.
I went to an Australian Jesuit day school in Sydney - St Aloysius’ College – and taught at Ecole St Joseph in Reims, France, and at Stonyhurst during the period John Mulholland was there and later (14 years overall). I then returned to Australia and for 27 years taught at St Ignatius’ College, a day and boarding school in Sydney, in fact a whole luxurious suburb disguised as a school. But having relished Ferulas and Thuribles, I must say I’m thankful I never went to an English prep school or, indeed, was sent to boarding school even though as a boarding master and Division Prefect at Stonyhurst, I enjoyed the role immensely and can vouch for the authenticity of the author’s detailed narrative. Mind you, to the best of my knowledge, there were for many students, not infrequent oases of pastoral friendship and consolation.
John was and remains a fiercely individual questioner and questor, and so from his early schooldays, he certainly wasn’t a student sponge ready to soak up what the Stonyhurst prospectus confidently outlined as the college’s aims. No adolescent swashbuckler, John explains himself as cautiously sifting and intuitively strategic. For the most part, he had sound judgment and built-in survival antennae, and this reader revels in his merrily subversive daring and his amusing crashes. But the really interesting thing is that his strength of character and his often quizzical acceptance of school rules and customs bouncing between incredible, eccentric and just plain daft ensured his sanity and survival in a theme park of tradition, evangelism, scholarship, toughness, opportunity, challenge, friendship, beauty, rain, cold, sport, ambivalence, support, subversion, adventure and most of all, bonding.
And he survived to become his ongoing true self – surely an eventual gift from his Stonyhurst adventures.
On the corporal punishment front, it was and is unchristian and barbaric. That senior students could decide on birching junior boys for quite ludicrous offences is disgusting and psychologically frightening. I’d dare to say evil. However, I remember Fr David Fleming taking a stand, going into wherever the foul assault took place and telling the perpetrators off and taking the boy away. That teachers, Jesuit and lay, chose to administer the ferula in private was and remains to me vomit making and, furthermore, at least suggests barely supressed sadism and kinky sexuality. Where the love of God and the God of love were as the ferula descended on the adolescent victim and the weirdly voluntary basher… complete this sentence. Jesus overturned the tables and the seats of the money lenders in the temple but he didn’t bash the bejesus out of the offenders.
As for thuribles, John is candid about his religious doubts but strikes me as giving a reasonable account of the absolutely central place of religion in Jesuit education and he admits to moments of ceremonial beauty as well as events spurring legitimately individual doubt. And his tribute to Fr Peter Low is marvellous: a description of a radical, inspiring priest and teacher. The other Jesuits don’t, unfortunately, get off all that lightly in the Mulholland courtroom, but then I knew those priests as valued, generous, scholarly and encouraging colleagues (well, most of them) and in my experience, they were formidable and formative schoolmasters to the boys entrusted to their care. The author also recognises the outstanding, indeed legendary lay teachers like Percy Haddock and Peter and Brigid Hardwick.
And I’m thankful John didn’t devote a chapter to Stonyhurst food. Enough said.
References to the inevitable subterranean sexual activity of adolescent male boarders - not without adventure, daring, comedy, continuity and calamity - are glancing, but that, perhaps, is a discreet - or revelatory - chapter for another book or film! The 1968 film If… springs to mind.
And I fear that these days, the interesting code of 60’s hitchhiking may not be quite as edifying.
The excellent Chapter 12, Hindsight, is frank, measured and fair.
I think Stonyhurst has every reason for pride in so civilised, truthful and fluent a writer as John Mulholland. After all, every single one of us has revelations and secrets, rewards and wounds, mistakes and triumphs – and the rest - about our schooldays, but John has dared to remember his experiences in calm detail.
What the cover promises in image and words is delivered in delightful and satisfying abundance. It’s a book to inform, challenge and reward readers by inviting them into an altogether unfamiliar and intriguing universe. Oh, and the sport and climbing sections absolutely land. As do the tragedies. The writer bleeds truthful reminiscences.
Ferulas and Thuribles is an authentic memoir deserving celebration, and every single person of the worldwide book buying public will get their money’s worth and much, much more.
Schoolmasters are lazily fond of writing ‘satisfactory’. This one gratefully writes ‘satisfying’.
Read it!
Melvyn Morrow
Melvyn Morrow, author of I CONFESS Diary of an Australian Pope available at Amazon.com
Extended review by Jimmy Burns
February 2024
A worthwhile Stonyhurst memoir.
Memory may fail us, not least as we enter our twilight years, but as luminaries such as Marcel Proust and T.S Eliot recognised, we carry within us our past, and parts of it can resurface unconsciously, and take shape if mind and body allow us that extra mile in which to reflect and discern. As Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, this use of memory is for liberation - ‘not least of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so liberation from the future as well as the past’.
As my late father Tom Burns, a fan of both literary icons, who personally knew and befriended Eliot, wrote: ‘there is no excuse for an autobiography unless it contributes some mite of human experience to the whole, sheds light on an unfamiliar scene, shares something of value with its readers, or - at the very least -entertains them for a while’.
A Jesuit-educated school contemporary of mine (a declared interest), John Mulholland, has recently published an account of his early life. His own journey, through a somewhat tortured memory lane of ancestry and no less troubled upbringing in boarding schools, focuses on his teenage and adolescent years -between 1966 and 1971 - at Stonyhurst College.
His book, with the title, Ferulas and Thuribles, referring to instruments of corporal punishment and religious ritual, that formed part of our shared school experience, suggests an exclusively dark story. Not so. There are shafts of light, in no small part thanks the influence of inspirational Jesuits who shared their vision of a very human and Ignatian God in all things - compassionate, uplifting and humorous. The Surviving Stonyhurst in the 1960s subtitle suggests a rite of passage.
The book begins with the author unravelling the skeletons that lay hidden in the ancestry cupboard, with a cast of characters from miners and WW1 soldiers to IRA volunteers and victims, from murderers to suicides, bankrupts to successful entrepreneurs. Mulholland traces his blood family, part Tyneside, part Irish, as a roller-coaster of highs and lows, of a rags-to-riches story, which allowed his parents to send him to a leading fee-paying Catholic school - today, co-educational and run by lay staff, unlike when we were there.
Mulholland’s own personality is forged in a less than ordinary Roman Catholic schooling, initially at the gentle hands of nuns imbued with caring Ignatian spirituality but later marked by the trauma of being physically abused aged thirteen by his drunken lay headmaster at a prep boarding school. Instead of going on to the nearer Benedictine school of Ampleforth, the author is sent in 1966, thirteen going on to fourteen, to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire the oldest Jesuit school in Europe (it was founded at St Omer in the Spanish Netherlands in 1593) dating back to the Elizabethan persecution of English Catholic lay and priests, with its own history of tough discipline, and no less strict adherence to the rituals of the ‘true faith’, prior to the abolition of corporal punishment in the 1980s and the compassionate Franciscan papacy of today.
It is Stonyhurst that proves formative for the young Mulholland, and he revisits episodes and personalities that unconsciously shaped his character in a way that at the time he failed to fully grasp. Thus, it is only with the passage of time, that the school motto Quant Je Puis - ‘as much as I can’ - in every activity of human development, takes on a fuller meaning. A latter day Just William, the eponymous school hero of Richmal Crompton’s 1920’s series, Mulholland is unapologetic and matter-of-fact in owning up to the times he was either complicit or directly involved in making mischief in an attempt to get his one-up on Jesuits he disliked as brutal or hypocritical and break rules which he regarded as unjust.
Mulholland believes that, paradoxically, the darker side of school life taught him a certain resilience to survive the more authoritarian rules and regulations. He enthusiastically helped subvert the system, with defiant school rags, several of which would have breached health and safety rules of today - non-existent at any institutional level at the time - but which run the risk of summary beatings by Jesuits and prefects or, worse, expulsion. On balance, however, the story that develops is one of discovery as well as emancipation including finding romantic love with a teenage French girl who he takes to the Isle of Wight rock festival in the summer of 1970.
Along with the less endearing, and in some cases psychologically disordered Jesuits, who traumatised their charges, were those Jesuits guided by a deeper humanity and more sincere spiritual conviction, which would have been inspired by the legendary leadership of Father Pedro Arrupe, Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965-1983.
Products of the emerging current in Catholic theology and social teaching post Vatican II, it was some of these Jesuits - Fr Tony Richmond and Fr Vic Low are among those Mulholland identifies in his limited gallery of inspirational spiritual stars - who helped him find meaning and emotional growth in the school.
Mulholland, as he went through school, managed - despite continuing with the occasional subversion of the system - to benefit from its evolution. He himself became a prefect.
Mulholland and I respected each other while at Stonyhurst, shared in some subversive plots but without becoming life-long friends, in part because we came from very different cultures and family upbringings, and our study interests and career paths were different too.
Mulholland’s subject preferences were sciences, mine were the humanities. His book makes passing mentions of the late Peter Hardwick, a lay teacher that proved inspirational in forming my love of writing and literature, and pays tribute to his wife, who taught us both French, and together with her husband was a hugely generously spirited soul. But it was precisely because the good Jesuits, whichever stream or subject they had some responsibility for, encouraged each individual pupil to find, develop and use their unique talents that boys like Mulholland and myself thrived, each in our own ways.
Stonyhurst gave him a sense of scepticism about those in authority and that leadership is more about example and influence than position. I second that. It also inspired us to follow paths in our lives that prioritised a sense of service to others, and in our search a loving God, the pursuit of the common good.
It was the hobby of climbing that Mulholland took part in with enthusiasm at Stonyhurst. It helped offset the darker moments as with the deaths of two of our contemporaries, killed in separate car crashes while at school. It filled him with anger for a God whose love he could not understand, while at the time put him in touch with a sense of his own mortality.
Among the Jesuits who died unexpectedly in the last months before Mulholland and I left school for separate universities, was Fr Low who was killed in a canoeing accident. I remember Fr Low, who launched a Film Society for the sixth formers, courageously showing us, in the hope we would discern it as a cautionary tale , Lindsay Anderson’s If… , the daring anarchic vision of British society, set in a boarding school in late-sixties England. Mulholland remembers Fr Low as an adventurer and explorer, as when he took a group of boys on an expedition to the Austrian Alps in 1969. As recorded by Mulholland in his memoir, Fr Low wrote this in a subsequent report in the school magazine prior to his death:
What had we learned? A good deal of confidence naturally….a realisation of the white icefields which somehow put man into perspective. A respect for the elemental forces of nature. An understanding of ourselves, of living and working together, of patience and tolerance and generosity. And a determination in many to return some day to the loneliness and purity of high places, where the silence shouts and the peace pervades us all.
The quote stands as a worthy testimony for true faith in action in our present day, respect for nature and care for the planet, our interconnected humanity, our common home, as the Jesuit Pope Francis never ceases to proclaim.
Our year of 1971 (the year we departed) at Stonyhurst was variously described by Jesuits and lay staff who experienced it as the ‘most memorable’, ‘the most challenging’, ‘the most brilliant’. It produced some individuals who went on to excel at university and in their chosen profession. Mulholland himself, after studying at Sheffield, went on to a career as a consultant in the energy sector, with an increasing and urgent emphasis on sustainability. His beautifully written book shows a further talent to tell a good story in a way that matters to other people.
John generously dedicates his memoir as belonging to ‘all of us thrown together for a shared season in an isolated place’. We were all shaped and changed in different ways, but I thank him for throwing up memories, some of which I had chosen to put behind me, and others that he has brought back to me in ways that make better sense of my life, deserving of my thanks to the good Jesuits, that John Mulholland was among my school contemporaries.
But regardless of whether you went to Stonyhurst or when, I recommend this book. It is a moving narrative of human experience, expressed with honesty, courage, and, dare I say it - Ignatian discernment.
A worthwhile use of memory.
Jimmy Burns OBE
Award winning author and journalist and former President of the Stonyhurst Association
Extended review by Dominic Boddington
December 2023
When there are frequent new revelations about historical sexual abuse in our top public schools one expects more of the same from a book sub-titled “Surviving Stonyhurst in the 1960s”. John Mulholland’s “Ferulas and Thuribles” doesn’t shy away from the subject but it’s accorded surprisingly little prominence in his narrative. Instead what comes across is the daily banality of a haphazardly brutal school regime. I can attest to the accuracy of this account as I joined Stonyhurst as a pupil with John in 1966.
As a professional who has spent a career working in and with schools and been passionately committed throughout to a child-centric approach to education, perhaps the most shocking realisation provoked by John’s book is how amateur the Jesuits were as educators. Stonyhurst ran on tradition with no systems ever explained or written down. John describes perfectly the utter confusion and misery this frequently caused new arrivals. I remember on one of my first days walking on one of the long galleries past a room labelled “Committee” when the door burst open and a large tea pot was thrust into my hands by a much older boy who barked at me “Tea!”
“What?” I stammered.
“Kitchen, NOW!” he yelled before he retreated, slamming the door behind him. Somehow I found the kitchen and asked politely to have the teapot filled. I half expected to be shouted at again but this was clearly part of the usual routine for the kitchen staff, and the pot was filled. It was now very heavy and required both my hands to carry and it was hot. I went back to the door labelled “Committee”. What now I thought? How do I open it? Another boy was passing. “What do I do?” I asked. I should have been warned by the mischievous look on his face as he replied, “Just take it in. Shall I open the door for you?” He turned the handle and pushed me forward. There were perhaps seven or eight senior boys lounged about the room and a television on in the corner. Every head turned towards me and every wide opened mouth screamed, “Get Out!”. I turned for help to the boy who had told me to go in but he was at the end of the gallery smirking at me. I left the teapot on the floor and the door was slammed in my face. I was thirteen, I’d never been away from home, I knew no one, I was lonely, I was frightened, I didn’t have a clue what was going on, I was close to tears and I knew that crying was the one thing I must never do.
One learned by experience. Little kindness was ever shown. The most shocking aspect of life there, for anyone viewing from this third decade of the twenty-first century, was the routine and casual use of corporal punishment. The slightest misdemeanour or even mistakes in one’s academic work resulted in ferulas. The ferula was a flat piece of whalebone that was used to strike you on the hand. Small offences were awarded three strikes, the most severe eighteen or “twice nine”. I was conformist and able academically, and the most I ever got was six but this happened many many times in my three years. With no rules written down the journey through our first year was fraught with peril. Not knowing one had done something wrong was never an excuse. John describes the corporal punishment system in detail. None of us escaped it. It was a brutal daily reality that we took completely for granted.
Ferulas were ordered and administered by staff, mainly Jesuits. But the adults had little to do with the day to day running of the school. This was left to the oldest pupils headed by The Committee. Their means of asserting their authority besides yelling (described above) was birching, or beatings on the backside. Birching was rare but John documents that it happened to at least three boys in our year group. To be formally beaten by other pupils was a deeply humiliating experience and clearly has had life-long consequences for those who experienced it. Absent from John’s book is any account from those who might have administered birching. Has that been equally damaging?
One suspects little of this approach to education had changed since the founding of Stonyhurst by the Jesuits in 1593. There was no pastoral care and that the child was left to survive as best he could was a key element of the educational system, or at least that is what one supposes as the ‘system’ was never articulated or written down. It must have worked or why else would parents have continued to pay for their sons to receive this education? There were some casualties of course but those endowed with normal human resilience generally survived and many even thrived. John was clearly a survivor and having studied the system did his very best to subvert it, and often triumphed. His book is full of these amusing stories.
Undoubtedly there were very many opportunities to develop talents and skills. As well as much time being devoted to sport, the range of available activities was immense. John describes how he got involved in mountaineering and joined expeditions to the Lakes, North Wales and the Austrian Alps. Others developed their skills in acting, music, singing, motor mechanics, art, photography, cricket, tennis, swimming. Students from our year group went on to prominent careers in the theatre, rugby, opera, the law, medicine and academia. We all took for granted that we lived in an ancient building among tremendous art treasures, collections of medieval manuscripts and hundreds of historical artefacts. The self-confidence that so many developed must have had its origin somewhere in this mix.
John documents his experience factually, honestly and without sensationalism. For any follower of education history in the last half century this memoir will be of interest.
Dominic Boddington
MBE OS69