eulogy - Gordon D. Spearritt

Eulogy for Selwyn

by Gordon D Spearritt

 

The story of Abbot Placid Spearritt's life really begins in a town that is about as far as it could be in Australia from Perth, diametrically opposite on the map - Cooktown in far north Queensland. It was there that Frank Spearritt and Lillas Herapath were born in the 1890s, and where they went to school in the early 1900s. Frank later joined the AIF and served in France in the First World War. On his return to Australia he married his childhood sweetheart, Lillas, in Cairns in 1920.

 

The young couple moved to Brisbane where Frank became a baker in his father's business in South Brisbane. Their eldest son, Donald, was born in 1921. About 1924 Frank bought his own small bakery business in Bundaberg and it was there that I, Gordon, was born in 1925. Three more sons joined the family in the next eight years, Robert in 1927, Clyde in 1929, and finally Selwyn (Abbot Placid's birth name) on 17 September, 1933.

 

It was quite a struggle bringing up a family of five children in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the years of the Depression. Nevertheless our parents managed to see that we were well nourished and cared for. Both parents placed heavy emphasis on the need for a good education, as both only went to Primary School level in Cooktown, there being no Secondary School there at that time. Our father did not want to see any of his sons take up baking for a business. All five boys went to State schools at both Primary and Secondary level and were encouraged to excel in their school work. In addition, our mother wanted all of us to learn music as she had done, so they paid for us to have piano lessons from the age of seven or eight. We all sang in the local Church of England choir in Bundaberg (an all-male choir) from about the same age, except Selwyn who was only eight years old when the family moved to Brisbane.

 

I do not remember distinctive characteristics about Selwyn in those childhood years as he was only seven when I left the family circle to go to Teachers' College in Brisbane. Then I was away teaching in various parts of Queensland until I joined the Air Force, and later undertook tertiary studies in Melbourne until the end of the 1940s. So it is the years from 1950 to 1957 that I knew him best, when we were both living at home with our parents, and my impressions of him are largely drawn from this period of his life, when he was aged 16 to 24 - a young man.

 

Reverting, however, to life in our Bundaberg childhood for a moment, it was a rough-and-tumble life at times, as you can imagine in a family of five boys. At least three boys at any one time had to try to fit piano practice in before and after school, and our father expected us to take turns in sweeping the bakehouse floor before school each day.

 

We had no radio, but did have a wind-up gramophone and a few 78 records. In the evenings there was homework to be supervised, and our mother would often have us standing round the piano while she played the accompaniments to songs from a Community Song Book - mostly folk songs from Great Britain or the United States and songs from World War I, like "It's a long way to Tipperary" or "Keep the home fires burning".

 

I think Selwyn must have gained some of his sight-singing ability in those home sessions. On Sunday afternoons, after attending Sunday school, we almost always went to the beach where our father taught all of us to swim in the still water at a rock pool called "The Basin" and later how to surf at Bargara beach.

 

It would be fair to say, I think, that Selwyn had a happy family life in Bundaberg. Despite his somewhat unenviable position as the youngest of five brothers, he was brought up in a family in which the prevailing ethos was cooperation and mutual support. There were too many bakehouse, school and social activities to accommodate any prima donna behaviour in the home environment.

 

When I returned to Brisbane from Melbourne in 1950, Selwyn was finishing his secondary schooling at the Brisbane State High School. He enrolled as an Arts student at the University of Queensland in 1952. At the end of that year I formed a small unaccompanied vocal ensemble based at the University with a repertoire consisting mostly of madrigals and motets from the Renaissance period. Selwyn was one of the keenest tenors of that group, and he liked nothing better than to be asked to sing the tenor part of the William Byrd Four-Part Mass.

 

The Madrigal Group was a socially cohesive group of students as well as one eager to explore the repertoire; Selwyn was a popular member, with a ready wit and a keen sense of fun. We were in the habit of holding choir camps at various places round the metropolitan area for a few days from time to time, especially just before we were due to give a public concert or broadcast. I recall one camp at Tallebudgera Ck, near Big Burleigh on the Gold Coast, when Selwyn appeared on the beach dressed in swimming trunks and holding aloft his beach umbrella, bereft of most of the fabric, with only the spokes remaining.

 

It was also the practice at the time for the University's graduation ceremonies to take place in the Brisbane City Hall. The choir would be involved in these ceremonies to lead the singing of the various Faculty songs before the graduands of that Faculty moved forward to receive their degrees. The stage was set up so that the various dignitaries (Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Deans, etc.) were seated in front, with the choir on the choir stalls behind them, so that the people in the auditorium could see the choir, but the dignitaries could not. Selwyn was one of the perpetrators of student pranks to keep the ceremony from becoming dull, such as suddenly holding up the ubiquitous umbrella. On one occasion there had been a jail-break some days before, and The Courier-Mail notice had the wording "Dangerous Prisoner Escapes". Selwyn chose to hold this up, unbeknown to me, as I walked across the stage to shake the hand of the Chancellor.

 

Selwyn's Honours Arts degree course centred largely on English literature and Philosophy. He became especially interested in Scholastic Philosophy towards the end of his third year (1954). Meanwhile, unlike his older brothers, he had kept up regular attendance at the local Holy Trinity Church of England in Woolloongabba, so the question of the connection between religion and philosophy began to exercise his mind fairly constantly, as it would for years to come. He came to the conclusion that for him a more satisfactory solution to the problem of faith could be met by converting to Roman Catholicism, which he did in 1956.

 

This caused some perturbation in the family which had been grounded in the Anglican Church for decades, and was especially difficult for our mother to accept, she having been brought up in a less ecumenical period. But even at other levels his decision to convert raised eyebrows. I remember Selwyn telling me at the time that the Professor of Philosophy at the University, who was a staunch Presbyterian, discussed the matter with him. The Professor, trying to urge him not to convert, said to him among other arguments "But Selwyn, 'Catholics are not gentlemen!'" The irrationality of this comment from a Professor of Philosophy only made him more determined than ever to make the move, not only to move to another religion, but away from Brisbane.

 

In 1955 Selwyn spent a year teaching at a Church of England boys' school at Warwick, on the Darling Downs, but apparently he decided that teaching was not to be his primary vocation. He took up a position in the University of Queensland Library as a periodicals librarian from 1956 to 1958, while he sorted out his future, and is still well remembered by surviving staff members of the Library to this day. The story goes that on one occasion, Selwyn (who rarely took himself seriously at that time) addressed one of his colleagues with a request: "Take a letter, Miss Brown," to which Miss Brown replied "Take a bath, Mr Spearritt."

 

Selwyn was fascinated with limericks, and was always ready with an appropriate verse whenever we were at a party. He loved his books and he loved music, but he was dedicated first of all to his faith and to his love of learning. When we farewelled him on Hamilton wharf as he embarked on the "Fairsea" (or was it the "Fairsky"?) in September 1958 departing for England and Ampleforth, we were very sorry to see him go but realised that he was doing what he most wanted to do with his life.

 

Our various families saw him from time to time in subsequent years when we were visiting Europe, or on his infrequent visits to Australia to see our parents who gradually became reconciled to Selwyn's conversion as they grew older. We welcomed his return to Australia in 1983 to join the Benedictine Community of New Norcia as Prior Administrator. After so many years in Yorkshire, his complexion soon began to change, as he acquired an Australian tan. Our families very much enjoyed the times they spent with him and the monks at New Norcia over some twenty-five years and also his numerous visits to the Eastern States for conferences and Retreats, and occasionally to officiate at the marriages of one or other of his many nieces or nephews.

 

When he turned 70 in September 2003, the four brothers and their wives celebrated the event by attending a party in his honour at New Norcia. Then in October 2005 he happened to be in Cairns, so his four brothers met him there and travelled by car to Cooktown to spend a couple of days at the birth place of our parents well over a century earlier. Finally, he was in Lismore, NSW, in late May, 2007, to conduct a Retreat. We managed to persuade him to come on to Brisbane after the Retreat for a family reunion. That was the last time we saw him.

 

If he had known he was going to die anywhere other than at New Norcia, he would have been happy to die at Ampleforth. Apart from its being the place where he served his novitiate and where he was ultimately to become a Prior, the Spearritt forebears came from Yorkshire, as Selwyn's research into the family history established when he was at Ampleforth. Selwyn was a "gentle" man, in the true sense of that word, who lived his life according to his convictions and who thought of others more often than of himself. He was much loved by his family and his friends; we find some consolation in knowing that he did not suffer a long-drawn-out illness, and that he died in the presence of fellow monks.