Father Charles Dilke
Veteran and much-loved priest of the Brompton Oratory noted for his sense of mischief as well as his knowledge of the Old Testament
THE REVEREND SIR CHARLES DILKE, 6th Bt, who has died aged 85, gave 61 years of his life to the London Oratory, 56 of those as priest and six years from 1981 to 1987 as Provost or superior.
A Wykehamist, Father Charles exuded an air of other-worldliness that sometimes caused him to be underestimated, but belied a curiosity about human nature and a degree of inner steel, even obstinacy. These qualities were demonstrated when as chairman of governors in the 1980s he played a central role in averting a disaster involving the Oratory secondary school, founded in 1863 by the Fathers of the Oratory.
The threat came from the bureaucrats of the Westminster Archdiocese education service and the Archbishop, Cardinal Basil Hume, who proposed doing away with the school’s outstanding sixth form and absorbing it into a central college. That the school succeeded in resisting the misguided scheme was in no small part due to Father Charles’s presence during negotiations, and the conversations he enjoyed with the headmaster John Mcintosh, who found him the most supportive chairman of governors in his 30 years as head.
Father Charles gave Mcintosh, a visionary educationalist, the outright backing he needed to protect the school, despite heavy pressure, including an intervention from Cardinal Baum in the Vatican. “In a considered reply that mixed deference with defiance in roughly equal proportions,” Basil Hume’s biographer Anthony Howard wrote, “the Fathers of the Oratory (through the skilful pen of their Provost) simply pointed out to Basil that, extensive as his writ might be, it did not apply to them.”
In fact Cardinal Hume, a monk of Ampleforth, had a lot in common with Father Charles, and admired the Oratory school; history has let the blame for the episode fall on his advisers.
Charles also served as chaplain to the school, and he was once addressing the Newman Society when a pupil made a cheeky reference to the explosive sex scandal that brought down his Victorian ancestor, the second baronet, also called Charles Dilke. Dilke was a statesman tipped as a successor to Gladstone, but his reputation was shattered after his sexual appetites were exposed when he was cited as corespondent in a divorce. “He taught me every French vice,” one housemaid reported.
Was it true, the Oratory sixthformer asked Father Charles, that his ancestor was “an adulterer”?
“No, he wasn’t,” the reply came back. “He was a multiple
adulterer!”
The second baronet’s downfall in 1886, just as he was about to reach the height of power and influence, came about because of the testimony of a 23-year-old MP’S wife called Virginia Crawford. By a curious twist, nearly 60 years later Mrs Crawford would feature directly in Father Charles’s life.
Virginia Crawford never spoke publicly about the case afterwards, but she regularised her life and, under instruction from Cardinal Manning (a friend of Dilke’s), became a Catholic. She survived until 1948, dying aged 85 after decades given to good works and the spiritual life. As “Auntie Nia” she became a friend of Father Charles’s family, and his mother told him that Auntie Nia had dandled him as a baby on her knee.
Charles John Wentworth Dilke was born in London on February 21 1937, son of Sir John Dilke, 5th Bt, and his wife Sheila, whose father Sir William Seeds was Ambassador to the Soviet Union. A brother, Timothy, was born 18 months later.
The baronetcy had been created in 1862, by the personal act of Queen Victoria, for (Charles) Wentworth Dilke, who had organised the Great Exhibition of 1851. His father, also Charles Wentworth Dilke, born in 1789, was editor-proprietor of the Athenaeum
literary magazine and a close friend of the poet Keats.
The second baronet gradually rebuilt his reputation, pursued Left-wing causes, and died in 1911.
After the third baronet died without issue the title passed to his cousin, Father Charles’s grandfather, Fisher Wentworth Dilke, then in 1944 to Charles’s father John, who worked for the Foreign Office before the war and was at various times on the staff of The Times foreign desk and the BBC’S External Service. In the postwar years he took to farming.
Father Charles inherited the title when his father died in 1998. He went through the formal process to confirm it with quizzical amusement, saying to a friend: “If it’s there for the taking…” and commenting on his “complicated and splendid” coat of arms.
Charles’s childhood suffered a disruption when his parents split and, when he was 12, divorced. Both remarried and the boys shuttled between the extended family’s homes. Charles became close to his stepmother, Iris, née Clark. A keen sailor as a lad (unlike his brother), he regularly went out in the Solent with his father and stepmother.
After prep school at Ashdown House in Sussex, followed by Winchester then National Service in the Royal Navy as a rating, Charles read Architecture at King’s College, Cambridge. There, having been brought up without much faith, he began assiduously attending services in chapel.
A motoring holiday, taking in Vicenza, Venice and Florence, affected his spiritual leanings – as did encountering Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who ran the university chaplaincy and inspired a string of converts, among them the distinguished Oratorian, Father Michael Napier, and Charles himself.
In the first flush of religious zeal after becoming a Catholic, Charles dismayed his father by expressing a desire to become not only a priest but also a monk – there was even talk of a monastery in Yugoslavia.
That idea was abandoned. But Charles spent some months getting up early in the morning to milk cows at his father’s dairy farm near Stroud before, with Gilbey’s encouragement, trying his vocation and joining, in 1961, the Oratory in Brompton Road, west London, founded in the 1850s by priests sent by John Henry Newman from Birmingham.
Gilbey had perhaps sensed that the minimal constraints of the Oratory’s independent congregation would suit Charles, providing the fellowship of life in community but without the vows taken in a religious order such as a monastery – on the model established by the counter-reformation Italian priest St Philip Neri.
After training at the Beda College in Rome he was ordained in 1966. These years coincided with the Second Vatican Council and the ructions that followed, when the Church’s role was redefined and wholesale changes made to the liturgy, simplifying it and allowing Mass in English. The reforms upset many traditional Catholics, but more than once Father Charles declared that if anyone insisted on writing an obit for him, it should include the words “he did not find the liturgical changes that followed the Second Vatican Council difficult”.
Tall and imposing (some saw a resemblance to Newman), with an impressive head of (latterly) white hair, Father Charles wore his Oratorian’s cassock scruffily; it might have gravy stains on it. But dandyish tendencies broke through, for instance in his choice of headwear, which ranged from a Breton fisherman’s cap to a straw hat worn at a rakish angle at the church’s summer fete – at which Charles, who liked a drop, would gulp a steady supply of Pimm’s in pint glasses bought for him by admiring, usually female, parishioners. (Other habitual pleasures included a pipe of an evening, with a glass of Sambuca.) Late in life he splurged on a black suit made for him by Anderson & Sheppard, Cary Grant’s tailors.
His powerful intellect – a deep knowledge of the Old Testament made his Bible study group perennially popular – was combined with a teasing contrarian disposition with which he liked to surprise people. “I’m a Corbynista!” he would announce, in his lugubrious, antique upper-class tones.
Though he suffered from melancholy, Father Charles found serenity in painting and drawing in the studio which he kept at the Oratory house – the subjects reflected his broad interests, from icons and the human figure to imagined architectural schemes in space. He held annual art exhibitions, and his paintings would be sold for good causes at the summer garden party.
However, when in 1996 he offered for sale a work entitled “Fathers in the Oratory Garden with Naked Nymphs and a Satyr”, the auctioneer could not bring himself to announce the full title.
Father Charles was a shy man, and underneath the curmudgeonly ways was a strong, though questioning, faith. The Church’s rule on priestly celibacy presented a challenge, both spiritual and intellectual; but through the heady post-vatican II era when priests were being laicised in droves, he remained faithful.
“Religion can be a frightful bore,” he would complain, but he had a devotion to the Virgin Mary and spent hours on his knees in prayer in the private chapel, or around the vast baroque church that adjoins the house, in which the fathers and brothers live in simple rooms similar to monastic cells. In his final bed-bound days, rosaries were all around his room within close reach.
Deafness contributed to a sense of isolation in his later years, and he fiddled with his hearing aid without much benefit. Penitents became wary of going to Father Charles for confessions during Mass, at his box in a side aisle, in case he bellowed “HOW MANY TIMES?” for all to hear.
The Oratory’s meticulously executed music, which draws hundreds of worshippers, left him cold, and when he was the celebrant at High Mass he struggled to chant tunefully the Latin words of dismissal, “Ite, missa est”.
Like Newman, whose birthday he shared, he resisted the division of the Church into parties like “conservative” or “liberal”, and both impulses were active in him. For many years on Sunday afternoons he went to Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park to defend Church teaching on behalf of the Catholic Evidence Guild. He would never try to humiliate the people who came, but enjoyed pricking pomposity. One professional barracker shouted: “Why do you always just spout the Catholic line?”, to which Dilke retorted, gripping his clerical collar: “What do you think this is?”
His legacy as a priest will endure in the lives of the many parishioners he helped without fuss in various ways. His catechism classes for converts were, in the words of one attendee, “clear, traditional, and unforgettable… he was a gentle soul with empathy for others”.
On his night off, a Thursday, Father Charles visited his club, the Athenaeum, where he would either sit at the long table or entertain guests, sometimes Catholic families he had befriended, proudly wearing his “clericals”.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2004, and explored astronomy and futuristic worlds in an unpublished novel. He wrote a booklet for the Catholic Truth Society, The Mass Explained.
His brother, Timothy, a rheumatologist, born in 1938, succeeds in the baronetcy.
Charles Dilke, born February 21 1937, died November 14 2022