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Revamped with effect from October 1964 as New Blackfriars, this journal first appeared in April 1920. We claimed then not to be ‘new’ but only The Catholic Review, ‘revived and renamed’: a quarterly that ran for several years but had to give up during the War. In 1919 Fr Bede Jarrett (1881-1934), then Prior Provincial, bought it for £40, on behalf of the English Dominican Province.
Bernard Delany (1890-1959) was appointed Editor of the projected journal. He had just come from two years as an army chaplain (1917-19). As he recalled, Fr Bede wanted a review which ‘was not to be learned or theological, nor of a specifically ecclesiastical character’ (see Bernard Delany, ‘The Beginnings of “Blackfriars”’, Blackfriars 34 (1953): 308-319).
The first issues were planned over lunches at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath. Besides Delany and Jarrett himself the editorial board consisted of Joseph Clayton and Stanley Morison, along with two other Dominicans, Fr Vincent McNabb and Fr Luke Walker.
Stanley Morison (1889-1967) was to become the most distinguished British scholar of typography. At this stage, barely thirty years of age, he was working for small presses in London. He became adviser to Cambridge University Press in 1925, designed Gollancz’s famous ‘yellow jackets’, completely restyled The Times, and created the Times New Roman type-family which remains widely in use.
1 The publicity leaflet reads as follows:
BLACKFRIARS was inaugurated in April 1920 by the Dominican Friars of the English Province in response to the general demand for a Review representing their traditional teaching in Religion, Philosophy, Science and Art, and its application to the needs of today.
The aim of BLACKFRIARS is to state in a form intelligible to modern readers the primitive and traditional principles of the Catholic Church, and to apply those principles to the peculiar needs of the present day.
In Religion BLACKFRIARS stands for the continuity of God’s intimate relations with mankind, as testified in the Old and New Testaments and in the history and authority of the Catholic Church.
In Philosophy and Science BLACKFRIARS stands for the validity of human thought in a priori and a posteriori processes of reasoning and for the necessity of experience and experiment as the groundwork of all syntheses and the test of all hypotheses,
In Art BLACKFRIARS upholds the relationship between the rules of human conduct and the rules of human production and the dependence of both on the End of human nature, whence all Goodness, Truth and Beauty are derived.
2 McNabb’s near contemporary George Tyrrell SJ (1861-1908) found the rigidities of Scholasticism increasingly intolerable; many other capable scholars of that generation moved discreetly into uncontroversial erudition or out of theology altogether, such was the anti-Modernist witch hunting from 1907 until 1914.
3 With ‘part’ instead of ‘art’, the first typographical slip in the history of the journal.
4 The ‘movies’ were obviously like the ‘telly’, for educated people: when a television set was introduced into the Dominican study house in 1958 it was placed in the library and we only watched edifying programmes.
5 C.C. Martindale published a 2-volume biography of Benson in 1916, and also the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography 1912-1921.
6 Pronounced ‘Shaun’.
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