Beneath the rose

Campion Hall, Oxford, part I: The task of creating a Jesuit hall in Oxford in the 1930s was eagerly assumed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. In the first of two articles, Clive Aslet reveals the story of this remarkable building

-  Clive Aslet

WHY not ask me?' enquired Sir Edwin Lutyens, when Father Martin D'Arcy needed an architect for Campion Hall in Oxford. It was 1934 and Lutyens was then in his mid sixties, knighted and the most famous architect in the country, whose oeuvre ran to some 550 buildings. 'But, Ned, D'Arcy replied, 'you have the reputation of being most appallingly expensive.' Lutyens assured him that his fees would be minimal and that he would keep an eye on the cost. He thus entered the esoteric, socially glamorous world of Jesuit Oxford, where architectural austerity would be combined with high art to form a haunt for, among others, Evelyn Waugh. Lutyens told Sir John Rothenstein that he considered Campion Hall his best building.

Although Oxford’s doors had been open to men of all faiths since 1871, it was only at the end of the century that the English Hierarchy thought it safe for Roman Catholics to attend. First on the scene had been the Jesuits, who opened Pope’s Hall—named after its master Thomas Pope, Society of Jesus (SJ)—in 1896. It was a small establishment, next to the Lamb and Flag pub, which, by the 1930s, seemed inadequate both to the numbers of Catholics at the University and the image that D’Arcy wanted to project. D’Arcy, who had been teaching at Oxford since 1927, was Roman Catholicism’s leading public intellectual in the UK, a magnet for an intellectual and social elite: among those who converted were Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. A vivid description of him comes from the artist Stanley Parker: his etiolated face looked as if it was ‘wasted to the bone by the rarest and most exquisite emotions, seared with the imprint of the deepest thought, consumed, almost, by the inner fire which blazed and smouldered in his eyes’.