In 1896, Episcopal clergyman John Byron Diman founded St. George’s School in Newport, R.I. It became one of the so-called Saint Grottlesex schools, that name being a portmanteau of St. George’s, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, Groton, and Middlesex: Protestant prep schools that fairly defined the Gilded Age
But then the Rev. Diman had a change of heart. He converted to Catholicism and joined the Benedictine Order at nearby Portsmouth Priory, a community founded from Fort Augustus in Scotland.
As now Father Hugh Diman, O.S.B., and ever the energetic educator, he founded Portsmouth School on the priory grounds in 1926. (Hugh was his name “taken in religion.”)
In his original prospectus, Fr. Diman noted that the Portsmouth school would be the first Benedictine school in the United States belonging to the English Congregation and cited such characteristics of Benedictine education as:
a general appreciation of scholarship, thoroughness in work and a belief in broad and liberal education as opposed to narrow specialization….Religion enters into the warp and woof of the School’s daily life. The chapel for the religious community and the School is the same. Students may enter or leave it at will. Thus, while religion is not thrust upon them, the daily spectacle of the Mass, the occasional presence of sung Vespers or some other part of the Office, the sight of the quiet and ordered routine of the Community often reach the mind and soul of even the most light-hearted looker on, where calculated effort would generally fail.
English boys’ preparatory schools such as Ampleforth College and Downside School served as its models, and, like Portsmouth Abbey, both are co-educational today.
Eighteen students enrolled in the school’s first year. Among them was Christopher Wyatt, brother of actress Jane, whose mother’s name, Euphemia van Rensselaer Waddington Wyatt, was the longest in the Social Register. The school’s enrollment doubled in the second year, and by the early 1930s “Father Diman’s School” had a national reputation, six forms, and students from across the country. By 1939, the school could count 118 graduates since its first Commencement in 1931. Of these, thirty had gone to Harvard, nineteen to Yale, thirteen to Georgetown, and eight to Princeton.
Father Hugh died after a second heart attack in March of 1948. Alumni of all his three schools attended the Pontifical Requiem Mass for his soul in the Priory chapel. Headmasters served as pallbearers, a fitting tribute to an extraordinary educator and priest.
In more recent years, the now Portsmouth Abbey School has undergone changes of development and crisis.
Most of the present campus was designed by the Italian-American architect Pietro Belluschi in a modernist redwood-and-fieldstone motif; the octagonal church at its centerpiece modeled after the Justinian Revival church of San Vitale in Ravenna, and often referred to by architectural historians as a “mid-twentieth-century masterpiece.”
But Portsmouth Abbey has experienced the shock of several faculty sex abuse cases and consecutive abbots who resigned for troubling personal lapses. But under the Headmastership of Matthew Walter and his dynamic wife Paula, Portsmouth Abbey School is entering what St. John Henry Newman would call a “Second Spring,” with record applications, a much-strengthened faculty, and ever-improving college placement.
Along the way, Portsmouth has known some wonderful characters. Librarian Brother Basil Cunningham, for instance, a leading tournament bridge competitor who could recite entire genealogies of European royal families but had such a deathly fear of lightning that he would summon a cab from Newport eight miles away to drive him during a storm the two hundred yards from the library to the monastery. Or the polymath eccentric genius Dom Andrew Jenks, who seemed never to sleep, seldom showered, computed the school’s entire daily class schedule in his head, and produced day-old pancakes from his habit to feed boys he thought might be hungry. Odd but charming.
Portsmouth’s list of distinguished graduates is long. I may or may not be on it. A final exam score of 29 in Math, in fact, required me to return to school in August of 1969, having spent the summer in Haight-Ashbury, then demonstrating for civil rights in Cairo, Illinois, and, finally, at Woodstock. For my penance, I lived with the monks for three weeks, was lovingly tutored, and I wondered if, of all the things I had done that summer, this was the most counter-cultural of all. And the words of St. Benedict resonated in my ears:
Seek peace and quiet; be more a listener than a talker; listen with reverence; if you must speak, speak the truth from your heart. In other words, walk in the presence of God under the guidance of the gospel, in order to see him who has called us to his kingdom. To start with, ask God for the help of his; then never give up.
Catholic education nationally has been in severe decline since the 1960s, from 5.7 million students to 1.6 million today; whereas in the Sixties Catholic schools accounted for 12% of the student population, today the number is just 3%. Of the three traditional New England Catholic boarding schools, Cranwell, a Jesuit school in Lenox, Massachusetts, closed in 1976 for financial reasons; Canterbury, in New Milford, Connecticut, has radically de-emphasized its Catholic identity. Only Portsmouth Abbey School carries forward the traditional academic rigor and Catholic fidelity.
Fr. Diman’s steadfast vision for the school remains: “An education of reason without faith can only take its possessors halfway along the road, if even as far as that.”
