Father Diman

As they usually did, the 22 Benedictine monks around the hollow square of tables ate their simple noon meal in silence. But then, since it was a special occasion, they broke out the good Priory port, to toast the eldest of their number. It was the Rev. Dom John Hugh Diman's 83rd birthday. It was also a memorable fortnight for him. Last week his old school, St. George's (Episcopal), one of the top U.S. prep schools, celebrated its 50th year. This week another of his old schools, Portsmouth Priory (Catholic), marked its 20th. He founded both, and was their first headmaster.

Hugh Diman was a rugged, ruddy Episcopal minister of a fashionable Rhode Island summer church. In 1896 he decided to become a schoolmaster. He had one master and eleven pupils when he started "Diman's School for Small Boys" in Newport, R.I. Gradually his posh Newport parishioners sent him their sons. Twenty years later, when Headmaster Diman retired, St. George's (as the school had been renamed) had 120 boys, a sizable debt, and a sizable scholastic reputation.

As headmaster and teacher, Hugh Diman preferred respect to love; he once complained of a picture that it did not make him look strict enough. He was kindly to his boys, but rarely familiar; at his most informal, he would give them friendly pokes in the ribs with his walking stick. Few "Mr. Chips" stories were told about him. More often the boys talked about his bad driving (he permanently scarred a driveway maple tree at St. George's) or his absentmindedness.

The Three Cs. Like two other famed headmasters of New England prep schools, Peabody of Groton and Coit of St. Paul's, Diman thought the English public schools were on the right tack in stressing classics, character and Christianity. (Dr. Coit, however, was too English for him: "He was such an Anglophile that he wouldn't let the students play baseball; they had to play cricket."*) He was impatient of office routine, and so worded his letters that few required answers. The hours thus saved he spent in meditation.

St. George's, Diman thought, came close to the ideal of a general education, but because it taught slowly, and tried to teach character and not job skills, it "clearly and necessarily had to be a school for rich boys."* Diman wanted to do something for working-class boys. In 1912, the Diman Vocational School opened its doors in Fall River, Mass., the big mill town where Diman's father had been a minister. Backed by Unionist John Golden, the school trained boys of 14 to 16 (too old for grammar school, too young for the mills) in manual trades. Today Diman Vocational is part of the Fall River public-school system.

On many of his walks at St. George's, Diman searched his soul for answers to some private questions of faith. An appendicitis attack decided him. He summoned a Roman Catholic priest, told him: "If I'm going to die, I'd rather die in the Catholic Church than out of it." After World War I service as a captain (with the Red Cross), he headed for Rome and the priesthood. At 63, Father Diman entered a Benedictine abbey in Scotland, where he cleaned corridors, dug ditches and performed penances with novices of 17.

In 1926, the Order sent him back to Rhode Island, to set up shop just nine miles from St. George's. In the School of St. Gregory the Great (Portsmouth Priory), Father Hugh proved he could do for Catholics what he had done for Protestants. The school now has 120 boys, 20 masters (more than half of them monks). Though he retired as headmaster in 1942, until recently Father Diman taught the course in "Christian Doctrine."

Most Powerful Instrument. Today, in black Benedictine habit, with clipped white hair and wrinkled face, Father Diman still strolls The Priory grounds, looks over Narragansett Bay to the sun setting red behind Prudence Island. The boys stand in awe of the old man; and he, who sees less of them than he used to, thinks boys have changed. "They turn the radio on as soon as they go to their rooms. There isn't half as much reading as there used to be," he says sadly.

But Father Diman looks back on St. George's and The Priory with an old man's pride. Says he: "Religion as a living force in deepening and enriching personality has been almost completely eliminated from [the public schools, and with it] the most powerful instrument for the development of character. . . . The greatest disappointment of my school career has been that [my" schools are] 'expensive schools.' I have never ceased to hope that they might become schools for the rank and file."

*They switched to baseball in 1904.

*Today one out of every four St. George boys receives a scholarship to help pay the high ($1,400 a year) tuition.

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