III
THE BEGINNING

HENRY FALCONAR BARCLAY MACKAY was the eldest son of Alexander Eugene Mackay and Alice Starbuck. He was born on March 22, 1864, at his grandfather's house, Priory Lodge, Milford Haven. His mother's father, Gayer Starbuck, was a Quaker, whose family had helped Charles Greville to build Milford Haven. But both Mackay's father and mother were Churchpeople.

Dr. Alexander Mackay was surgeon in the Fleet, and he and Mrs. Mackay were married on May 8, 1861, at the parish church of Steynton. There were five children of this marriage, two girls and three boys. One boy died when he was a baby, and Gayer Mackay, the well-known actor, died in 1920.

After a six weeks' honeymoon, Dr. Mackay was appointed Staff Surgeon of the flagship of the China Fleet, and Mrs. Mackay returned to Priory Lodge to await his return two years later. Dr. Mackay was then appointed to the Admiralty as Deputy Inspector-General, and they took a house in St. John's Wood.

Henry Mackay was a delicate child, and his early days were very happily spent with his grandmother at Priory Lodge. When he was ten, his father died of typhoid fever. Dr. Mackay was very popular in the service, and his fellow naval medical officers put up a cross over his grave with the inscription: "In memory of his pure and blameless life."

The childhood at Milford Haven had its influence until the end of Mackay's life. He himself wrote a charming description of his childhood home in an introduction to his cousin Flora Thomas's Down the Line:

"I awoke to life in an old-fashioned house lying high up on the green and red bank of the Pill, amid its shrubberies and meadows.

"Every day the sea water used to swell up beneath our nursery window, and as I write, once more I watch the curtains of rain drifting up on the soft sou'wester, and the seagulls hovering and calling above the tide. In a clearing of the wooded bank across the water stood a little farmhouse with its out-buildings, brilliantly white. It rose out of the red earth, thirty feet above the seaweed-covered rocks, set in the hanging wood, and I have often thought of it since as a perfect setting for a rustic opera.

"The house from which I looked was a quiet house in all the years I knew it. A big family had lived there happily in the good Puritan tradition of its ancestors, loyal American colonists, but now it had been scattered by death and circumstances, and we children wandered through silent rooms and amid the forgotten relics of other days.

"But the disuse into which so much of the house and its surroundings had fallen gave a splendid domain for childish make-believe. No brigands ever had better fastnesses than we amid the wind-blown shrubberies and empty out-buildings of this quiet house. All English children should be sent sometimes to Wales to learn tree-climbing; these English trees are too big, but the little Welsh trees of the coastlands, their branches low and twisted by the wind, are designed by Providence for perching and swinging, and when they grow tall and slim in some sheltered spot, what more delectable fun than to get up into the slender topmost branches, and be rocked by the soft wind blowing through thin summer clothes like a spray bath of warm milk ?

"But you and I most often met as children among the guests of the ladies whose terraced garden looked out upon the sea. You have said something in your book about my Godmother, but neither you nor I nor anyone else will ever be able to give the world a real glimpse of what she was. It seems to me that she exhibited the Christian character in perfect balance, its firmness, fire, and courage, its perpetual youth, its spirit of adventure, all controlled by radiant Divine and human love. She had been a beautiful girl, like an exquisite fairy, and she retained this beauty to the last, transfigured by the life of the Holy Spirit within her. Then again, no one ever had a more exquisite charm and courtesy of manner, a more delightful sense of humour, a greater compassion for the sufferings of all created life. The house in which my Godmother and her beloved daughter reigned was the most perfectly ordered house I have ever seen, and within it we children came to have some love and understanding of painting and poetry and music. I remember how I used to browse on Ruskin and Sir Walter and Charles Lever and on all the Punches. Most vividly do I remember my Godmother reading Rob Roy to me when the curtains were drawn and the fire blazed in the 'Ante Room' and the wild wind howled without.

"From that blessed house we wandered far across your countryside, and as I sit in my London study, features of it flash before my mind. It has the most fragrant air I know. Coming 'down the line' one begins to taste it at Carmarthen, the scents in the air are the first sign of one's journey's end.

"Then the rough pastures begin to look more and more attractive and mysterious, and it begins to be natural to look out for pixies. The gorse becomes more glorious, the colour of the field flowers deepens, and the plough turns up rose coloured earth. And on three sides of this pleasant land lies the curving fretted Atlantic coast, its rose red islands rising out of blue and silver seas. There are countries in which the land makes its stand against the waves, impoverished not enriched by the sea; but on your coast Neptune has come up on to the shore and made it part of his kingdom. What treasures those shores reveal! What strange shy creatures might not be surprised in those lonely bays and caves!

"Here and there the way to the sea lies down some shallow gorse-hung bracken-strewn valley, a setting for an Arthurian tale. In the vale of Manorbier, or in the valley of the Alan, what more likely than to see a lady mounted on a white palfrey, with a couple of serving men and a fool in his motley, all coming down the winding bank of the stream amid the black and white cattle!"

Canon Howells, the present vicar of Milford Haven, wrote after Mackay's death:

"In this town Canon Mackay spent his early boyhood, and in its church first learnt to lisp the praises of God, Whom in after life he served so faithfully. Several of the streets in the town bear the names of his ancestors. Springing from a sturdy and noble Quaker stock, he, in later life, learned to blend the sacramental teaching of the Church with the simple, evangelical, mystic teaching of his early environment.

"The Church in which he worshipped as a boy was typical of the dreary Churchmanship of those days. A 'Three Decker' hid the mean altar from the sight of the congregation--the black gown and quarterly Communions were the rule. Yet in those far-off days saintly souls were reared, and among them Henry Mackay, whose life and work have been an inspiration to so many, not least to the writer of these lines, who has been privileged for forty-two years to take a humble share in the teaching of the Faith he loved. The child baptized in St. Katharine's seventy-two years ago possibly never knew how much his influence and teaching affected this remote Pembrokeshire parish.

"St. David's Cathedral he loved. The last time I spoke to him there, he told me of his longing to see St. Katharine's again, but one saw with pain that the erstwhile active footsteps had lost their spring, and that the pace had considerably slackened. He preached to us recently at the Cathedral's Society of Friends. It was a sermon to be remembered--full of memories of the Cathedral in past days, and of its marvellous recovery.

"Then, too, at the Anglo-Catholic Congress in Cardiff, a few years previously, he referred in touching terms to the change which had taken place in the Church in Wales, of days when he remembered Holy Baptism being administered from a pudding basin placed on the font.

"His earthly life, so full of intense realization as a priest of God, is over. Hundreds will remember him with gratitude as a wise director of souls. Now he is in the nearer presence of his Lord, we think we shall be strengthened still more by his prayers for the Church of Wales, and particularly for the Church in this parish where he was admitted into the Kingdom of Grace."

Mackay remained a very delicate boy and his godfather decided not to send him to a public school. He accordingly passed very happy years reading with the Rev. Rowley Lascelles, the rector of Lavington in Sussex, before going to Oxford at the age of nineteen. Mackay went to Lavington almost exactly thirty years after Manning left the rectory for the last stage on his road to Rome, a journey that Mackay was destined never to begin, or even to dream of beginning.

When her husband died, Mrs. Mackay and her family settled in a house in Clifton Road, St. John's Wood, and an old friend, Mrs. Weber, has written her memory of their happy life there.

"The Mackays have been my dear and intimate friends for fifty odd years. Our families lived in those days in adjoining roads in St. John's Wood and we all attended St. Mark's, Hamilton Terrace, and lived under the benevolent sway of Canon Duck worth.

"Perhaps I was too young to understand the currents and cross-currents of parochial politics, but it seems to me, looking as it were through the wrong end of the opera-glasses, that St. Mark's was a singularly happy and peaceful parish and that the Vicar had a real flair for getting everyone to work together in peace and concord. Fifty years ago there were no cinemas, or wireless, or such cheap and easy means of transit as now, so that Parish concerts, penny readings and amateur theatricals were a real part of parochial life.

"Every New Year the parents of the Sunday school children were entertained with a supper and a play, and the three following nights the play was repeated to a paying audience who rolled up in their scores. One happy year I came home finally from school abroad to find that the Rivals was to be presented and I saw Father Mackay, known to us as 'Kye', for the first time on the boards. He played Sir Anthony Absolute and I can see him now. Even then in my youthful ignorance of stagecraft I knew he was a born actor.

"The next year these enterprising young folks put on Masks and Faces. Our leading lady was Miss Violet Goetze (now Violet, Lady Melchett). She was a beautiful girl and very taknted, and might easily have had a successful career as an actress. Kye played Triplet, his last performance before his ordination. This time I was given my first part and Kye taught me how to play it. After his ordination he became our producer, and under his benevolent autocracy we gave such performances as School, She Stoops to Conquer, A Scrap of Paper, The Heir at Law.

"Kye was a wonderful producer (as the plays by the choirboys at All Saints' have abundantly shown) and a wonderful coach. He not only put me through my paces as regards my words, but he showed me exactly how to sit, stand, move and control my hands and feet-- those unruly members to the amateur actors! Why was it that I never remember any rows or bickerings or jealousies or backbitings such as often prevail during the rehearsals of amateur theatricals? Surely because of the spirit which our producer brought to his work. The leading juvenile was always played by his brother William, later to join the professional stage as Gayer Mackay.

"In looking back I feel that the acting of the St. Mark's plays must really have been of an unusually high order, for the audiences paid well and filled the Kilburn Town Hall for three nights in succession, year after year. Unquestionably the Mackay brothers were the mainspring of that little machine--and they knew their business so well!

"Those were the great days of Irving and Ellen Terry and I think the Mackays had absorbed the Lyceum teaching.

"One more reminiscence I must set down. Our families spent one or two summer holidays at the same place and in the evenings we had games of all sorts, among them 'dumb crambo'. Under Kye's direction it was not the silly scramble it usually is--the word to be presented in dumb show was arranged round a little plot, all invented and settled in a few minutes. Two episodes I shall never forget, though I cannot recollect the 'Words'. Kye was a dancing-master and we were his pupils. He somehow produced a dancing-master's kit--a tennis racket, I think, and a stick for a bow--and his pirouettes and leaps and twirls reduced the audience to a state of helpless exhaustion. In the other 'Word' he was a hairdresser and I can see him now operating on the auburn locks of his younger sister with a soda-water syphon.

"These are slight and trivial recollections of a great man, but even to so small a matter as a parochial entertainment he brought to bear his earnestness, his humour, his imagination, his thoroughness, and his intimate knowledge of whatever job he had on hand."

It is interesting that, as a very young man, Mackay loved acting and had already learned the part that the drama can play in the life of a parish. The result of the fun at St. Mark's, Hamilton Terrace, was the choirboys' dramatic achievements at All Saints'. That, too, he was to make "a very happy parish".

In 1883 Mackay went to Merton College, Oxford, where he won an Exhibition and took a first in Theology. Professor Allison Phillips, who was a contemporary of his, remembers him as shy and retiring and taking no prominent part in undergraduate life. He was self-distrustful and eminently family loving.

During the week of the examination his mother received despairing postcards from him every day, for the authorities had made the examination stiffer that year and he had a poor opinion of his papers. Then came the awful day of his Viva. He went to the Schools overstrung and ill. The examiners were very kind, but suddenly one said quickly, "Mr. Mackay is ill." The boy had fainted and, when he came to, he found himself lying on the floor supported in the arms of one examiner, while another sprinkled him with water "all over like a cucumber bed", as he afterwards said. He was taken back to his rooms and his tutor went to the examiners to find out if his chances were injured. "No," they said, "we had decided on Mr. Mackay's class before his Viva"--and they gave him a first.

It was while he was an undergraduate that he became a convinced Catholic. "It was I Corinthians," he said, "that made me a Catholic. When I first read it carefully at Oxford, I realized that the Church at Corinth was Catholic, not Protestant."

After Merton came a year at Cuddesdon. Canon Ducat was Principal, Canon Lawrence Ottley Vice-Principal and Canon Mills (now Honorary Canon of Gloucester Cathedral) was Chaplain. Mackay taught in Sunday School--a mixed class of twenty-four infants--and at Cuddesdon he preached a sermon that brought him a letter from the Vice-Principal saying that "he thanked and blest him for it". Among his contemporaries at Cuddesdon was Archbishop Cosmo Lang. His deep religious feeling and his family affection are both evident in a letter to one of his sisters.

CUDDESDON, Saturday Morning.

MY DEAREST SAA,

I am so sorry not to have got that lesson ready but collections and Ember addresses and services have been too much for me to manage it; on Trinity Sunday I think you had better not talk about the doctrine of the Trinity itself, but speak rather of the three threads as a whole, and then tell the story about the shamrock if you like (St. Patrick using it as an explanation of the Trinity). Flame, heat and brightness are a good illustration of three in one. Then one has to insist upon it as a "Mystery" and illustrate it by other mysteries, e.g. the relation of soul and body. One might show how the Jews only thought of God as One and how it is our Lord who teaches the three persons. The Father who sent Him, the Son who comes, the Holy Spirit whom He sends, and then point back to the Old Testament for Traces of the Trinity.

(i) Angels to Abraham. (ii) the Holy, Holy of Isaiah VI. I should not talk long on the Trinity but bring another lesson as well, talking fast about the Holy Trinity in connection with Collect.

Aunt Dickie I hope is coming. Godmamma is very keen about it, so do back it up. She only hesitates about leaving her mother.

I think we must choose the RifFelberg plan (the new Hotel on the Riffel is so charming), breaking the journey between London and Bale at Rheims, I thought, and possibly detouring to Strasburg coming back?

Aunt Rah has not written home because you did not know of the plan. I have written her to-day suggesting Tuesday week as the latest starting date.

Do write Aunt Dickie. I am certain she means to come. Just slip the notes in. Dear love all round.

Your very loving

KYE.

In 1887 Mackay was ordained deacon with a title at All Saints', Margaret Street, under the Rev. Alien Whitworth, and the following year he was ordained priest. He was at All Saints' about three years, and chiefly worked at the Penton-ville Mission. Mackay has, himself, described his first curacy.

"The second thing Alien Whitworth did was to attach to All Saints' the Mission in White Lion Street, Pentonville, which was subsequently worked for so long by Father Preedy. In 1889 he accepted me to work at Pentonville with my licence to All Saints', and I began my ministry on Christmas Day by flinging two hulking girls out of the Mission Chapel, after which we sang 'Hark the herald', and they screamed on the mat. They were afterwards converted by the Stations of the Cross in Lent and became the jolliest of girls. Much good was done by the Mission and still remains. It could not be worked from All Saints' continuously, communications were too difficult.

"Soon after the Mission started we began the Mission for the Welsh in West London. In those days All Saints' had an Evensong at four, the one the Prince and Princess of Wales attended when in London, and another, thinly attended, at seven. Between, the Welsh had a sung Evensong at five, with a bun fight afterwards in the Parish Room, presided over by Sister Catherine, the great-niece of Isaac Williams, the boy who went with Hurrell Froude to John Keble at Southrop. Mr. Whitworth made Killin Roberts our Chaplain, a charming Welshman who used to sing the prayers in a lovely hwyl, and afterwards became Vicar of St. Andrew's, Hertford. It was he and I who broached the idea of the Welsh Evensong at St. Paul's on St. David's Day to the Archdeacon of London, when I was ordained Priest at Fulham. We carried home the collection to my rooms at 84 and never saw so much copper in our lives. The Welsh Church was built soon afterwards in West London, and our service was no longer needed.

"In 1890 came the Lincoln Judgment. Mr. Whitworth considered that All Saints' should conform to it, and did. I resigned and went to Randall at All Saints', Clifton--the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol having forbidden his clergy to conform to the Lincoln Judgment."

Mackay stayed on at Clifton with Father Bromby till the Principal of Pusey House asked him to go back to Oxford as a Pusey Librarian. Mackay spent thirteen years at Pusey House. I am indebted to my friend, Canon Ollard, for the following memory of Mackay at Pusey.

Pusey House was then under its second Principal, R. L. Ottley, who had succeeded Gore two years before. Ottley was not in his element at Pusey House, but with him were two of the original Librarians who had already established the House securely, V. S. S. Coles and F. E. Brightman, and there was also John Carter, unceasing in his activity for the C.S.U.

The addition of two new Librarians, E. B. Layard and H. F. B. Mackay, in 1895, strengthened the pastoral work of the House very considerably. Layard was attractive to most men at once: an old Etonian, genial, easy, beaming with kindness and good humour, resembling very closely his older colleague, Coles. Mackay was of another type, rather shy and stiff in manner, very definitely ecclesiastical, and, at first, a little alarming to a strange undergraduate. He was known to men who had links with All Saints', Margaret Street, and All Saints', Clifton; but to those who lacked that advantage, he seemed a fastidious person, with a considerable knowledge of pictures, but aloof from the Philistines among undergraduates.

That impression of aloofness soon wore off as one got to know him. Unreserved he certainly was not; but behind his reserve was a brilliant humour, a fund of goodness, and a very human heart. Men soon found that here was no mere High Church curate, but a very attractive and accomplished companion, who could become a most delightful friend.

In his early days at Pusey House Mackay used to preach very frequently at St. Barnabas's on Sundays in term, and gradually the word went round that he was an arresting preacher of unusual power. He preached in college chapels, too, and his sermons were of a type not soon forgotten. Behind the austere and slightly staccato manner was an intellectual and a spiritual power which drove his message home.

Senior members of the University, as well as undergraduates, came to realize that Mackay was a very strong as well as a very delightful priest, and his influence in Oxford in his latter years at Pusey House was considerable. Yet he never sought influence, he was no diner-out, the mark that Cuddesdon had set upon him remained very sharp and clear. Possibly that impression of clearness and definiteness was what remained with those who met him only occasionally; those who got to know him found him a very wise spiritual guide and a very sure and true friend, with an unusually wide range of interest.

His time as a boy at his tutor's at Lavington had made him not only a skilled horseman, but had impressed on him a strong devotion to Cardinal Manning, memories of whose rectorship still survived in that lovely Sussex parish into Mackay's days, and it sometimes seemed as if something of the severity of Manning had overcome his own human kindness. But though, like Manning, Mackay was an ecclesiastic and a priest to the very core of his being, he had learned also the lesson of the Good Shepherd, and his gentleness and goodness of heart were a very real part of his success in Oxford in attracting and influencing some of the very best undergraduates of his time, as his staff at Margaret Street was to show later on.

While he was at Pusey Mackay began the friendship with H. R. Gamble, then vicar of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, and afterwards Dean of Exeter, which was one of the great things in his life and lasted without interruption until the Dean's death. For years Dr. Gamble and Mackay spent a week together at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford. In 1902 Gamble invited Mackay to dine, and illness prevented him from turning up. There followed this correspondence in verse:

Crock of crocks and ass of asses,
Wherefore have you got a cold?
Vainly sparkle all my glasses
Waiting for the vintage old;
And more brilliant than the wine
Would my words of wisdom shine.

See the busy preparations!
All upon their tasks engage,
Virgins of the house, and parlour,
Ponderous porter, perky page,
Butler, footmen six or more,
Cooks and kitchenmaids galore.

When 'tis known thou art not coming
Oh, what grief their bosom tears;
Groaned the butler; many buckets
Overflowed with footmen's tears,
Fainted scullions right and left
Of thy countenance bereft.

But since Fate has thus determined
Let us try again: oh, say
Can'st thou grace my spotless table
On the nearest Wodin's day?
Be not faithless, be not late:
Fifteen minutes short of eight.

H. R. G.

Mackay replied:

Purple Palatine of Chelsea
Spreadst again thy bounteous board
For the patched and faded cassocked
Starveling clerk of Oxenford?
Thou canst summon lordlings, why
Stoop to summon such as I?

Since thy charity doth bid me
See me standing at thy gate
On the approaching Wednesday evening
Fifteen minutes short of eight
Eager to sip with thankful awe
Thy champagne (Felix Ponbelle d'Or).

And as thou makst my palate's zest
Overjoyed to change its convent fare
For "dindon roti" stuffed "aux marrons",
Just whetted by thy "tortue claire",
Overjoyed to change its "mouton froid"
For "riz de veau aux petits pois."

Mackay was already a pastor of souls, as is indicated in the following letter to a young girl whom he had known in Clifton, and who had just been confirmed:

PUSEY HOUSE, Monday, December 7, 1896.

MY DEAR AMY,

I have been thinking of you all so much this afternoon. It is a great day in your life and one which can never return, but the Gift you have received abides with you for ever and as I am sure you have tried to welcome Him to your heart so you must go on day by day trying more and more to use all the help which He has ready for you. And now you are facing your First Communion in this new Power of the Spirit. The First Communion is, please God, to be the first step of that Golden Ladder of Good Communions by which you will gain Heaven. You must see to it that it is an unbroken ladder, that there are no ugly black gaps between any of the steps, but that Communion follows Communion in beautiful steady orderly succession. Every day in your new life must be lived in remembrance of the last Communion in preparation for the next.

When I come to Clifton in January I shall hope to come and see you.

With my kind regards to your Father and Mother and my love to you three,

Your affectionate friend,

H. F. B. MACKAY.

So was Mackay when he went to All Saints' to find himself and his real mission.

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