Montague Summers

Father Brocard Sewell’s Montague Summers: A Memoir (1965) is a model of how to build bricks without straw. There are profound mysteries and gaps in Montague Summers’s life and personality, yet despite the book’s slightness, Brocard was able to present a rounded portrait of the controversial priest and demonologist. Brocard always argued that Montague Summers was in possession of valid holy orders ― even if they were obtained irregularly. He wrote in Tell Me Strange Things: A Memorial to Montague Summers (The Aylesford Press, 1991): " ... as he says at the beginning of his will, 'I, Montague Summers, Clerk in Holy Orders ...', there is no getting away from that. Anyone who says that Montague Summers was not in holy orders is just saying that which is not, and is talking about something that he doesn’t understand."

As he wrote in the Review (Summer 1966): "Would that [Summers] were here today to lash with his vitriolic pen (as it could be on occasion) those in the Latin Church who are busily engaged in dismantling the liturgical heritage of a thousand years."

It is stated in the obituary of Father Brocard Sewell ― the "Literary friar who challenged the authority of the Pope," as The Times characterised him ― that he died in London on 2 April 2000, aged eighty-seven. The Carmelite scholar, theologian, biographer, editor, printer and publisher was a great advocate of "minor literary figures," as the anonymous Times obituarist pronounced.

The Times obituarist struck a sour note, suggesting that the Review’s "eclecticism reflected Sewell’s own tastes, which ranged widely if uncertainly." Evidently his passion for Machen, Summers and Gray was misplaced! (These writers are admittedly not household names, but so much the worse for our households.) The Times also indulged in a little guilt-by-association innuendo. Father Brocard championed Henry Williamson when the writer was condemned for his fascist leanings: "His friendship with Henry Williamson led him into some dubious territory, since, like Williamson, he was an admirer of Sir Oswald Mosley." Father Brocard claimed never to have voted Conservative, and who can fault him for that? In an obituary notice written for The Independent Brocard’s friend the artist Jane Percival quoted his views on Mosley: "Sir Oswald is a greatly misunderstood man, but I feel that he is partly himself to blame for this. The turning point came, I think, when he was released from prison in 1944. He should then, in my judgement, have retired from politics."

A key to Father Brocard’s tolerant personality can be found in Jane Percival’s assessment: "He had an entirely non-judgemental attitude. He hardly ever criticised others and if he did it was with some subtle epithet which would be hard to interpret and which could hardly give offence to anyone." Montague Summers was elevated to the episcopate within the Old Catholic succession in his latter years and died of a heart attack in 1948. His vampirological mantle awaited the arrival of Bishop Seán Manchester.

Montague Summers (1880-1948) was a fascinating character without whom vampire research would be very much the poorer. Throughout his life he was described by acquaintances as kind, courteous, generous and outrageously witty; but those who knew him well sensed an underlying discomfort and mystery. In appearance he was plump, round cheeked and generally smiling. His dress resembled that of an eighteenth century cleric, with a few added flourishes such as a silver-topped cane depicting Leda being ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan. He wore sweeping black capes crowned by a curious hairstyle of his own devising which led many to assume he wore a wig. His voice was high pitched, comical and often in complete contrast to the macabre tales he was in the habit of recounting. Throughout his life he astonished people with his knowledge of esoteric and unsettling occult lore. Many people later described him as the most extraordinary person they had ever known.

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His successor in the annals of vampirology and demonolatry was barely an infant when Montague Summers died. Curiously, Bishop Seán Manchester (whose initials are the same as Montague Summers’ initials reversed) began in the Church of England and converted to Roman Catholicism before entering holy orders and becoming a traditional Old Catholic ― as, of course, did Montague Summers. Both were ordained within the context of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and, as Old Catholic Bishops, led autocephalous jurisdictions that held authority in Great Britain.

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Montague Summers entered the Old Catholic priesthood in 1913 and, towards the end of his life, was elevated to the episcopate by Hugh George de Willmott Newman, Archbishop of Glastonbury ― an Office and See currently held by Bishop Seán Manchester. Montague Summers was episcopally consecrated for the Order of Corporate Reunion. Despite his cherubic demeanour and affability some people found Montague Summers sinister, a view he delighted in encouraging. Although in everyday life he was kind and considerate, when engaged in academic debate Montague Summers was furiously intolerant.

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There were also rumours that in his youth Summers had dabbled in the occult. Curiously enough, the same rumours, albeit unfounded, persist about Bishop Manchester. If true, the only effect seems to have been to deter Montague Summers against such meddling. He may have been fascinated, even obsessed by witches, vampires and the like but the tone of Montague Summers’ writings is consistently hostile towards them. Ditto goes for Bishop Seán Manchester who is believed to have infiltrated occult groups in order to later expose their depraved goings-on. Montague Summers was a contemporary of the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley with whom he was acquainted. Likewise, Bishop Manchester is at least two contemporary Crowley devotees of a later generation whom he met and interviewed during the 1970s and 1980s. .
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Montague Summers grew up in a wealthy family living in Clifton, near Bristol. Religion always played a large part in his life. He was raised as an evangelical Anglican, but his love of ceremonial and sacraments drew him to Anglo-Catholicism. After graduating in Theology at Oxford he took the first steps towards holy orders at Lichfield Theological College and entered his apprenticeship as a curate in the diocese of Bitton near Bristol. A year or so later he converted to Roman Catholicism. He had been made a deacon within the Church of England in 1908, and was diaconated again within the Roman Catholic Church, but it was not until he embraced the Old Catholic Church that he was ordained into the priesthood. He celebrated Mass publicly when travelling abroad, but at home in England he only performed this sacrament in private. This was probably due to the fact that he was ordained into the priesthood outside the regular procedures of the Church. Old Catholic holy orders, albeit valid, are irregular in the eyes of Rome and Canterbury (the latter, of course, being the Church of England, is not accepted as being remotely valid by Rome).
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None of his close friends doubted the sincerity of his religious faith. Dame Sybil Thorndike wrote of him: “I think that because of his profound belief in the tenets of orthodox Catholic Christianity he was able to be in a way almost frivolous in his approach to certain macabre heterodoxies. His humour, his ‘wicked humour’ as some people called it, was most refreshing, so different from the tiresome sentimentalism of so many convinced believers.”

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For a living, Montague Summers was able to draw on a modest legacy from his father, supplemented by spells of teaching at various schools, including Hertford Grammar, the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Holborn, and Brockley School in south London where he was senior English and Classics Master. He described teaching as: “One of the most difficult and depressing of trades, and so in some measure it must have been even well-nigh three hundred years ago when boys were not nearly so stupid as they are today.” In practice though, he was both entertaining and effective as a teacher once he had overcome initial problems with discipline, and was popular with both pupils and colleagues despite making it plain his real interests lay elsewhere.
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From 1926, when he was in his mid-forties, Montague Summers' writings and editing earned him the freedom to pursue full time his many enthusiasms and love of travel, particularly in Italy. The bulk of his activity then was related to English Restoration drama of the seventeenth century. Beginning in 1914 with the Shakespeare Head Press, Montague Summers had edited a large number of Restoration plays for various publishers, accompanied by lengthy critical introductions that were highly praised in their own right, and did much to rescue that period of literature from oblivion.

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Not content with editing and introducing these plays, Montague Summers helped in 1919 to found the Phoenix Society whose aim was to present them on stage in London. The venture was an immediate success and he threw himself wholeheartedly and popularly into all aspects of the productions, which were staged at various theatres. This brought him a measure of fame in London society and invitations to the most select salons, which he dazzled with his wit and erudition. By 1926 he was recognised as the greatest living authority on Restoration drama. Some ten years later he crystallized his knowledge in The Restoration Theatre and The Playhouse of Pepys which examined almost every possible aspect of the London stage between 1660 and 1710.

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Montague Summers' involvement with the theatre presents a curious parallel with his near contemporary Bram Stoker, who for most of his working life was business manager to Sir Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London. There is even a suggestion of some jealousy in the grudging praise Summers gives Bram Stoker's Dracula, leading to his conclusion that the novel's success owed more to Bram Stoker’s choice of subject than any authorial skill. One cannot fail to suspect that Montague Summers felt he might have written the definitive vampire novel himself, only better. Notwithstanding this conjecture, Bram Stoker’s Gothic masterpiece remains a work of sheer genius. It was left, almost inevitably, for Bishop Seán Manchester to tie up the lose ends left flapping about at Dracula’s conclusion in a sequel titled Carmel. The thought must have surely occurred to Montague Summers, but it was to be his successor who executed the deed.

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In his introduction to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto Montague Summers articulated the appeal of Gothic novels, and perhaps also the appeal of all the dark mysteries that fascinated him: “There is in the Romantic revival a certain disquietude and a certain aspiration. It is this disquietude with earth and aspiration for heaven which inform the greatest Romance of all, Mysticism, the Romance of the Saints. The Classical writer set down fixed rules and precisely determined his boundaries. The Romantic spirit reaches out beyond these with an indefinite but very real longing to new and dimly guessed spheres of beauty. The Romantic writer fell in love with the Middle Ages, the vague years of long ago, the days of chivalry and strange adventure. He imagined and elaborated a mediaevalism for himself, he created a fresh world, a world which never was and never could have been, a domain which fancy built and fancy ruled. And in this land there will be mystery, because where there is mystery beauty may always lie hid. There will be wonder, because wonder always lurks where there is the unknown. And it is this longing for beauty intermingling with wonder and mystery that will express itself, perhaps exquisitely and passionately in the twilight moods of the romantic poets, perhaps a little crudely and even a little vulgarly in tales of horror and blood.”
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Montague Summers died of a heart attack in 1948 and his mantle awaited the arrival in London of Bishop Seán Manchester who would there establish himself as the other celebrated vampirologist and exorcist of the twentieth century. In 1991 an updated and enlarged hardcover edition of the bishop’s best selling The Highgate Vampire was specially dedicated to the memory of Montague Summers.

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An extract from Stray Ghosts by Bishop Seán Manchester follows:

“Without some would - be Parsifal … could there be any re-discovery of the Holy Grail? And what about Christ’s own preference for the company of publicans and sinners? Oh there were a lot of riddles like bats or broomsticks flying around at night!" ~ Nicholas Mosley (Efforts at Truth, 1994)

Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, in whose memory I would dedicate my most popular work in print, entered the Old Catholic priesthood, having been diaconated in 1908 in the Church of England, and later becoming ordained in the diaconate of the Roman Catholic Church a year later. He was episcopally consecrated for the Order of Corporate Reunion on 21 June 1927 by Dominic Albert Godwin, and was later consecrated sub conditione on 21 March 1946 by Roger Stephen Matthews and appointed Nuncio for Great Britain. His biographer is the late Roman Catholic Carmelite Father Brocard Sewell who, like this author, knew Sir Oswald Mosley. This acquaintance, in my own case, came about due to me being a professional photographer. I also met Lady Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald's wife.

Interest in Mosley as a subject stemmed from certain parallels between the fascist leader and Byron. Both were of noble lineage; they were each drawn to the classical worlds of antiquity; each supported despots whom they eventually turned against (Mussolini influencing Mosley ― not Hitler as often imputed ― while Napoleon gained Byron’s admiration); each felt a romantic impulse to lead ultra-nationalistic causes (Mosley’s “Greater Britain” prior to his internment in 1940 and “Europe a Nation” after the Second World War; Byron’s a miserable death at Missolonghi for the cause of Greece). Both limped due to a lame right foot that required a specially made shoe. Last but not least, they were each serial womanisers, and both shared a penchant for the company of the lower echelons, joining them for a drink and a chat. This contrasted with those at the other end of the political spectrum, whose leading lights were invariably middle class and out of touch with the ordinary people.

I met and came to know Mosley at the turn of the 1960s. Much later, I came into contact with Fenner Brockway (who personally supported my campaigns around the time of Sir Oswald's death at the age of eighty-four in 1980) and Tony Benn whom I would meet at various rallies and during the making of a television programme for Channel Four. The former was Lord Brockway, and the latter had been Viscount Stansgate before renouncing the title. These, and others on the far left, I would discover, unlike Sir Oswald Mosley, frequently lacked the common touch. Anomalies such as this were curious, but noneless true.

It has been assumed that Father Brocard Sewell and I were well acquainted. This is not the case, however; though a robust correspondence between us was occasionally entered upon; one might even say erupted. The topic of Montague Summers and, indeed, vampires was never too distant.

My colleague and good friend Peter Underwood knew Montague Summers well enough to have been presented with a protection medallion by him. Summers’ fame as an expert on the occult began in 1926 with the publication of his History of Demonology and Witchcraft followed by other studies of witches, vampires and werewolves; notably The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929). He also introduced to the public, as an editor, along with many other works, a reprint of The Discovery of Witches by the infamous Matthew Hopkins, and the first English translation of the classic fifteenth century treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum. In later life he also wrote influential studies of the Gothic novel, another lifelong enthusiasm; notably The Gothic Quest: a History of the Gothic Novel (1938), and A Gothic Bibliography (1940). Much of Summers’ life remains in obscurity, many of his personal papers have been lost; yet he left an autobiography, The Galanty Show, that was published over thirty years after his death.

Montague Summers died of a heart attack in 1948. When Sandy Robertson launched The Summers Project in 1986 to raise money for a tombstone to be laid on Summers’ unmarked grave in Richmond Cemetery, then known only as plot 10818, he turned to me for support. The simple stone, bearing the legend “Tell me strange things,” was erected on 26 November 1988. Summers invariably opened his conversation with those words when people visited him. He yearned to hear strange things. In 1950, two years after his death, Summers’ longstanding friend, Hector Stuart-Forbes, joined him in the then unmarked plot at Richmond Cemetery. This Old Catholic bishop’s work in the filed of demonolatry, not least the specific area of vampirology, is unparalleled in the twentieth century. It was when I studied this spectrum of the supernatural in my early teenage years that I first came across the works of Montague Summers. They were to prove invaluable.

My appreciation of Summers’ work is a matter of public record. Yet I have no knowledge of his private life, or his degree of involvement in esotericism about which rumours abound. I do not question his ordinations, as have some commentators, but I am not qualified to access him beyond his published works. I have grown more than accustomed to misrepresentation and cheap jibes against anyone vaguely knowledgeable of vampirism and demonolatry. The only other information I have been privy to regrading Summers relates entirely to his ordinations and episcopal consecration within autocephalous jurisdictions of the Old Catholic Church.

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Stray Ghosts copyright © +Seán Manchester, 2003