Quentin de la bedoyere biography of christopher

Doubt and its religious cousin agnosticism, a word rarely heard nowadays, may have fallen out of fashion, but they have much to teach us, despite the disdain of Richard Dawkins, who famously wrote in The God Delusion: “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” He also quotes approvingly Quentin de la Bédoyère, science editor of the Catholic Herald, who in 2006 wrote that the Catholic historian Hugh Ross Williamson respected firm religious belief and certain unbelief, but “reserved his contempt for the wishy-washy boneless mediocrities who flapped around in the middle.”

To see doubters and freethinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, Thomas Huxley (who coined the word “agnostic”) and Darwin himself mocked in this way, given their intense engagement with complex human issues, only highlights the boldness of their thinking and the intellectual hubris of today’s unbridled certainty. The stridency of both Dawkins and de la Bédoyère misses how these and other Victorian intellectuals saw doubt as a creative force – inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, and a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and zealotry.

Ironically, it was the Victorians, often dismissed as prudish and uptight, who led the way to an open-mindedness and engagement with ambiguity that stands in stark contrast to the impoverishment of contemporary thinking about religious doubt and belief. The debates about religion and science that flared in the 19th century predate by almost two centuries the “new” atheism that has evolved today, undermining many of its claims for originality. As one scholar describes the Victorian era, “Never has an age i

What is it about Alice in Wonderland? At a point, around seventy years ago, it was imprinted on my mind, and there it remains. And I am not alone. It would seem that in some way it speaks significantly to the child who continues to live within all of us. This is not a generational thing, for three of my (young adult) grandsons turned out to know Alice well – although their most recent meeting was through a film I had not seen. Nor, they assured me, was this a middle class thing: Alice apparently remains in the patrimony of the English mind.

A universal reaction invites some kind of psychological explanation. And indeed, in the matter of fairy tales, Freud, Jung and Bettelheim can be plausibly, if sometimes gratuitously, invoked. In the end, the grandsons settled for the characteristics of dream sequences, and the need to cope with the uncertainties of early puberty. Interestingly, they put some weight on the masculine fear of female power, and the eldest grandson – who knows such things – gave us a disquisition on the power of the female in primitive religions. This was later supplemented by a granddaughter who gave me a quick run-down on transsexuality and female threat in Thailand. I would have settled for the Wicked Witch of the West, but, in a kind of Wonderland reversal of order, I see that I must now be educated by my grandchildren. Was it significant that, in this case, the boys did not relate the threat to the Red Queen but to mistressy Alice herself, a female of half their age? Oh yes, I know what they mean.

My renewed acquaintance with Alice was more recent. I attended the Royal Ballet’s production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, with music by Joby Talbot and conducted by David Briskin. This was a live transmission to my local Odeon, no more than a few minutes’ bus ride from my house. Once upon a time, when I regarded Covent Garden as a second home, I would h

Quentin de la Bédoyère, 1934-2023

Quentin de la Bédoyère died on 1 August, at the age of 88. A former Catholic Herald columnist, he used to relate how, when he was a teenaged second lieutenant on national service in Austria in the early 1950s, illiterate servicemen in his transport regiment would ask him to read out their letters from home. Meanwhile, his own post arrived from his mother, Catherine, and from his father, Michael – who was then editor – written from the Herald’s offices on Whitefriars Street, with Blitz-flattened buildings all around as Britian continued to recover from the Second World War. 

Educated by the Jesuits at Beaumont College, Quentin had gone to Austria after a period at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but not before he had met his future wife, Irene Gough. They were married in 1956 at the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer & St Thomas More in Chelsea, and together they raised five children at their home in Wimbledon. Quentin worked with the Sun Life Assurance of Canada for the whole of his professional career; there he expanded his management skills and widened his taste for travel. 

In retirement, Quentin wrote the Herald’s “Science and Faith” column, the “Charterhouse Chronicle” – a retake of Michael de la Bédoyère’s informal “Jotter”, a sort of literary chat show intended to enhance readership – and a variety of interesting features. To these, he added a number of books on theology and business psychology and numerous engagements as a public speaker.

It was as a committed and educated Catholic husband and father, however, that Quentin came into his own. He was a layman who used his skills to spread the Kingdom of God in the spirit of Vatican II; an annual excitement for the family was the Family Week run by Fr Conrad Pepler OP and Sr Assunta Kirwan OP at Hawkesyard Priory and Spode House.

In the 1960s and 70s, he and Irene served as c