Something of the Crusader’s Zeal: 1930–39

Abstract

English Catholics, Waugh asserted, were ‘usually served by simple Irish missionaries’, but the priests who were important in his life were rather different. He went for instruction to Father Martin D’Arcy, SJ, who was soon after to become Principal of Campion Hall, the Jesuit establishment at Oxford. Proud of his Norman ancestry, D’Arcy was a great fisher of men among the English prominenten, upper-class people and people of talent and achievement.

He spent the next nine years without fixed abode travelling in most parts of Europe and the Near East and tropical America; he has been three times in Abyssinia, once as war correspondent for the Daily Mail in 1935. In 1930 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.