A couple of days ago, my Bishop wrote me an e-mail to tell me that The Trinitarian, (the ACC Provincial newspaper) of May-June 2016, took an interest in his visit to my home and chapel at the beginning of this month. The Trinitarian article seems to be inspired by our Diocesan news article.
In itself, it is only news to those who do not use computers or internet. I have in my life been interviewed live on Radio Courtoisie, invited to various conferences here and there. However, there is something that really caught my eye. I was called Owen Chadwick!
Obviously an oversight, otherwise I am celebrating my one hundredth birthday this very day and writing this article from the hereafter, perhaps through a medium. Dr Owen Chadwick was a highly distinguished historian and Anglican cleric as was his younger brother Dr Henry Chadwick. They were among the leading lights of Anglican theological and historical scholarship of the twentieth century.
Actually, not a bit of it. My name is Anthony James Chadwick, am not to my knowledge related to either of these intellectual giants, and am a very ordinary guy blessed with the gift of the priesthood despite my unworthiness. I descend from a Yorkshire family of seafarers and businessmen, my grandfather with a distinguished military and wartime record. My father, still alive, practised as a veterinary surgeon in the north of England for many years in the farms of the Lake District and at his surgery in Kendal.
I am indeed flattered to have been mistaken for the great professor at Cambridge, but I am sure it was a slip of the printing press, a Freudian slip or I don’t know what. Anyway, I thank the Editor of The Trinitarian for thinking of my humble mission and my desire to encourage others to build chapels or fit them out in existing buildings in good taste for little financial outlay. There are indeed many fine places of worship in our Church both sides of the Atlantic.
If I know anything of church history and the Fathers, it is through the late Fr Guy Bedouelle OP of Fribourg University and having read some of the inspiring books written by my namesakes mentioned above.
The Blue Flower 
What a refreshing post, father! Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a famous Irish playwright and Member of Parliament, honoured with a burial in Westminster Abbey, but I am not entirely sure if I am related to him. It’s possible since he came from the same part of Ireland as my Sheridan family.
As for the Chadwick brothers, what praise could one say? I have many of their books, some of them bought during my “traddie” days. And I distinctly remember a “traddie” priest scoffing at Dr Henry Chadwick for the simple reason that he was an Anglican. That was one of many instances that put me permanently off RC traditionalism.
It also looks like you live on Hautot Street! Hopefully no intrepid Americans will get lost trying to find your chapel.
Hautot Street in Sulpice. The French are becoming civilised and now talk of a street and not a rue. The name of my village is Hautot Saint Sulpice.
Fr Chadwick, it does rather look like from the photo that you and I have our hands behind your wife’s back and are lifting her off the ground! lol Following the photograph in which you appeared to ‘conjure’ hand fire – taken on the same day as this – perhaps levitation is another … “For my next trick”?
Welcome to the blog, Bishop! You can now comment freely whenever you want. Strange things… 🙂
Before reading on, I was complacently willing to accept it was one of your names (vaguely thinking I did not certainly know any St. Owen (a quick search turned up four!), and wondering if you had taken it at confirmation, knowing people who added a name of their choosing, then)!
A delightful aspiration “to encourage others to build chapels or fit them out in existing buildings in good taste for little financial outlay”! I suppose it is my mere ineptitude not seeing how I can easily consult older posts relevant to this (hints the more welcome!). Alas, I suppose one would have somehow to come to be consecrated to make much use of any such (or be on a beaten path for those who are)?
Do you happen to have a family trove of ‘James Herriot’-like stories, for the lake District?
To answer your final question, my father worked for James Herriot from the year he qualified at Liverpool University (1953) until 1957. My brother and sister Jane were born in the assistant’s flat above the surgery in Thirsk, which is now a museum. In his autobiography, “Alf” White mentioned my father as a dashing young man, a favourite with the ladies and self-effacing.
I don’t think my father would attempt to write anything about his own career in the shadow of such a character. I have memories of Longsleddale Valley and the driving rain, my father treating sheep and cows on the farms. I often had to go outside the barn and puke up when it got too much for me when my father did an operation. It’s amazing how little hygiene those hardy animals need! It was always the vocation of looking after animals as sentient beings before money for my father. Few vets are cut out of the same cloth these days.
What a surprising and delightful answer! Thank you for its vivid glimpses!
(I remember when one of my best friends was aspiring to be a vet, it was harder (in the U.S.) to get into ‘vet school’ than into ‘med school’, and that part of its attraction for him then was that it was not over-specialized: you had to deal with dentistry and eye-surgery, for example, as well as general medicine.)
My father found bio chemistry to be the most boring discipline, but he worked at it. That was in the early 50’s. I don’t know anything about the profession these days. Operating procedures and anaesthetics are about as refined as for humans these days. The training would be very rigorous and perhaps more so than human medicine. A vet is a specialist in everything! The vet we go to in Rouen for our dogs and cats works on her own and exclusively on small animals, nearly all domestic pets. She has everything in her surgery: operating facilities, dispensary, laboratory with blood analysis machines, everything. A doctor will send you to hospital or the specialist depending on what he finds. More appointments and more waiting time!
“A vet is a specialist in everything!” A good way of looking at it!