As they usually did, the 22 Benedictine monks around the hollow square of tables ate their simple noon meal in silence. But then, since it was a special occasion, they broke out the good Priory port, to toast the eldest of their number. It was the Rev. Dom John Hugh Diman's 83rd birthday. It was also a memorable fortnight for him. Last week his old school, St. George's (Episcopal), one of the top U.S. prep schools, celebrated its 50th year. This week another of his old schools, Portsmouth Priory (Catholic), marked its 20th. He founded both, and was their first headmaster.
Hugh Diman was a rugged, ruddy Episcopal minister of a fashionable Rhode Island summer church. In 1896 he decided to become a schoolmaster. He had one master and eleven pupils when he started "Diman's School for Small Boys" in Newport, R.I. Gradually his posh Newport parishioners sent him their sons. Twenty years later, when Headmaster Diman retired, St. George's (as the school had been renamed) had 120 boys, a sizable debt, and a sizable scholastic reputation.
As headmaster and teacher, Hugh Diman preferred respect to love; he once complained of a picture that it did not make him look strict enough. He was kindly to his boys, but rarely familiar; at his most informal, he would give them friendly pokes in the ribs with his walking stick. Few "Mr. Chips" stories were told about him. More often the boys talked about his bad driving (he permanently scarred a driveway maple tree at St. George's) or his absentmindedness.
The Three Cs. Like two other famed headmasters of New England prep schools, Peabody of Groton and Coit of St. Paul's, Diman thought the English public schools were on the right tack in stressing classics, character and Christianity. (Dr. Coit, however, was too English for him: "He was such an Anglophile that he wouldn't let the students play baseball; they had to play cricket."*) He was impatient of office routine, and so worded his letters that few required answers. The hours thus saved he spent in meditation.
St. George's, Diman thought, came close to the ideal of a general education, but because it taught slowly, and tried to teach character and not job skills, it "clearly and necessarily had to be a school for rich boys."* Diman wanted to do something for working-class boys. In 1912, the Diman Vocational School opened its doors in Fall River, Mass., the big mill town where Diman's father had been a minister. Backed by Unionist John Golden, the school trained boys of 14 to 16 (too old for grammar school, too young for the mills) in manual trades. Today Diman Vocational is part of the Fall River public-school system.
On many of his walks at St. George's, Diman searched his soul for answers to some private questions of faith. An appendicitis attack decided him. He summoned a Roman Catholic priest, told him: "If I'm going to die, I'd rather die in the Catholic Church than out of it." After World War I service as a captain (with the Red Cross), he headed for Rome and the priesthood. At 63, Father Diman entered a Benedictine abbey in Scotland, where he cleaned corridors, dug ditches and performed penances with novices of 17.