Mother Mary of the Cross: O.D.C.

Extract

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquis of Salisbury and three times Prime Minister of Great Britain, was a man of many principles. One of these was that the more public houses you had in a place the fewer people were likely to get drunk; another was that in the town of Bishops Hatfield, over which he ruled with a benevolent and unquestioned authority, the Roman Catholics must be kept on the other side of the railway. The ‘other side’ is all that most people now see of Hatfield, as they rush northwards along the double lanes of the A. i; but in the days when I lived there the Great North Road passed through the middle of the town, and I can remember at least three public houses – one of them the Eight Bells where Bill Sykes ordered his pint after the murder of Nancy – which the eye of an alert traveller might have caught within the space of sixty seconds. To catch sight of the Roman Catholics you would have had to go a mile or two up the St Albans Road where the Oblates of St Charles maintained their unobtrusive Oratory. The old part of the town was dominated by the spire of St Ethelreda’s church, with the Old Palace of the Bishops of Ely, and the great house and park beyond, and the statue of the third Marquis meeting you as you came out of the station. If ‘Establishment’ means anything, it meant everything at Bishops Hatfield.