Society History

Abbot Geoffrey Scott has published a history of the Society in the 2019 Douai Magazine - No 181,Page 71 (1868 - 2017). Click here to download  the PDF

Society President Michael Skivington also reported in 2012;
"The Society was formed in 1868.
A menu records the Jubilee Dinner. See the photo of the cover of an early secretary's minute book from 1873, the first page which lists the early venues where meetings were held and the opening page of the minutes of the first recorded meeting at the Clarendon Hotel Oxford. This was of course thirty years before the monastery and school moved to England.
There are also two early pictures of those attending AGMs. One is from 1910 and the other includes the impressively bearded Archbishop Bilsborrow OSB flanked by Abbots Taylor and Hurley . I did not make a note of the date of the later picture. There was an annual report in 1927 two pages of which show the early past presidents, the council and a list of patrons of the Society that must have included the whole of the English hierarchy. There is a 1927 picture of a Douai dinner taken at the Criterion restaurant in London with Fr. Ignatius and Abbot Mooney in the centre of the top table. A more recent photo taken at the 1953 jubilee dinner shows Abbot Mooney chatting to Bishop "Jock" Tickle."

And Michael has also collected some pictures of Abbots of Douai, School Headmasters and sports teams over the years.

Complete Archive Picture Gallery