Kelham Theological College
For a number of years before covid, I used to visit ‘The Well at Willen’, Milton Keynes, which was also known from 2016 as St Michael’s Priory. The residential spiritual community was ecumenical – when I first visited there were amongst others: a Quaker, a Buddhist, a C of E woman vicar, and some monks from the Society of the Sacred Mission, who founded the centre in 1973 after Kelham College, their religious community and associated theological training college, was closed down in 1972.
After the Kelham closure, the Society were invited to provide a “still centre on the edge of a new city”. That grew into ‘The Well’. At the Well there were also families living, alongside single people and couples. You could stay there on retreat or go to events, services, and conferences. There was also a large library which for a while housed the Thomas Merton Society book collection. The community closed in 2019.
One of the SSM monks Ralph Marten writes of the massive changes that took place in the 1960s which he describes as:
‘…like living through a world-wide earthquake which shattered the foundations of society although, oddly enough, at first we were hardly aware of what was happening to us and around us.’
At its height around 170 men were living at Kelham, and, at the beginning of the 1960s, there were 85 professed members of the Society of the Sacred Mission. The founder Fr Herbert Kelly, in the late 1880s was quite sure that men from non-academic, what he called ‘working class backgrounds’ needed a formation which was demanding and rigorous. The College aimed to teach these students to think, to do their theology, and not just to learn a series of ‘correct’ answers to be trotted out in sermons. So, the life he created was all-embracing: Mass and the daily Office, lectures, housework, manual work, football were all part of the everyday life of the College. Students lived alongside the monastic community, and the Kelham way often saw the older men sweeping corridors and washing up alongside students. It was highly organized:
‘The house at Kelham was a complex network if inter-locking boundaries which, with a wonderful clarity, marked out for you where you were in the pecking order, where you should be and what you should be doing at any hour of the day. Such dependable boundaries around you gave life cathedralesque proportions. It felt safe, it felt holy, it felt permanent, very reassuring and secure – and it certainly was, until that day … it all went up in the air with a bang and a boom in a cloud of dust.’
One monk wrote of the contrast of his arrival in the early 1920s and his departure in the 1970s:
‘Looking back, I can hear the clip-clop of a horse bringing some of us in a cab from the station to Kelham We approached slowly and gently one sunny warm afternoon in June, but that was more than fifty years ago. The other day we left the house with a rush down the great M1 … we went with surprising speed down the great highway to Milton Keynes Bucks … It’s a great exciting business trying to keep up with the angels, especially when in old age you might have dreamt of retiring in quiet and obscurity amid the splendours of Kelham.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPLbEPXWts
This BBC Midlands film from many years ago shows Kelham at its height.