Introduction

Expansion and decline

It should be already evident that the life of the Guild cannot be told as a static story.  Its trajectory was one of strong initial growth and optimism before World War Two; post-War expansion and consolidation; rapid decline during the 1960s followed by retrenchment; and in its final years, valiant but unsuccessful attempts at revival.   

The early years

Over 120 Catholic Civil Servants attended the inaugural meeting in St. Peter’s Hall Westminster on 27th February 1933. The “founding fathers” were Mr F. W. McAweeny of the Inland Revenue who had sought permission for the Guild from the church authorities; and the Reverend Malachy Feery of Westminster Cathedral: laity and clergy working together. Father Feery chaired the Guild’s management committee throughout the 1930s until the new Constitution of 1940 provided for a Master who would be a Civil Servant. 

Established initially for men, in 1934 the Archbishop gave approval to extend it to women in acknowledgement of the rapid growth in female employment in the Civil Service since the Great War. Women not only accounted for one quarter of the 300,000-plus workforce, but they now worked alongside men in clerical, executive and administrative roles, as well as in external roles such as medical officers and school inspectors. A Council paper of 1935 summarised their reasoning: 

Since the War, there has been a complete reversal of the policy which restricted considerably the employment of women in the Civil Service, and now both sexes enter it through common open competitive examinations, are employed side by side, and undertake precisely similar duties … If any advantages, whether spiritual or social, were to be derived from membership of a guild, the men would have been acting in an un-Catholic manner by the exclusion of their women colleagues.  

Admission of women contributed to an increase of 200 members by the time of the 1935 AGM, when the whole Catholic hierarchy of England and Wales gave its approval and blessing to the Guild. Women quickly came to serve on the Council and sub-committees. 

With the support of the bishops and a strong publicity drive in the Catholic press, by 1936 Guild membership reached nearly six hundred, representing “practically every grade”. By 1938, numbers approached 1000, and addressing the Annual Dinner at the Waldforf Hotel in London, Cardinal Hinsley said it “gave him great pleasure to be present to meet so many members of the Guild, all earnest Catholics, who exercise moral influence in their work for their country.”

Post-War expansion

Wartime government served only to sustain and nationalise this growth. New regional centres of administration and Catholic civil service fellowship emerged, and so new Guild branches outside of London were established, including Oxford, Blackpool, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Numbers appear to have boomed but staff relocations made it difficult to document membership accurately. After 1945, welfare state expansion and a desire to resist communist infiltration led to a further uptick in membership. 

Leading figures after the War cemented the reputation and rise of the Guild. Most notable was Sir Desmond Morton, a former decorated soldier and PA to Winston Churchill during the War, who became Under Secretary (Director) at the Treasury. By 1950 over 1900 Civil Servants were paid-up members and by 1956 this total had reached 2530, spread across nine London branches and twenty provincial branches. 

Decline and retrenchment

The late 1950s was to be the high-water mark in membership (see chart). Yet even at that time, its leaders were concerned that the Guild was not fulfilling the high aspirations that marked its early days and post-War years. By 1960, the editor of the national Guild bulletin would plaintively write:

Sitting in my Editor’s chair reading up some of our Bulletins of ten years ago, one cannot be proud to see the names of so many distinguished persons mentioned, to take a few Dr Magee, Sir Desmond Morton, Messrs Manning, Batten, Last, Yeoman, Corcoran, and Miss Carey, who helped to build such a firm foundation of the Guild. Comparing it nowadays with the problem of apathy in attendance at meetings etc, the old phrase “they never had it so good” is very apt.

Such concern was not a one-off. Guild Bulletins in the early 1960s repeatedly fretted over a declining and ageing membership, loss of branches, and struggles with recruitment. Guild activities were less reported in the national Catholic press. The very raison d’etre of the Guild came to be questioned, and this led to the review in 1964.   Although that Review injected new energy and strategic focus it did not stem the decline in numbers, which had fallen to around 900 by 1969. The reality was clear that the operations of the Guild and its Branches were increasingly relying on a dwindling number of key individuals, including retired individuals.

Sources – Various National bulletins (in particular historical articles published in 1962 and 1964).  Registrar reports to AGMs thereafter reported in bulletins. 1945 data seen as unreliable due to re-location of staff.

So the 1970s was a decade of retrenchment. The Guild had ostensibly reached a level of maturity, sustained by the most committed of the post-War boom in members, who had developed strong friendships and connections over two or three decades.  But renewal and rationalisation was also in the air. A new Grand Master, David Marsh of the Ministry of Defence - at 44 years of age probably the youngest of all the Grand Masters - led the Guild from 1971 to 1976 with optimism and energy. Under his direction, a new Constitution and Officer handbook was produced, clarifying objectives, activities and rules. Governance was somewhat slimmed down. Only the strongest provincial branches remained and the London ones merged. Chunky quarterly bulletins gave way to more regular, lower cost newsletters. With rampant inflation throughout the decade, membership subs had to rise in 1973, 1975 and 1979. Although the 1977 AGM considered but rejected a proposal to drop the “old fashioned” name of “Guild”, the organisation sought to become less insular. Conscious efforts were made to join up with and feed in to other diocesan educational initiatives and apostolates. A formal hand of friendship was extended to the Civil Service Christian Union, and a number of Guild members became involved in their departmental branches in the later 1970s.  Numbers stabilised and hopes of a second spring revived, subsequently boosted by the Papal Visit in 1982 and the Guild’s Golden Jubilee in 1983 - Cardinal Hume attending the Annual Dinner along with 80 members -  when membership stood at 371. But unless sufficient new blood came in, the Guild’s active days would be numbered. 

Dissolution, rebirth and retirement 1991 - 2005

After his term of office, David Marsh continued to be actively involved, but returned as Grand Master in 1986 to make one last attempt at renaissance. As late as 1989, he wrote to members with the hope that 

“sufficient new and younger members will join together to form and run new Branches of serving Civil Servants … enabling the older members to regroup into retired sections; [and] that new Branches will start in towns where there are major concentrations of Civil Servants”

Repeated recruitment and publicity efforts led to a handful of new recruits but by 1990 the majority of the 209 paid members were retired. Outside of London, only Cardiff, Leeds and Blackpool had branches. Around twenty members attended monthly meetings of the London branch, but for most members, retired, the Guild had become a friendship network for socials, holidays and study weekends. David Marsh himself retired and moved out of London to Dorset in 1990 signalling the end of his valiant, twenty year, fight. 

So the Guild formally decided at its last AGM in Cardiff in May 1991 to dissolve itself at the end of that year. It was a poignant irony that the Guild was wound up exactly one hundred years after the publication of the great social encyclical Rerum Novarum. In his remarks, the Grand Master drew attention to the wider centenary celebrations around the famous encyclical, pointing out that “the Catholic Media Office is anxious that the Church’s social teaching should be widely publicised”. 

Even this was not the end. The Guild was reincarnated on 1st January 1992 as the “Catholic Guild of Civil and Public Servants”. The almost sacred name of “Guild” was retained for continuity and heritage, but governance was minimal:  a single “Master” (Mrs Mary Gallagher, Deputy Grand Master 1983-88), no branches, a small organising committee and events newsletter. Sixty members signed and paid up to what was in effect a retirement fellowship but which was open “to all Catholic retired or serving members of HM Civil Service or Local Government”.  Despite it being in the draft title, the word “retired” was subsequently dropped, for the hope remained that the new Guild would be a seedbed of re-germination; that was why its scope was widened to include local government officials. In the valedictory words of the ever hopeful David Marsh:

Serving members are strongly encouraged to join … they must not be put off by the title “Retired” which is merely a reflection of the major element of current membership and which could well change in the future. My prayer is that for the good of the Civil and Public Service and the spiritual and professional well-being of the Catholics and other Christians within it, there will be a move towards building the Guild to a viability which will enable it to meet the needs of the future as effectively as its predecessor did in its own period of 58 years of service (1933-91). 

But no such move to viability ever materialised, and the new Guild would inevitably grow old and die out. The new “Catholic Guild of Civil and Public Servants” appeared in Diocesan directories with its “primary objective” being “to develop the spirit of Catholic fellowship among members” – a shadow of the original Guild. It was last mentioned in the Westminster Directory in 1997. It remained in the Leeds Diocese Yearbook until 2005, with contact details for Miss Connie Grainger, who was still apparently organising the study events in Yorkshire that she had done for the Guild ever since the mid-1970s! 

Why the decline?

In retrospect, it might be guessed that the Guild’s heyday was the 1950s, that fabled oasis of stability between the turbulence of war and the culturally corrosive 1960s.  Not only was the Civil Service rapidly growing then, but the Catholic Church was consolidating and expanding its parishes, schools and influence. It was bolstered on the one side by hardy older generations who had known persecution and the inter-war Catholic revival, and on the other by younger generations, sustained by an Irish influx, who were schooled in the clarity of the Penny Catechism, reasonably clear what they believed, and entered society with a strong Catholic identity. 

And yet, as the Guild in 1962 looked back at its own history, it was realistic enough to recognise the “melancholy fact that at no period has the Guild enrolled more than a fringe of the Catholics in the Service”. When practising Catholics comprised perhaps 10% of the national population, the Civil Service would have contained over 50,000 Catholics. So even the Guild at its peak would have represented a maximum of 5% of these. 

By 1960, changes in lifestyle had set limits on what the Guild might achieve, with a kind of comfortable Catholicism setting in, as the plaintiff editorial cited earlier went on to say: 

I remember meetings in those days were fully attended and plenty of interest shown, also in all Catholic activities, but nowadays what with Television, and so many other Catholic organisations, attendances are poor. It is generally the same people to be seen at all these functions (a small hard core of enthusiasts). When most Catholics have completed their Sunday obligations we never see them again until the next week-end … This feeling of apathy is not only peculiar to Catholics, but to all walks of life … I know personally to drag one-self away from a good programme on the T.V. for a meeting requires an awful effort, especially when one is getting older (who isn’t), and to encourage the youth that are coming into the Guild, a poor example 

Looking back from 1991 across the decades that he lived and worked and served the Guild, David Marsh offered the following telling analysis:

For many years success could be measured in the form of branches in all the main areas of appreciable civil service numbers. Events were well attended and interest was sustained. Then came a coincidence of several events within a fairly short period: 

• to be a Catholic no longer entailed acute feelings of isolation (still less of threat) leading to a need to band together with other Catholics for encouragement, comfort etc

• familial instructions to the youngsters embarking upon a career in the big city (“mind you join your vocational Guild as soon as you get there”) tended to get discarded like so many other caring and well-meant admonishments; the ‘age of independence’ had begun (“I don’t owe anybody anything and I don’t have to join anything if I don’t want to”)

• the Churches were re-examining their respective positions on everything on which they had seemed to be so consistent … (‘when the churches have finally made up their minds – if I think it makes any sense – I’ll think about it … meanwhile I’ll just do my own thing like most other people’)

Regarding the last point, the extensive deliberations and decrees of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and the challenges around their communication and implementation, cannot be underestimated, particularly their coincidence with the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. This sense comes through in the Bulletins of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a tragic and ironic quality in the fact that the Guild of the 1930s and 1940s anticipated the Council’s vision of lay Catholics engaging with the complex challenges of the modern world; and yet in the years following the Council the Guild entered permanent decline. 

At its 1982 AGM, the Guild’s Grand Chaplain Francis Bartlett drew attention to the wider ecclesiastical context that was affecting all vocational guilds at that time:

While many Catholic societies were flourishing in the 1950s, the changes following Vatican II had resulted in new structures which perhaps naturally drew much of their support from the members of the old organisations; and so the old organisations withered. It was useless for the Guild to live in the past; somehow for the future if it was to thrive it must find its way to being fully compatible with the changing church.

But it would be incorrect to “blame” the decline on the Council, to attribute the Guild’s decline directly to the Council. For the rot had set in before it convened. And as we have seen, the Council’s teaching had brought new perspectives that helped, at least to some extent, to re-focus and renew the Guild. 

Ecclesiastical and cultural changes aside, there was a quite separate reality that was also imposing upon the Guild. In Marsh’s final analysis, “the most important factors affecting our Guild” were institutional and internal to the Civil Service itself, in particular:

• the long period of the 70s and 80s in which departments were combined, reconstructed, relocated, dismantled, dispersed, given Agency status etc – all of which significantly eroded the family spirit (at and between all levels) which had existed in so many of the long established departments and which had benefited the Service and underpinned and encouraged all forms of ‘out of hours’ activity and associations.

• the heavy increase in workloads without adequate resources associated with restructuring, policy review upon policy review … and a proliferation of “management information systems”. The evening stroll across the park yielded to the dash for the long-distance commuter train, with a bag of papers to be worked on for the morrow … By the time the working day was over people had had enough”

These changes had taken a heavy toll on the “spirit” of the Civil Service, and by extension on the Guild itself. 

Conclusion: valuation – a vision partially achieved

But while it lasted, and for those involved, the Guild had borne much fruit, which was why its faithful core saw its eventual demise as avoidable and tragic.  To be a Civil Servant itself was to enter a distinctive, stable and potentially life-long profession; to be a practising Catholic was to be part of a distinctive, stable and life-long vocation. An organisation bringing these two existential dimensions together in visible, tangible form would have much to offer, making its members better Civil Servants and a basis for “lay apostolate”. The Master of the Chesterfield Branch mused in 1964:

The most important thing, to my mind, about the Guild, is that by its means there is spread, through the Service, a group of practising, instructed Catholics, known as such, and known to each other; and a Catholic is always of interest to his non-Catholic friends, who are intrigued to know how he can believe anything so ridiculous … 

The main function of the Guild is apostolic – the apostolate of the office. We do not have to thrust the Faith down other people’s throats – they would not take it if we tried – but by prayer and example we can help them towards it. The impact of a good Catholic is reinforced by the impact that a strong Branch of the Guild can have; and it is perhaps not without interest that one of the Apostles and Evangelists started his working life collecting taxes. 

But as the Guild’s Council recognised in its review that year, many members did not share this apostolic vision, so it was  

important not to lose sight of the fact that a large number of members joined the Guild, not so much to participate in the lay apostolate as for the Catholic companionship the Guild offered. This will always be so, and the social side of the Guild should not be ignored or its importance minimised.

For its active members, the Guild surely did promote their spiritual welfare, Christian fellowship and an “enlightened Catholic outlook” on public administration. The educational element was probably the Guild’s most durable “unique selling point”. Contributors to the Guild bulletins often pointed out how much they learned from Guild talks and seminars. This was best summed up in the Easter 1957 Bulletin by the Swansea Branch lead, reporting his experience of a “Catholic Question Box” with their Chaplain: “It makes you think and that is surely what we want – Thinking Catholics”. 

That sentiment was echoed a quarter of a century later, by the Vice President, in the special Golden Jubilee bulletin:

You may ask have the aims of the Guild been fulfilled during the past 50 years? We can perhaps claim that we have tried to fulfil them. The main reason for the Guild as a separate society is its second object, namely to develop among its members an enlightened Catholic outlook on the problems of public administration. But what does that second object mean? It means that in addition to being well trained and efficient civil servants we should be equally well trained in the principles of our Faith and be ready at all times to apply those principles as far as we can. The Civil Service has a first-class training scheme for its staff. The Guild, too, provides training for its members so that they can become good disciples of St. Thomas More.

Given its objectives and the relatively educated level of its members, it is fair to say that the Guild provided a kind of ongoing open university, giving a platform to the best Catholic minds. The Vice President reflected on the numerous educational weekends for Guild members at Spode House and Wood Hall, “where year after year expert Catholic lecturers have appeared”, and he surmised that “at some time or other Guild members have been addressed by nearly all the well-known members of the Catholic community – learned clerics, academics and outstanding lay people”. In one of his last appeals to members to work and pray for Guild renewal, Grand Master David Marsh confessed “how much we owe to the Guild for the depth of our understanding of the Church and of our responsibilities as laity in the modern world”. Writing to Cardinal Hume in 1990, when the end was in sight, he averred: 

the aims of the Guild have been achieved in full measure – to the benefit, I believe of the Church, the individuals and the communities in which we live and work … We can take some comfort that the Guild’s efforts over past years have helped to deepen knowledge of the faith and encourage wider involvement … those ‘ripples’ will have their effect long after the Guild has ceased to exist.

“Are we Civil Servants who happen to be Catholics, or Catholics who are also Civil Servants?” After the War, if not before, the Guild was an embodied attempt to answer that question in real time. In its loftiest understanding, more and more influential, Guild-educated and inspired Catholics would, by their “enlightened outlook on the problems of public administration” (its second object), help to shape the character and direction of the growing state, bringing the authentic humanism of Catholic social thought “to counter the insidious and powerful propaganda of the atheistic materialists in our midst”, in particular communists who were feared to be infiltrating the Service. But this was of course limited. The Guild was for Catholic politicians but Catholic civil servants, and since most civil servants  - “officials” - were in “delivery” rather than “policy” roles, and professionally signed up to impartiality, the Guild’s focus gravitated to building the Catholic character and knowledge of its members. Accordingly, in the 1970s, the Guild’s second object was subtly modified to help members “develop a greater awareness of the moral responsibilities attached to work in public administration”, and so “become effective in the lay apostolate”. 

In reading the Bulletins of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, one can at times forget that these were written for civil servants. There is talk of the wider Church and culture, reports of seminars and holidays, charitable and social branch activities, recruitment challenges and initiatives, but the workplace and official work is often invisible. In later years, this doubtless reflected the growing number of active members who were moving into retirement, and perhaps the vast diversity of civil service roles that made generalisations difficult.  But it also betrayed perhaps a limited and waning sense of how faith and work could be actively and consciously integrated in a turbulent and ever-changing world. 

Learning from the past – looking to the future

History matters. It is a window on cultures past that differ from us, yet it shapes and deepens our understanding of who we are. It offers alternative ways of imagining and thinking through present challenges and concerns. To be sure, history never simply “repeats”. But it does rhyme and resonate, as the one human condition interacts with ever-changing circumstances and constellations of social, cultural, economic, technological and political contingencies. By considering the past on its own terms, we begin to see patterns and pointers for our own times.  

But was the Guild simply “of its time”, belonging to a “world we have lost”? An artefact of historical curiosity, but with nothing to say to Catholic Civil Servants working in the second quarter of the 21st century? To be sure, it lived in a world without internet, email, smartphones and video calls. Civil Service work was less frantic, less fluid than now. Churchgoing Catholics were 10% of the population, the Church, and Christianity in general, was far more visible in the mainstream culture then. 

Writing in the National Bulletin in 1985, six years before its dissolution, the Vice President reflected soberly on the Guild’s role in a changing world, and pointed to its permanent value: 

Now that we are in the latter part of the twentieth century, some may ask “Of what use is the Guild today? The word ‘guild’ conjures up visions of medievalism, monasticism and the middle ages. Surely, since Vatican II such an organisation is a thing of the past and quite out-of-date?” So one could go on … it all seems quite convincing. One must admit that circumstances have vastly changed since the Guild was formed over fifty years ago. On the other hand to associate with Catholic colleagues, whether at work or play, can still help us … “to fortify our souls” and to strive together to uphold the traditions of honesty, integrity and loyalty which the Guild, and indeed the Civil Service as a whole, tries to achieve. In other words to be a better Catholic … and to be a better civil servant.   

Perhaps not as lofty a vision as in the post-War years, but it is getting at the permanent need for Catholic civil servants, nowadays a small minority, to practise, and be exemplars of, the intellectual and moral virtues that civil service work affords. And how workplace fellowship can be integral, not superfluous, to the formation and education of the modern Catholic. To be, like Saint Thomas More, “the King’s good servant - but God’s first”. 

Recalling David Marsh’s analysis of the Guild’s decline, it is precisely because Christianity is no longer mainstream that practising Catholics now once experience “acute feelings of isolation” and so again “need to band together with other Catholics for encouragement” - finding other Catholics in the office, other civil servants in the parish. Where there are Catholics in a particular sphere of life or work committed to living out their faith every day, there is a lay apostolate, and the need for some kind of Guild-like association to support and develop it. The lay apostolate certainly consists in “the apostolate of the office” - acting and working virtuously, of being “salt of the earth”, of not hiding faith as if it was some embarrassing private hobby, and of having intelligent responses ready to religious, social and cultural questions that may arise in workplace conversation. Moreover, Catholic civil servants, steeped in the humanising principles and deep but rationally accessible insights of the Catholic Social Thought tradition, can also bring new perspectives and creativity to addressing “problems of public administration” whilst remaining politically impartial. 

“Well-formed and well-connected”

The Guild that existed from 1933 to 1991 cannot be simply recreated, were that even desirable. But its experience can offer fresh perspectives and possibilities for how Catholic civil servants connect. Should they be merely another loose and fluid, open access, staff network, subject to the strictures that go with that, or is there something to be said for a more solid and independent association, subscription-based like the Guild, that confers identity and community on its members, and is overseen by bishops – Catholics who are also civil servants rather than civil servants who happen to be Catholics? The Guild’s focus on the twin needs of formation and fellowship are surely perennial. And the means to support these are wider now not narrower; video calls and whatsapp cannot of themselves sustain a vibrant, long-term national community without the local, regional and national embodied gatherings that the Guild had only known as options. The Guild’s efforts in terms of publicity drives, calendarized events, diocesan and ecumenical links can all provide food for thought and initiative for the future. 

With all of this rich example and memory behind it, the current Catholic network of civil servants founded in 2021 has much to hope for. Extrapolating from national statistics, there are still many hundreds if not thousands of practising Catholics across the Civil Service, and evidence of a “quiet revival” nationally in religious interest and practice offers hope that this can only grow. The value, purpose and opportunity for today’s successor to the Guild is elegantly summed up by Bishop Moth, now Archbishop of Westminster, in his message of July 2025:

I am pleased to endorse this Catholic apostolate … which seeks to bring together, encourage, and support Catholic civil servants through the promotion of Catholic Social Teaching. It is in all of our interests that Catholic civil servants are well-formed and well-connected.

While you are not yet at the peak of the 2,500 members your predecessor enjoyed in the 1950s, we look ahead with hope to your future. Where the seeds of fellowship and the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ are sown anew, much fruit can be reaped.