A good man up against it

Basil Hume, when a young Benedictine monk from Ample- forth in Yorkshire, was sent to study in Switzerland at the Catholic university of Fribourg. While he was there, two young men, staying at the same college, went mountaineering and got lost. The priest in charge of the seminary told the students that two young Englishmen had gone missing and that there was nothing to do but pray. Basil Hume prayed for a bit. Then the situation became too much for him. He went out, got hold of a car, drove to Gruyère and took charge of the search. Eventually, one man was brought back dead, the other alive. Hume helped to arrange the funeral of the man who had died. The other man went on to become a professor of philosophy at Cambridge. Hume remembered to go back to the village and reward all the rescue-helpers with cigarettes.

It is one of the many illuminating stories in this wholly sympathetic biography by the political writer Anthony Howard.