Dom Columba Thorne (centre) with fellow Army chaplains
Dom Columba Thorne, who has died aged 101, dispensed vital moral and medical aid as an Anglican chaplain at the ill-fated Arnhem operation in September 1944.
After landing by glider in a potato field, Acting Captain the Reverend Selwyn Thorne slept his first night in a ditch, then helped to set up a first-aid post in the parsonage of a Calvinist church, outside the Dutch village of Oosterbeek. He attended the gun crews of three nearby batteries, and arranged for the burial of a glider pilot whose legs had been blown off while walking past.
As the situation worsened, and it became impossible to move serious casualties two miles away to St Elisabeth’s Hospital at Arnhem, the house provided medical service for the British force’s entire southern perimeter. Wounded men lay in every room, in every corridor, even under the stairs. Blood smeared the walls. Windows were smashed. Furniture was thrown out.
The bespectacled padre, still dapper in his dog collar, conducted burials at dawn and calmly took on the role of the doctor’s right-hand man. When a shell narrowly missed Thorne as he carried a glass of water across a room, he was too busy to feel fear, but recalled later how he had wished that God would stop the noise.
As the walls shook from the hurricane of explosions outside, the local minister’s wife watched the kindly little chaplain with the curly hair and glasses ferociously setting about the task of lavatory cleaning. “A captain and a chaplain doing such work?” she thought, as half a dozen privates looked on. “You should have had five years of German 'discipline’.”
When the minister’s wife came up from the cellar after giving her five children supper, Thorne handed her his small Bible, saying: “I have no time to read to the boys. Will you do it for me?” In a scene poignantly recaptured in the film A Bridge Too Far, she walked through the rooms reciting in English Psalm 91: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.”
As a King Tiger tank approached the house and slowly started to train its enormous gun barrel on it, Thorne rushed outside with the medical orderly Bombardier “Scan” Bolden, who waved a Red Cross flag while roaring in ripe language that a regimental aid post was being attacked. A German officer arrived to say the post would be spared if they removed a machine-gun firing higher up the building, and the vehicle drove away. Afterwards the minister’s wife and another chaplain could not remember any machine-gun, but Thorne was adamant that there was one as this was the only time he could recall giving a direct order.
When the retreat was ordered after a week, there was little food left and medical supplies had run out. At the request of the operation’s commander Major-General Roy Urquhart, the chaplains and medical teams remained with the wounded, who were moved to the St Elisabeth Hospital at Arnhem. It was there that Thorne saw an unconscious Jesuit chaplain, Father Bernard Benson, who had lost an arm. When Benson died, the attending doctor said: “I think you should have this”, and gave Thorne the dead priest’s crucifix.
As a High Churchman, familiar with the works of St Francis de Sales and Abbot Marmion, Thorne already had an interest in Catholicism, which crystallised in conversations at the hospital with Père Pailler, later archbishop of Rouen. But when Thorne asked to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, the French priest said this would leave Anglican soldiers without any spiritual sustenance, and told him to wait until he returned home; he could then visit Downside Abbey in Somerset, where the monks would sort him out.
After a harrowing journey in which prisoners and chaplains found themselves next to an anti-aircraft gun train firing at Spitfires overhead, they arrived at the prison camp Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel, near Hanover. Thorne and the senior chaplain Major Gedge were kept busy tending Americans and Canadians arriving from the east with severe frostbite, as well as conducting Sunday services. The problem with burials, which had previously been run by the French chaplains, was solved by an RSM in the Parachute Regiment who ordered everyone, including German guards, to attend all funerals.
On arriving back in England after six months, Thorne explained his dilemma to the Chaplain General, obtained six weeks’ leave, and visited his mother. He then went down to Downside, where Abbot Siegbert Trafford genially greeted him: “Are they looking after you? Stay as long as you like.”
The son of a solicitor, Selwyn Thorne was born on March 1 1914 at Southend-on-Sea and went to Lindisfarne College in North Wales before going up to Keble College, Oxford, where he read English and switched to Theology. He studied for Holy Orders at Cuddesdon, then was ordained by the Bishop of Chelmsford, and served as a curate at Woodford Green and Becton before being asked to volunteer to be a military chaplain.
After three months training with the Grenadier Guards, Thorne was transferred to the 1st Battalion, Light Regiment, Royal Artillery.
Following his reception into the Catholic Church and discharge from the Army, Thorne trained for the Catholic priesthood at St Edmund’s, Ware. He served as a curate at Brook Green, London, for several years before returning to Downside, where he joined the community with the name Columba.
In the succeeding decades, he said little about Arnhem, which he considered well depicted in A Bridge Too Far, though he could not recall any crosses over the graves of those he buried at dawn in the parsonage garden.
Only after he had turned 90 did his brethren learn what he had done when he donated Father Benson’s crucifix to the museum of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department; and the Chaplain General attended his 100th birthday party.
Dom Columba spent 15 years as a chaplain to the nuns of St Mary’s Abbey at Colwich, Staffordshire, where visitors were surprised to find the man they had seen planting flowers in the garden later celebrating Mass.
A man with a dry sense of humour, he would check any inclination to speak uncharitably by saying “Down Fido, down Fido” – while waving down an imaginary dog. Earlier in his career Dom Columba had taught English and conducted religious instruction at the school.
He was nicknamed “Bert” by the boys in his class, who were puzzled as to why a short, quiet monk with a stammer was chosen to serve as chaplain to the military prison at Shepton Mallet.
Fr Columba was made of sterner stuff than they realised. Even before the liturgical changes of the Vatican Council were introduced he celebrated Mass facing his congregation. This, he would say, was so that he could keep his captive audience under observation.
Dom Columba Thorne, March 1 1914, died August 24 2015
A great loss to the world
