The abbey in exile

Architectural Review, The, August, 1997 by Charlotte Ellis

When Quarr Abbey church was consecrated in 1912, The Tablet commented: 'The new Abbey ... is built almost entirely of bricks, and is severely plain in style. The architect is Father Billot, one of the community, who received his architectural training in Paris, being a member of the Institut des Beaux-Arts before joining the Order'. Neither the misspelling of his name, nor his alleged membership of a non-existent 'Institut des Beaux-Arts', can have done much to improve Dom Paul Bellot's opinion of the English, whom he habitually described as 'savages'. He had trained at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1894-1901, as a student of Marcel Lambert, and he was proud of it. Fellow Lambert students had won the Grand Prix de Rome for architecture in 1901 and 1902(2) and it was at the atelier Lambert that Bellot had himself acquired the skills in architectural composition and draftsmanship, and the stylistic versatility, that earned him a steady series of 'first mentions' for the work he submitted to the school) He obtained the Diploma in December 1900 and, the following year, entered a public competition for the design of a church at Flers in Normandy with another Lambert student, Paul-Marie-Joseph Hulot (1876-1959).(4)

Paul Bellot had hoped to marry Hulot's sister, but she chose instead to become a Carmelite nun a decision that led him to abandon his budding career as an architect in Paris and to join the Benedictine monks of Solesmes in their exile on the Isle of Wight.(5) As a newly arrived novice, he was 'requistioned' by the monk-architect Dom Jules Mellet(6) for a few days in the autumn of 1902, to copy plans of the temporary timber-and-corrugated-iron church the latter had designed for the monastic community, and he probably imagined any future demands on his skills as an architect would be no less modest after he had taken his monastic vows in 1904. But, in March 1906, he was summarily dispatched to the Netherlands by his Abbot, to supervise the construction of a Benedictine monastery at Oosterhout, near Breda.(7) No doubt it was the efficiency with which Dom Bellot accomplished the first building phase there in 1906-1907 that prompted the Abbot of Solesmes to give him the task of designing the new Abbey at Quarr for his mother house in 1907.

In deference to local building practice, the monasteries at Quarr and Oosterhout were both built principally of load-bearing brickwork - though for reasons of economy, most of the bricks used were cheap Belgian imports from Zandvoorde near Ostend. As Dom Bellot had been taught little or nothing about brickwork at the Ecole des BeauxArts, he stopped off on his outward journey to Oosterhout in 1906, to collect such technical information as his father, the architecte-verificateur Paul-Emile Bellot, had been able to find on the subject in Paris. In the course of the next 12 months, he divided his time between the drawing-board and the building site and learnt a very great deal, not least that bricklayers are not much inclined to read plans. He kept a close eye on them and, when necessary, placed the bricks himself, to demonstrate his design intentions.(8) His father sent him a constant stream of technical tips through the post, on such matters as down-pipe dimensions and gutter flashings, and travelled twice to Oosterhout to inspect the progress of the works. What is more, it was to his father in Paris that Dom Bellot sent his working drawings, to have prints made for the contractor at Oosterhout - and Bellot pere did not hesitate to let his son know of any errors in the construction details that caught his eagle eye.

In the beginning

The first phase - the cloister, enclosed on two sides by ranges containing the Chapter House and the Refectory, was completed in April 1907 and, soon after the monks of Saint-Paul-de-Wisques had moved to Oosterhout from Belgium, Dom Bellot returned to the Isle of Wight, to make a start on the new Quarr Abbey. Whereas the Oosterhout monastery was built on a green-field site for a small community (a total of 21 monks' cells was envisaged at the outset), a mid-nineteenth-century villa had to be adapted and extended for the use of 100 monks in little more than a year at Quarr.

The monks of Solesroes purchased Quarr Abbey House, near Ryde, in May 1907. Built in the 1840s near the ruins of the mediaeval Quarr Abbey, to receive a few guests in comfort, the house was nowhere near big enough for 100 monks. It was Elizabethan - or Post-Reformation - in style, the garden front overlooked the Solent to the north, and the south-facing entrance front was screened from a service court by a projecting west wing. The strategy adopted by Dom Bellot was to eclipse the house and to assert the presence of the new Abbey. The projecting west wing was demolished, retained buildings were adapted for secondary purposes, such as the kitchens and the noviciate, and the principal elements of the new Abbey - the Refectory, Library, Chapter House and Sacristy were contained in purpose-built ranges organised round a quadrangular cloister placed hard against the original entrance front. Building was begun in June 1907 and was sufficiently advanced for the whole community to move in - albeit 'unpeu dans l'improvisation d'un chantier', before the lease expired at Appuldurcombe in June 1908. Only the Abbey church, the guest-house and parlours were reserved for later building phases and, in the meantime, Dom Mellet's 'Iron Church' was transported to Quarr and re-erected on the future cloister garth at a cost of [pounds]488/6/0d.(9)