William Purcell Witcutt

Who is William Purcell Witcutt?

William Purcell Witcutt was a notable British religious minister, folklorist and author.

Witcutt was the son of a Staffordshire merchant tailor. He studied law at The University of Birmingham, England, and around 1928 his interest in G.K. Chesterton's anti-industrial theory of Distributism led him to become a prominent contributor to Chesterton's G. K.'s Weekly publication, where he was a strong critic of the theory of the Leisure State. His interest in Distributism continued into the 1930s, as evidence by his article "William Morris: distributist" in American Review in 1934, and he appears to have been a Distributist at least until around the outbreak of war in 1939. His 46-page pamphlet The Dying Lands: a fifty years' plan for the distressed areas appeared under the imprint of the Distributist League of London in 1937, and offered a radical agrarian solution to the problem of mass unemployment. This line of thought eventually led him into the Roman Catholic church, and on converting to Catholicism -sometime in the early 1930s - he obtained a dispensation to void the usual two-year probationary period, immediately undertaking a seven-year seminary training at New Oscott to become a Catholic priest. On graduating he was sent to serve in a slum parish in nearby Birmingham. He tells in his spiritual autobiography Return to Reality, of how his lecture on The Reformation and the corrupt nature of many medieval Catholic priests inadvertently led to his being 'banished' to serve in the most remote parts of the diocese. He thus became a parish priest in the humble rural town and hinterlands of Leek in North Staffordshire, and then during the Second World War also served at St. Annes, Wappenbury in Warwickshire. He eventually converted back to the Church of England, which was a notable and controversy-stirring move at the time - his re-conversion even merited an article in the American Time magazine. He then became a high-church Anglican curate in the working class area of East Ham, London, and later on served as the Rector of Foulness Island a short while after it had been badly affected by the great North Sea Flood.