Remembering…Aylwin Tyndal-Atkinson OP
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The son of an Anglican clergyman, Fr Aelwin Tindal-Atkinson was born in Zurich in 1896, and was brought up in England. After leaving Lancing College, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and at the end of the First World War, he studied at Oxford where he became a Catholic. He went as a seminarian to Fribourg, but decided to offer himself to the English Dominicans.
He received the habit in 1923, made his profession on 10th November 1924 and was ordained priest on 2nd June 1928. By the following year, Fr Aelwin was to be one of the original members of the new Blackfriars community in Oxford. Although it was originally intended that he continue studies, he went in 1929 to teach in the Dominican boarding school at Laxton Hall, Northamptonshire. For ten years he was in charge of the liturgical life of the school and for the last five of those also in charge of the boys’ religious development.
Academically, his concern was to resurrect European and Christian culture from its ‘museum status’, and to educate in mind and emotion a generation of integrated human beings as the “living stones” for a new Jerusalem.
He became a military chaplain at the outbreak of the Second World War and for most of it was the senior chaplain in Scotland where he won much respect. In 1945 he was elected prior of Oxford and three months later, provincial of the English Province. The following year, at the invitation of the Master General, he became a member of his council with the title ‘Provincial of Scotland’ and so he presided as vicar general of the province at the elective chapter before proceeding to Rome. As well as being a member of the council there he was also for a term Prior of Santa Sabina. In 1957 he left Santa Sabina and became a penitentiary at St Mary Major’s where he stayed until his retirement in 1974.
Shortly after his return to England he died very suddenly in an accident in London, on 4th December 1974, aged 78 with 50 years of profession and 46 of priesthood.
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A Website Visitor
I was named after Father Aelwin whom they knew in Edinburgh in the Second World War
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Aylwin Tindal- Atkinson’s father, the ‘Anglican clergyman’, was Rev. William Roffe Tindal-Atkinson (14 August 1850 – 17 December 1928). He was Permanent British Chaplain at Zurich, Switzerland, from 1891 to 1898. He retired in 1918, having served as the first Vicar of St. Andrew’s church, Burgess Hill. The report of his death and funeral in the Mid Sussex Times for 25 December 1928 noted he was ‘buried in the same grave his second wife. The rites were according to the Church of Rome, into which [the] deceased was received three months ago, and they were conducted by Father Aylwin Tindal-Atkinson (a son)’. Aylwin Tindal-Atkinson’s mother was Emily Marion Tindal-Atkinson, W. R. Tindal-Atkinson’s second wife, ‘a daughter of Dr. Cockcroft, of Masham, Yorkshire’, who died on 14 October 1904, aged 39.