These days, schools and universities enjoy sending out yearly bulletins to their alumni: it’s partly an exercise in reminding former students of happy times and partly a way of raising funds. Neither pursuit is reprehensible. If such updates had been the fashion during earlier centuries, Stonyhurst would have been able to produce a very impressive list of update recipients on the other side of the Atlantic.
Before the forced move to the Ribble Valley in 1794, back when Stonyhurst was its continental forerunner at St Omer, all manner of future luminaries who would help to shape America passed through its classrooms. The founder of Georgetown and America’s first Catholic bishop, John Carroll, was an old boy, as was his father, Charles, who got to sign the Declaration of Independence. Aedanus Burke, a Galway boy, went on from St Omer to become a rather puzzling figure during America’s revolutionary wars. He was all for tearing down the “unnatural distinctions of nobleman and commons” and talked of the “new republic ... launching into the immense ocean of future times”. Still, he was far from pleased with the precise details of the US Constitution. He did his bit, however, and became a leading jurist in South Carolina – the place where he and his militia comrades had attempted to batter the Brits. And let’s not forget Thomas Lloyd, who made life a good deal easier for generations of secretaries and journalists by inventing American shorthand.
