Rowing monk now leads abbey crew: Richard North witnesses a rare investiture as a former pupil and headmaster of a monastery school becomes an abbot

THE ROWING blazers were outnumbered by the monks' robes at yesterday's blessing of the Abbot of the Benedictine monastic community at Belmont, Hereford and Worcester, but it was a close-run thing.

Athleticism was in the air, as was a good deal of incense. The latter was swirling about in great puffs, as a sixth-former of Belmont Abbey School, staffed partly by the monks, wielded a long-chained thurible with a smoky cargo.

Father Mark, a former pupil and headmaster of the school, was invested as the 10th Abbot since Belmont was raised to an Abbey in 1920. The rare ceremony brings together Benedictine abbots and abbesses from throughout Britain. The Right Reverend Mark Jabale - his family is Egyptian - was reminded that he must rule in the spirit of St Benedict: he must not be dictatorial within his community, but rule by example.

His gorgeous ring, said the Metropolitan Archbishop of Cardiff, John Ward, 'is there on the hand almost like a daily examination of conscience'. Father Mark's hands are remarkable. Though they are pale like a scholar's (French was his subject at university in Switzerland), they are huge. They must have been useful in rugger, his game when he was a boy at the monastery school.

Later, he became a monk, joining the community straight from the sixth form - 'a thing we would never allow today' - and then a master. 'They needed someone to take over the rowing,' he says of the beginning of a career that was to make him famous. 'I knew nothing about rowing, so I read it up in books.' He did so to such effect that by the late 1970s he was coach to the Oxford Boat Race crew, victorious for several years in succession. And he coached the national lightweight coxless four to a world championship in 1979.

'It's one of the benefits of the monastic rule of obedience: you get given jobs you would never expect and discover talents you never suspected,' he said, adding on his success with rowing: 'I just knew what makes a boat run well in the water.'

As he prostrated himself and then knelt before the archbishop, the abbot, who is an absurdly youthful 60, was watched by one Belmont sixth-former who has just captained the four which last weekend won a prestigious race on the Boat Race course at Putney. Also present was David Riches, Master in Charge of the Water at Westminster School, himself an ex-pupil at Belmont and a rowing coach for the British Olympic team in Barcelona. He learnt his rowing from the abbot. When asked what he might have done if he had not become a monk, the new abbot replied: 'I wouldn't have taught.'

He says he enjoyed the early part of his 14 years as headmaster of the school, but at the sort of time another man might have looked around for a change of school, he stayed put, being anchored by his obedience to Belmont. He had, before deciding he had a vocation, considered the Navy, and even joining an accountancy firm ('I was quite good at maths').

The solemnities of the day over, there was a sunny team photograph on the lawn overlooking the Welsh hills, and the master of ceremonies for the service, Father Antony Tumelty, declared himself about ready for bed. Flu has been cutting a swathe through the county, but it had not stopped him guiding his abbot and the assembled clerics through the impressive ceremony.

The abbot, necessarily a busy man, is up at 4.30am and at his devotions not long after. But, as well as a place of prayer, Belmont is - or was - a great place for parties. The senior boys have been in the habit of attracting Hereford's teenagers in droves to their thrashes. Regrettably, the wrong type gatecrashed a recent one and, Father Tumelty says, it may have to be the last.

(Photograph omitted)