| Admin_History | Fr Peter Blake SJ was born on 25 August 1903, and died on 6 June 1981. Born in Liverpool, he was the eldest of seven children, with four sisters and two brothers. He went to school at St. Francis Xavier's College in Liverpool, where he was a keen footballer, boy scout, and singer. On 7 September 1920 at age seventeen he joined the novitiate at Roehampton and entered the English Province of the Society of Jesus, and from 1927 to 1931 he did his regency in Liverpool and was ordained on 6 September 1934. After tertianship he was appointed to teach at Preston, then he became chaplain at Winckley Square. During the Second World War, he served as a chaplain for the R.A.F. from April 1940 until he was discharged in 1946, and he became the Superior at Loyola Hall, Rainhill, Liverpool. He was at Loyola Hall for a total of twenty-four years, from 1946 till 1970, and was responsible for improvements to its facilities such as a new chapel and forty extra rooms for retreatants. During this time at Loyola Hall he ran Leadership Courses, established by Mgr Harry Beauchamp, providing spiritual retreats for R.A.F servicemen and later for industry men too, and for this work he received an O.B.E. He also gave retreats on R.A.F. stations all over the world. At sixty years old he suffered a heart attack, but continued to work and in 1970 he joined the Church staff at Farm Street, where he worked for eleven years, and also continued his retreat and mission work. He collapsed and died on 6 June 1981, apparently of a coronary thrombosis. |