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Peter Anson, Painter and Friend of Neglected SEAMEN

[ABOVE: The Moray Firth as seen from the North Sea—Mehlauge / [CC-BY-SA 4.0] Wikimedia]


FROM A YOUNG AGE Frederick Charles Anson was in love with the sea. Perhaps this is not surprising considering he was born at Southsea, a resort beach near Portsmouth, one of England’s great seafaring centers. His family moved frequently, but wherever they lived, his mother took him on the water, which she loved. His earliest memory, he said, was seeing a ship on which his father, a rear admiral, was arriving home. Intrigued by sailor life, Anson haunted docks and wharves even as a boy, and made his first attempts to draw and paint sea life. He became a watercolorist whose prominent themes were fishing boats and fisherfolk. He also painted the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland, his mother’s land of origin.

From 1908 to 1910 he attended an architecture school but, drawn by his love of solitude and the sea, he left to become an Anglican Benedictine oblate on the Isle of Caldey to see if his vocation was to be a monk. Three years later, the entire community converted to Catholicism. One of the ministries of the Benedictines was to pray for seafarers. Anson felt increasing concern for the souls of Catholic seamen. 

Meanwhile, Mary Scott-Murray, an invalid who had been carrying on a ministry of prayer, letter writing, and provision of Catholic literature to seamen, prayed a Novena (nine consecutive days of intense prayer), petitioning for a helper. She considered her prayer answered by the arrival of Anson on this day, 31 July 1917, when he joined her in the Apostleship of Prayer.

The answer to her prayer would result in more than either she or Anson expected at the time. He eventually took over and expanded the work. 

Because Anson struggled with poor health, his abbot sent him late in 1919 to Fort Augustus, a Scottish abbey, hoping the change would help him. In 1920 Anson generated enormous interest through an article calling for a Catholic work among sailors. He had already become acquainted with Arthur Gannon who sought to revive a ship-visiting work founded earlier by Daniel Shields in Glasgow. Shields returned from an assignment in South Africa and joined with Gannon and Anson to extend the work. Gannon, Shields, and a few others held a meeting in October 1920 that sometimes is called the start of the Apostleship of the Sea. Anson, however, had a larger vision. 

Soon Anson was volunteering as an “extra hand” on boats, reasoning that he needed to know first-hand the life, working conditions, and psychology of seaman if engaging them in a larger work was to be effective. In the early morning of 6 July 1921—the last day of the Octave of St. Peter and Paul—while steering a poaching vessel, he mentally drafted the rules and constitution of the Apostleship of the Sea. He put his ideas on paper and obtained the approval of Catholic leaders. Shields was resistant, feeling his own work would be overshadowed. However he overcame his reservations to join Anson, Gannon, and a few others in the Apostleship’s first meeting on 11 October 1921. Largely run by laypeople, the Apostleship set up hostels, visited ships, and engaged sailors with religious teaching and entertainment. It insisted Catholic sailors undertake work among their fellow crew members. Anson made it his mission to forge connections between the Apostleship and existing Catholic maritime ministries world-wide.

Anson never took vows as a Benedictine monk. His abbot recognized he was not cut out for the restrictions of a monastery and released him. While visiting Italy in 1924, Anson entered into the process of becoming a Franciscan tertiary and took the name “Peter” by which he is now known. He had already left the Apostleship of Prayer, but for several years continued his association with the Apostleship of the Sea, attending its annual conferences from time to time. He was named Honorary Organizing Secretary.

Much of his focus to the end of his life would be on writing and art. His best known books are Fishing Boats and Fisherfolk on the East Coast of Scotland and How to Draw Ships. He traveled extensively, especially to ports, capturing the everyday lives of seafarers in his watercolors and books. Anson opened his home on Moray Firth to local seamen for over a decade. While staying at a Scottish monastery near the sea, he died at age 86. The Apostleship he inspired was renamed “Stella Maris” in 2020 and remains the primary ministry of the Catholic Church to seafarers around the world. 

—Dan Graves

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