Constitution and Rules

[1922]

Private Collection

[Ditchling, Sussex: Douglas Pepler]

In February 1913, Gill was received into the Catholic Church. In 1916 Pepler also became a convert. In 1921 Gill, Pepler, and Desmond Chute founded The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a community of craftsmen who had to be, according to the constitution and rules on display, ‘practising Catholics’, ‘earning their living by creative manual work’, and ‘owners of their tools and of their work’. Envisaged as an integrated artistic community, and for Gill an attempt ‘to make a cell of good living in the chaos of the world’, it actually enabled extreme license. For Gill, the self-designated paterfamilias, sex was an expression of the Creator’s love. He played out relationships with his wife, lovers, and as recorded in his diaries and documented in Fiona MacCarthy’s biography on Gill, his sister and daughter.