Douglas Woodruff


John Douglas Woodruff was the editor of the Tablet and later chairman of the Catholic publishers Burns & Oates.

Biography

Douglas Woodruff was educated at Downside School and New College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a member of the Union's debating team; his lifelong friend Christopher Hollis was in the team as well, and they successfully toured the world. Oxford's professor, Maurice Bowra, suspected that already at college Woodruff "was a Roman Catholic of the proselytizing kind, who therefore represented an immediate threat to his own flock". Woodruff was a close and influential friend of Evelyn Waugh.
From 1936 to 1967 he was the editor of the Tablet, making the periodical the leading voice of English Catholicism, and from 1948 to 1962 he was the chairman of the Catholic publishers Burns & Oates. He was an expert and essayist on Hilaire Belloc. Woodruff first met Belloc in Oxford in the autumn of 1920, having been introduced to him because he had been a friend and contemporary of Louis Belloc at Downside School.
Woodruff was part of the Catholic right-wing, and, according to Martin Redfern, one of his employees at the Tablet, he wanted a clear separation between politics and religion. In Pope Paul's New Mass, Michael Davies introduced him as "probably England's most erudite layman".

Personal life

In 1933 he married Hon. Marie Immaculeé Antoinette Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, widely known as ‘Mia’ . She was the eldest child of Richard Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, 2nd Baron Acton and Dorothy Lyon.

Works

Douglas Woodruff Papers are preserved at the Georgetown University.