As a young man he was involved with H. D. C. Pepler in craft printing, before testing his vocation first of all with the Dominicans, whom he left shortly before joining the Royal Air Force during World War II.
[1] In a subsequent career as editor, publisher, printer and writer, he commemorated and wrote up a number of lesser literary lights: Arthur Machen, Frederick Rolfe, Montague Summers, Marc-André Raffalovich, John Gray, Olive Custance, Henry Williamson.
Yet in other ways Sewell seems to have been curiously non-condemnatory in his evaluations of people and could also be extremely detached in assessing the contributions of those of other points of view or lifestyle, not least the Communist Harry Pollitt, whose oratory he praised, and Christine Keeler, with whom he struck up a friendship.
Sewell notably criticised the treatment of Stephen Ward by the authorities during the Profumo affair of 1963, and was an opponent of nuclear weapons, finding himself, in his words, "at odds with a red hat" on account of his membership of the radical Catholic peace movement PAX.
At this point, the monastery was the private residence of Helen Davies, granddaughter of both Hilary Pepler and of Eric Gill, but by Sewell's own admission, he went there because he had been informed he was no longer "persona grata" in the diocese in which he had worked, even if the suspension of his faculties to preach and hear confessions was quickly rescinded as uncanonical.