Annoying the Vicar of Withernwick

St. Alban's Church, Withernwick

"Local affairs at Withernwick do not, generally speaking, present a very fruitful topic of discourse," a Victorian observer wrote. The village is not but three miles from the North Sea in East Yorkshire. When the Rev. Walter Welch came to the vicarage in 1891, there were fewer than 400 souls about, and minus the dissenters, that made for a small congregation at St. Alban's church. 

The locals certainly got "summat" to chat about on 11 May 1900. Mr. Welch, with two of his young sons, was out in the carriage for a Friday drive. From the opposite direction came a horse-drawn coal lorry driven by Alfred Nightingale, who was also the church sexton. As they passed, Nightingale began shouting, employing the most explicit and vulgar terminology, demanding that the vicar stop - as the newspapers put it - "misconducting himself" with the good Mrs. Nightingale. As the vicar chirruped his horses and trotted away, Nightingale's curses continued behind them. A few days later, Jane Nightingale placed an ad in the Hull Daily Mail claiming that her husband had acted out of "wickedness & folly" and there was no truth to his accusation. Later that month, in a police court, Nightingale was charged with "annoying the vicar of Withernwick." Welch and his sons, Walter and Arthur, only teens, testified to the profane outburst they endured that day. The vicar insisted that he never had any improper relations with the man's wife. The attorney for Nightingale admitted everything but said his client acted "under great provocation." The whole town knew of the affair. Instead of a trumpery charge in police court, why hadn't the vicar filed a proper slander action. Because then the plentiful evidence of the truth of the allegation could be presented. The magistrates refused to hear that argument and fined the still fuming Nightingale £1 and ordered him to keep the peace. 

That October, Mr. Welch rather suddenly left Withernwick, reporting that he was suffering from an illness that "required recuperation in a more congenial clime." He died only two years later.

There is an excellent local website at withernwickvillage.co.uk

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Incapable of an Innocent Explanation - The troubles of a Lincolnshire curate.

St. Nicholas, Fulbeck

In one of those "advice to young curates" books that are now so much out of style, the newly fledged cleric was warned to avoid "that familiarity which so soon springs up between a young curate and some of the young women who 'go in' for church work." It was ever a delicate balance because an unmarried curate was also expected to "chat and flirt" with the village ladies lest he be thought aloof. 

Fresh from St. Peter's College at Cambridge, the Rev. Frank Darwin Chawner returned to his native Lincolnshire to accept his first assignment as curate in Fulbeck, a small farming village not too far from Grantham. He arrived at St. Nicholas Church in July of 1865. He was quickly accepted in the town's society. The son of a surgeon, Mr. Chawner became friendly with the local medico, Dr. Charles Smith, and his young wife. Within six months, however, Dr. Smith had banned the curate from his home. The very next day, Mrs. Smith decamped. The disconsolate husband was said to be indulgent to a fault and his divorce action was supported by nearly a dozen villagers. The Hare & Hounds pub seems to have been the base for a network of "spies" who swore to seeing Mrs. Smith and the curate walking arm-in-arm in "out of the way places." They were seen drinking brandy from the same glass! She was found "napping" in the curate's bedroom at the rectory. All of this, Dr. Smith's counsel argued, was “incapable of an innocent explanation.” Mrs. Smith made no defense; the Rev. Chawner - to his credit - did not try to argue that he was more seduced than seducer. He admitted that in his inexperience he had behaved with a great deal of impropriety but no adultery had occurred. Dr. Smith, of course, got his divorce. The young curate was long gone from Fulbeck, retreating to a chaplaincy in Stoke Newington. By August, Rev. Chawner was in bankruptcy court with debts of £600, most of that for legal bills. Certainly, it was an eventful first year in service to the Church of England.

The amours of Victorian curates were ever in the news. Clerical Errors - A Victorian Series, Volume 1 is now available for your smart phones and tablets at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk. 

A Vicar "on the Turf"

“A more sensational Leger ... has never been experienced in the whole history of the race,” the sporting papers declared in September 1874. Apology, the pre-race favourite in Doncaster, had been the subject of the wildest rumours: that she was lame and one or more legs had to be packed in ice the night previous. But, with "all of Lincolnshire" betting on her chances, she cantered to the post with twelve other horses. Three minutes later, charging from behind, Apology triumphed by a length and a half, “amidst a scene of the wildest excitement and enthusiasm.” Having earlier won the 1000 Guineas in May, the Coronation Stakes in June, and now adding the St. Leger, Apology became only the third filly to sweep the triple-crown for three-year olds. 

It was a signal achievement for Apology's owner, a mysterious "Mr. Launde." The attendant publicity, however, soon revealed that the champion horse was owned by the Rev. John William King, longtime vicar of St. Hybald's, Ashby-de-la-Launde. That a clergyman would be "on the turf" excited some comment and public debate to the point that the Bishop of Lincoln felt the need to administer a "smart rap with his episcopal crook." He publicly scolded the Rev. King for "bringing discredit on your sacred profession ... training racehorses for the turf, instead of devoting yourself entirely to the work to which you pledged yourself at your ordination." As for the sporting parson, the Rev. King was 82 and in extremely poor health (although tended to devotedly by his new wife in her late 20's!) He still took offense at the reprimand, demanding to know "what was so scandalous about improving the horses of this country?" King announced that he would be resigning all his church livings, "not under compulsion, but simply because I desire to live out the remainder of my days in peace.” 

The Rev. King died within the year and left his stables and Ashby Hall, a mansion well-stocked with the finest wines, to his youthful widow. 

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Illustration: Apology (wikipedia)

The Parable of the Mustard and Cress

Sydling St. Nicholas

Sydling St. Nicholas, in the remote folds of Dorset, seems an unlikely venue for one of the more curious clerical spats in the Victorian Church. During the local vicar's last illness, the Rev. George Whitehead, curate, had filled in. He proved popular enough to where he had hopes to succeed when the time came. But the appointment was up to the Warden and Fellows of Winchester College, an arrangement dating back to good old King Athelstan! Alas, Mr. Whitehead's CV was rather unimpressive. An ex-policeman, he'd taken his degree at St. Bees College – a Cumbrian institution that had the reputation of accepting those who didn’t quite have “the A levels” for Oxford or Cambridge. Thus word came from Winchester that the vicarage was to be presented to the Rev. William James Vernon BA, of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

Rev. Vernon was from distant Lancashire; Sydling was his first parish and things did not go well. Within the year, he began banging on about a conspiracy against him. Mr. Whitehead had only gone as far as Atherington, still a curate, but everywhere Mr. Vernon turned in Sydling, he saw Whitehead partisans. He produced a pamphlet charging the erstwhile curate with stealing from the tithes and taking more drink than was seemly. Finally, in his vicarage garden, where all the churchgoers would see it on their way into St. Nicholas, Mr. Vernon planted mustard and cress in such a way that, when it sprouted, the vegetation spelled out “WHITEHEAD IS A SCAMP.” Truth – the London based weekly that delighted in all clerical scandals, was delighted: “The last new thing in libel is decidedly quaint and beats chalking on the walls hollow."

It was, well, food for the press but Mr. Whitehead could not allow these attacks to stand. In 1877, at the Assizes in Dorchester, the Rev. Mr. Vernon was charged with “publishing defamatory libels.” The Lord Chief Justice of England – Lord Coleridge, presided. The law states that any injurious writing is libelous and is not limited to the printed word. Writing includes “every means of symbolizing language by alphabetic characters with every kind of implement, with any kind of pigment, on any kind of substance.” That would encompass the vicar’s scurrilous Sydling seedlings. 
  
Mr. Vernon - on advice of counsel - plead guilty. Lord Coleridge agreed, for “a more malignant libel he had never read.” He sentenced the Rev. Vernon to two months in the Dorset gaol. Vernon served his time and remained in Sydling for many more years but was so unpopular he usually employed a curate-in-charge. The so-called vegetable libel would be his legacy. The Gardener’s Chronicle, beloved by all tillers of the English soil, declared: 

This man may have been a clergyman, but he was no Christian; he may have had a garden, but he was no gardener. Mustard and Cress may be slightly pungent, but it is neither sour nor bitter, and in being made the instrument of libel has itself been grievously libeled.

A longer version of this story appeared in Dorset Life in 2010.
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Clergyman, Scholar, Murderer: The Rev. John Selby Watson

The Rev. John Selby Watson - a respected scholar and former longtime headmaster at the Stockwell School in South London - had a long and difficult married life. Even friends of Anne Selby-Watson described her as "always fretful." In October 1871, in his library at home, Rev. Watson beat her to death with the butt of a pistol. He dragged her body into a small closet, later telling a curious servant that the stains on the carpet were spilled port. 

The 67-year old cleric spent the next two days getting his affairs in order, leaving instructions for the disposal of his books and papers, including a translation of Valerius Flaccus "which I think deserves to be published." Then, he took to his bed with prussic acid, leaving a note: "In a fit of fury I have killed my wife. Often and often she has provoked me and I have had to restrain myself, but my rage overcame me and I struck her down." Selby-Watson was well-trained in the classics but not so much in chemistry; he survived the suicide try to be charged with murder. 

The brutal, calculated slaying cast "a distressing gloom over all thoughtful minds." The clergyman plead insanity, claiming a melancholia brought on by the loss of his job after 25 years. But a jury of Londoners proved unsympathetic and sentenced Selby-Watson to hang. The Home Secretary was besieged with appeals for mercy, many citing the murderer's age and scholarly accomplishments. The Times groused, "There are other murderers besides clergymen ... if extremity of temptation be once admitted as a bar to execution, a dangerous hope might be opened to criminals," while The Spectator decried "sickly sympathy... not creditable to English moral feeling." In plainer language, The Globe inquired, "Would the same sympathy have been felt if a Mr. Mick Connor had knocked his wife's brains out with a pick-axe?" Nonetheless, Selby-Watson's sentence was soon commuted to life. 

He died in his hammock in prison on the Isle of Wight in 1884. The Rev. John Selby Watson makes The Dictionary of National Biography with the unique listing of "author and murderer." I highly recommend Beryl Bainbridge's fictional study of this case, Watson's Apology. Murders by clergyman were (thankfully) rare. In 1887, an insane curate murdered his vicar in Suffolk. 

Illustration: The Penny Illustrated Paper

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The Cawston Rectory Scandal

The Norfolk crowd gathered early on the morning of 15 July 1890, filling all the available space in the Town Hall in Aylsham. The Rev. Theodore Henry Marsh, since 1855, the rector of St. Agnes, Cawston, was to answer a "shocking" charge brought by the National Vigilance Association, a late-Victorian group dedicated to "the repression of criminal vice and public immorality." 

Sophia Barrett - in the parlance of the day - was deaf and dumb. She claimed that Marsh had fathered her child born in May. In the witness box, through a sign-reader, Sophia "with great force" pointed to the rector when asked to indicate the father of her son. The lawyer for the NVA stated that Sophia had been seduced both in the rectory greenhouse and parlour. She could not cry out nor tell anyone what happened. The rector had been giving her sixpence a week but when he heard that a charge was to be brought, he cut her off. 

The Rev. Mr. Marsh was questioned for two hours. He admitted living apart from his wife. He had known his accuser for some time and had tried to help her in many ways. He arranged for her to attend the Brighton Institution for the Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Children. But she led a much troubled young life and had been in and out of the workhouse. He stopped giving her the sixpence because he disapproved of her general conduct. "Before God," he denied paternity of her son. A series of rectory servants and gardeners testified they never saw or suspected anything. His lawyer wondered whether anyone could believe that a blameless village clergyman of 35 years service would risk all to misconduct himself in an open greenhouse or his own parlour. There were the usual attacks on the accuser's character: a young man named Bloomfield, another workhouse regular, was squarely in the frame as the likely father. After six hours, the local magistrates retired to discuss, returning to dismiss the charges. 

The Rev. Marsh remained in Cawston rectory until his death in 1905, to be succeeded by his son until 1933. 
Illustration: www.cawstonparish.info

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The Vicar of Cowley and "a Most Unpleasant Enquiry"

Cowley St. James

The Rev. George Moore arrived as vicar of Cowley St. James in east Oxford in the late 1870's and remained for more than a half-century. A character he was. While still a young man and new to Cowley, he ran for a seat on the board of Poor Law Guardians. He later accused his opponent - a schoolmaster named Barling - of spreading a story that Moore's wife was keen to divorce him for fathering a child with a household servant. The slander trial was heard in 1881. Moore admitted that he and his wife lived apart - she preferring the seaside "for her health." His own health was not strong - he suffered from rheumatism to the point that he acknowledged that a female servant regularly helped him to dress (and undress?) and brushed his hair. But there were no improper intimacies and it was certainly not true that he had a child with any domestic. A three-day trial in Oxford - a "most unpleasant enquiry" - ended with a verdict for Rev. Moore but with an insulting award of a lone farthing for his damaged reputation. Moore fought on to the Appeal Court in London to win a new trial on the grounds of his "unreasonably small" damages. Forestalling a second trial, Barling issued an apology and agreed to pay an unstated but certainly larger amount. Moore was a celebrated figure in greater Oxford for a long time. After his wife died (see, she was poorly), Moore was rather openly seen in the company of his longtime housekeeper, Emily Durrant*. When the vicar died in 1928, he received an "amazing" funeral and is buried in the churchyard.
* Information courtesy of the Cowley Team Ministry.
Photo: geograph.org.

The vicar of Bracknell faced similar accusations. His story and more can be found in Clerical Errors - A Victorian Series, Volume 1, now available at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk