Sometimes a confrontation with violent intent is a foul deed and little else: a matter of instant enmity or the culmination of a long rankling hatred. But, at times, history throws up a story that, while it has extreme violence, also has a streak of the bizarre running through it.
Such is the case of a rough and hot-tempered fight that took place in a small village schoolroom. North Kelsey in the last decade of the nineteenth century was a tiny place. Even today, it is a small village, just a few miles south of Brigg. But the size of a place is no guarantee that things will not get out of hand. They did just that one day in 1892 when the vicar, the Reverend Curry, set about the schoolmaster, Mr Ralphs, actually in the school classroom, and in front of the pupils. The local journalist had to admit that he felt ‘deeply pained’ at this particular scrap. But this was no light show of temper and a tantrum. In modern terms, it was an explosion of stress-related feelings, but there was also a deep aggression underneath.
As with most serious assaults, the catalyst does not seem significant when we look with hindsight. Mr Ralphs had been allowed to have a school photograph taken, with permission of the School Board. But this was the last thing that Curry was going to allow on this fateful day. He spoke to the letter of the law and insisted that in his capacity as Vicar he could give the orders until mid-morning. Ralphs’ response was to aim to take the children out onto the road for the picture, and this was the spark that ignited the row.
The class were commanded to stay where they were. The vicar was then pushed into action when, after bolting one door and saying that none should leave the room, Ralphs opened another door and that was the final straw. Curry leapt across the room, slammed the door on the poor man’s arm, and then held him fast. Poor Ralphs shouted for the boys to help him, and this led to the unseemly sight of a crowd of boys pulling their churchman off, as you would a rabid dog in a fight.
When the door was opened and the boys let go, Curry was still not finished; he grabbed the teacher and swung him round, thumping his body heavily against a wall and then onto some desks. This led to the climax, as the vicar chased after the teacher and took him by the throat, digging in his knuckles and seizing him in a tight hold. The children were taking the opportunity to escape, and when Ralphs wrestled free, he led the last few scholars out into the road, leaving Curry inside.
The amazing fact about the relationship at the basis of the fracas is that Ralphs had been teaching there for six years, and on a voluntary basis. It appears that, as Ralphs was teaching religious education, there was a difference of opinion somewhere, either on teaching methods or on dogma. Ralphs’ arm was severely injured, yet at the hearing (informal, before action was decided on) the vicar claimed he had never seen the teacher’s arm across the doorway. Either he was in a crazy rage or something close to envy and spite had driven him to act after years of enmity.
There is a very modern feel to the consequences: the National Union of Elementary Teachers took up the case and it went to the courts. Curry was not punished, and we would use the phrase ‘it all blew over.’ A personality defect was at the core. But the matter did not end there. A heated correspondence followed, and it is clear that the vicar was well-liked by his parishioners. ‘A Churchman’ sprang to his defence a week after, and wrote that this was another case of attacking the feudal spirit. He said, ‘There are villages where the squire still exercises his autocratic will…Has the reverend Vicar of North Kelsey no defence? Is this another case of clerical oppression?’ The man had been dismayed that the story had not been developed more in the intervening two days since the assault.
Unfortunately for the moral issue at the heart of the events, it was local election time the next week, and the violence was useful to certain conservative factions. What no-one at the time thought worthy of mention is what might have been put in the minds of the children as they witnessed this?
The research of local historian, A J Kerswill has unearthed more details about the vicar. There had been a small school built on the moor in 1872, with a cottage for the teacher, but there had been difficulties in finding any staff, despite Reverend Curry’s attempts to find ‘A mistress … who must be willing to sit for a certificate.’ He wanted ‘A married woman whose husband would work in the neighbourhood.’ But by 1882 a school inspector, Mr J Wilson, wrote to Curry to ask why the school had been discontinued. He noted that when he had been there last he heard ‘one girl of about twelve saying that she had not been to school for three years.’
It is not difficult to see why there had always been problems accommodating the children of North Kelsey in a schoolroom during Reverend Curry’s time there. If the clergyman had been charged, he would undoubtedly have appeared before a Consistory Court in Lincoln, as the recent Clergy Discipline Act of this same year would have meant that internal matters within the church would have been dealt with by the Bishop. A few years later, in 1904, a vicar from Carrington was defrocked by this process, but that had been for a sexual misdemeanour.