Monday is parson’s holiday.

                    DEAN SWIFT

 

‘I am parshial to ladies if they are nice I suppose it is my nature. I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it but cant be helped anyhow.’

MR. SALTEENA—The Young Visiters

‘WHAT is truth?’ asked jesting Pilate. What indeed! might have replied that nimble divine, Harold Francis Davidson, M.A., Rector of Stiffkey with Morston, whose application of the truth as it appeared to him was to provide a ribald anti-clerical entertainment throughout the whole of 1932, the year of the yo-yo. When human conduct reaches a certain point the ordinary laws cannot apply. Where one insists upon applying them there is set in motion a comic process in which retribution slips on its own banana-skin, as it were. For Church and State to conspire together so elaborately to exact a penalty from the Rector was a hopeless gesture from the very beginning. That much is plain now. They might as well have tried to lasso a Chagall cow and drag it from its pasture among the stars. The Anglican Church is an elastic institution and had it not been for a little Miss Judas it is doubtful if the Rector of Stiffkey’s stretching a few points would ever have been noticed. The parish was a different matter. When the storm broke, the village may have been staggered by the fury of it but not at all surprised that there should have been a storm eventually. Villages know.

Stiffkey, which the locals call ‘Stewky’, is a pretty place near the Norfolk coast, and its only claim to fame before 1932 was the fine house built by Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal to Queen Elizabeth I. The Rector was inducted into the living there in 1906 when he was thirty-one years old, and he had lived with his wife and five children in Stiffkey Rectory, a handsome structure, for twenty-six years before the extraordinary events of 1932 caused him to remove himself to a barrel in Blackpool.

The Reverend Mr. Davidson’s downfall—he would never have it so—was girls. Not a girl, not five or six girls even, not a hundred, but the entire tremulous universe of girlhood. Shingled heads, clear cheeky eyes, nifty legs, warm, blunt-fingered workaday hands, small firm breasts and, most importantly, good strong healthy teeth, besotted him. A single human life was all too short for him to savour such a universe and his awareness of this allowed him to encounter at least a thousand girls during the twenties alone. And this on his own estimate, not his detractors’. Quite early on in his sacred career he hit upon an exciting solution to what otherwise might have been an insoluble problem; he would make girls his special ministry. And so he set about it with a single-mindedness which in any other circumstances should have brought him a deanery.

Sunday found him bustling into the pulpit of St. John with St. Mary, Stiffkey. Monday found him rushing to Wells-next-the-Sea to catch the London train. If either he or the Church itself had thought that dull Stiffkey was a safe address for an Agapet, a reliable exile for an early twentieth-century Herrick, they must have quite forgotten that love will find a way. The most efficient way back to Paradise, or Piccadilly, as the prosecution called it, was by the London-North-Eastern line and the Rector took it with alacrity. He went to London first thing Monday morning and returned to Stiffkey last thing Saturday night, not just often, but regularly every week for years and years.

The next thing about the Rector, his kind of girl, as it were, can be partly explained by his times. He was born in 1875 when Mr. Gladstone was picking up fallen women on the Duke of York’s Steps, to take them back to Mrs. Gladstone, soup and concern. A child of the rectory himself and related to twenty-seven other clergymen, he knew that bourgeois churchmanship and fundamental Christian ethics took care to have nothing in common which might cause embarrassment. The Rector sought to remedy this, to lessen the gap, as it were. His error, or one of his errors—there were so many—was to see every young girl from fifteen onwards on the skids, and being torn between preventing her from falling any further and from rescuing her when she had fallen as far as a girl can tumble. Eventually, his attitude seemed to be, let them fall if they must. And if they don’t, give them a little shove. What was there to worry about? Most of them were so low already that they wouldn’t be able to fall very far and, anyway, where in the world would they find charity like that of the unfortunate sisterhood? Good girls knew where they were at once with the little rector from the word go, and bolted. Bad girls sank back into the sleazy bed-sitters he discovered for them, heartily relieved that there was nothing to fear, such as salvation, for instance. Styling himself the ‘Prostitutes’ Padre’ and working out a plausible analogy between his vocation and the Magdalen’s repentance, the Rector of Stiffkey began to lead a life in London which passed all comprehension.

London is all things to all men but even allowing for this there can be few men who saw London as Harold Davidson saw it. As the train fled from Norfolk in the small hours of Monday morning, his heart would soar, his blood would race. As Romford and Ilford flashed by, he might fancy he already heard it, the siren song of the Nippies, the ineffable harmonies created by starched linen crackling over young breasts and black-stockinged calves in chubby conference just below the hem of the parlourmaid’s frock. As Stratford disappeared, an inexhaustible plethora of A.B.C.s, Express Dairies and Lyons’ teashops would come sharply into focus and his eyes would grow dreamy at the thought that he would soon be present in one of his marble-tabled temples where, all unbeknown to him, the staff knew him as ‘the mormon’.

Some people in London are blackballed at clubs or made persona non grata at courts and embassies, but the Rector of Stiffkey’s fate was to be turned away from teashops. He challenged this rule once by arriving at such a teashop with a bishop, but the bishop was served and he wasn’t. He was philosophical about this persecution; there were always rebuffs to reform and, mercifully, there were in the London of the twenties a quite unparalleled number of teashops. Moreover, the pavements between the teashops were agog with girls tottering along in shiny art silk stockings, their pretty baby faces clownish with cosmetics beneath the mysterious shadows of the cloche hat, their handbags not often containing more than two and sixpence, for times were hard. The Rector plunged into this ever-flowing girlish flood, intoxicated by its sweet cheap scent, not over-much worried by its skin but wild when spikily painted lips parted to reveal good white teeth. He was potty about teeth.

‘You said she had pretty hair, skin and teeth?’ asked the prosecution.

‘I never said skin,’ said the Rector.

Council for the Prosecution then looked at his notes and murmured, ‘You are quite right; you did not say skin.’

‘I know I am right,’ said the Rector in the tone of one who never erred in essentials. Skin meant nothing to him.

While in London he rarely, if ever, went to bed. All day and all night until it was time to hurry back to Stiffkey for Matins, he waded deeper and deeper into girlish streams. He spoke to them, smiled at them, kissed them and kept them, but muddled himself up so cosily between adoring them and saving them that the difference soon escaped him.

In late 1931 the girl of girls, Miss Rose Ellis, his proto-penitent from as far back as 1920, irrupted. There was a chain reaction of ingratitude and before his bishop or anyone else had taken the first step to investigate the scandalous nature of his life, the Rector began to defend himself against Miss Rose Ellis in the newspapers. The sensation was immense. So was the congregation at Stiffkey Church on Sunday, February 7th, 1932, when 500 people arrived to sing Evensong and hundreds more swarmed devotedly in the graveyard outside. They came on foot from miles around, by bicycle from Norwich and special excursion buses from places as far away as Bournemouth.

A week later Miss Rose Ellis made a public recantation. Eight glasses of port wine plied to her by a ruthless inquiry agent in a saloon bar had wrung these untruths from her. She was sorry and ashamed. But by this time the Rector had contracted with the Empire News to tell his version of the story and didn’t see why his chance of authorship should be lost just because Rose had changed her mind, and so he Told All. Friends and the bishop’s legal advisers hurried to beg him to say no more and to point out the folly of all this publicity, but they found him very divided on the subject. He had stood up in the pulpit at Stiffkey and seen a great multitude reaching from the lectern right out into wintry Norfolk itself and it struck him as an excellent opportunity to preach about love. He became exultant. He wrote more articles, preached more sermons, threw himself into the thing and became very famous.

The law and the Bishop of Norwich could not share these views and made legal history by prosecuting the Empire News, the Daily Herald and the Rector of Stiffkey for contempt of a consistory court. Thus, still before anything had occurred officially, the Stiffkey affair was already established as a cause célèbre. When the trial opened, on March 29th, Stiffkey was as notorious as Babylon and its incumbent as celebrated as Al Capone. With poetic justice and some consideration for what it might cost to bring scores of London girls to Norfolk, the Norwich Consistory Court decided to sit in the Great Hall of Church House, Westminster. The Rector, who had little sense of time and was to be conspicuously late for his manifold tribulations at every stage, dashed to his place a few minutes after the proceedings had begun. The charges, after so much juicy gossip, left everybody feeling distinctly cheated, though not for long.

The defendant had been guilty of immoral conduct for ten years from 1921 to 1931 with a woman named. He had made improper suggestions to a waitress in Walbrook. He had kissed a girl in the Chinese restaurant in Bloomsbury. And for five years he had habitually associated himself with women of loose character. The Rector denied all the charges and then sat quietly watching the Bishop’s Counsel, Roland Oliver, K.C., Walter Monckton, K.C. and Humphrey King. His own Counsel sat near-by. The galleries of the Great Hall of the Lower House of Convocation contained quite a fair number of spectators, but were not crowded. Among them sat Mrs. Davidson, the Rector’s patient wife. Nobody present that cold March afternoon dreamed that they would still be present in June. Nobody guessed that the thin line between jurisprudence and entertainment was to become invisible. Nobody mentioned lions.

But before the day was out it was plain that ecclesiastical justice being seen to be done under the quizzing-glass of Fleet Street was legal folly. But such folly! Yo-yos were laid away, the Dartmoor riot forgotten and the semi-literate and the wholly sophisticated alike settled down to read an extraordinary serial which might have been called, ‘A thousand and one nights in darkest London, thank goodness’. Presiding over the Court was the Chancellor of Norwich, Mr. F. Keppel North, and he was the first to fear and in some ways regret the probing of this hornets’ nest. The Rector of Stiffkey regarded him blandly. The shrill humming set up in the world on account of his odd ministry was not unwelcome. He heard the astounded Mr. Oliver tell the court the pattern of his life for the past decade or so, and he smiled.

He had been Rector of Stiffkey since 1906. He had married and he now had five children. His stipend was £800 but a bankruptcy and a flair for financial disasters of all kinds had reduced this to about £400 a year. The only time he ever spent in his parish was on Sunday; all the rest of the week he was in London. So eager was he to be in London that it was nothing for him to leave Stiffkey in the small hours and arrive in town by dawn, and so reluctant was he to return to Norfolk that often brother clergy in the neighbourhood of Stiffkey would be telephoned very late on Saturday night to say that the Rector had been unavoidably delayed and would they please take the services for him? This went on for many years. It was not his occasional whim; it was his regular habit. In London the Rector’s activities were unevenly divided between searching for a Mr. Gordon, who owed him a thousand pounds—sometimes a quarter of a million pounds, and certainly an apology—and in making friends with girls. The point the Court had to prove was, were these friendships innocent? And this was the sole reason why the court was sitting.

A number of things occurred to the prosecution, grumbled Mr. Oliver. Why, for instance, did the rescue work include taking all these girls to theatres, to cinemas, to meals in restaurants and—to Paris? And, how did a man who was an undischarged bankrupt since 1925 and who had a country rectory full of children over a hundred miles from the capital, and only £400 a year, do it? Also, why did not the Rector’s charity include young men as well as young women? To discover some of the answers to these questions a firm of private detectives had followed the Rector on and off for about six months. And things had rushed to a climax after one of his girls, Barbara Harris, had written to the Bishop of Norwich.

The Rector had met Barbara Harris, the first witness and the last angel, through means he had invented, perfected and made foolproof. He saw her at Marble Arch, he walked round and round her in wonderment and then, in his most gentlemanly way, he had begged her to forgive him and tell him. Was she—could she be—surely she must be—Miss X, the film actress? Barbara, who was a highly experienced sixteen-and-a-half, found such an approach dottily intriguing. Very soon afterwards, she and her Indian lover were silting up in bed in their pyjamas entertaining the Rector to tea when he happened to call about two in the morning. They got on fine. The Indian was a policeman and he told the Rector fascinating tales of temple girls. ‘God,’ the Rector told Barbara, ‘did not mind sins of the body, only sins of the soul.’ And he went on to urge her to improve her mind with literature, such as the Works of William Shakespeare and Damaged Goods. ‘Have ideals,’ he advised her in a letter from his study in Stiffkey, ‘and you will become ideal yourself.’ On the day she found out that he was a parson, for he had concealed this from her, his advice took on an added urgency. ‘Let me warn you in the words of Psalmist, “to set a watch over the door of my lips so that I offend not with my tongue.”’

During the prosecution’s cross-examination of Barbara the Rector was seen shaking with laughter and had to be called to order by the Chancellor. Mr. Davidson said that he wasn’t laughing at the witness’s answers—which only left the prosecution’s questions as the source of his amusement, and it was true they would have entertained a cat. Mr. Oliver began to dislike Mr. Davidson very much indeed from this moment.

Barbara’s story continued. The Lower House of Convocation became frowsty with her bed-sitters and bizarre with her lovers, but she herself, now at the ripe age of eighteen, seemed pleasant enough. She described her digs and jobs. She told of a journey to the Rectory at Stiffkey with Rose Ellis. This was during the summer of 1931, when the Rector had a brainwave and had solved the Sunday problem, as it were. On July 29th he had put Miss Barbara Harris and Miss Rose Ellis, the last and first of his loves, on a train for Wells-next-the-Sea. He said he was going to give them a country holiday, which was something neither of them very much wanted. When they reached Stiffkey Rectory they found to their disgust that it was not only full of Mr. Davidson’s big family, but paying guests besides, and that they were expected to do housework. So furious were they with this arrangement that they at once began to walk back to London, sleeping under hedges and running all sorts of risks, such as catching colds or getting blisters. A kind man had eventually given them a lift in a motor-car and taken them all the way. The Rector immediately hurried back to town and made his peace with Barbara and soon afterwards resumed his amiable régime of hurrying from her side on Sunday mornings to catch the 5.5 a.m. train which got him to church in Norfolk just in time to hare into the vestry and robe for Matins. The private agents were worn out with his ways, particularly with his indifference to whether it was day or night. He drifted almost ceaselessly two and three days at a time through the packed streets of the West End, he paid calls after midnight, he cashed cheques in friendly pubs, in one of which he was greeted with ‘Hello, you old thief! How are all the girls?’ He spoke to countless strangers, none of whom seemed in the least bit offended. Clothes and class meant absolutely nothing to him. His hands patted shoulders, waists, clung to other hands. His eyes recognized no social barriers. He offered no guard and expected none. He was entirely disarming and he made the disarming of others his chief business. All this naturally led him into spheres where the normal social taboos had never properly taken root and which he genuinely believed to be full of pagan innocence. But neither Barbara Harris, nor Rose Ellis, nor Miss Nellie Churchill, who rather came it with a refained accent, nor the Rector himself was concerned with innocence, and well they all knew it. But by manipulating the convention of innocence they were able to amuse themselves for years. They met their Waterloo when their version of innocence had to compete with innocence viewed as an absolute. This became the central dilemma of the trial, for the Rector stuck fervently to his beige conception of purity. It was a shade much favoured by the girls he knew, since they could not wear white. They were not unprincipled and neither was he. Let him who was without sin go out and cast the first stone. Since the Rector’s life, subsequent to his removal from Holy Orders, was nothing more nor less than a dedicated vocation to force the world to comprehend what he meant by ‘innocence’, and since he was certainly the last Christian to be eaten by a lion for the sake of his beliefs, it would be fatuous as well as uncharitable to deny him principles. It has to be remembered that the extraordinary Mr. Davidson was not ruined by his trial. He was roused. The suppressed Thespian of Stiffkey, released from the restrictions of his cloth, donned the motley with prodigious effect. If the world insisted that he had turned the pulpit of Stiffkey into a sideshow, then he would turn a sideshow into a pulpit. Nor would he be the first to do so. Supposing Diogenes or St. Simon Stylites had lived in 1928, would they have been a don and parson respectively? Of course not. They would have joined Bertram Mills’s Circus. Did such dreams as these sustain the Rector on the last day of March, 1932, in the Great Hall of Church House? For it was certain that something sustained him. It was he who smiled and his nostrils which did not wrinkle as the court forked over the steamy humus of his past.

He listened as the prosecution insisted on being shocked and surprised by things which had never remotely shocked or surprised him. The inquiry agent had tracked him down to a Chinese restaurant in Bloomsbury and had seen him kiss and embrace Barbara. What was surprising in that? What was surprising to him was that men could sit among the cruets and cream buns of restaurants and teashops and not kiss girls.

Barbara was a very special girl and his feelings for her had got quite out of hand. Conventional girlish treats, such as taking her to the Folies Bergère in Paris, were not for her. She was witty, rising eighteen and she dazzled him. They gipsied together through a warren of rooms in the West End. He was her ‘uncle’, her ‘guardian’ and sometimes just her very good friend. He bought her clothes. He even told her about Mr. Gordon, his peregrinating pot of gold. Finally he told her what it had never been necessary to tell all the others, that he would divorce his wife and marry her. Or so she said. In and out of this romance, tangling it up into a grossly complicated knot, were Barbara’s youthful Indians and the Rector’s Rose, the latter no longer eighteen but thirty, and faithful like Cynara in her fashion. It was Rose who had got sloshed on the inquiry agent’s port and said too much.

It now became the object of the prosecution to tie labels on Barbara and Rose for the sake of clarity. Rose, being thirty, was Bad. Barbara, being eighteen, was Good, but Betrayed. But no sooner had these labels been safely fixed than the two girls began tearing them to bits for all they were worth, Barbara, with the immortal candour of the harlot, Rose with a certain bleak logic. Rose had, after all, outlasted a thousand girls and had known the Rector for ten years. She was truly sorry for her part in the débâcle. Hopeless she may have been by any of the rules governing Church House, Westminster, but not hopeless to the angels.

Barbara was a different matter. In the first place she gave the sentimental protection of her age the brush-off. Mr. Levy, for the defence, who quite expected contrite sobs and pathos, found a ready conversationalist whose terrible honesty and frightful lies were equally reprehensible, since his witness used them according to which she thought might entertain the court most. Her real name was Gwendoline and she had made love with many men, including some Indians. No, she hadn’t had V.D. but once she thought she had. Silly me, she implied cheerfully. Banking on her good nature, Mr. Levy launched a crucial question. And kind, girl-saving Mr. Davidson had intended to take her away from All This?

‘No,’ said Barbara.

‘He tried to get you a situation?’

‘He pretended to try,’ said Barbara.

She told how the Rector had introduced her to titled people, though goodness knew why, since none of them ever helped her although they were very interested to hear all the details of her life. Nobody helped her. Nobody ever had. Mr. Davidson had said that she should be an actress. She had left school at fourteen and from then on she had helped herself. When she had not got a job she stayed in bed until eleven or more in the morning. She liked all the men she had known. She was always happy. She liked reading. She would have liked to marry one of her Indian boys but he had returned to India and quite vanished but she still liked him.

‘I suggest to you that you wrote to Mr. Davidson because he was kind and useful to you?’

‘He was kind and useful,’ said Gwendoline-Barbara.

‘Do you usually keep friendly with people who try to rape you?’

‘If they come in useful,’ said Gwendoline-Barbara.

The Chancellor had to interrupt here to make a moral observation about staying in bed until eleven in the morning, which struck him as the worst thing he had ever heard in his life.

Barbara trumped this enormity with a story about her lover, the Strong Man. The Strong Man did feats in the gutter to theatre queues and she went to live with him. He was young and kind. She told him that the Rector of Stiffkey was her uncle and he believed her. The Rector always wore his clerical collar when he met the Strong Man. All three of them got on well together. The Rector had taken her to the home of a Mrs. Beach, who was married to an actor. Mrs. Beach was to teach Barbara to dance. He had tried to reconcile her with her family, but had fallen for her sister, a housemaid of twenty-two. He had got her various jobs which she had been obliged to abandon after the briefest trial because of the number of gentlemen who asked for her on the telephone of any house she occupied. What a tiresome invention! Barbara implied. Inconsequentially, she added Mr. Davidson had given her a black eye.

‘Why have you not mentioned this before?’

‘I wasn’t asked.’

‘Mr. Davidson is rather different from many people?’

‘Yes.’

‘Kind hearted spasmodically?’

‘Yes.’

‘People who are quite strangers to him he will greet by putting his arms on their shoulders?’

‘Girls,’ amended Barbara mordantly.

She became precise. No, Mr. Davidson had never mentioned the Prodigal Son. No, it wasn’t a wicked lie to suggest that he had suggested that she should enter a brothel; he had suggested it many times.

And in February she had felt compelled to write from her very latest address, Providence Place, Shepherd’s Bush, a long letter to the Lord Bishop of Norwich. It was ‘very hard to be good when once you have been bad’, she told the Bishop and after many appalling revelations concerning the Rector of Stiffkey’s evangelism she signed herself off ‘in all sincerity’.

After this the grumpy Mr. Oliver for the prosecution began the impossible task of putting Barbara together again after she had so obligingly desiccated her own character and left it more or less useless as a weapon with which to belay the Rector or to save him. Barbara had got the hang of the law by now. Somebody asked you a question to which there was a right answer and the answer they required. It was her business to make a good guess at the latter. She did her best. She went so far as to tell them her joke about appendicitis. A Scotsman had asked his girl whether she would like to see where he was operated on for appendicitis and had pointed to St. George’s Hospital. The Chancellor said he had never heard a joke with less joke in it.

Landladies began to arrrive. They processed in and out of the witness-box noisily announcing their respectability. Barbara’s housemaid sister came to attest that she had heard the Rector call Barbara the ‘Queen of his heart’. Major Philip Hammond, a Stiffkey churchwarden, took the stand to protest bitterly that the Rector hadn’t shown up at an Armistice Day service and a London chemist came to add his naïve view that the reason why the Rector chased waitresses—even to their cloakroom behind the restaurant—was to hurry up the service.

And so the case built itself into a fantastic edifice of prelates, waitresses, strong men, hunting churchwardens, amorous Indian youths, publicans, landladies, dentists, titled female do-gooders with a passion for facts, the Folies Bergère, bathing suits, photographs, train journeys, Mr. Gordon and every possible variation on the popular prurient theme of ‘virtue exposed’. The Press had a field day—or rather a field year—for there was scarcely an issue of any newspaper appearing between February and October 1932 which did not contain something about the Rector of Stiffkey. Very soon, the Chancellor was forced to announce that the Court would be obliged to sit continuously and indefinitely. Far from being aghast at such a prospect, the Rector showed positive signs of relief. Sometimes he laughed aloud, to the great irritation of the Chancellor. And sometimes his gaze would stray to the disastrous Barbara in open admiration. She was unique. There seemed no end to the distance she could fall.

A landlady told of her friendship with the Rector. He was different from the ministers she had been used to. He moved in a galaxy of girls. They came to his room at all hours of the day and night, and because of them she had given him notice no less than six times. Yet she liked him. She and her husband had driven the Rector all the way back to Stiffkey for an ordination but even then he had sat in the back of the motor with a pretty actress. They had had their photos taken on the Rectory lawn. The Chancellor took one look at the prim group.

‘Does Mrs. Davidson always go about like that?’ he asked in wonder.

‘She refused to be taken and put leaves over her face,’ explained the landlady, as if this was the most ordinary thing in the world.

The Chancellor became hypnotized by this photograph. Yet another dimension was being added to the Stiffkey affair.

‘It puzzles me …’ he said helplessly.

The reason for taking a London actress to Stiffkey was explained. It was to prevent her from joining the Roman Catholic Church, but although the Rector had travelled all the way back to town with his arm round her waist, she had joined the Roman Catholics, and what was more, she had become a nun. The landlady, momentarily transported to rural Norfolk, took the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with the Rector’s wife. She heard how Mrs. Davidson and her children muddled along in profound resignation to a never-ceasing accompaniment of duns and girls.

Day after day passed, and still the witnesses arrived at Church House and told the same stories with different names in them. After two weeks it didn’t seem as if anything fresh could be added. The kind witnesses spoke of friendly pats and the unkind ones of pestering. Mr. Levy complained that, ‘the word pestering seems to be like a gramophone record in the mouth of every witness’, to which Barbara replied that ‘she did not know another word that fits so nicely’.

On April 6th there was a different consternation. The funds for the defence began to run out. With great magnanimity, the prosecution offered to hand over £250 of its money for this purpose, to the faint depression of the Chancellor who hoped that lack of funds might hurry things up a bit. He pulled himself together to hear the testimony of a Mr. Inglebert Thole of the Arrows Detective Agency. Mr. Levy was frivolous with Mr. Thole. How many cigars had the Rector smoked? How many times had he sneezed? Mr. Thole, who had no wit, tried to remember. His colleague, a Mr. Percy Butler, was more graphic. He had seen the Rector talking to strange girls everywhere. He had seen him write letters in the Charing Cross Hotel, take taxis, tubes, visit pubs and, needless to say, take in on the way quite a lot of teashops. He had followed the Rector and Barbara to the Piccadilly Theatre, where they had seen a play called Folly to be Wiser. This was one of the Rector’s favourite shows. By nine o’clock the agent was whacked hollow and the Rector disappeared from view, with many happy hours still before him.

The following day began with the Rector showing a rather grand reluctance to accept charity from the prosecution in relation to the £250 it was willing to hand over for his defence, and with Mr. Oliver rapping him severely over the knuckles. ‘Mr. Davidson is entirely wrong in thinking that the offer is made as a favour to him. It was made in what was conceived to be the best interests of British justice. Who made it doesn’t signify in the least. It has been refused. The result is that this case, which should have been finished in a reasonable time, will now drag on for many many weeks…. May I mention that while it goes on Mr. Davidson goes on exercising his sacred functions….’

This was true enough. Stiffkey, once so remote and quiet, was now the centre of a deplorable pilgrimage. Sensation-lusting multitudes bore down on its little valley every week-end and packed the church, the churchyard and the lane beyond. When the Rector preached he mistook this gaping audience for a congregation. It was the first of the countless open-mouthed crowds which from henceforth were to mill around him until the day of his death. Not that he cared. When the trial was adjourned he used his notoriety to get funds. On May 19th he returned jauntily to Church House to hear the defence offer the following highly intelligent analysis of his character.

‘Mr. Davidson’s friendship starts not after years of acquaintanceship, but immediately; in fact almost before acquaintanceship begins. He likes his fellow creatures and expects, rightly or wrongly in many cases, that they will return this feeling. It is not unusual for him to kiss women. His kisses have been paraded before you as signs of guilt, but you will hear from many that he is quite accustomed to kiss…. It is a stupid thing to do, and may lead to all sorts of suspicions on the part of evil-minded people. You will find he kisses his landlady, his landlady’s daughters, his maids, not in a sensual or sexual way; it is a kiss on the cheek or on the forehead. It is the usual gesture for him when leaving someone he likes or if they have done something for him….’

Mr. Levy filled in the big blank spaces of the Rector’s life with some unsuspected facts. How he had not been able to go to the university for lack of funds and had gone on the stage instead. How he had eventually earned his own university fees by acting. Ordained in his late twenties, he at once set about his mission for saving the hordes of youthful nobodies which drifted across the metropolis. He had scarcely begun this work when he was suddenly inducted into the living of faraway Stiffkey. Undaunted, however, by this fate he turned his attentions to the young in Paris and during 1910, ’11, ’12 and ’13 he went to Paris once a fortnight without fail. He served with the Navy during the war and then, in 1919, began his work among London’s teeming girls. Mr. Levy’s speech began all right but half-way through it could not sustain its reasonable edge. The facts simply refused to be accommodated in rational lodgings. The effect was bizarre to everybody except the Rector, to whom the recitation sounded plain dull. He listened patiently, even sweetly, to the defence and prosecution in turn and it was only when the latter dared to attack the mysterious Mr. Gordon that he showed any asperity. He had met Mr. Gordon in 1919 and had helped him during his bankruptcy in 1922.

‘Quite frankly,’ said Mr. Oliver disparagingly, ‘I am suggesting he is just a sort of swindler.’

‘I am being charged with sexual immorality, not financial immorality,’ declared the Rector. This brought a great burst of applause and the police began to hustle people out of the public galleries. But Mr. Oliver wouldn’t drop the money business and it was some time before the Court settled down to matters which the Rector found less harassing, such as being barred from the Overseas League for chatting to the telephone girls in their den. That day’s proceedings concluded snidely with the prosecution muttering, ‘I care nothing for delicate circumstances,’ and the defence snapping, ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

The Rector found the persistent fogginess of the prosecution irritating. This time it was about such normal matters as going to theatres twice in one day, taking taxis and eating out in West End restaurants immediately after writing to a duchess to tell her that his family was starving at Stiffkey and that they had no coal. He told the Court crossly that ‘I generally take one day off a week, like the Bishop of London, who always takes Friday off’. Nor could he understand how, because a girl was a tart, she was necessarily beyond the pale.

‘She must have been an abandoned little creature,’ said Mr. Oliver of Barbara.

‘Abandoned morally,’ said the Rector, ‘but she had remarkable qualities of character.’

Mr. Oliver wanted the Rector to hold up a photograph of himself posing with a naked sixteen-year-old. He was dreadfully shocked. Really, it was disgraceful! The court had no shame. The descriptions of how the subpoenas were served did nothing to lessen the levity. ‘A man came in, ran upstairs and pushed it down Mrs. P’s neck. The landlady fished it out and stuffed it down the young man’s neck.’ Sighing during his examination, the Rector shook his head and said, ‘As a clergyman one spends one’s whole life in bedrooms….’

He had written to his bishop,

‘For years I have been known as the Prostitutes’ Padre—to me the proudest title that a true priest of Christ can hold. I believe with all my soul that if He were born again in London in the present day He would be found constantly walking in Piccadilly. He suffered the cruellest slander, but this did not deflect Him from solicitude for the fallen, and His attitude to the woman taken in adultery and still more His close friendship with the notorious harlot of Magdala … has always been my inspiration and comfort in the difficult work I have humbly undertaken in His name….’

Five super-sensational days later, the defence clung to these scriptural precedents with both hands.

‘Time after time in the New Testament kissing has been enjoined upon the Church….’ ‘Greet him with an holy kiss….’

But the prosecution left both kisses and Holy Writ alone and concentrated on the ‘black-hearted’ Barbara and divers other matters, none of them salubrious. On June 6th, after twenty-five days of unabated and unprecedented clerical scandal, the court adjoined, the Chancellor to work on his summing-up and the Rector to work out an ingenious plan to raise cash. But first of all there was the welfare of Stiffkey itself. Alas for prophets in their own country. When he got there he found another clergyman just about to take the service. However, Mr. Davidson soon sent him packing, though not before this clergyman had made a speech. The next day there was consternation over all Norfolk and the Archdeacon was seen wringing his hands and murmuring, ‘hectic conditions’. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang, had already protested at the verbatim reports of the trial and the terrible publicity. When, towards the end of June, the Rector of Stiffkey was granted an application to give dramatic recitations in Birmingham to an audience not exceeding 2,000 people, the Church authorities realized with a groan that their troubles were only just beginning.

On July 8th the Rector was found guilty on all five charges. He listened to the verdict impatiently and then, snatching up his silk hat, he ran at full speed down the length of the Great Hall of Church House, down the stairs and out into Westminster, for there was much to be done and not a moment to lose. He appealed to the Privy Council. His appeal was dismissed. He presented a private bill to the Privy Council and took it to the office himself, but nobody could look at it as they were all just about to go home to tea. He dashed to the office again the next day but they said he needn’t have hurried because the Privy Council wouldn’t be sitting again until October. Five days later, he heard from the Bishop of Norwich that he was not to hold services at Stiffkey after August 25th. Like all his tweenies and Nippies, he had been given a fortnight’s notice. He was severely shaken by this.

It was then that the Rector of Stiffkey turned cynic, and left cold-hearted Norfolk for Lancashire, to throw in his lot with Diogenes. Diogenes, whose friends called him Dog, sat in a tub and believed that one should be free from shame, free from emotion and free from all useless conventions. Not having any honour to begin with—his father had defaced the coinage—he refused to acknowledge the existence of honour. ‘Get out of my light,’ was all he had to say to Alexander the Great when he called on him. Neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Chancellor of Norwich came to Blackpool to see the Rector sitting in his barrel on the promenade, muttering, ‘desperate ills require desperate remedies’, but roughly 3,000 other people did and he was fined for obstruction. His barrel was sandwiched between a fasting girl and a flea circus. He sat in it for fourteen hours a day, hoping to get about £2,000 for all the appeals which lay before him.

October came, and with it a chilly notice from the Privy Council dismissing his private bill appeal. The Rector was feeling unusually bitter because only a few days before, when he had called on Major Hammond, his churchwarden at Stiffkey, the Major had turned him right-about-face on the front steps and booted him down them. Life indeed was hard. On October 14th he saw himself as the subject of the whole of the first leader of The Times and took heart. The Major had been fined twenty shillings but his own fame was priceless.

A week later, on Trafalgar Day, the last great set-piece of the Stiffkey drama was staged; the place, Norwich Cathedral itself. Early in the morning the great doors were locked and the Beauchamp Chapel was arranged like a little court, with a red-covered table in the centre and hard chairs placed in rows all around it. The Close was mute, the first leaves were falling. East Anglia cringed in the gritty October sunshine. The shades of the Lady Julian, Old Crome and Sir Thomas Browne rustled mournfully and the bell of St. Peter Mancroft tolled plangently, for the Rector of Stiffkey was to be unfrocked.

Promptly at a quarter to twelve, the time arranged for the horrible little ceremony, the Bishop of Norwich, the Chancellor, the Registrar, the Dean, the Archdeacons, the Canons and their solicitors came in solemn procession to the Beauchamp Chapel fully robed and, in some instances, wigged. The Registrar then read out the following telegram.

Shuffling, its majesty scarcely impaired, the procession departed but had no sooner disappeared than distant cheers announced the break-neck arrival of a small muddy car in the Close. And its wheels had hardly slithered to a standstill when out leapt the Rector of Stiffkey in a silk hat and accompanied by his sister and a friend. The three of them rushed into the Cathedral and the Rector took a seat immediately opposite the Bishop’s throne. The solemn procession returned, the Bishop striding along somewhat wrathfully with the aid of a magnificent gold and silver crozier. Everybody stood while the Apparitor called, ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez, all persons cited and admonished to appear at this court and answer to your names as you shall be called. God save the King.’ The Rector’s name was then called three times and he answered, ‘Here.’

The Bishop then prayed, ‘Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings …’ and was answered with a volley of fervent Amens. And then, making no more ado, and simply picking up a paper, he began to pronounce sentence.

This was too much for the Rector, particularly after such a long drive. He was accustomed to justice taking its time. He sprang to his feet and shouted, ‘May I be allowed to say anything before sentence is passed?’

The Bishop and his solicitor bowed nervously towards each other and then Dr. Pollock said, ‘Yes, if you please briefly.’

The Rector then stood very straight, glared hard at the Bishop, gripped the table and said, ‘I wished before you pass sentence to say that I am entirely innocent … it is the Church authorities which are put on trial, not myself … and I shall work for the rest of my life for the reform of the procedure under which these courts are conducted…. There is not one single deed which I have done which I shall not do again with the help of God….’

He then sat down and the Bishop rose. Holding his crozier in one hand and a large piece of paper in the other, he read in a flat sad voice,

‘In the name of God, Amen. Whereas the Judge and Chancellor of our Consistory Court has notified us that the Reverend Harold Francis Davidson, M.A., Clerk in Holy Orders, Rector of the parish churches of Stiffkey and Morston, has been found guilty of immoral conduct, immoral acts and immoral habits … we, Bertram, by divine permission Bishop of Norwich … pronounce, decree and declare that the Reverend Harold Francis Davidson ought to be deprived, and we do deprive thereof by this our definite sentence….’

He then sat down, signed the document he had read, rose again and pronounced the Blessing in an atmosphere so frozen that the ancient wastes of the Cathedral seemed to ache with silence. There was a pause and then he added, almost conversationally, ‘I shall now move to the High Altar.’

But no sooner had he said this than the Reverend Harold Davidson was on his feet and haranguing the throne. He threatened more appeals and a competent judge. He then led the way to the High Altar himself, forcing the Bishop and the clergy to process behind him. In the chancel he broke away and took a front seat. A second or two later the sumptuous ecclesiastics swayed past, what feelings they had quite concealed by gorgeous vestments. The Bishop prayed; Mr. Davidson prayed. Then, standing before the High Altar of Norwich Cathedral the Bishop deposed the ex-Rector of Stiffkey from Holy Orders because he had caused grave scandal.

‘Now, therefore, we, Bertram, by divine permission … do hereby pronounce, decree and declare that the said Reverend Harold Francis Davidson, being a priest and a deacon respectively, ought to be entirely removed, deposed and degraded…. We hereby, by the authority committed to us by Almighty God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, remove, depose and degrade him….’

It was done. The Bishop prayed about human frailty, pronounced the Benediction, then crumpled to his knees. But not so the ex-Rector of Stiffkey. He jumped up and cried in a high imperious voice which rang through the entire Cathedral,

‘I am very glad that the deposition service has been added because I know that there is a right under the Clergy Discipline Act to address an appeal to the Archbishop of Canterbury within one month, and this I shall do.’

But the Bishop seemed not to hear. His procession re-formed and passed into the vestry.

*

Five years passed during which Harold Davidson should, by every law of social retribution, have sunk conveniently out of sight. But the lurid waves which had washed him from the pulpit at Stiffkey were not destroyers and once he showed signs of coming to terms with them, they began to keep him afloat. Diogenes continued to sustain him in other ways. He recognized that humanity is divided between the entertained and the entertainers, and that he belonged to the latter. He joined the great company of buffoons. He learnt to live on his shortcomings as well as with them. The campaign to clear his name, very real at first, declined with gimmicky tricks until it became an outré side-show in which goggle-eyed holidaymakers would cram themselves to see a real live Sunday newspaper sensation.

But by 1936 his position was that of a once famous music-hall turn whose act was on the wane. The ‘Rector of Stiffkey’ was billed in increasingly outlandish circumstances and during the summer of 1937 it was announced that he would lecture in a lion’s cage at Skegness.

The cage was part of Skegness Amusement Park and it was busy August with the trippers pouring through the town. Mr. Davidson had signed a contract to appear with one lion, but when he reached the cage he found there were two, a male and a female. He questioned this but courageously went ahead with his act. The lion-tamer opened the cage and he slipped between the huge Freddie and his mate, who rested towards the rear of the den. And thus, in scarcely credible terms, the little clergyman from Norfolk and the lion acted out the classical Christian martyrdom to the full. He fought wildly, gallantly, but Freddie killed him in full view of a gaping mob. Eventually, the lion-tamer showed immense bravery and managed to get his body away from the animals and out of the cage. She was a sixteen-year-old girl named Irene.