Ecclesiastical eccentricity
H u m ph ry Berkeley
Hawker ,bf Morwenstow Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape £4.95)
Richard Hawker was born in 1803 and died in 1-875. He was Vicar of Morwenstow, a small and isolated parish on the North East coast of Cornwall. It is, on the face of it, quite remarkable that such a man who was admittedly also a minor poet should have had no less than five biographers, of whom the latest is Mr firendon, whose life of Hawker is the first to nave been written for seventy years.
Mr Brendan, in part, justifies his, the fifth, attempt to portray Hawker on the grounds that the four previous attempts were in varying ' degrees unsatisfactory, twice deliberately so. He also clearly considers the subject of his biography to have been a man of unique interest and eccentricity, to whom full justice has not previously fully been accorded.
It is true that Robert Hawker led an unusual life which was to some degree surprising. He married twice. His first wife, who was also his godmother, was more than twenty years older than he was and his second was forty years. younger. Towards the end of his life he became addicted to opium, a taste which is probably rare among clergy. His attire was apparently somewhat extravagant, though not, to judge from Mr Brendon's description, unduly so. Twelve hours before his death Hawker was received into the Roman Catholic Church, a step which must seldom if ever been taken by an Anglican parson at suth a time in his life. His widow, however, who also became a Roman
Catholic subsequently explained that her husband had for some years been a believing Roman Catholic but hesitated until the end to submit to an act of conditional rebaptism into the Roman Catholic Church, a .steP which, if taken earlier, would, because ()this marriage, have simultaneously have deprived him of his clerical status and means of livelihood. This was a practical difficulty which must evoke some sympathy from the reader, coming as it did at a time when the Convert's Aid Society (a charity to aid Convert married clergy)'did not exist.
The previous biographies of Hawker were written by the Rev Sabine Baring Gould, the Rev Frederick Lee, Mr C. E. Byles (Hawkers son-in-law) and Mr H. R. Smallcombe at least two of Hawkers previous biographers, Mr Baring Gould and Mr (or to give him his technical ecclesiastical rank, Bishop) Lee appear to have been even more eccentric than Hawker and in the case of Lee a good deal more interesting. As Vicar of Lambeth, Lee went to Rome where he was conditionally rebaptised, confirmed, made a deacon and ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. He was subsequently consecrated a bishop bya mysterious triamvirate of prelates, the identity of whom has never been revealed but who were popularly supposed to have been a Greek, a Copt and either a Roman Catholic or an Old Catholic. His episcopal status was apparently recognised by Rome although he conginued to act as Vicar of Lambeth. It is in many ways a pity that Mr Brendon did not choose Bishop Lee as the subject of his biography, since his potentially rich biographical particulars are as yet unknown to the general public and have yet, apparently, to be fully explored. While the reader of Mr Brendon's book must be grateful to learn in two hundred and thirty two pages what Mr Byles evidently took seven hundred pages to say, it is imposssible not to put to Mr Brendon the constant war time query "Was your journey really necessary?"
Mr Brendan devotes an entire chapter of his book to The Eccentric" seeking to establish beyond doubt that Hawker is given true recognition, at least in this sphere. But Mr Brendon has researched into the conduct of other ecclesiastical eccentrics too well. One _ parson from the West Country, he tells us, did not enter his church for fifty three years. Another drove away his congregation, replaced them by wooden and cardboard images in the pews and surrounded his vicarage with a barbed wire fence behind which savage Alsatian dogs patrolled. I have a strong desire to know more. In comparison with eccentricity on this majestic scale Hawker's life appears to be pedestrian. His conversation drab and his alleged excommunication of his cat (which Mr Brendon cannot authenticate) positively hum dran.
Mr Brendon even contrives to discover, a coroner, a breed of man whom I never previously supposed would provide lush material for biography, whose eccentricity shocked Hawker himself. In 1861 this unnamed but surely untraceable Devon coroner refused to hold an inquest on the body of a murdered child "Because the corpse is so small, therefore the murder is too trivial for an inquest and utterly beneath my notice."
It is impossible to say that Mr Brendon's book is without interest; it is in many respects fascinating, not least because despite meticulous research (proved by thirty pages of bibliography and notes) Robert Hawker emerges as one of the least interesting of the many and highly colourful characters in the book. I hope that we can look forward to further biographies by Mr Brendon of some of them, whom he has described with such tantalising brevity.
Previous page
