Clerical japes
Benny Green
The Flesh is Weak Andrew Barrow (Hamish Hamilton pp.296, £10.95).
The sub-title of Mr Barrow's book is self-explanatory: 'An intimate history of the Church of England'. By intimate Mr Barrow means secular, and he must have had an enviable time of it raking over the history of the rectors and reverends, the lowly bell-ringers and the elevated archbishops, whose spirit was willing but evidently not quite willing enough. The material is so rich that Mr Barrow has had to attach not so much as a single annotation, being content with a brief summary at the head of each historical sub-division. There is, of course, something irresistibly risible about the spectacle of a man whose profession is religious spirituality behaving as the rest of us do, and it is this wonderful — I almost said heavensent — discrepancy between that assumption of angelic purity Which is part of the professional uniform of every divine, and the reality of his bodily " functions, fleshy desires and worldly pursuits, which raises a thousand smiles from items which ought to be perfectly solemn but somehow are not.
A few of Mr Barrow's cast of players are honourable men with honourable achievements to their name, whether those achievements be comic, like Sydney Smith, ornithological and botanical, like Gilbert White, or even arachnicological, as in the case of the Rev. Octavius PickardCambridge who in 1879 offered proof of his religiosity by publishing Spiders of Dorset,. following this with Specific Descriptions of Trapdoor Spiders, and furthering his knowledge of the spider world by discussing their sex habits with Charles Darwin. At least Pickard-Cambridge did not ill-treat his subjects, unlike the Rev. John Lucy, Rector of Hampton Lucy, a Victorian aristocratic gentleman who was in the habit of giving out fox-hunting notices from the pulpit, or even more picturesque, a journalist-parson called Henry Bate, who so spurned the teachings of Assisi while occupying the living of Bradwell-juxta-mare in Essex that one day he killed a fox on the roof of Bradwell Church.
It was in the year after the Reverend Bate's bid for temporal glory at Bradwell that the Bishop of Durham so criticised the dancers at the Opera, accusing the French government of trying to corrupt English manners by sending us abandoned dancers, that the following night the said young ladies exchanged their flesh-coloured stockings for chaste white. But alas, there were times when the pillars of the church were themselves guilty of indecent behaviour. In 1900 in Suffolk, the Rev. Robert Fillingham was fined 20 shillings for standing up in church during the celebration of Holy Communion and shouting, 'This is idolatry, Protestants, leave the house of Baal'. He would appear to have been hard done by in the matter of the fine, for at least his indecency had been inspired by passions biblical, which is more than can be said for the succession of drunkards, lustpots, lechers, gourmands and drug addicts who parade through the pages of Mr Barrow's book without so much as a reprimand.
Curious facts emerge from this delicious tissue of ecclesiastical moonshine, for instance that no fewer than three-quarters of the young huskies participating in the first ever Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race subsequently became clergymen, although Mr Barrow does not go quite so far as that eccentric cricket historian E.H.D. Sewell, who once selected an army of clerics, to be called 'The Saints' to play against an eleven of military gentlemen to be dubbed 'The Sinners'. Fielding practice of a sort, however, is recorded by Mr Barrow with the following entry for 1859: Rioting had begun at the mission church of St George's-in-the-East where certain parishioners and churchwardens objected to the ritualistic practices of the resident clergy. The Rev. Charles Lowder counter-attacked by giving local boys sixpence each to throw rotten eggs at a sandwich man parading on 1p/eh& of a hostile churchwarden and, by 25 September, the situation had become sufficiently grave for the Bishop of London to close the church.
It begins to be apparent why no annotations or comments are required from Mr Barrow, who is wisely content to let the facts speak for themselves.
Not all his notes are sour. There is, for instance, the haunting sadness of the fate of the Rev. F.J. Bleasby, who in 1902, after making 470 unsuccessful applications for a curacy, entered the workhouse at Tiverton. One wonders what shocking impediment, spiritual or temporal, brought about so consistent a failure to ingratiate himself. Perhaps he should have turned for succour to that high-living Bishop of Winchester, Dr Anthony Thorland, whose self-indulgences were so notorious that the editor of this very publication was moved to object to the Bishop's lack of spirituality. It seems the complaint was justified, for on being installed at Winchester, the doctor proceeded to spend two-thirds of the total income of the see on entertaining friends at Farnham Castle.
Evidently the bishop had remained unmoved by evidence a few years earlier of divine intervention in the affairs of the Church of England, when a bell-ringer at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset anticipated the findings of Lord Peter Wimsey by becoming entangled with the rope while ringing in a wedding peal — a truly Hardyesque juxtaposition, that — was lifted up by the bell, cracked his head on the ceiling, dropped to the floor and was killed. For believers and infidels alike, Mr Barrow has complied a work of such surpassing triviality as to be quite irresistible.
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