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such as it was through the ages,
officiating at Parish
meetings that held responsibility for everything from the
poor to the roads. Wealthier clerics could employ a curate
to assist or in some cases carry out the bulk of the work
allowing the gentlemen cleric to pursue their own interests
and hobbies. It has been claimed that clergymen might have
contributed ten times as much to advances in learning and
knowledge than professional scientists, economists and
inventors. An impressive roll-call includes Surrey Vicar
Thomas Malthus the population economist, Edmund
Cartwright who invented the power loom, the esteemed
naturalist Gilbert White of Selborne in Hampshire, Parson
Jack Russell, William Greenwell the father of modern
archaeology, the Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge –
a giant in the world of spiders, Reverend Berkeley king
of the fungi, Reverend George Garrett who invented the
submarine and Reverend John Mitchell a keen amateur
astronomer who helped discover Uranus.
A Roll Call or Extraordinary Incumbents
Barring extraordinary action by the Bishop a living was for
life and whereas the later social and geographic mobility of
the people meant that folk could vote with their knees, as it
were most people were stuck with their clergyman, like him
or lump him, and my goodness there were some eccentrics.
The Rev. John Alington (right) who had been ordained in
1823 was invited to take a few services at St. Mary’s
Church, Letchworth but soon they became incoherent and
increasingly inappropriate and the Bishop suspended them
sparking Alington to wage a mad campaign of revenge. He
set up his own unofficial
church
with 2 pulpits, an organ, 2
large musical boxes and a run-down piano that he called
‘Tidlee Bump’. For his congregations of tramps and gypsies
he would parade around on a hobby-horse before changing
into a leopard skin cloak and Moroccan slippers to read love
poems from one pulpit and short stories from the other.
To announce the end of the service he would throw his
curly wig into the cheering crowd. Dancing and drinking
followed while he conducted gypsy violinists with the tail
of his leopard skin.
Reverend Morgan Jones was the incumbent at Blewby,
near Didcot in Oxfordshire, for forty years until the
1820s. A notorious miser who wore the same coat for
forty-three years and repaired his clothes with rags taken
from scarecrows he wrote his sermons on the back of old
banns certificates and cadged meals from parishioners
whenever he could. Of course he left a small fortune.
The Reverend William Buckland claimed to have eaten
his way through the animal kingdom. Appointed Reader
in Mineralogy at Oxford in 1813, and a little later to the
Chair of Geology, he also became a canon of Christ
Church, Oxford in 1825. He served to his guests
crocodile and mice cooked in butter and even had a
nibble at the heart of a French king. Buckland declared
that the most disagreeable creatures he ever ate were
moles and bluebottles. Buckland was the first to present
a full account of a dinosaur fossil, which he named
Megalosaurus and coined the term coprolite for dinosaur
poo. He went on to become Dean of Westminster.
The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould of Mersea Island in
Essex who wrote the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers
is a late example of what has been termed a
Squarson
,
a parson and substantial landowner. Baring-Gould
collected folk songs (at times working alongside Cecil
Sharp) and was often quite shocked by what he
transcribed – his sanitised version of Strawberry Fair is
the one that children sing in schools. Baring-Gould also
wrote the biography of the Cornish vicar Robert Hawker
who created the Harvest Festival service in 1843. Hawker
wore a pink fez and a yellow poncho, camped out in a
tiny driftwood hut (now the smallest property owned by
the National Trust) and went through a phase of eating
only clotted cream. When he died he asked that people
wore purple to his funeral.
Alarming stories of eccentricity and perhaps even mental
illness continued into the 20
th
century. When Daphne du
Maurier tried to visit Frederick Densham, Rector of the
remote parish of Warleggan on Bodmin Moor a dozen
Wolfhound and Alsatians sprang at her from behind an
eight-foot barbed wire fence. Densham had driven his
congregation away by picking endless quarrels with them
and
painting the
inside of
the church
in gaudy
strips of red
and blue
and when
they
finally left
altogether
he filled the
pews with
cardboard
cut outs of
people and
continued
to hold his
services.
Royal Doulton Toby Jug of the Vicar of Bray