The rector of Stiffkey: Britain's most infamous clergyman
He was one of the most scandalous figures of the age. But who was the rector of Stiffkey? In his new novel, JOHN WALSH tells his story – and, here, uncovers the startling facts of a sensational life
Published: 28 April 2007
He stood five foot three, his parishioners nicknamed him "Little Jimmy" and in 1932 he became the most famous clergyman in the country. A J P Taylor called his trial "the sensation of the decade" and said he deserved a more significant place in the history books than the Archbishop of Canterbury. The latter years of his life are still invoked by commentators seeking to make a point about the folly of notoriety. But nobody in history embraced renown with such enthusiasm as did Harold Francis Davidson, the rector of Stiffkey.
Then again, nobody embraced so many people as the rector. In the 12 years in which he patrolled the streets, cafes, lodging-houses and bed-sits of London while pursuing his work of saving young women from perdition, he encircled the waists, patted the knees and kissed the cheeks of hundreds, possibly thousands of girls. His natural, perhaps foolish, assumption was that the girls must be as pleased to meet him as he them. But he lacked the perspective to see how his behaviour might look to the outside world; and when the British establishment, the Church of England and the national press inspected his remarkable life, they assumed the worst.
An ebullient, Hampshire-born extrovert, born into a family awash with clerics, he was a naturally gifted organiser, fund-raiser, public speaker and setter-up of charities. While still a teenager, he became involved with the Toynbee Hall Mission, devoted to helping the poor improve their conditions; he also set up the Newsboys Club, to help young, exploited newspaper sellers. He was dashingly theatrical. In school holidays, he and a friend mounted charity performances to raise money for the local church. To pay his way through university, they toured the provinces: Harold specialised in comic monologues in the style of George Grossmith (co-author of Diary of a Nobody).
After Oxford, he entered holy orders, worked as a curate in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, and fell in love with an Irish singer and suffragist called Moyra (Molly) Saurin. In 1906, he was given the joint living of the parishes of Stiffkey-with-Morston (total population: 740) on the north Norfolk coast. He and Moyra married, moved to Stiffkey, spent a small fortune renovating the Rectory and threw a grand charity opening in 1907, with a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, attended by no less than the Princess of Wales. Harold perched in a tree to play Puck.
It was idyllic. Embedded in a snug Norfolk village, devoted to good works, keeping open house for beggars or homeless people, starting to raise a family of four children, Harold and "Mimi" were souls in bliss. The future was rosy. It was all going to be such fun.
Things began to fall apart during the war. Harold served as a naval chaplain in the Middle East, while Moyra became a nurse. She met a soldier on leave, became pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption. Harold lost most of his money after he entrusted it to a shady dealer. Temporarily estranged from Moyra, the rector agreed to tutor the Maharajah of Jaipur's son for a year, and take the children to India. The Bishop refused to allow it. But Harold had contracted a locum to run the parish; the man stuck to the contract and insisted on being paid two-thirds of the rector's salary. Bankruptcy loomed. Moyra turned deaf, began to decline into madness and became pregnant again in 1919, the father unknown. Harold decided to adopt his errant wife's child and, after years of upset, they returned to Stiffkey in 1920, to re-start their lives.
From this time on, the rector was gripped by a crusade that was to bring him ruin, then fame. Though he still worked with the homeless, he devoted himself to rescuing girls between the ages of 14 and 24. He asked the Bishop of Norwich's permission to pursue a ministry around the theatres of London's West End. It became his battleground and playground.
Every week, for 12 years, he would leave the rectory in the small hours, take the first train from Wells-next-the-Sea and emerge, flushed and happy, at Piccadilly, returning to Stiffkey late on the Saturday night, arriving in time to give a sermon from the pulpit of his church, St John the Baptist. In London, he would spend every waking hour (he seldom slept in a bed, merely dozed briefly in a chair) in the streets around Waterloo or Soho, looking for girls immured in vice. If he found none, he would meet and befriend young single women, shop assistants or waitresses, who might be in danger of "falling". He was especially keen on the "nippies" (waitresses) employed in Lyons Corner Houses. With prostitutes, he would try to put them in touch with their parents, or find them decent work in shops or clothing factories. With innocent girls, he would tell them of his acting career, buy them dinner and tickets to the theatre, and urge them to follow a career on stage rather than on the street.
He seems to have been a man of staggering naivete - not only for assuming that a life in the theatre would be a step in the direction of moral decency. He had a blind spot about how he came across - to the girls he visited at 1am or 2am, to see if they were lonely and remembering their prayers, and to the girls' mothers and landladies, who regarded him with understandable suspicion. He used to tell people that he'd once saved a desperate 16-year-old girl from throwing herself off Tower Bridge and that " I have ever since, whenever I had some spare time in town, kept my eyes open for any opportunities to help that type of girl, namely, the country girl stranded on the alluring streets of London." More guilelessly, he admitted that, "I was picking up roughly, as my diaries show, an average of 150 or 200 girls a year..."
The balloon went up in November 1930, when Harold missed his train and failed to attend the Armistice Day service in Stiffkey. A local bigwig called Major Hammond, who disliked Harold intensely, complained to the Bishop of Norwich and accused the rector of "immorality" because of his habit of inviting some of his London girls home to Stiffkey Rectory. The church had to take notice of an immorality charge, so, in 1931, the Bishop hired two private detectives to tail Harold in London and Norfolk. After fruitless months, they found one of his early charges, Rose Ellis, an alcoholic ex-prostitute, who was made to testify (over eight glasses of port in the Strand Palace Hotel) that the rector had once slept in her room and tried to have "a connection" with her. Hearing about the accusation, Harold wrote articles defending himself in various newspapers.
The wheels of church law began to grind. The Bishop's creepy legal consultant, Henry Dashwood, sent a flood of subpoenas to anyone who'd ever been approached by the rector. A young prostitute called Barbara Harris, whom Harold had befriended a year before when she was 16, wrote to the Bishop to condemn his behaviour. In a private meeting Dashwood confronted the rector with his "sins" and tried to force his hand, telling him to resign without explaining the charge against him, and threatening him with a "consistory court" where his family secrets would be exposed. Encouraged by his wife, Harold refused.
The battle lines were drawn. Under the 1892 Clergy Discipline Act, he was charged on four counts: immoral conduct with Rose Ellis; immoral conduct " towards a woman in a cafe in Walbrook"; immoral conduct "in embracing a girl in a Chinese restaurant in Bloomsbury"; and with " the immoral habit of associating with ladies of loose character". It was a trial of sins rather than crimes, but if the verdict went against him, he was ruined.
The trial of the rector of Stiffkey began on 29 March 1932, at Church House, Westminster, and it started with a blast. Barbara Harris took the stand and scandalised the court, the Chancellor, the public gallery and the open-jawed Press, with her stories of her bed-sit amours, her Indian policeman lover, her circus-strongman lover, her little VD scares. She explained how the rector had taken her all over London, kissed her umpteen times and promised to divorce his wife and marry her. She was either appallingly honest in her replies or appallingly mendacious, depending on what you believed. "Do you usually," thundered the defence, "keep friendly with people who try to rape you?" "If they come in useful," said Barbara, adding that the Reverend Davidson had suggested, many times, that she should enter a brothel. She was outrageous. She was the Mandy Rice-Davis of her day. f
The trial dragged on through spring into the summer. An awkward army of waitresses, street performers, landladies, publicans, hookers and posh lady benefactors progressed through the witness-box, their stories reverberating around the nation. The court began to speculate how, as an undischarged bankrupt, the rector was able to afford taxis, theatre tickets and meals in West End restaurants twice a day. Hardly a single issue of any newspaper between February and October 1932 did not contain something about the little man and his entourage of innocents - or was it a harem of concubines?
As the private eyes gave their reports, the rector's fame spread. Stiffkey became the centre of celebrity pilgrimages, as crowds of rubber-neckers motored to the Norfolk coast. When he was found guilty of all charges on 8 July (punishment: to be defrocked), he had already made arrangements for an alternative career as a public figure. He had applied for a licence to give dramatic recitations and, disgusted at the bullying and double-dealing of the Church of England, would spend the rest of his life as a vocal anti-Church celebrity. He appeared in a barrel at Blackpool illuminations, beside a flea circus and a three-legged boy; 3,000 people came to gawp at him until the police broke it up. In October 1932, he was defrocked in Norwich Cathedral. He turned up late for the service and interrupted proceedings to say, "It is the Church authorities which are put on trial, not myself ... There is not one single deed which I have done which I shall not do again with the help of God." They ignored him. Chancellor, Registrar, Dean, Archdeacons, Canons and their lawyers listened as the Bishop of Norwich read a proclamation that the rector should be " entirely removed, deposed and degraded".
It should, by rights, have been the end of him. When you've been defrocked, court-martialled, cashiered, struck off or similarly disgraced, you're supposed to go quietly, possibly to an empty room with a bottle of whisky and a service revolver. The rector of Stiffkey was made of different stuff. The newspapers had made him a national celebrity, one whom everyone wished to meet, if only from curiosity. Offers began to come in - a trickle then a flood of requests, to speak at this concert hall, that ice rink. The old ham in him rose to the challenge. He performed his old monologues before ranting at audiences about the iniquity of the Church. He drew crowds at fairgrounds. He posed on Hampstead Heath beside a dead whale. He took part in a stage skit showing him in Hell, prodded with tridents by little red-clad devils.
His last "turn", alas, was the death of him. Taking his text (rather literal-mindedly) from the Bible story of Daniel in the lions' den, he signed up with Skegness Amusement Park to appear in a lion's cage, delivering his denunciation of the Bishop to a thunderstruck crowd. The lion, Freddie, was an alpha male, but was (Harold was assured) drugged. All went well until someone decided to put a lioness in the cage as well. On 28 July 1937, Harold finished his speech, stepped back to take applause and stood on the lioness's tail. She let out a roar, her alpha boyfriend woke from his doped slumbers and mauled the rector.
He might have recovered, had he not, following the incident, been wrongly administered with insulin which sent him into a coma. Harold died two days after the attack; his funeral in Stiffkey was attended by 3,000 people. Inhabitants of the village will tell you it's hard to find anyone with a word to say against the rector.
His granddaughter, Karilyn Collier, a TV producer, has for years campaigned to clear his name. "I've discovered that my grandfather was set up," she says. "He never knew what he was going to be accused of until he went into court, so he never got a chance to prepare a defence." Collier believes Barbara Harris's testimony was a pack of lies: "They offered her money and she said yes. I don't blame her - a 16 year-old-girl, what do you expect?" And in her view, the trial was motivated by greed. "In 1925 there'd been a new Land Act, which changed the way land was disposed in England. The Church didn't own private livings; they were now in the hands of private owners. That's what the church commissioners were trying to retrieve, through trials like the rector's. I've got the evidence that will show he was innocent, and it's time his name was cleared - if only we could get the Church to speak to us. Otherwise these lies will go on for ever."
Whatever comes of Collier's campaign, the rector of Stiffkey will remain a potent legend. Not as a serial fondler, an epic lecher, or the other labels imposed on him by history. But as the first sighting of the press-generated anti-celebrity, famous for bouncing back from public disapproval, ready to do anything to stay in the spotlight. Neil Hamilton, Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken, Major Charles Ingram, George Galloway - whatever their relationship with fame and notoriety may be, the rector of Stiffkey got there first.
John Walsh's novel, 'Sunday at the Cross Bones', is published on 8 May by 4th Estate, price £12.99. To order it at a special price, including free p &p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897
Also in this section
- Godly pleasures: Sacred texts at the British Library
- In search of novels about working life
- Make merry and save the planet
-
Paperbacks: Afterlands
Bring the Noise: 20 years of writing about hip rock and hip-hop
Swung
Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You
Digging to America
The Boy
- Nova Pilbeam: The lady vanishes
