Actor on an ecclesiastical stage

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34130, 17 April 1976, Page 10

Actor on an ecclesiastical stage

The Prostitutes' Padre. By Tom Cullen. Bodley Head. 199 pp. NJ. price $9.70. (Reviewed by David Gunby)

On March 29, 1932, there opened at Church House, in London, ’he trial of Harold Francis Davidson, clerk in holy orders and rector of Stiffkey. in the diocese of Norwich. The venue, combined with the defendant’s occupation, suggests what in fact was the case: that the trial was an ecclesiastical one, involving church law, not the criminal or civil code. The charges laid against Davidson were moral ones, brought under the Clergy Discipline Act of 1892, and resulting from complaints brought before the Bishop of Norwich by the squire of Davidson’s parish, a Major Hammond. Enraged by Davidsons erratic performance of his parochial duties over a long period of years, the Major had felt compelled to act against the rector when the latter brought a number of young prostitutes up from London for the week-end. and they broke out of the Rectory grounds at night to cavort with the local farm hands.

As a reluctant Bishop investigated the situation, however, the nature of the case changed. It was less cn account of goings-on at Stiffkey that the rector was charged, and" more because of his behaviour in London, and particularly in Soho.

What was the rector of a remote Norfolk parish doing in Soho? Harold Davidson’s answer was that he was attempting to save young girls (preferably those between 14 and 20, who were just beginning the life of the streets) from the evils of prostitution. His detractors asserted, however, that he was, on the contrary, seeking out those young women for immoral purposes, and that he “pestered” (the word was used o frequently during the trial that almost became a keynote) more g ris than he preserved. And if the evidence of one witness, Barbara Harris, was to be believed, he occasionally went further than pestering. The question was whether Barbara Harris constituted a more trustworthy witness than a middle-aged cleric. In assessing the evidence, and in building around the case a biography of Harold Davidson, Tom Cullen reaches no certainty on this crucial point. He does not trust Barbara Harris’s testimony entirely, yet he feels convinced that the rector of Stiffkey (the name inevitably gave rise to witticisms) was very far from being the naif that he made himself out to be: a kind' of holy fool who, by his own admission, was not sure what the term “buttock” meant!

What in his own mind Mr Cullen does reach certainty on, however, is a thesis in explanation of Harold

Davidson’s odd mode of living and even odder performance in court. After discussions with the late J. Rowland Sales, a London theatrical agent personally acquainted with Davidson, he advances the theory that the cleric suffered from multiple personality: that (to use the nicknames Sales attached to the facets of Davidson) there co-existed within the Church of England cleric not only “Uncle ’•’arold,” the gentle and kindly vicar, ' “Little Jimmy,” an impish and v ■ ward frequenter of theatres and brothels, and even “the Bunco Kid,” a con nan with a flair for borrowing money and not repaying it. Considerable space would be needed to evaluate Mr Cullen’s case. Suffice it to say here that the thesis provides a fascinating explanation for Davidson’s behaviour, and makes for the most entertaining reading. Torn in his youth between the cloth and the footlights, Davidson spent several years on the stage and retained to the end his dramatic flair. In court he performed magnificently, if somewhat inconsequentially. After being found guilty, and (in a most dramatic manner) unfrocked, he continued to live in a thoroughly dramatic fashion, first exhibiting himself in a barrel at Blackpool and

then (after various ups and downs, including a flamboyant protest during the Church Assembly) sharing a cage with two lions at Skegness. It was in the latter capacity, as “A Modern Daniel in the Lions’ Den” as the billboards put it, that Davidson met his end. On July 28, 1937, during his act, he aroused one of the lions to the kind of frenzied rage he had induced in his ecclesiastical opponents. The Bishop of Norwich had unfrocked him. The lion mauled him so severely that he died two days later in hospital. It was a grotesque ending, yet not without its symbolic rightness. For whatever Harold Francis Davidson, M.A., was, he was no Daniel, and divine deliverance eluded him in Skegness as it had, it seems, in Soho. Only in Stiffkey, where his parishioners remained for the most part remarkably loyal, did he perhaps achieve some of the goals which his divided personality sought.