A FIGHTING CLERGYMAN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XXI, 21 November 1896, Page 87

A FIGHTING CLERGYMAN.

Mr Bellairs, an old English clergyman of pugnacious tendencies, stood 6 feet 2 inches in his stockings. He bad once been wounded as midshipman on board the ‘Spartiate,’ at Trafalgar, and afterward got a commission in the Fifteenth Hussars, where he was one of the best lightweight bruisers in the regiment. Subsequently he took holy orders and went to do duty for a friend in Warwickshire. The ribbon weavers in the congregation were an excitable lot of men, and when he got up to preach they evinced their dislike to him as a stranger to the parish by catcalls and unpleasant epithets. Thereupon, addressing them, he said : ' You are a pack of cowardly fellows, who would not dare to act as you are doing if you thought I could defend myself, but I have served the king in his navy and his army, and if you will pick out your best man I will go into the churchyard and have it out with him.’ They did so. Their champion got severely the worst of the encounter. Then they took the parson on their shoulders, set him again in the pulpit, and listened to bis sermon as quiet as mice, and when the old incumbent died petitioned the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift was the preferment, to appoint Mr Bellairs, who, at the time of his death in 1872, was the Hon. Canon of Worcester and had made Bedworth a model parish long before. No man was better known, both as clergyman and magistrate, in Warwickshire. Lord Hill, the Peninsula General, at whose house he was often a guest, used to illustrate bis versatility by asking him when he arrived : • Which is it to be this time—cockpit or pulpit ?’