The last time I was in an Anglican church, when I attended the baptism of a friend’s daughter, the ceremony was conducted by a dreadfully limp-minded vicar whose sermon delivery was hindered by the red wine that had also stained his tongue black and half-glued his eyelids together. I don’t remember what he preached about, but his heart wasn’t in it and his words made me yearn for a happier, more muscular era in the Church.

An era like the 1930s, in fact.

Although my grandfather later converted to Catholicism, his own father, Henry, was a Church of England clergyman. In 1930 Henry sent my grandfather to his old school, Sedbergh, which was then within the North Riding of Yorkshire.

Two years later, at the end of morning chapel, the Headmaster announced that there was a man who had spent the night in the local police cell and who was claiming to be my grandfather’s father.

Sure enough, Henry was rattling the bars on the cell door. He had been in a neighbouring town. He thought he would pay a surprise visit to his son. He had decided to walk the length of the railway line in full clerical fig.

He had also been seen by someone who imagined him to be Harold Davidson, the “prostitutes’ padre” who saved the souls of more than 1,000 fallen women before being tried in a Church court for adultery and “habitually associating with women of a loose character for immoral purposes”. It was the duty of all right-thinking citizens to apprehend such a man.

Davidson was Rector of Stiffkey (pronounced Stewkey) in Norfolk and, like many of his beneficed predecessors stretching back to long before the Reformation, had a rather laissez-faire attitude to his parochial duties. Every Monday morning he would catch the train to London and every Friday night he would return. Inbetweentimes he would rescue fallen women: preferably young ones. “I like to catch them between 14 and 20,” he remarked.

I believe with all my soul that if Christ were born again in London in the present day He would constantly be found walking in Piccadilly.

At his trial, a photograph of an elegantly dressed Davidson with a naked girl was produced. The girl was 15 years old and Davidson had told her he could help to advance her career as a bathing-suit model.

Davidson was defrocked and, deprived of his living, began to exhibit himself in a barrel on Blackpool’s promenade, charging tuppence to people who wanted to look at him. He then starred in a music hall turn before moving to Skegness, where he shared a cage with a lion called Freddy.

It was from this vantage point that the former Rector denounced the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury and, more particularly, his arch-enemy the Bishop of Norwich. Whether Freddy thought his companion was being a “Christian basher”, or simply anti-clerical, is not known. What is known is that, one night in 1937, the animal ate him.

+ RIP.

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