by A. N. Wilson
Is your heart with sorrows torn?
Come to me, I’ll heal them all
Martin d’Arcy. Campion Hall.
But in the event, it was his own sorrows which were poor Father d’Arcy’s undoing. His life was clouded by a hidden tragedy. Not for nothing was he a Jesuit, so the matter was all hushed up, and the famous Master of Campion Hall was spirited away to the Jesuit house in Boston, Massachusetts. No one in his lifetime ever knew what had happened. A Jesuit scholastic, a very young man, little more than a boy, had committed suicide when d’Arcy had revealed, by propositioning the youth, a darker side to ‘The Mind and Heart of Love’.17
While many Roman Catholics, especially converts, probably look back to the 1930s as a period of expansion and triumph, other nonconformist bodies suffered a decline in numbers at this time. The Baptists, for example, who numbered 434,741 in 1906, had lost nearly a quarter of their members over the next thirty years.18 Almost certainly the three chief causes of this were Death; Doubt – very many nonconformists who learnt their left-wing politics in the chapel abandoned religion for politics when they grew up; and the unthreatening inclusiveness of modern Anglicanism, which meant that many whose Victorian forebears had been Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, found that Episcopalianism in one form or another answered their needs.
There was, however, another way in which the Church of England occupied a unique place in national life, and this had scarcely anything to do with religion, certainly nothing to do with belief. Drive round twenty-first-century England and in every village and small town you will pass a gateway or a drive to ‘The Old Rectory’ or ‘The Old Vicarage’.
In the post-Second World War world when Church membership began to decline drastically, and with it Church money, the authorities made the decision to sell off the parsonages – some Victorian villas, but for the most part decent, sometimes large Georgian houses, with a few acres of garden and a glebe, that is a patch of land set aside for the parson to grow his own fruit and vegetables. The clergy were seldom rich, but they were treated as if they were gentlemen: very often they were. Nearly all of them had degrees. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, they were disseminated throughout the land. If they were even half good at their jobs, they and their wives and families mixed with everyone in their parish. They were extraordinary agents of social communication. It meant that almost everyone in England was within five miles of a man who could read ancient Greek.
Their families, often impoverished but growing up with a certain set of shared values which could loosely be defined as decency, were notably more bookish, more self-reliant than other middle-class families who had more servants or moved in narrower social fields. It is no wonder that such a very high proportion of writers, creative men and women of other talent, teachers, civil servants, and of course clergy, came from ‘clergy families’. Nowadays the clergy family is all but obsolete and only a few of the children of priests follow in father’s (or nowadays mother’s) footsteps. Much has been lost, not least some of the more wildly eccentric figures in British national life; for living in a small community where you were the only middle-class family, the only family who read books, the only family that was neither as rich as the squire nor as common as the shopkeeper, isolated people and intensified their tendency to oddness.
On Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1932, an extraordinary scene was enacted in Norwich Cathedral. At a quarter to twelve, the Bishop of Norwich, Dr Bertram Pollock, the Chancellor of the Diocese, the Registrar in a legal wig, the Dean and the canons, the Archdeacon and various other bewigged lawyers proceeded to the Beauchamp Chapel. Outside the building they could hear a car screeching to a halt, followed by the cheers of a crowd. Before the proceedings began, they saw, hurrying into the cathedral and clutching a silk hat, the diminutive (five foot three) figure of the Reverend Harold Francis Davidson, MA, accompanied by his sister and a female friend. The appointer called out: ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez, all persons cited and admonished to appear at this court and answer to your names as you shall be called. God save the King.’ The rector’s name was called three times and he answered ‘Here.’ The bishop then proceeded with the melancholy ceremony of defrocking the rector, or depriving him of his holy orders. He had entered the cathedral a priest. He left it a yelling, furious layman, calling out that he would make an appeal to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
There was hardly an English newspaper, between March and July 1932, which did not contain daily references to the Rector of Stiffkey, the north Norfolk village pronounced Stewkey, whose parish priest Davidson became, aged thirty-one, in 1906.19 For years, Mr Davidson had been conducting the services at Stiffkey each Sunday. As Monday dawned he would leave his wife and five children in the Rectory while he himself would catch the train (London-North-Eastern Line) from Wells-next-the-Sea to the capital, where he would spend the remainder of the week making a nuisance of himself with adolescent girls. At Marble Arch for example he met Barbara Harris, aged sixteen. Surely she was – she must be – Miss X – and he had named a famous film star. Barbara was no innocent, but she liked the chat-up line. At 2 am. not long afterwards the Rector called on her and found her sitting up in bed with an Indian lover – a policeman – who told the over-excited padre fascinating stories of temple prostitutes in his native land.
When Harold Davidson was prosecuted and brought to Church House in Westminster to answer charges of conduct unbecoming a clerk in Holy Orders, he was forced to go through one of those humiliating cross-examinations which seem designed for the sadistic amusement of lawyers and enrichment of cheap newspapers, but which are curiously difficult to see as advancements of civilization. When one of the girls, Rose Ellis, had given evidence, Roland Oliver, for the prosecution, asked the rector:
‘Is it your view of decency to go to a flat and to get this pretty girl to dress your naked body?’
‘You are making the most outrageous suggestion. I never said that.’
‘Was the boil on the buttock of your body?’
Silence.
‘Have you to think?’ nagged Oliver.
‘Yes. I do not know what the buttock is.’
‘Do you not know?’
‘Honestly, I do not.’
‘Mr Davidson!’
‘It is a phrase honestly I have never heard. So far as I remember, it is a little below the waist.’
Davidson was more interested in red lips and white teeth and cheeky smiles than in what could be found a little below the waist. In the weeks of trial no evidence was produced that he had made love to the girls whom he flattered and pestered. He had kissed and fondled and chatted. He had invited them down to the Rectory for pyjama parties. He had approached so many young girls in ABC tea shops and Lyons’ Corner Houses that there were many such establishments where he was banned. He was unsavoury and a little mad, but the savage processes brought against him were unable to yield quite the results they wanted. Even Rose Ellis, most salacious of the witnesses, admitted under cross-examination that she had lied, having been bribed with port wine in a saloon bar by a private detective engaged on behalf of the Chancellor of the Diocese of Norwich.
The trial and defrocking of the Rector had revealed the extent to which upright bourgeois ‘morals’ were upheld more in the minds of leader-writers and suburban Sunday school teachers than in the actual lives of young people living in big cities. The girls Davidson befriended – whom he claimed by turns he wanted to rescue from the dangers of drink, prostitution, the Roman Catholic Church, or the Stage – were those who in a very few years would join the ATS, become Land Girls, Wrens, factory workers, the pillars of England. In 1932 they were bored teenagers, hanging around in cafés, easy in morals, and amused by the antics of funny little Harold who sometimes wore a collar and tie and pretended to be a theatrical impresario and sometimes wore a clerical collar – ‘For years I have been known as the Prostitutes’ Padre – to me the proudest title that a true priest of Christ can hold. I believe with all my soul that if He were
born again in London in this present day He would be found constantly walking in Piccadilly. He suffered the cruellest slander, but this did not deflect Him from solicitude for the fallen, and His attitude to the woman taken in adultery and still more His close friendship with the notorious harlot of Magdalene … has always been my inspiration and comfort in the difficult work I have humbly undertaken in His name.’
‘Hello you old thief,’ called out one barman who, in spite of Davidson’s being an undischarged bankrupt, allowed him to cash cheques. ‘How are all the girls?’
So might Our Saviour have been greeted had He walked in England in the 1930s. Or so Davidson believed. His end was as dramatic as had been his vision of life. Unable to take his case to appeal, he raised money by performing stage re-enactments of his trial. When one of the vindictive landladies who gave evidence at his trial pursued him in law for £45 he was unable to pay. He spent nine days in a Liverpool gaol and upon his release he rode through the streets of Blackpool, with a young negress on either side of him, throwing flowers to a jubilant crowd of spectators. The Church had arrayed itself in the clothes of Caiaphas to condemn this mentally unbalanced figure. In its brutality towards Davidson there was some foreshadowing of the way it would destroy the new king in 1936. By then, Davidson’s fate as Tragic Buffoon cum Early Christian Martyr was grotesquely sealed. He had begun to appear during the summer months at Skegness Amusement Park, in a lion’s cage. In July 1937, from a cage measuring 14 feet by 8 feet, Davidson addressed the crowds on the iniquities of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Norwich. Freddie, the lion who shared the cage while these denunciations were in progress, reared up on his haunches and began to maul the little man. It was appropriate that the human being who came to his rescue, Freddie’s tamer Irene Violet Sumner, should have been a sixteen-year-old girl. He never recovered consciousness when they took him from the cage. Perhaps, who knows, as he drifted towards death, his spirit saw Irene Violet and leaned smilingly towards her with the offer of a teacake, or help in getting a ‘position’, or with an exclamation of astonishment at her supposed resemblance to Miss Jean Harlow. As he died, he perhaps entered the Empyrean as Dante did, thinking of girls, or like Goethe’s Faust, whose last gasp is an affirmation of belief in the Eternal Feminine Principle leading us on:
Das Ewigweibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
23
Politics
If you were an English Tory of the generation who voted for Disraeli and the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, in the closing years of Queen Victoria, you would have seen the rising generation of socialists as the greatest possible threat to the old order. Such a figure as Philip Snowden (1864–1937) would have filled you with terror. He was a broad-shouldered, thin-lipped, intensely serious Yorkshireman, with blond hair, steely light blue eyes and the gift of the gab.1 With the rise of the Independent Labour Party, Snowden was always seen as second only to Keir Hardie himself as a ‘draw’ of crowds. Malcolm Muggeridge, the disillusioned ex-socialist, used to say that had Keir Hardie lived – he died heartbroken by the failure of international socialism in 19152 – he would have ended his days on the right wing of the Conservative party. Muggeridge spoke satirically, but he also spoke whereof he knew. Snowden, who had been born as a weaver’s son in a two-roomed cottage in the hamlet of Ickornshaw, Cowling, near Keighley in West Yorkshire, died as Viscount Snowden. He was one of those senior members of the Labour party who followed Ramsay MacDonald into the National Government of 1931, sitting in collaboration with Tories such as the ironmaster Stanley Baldwin and the Liberal Rufus Isaacs, who was one of nine children of a Jewish fruit merchant from Spitalfields.
All three of these – Snowden the poor weaver’s son, Isaacs the fruiterer and Baldwin the Bewdley ironmaster – ended up in the House of Lords: Viscount Snowden; Earl Baldwin of Bewdley; Rufus Isaacs was the Marquess of Reading, the British Ambassador to the United States and Viceroy of India.
Romantic snobs such as Proust’s Baron de Charlus, who liked to trace his ancestry back to the Emperor Charlemagne, would perhaps have considered that this marquess, this viscount and this earl were not ‘real’ aristocracy. But there is not a single member of the British aristocracy whose family was not, once upon a time, doing something just as lowly as the forebears of these three noble lords. Britain’s premier duke’s surname, Howard, means harbourmaster, and that was the original avocation of the dukes of Norfolk.
There were many things about the political system in England which would have made, and did make, angry, thinking and discriminating people into communists, or, if they knew the nature of communism in Russia, into fascists. The poor were still horribly poor, and the conservatism, small c, of the English system seemed relentlessly biased against them. As a political vehicle, the system of hereditary monarchy seemed, in 1936, as if it had run into the ground. The system of parliamentary democracy threw up some quite shockingly pedestrian and short-sighted political leaders. And the system of aristocracy, in a democratic world, might well have seemed untenable. Probably on any logical level it was. But it is important to recognize the kind of aristocratic system it was. It was not, like so many aristocratic castes on the Continent, one designed to keep people out of it. On the contrary, it evolved as a flexible system. If a weaver’s son shook his fist at privilege, said this system, do not fight a class war with him. Create a viscountcy for him. This Gilbert and Sullivan and mildly, but not sensationally, corrupt method of doing things allowed for many of the things which warring factions on the Continent in their separate ways wanted. It allowed the old aristocracy, who had administered Britain since 1689, to remain in place. It also allowed the rising class, created by the industrial revolution and free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1840, to exercise the power of their own money. In many cases, at the top end of this class they intermarried with the ‘old’ families. It also allowed for Ramsay MacDonald and for Philip Snowden to be respectively Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. What it did not appear to allow for, which is why so many of the Labour party saw MacDonald as a traitor, was true socialism, and the dismantling of the old order altogether. When the British looked at the countries with socialist leaders such as Lenin, Léon Blum or Hermann Müller, or those of the Spanish Republic, who guaranteed their liberal-socialist regime by sending the entire Spanish gold reserve to the Soviet Union, they might have felt happier with British muddle.
Philip Snowden, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had economic ideas which were indistinguishable from those of Churchill, his Conservative predecessor. True, he put taxes up, increasing income tax by sixpence to four shillings and sixpence in the pound to pay for the worthy measures introduced immediately by the Labour government, such as the Widows’ and Old Age Pensions Act, which greatly extended benefit to those in need. But over the two great economic questions of the age – whether to support tariffs or free trade, and whether to remain on the gold standard, Snowden was deeply unbudgeable. He was implacable in his devotion to free trade, in spite of what the downturn in the world economy was doing to British jobs. And he was a fanatical believer, as an eloquent and highly popular socialist, in the pound being tied to the gold standard. So it was that in Britain, in the opening years of Ramsay MacDonald’s government, the position of the working man grew more perilous than at any stage in history since the worst days just after the Napoleonic Wars. When Labour took office in June 1929, unemployment stood at 1,163,000 – that is 9.6 per cent of the insured population. A year later there were 1,912,000 unemployed, and by December the total was 2,500,000.3 The withdrawal of American money following the Wall Street Crash threatened to plunge the economy of the West into ruin. Within the Labour cabinet there was complete confusion about what should be done. Snowden’s policies would obviously prove unworkable – eventually. But in the meantime, how many more men would be thrown out of work, and what would be the social and political consequences of such a disaster?
Wisdom after the event does not help very much,
though there is usually plenty of that in the histories of the 1929–31 government. It has been assumed that some form of New Deal would have saved the day. But, from an economic point of view, the New Deal was coming unstuck by 1937, when American unemployment climbed again to 10 million. What saved the US economy by the following spring was rearmament. The same was true in Germany. The mysterious disappearance of the German unemployed into useful labour as soon as the Nazis took control was seen by Hitler’s admirers to have solved the crisis by means of building autobahns, holiday camps and schemes of public works. They overlooked the fact that from the beginning his aim was to have a war. He had written at length about it in Mein Kampf, and the only secret was the extent to which, in defiance of the Versailles treaty, he was rebuilding Germany as a military force sans pareil. Neither he nor Roosevelt adopted their policies as a result of reading J. M. Keynes. It could be said that Keynes in part developed his ideas during the 1930s as a consequence of seeing the apparent success of American and German national revivification programmes.
