Give thanks and praise, for it is the 148th anniversary of the birth of destined-to-be-defrocked vicar Harold Davidson, self-styled Prostitute’s Padre, enthusiastic ‘helper’ of fallen women, and (eventually) victim of a Skegness circus lion.
Harold’s life started normally enough — the son of a vicar, he was educated with a view to joining the church — but at school developed a love of the stage. He wasn’t a star, but had success in a touring production of Charley’s Aunt (as the aunt).
The turning point in his life seems to have come, according to William Donaldson’s Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics, in a late 19th-century London pea-souper.
In 1906, he became Rector of Stiffkey (pronounced ‘Stewky’), a parish he grew into the habit of leaving for London first thing Monday morning, and returning to on the last train to Norwich on a Saturday night (sometimes not until Sunday morning).
As Fergus Butler-Gallie says in his excellent A Field Guide to the English Clergy, Harold became chaplain to “various theatres”, and “it didn’t escape comment that Davidson invariably judged chorus girls and struggling actresses to be most in need of pastoral attention”
That great chronicler of rural life, Ronald Blythe, wrote a book, The Age of Illusion (a few years before his seminal Akenfield), about interwar life in England, in which he said this of Davidson:
(You may think these turns of phrase shed at least as much light on Blythe as they do Davidson; I couldn’t possibly comment — except that’s the only source I came across which makes any mention of such details as… teeth. But I digress…)
Blythe adds that Harold ‘encountered’ “at least a thousand girls during the twenties alone. And this on his own estimate, not his detractors’.” For critics of his methods there certainly were. As Fergus B-G says:
He accosted waitresses in Lyons Corner Houses to the extent that he was banned from them, got the girls theatre work through his connections, and devoted so much time to this that he missed Sunday services. Only in the early 1930s did the Bishop of Norwich take a stand.
After a written complaint from a congregant, Davidson appeared before a consistory (i.e. ecclesiastical) court accused of adultery, making an improper suggestion to a waitress, and
habitually associating with women of a loose character for immoral purposes.
He defended himself vigorously, but then a photo turned up of “the reverend standing between an aspidistra plant and a bare-bottomed teenage actress”. In October 1932, he was publicly ‘defrocked’, and all but financially ruined.
But Harold was a resourceful man, with a theatrical background to fall on, so he improvised. The first step — well, obviously — was to exhibit himself on the Blackpool seafront in a wooden box. The coverage of his case had made him rather famous, after all…
He charged tuppence to anyone who wanted to come and see him preach and/or list his grievances from inside a box, and attracted such a crowd that he was prosecuted for causing an obstruction. And again later for fasting inside it with intent to commit suicide.
By 1937, he was in Skegness, where he appeared at Thompson’s Amusement Park “billed as ‘A modern Daniel in a lion’s den’ … in a cage with a lion called Freddie and a lioness called Toto”. Sadly, with this stunt, he really was putting himself in harm’s way.
According to one account, he trod on Toto’s tail, but something, anyway, displeased Freddie, who fatally mauled him. In an almost poetic turning of the tables, the assistant lion tamer was a 16-year-old girl called Renée, and she tried to save the former vicar, but without success.
As he was rushed to hospital, Davidson supposedly said “Telephone the London newspapers — we still have time to make the first editions!”, but that may be apocryphal. What is true is that the arcade’s owners put up a spectacularly tasteless notice.
There are many tellings of his story, and I can definitely recommend Fergus’s, who sums the man up as follows:
One would be hard-pressed to find a more tragi-comic figure in the history of English public life.
And, well… Amen to that.
