The Parish Clerk Part 27

The following reminiscences are supplied by the Rev. W. Frederick Green, and are worthy of record:

I well remember the parish clerk of Woburn, in Bedfordshire, more than sixty years ago. His name was Joe Brewer--a bald-headed, short, stumpy man, who wore black knee-breeches, grey stockings, and shoes. He was also the town crier. He always gave out the hymns from the front of the west gallery. "Let us sing to the praise and glory of G.o.d, hymn--" Once I heard him call out instead, "O yes! O yes! O yes! This is to give notice," and then, recollecting he was in church, with a loud "O crikey!" he began "Let us sing," etc.

Collections in church were made by him in a china soup plate from each pew. Ours was a large square family pew. One Sunday my brother put into the plate a new coin (I think a florin), which Brewer had never seen before, and which he thought was a token or medal, and thinking my brother was playing a trick upon him, said in a loud voice, "Now, Master Charles, none of them larks here."

I have also seen him at afternoon service (there was no evening service in those days), when it unexpectedly came on too dark for the clergyman to see his MS. in the pulpit, go to the altar--an ordinary table with drawers--throw up the cloth, open a drawer, take out two candles and a box of matches, go up the pulpit stairs, fix them in the candlesticks, and light them.

During the winter months part of his duty was to tend the fire during service in the Duke of Bedford's large curtained, carpeted pew in the chancel.

When I was a boy I was staying in Northamptonshire, and went one Sunday morning into a village church for service (I think it was Fotheringhay).

There was a three-decker, and the clerk from his desk led the singing of the congregation, which he faced. There was no musical instrument of any kind. The hymn, which of course was from Tate and Brady, was the metrical version of Psalm xlii. The clerk gave out the Psalm, then read the first line to the congregation, then sang it solo, and then the congregation sang it altogether; and so on line after line for the whole eleven verses.

More attention must have been paid in those days to the requirement of the ninety-first Canon, that the clerk should be known, if may be, "for his competent skill in singing."

In 1873 I was curate-in-charge of an out-of-the-way Norfolk village. On my first Sunday I had an early celebration at 8 a.m. I arrived in church about 7.45, and to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave with their hats on, smoking their pipes. I expostulated with them quite gently, but they left the church before service and never came again. I discovered afterwards that they had been regular communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory to the poor present immediately after the service. When these men in the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants.

In 1870, in Norfolk, I went round with the rural dean visiting the churches. At one church the only person to receive the rural dean was the parish clerk, who was ready with the funeral pall to put over the rural dean's horse whilst waiting outside the church.

It was this same church which, in preparation for the rural dean's visit, had been recently and completely whitewashed throughout. Not only the walls and pillars, but also the pews, the school forms, the pulpit, and also the altar itself, a very small four-legged deal table without any covering. I suppose this was done by the churchwardens to conceal the dilapidated condition of everything; but they had omitted to remove the gra.s.s which was growing in the crevices of the floor paving.

Mr. Moxon (deceased), formerly rector of Hethersett, in Norfolk, told me that he had once preached for a friend in a Norfolk village church with the woman clerk holding an umbrella over his head in the pulpit throughout the sermon, because of the "dreep."

Miss E. Lloyd, of Woodburn, Crowborough, writes:

About the year 1833 a gentleman bought an estate in North Yorkshire, seven miles from any town, and built a house there. The parish was small, having a population of about a hundred souls, the church old and tumbledown, reeking with damp; the rain came through the roof; the seats were worm-eaten, and centipedes, with other like vermin, roamed about them near the wall. The vicar was non-resident, and an elderly curate-in-charge ministered to this parish and another in the neighbourhood. The customs of the church were much the same as those described by Canon Atkinson in his _Forty Years in a Moorland Parish_ as existing on his arrival at Danby. There was no vestry. The surplice (washed twice a year) was hung over the altar rails, within which the curate robed, his hat or any parcel he happened to have in his hand being put down for the time on the Holy Table. The men sat for the most part together, the farmers and young men in the singing-loft, the labourers below, and the women in front. The wife of the chief yeoman farmer--an excellent and superior woman--still kept up the habit of "making a reverence" to the altar before she entered her pew. The surplice, which hung in the church all through the week, was apt to get very damp. On one occasion, when a strange clergyman staying at the Hall took the service, he declined to wear it, as it was so wet.

"He wadn't pit it on," said the old clerk Christopher (commonly called "Kitty") Hill. "I reckon he was afeard o' t' smittle" (infection).

The same clergyman, when he went up to the altar for the Communion Service, knelt down, as his habit was, at the north end for private prayer whilst the congregation were singing a metrical Psalm (Old or New Version). On looking up he saw that Kitty Hill had followed him within the rails and was kneeling at the opposite end of the Holy Table staring at him with round eyes full of amazement at this unusual act of devotion. Both the curate and the clerk spoke the broadest Yorkshire.

Psalm x.x.xii. 4 was thus rendered by Kitty: "Ma-maasture is like t' doong i' summer." He was an old man and quite bald, and used to sit in his desk with a blue-spotted pocket-handkerchief spread over his head, occasionally drawing down a corner of it for use, and then pulling it straight again. If the squire happened to come late to church--a thing which did not often happen--the curate would pause in his reading and apologise: "Good morning, Mr. ----. I am sorry, sir, that I began the service. I thought you were not coming this morning." One sentence of the sermon preached on the death of King William IV long remained in the memory of some of his young hearers: "Behold the King in all his pomp and glory, soodenly toombled from his high elevation, and mingled wi'

the doost!"

In 1845 a new church was built on the old site, a new curate came, Kitty Hill died, and was succeeded in his office by his widow, who did all that she could do of the clerk's work, and showed remarkable taste in decorating the church at Christmas. No clerk was needed for the responses, as the congregation joined heartily in the service, and there was a much better attendance than there is now. She died in the early fifties.

Amongst other varied readings of the Psalms that of an old parish clerk at Hartlepool may be given. He had been a sailor, and used to render Psalm civ. 26 as "There go the ships, and there is that lieutenant whom Thou hast made to take his pastime therein."

The late Dr. Gatty, in his record of _A Life at One Living_, mentions that at Ecclesfield, as in many other places, the office of parish clerk was hereditary. The last holder of the office, who used to sit in his desk clad in a black bombazine gown, was a publican by trade, a decent, honest man, who during the fifty-one years he was clerk was only twice absent from service. He died in 1868, and the offices of clerk and s.e.xton were then united and held by one person.

The register books of Weybridge, Surrey, were kept for a great part of the eighteenth century by the parish clerks, the son succeeding his father in office for three or four generations.

Now probably the clerks are no more clerks but vergers; and as a Yorkshireman remarked, "_Verging_ is a very honourable profession."

The portrait of John Gray, sometime clerk in Eton College Chapel, taken in his gown as he stood in his desk, has been engraved, and is well known to old Etonians.

Few people possess the gift of humour in the same degree as the late Bishop Walsham How, and his stories of the race of parish clerks and vergers must not be omitted, and are here published by permission of his son, Mr. F.D. How, editor of _Lighter Moments_.

When I was a deacon, and naturally shy, I was visiting my aunts at Workington, where my grandfather had been rector, and was asked to preach on Sunday evening in St. John's, a wretched modern church--a plain oblong with galleries, and a pulpit like a very tall winegla.s.s, with a very narrow little straight staircase leading up to it, in the middle of the east part of the church. When the hymn before the sermon was given out I went as usual to the vestry to put on the black gown.

Not knowing that the clergyman generally stayed there till the end of the hymn, I emerged as soon as I had vested myself and walked to the pulpit and ascended the stairs. When nearly at the summit, to my horror I discovered a very fat beadle in the pulpit lighting the candles. We could not possibly pa.s.s on the stairs, and the eyes of the whole congregation were upon me. It would be ignominious to retreat. So after a few minutes' reflection I saw my way out of the difficulty, which I overcame by a very simple mechanical contrivance. I entered the pulpit, which exactly fitted the beadle and myself, and then face to face we executed a rotary movement to the extent of a semicircle, when the beadle finding himself next the door of the pulpit was enabled to descend, and I remained master of the situation.

At Uffington, near Shrewsbury, during the inc.u.mbency of the Rev. J.

Hopkins, the choir and organist, having been dissatisfied with some arrangement, determined not to take part in the service. So when the clerk, according to the usual custom of those days, gave out the hymn, there was a dead silence. This lasted a little while, and then the clerk, unable to bear it, rose up and appealed to the congregation, saying most imploringly, "Them as _can_ sing _do_ ye sing: it's misery to be a this'n" (Shropshire for "in this way").

At Wolstanton, in the Potteries, there was a somewhat fussy verger called Oakes. On one occasion, just at the time of the year when it was doubtful whether lights would be wanted or no, and when they had not yet been lighted for evening service, a stranger, who was a very smart young clergyman, was reading the lessons and had some difficulty in seeing. He had on a pair of delicate lavender kid gloves. The verger, perceiving his difficulty, went to the vestry, got two candles, lighted them, and walked to the lectern, before which he stood solemnly holding the candles (without candlesticks) in his hands. This was sufficiently trying to the congregation, but suddenly some one rattled the latch of the west door, when Oakes, feeling that it was absolutely necessary to go and see what was the matter, thrust the two candles into the poor young clergyman's delicately gloved hands, and left him!

At the church of Stratfieldsaye, where the Duke of Wellington was a regular attendant, a stranger was preaching, and the verger when he ended came up the stairs, opened the pulpit door a little way, slammed it to, and then opened it wide for the preacher to go out. He asked in the vestry why he had shut the door again while opening it, and the verger said, "We always do that, sir, to wake the duke."

A former young curate of Stoke being very anxious to do things rubrically, insisted on the ring being put on the "fourth finger" at a wedding he took. The woman resisted and said, "I would sooner die than be married on my little finger." The curate said, "But the rubric says so," whereupon the _deus ex machina_ appeared in the shape of the parish clerk, who stepped forward and said, "In these cases, sir, the thoomb counts as a digit."

A gentleman going to see a ritualistic church in London was walking into the chancel when an official stepped forward and said, "You mustn't go in there." "Why not?" said the gentleman. "I'm put here to stop you,"

said the man. "Oh! I see," said the gentleman; "you're what they call the _rude_ screen, aren't you?"

A clergyman in the diocese of Wakefield told me that when first he came to the parish he found things in a very neglected state, and among other changes he introduced an early celebration of the Holy Communion. An old clerk collected the offertory, and when he brought it up to the clergyman he said, "There's eight on 'em, but two 'asn't paid."

A verger was showing a lady over a church when she asked him if the vicar was a married man. "No, ma'am," he answered, "he's a chalybeate."

A verger showing a large church to a stranger, pointed out another man and said, "That is the other verger." The gentleman said, "I did not know there were two of you," and the verger replied, "Oh, yes, sir, he werges up one side of the church and I werges up the other."

On my first visit to Almondbury to preach, the verger came to me in the vestry and said, "A've put a platform in t' pulpit for ye; you'll excuse me, but a little man looks as if he was in a toob." (N.B. To prevent undue inferences I am five feet nine inches in height.)

One of the speakers at the meeting of the Catholic Truth Society at Bristol (Sept., 1895) told a story of a pious Catholic visiting Westminster Abbey, and kneeling in a quiet corner for private devotion, when he was summoned in stentorian tones to come and view the royal tombs and chapels. "But I have seen them," said the stranger, "and I only wish to say my prayers." "Prayers is over," said the verger.

"Still, I suppose," said the stranger, "there can be no objection to my saying my prayers quietly here?" "No objection, sir!" said the irate verger. "Why, it would be an insult to the Dean and Chapter."

The Rev. M.E. Jenkins writes his remembrances of several old clerks.

There was dear old Robert Livesay, of Blackburn parish church, whom every one knew, his large rubicund face beaming with good nature and humour--a very kindly old soul. In 1870 I was appointed to an old-world Dale's parish, which had one of the real old Yorkshire clerks, Frank Hutchinson. He was lame and blind in one eye, and well do I recall his sonorous and tremulous response, his love for the Psalms (Tate and Brady's); he "reckoned nought o' _Hymns Ancient and Modern_." I used generally to find him with a long pipe in the vestry on my return from afternoon service. He was a great authority on the ancient history of the parish, and was formerly schoolmaster. He had brought up most respectably a large family of sons and daughters on the smallest means, many of whom still survive. I had a great respect for the old man, and so he had for me. He was very great at leading that peculiarly dirge-like wail at the huge Yorkshire funerals. I never could quite make out any words, but as a singularly effective and musical cadence in a minor key, it was no doubt a survival, as I once heard Canon Atkinson say, the famous vicar of Danby, my immediate neighbour on the moors. At last I attended Frank Hutchinson daily in his prolonged decay, and received his solemn blessing and commendation on my work; and he received at my hand a few hours before his death his last communion, surrounded by all his children and grandchildren, in his small bedroom, by the light of a single candle. I can still see his thin face uplifted.

It is thirty-five years ago, and I can still hear the striking of his lucifer match in the midst of the afternoon service, and see him holding up close to his own eye the candle and the book, and can hear his tremulous "Amen," quite independent of the choral one sung by a small choir in the chancel. He was great in epitaphs. A favourite one, which he would recite _ore rotunda_, was:

"Let this record, what few vain marbles can, Here lies an honest man."

Another, which, by the way, is in Egton churchyard, ran as follows: