583. The Lion, the Priest and the Parlourmaids: A 1930s Sex Scandal

0:09The Reverend Mr. Davidson's downfall was girls. Not a girl Not five or six girls even Not a hundred But the entire tremulous universe of girlhood Shingled heads, clear cheeky eyes, nifty legs Warm, blunt-fingered workaday hands Small, firm breasts And, most importantly, good, strong, healthy teeth Besotted him A single human life was all too short for him to savor such a universe, and his awareness of this allowed him to encounter at least a thousand girls during the twenties alone. Quite early on in his sacred career, he hit upon an exciting solution to what otherwise might have been an insoluble problem.

1:06He would make girls his special ministry. And so he set about it with a single-mindedness, which in any other circumstances should have brought him a deanery. So that is from Ronald Blythe's book, The Age of Illusion, which is the history of Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Ronald Blythe did not talk like that, but I think the quality of the material is kind of appropriate to, I can imagine Alec Guinness or somebody maybe reading that out. And Dominic, it's a brilliantly funny, witty book, isn't it? Full of strange stories and anecdotes. And you, like me, have fixed on one chapter in particular, which is the extraordinary story of Harold Davidson, who was the rector of church in a Norfolk village called either Stiff Key or Stuky.

2:01And opinions on this vary. And we will be coming to the big debate on how you pronounce that word. in due course people in britain have always loved the kind of scandal hit vicar and the rector of stiffy or stuke is the archetype of that isn't he he is the ultimate scandal played vicar is fair to say so if listeners like the episode and they want to buy ronald blyth's book the age of illusion the folio society edition has an introduction by me which i did about 10 years ago and when i was reading that book, this one chapter. I mean, it's all great, but this one chapter absolutely leapt out at me.

2:37He is an extraordinary man. He is a man who boasted, who prided himself on, to use his own terminology, picking up 200 girls a year. He made newspaper headlines day after day in the mid 1930s. Having been a vicar of this small parish in Norfolk, he ended up as a fairground attraction in Europe's most popular seaside resort. And he has a final showdown with a lion called Freddy before a gaping audience of holidaymakers in Skegness. So, Tom, it is an incredibly funny story, but it's quite a melancholy story as well, isn't it? You think it's quite a dark story. I do. Well, so I came across this story when I went to the place you described as Europe's most popular seaside resort, which is Blackpool.

3:22I read Ronald Blythe's chapter on the Vicar of Stuky or Stifke there, and I've been wanting to do an episode on him ever since. And now at last we get the chance. And it strikes me that actually, coincidentally, this is quite an odd pairing with our previous episode, which was also about a priest from East Anglia behaving badly. And it featured a trial on an East Anglian offence that was done in London. So there were certain points of comparison. But just to put my cards on the table, I think the Reverend Mr. Davidson is not remotely as bad a person as Thomas of Monmouth, who featured in our previous episode.

4:02Indeed, I think he's maybe quite hard done by. Yes, I may well agree with you. Now, anybody who thinks, gosh, this is a slight subject, you should stand corrected. because no lesser historian than AJP Taylor said that the story of the Reverend Mr. Davidson offered a great parable of the age of the interwar years in his history of this period. He wrote of him, he attracted, he, the Reverend, attracted more attention than, say, Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury. Which man deserves a greater place in the history books? And I think our answer is quite clear because we will never do a podcast about Cosmo Lang, but I think we could do a whole series about Harold Davidson.

4:41Now, he has attracted, it's a sign of his importance that he's attracted several excellent biographers. Most recently, an author from Norfolk called Jonathan Tucker, who wrote a book called The Troublesome Priest, who argues that, like you, Tom, he thinks Harold Davidson has been much maligned. So let's get into his story. He was born just outside Southampton in Hampshire in 1875. And he came from an ecclesiastical family. More than 20 of his relatives had been Anglican clergymen. And his father, Francis Davidson, was the local vicar in this place called Schoeling in Hampshire. And another of Davidson's biographers, Tom Cullen, describes his father as a tiny man with a luxuriant beard that gave him the appearance of a gnome.

5:22And his mother was the great niece of Dr. Arnold, as in Tom Brown and rugby school. So he's the great, great nephew of Dr. Arnold, which is quite a thought. Here's the point at which our podcasts on Benjamin Lay and Harry Potter and public schools meet, I think it's fair to say, because Harold Davidson was a very short man. He was five foot three. He went to a school called Whitgift in Croydon. Actually, I've been to give a talk. They have a very good history festival. I recommend it. He stayed with his maiden aunts in Croydon. And under their influence, they were massive kind of Christian do-gooders.

6:01Under their influence, Harold worked part-time at Toynbee Hall in the East End, this kind of settlement house, helping the poor. I mean, that is the idea, isn't it, of the middle classes going out into darkest London. The idea that you bring poor relief not just to darkest Africa, but to the most poverty-stricken reaches of the capital. And I guess it's really the kind of intersection point between institutional Christianity and socialism. Massively influential. It is. And actually, there is a political dimension to Mr. Davidson's career, which we will come to. Now, the expectation is that he will follow his father into the priesthood.

6:41But when he was at school, he discovered the pleasures of the stage. He acted in farces with his friend from school, who was a man called Leon Quartermain, who later became a West End star and actually acted with what became the Royal Shakespeare Company. So that's jolly good. And Davidson's life might well have been happier had he continued in that career, don't you think? Oh, unquestionably, unquestionably. So actually, when he left school in 1894, his family expected him to go to Oxford and to study for Holy Orders, but he does something very different. He becomes an actor. So his specialism is the sort of classic late Victorian Edwardian light entertainment, drawing room comedies for the kind of respectable middle classes.

7:22At his finest hour, he played Lord Fancourt Babily in the farce, Charlie's Aunt. Which involves dressing up as a woman, doesn't it? Yes. So he dresses up as his friend's aunt. This is the great joke of the play. Now, the thing is, while he's being in these farces, he's still quite a morally serious person. He's a teetotaler. and when they go to provincial towns to do plays, he will give Bible readings to the elderly. You know, he takes this quite seriously. And in fact, in 1894, so at the end of the year, by his own account, he has an encounter that changes his life. He's walking along the embankment of the River Thames in London in heavy fog and he comes across a girl of 16 who is about to throw herself into the river.

8:06And she is from Cambridge. She has run away from home. and she has no money and she has nowhere to go. And he takes pity on her. He offers to pay her fare home and he gives her a letter to her mother explaining what he's done. And he said afterwards, her pitiful story made a tremendous impression on me. I have ever since kept my eyes open for opportunities to help that kind of girl. That kind of girl. Now, the trouble is... What does he mean by that? Yes, I've always kept my eyes open for opportunities to help girls like that. You can interpret that, of course, two ways. And I think one of the things that listeners will have to decide for themselves is whether to take a charitable explanation of his activities or a more cynical one.

8:45Anyway, four years after this, he decides he will give in to his father and he will become a vicar after all. His father has a friend called Basil Wilberforce, a descendant of the great man. And Basil Wilberforce is the chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. And he says, oh, I can wangle your boy a place in my old college, Exeter, Exeter College, Oxford, even though Harold doesn't have very good qualifications so he gets this place at Exeter Oxford he goes up there and he's useless he doesn't really want to be there he says he really wanted to be an actor he says later I could have earned hundreds of pounds a year as an actor but I've had to settle for three pounds a week as a curate which is not very much he's still massively into the theater he's still appearing in plays and it was later said that he decorated his Oxford rooms with signed photographs of actresses, which perhaps not the ideal look if you're hoping to be a late Victorian man of the cloth.

9:43Anyway, he ignores the rules at Oxford. He's always late. He fails loads of exams. And in 1901, he's basically kicked out to a private hall associated with Oxford called Grindle's Hall. And it takes him two years to pass. And the Bishop of Oxford is very dubious about ordaining him for the priesthood. He says, This bloke is useless. He's not really committed. He obviously wants to be an actor. Fine. And he gives in to a lot of pressure. So Harold becomes a curate at the Church of St. Martin in the Fields in London. So their orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, has appeared with us at the Royal Albert Hall.

10:18So that's a lovely intersection point. And a church with a great commitment to the homeless, which in due course, the rector will demonstrate. Right, exactly. And then in 1903, he gets a brilliant break in North Norfolk, Alan Partridge's territory. He is offered a job as the rector of Stiff Key St. John and Stiff Key St. Mary and Morstan. Now, some listeners will say, Stiff Key, is it not pronounced Stooky, as you used to believe, Tom? But you know what? I did some digging into this. The only thing that's pronounced Stooky is the local cockles, which are called Stooky Blues. but the people of the area call the place Stiffke.

10:59So Stiffke is this village with about 350 people. It's got a few shops, it's got a pub, but it's a very good job. The job is in the gift of this bloke who's called the Marquis Townsend, who has had a very scandalous private life. Now, as the curate of St. Martin in the Fields, Davidson had officiated a controversial wedding to a beauty called Gladys, and he'd had to persuade Townsend's family to accept the match. So Townsend owes him a favour. And Townsend says, look, I'll give you the living at this place, Stifke. And he's got a Georgian rectory. He's got acres of farmland. And he has an annual income of£500 a year.

11:37Now, if you go onto the website, the academic website, Measuring Worth, which charts relative values over time, in relative income terms, that is an income of£400 ,000 in today's money. You can buy on that, can't you? You would think you could get by on it, but not if you're a man like Harold Davidson. So now he can get married. He's been courting, of course, an actress, a blonde Irish actress called Molly Sorin. And they get married. And between 1907 and 1913, they have four children. Davidson is still very committed to his social work. He goes off to London a lot in the week. He works in these kind of East End settlement houses.

12:16And actually in the village, he is popular with the poorer residents. he's known as somebody who's very kind-hearted who lends them money to help with their bills and their rent and people nickname him little jimmy now i don't know why jimmy but they name him little jimmy and they say he's a sort of friend of the poor man you know people like him for that yeah and also he falls out with the local landowner doesn't he a colonel groom yes and davidson has rebuked groom for keeping a mistress the irony but maybe there's an element of kind of class tension there, I think, a political dimension. I think he's a do-gooder.

12:52He's a social reform kind of person, and some of the North Norfolk landowners don't really care for that. He also has these extracurricular interests. So he's still spending a lot of time at the theatre, and he will spend a lot of time backstage at West End theatres talking to people about the Bible. Even at this point, people say, it's interesting how the people he talks to, they all tend to be women of a certain age. You know, have you noticed this? wearing skimpy costumes right so by 1910 he's expanded his horizons to paris and he goes to paris every few weeks and he says i'm very happy to act as a chaperone for dancing girls who've been recruited by the folly berger these show girls and over time he starts to invite these girls back to the rectory in norfolk sometimes he invites groups of them up to 20 at a time now molly doesn't like this and they start to argue very bitterly but also the local gentry don't like it they say what you know we don't want showgirls in north norfolk what's all this now he might have been consumed by scandal earlier were it not for the first world war so just as asquith was rescued from civil war in ireland by the events in sarajevo so harold davidson is rescued so the first world war not all bad no he volunteers to join the royal navy as a chaplain and this is probably his biographers think because basically relations in the rectory are not good molly is very cross with him about his enthusiasm for these girls so first of all he goes on to HMS Gibraltar, which is stationed in the Shetlands.

14:20And his biographers have found a service report from the captain who says he was absolutely useless. Performs his duties in a perfunctory manner, not on good terms with messmates, disregards mess rules and regulations. But then he's moved to HMS Fox in the Eastern Mediterranean. And here, perhaps an ominous sign, the police raid a brothel in cairo and they find him in there and he says oh thank god you've come i've been searching for a prostitute who's been infecting my men with vd because the thing is that these kind of explanations are a feature of the story as it develops and they keep cropping up and as as you said dominic listeners have to decide whether they want to be charitable or not in accepting the truth or otherwise of these explanations.

15:11I think a clergyman who goes to a brothel because he's worried about the health of his men, I think that's commendable. Don't you? I do. But also, there's a slight kind of, me in a brothel in Cairo. Exactly. What were they thinking? Well, the war ends in 1919. He returns home to a bombshell, actually, a very sad bombshell. His wife, Molly, is six months pregnant. But six months earlier, he was in Cairo. He was not in Norfolk. so when their daughter is born in June 1919 she's not his Jonathan Tucker thinks that the father was an old school friend of Harold Davidson that's low the daughter looks like him doesn't she so he can kind of get away with it yes she does she looks just like him this school friend is now a colonel in the Canadian army who had come to stay with Molly in the second half of 1918 anyway Davidson he's pretty good about it he says well I will accept that the girl is my own I think the atmosphere now is very tense in the rectory so he's spending more and more time in London and here we should perhaps talk about his routine he will leave home first thing every Monday morning and he will spend the whole of the week in London not in Norfolk and then he will come home either very very late on Saturday night or increasingly he gets the five o 'clock in the morning train for on Sunday and that if he's lucky will allow him to get to the church just in time.

16:36I'm rushing him put his surplus on. Right and often there are stories about him desperately pedaling on his bike from the station and literally pedaling up the aisle to the altar getting off his bike and starting the service. So as a parish priest he's actually only there one day a week and sometimes barely even that. What he's doing is he's hanging around the theatres as usual he's also a part part-time chaplain at the Actors Church, which is St. Paul's in Covent Garden. But what he's really thrown himself into is his mission to rescue the girls of London. So to give you an example of how this works, probably his favourite of all the girls was a girl called Rose Ellis, who was a homeless prostitute whom he met in Leicester Square in 1920.

17:21And he gave her cash for a room. He met her every week. He sometimes would bring her up to Norfolk to the rectory. He would get her to work in the garden and he would try to fix her up with acting jobs. But Rose is just one of many girls because anybody who thinks, oh, London in the 1920s is all very starchy, all very boring, you're wrong. Central London was notorious for working girls, for streetwalkers. There were probably about 25 ,000 prostitutes on the streets. And for guardsmen as well, weren't there? Yeah, exactly. Guardsmen, I think a bob or two. So a lot of these girls are former servants or farm girls or shop girls who have got into trouble in some way and have come to London to try and start again, but it hasn't really worked out.

18:04So Davidson has a lot of, shall we say, recruits to choose from. And as he says himself, he picked up on average 150 to 200 girls every year. That is a quotation. Picked up is his term. Again, perhaps a slightly injudicious choice of words. And his great error, as Ronald Blythe points out, is that he doesn't really discriminate. So he sees, and I quote, every young girl from 15 onwards as a fallen woman who needs to be saved. So he will hang around theatres. He goes to Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square, the places where you pick up prostitutes in those days. But he has a particular tondress for waitresses in tea shops, so nippies.

18:48so yeah so like the lion's chain or whatever so as ronald blythe puts it he's a sucker for the ineffable harmonies created by starched linen crackling over young breasts black stocking calves in chubby conference just below the hem of the parlor maids frock he loves all this so he's going into the tea rooms they come up and serve tea and then he starts talking about the bible yes i don't know how much the bible i mean the bible does play a part at some point quite often what he does is um he will say well can i get you a drink my dear you know when do you get off work all this kind of thing it seems pretty innocuous he'll talk to them a lot about the stage i have great contacts on the stage you would you'd be a wonderful actress on the west end yeah this kind of thing he will listen to their woes listen to their story often he'll say i can find you somewhere to stay a better place to stay.

19:40I can fix you up some better lodgings. I can find you a job as a domestic servant, or I can put you in touch with some of my theatrical friends. And so actually, I mean, in due course, when he gets into trouble and people are trying to work at what he'd been up to, the word that comes up again and again and again is pestering, isn't it? And I think somebody says this is like a kind of a repetition in a gramophone record. Every time a witness describes his approach, he is a pesterer. Well, some of these tea shops actually end up banning him. They're like, him again, really pestering our waitresses?

20:13He won't leave them alone. But he will bring them, if they become close, he'll bring them to Stifke to stay in the rectory and to do odd jobs. And just to stress, we're not talking about 10 girls or 20 girls or 30 girls. We're talking about 200 girls every year over a period of 12 years. That's by his own estimate. So, I mean, thousands. Now, all of this costs him a lot of money. As we've heard, he's making a good living, but he's spending so much money on these girls that he can't make ends meet. And around 1920, he meets a man called Arthur John Gordon. He says, I'm a rich American businessman and I can help you out.

20:51Actually, Arthur John Gordon is a total con man. And he persuades Davidson to give him his savings and then keeps asking him for more money. It's a classic kind of pyramid scheme type thing. Davidson, a complete mug, believes him. Five years on, he's in such a mess, he has no money that he can't pay his tax bills. and he's facing prison. He has to borrow money from moneylenders and that autumn he is declared bankrupt. But he still can't stop himself from spending all this time in London and throwing all this money at waitresses. Also, one of the reasons he's now going up to London is to try and find this guy, Gordon, who's ripped him off.

21:26So it's about rescuing girls, but it's also about rescuing his own personal finances. It is indeed. And also, I suppose, North Norfolk is becoming an increasingly unwelcoming place for him because he has made an enemy of one of his church wardens, who is Major Philip Hammond. Of course, he's a major. So Major Hammond, I looked him up. He was decorated in the Burr War. He won a military cross on the Western Front where he was a tank commander. So he is a serious person. Hammond has long been very suspicious of all these girls at the rectory, and he thinks Davidson is a useless parish priest, which I suppose in many ways he is.

22:05Yeah, he's never there, is he? Yeah, it's never there. And then in 1927, they have an absolutely astronomical, massive falling out, in which I have to say, I think Davidson is completely to blame. Hammond's wife, Rita, has recently died, and he decides to tidy up the area around her grave in the churchyard in Morstan, which is part of the parish. and Davidson goes absolutely ballistic and he sends him a letter and he says Morstan Churchyard is my private property you have no right to interfere in it in any way without my permission any more than I have the right to come and annex a part of your garden yeah that's mad that's really unthinking and cruel I think there must have been bad blood there because you wouldn't go surely if you had any brains at all and the bloke's just lost his wife you wouldn't do this he seems to have a particular dislike for upper-class military men.

22:55Yes, I think so. Major Hammond obviously is furious and never forgives him and is determined to get his own back. Then three years later, November 1930, Davidson makes a terrible mistake. He's in London with the ladies and he fails to make it back to Stifke in time for the Armistice Day ceremony at the Village War Memorial. And when you think this is within, you know, what, 12 years at the end of the war, this is a mad mistake to have made i mean it's a very bad it's a really bad look major hammond is absolutely outraged remember decorated in the first world war and a church warden yeah he says i will bring this guy down and he makes a formal complaint to the bishop of norwich about davidson's behavior with women and it's great to have the bishop of norwich back on the show yeah yes so the bishop but a better man i think than his predecessor yes well we'll see The Bishop of Norwich says, I don't know whether I really want to get involved in this.

23:54But he has a legal counsel called Henry Dashwood who clearly thinks they should get involved. And Henry Dashwood says, what we ought to do really is to have this out in open court. There's a thing called a church consistory court and we can prosecute the rector for immoral acts. And if he's guilty, he can be suspended or he can be defrocked. He can be kicked out. But we need evidence. so dashwood hires a private detective and she tracks down this girl rose ellis who was um davidson's favorite he pours port and lemon into this girl vast buckets of port and lemon she gets absolutely wasted and she tells all the whole story he lends her money he takes her out he does this that and the other but nothing too bad comes out of it does it no this is the thing so there's one incident which we'll come back to in the second half buttock related yes he persuaded me to lance a boil on his bottom right but that's it there's nothing beyond that meanwhile davidson himself has got wind of all this going on he's protesting his innocence to the bishop he writes him a tremendous letter december 1931 tom would you like to read the letter for years i have been known as the prostitute's padre to me the proudest title that a true priest of christ can hold.

25:12I believe with all my soul that if he were born again in London in the present day, he would be found constantly walking in Piccadilly. So anyone who wants to meet Christ, head to Piccadilly. Exactly. Yes, he says Christ suffered all this slander, but he looked after the woman taken in adultery. He was great friends with the notorious harlot of Magdala. And the unbelievable thing is the bishop i don't know if he's totally convinced but he seems pretty happy but you know what he's i mean davidson isn't wrong i mean jesus in the gospels does get criticized for hanging out with prostitutes he does maybe all priests and prelates should do that all i'm saying is it is it is an option that's always there well it's an option that davidson has undoubtedly taken he's embraced it i think it would be fair to say anyway the bishop unbelievably seems tempted to let the whole thing drop but then on the 7th of february 1932 a bombshell that changes the whole complexion of the case the bishop gets a letter from a 17 year old girl called barbara harris she says i have known davidson for two years quote i know lots of things against him that might help you he has the keys of a lot of girls flats and front doors let's take a break and when we come back we will find out the full detail of what babs harris has to reveal hello welcome back to the rest is history the date is the 29th of march 1932 and we are in church house in westminster where a consistory court is about to hear the opening statements in the trial of the rector of Stifke, Harold Davidson.

27:02And Dominic, he stands accused of associating with women of loose character and also of accosting, molesting, and importuning young females for immoral purposes. And it's lucky for Harold Davidson, isn't it, that the great British public take no interest in the thought of vicars who go around consorting with women of loose character. No interest at all, or do they? Well, I think if you're in the 1930s, if you live in the 1930s and you hear of a vicar who's been accused of importuning, that is a dream. You're all over it. You're all over it, exactly. As Ronald Blythe says, by the time the case opened, Stifke was as notorious as Babylon and it's incumbent to celebrate it as Al Capone.

27:46And the thing is, it's even better for the newspapers. They don't have to go to North Norfolk because the Church of England is so cheap that they don't want to have to pay to take witnesses to Norfolk. So they say, well, we'll do it in London to save money. But of course, that's a gift to the reporters. So this trial opens at the end of March. The prosecution is led by one of the stars of the criminal bar, Sir Roland Oliver Casey. And his star witness is this woman, Babs Barbara Harris. She's now 17. And she says, I met Davidson in Marble Arch in September 1930. At that point, she was what Ronald Blythe calls a highly experienced 16 and a half.

28:26Davidson, she says, pretended to mistake her for a well-known actress and persuaded her to have tea with him. And this is a favourite kind of tactic of his. It is. Later on, he visited her lodgings. He got her address and he visited her lodgings, telling her landlady that he was her uncle. She was at that point living with an Indian policeman. But when Davison turned up at two o 'clock in the morning, they didn't mind at all. He made a point of saying to them, oh, it's fine, you're in bed, you're not married, whatever. But actually, God does not mind sins of the body. He only minds sins of the soul.

29:03And Dominic, this is a reflection that is inspired by tales that the Indian policeman has been telling about temple girls back in India. And I kind of thought when I reread the chapter, we are only three and a half decades before the summer of love in the 1960s. And there's a sense in which poor old Harold Davidson is a man out of time. Because that mixing of interest in Eastern religion, ecumenicism and sexual liberation. I mean, he'd have been much happier in the 60s than in the 30s. Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Do you know what, though? I have a theory, and I've always had this theory, that the 1930s are actually a little bit of a dry run for the 1960s.

29:42There's more similarities between those two decades than people think. The rector born in the wrong decade. Exactly. So he starts to stay overnight at Babs' lodgings, especially when the policeman goes home to India. Barbara Harris says, at first he kept to the chair, but after the first few nights he did not. She claimed that he made advances to her, but she wasn't interested. So, and I quote, he relieved himself. he got her to come and stay at Stiffke Rectory she said actually this element of it has been slightly glamorized it's not as exciting as you might think when I arrived at the rectory he asked me to work as a kitchen maid and for no money yeah and told me to sleep in the chair I didn't get a bed anyway she's a tremendous character so when the defense lawyer questions her it gets better and better it turns out as Ronald Blythe puts it her real name was Gwendolyn she'd made love with many men including some Indians she had left school at 14 and from then on she'd helped herself when she'd not got a job she stayed in bed until 11 or more in the morning she liked all the men she'd known she was always happy she liked reading no she hadn't had vd but once she thought she had silly me she implied cheerfully and actually blithe's discussion of the trial is very very funny and what he captures is just what a mad comedy it is and actually davidson himself who of course had acted in farces and light entertainment is determined to behave as though he's on the stage so he's chuckling and winking and making ridiculous asides and all of this stuff and of course all of this is brilliant for the newspapers as to quote blithe again it gives them a combination of prelates waitresses strongmen hunting church wardens amorous indian youths publicans landladers dentists titled female do-gooders the folly berger bathing suits photographs train journeys and every possible variation on the popular prurient theme of virtue exposed i mean there's a sense isn't there in which this is the archetype for every kind of tabloid scandal that will follow all the ingredients are there this is the ultimate it can never really be exceeded um and in a sense journalists right the way up into the 1990s are simply trying to reheat this yeah i think that's absolutely right now the funny thing is it goes on so long that davidson runs out of money he can't pay his defense team and unbelievably the prosecution actually give him money so that the trial can continue now his defense team their argument is this is completely unfair and everyone has the wrong idea that he's not morally corrupt he's just well-meaning and a little bit naive and his defense lawyer says you know there's a lot of talk about him kissing women but he kisses everybody not in a sensual or sexual way.

32:22It's the usual gesture for him when leaving someone he likes or if they've done something for him. Now, you might say, well, come on, I don't believe this. But I actually think this could well be true. In all the parade of witnesses, the only one who accuses him of indecency is Barbara Harris. And she's kind of the most meretricious of the witnesses, would you say? So Jonathan Tucker thinks that she was coached by the rector's enemies. He points out the guy who's presiding over the trial is a great friend of the Bishop of Norwich. So the whole thing is slightly rigged. And that letter that blew the whole thing open, I think it's generally agreed now that she didn't write it, that it was a fake, that it was probably written by somebody else, one of his enemies, with her connivance possibly.

33:06And just to add, you say how the tone is comic. I mean, it is, and that's why it's such a kind of richly and fondly remembered story in so many ways. But it is Barbara Harris or people who are manipulating her who does introduce a slight darker element to the story. So she says that he gave her a black eye at one point and that he recommended that she go and work in a brothel. That sounds very out of character. But again, we're kind of left with, you know, do you believe the worst of him or do you think he's very hard treated? I mean, it's very, you know, you've got to essentially decide what you think, I guess.