The Rector of Stiffkey: Life as a sideshow

Much in post-war Blackpool, Harrisson found, was as it had been before, but the entertainments on the seafront had changed. Whereas holidaymakers in the sixties were offered striptease acts (‘Girls from France, Brussels and international countries’) and performing poodles, their parents had enjoyed such diversions as ‘Colonel Barker and his or her bride’ and the rector of Stiffkey, who exhibited himself in a barrel and met his end when he was mauled by a lion.

Harold Davidson was born into a family of clergymen, but his first love was the stage and he had some success as a comedian before bowing to family pressure and securing ordination and the valuable living of Stiffkey in Norfolk. But an encounter in which he had talked a homeless girl out of a suicide attempt had sparked a passion for saving fallen women: or, as became apparent, any women whom Harold felt in any danger of falling.

The front cover of Britain Revisited (1961). Image © Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex Special Collections. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

He spent his days in London, seeking out young women – though he styled himself the ‘Prostitutes’ Padre’, they were mostly waitresses and West End showgirls – taking them for meals and giving them money. Sometimes they came to stay at the rectory, as many as twenty at a time. Discomfort grew in Stiffkey, and a letter Harold sent to a local squire upbraiding him for cutting the churchyard grass proved his undoing. An ecclesiastical trial in 1932 proved little more than that he was an oddball with a chronic blindness to other people’s expectations, but the squire had his friends and the case had reached the Sunday papers, and Harold was defrocked for immorality. Ten days later he opened in variety in Wimbledon.

At the headquarters of the Worktown study, 85 Davenport Street, Bolton. Tom Harrisson is standing. Image © Bolton Library and Museum. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

But injustice burned, and so did legal bills, so Harold took himself off to Blackpool, where tourists gawped as he sat in a glass-fronted freezer, or in an oven, prodded by a mechanical devil, or, between times, in a barrel. When, after a few summer seasons, his novelty waned, he joined an animal act in Skegness, in which he made a speech about his case and then entered a cage of lions, a modern Daniel. On 28th July 1937 one of them, Freddie, forgetting his Old Testament, seized Harold by the neck and ran around with him. He died two days later, but not before reportedly asking his doctors, ‘Did I make the front page?’.

Later I […] mention that parsons should not have allowances restricted for the private use of a car, for example. I mean it only jokingly, but he asks “Don’t parsons have private lives? What about the Stiffkey rector?” “He might have claimed wear and tear of barrels,” I answer.