There was once a breed of
Englishman, now almost extinct, that leaves you astonished by its
accomplishments - the country
clergyman. Why it should be that this particular profession should produce so
many polymaths is a mystery, but we can, perhaps, get some sort of an answer by
a cursory look at the works of Anthony Trollope (not exactly a slouch himself).
The first of his Barsetshire Chronicles, The Warden, gives us a portrait
of a clergyman, Mr Septimus Harding, who enjoys a good living and income from his
wardenship of Hiram’s Almshouse, a position that has few onerous duties and
leaves Mr Harding with plenty of time for his musical pursuits.
In the next
novel of the series, Barchester Towers, we meet other clergymen with
goodly incomes and light duties; one, a prebendary called Dr Vesey Stanhope has
spent twelve years in Italy recovering from a sore throat, where he spends his
time catching butterflies. Another, Rev. Francis Arabin, is a former Oxford
University Fellow, whose Deanship of the Cathedral brings with it a beautiful
house in the Close and a garden of 15 acres. Yet another, Mr Quiverful, is the
father of fourteen children. These would all have been instantly recognizable
types to Trollope’s readers and are no mere caricatures, for we have real
Victorian clergymen who spent their time doing far more interesting things than
simple clergying.
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| Sabine Baring-Gould - aged 5 |
One such was the Reverend Sabine Baring Baring-Gould MA, whom
I mentioned almost in passing yesterday, as the author of The Book of
Were-wolves. Born in 1834, Baring-Gould was named for his astonishingly
accomplished uncle, Edward Sabine, and was a sickly child who spent much of his
infancy touring Europe with his father and was taught by a succession of
private tutors. He went up to Cambridge in 1852, took a BA and an MA, and
became a curate at St John’s Church, Horbury Bridge, West Yorkshire in 1864. He
was popular with the Sunday School pupils, to whom he would tell stories, and
in 1865, he wrote the hymn for which he is best remembered, ‘Onward,
Christian Soldiers.’
He said later that he had written the hymn in fifteen
minutes and was not satisfied with some ‘faulty’ lines, but when Sir Arthur
Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) added the now familiar tune (St Gertrude)
in 1871 it became one of the most popular hymns of all. In about 1866, he met
Grace Taylor, who had left school at ten to work in a mill, lived in poverty
with her mill-worker family, dressed in clogs and shawl, spoke with a broad
Yorkshire accent – and she was fourteen.
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| Sabine Baring-Gould - aged about 34 |
Baring-Gould’s bishop arranged for
Grace to go to stay with his relatives in York, where she was taught etiquette
and elocution, and the manners of an educated lady. Two years later, she
returned home and, at the end of a service at Wakefield, Grace became Mrs
Baring-Gould. She was by then sixteen, he was thirty-four, and neither family
was overly impressed by the marriage, predicting the very worst would surely
follow.
They moved first to Essex, and then in 1880, to Lewtrenchard, Devon,
when he had inherited the family estate of 3,000 acres, and where, when the
living became vacant in 1881, he appointed himself to the post, becoming both
the Parson and the Squire, and where the former mill girl now had a staff of
thirty servants.
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| Lewtrenchard Manor |
Baring-Gould did not like the bishops and they did not like
him, he wasn’t fond of other vicars or meetings with them, he was a High Church
Anglican when it was not popular, and although he was intensely religious and
people enjoyed hearing him preach, he imposed a ten-minute limit on his sermons
and if any of his curates exceeded his ten-minute rule in their sermons, he
would throw hymn books at them until they stopped.
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| Sabine Baring-Gould |
He was absent minded – he
once bought forty pounds of meat from an itinerant butcher whilst distracted,
and had to throw a grand dinner to get rid of it all – and he didn’t care what
anyone thought about him, anyone that is but Grace, who saved him from many a
potential situation; she would hold onto his often angry, spontaneous letters
until the following day, when he had calmed down and thought better of sending
them.
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| Sabine Baring-Gould |
What he did enjoy was working, particularly writing, which he did whilst
standing up, and over his lifetime he wrote over 1,200 publications – more than
any other author in the collection of the British Library, some of which have
yet to be published. He wrote about anything – a sixteen volume series on the
Lives of the Saints, travel books, geology books, geography books, language
books, folklore books, books about folk music, books about customs, books about
myths and books about books. He wrote hymns, he wrote songs, he wrote poems, he
wrote novels, but he considered his best work to be his collections of folk
songs, on which he collaborated with the legendary Cecil Sharp and which have
preserved many songs that otherwise might have been lost forever.
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| Sabine Baring-Gould |
He was an
antiquarian, a historian, a geologist, a palaeontologist, an archaeologist, an
anthropologist, a hagiographer, a travel writer, a folklorist, a philosopher, a
naturalist, and a practical joker. He entered fictitious works into his
bibliographies purely for the devilment of it, he put rubber bulbs and tubes
under his tablecloth and if he thought a dinner guest had drunk too much, he
would make their plate wobble by inflating the bulbs, and when the Great War
broke out, he faked ‘call-up’ papers for step-mother’s elderly and plump pony,
much to the old lady’s consternation.
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| Grace Baring-Gould |
With an almost deliberate contrariness,
Sabine and Grace had a very happy marriage, which must have upset their family
expectations greatly, and had a total of fifteen children, all but one of whom
grew to adulthood. Grace died in 1916, after forty-eight years of marriage –
Sabine had the words Dimidium Animae Meae (‘Half my Soul’) inscribed on
her tombstone.
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| Sabine Baring-Gould in later life |
He died in 1924, just a few days short of his ninetieth
birthday, (possibly of old age). I keep repeating this, but if you have time to
spare, seek out some of his books and enjoy reading them. It is a far better
option than some of the other things you might be tempted to do.
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