THE POOR DO.

When I was younger you often heard this phrase: "it's a poor do!" It's not a phrase you hear so much these days. It means "I don't think much of that" or "that's not very good". However, that is not the meaning I have in mind now. I will explain why I have titled these postings 'The Poor Do' as I go along.

While I was at school I was always aware that my parents were financially much poorer than the parents of the other boys, and it was clear that I always had less pocket money than they had. Like many people, I had a penny every Saturday for pocket money until I went away to a boarding school, where it went up to a shilling a week.

Those were the days when some town children ran around the streets barefoot in the summer, and their clothes were usually torn, patched hand-me-downs – as we can see from photos of that period.

But people still thought of clergymen as ‘gentlemen of private means’, and even as late as 1938 one of my school friends, knowing, by then, that I hoped to be ordained into the church ministry, said to me: “But I thought you had to have independent means if you wanted to go into the church.”

My father, ordained at the end of World War I, was among a growing number of clergy with no money at all, except the income of the parish where he worked.

At that time, a vicar’s income depended on whatever endowments had been given to the parish by past generations. The stipend could be as little as one or two hundred pounds a year, though there were a small number of ‘plum livings’ where the incumbent (or clergyman) was well-off. (This can be seen in novels such as Anthony Trollope’s ‘Barchester Towers’ or ‘The Warden’, and Jane Austen’s novels where young clergymen wanting to marry cannot do so unless they are given a ‘good living’. The livings in those days were endowed by the patrons, which is why Mr Collins in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is so anxious to please Lady Catherine, who is his patron.)

When my father was working, and right up into the late 1960’s, it was taken for granted by the parishioners and the church authorities that the parson would provide and pay for a car, telephone, postage, travel, office equipment and expenses, rates on his large house which went with the job, and a thing called ‘dilapidations’ – which meant that an architect arrived every five years and decided what outside painting and fabric repairs or domestic utilities replacements would be needed from then until his next visit. This total was divided into five, and the appropriate sum paid annually. I recall, when we went to Crawley rectory near Winchester in the 1960s, the rates came to just under £100 and the dilapidations to £120 a year. I had to pay this out of a salary of £720 per year, and we had four children to look after too.

Any interior decoration was entirely up to the family living there. So if you do the sums you will see that money was very tight indeed. Fortunately for all of us, Dilys was always absolutely wonderful at making a little go a very long way!

(to be continued)