Because vicarages and rectories were such large houses, standing in their own grounds, everybody in former days subconsciously classed the Anglican clergy as ‘gentry’ and assumed that they could manage financially, and were even well-off.

The reality was often very different.

Clothing

What many of us did was to apply to the charity the Poor Clergy Relief Corporation for clothing. One of the great excitements of my childhood days, when my father was vicar of the little village of Molland in North Devon, was the arrival at the railway station five miles away of two big canvas-covered bundles, labelled ‘cushions’.

My parents would have filled in a form showing their exact financial position, and stating their essential needs for clothing for themselves and their two sons. The clothing we received was usually good quality second-hand items, though on rare occasions some things looked new.

Picture us in the big bedroom at the back of the house undoing these parcels, lifting out the clothes, holding them up and trying them on for size! I can still smell the (quite pleasant) scent of these garments.

The same charity helped my wife and I during our marriage, and my eldest daughter still remembers the bundles arriving, and trying on the second-hand suits in the ‘swinging sixties’ when her better-off schoolmates were buying miniskirts and jeans.

As for me, I did not know what it was like to go to a shop and buy new clothes, up until the very end of the 1950s. There was never enough money to live on until the late 1960s.

Holidays

For holidays there were two things which most of us did. One was to take a locum parish; for example, one summer I went to Sandown on the Isle of Wight, where we lived in the vicarage while the incumbent was away having his holiday. I took Sunday services, saw to emergencies, and my wife and I kept the garden and house tidy. It made quite a good self-catering holiday for the weekdays.

The other way to get a break was to go to one of the Church Army (not Salvation Army) clergy holiday houses. One was at Birchington-on-Sea in Kent, and the other at Clevedon in North Somerset. We paid a modest sum for board and lodging, and the whole family shared one bedroom. (Imagine six of us in one room for a fortnight!)

At mealtimes, all the adults sat at one table and the children at another. Each clergyman took a day in turn to say prayers at breakfast and grace before and after main meals. We always remember one of them who had a different grace for each meal. I don’t know how we kept from bursting into laughter when he said, very solemnly at the end of breakfast

“For porridge, tea and buttered toast,

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost”!

These holidays could be good fun, especially if the children met up with boys and girls of their own age. Sometimes there were clergy who wanted to explain that they had the most difficult parish in England, but by and large each family was free to do its own thing and enjoy the time by the sea as they wished.

I remember talking to one of the ladies in Clevedon who had worked at the clergy holiday house there ever since it opened when she had just left school. She was from a working-class family, and she told me how shocked she had been in the 1920s when she saw the worn-out clothes and poverty of the clergy and their families. “I told my father,” she said, “that I had not seen anything like it in Clevedon.”

Well, it is all very different now. I am not writing this in order to complain – indeed, I think I grew up just assuming that that was the nature of our life! But I do have a purpose for talking about the past days of clerical poverty.

(to be continued)