SCANDALS IN EDEN, Selected Tales Of Religious Misbehavior, part 2

But no matter how frantically he behaved, heartier villains like Hitler and Mussollini were nudging him out of the headlines. He took another job, appearing in a cage with two (Geriatric) lions, billing himself, ever religious, as a "Modern Daniel in the Lion's Den."

THE REVEREND HAROLD DAVIDSON

IF THE REVEREND HAROLD DAVIDSON, Victorian religious leader and British idiot, had lived today, he would be described as one of Monty Python's clergyman jokes. A bothersome, scurrying, caricature of a man, he was one of those tedious people who are not quite certifiable enough to be locked up, and not quite sane enough for anything else. Mingled with his personal madness was a generous dose of the bad qualities one finds in regular folks. He was sneaky, self-important, humourless, religious, and utterly incapable of accepting anybody else's opinions. His own lawyer called him a troublesome busybody, and his oldest son pronounced him "Mad, quite mad."

Besides that, he had the tenderest dick in the British Empire. Probably no figure in history has chased so many women with such heedless abandon, and certainly no one has ever made himself look so foolish in the process.

Ordained in 1902, he made himself a name with some genuine good works, and indeed half of his character was the sort of fussy, decent churchman from the BBC dramas. But he used that as a foundation to pester people who could advance his career. He bombarded the entire British upper class with letters, letters that bitched about his personal problems, lack of recognition, and ended up begging for donations. In a way he was the first direct mail hustler, an unpleasant man starting an unpleasant profession. In the evenings he pestered teenage girls. He would officiously push his way backstage at the theater and lurk around the dressing rooms, leering at the half-naked actresses. He was eventually banned from coming backstage. He was also banned from most of London's tea shops, a considerable achievement, for his practice of sniffing after the waitresses. He would tell them that they looked like one actress or another and invite them home. An astonishing number of these young "Nippies" (His phrase) fell for this and went off with him. In fact, with his formal, fatherly countenance, he managed to pick up a new girl almost every other day for the next two decades. He set them up in furnished rooms, gave them money, found them work, even brought them home to his wife (Who put them to work in the scullery). Then he tried out his hapless, pathetic manner of seduction on them. It was a bumbling, ludicrous performance, a bunny rabbit in heat, and as far as anybody knows, he never got over. Not once.

By 1931, a faction of his parishioners were losing patience with Reverend Davidson. They were sick of him stumbling in late to deliver his sermons, and they were really confused by the overflowing stable of strange young girls in the vicarage. Some of the girls seemed to be mating with the local lads, and respectable people were forever stumbling over strange couples groping in dark gardens. Word of this finally reached the District Bishop, who reacted in a singular manner. He engaged a private inquiry agent.

Oh, what a spin-off for a detective movie.

A young nippie named Rose Ellis was located, and after a couple of free drinks and a dash of 40 shillings, she signed a statement against her former benefactor. Then came one Barbara Harris, who, although barely 16, was already a character out of the dark side of a soap opera. Vain, vacuous, infected with gonorrhea, she spent her days laying about in bed reading fan magazines and her evenings screwing anyone who passed by her window. She testified that the reverend had supported her life style and that he had made numerous advances upon her. She had resisted them all, more out of cruelty than virtue, and he finally tried to rape her. He botched this, too. She testified that he could only "Relieve himself" upon the bedclothes.

That sort of thing was prime meat for the British Tabloids. Early in 1932, The Reverend Harold Davidson, in a blaze of penny press publicity, stood an ecclesiastical trial.

It was a long, painful, farcical affair, during which he made an ass out of himself on the witness stand and got caught, over the weekend, with a nude 15 year old. For years afterward, the gutter press scriveners looked back on those days as their finest hour. On July 8, 1932, the verdict was an unsurprising guilty, and shortly afterwards the Reverend Harold Davidson was defrocked.

By then all of England knew him, and he proceeded, like Spiro Agnew, to cash in on it. And showing even less taste than the Grafting Greek, he hired out to exhibit himself in a barrel at the Blackpool sideshow. He gave the crowds a tedious harangue about his injured innocence, which had occupied his wooden head since the trial. Nobody believed him, but the folks enjoyed laughing at his pretentions, and the act ran for five years. He raked in between five and twenty thousand pounds, a huge sum in the thirties. (As a vicar, he had been comfortable on 400 pounds a year)

He didn't let up with his self-advertising, either. He went from a purely ecclesiastical nuisance to a national pain in the ass. He interrupted church proceedings, instigated lawsuits, and undertook a 35 day fast. He was also arrested in 1936 for accosting two teenaged girls in Victoria Station. (He had told them that he was a theatrical producer.)

But no matter how frantically he behaved, heartier villains like Hitler and Mussollini were nudging him out of the headlines. He took another job, appearing in a cage with two (Geriatric) lions, billing himself, ever religious, as a "Modern Daniel in the Lion's Den."

The years and scandals hadn't taken away his sense of self-importance and idiot righteousness, and in fact he was the same pompous ass that had gone through his trial insisting that he didn't know what "Buttock" meant. When Freddy, the male lion, wouldn't move fast enough, the Reverend snapped the whip, snarling "Get a move on!", in what he imagined to be a commanding kind of voice. Freddy, however, wasn't impressed.

Freddy, it must be said, didn't like humans in the best of times. They had already yanked him out of his savannah, cooped him up in a cage, Anglicized his name, mated him with Leona (Whom he secretly hated) and made him perform for his food. Now they were sending in some smartass ecclesiastic telling him how to spend his spare time. It was pretty much the same situation that produced Nat Turner.

With a mighty, atavistic roar, Freddy bounded over to the reverend and beaned him. Then he scooped him up and carried him around, a triumphant kitty bringing home a mouse, mangling the reverend not a little. The crowd gasped, petrified with fear. Then, 16 year old Irene Somner jumped in, yanked Freddy's mane, and dragged the mortally wounded Davidson out of the cage. After chasing and groping and earning the contempt of so many little nippies, he finally found the one he was looking for. Alas, he died two days later. Against the backdrop of the cold-blooded grifters and widow-bilkers that constitute religious hustlers, the Reverend Harold Davidson is a comic interlude, a bit of English humour. But he has this distinction in the annals of religious hypocrites. Instead of conning his flock out of their life savings, he gave them a good laugh.

It's a miracle.