During the summer of 1952, my older brother and I visited our distant cousin Ernest Howe. A gaunt figure in his late sixties, he was the Vicar at Misterton, a tiny Somerset village.
‘Not one of the bishop’s plums,’ he complained, showing us round St Leonard's, his church. Greeted by a parishioner, Ernest smiled, raising his panama hat. Out of earshot, the smile quickly disappearing, he observed, “That’s one of the problems of this job, boys. You have to keep kow-towing to all these people!”
Ernest then pointed towards the nave. “That’s where the opposition sits.” A typically dry joke, but years later I learned that on April 30, 1890, when he was aged seven, he had indeed experienced some genuinely frightening opposition.
Around 600 youths had besieged his former vicarage home in Swindon, ’banging and clashing tin-pots and trays’ as reported in the Warminster & Westbury journal. This rage was directed at the Rev.Newton Ebenezer Howe, Ernest’s father and the recent decision in court to find him not guilty on several charges. There were more demonstrations on June 21, the vicarage once again guarded by twenty policemen, when missiles were thrown along with much hooting and whistling. Newton was away that day on one of his many long absences. After his return he once needed a police guard to get from his church to the vicarage.
His long life is recounted in Mark Bridgeman’s The Beacon on the Hill. The story of Christ Church, Swindon, and the community it serves. Born in 1848, the seventh son of a schoolmaster, Newton left Oxford University without a degree. Somehow getting by as ‘a student of philosophy’ he was later appointed Rector of Luckington, near Malmesbury, in 1882. Five years after he moved to Christ Church, Swindon. By 1889 rumours began swirling about payments going missing to the New Vicarage fund and various church charities.
There were also reports of a clandestine relationship with Marion Ormond, a 23-year-old friend of Newton’s wife Susannah and a Sunday School teacher. All three lived together in the vicarage. The Western Daily Press wrote that he had been seen ‘Walking and being alone with her in secluded places, putting his arms around her waist and kissing her.’ The Bristol Mercury claimed that he had ‘Solicited the chastity of Marion Ormond, and endeavoured to have criminal intercourse with her.’ Supported by his deeply religious wife he denied everything and was found not guilty. But later he admitted all charges at Bristol Consistorial Court and was suspended for three years.
Coming back in 1894, brazen as ever, he started another relationship with Mary Roskyll, a comfortably off, more mature woman whose parents had unwisely appointed Newton her guardian before their deaths. Living in the vicarage, Mary was often seen with him and in 1900 he once again faced the Consistorial Court, this time charged with adultery. Bessie Crowest, the vicarage cook, testified that she had seen him leaving Miss Roskyll’s room in a state of undress. Others claimed he called her ‘Darling’, and they were often seen holding hands. Still backed by his wife, he was found not guilty.
But after going on to pass a series of dud cheques, and selling non-existent burial plots because his churchyard was already crammed full, he was found guilty of obtaining money by false pretences. His trial and conviction were widely reported, even reaching the Australian press. Humorous references to ‘Higgledy-Piggledy N.E.Howe’ enjoyed some popularity.
Dismissed from the church he was sentenced in 1901 to a year’s hard labour at Devizes Jail. Each morning he had to take his turn on the prison treadmill grinding corn. His health soon broke down and he spent time in the prison infirmary. Turning to teaching on his release, again with the support of his wife, Newton claiming still to be a clergyman soon started collecting door to door for bogus charities, culminating in an appeal to help an ill schoolmaster who turned out to be perfectly well. In 1908 he pleaded guilty to these and further charges and was sentenced in Lewes to another year’s hard labour, this time breaking stones. But the old rascal was not done yet. In 1910 he persuaded Mary Roskyll to take him in as a lodger, living reclusively in her pleasant house until his death in 1925.
His only son Ernest, protected as much as possible by his devoted mother, abandoned his plans to study theology after the first prison sentence. Mark Bridgeman describes in his website how Ernest then escaped the family disgrace by migrating to Shoreham in Sussex, supporting himself by teaching. In 1908 he started studying Divinity at Oxford University, graduating with an MA. Aged 47 he entered the church, and in 1936 began 22 years’ service as Vicar of Misterton. He died in 1972, with his gentle, charming wife Ivy, a church worker whom he married when they were both middle-aged, following him two years later.
My brother and I in later years used occasionally to make affectionate fun of this quiet, retiring man and his perpetual air of mild discontent. Finally understanding the agonies of shame and humiliation he must have suffered for the first half of his life, I would now know better.
