A Clerical Error
At 9 pm on Friday the 30th of August 1889, on his way back from Glossop the Reverend George Collins, Vicar of Charlesworth, stopped his horse and trap outside the George and Dragon (at the right of the picture) and went in for a drink. From there, things went rapidly downhill, and five weeks later he appeared before the magistrates at the Town Hall charged with being drunk and disorderly. “The courtroom was crowded, while the street was thronged with people unable to gain admission.”
The prosecution alleged that he had gone from the pub to the vicarage 100 yards away, then returned with “a formidable bread knife” which he brandished at people in the street, “threatening what he would do.” When he came out of the pub a second time, “he was exceedingly violent, went down the street and again brandished the knife dangerously near the people in a very threatening attitude.” When PC Brown took the knife off him, he “took a penknife from his pocket and said he would do it with that.”
His defence was that he was not drunk, having had only “half a wineglass full” of the beer he had ordered, but that he was “naturally an excitable subject” and that he had got the knife to frighten away a crowd which had gathered opposite the pub and which had hooted him as he left and then followed him, throwing stones and sods at him and his horse. They had, he said, previously broken his windows.
Reading between the lines, as Their Worships, James Sidebottom and Edward Partington, undoubtedly did, this was not the first time he had returned from Glossop in an inebriated state, and it being a Friday night, the local lads had been waiting for him. They found him guilty and fined him £2.
That was a very small fine for someone of his means, and given that he could have been charged with the much more serious offence of affray. The magistrates would have been aware, however, that for him the social consequences would be much greater than for an ordinary working man. As he left the court “he and his witnesses were hooted by the crowd, and it was feared that he would be molested. He had to be escorted to a neighbouring hotel by the police.”
A church court later suspended him for three months, although not before his lawyer had tried to allege that the conviction was unsafe and that the magistrates regretted their decision, forcing them to confirm that “their decision was perfectly consistent with the facts, and nothing has transpired to alter it.” The case went viral, as we would now say, and the Daily Telegraph thundered that “it is scandalous that there is a possibility of a clergyman who has thoroughly disgraced himself and his cloth purging his offence with three months of absence and then commencing his duties again as if nothing had happened….we protest against the vicar, or any other clergyman convicted of like behaviour, ever appearing in a pulpit again, to the amusement of the profane and the grief and humiliation of the pious.”
Nevertheless he did return, dying in office 10 years later. His successor found the church, school and vicarage “in a deplorable condition” and spent the equivalent in today’s money of £75,000 putting things to rights.
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