Austin Lee (1904-65)
Austin
Lee was a restless soul - a socialist and pacifist who fitted uneasily
into the Church of England, but was by all accounts a stirring preacher
who aroused affection. Son of the incumbent of the family living in
Claxby, Lincolnshire, after reading English at Trinity College
Cambridge he trained for ordination first at Wells Theological College
and then at Ripon Hall, Oxford (more liberal - perhaps he fell out with
them at Wells?) He lasted a year as curate of Kew, courting controversy
with articles for the Sunday and popular papers as well as doing some
serious reviewing - his name is among the acknowledgements in Frederick
Brittain's Arthur Quiller Couch: a biographical study of Q
(CUP 1947). His equally brief spell at Christ Church Watney Street
(1930-31) followed, where he was no doubt on Fr Groser's wavelength but
an uneasy colleague. Despite his views, for the next two years he was a
naval chaplain, serving with HMS Pembroke, HMS Royal Oak, the Mediterranean destroyer fleet, and HMS Cumberland (sailing to China), denying allegations of communism. In 1932 he wrote in the Daily Mail
| In the Middle Ages the church seemed to have touched the lowest depths of unspirituality. It seemed a spent force. But the Reformation came and brought new life and light to Europe. We are at the ebb of another tide. But can we say that the torch that blazed on Calvary has burned down and flickered out forever? ... There will be another revival in the church. Men touched with the old fire will go out again ... The man will come, and a new tide will sweep around the world, cleansing and renewing. |
There followed a period of other brief posts, including a hospital
chaplaincy and two incumbencies, before he returned to the family
parish of Claxby with Normanby-le-Wold as Rector from 1944-48 - a
relatively rich living (though he said publicly it was hard to live on
the stipend) and an appointment for which he did not need the
congregation's consent. His time here was lively. Unmarried, in 1945 he
moved out of the rectory into the gardener's cottage to give rent-free
accommodation to an ex-serviceman with six children: the Diocesan Board
forbade it, but in a press report he said It
is pure nonsense to have 22 rooms to one's self. But the board are
laity who believe that the village parson should be gentry, letting
people see that he is a cut above them by living in a big house. Pure
rubbish, I call it, so I have taken matters into my own hands. If the
Church will not let me do good, I will do it off my own bat.
His rural congregation was no doubt surprised by his special prayers
for the left-wing faction in the Greek civil war (ELAS) - and he
pressed the local MP, Colonel Heneage, to oppose the government's
policy on Greece. He attempted to stand for Parliament in the 1945
election, despite the legal ban on Anglican clergy candidates. The Bishops sit in the House of Lords with impunity, he said (which was the historic basis of the clerical disqualification, removed in 2001). This is how it was reported in the Australian Women's Weekly of 7 July 1945:
| Rector of the little Lincolnshire parish of Claxby, Rev. Austin Lee,
who is Independent candidate for Cambridge University, may, if he wins
his seat, have to pay £500 per day in fines. According to my interpretation of the hundred-years-old law [the
Clergy Disqualification Act, in fact of 1801] the fine becomes payable only if and when
I actually take my seat in the Commons, he told me, so I'm not
worrying till then. A tall, bearded bachelor of forty, Lee has had a varied career. During the Battle of Britain he served in the ranks of the R.A.F. He bas been a naval chaplain and a newspaper reporter, and now looks after two parishes, covering the two miles between them on horseback. He leaves the horse in unorthodox fashion tethered to a haystack while he preaches his sermon. Friends at Cambridge University are in touch with the Clerk of the House of Commons trying to clear up the legal position, and protesting on the undemocratic bar on Anglican clergymen. |
He refused to pay his rates of £30 as a protest against
the neglect of rural areas; he didn’t expect water, sanitation or
street lighting (as a city dweller might!) but objected that primary-age children had
to rely on powdered milk - milk from the tuberculin-tested herd in
Claxby went to the towns. He often officiated in wellies, ready for a
quick getaway on his motorbike to the Gordon Arms, and gave talks about
cookery.
When Clement Attlee became Prime Minister in 1945 Lee sent him an 'open letter' which was widely quoted in the press.
In 1946 he announced that he was moving to a woodman's cottage in
Normanby Dales, lent by Lord Yarborough, which he shared with students
(renting out the Rectory). He continued to despair of the Church of
England, which was timid and lukewarm; its bishops were timid little men frightened of offending government,
and he surely did not endear himself to his parishioners by declaring
that in Claxby a parson was cut off from any real spiritual life. In 1947 he sought Monday to Friday work as a coal miner. He
announced that he was off to South America, to work for a British
Seamen's organisation in Rosario. This did not happen; instead, in 1948
he moved back to London as Vicar of St Stephen Hounslow, exchanging
livings with the Revd Lancelot B.Z. Davies. He warned you may have had criticisms of me but just wait until you get the next man. This
proved to be true: within three months his successor was inhibited for
marriage irregularities, though his 'crime' was a willingness to
conduct the marriage of divorced people. (For more details about
Claxby's history see this excellent and detailed study.)
At Houslow, the church had to be kept locked: in Claxby and Normanby,
he pointed out, the keys were either lost or had been melted down for
Waterloo cannons. During his three years here, he took up the cause of
Margaret Allen, a former bus conductress from Rawtenstall, sentenced to
hang for the murder of Nancy Ellen Chadwick (the first female death
sentence since 1936). In 1949 he sent a telegram to the King and Queen,
and to Clement Atlee, asking them to intervene to prevent the possible suicide or insanity of the men and women prison officers who will have to drag her to the scaffold. In press reports, he claimed he was less concerned about the accused's metal condition, but rather that there are warders in mental hospitals as a result of officiating at hangings. It was to no avail: Margaret Allen was executed at Strangeways.
He resigned his post, and a further period of wandering followed. In
1953, aged 49, he took to selling matches outside St Paul's Cathedral,
to draw attention to the plight of underpaid curates. Talk
of a shortage of clergy is humbug: the truth is that there's a shortage
of assistant clergy to run around and do the work for the incumbents
who draw the money. He then moved to Eire, and was for a time a lay worker in the Roman Catholic church. In 1954 he published his autobiography Round Many A Bend (Jonathan Cape 1954) [also published as Wild Goose Chase],
'written in a remote cabin' and describing his varied experience as
naval chaplain, aircraftman, schoolmaster, barman, chef and editorial
assistant on the Daily Mail.
During this period he earned his living as a writer, as other clergy
who had served in this parish had done: probably little of their work is
still read! He wrote screenplays and detective fiction, creating the
character of Miss Flora Hogg, a teacher who took up detective work
after the death of her police superintendent father - in the words of
one reviewer, frumpish in her purple
woollen three-piece, battered felt hat and heavy outsized brogues ...
not fearfully astute ... she did however get to her solution in the end. There were nine novels, Sheep's Clothing (1955), Call in Miss Hogg (1956), Miss Hogg and the Bronte Murders (1956), Miss Hogg and the Squash Club Murder (1957), Miss Hogg and the Dead Dean (1958), Miss Hogg Flies High (1958), Miss Hogg and the Covent Garden Murders (1960), Miss Hogg and the Missing Sisters (1961) and Miss Hogg’s Last Case (1963). All but Miss Hogg and the Dead Dean originally appeared pseudonymously, under the names of John Austwick or Julian Callander.
In a feminist critique, Kathleen Gregory Klein The Woman Detective: gender and genre (Univ of Illinois Press 1995) p 137 comments
| She fits the stereotype of an eccentric fiftyish English spinster ... She wears a pince-nez, smokes a cigarette after breakfast, goes to church on all the proper days, and doesn't approve of the Inland Revenue. She expects to be paid but has a distinctly haphazard attitude about retainers. She speaks of detecting as "something like collecting stamps or taking up gros point" (Last Case 92); acknowledging that a detective ought not to be without a weapon, she suggests an umbrella. Without a car, she conducts her cases by walking or taking the bus, to the detriment of her investigations. Needing to follow a suspect, she commandeers two Cambridge undergraduates who are bored and have had a bit too much to drink; naturally, they treat the whole matter as a joke. But Miss Hogg is easily tripped up; once she even fails to negotiate a revolving door. It goes almost without saying that Flora Hogg always solves her cases by a combination of good luck, trances, forced confessions, and intuition which she attributes to psychological insight from her years of teaching. She readily admits that guns, bullet trajectories, footprints, and other material clues are beyond her scope. Her vivid imagination overcomes the deficiency. In Miss Hogg and the Dead Dean, she explains her methodology: "My forbears had a very low opinion of episcopal clergymen, And, of course, I have a romantic temperament. I was brought up to think that all baronets were, ipso facto, wicked. Bold bad baronets figured in lots of the books my mother used to read, and which I read as a child. So Sir Andrew was my first suspect, naturally, and when I saw the archdeacon with him in the Mitre, I moved the archdeacon up into first place" (189). The police superintendent who is told that her intuition needs material to work on queries aptly, "Like compost?" (Bronte 133). Results - upholding justice and capturing criminals - are certainly important to her; but she admits another pleasure: "In this job ... you enjoy all the delights of not minding your own business with none of the feelings of guilt" (Call in Miss Hogg 65). This sort of frivolity pervades Austin Lee's novels; they achieve their humor through stereotyping and mysogynistic mockery. |
Austin Lee finally returned to Anglican parochial life, as
curate-in-charge of West with East Allington and Sedgebrook in 1958,
and Rector of Great Carlton, near Louth, the following year. On 6 January 1958 he wrote to the Editor of The Times
| ELECTRICITY CHARGES Sir - Is not one of the great drawbacks of the national industries that they are so inflexible and impersonal?. Local representatives cannot accept responsibility or make decisions, and must work by rule of thumb. I recently came as priest-in-charge of Sedgebrook with East and West Allington (where George Crabbe was once rector). I am occupying only 2 rooms in what, even by Victorian standards, was a very large rectory. (At one time it accomodated the boarders of the now defunct Sedgebrook Grammar School). The East Midland Electricty Board informs me that it does not matter how many rooms I occupy. I am to be charged on the floor space of the rectory. My sister, who has a small house in Fulbeck under the same authority, with 5 rooms and a great variety of electrical apparatus is paying less a year than I must pay a quarter for my 2 rooms. This seems unjust. Yours Faithfully, Austin Lee Sedgebrook Rectory, Grantham, Lincolnshire. |
and on 11 June that year he placed this advertisement in the same paper:
| Writer wants a typist, male, short period [about 100.000
words] pleasant accomodation, salary, expenses. |
He
continued to bemoan the fate of the clergy, complaining that he didn't
have enough work to do, for which he was taken to task by one Colonel
Madge in Time and Tide Business World (1961) who asked tartly what was the population of his benefice - is it by any chance one of those with less than 1,000 souls?
- and what stipend and other sources of income he received. He died in
1965, and his ashes were interred in the family grave in Claxby
churchyard.
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