Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

99 specific church, though in this period he definitely had some association with the church at Evenjobb, about three miles west of Presteigne. There were also reports that he was in line to take over the living at Knighton. Perhaps he was undergoing some sort of crisis of faith; but by 1902 he was once again ready to resume formal parochial duties, and in that year he moved back into England, though not very far, to become the Rector of Tarrington, a village a few miles east of Hereford. Here he finally put down roots, remaining from 1902 until 1925, when he finally took what he may well have seen as the perfect job for his ‘senior’ years - Vicar of St Andrew’s Church at Norton, close to his childhood home of Norton Manor. Here he remained until he retired, in 1939. Sadly he did not enjoy a long retirement, for he died on 29 June 1940, four months after his 80th birthday, in the house in Presteigne to which he had now moved. But it was at Tarrington where he made his greatest impression as a clergyman. They don’t have a rector there any more; the church of St Philip and St James is now in the charge of Rev John Watkins, officially an assistant curate in the Ledbury Team Ministry. John is as entertaining a clergyman as you could hope to meet; I had the feeling that if the church hadn’t called, he would have enjoyed the opportunity of a career on the stage! Following a chance encounter with one of Alfred’s descendants around ten years ago, and using information from her and from his own further researches, John helped to mount - and star in - a short and very sympathetic (but also rather melancholy) play in the church about Alfred’s life and times. John was kind enough to lend me a copy of the script of the play, and many of the papers that he and writer Thony Handy had used as their source material. It is from these that I have been able to draw much detail about Alfred’s life in Tarrington, and about his character as a clergyman. My first, and lasting, impression is that Alfred was a genuinely godly man, perhaps a little paternalistic (but that was the way in those days), but genuinely caring for his parish and his parishioners. As John Watkins put it after reading Alfred’s contributions over many years to the local deanery magazine: ‘He complains a good deal about poor attendances and feeble giving and generally puts the ecclesiastical boot in, albeit balanced with praise where he considers it to be justified.’ Maybe his parishioners’ giving was sometimes ‘feeble’, but Alfred was always ready to come forward with money from his own pocket in support of worthy causes in the parish. He is recorded as being the driving force behind the establishment of a parish hall in Tarrington in 1906, an endeavour of which he was particularly and justly proud, and which he had overseen ‘with characteristic energy’ ever since he first moved to the parish. And in several years, around Eastertime we read a message such as this, from 1914: ‘The offertories on Easter Sunday, which in most parishes are given to the Rector, will be given by him to funds in the parish which are most in need of support. He will consult the Churchwardens in this matter.’ He probably didn’t need the money from these offertories (among other things, he had married well), but that is not the same thing as saying The oldest of them all