England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
asked to be quiet, he replied by singing and hallooing, with his friends joining in.
‘I went to the door and stood near them,’ Leonard Benham told the court. ‘They said, “Take your sins off your own back, we won’t believe you, you’re a liar.” I told them mine was a registered house. They told me not to daubt them up with untempered mortar’ – an obscure metaphor which would pursue the Girlingites, along with mobs hurling slack, or slaked lime.
The hooligans then began pulling off his wallpaper, and declared that ‘they would be d—if they wouldn’t kiss Mrs Girling before they left’. Failing in this, they tried to kiss another member of the congregation, Robert Spall. ‘Not being able to do that, they said they would kiss Mrs Spall, but did not attempt to do it.’
That night the gang came back to finish what they’d started. ‘What a pity it is you young men come here and make a disturbance,’ Benham told them. ‘The law is very stringent about this, and you’ll hear something from me about it.’ But Nichols strode into the room and began shouting and stamping, while Goldsmith mockingly held up a stick to which he’d attached a red handkerchief, saying, ‘This is a flag of distress.’ He then began to declaim a text of his own, and sat down to light his pipe. Crane, also smoking, cried, ‘Pinpatches and sprats at three pence a quarter.’ The scene turned violent as the gang began to break up the furniture, with Barham sitting on the window-sill shouting, ‘My wife has run away with a man that has three children, and when she comes back I’ll be d—if I have her again.’
The mob had tailored their insults to the Girlingites, and their actions had the air of a concerted assault rather than the casual vandalism of bored young men with nothing better to do on a Sunday night in a small country village. The explanation became clear when Benham told the court that such meetings were held every three weeks at his house.
‘We have two or three places where we worship under the head of Mrs Girling. Singing hymns is part of the services, which were usually well attended. I have never seen anyone on the floor fainting. Mrs Girling has a husband and two children at Ipswich. The rooms will hold one hundred people.’
Mr Jewesson, acting for the defence, asked, ‘You’re one of the disciples, ain’t you?’, his biblical overtones somewhat undermined by his grammar.
‘Yes, and thank God for it,’ replied Benham, who proceeded to give intriguing details of the sect and the power of their leader. ‘There is silence generally when Mrs Girling reads the word of God … It is customary for any person to pray who likes. I never saw two or three praying at once – one stopped till another had finished. Mrs Girling was the only one that read and expounded.’ He admitted, modestly, ‘I am not sufficiently high to read and expound the Word of God; I wish I was.’
It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to his stature or his spiritual status. Mary Ann had first come to his house eighteen months ago – ‘Eliza Folkard sometimes expounded, but not publicly’ – and although he had never seen anyone faint at any of these services, ‘I have seen them fall under the power of God.’ As an elder of the Children of God, Benham sought to counter some of the more extraordinary rumours already gathering around them. He told the court that their services differed little from those of other dissenting chapels:
‘It is just the same with the exception that other people give out a text while Mrs Girling only expounds the word of God.’
Yet there was the sense of something other at work, not least in the shape of Mary Ann herself and the transcendence to which she aspired.
‘By our people I mean the people who follow Mrs Girling. We subscribe money amongst ourselves. We only provide Mrs Girling with clothes and boots. We pay nothing for the rooms; I give mine gratis.’
‘You speak of falling down,’ remarked Mr Corrance, ‘when does that occur?’
‘Very often, sir,’ replied Benham. ‘We see people fall down by the power of God.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Corrance.
‘They go into a trance, sir, and can see all things that are going on around them. We allow them to remain till they come to themselves.’ Benham insisted that they never disturbed anyone: ‘We have never recognised these roughs as part of our congregation … They are the Devil’s congregation, and ours are the children of God.’
This testimony was supported by key figures in the movement: Alfred Folkard, Eliza’s father; Cornelius Chase, a twenty-seven-year-old coachmaker, and Isaac Batho, postmaster and shoemaker, both of Benhall; and Sally Spall, wife of Robert, a machinist from Hascheston, with whom Mary Ann had been staying during her missionary work. Sally Spall bore witness to the ‘kiss of charity’ which had prompted the gang’s sarcastic amorousness.
‘It is usual to kiss each other indiscriminately?’ Mr Jewesson asked Mrs Spall.
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied.
‘Both males and females?’ inquired Mr Corrance.
‘Both, sir.’
‘Men, women and children, I suppose?’ prompted Jewesson.
‘Yes, sir.’
This sounded decidedly immoral, so Mr Hill stepped in, acting on behalf of the Girlingites: ‘I suppose it was only a brotherly and sisterly expression of affection?’
‘That’s all,’ said Mrs Spall.
‘You don’t rush into just anyone’s arms – it is only the members of the congregation?’
‘It’s a salutation, I suppose,’ remarked the Reverend Pooley.
‘Just so, sir,’ said Mr Hill.
Mary Ann was as much on trial here as any of her potential assailants. ‘The members of this sect were led by a woman,’ Jewesson was reported as saying, ‘of whom, without imputing anything wrong to her, he might say that it was to be regretted she should leave her husband and children, and put herself forward in the way she did, creating as she must necessarily do so, a disturbance wherever she went.’ Thus Mary Ann was portrayed as a troublemaker, a woman who, by her very sex, sought to disturb the status quo. Jewesson went on to claim that his clients had gone to the service as potential converts, ‘and the confusion which took place was not caused by them or anyone connected with them’. It was a lame excuse. Hill said his client was willing to drop the charges if his expenses – and the fine – were paid there and then; and in an extraordinary intervention which to some seemed to compromise the impartiality of the Bench, Mr Corrance himself advanced the required sum for the defendants.
A legal resolution had been reached, but the wider question of the Girlingites and their freedom to worship remained. The Woodbridge Reporter may have been a local paper, but it reported on national issues: ‘the Rights of Women’; ‘Spirit Rapping Extraordinary in Woodbridge’ (which turned out to be a skit advertising alcohol); Primitive Methodism; the vaccination debate; and emigration, ‘a subject uppermost in men’s minds now’. Disturbing events across the Channel – the ‘Literary, Scientific, and Artistic Communists’ in the Paris Commune – sat alongside reports of riots in Dublin and an apocalyptic editorial on cholera, ‘the most destructive of human diseases’, whose invasion no ‘“streak of silver sea”’ could prevent. Amid such signs and wonders – as if plague and famine might yet sweep the land, just as the sea could break its defences – the appearance of a local prophetess was of more than a little interest; especially when her crusade provoked a riot at the Mechanics’ Institute in Woodbridge.
Mechanics’ institutes were established in the 1820s as educational centres for artisans. Often used for lectures on sectarian beliefs and spiritualism, they provided the working man with ‘an opportunity to ride the wave of the new pseudo-sciences’. On 2 May 1871, the Reporter noted that ‘