A CHURCH BAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 323, 7 April 1928, Page 24

A CHURCH BAN

VICAR’S “BLACK EYE”

As a result of a scene in St. Faul’s Parish Church, Kingston Hill. London. George Sherwood Lewis, of Alexandra Road, appeared before the Kingston-on-Thames Bench recently. On a summons for riotous behaviour he was bound over under the Probation of Offenders Act to be of good behaviour for 12 months and to abstain from going to St. Paul's Church or the vicarage during that tine. He was also ordered to pay five guineas costs. Mr. W. E. Blake Cam. solicitor, opening the case, said the incident was the culmination of a series of incidents and threads in letters written to the vicar, the Rev. A. Wellesley Orr. When Mr. Orr went into the pulpit on Sunday evening to deliver his serman, Lewis jumped up and shouted: “Mr. Orr, you are a scamp and a scoundrel, and you are not fit to preach/’ Lewis, giving evidence, said he once went to the vicarage to “ask for the explanation of a certain act which he did not think quite straight.” When he got up to go, the vicar turned the ! key in the door and put his back I against it. Mr. Carn: Is that why the vicar got a black eye?—Yes. The vicar, in evidence, said that on the occasion in the vicarage he put his hands in his pockets and Lewis struck him a blow. He did not lock Lewis in the study.