STRANGE TALES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 March 1939, Page 11

STRANGE TALES

STORIES FROM VESTRY RECORDS.

DOUBTS ABOUT A DOCTOR,

When the clerk of the vestry committee at Chatham Church, England, finished writing the minutes of a meeting on July 17, 1726, he laid his quill pen in the fold of his minute book and closed the covers on it. Then, apparently, he forgot it. < Today, more than two centuries later, the pen has come to light, discovered by the rector of Chatham, the Rev C. A. H. Lowe, while he was going through ancient records preserved in his vestry strong-room. Mr Lowe’s search has revealed accounts of many amusing incidents. The best one is the story of members at a vestry meeting who wanted to. pay a doctor by results. This was in 1734, when it was proposed to pay Mr John lyioorcock five guineas “if he performs a cure of Edward Reed, but in case he dies, before cured, then the fee be two guineas and one half.”

A year earlier there appears to have been a great to do over a certain Mr Gilmore, “a foreigner living in London,” who, the clerk records, “hath lately violently intruded himself into a pew and rudely thrown or kept out those parishioners seated there by the churchwardens.” Mr Gilmore, it seems, simply refused to budge, so the churchwardens were empowered to take off the lock he had placed on the pew.

The idea seems to have been that they should drag him out if necessary, but unfortunately the sequel is not recorded.

Mr A. G. Shellock who, as honorary parish clerk has had charge of the church records for many years, showed a representative of the Evening Standard the burial, registers for 1665 and 1666, which reveal the terrible toll of the Great Plague in Chatham. The total number of plague deaths in those two years was 534. Sometimes there were as many as nine deaths a day. After each name appears the word “plague,” or the abbreviation “plge.” But the strangest story that evei 1 came out of these recoras concerns Mr Shellock himself. Years ago he had an inquiry from a woman living in New Zealand who asked him to search in the registers for the date of her baptism at Chatham.

He found the entry, wrote and told her of it, and asked if by the slightest chance she happened to know a half-brother of his who had gone to New Zealand. 20 years before and with whom he had lost touch. There was a chance in a million, he thought, that she might do so. Shortly afterwards the woman replied saying that she knew his halfbrother very well. She happened to be his .wife. To avoid confusion she had signed her original inquiry by her maiden name.