Past Lives: The fall from grace of a country parson

Whatever, it is unlikely even to approach the misery of the Rev John Lax, central figure in a scandal which 90 years ago this festive season heaped nationwide notoriety upon the remote Pennine community of Stainmore. He had already lost his wife, his new love, his congregation, his reputation.

Ahead, in a few days' time, lay the first of a series of ecclesiastical hearings which would eventually also take from him his church, his livelihood and his home. And his faith? If it did not, then that is the nearest to a happy ending that this sad story can get.

This is a moral tale, told at the time of year when a reformed Scrooge, a vindicated Oliver Twist or a justly rewarded David Copperfield finds his most appreciative audience. But what follows is less the alternating hardship and joy of Dickens, more the spiralling despair of Thomas Hardy.

The setting, however, is more ambiguous. In bleak mid-winter, the landscape is straight from Nicholas Nickleby; indeed, the harsh moors surrounding Dotheboys Hall are the very same that, higher up today's A66 trunk road from Bowes, still intimidate Mr Lax's former parish. In summer, though, the view down towards Appleby-in-Westmorland once you have passed Stainmore summit is pure Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a soft, wide-horizoned Wessex of pasture and cornfields.

It is the pivotal event of John Lax's downfall which really defines this as a Hardyesque tragedy. He is a 42-year-old married man paying court - to put it no stronger than that for the moment - to the young and pretty schoolteacher who plays the harmonium at his South Stainmore church. This so scandalises the villagers that their sympathies are overwhelmingly with the gang who ambush the couple to inflict ritual humiliation on them.

In Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, published 23 years before the Stainmore incident of 1909 and set in the opposite end of the country in the earlier 19th century, there is a similar expression of hypocritical moral outrage. But whereas in real-life Stainmore violence is used, especially against the vicar, Henchard and Lucetta are merely the victims of a vicious charade that the Wessex peasantry called a "skimmity-ride".

A note to the 1974 edition translates that as "skimmington ride ... a public demonstration of disapproval with the conduct of a couple". Their effigies "were tied to a horse and paraded, while the crowd makes a hideous din outside the offenders' houses all night. The ride was particularly aimed at those who had broken marriage laws or who had committed fornication."

Another name for all this is Riding the Stang. And that is the title of a "fictionalisation" of the South Stainmore affair written as a first novel by Dawn Robertson and published by the business she and her husband run from their home in that village "near" Kirkby Stephen.

It is a good read, enhanced by some informed guesswork by the author as she dramatises the documented facts and the background to them.

Stang? Just a coincidence, apparently, that the events took place not that far from The Stang, the steep, now-forested fellside between Teesdale and Arkengarthdale, in the direction of the Tan Hill mine workings which in those days were still providing coal for the Stainmore area.

My dictionary says the word, from the Old Norse, means a pole or stake and defines riding the stang as "punishment by being carried astride a stang".

Not that Dawn Robertson has anyone using her apt title-phrase in this well-researched book. Someone does call for a lynching, but is clearly using that word in the sense of summary punishment short of death. In Casterbridge, the rabble acted on their own initiative, but in Stainmore that suggestion was enthusiastically taken up at a clandestine meeting hosted by the widow of the local squire and refined by the Methodist minister. So, at least, says the book.

The minister, whose newly-built chapel is a beneficiary when gossip about his rival clergyman causes the entire Anglican congregation to desert - the vicar is left with only his girlfriend to preach to - wants the riding of the stang to have a religious dimension. No violence, he says.

But when, with half the village as onlookers, the pair are waylaid on a warm night in mid-September, the young men at the sharp end of the operation inevitably handle them roughly.

It is dramatic licence that the brown-haired girl, in her 20s, is that evening met by the vicar off the 8.45 train at Barras station. But her father had been station-master there and she did use the train to visit him in retirement in Darlington. Certainly the couple are walking happily in the by-now moonless darkness when they reach a path above Great Skerrygill - which three generations later will be the home of author Robertson.

Here it is that the posse breaks cover and pulls the girl from a stile she is crossing. After a struggle, Mr Lax is overpowered. He is pinned down, tightly bound and has carbolic poured over his head by someone else with a special axe to grind, perhaps a man whose advances may have been spurned by the school teacher.

The same man recites the burial service over the vicar and sprinkles a handful of earth on him. A shot is fired and there is blasphemous abuse.

The vigilantes, their faces blacked up, gather round their victims and the Methodist minister begins a hymn in which they all join: Lead kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, lead Thou me on ...

The vicar is then tied to a loose farm gate, carried to the vicarage and dumped there just before midnight.

Mrs Lax is awakened to find a large crowd gathered around her prone husband and the Methodist minister kneeling to declaim the Ten Commandments at him. She hears, too, before slamming and bolting the door, the sobs of the schoolmistress, who is being held between two men. As the lynch mob disperses, the Methodist cuts the binding and leaves the girl to extricate him.

By 4am, after walking six miles to Kirkby Stephen, the vicar is reporting the assault to a policeman. He shows his cuts and bruises and alleges the theft of his purse containing 25s (£1.25).

Summonses for assault are served on eight ringleaders. They do not include the squire's widow or the Methodist minister. All are men aged between 21 and 24 and without exception, says a newspaper report, they belong "to respectable families, the majority of them being sons of farmers. Some of them are actively connected with religious bodies, either as local preachers, Sunday School teachers or as Christian Endeavour workers."

Only one conforms to latter-day popular prejudice as a likely troublemaker: he is "a prominent footballer in the North Westmorland League". But that is year-2000 mischief, overlooking the fact that church teams were the backbone of much amateur soccer in great-grandfather's playing days.

A bumper congregation attends the Sunday service at South Stainmore the day before the court hearing. They are 12, including three of Mr Lax's friends from Manchester. But nine are journalists, who note both the rosebudded hat worn by the harmonium-playing special friend of the vicar and points in the sermon they consider apposite: "St John taught that worship must be accompanied by activity in doing good and in a life of innocence."

Treble that number of journalists, some from London, were in Kirkby Stephen magistrates' court on September 27 and the 30,000 words they wrote justified the post office's decision to import 12 extra telegraph officers. All eight defendants were convicted and all chose to pay their £5 each in fine and costs rather than be jailed for a month; no doubt they were reimbursed by the village conspiracy.

The squire's widow paid the £50 fee charged by defence solicitor, Mr Irving Dawson of Barnard Castle.

Three weeks later the teacher was sacked. It was a step the South Stainmore school managers said that even before the assault they had planned this sanction against a woman they considered to have disregarded her moral duties towards their children.

On January 2, 1910, a five-day church inquiry began at Kirkby Stephen into Mr Lax's conduct during his relationship with her. It found a prima facie case against him and committed him to a consistory court to be held in York Minster in July.

Although the latter hearing gave him a temporary reprieve on technical grounds, in February 1911 he appeared before an ecclesiastical commission accused of immoral conduct.

Thirty witnesses, nearly all from Stainmore and including the convicted eight, testified against him. His erstwhile girlfriend attended but did not give evidence; she had smashed windows and furniture during a final call at the vicarage the previous May, although she gave the D&S Times a different account of that stormy visit.

He was found guilty and there were unseemly scenes of jubilation at Stainmore that night, with procession led by a brass band, as well as dancing, fireworks and a bonfire. But it was not quite the end. He again protested his innocence at an appeal where his solicitor spoke of an organised system of espionage by local people against their vicar in the months before the assault. Again the decision went against him and a week later the Bishop of Carlisle dismissed him from the parish.

But the novel is ambiguous about the exact nature of his long friendship with the girl, which began when she was a teenage assistant teacher whom he was helping with her studies; although replete with indications, often beyond the circumstantial, that this was a physical love affair, it never quite faces up to the fact.

It is clear, though, that the man was frustrated within a highly unsatisfactory marriage, which seems to have been unconsummated. A constantly depressed Mrs Lax also failed to respond to her husband's efforts to join him in church and other activities in a parish she loathed.

The author says she has not used the real names of main characters in the drama in deference to families still in the area.

Here, though, the Rev John Lax is not a pseudonym. He emigrated to Australia and became a teacher at All Saints' college, Bathurst, where he died in 1927. The schoolmistress returned to Darlington but no more is known of her