Clergy and the working girls

Over the decades, they have stirred up furious debates over horseracing on the sands, mixed bathing, Sunday shop opening, and the screening of X certificate films in the town's cinemas.

Sadly, troublesome clerics are today few and far between, probably because preaching from the pulpit reaches so few people nowadays.

But in 1906, two vicars joined forces to launch an outrageous attack on the town's house servants, sparking angry rebukes from all quarters.

At a public meeting on an entirely different, seemingly innocuous matter, The Reverend JP Fallowes, rector of Heene, strayed off the subject to say: "This small town of ours is advanced in iniquity."

The Reverend ET Finch, of St Andrew's Church, lit the fuse when he added: "I appeal to all employers of young female servants to make a regular and sustained effort to break down the custom of an evening out a week, which was demanded almost as a right."

Putting both comments together, it was interpreted that young servants were responsible for the decline in Worthing's moral standards.

The vicars did not spell out exactly what they meant by iniquity but, reading between the lines almost a century later, the accusation was aimed at servant girls enjoying the company of male friends while out for an evening stroll.

The Rev Finch suggested that servants, who often worked gruelling 15 hour days, should not get a single night off.

The retribution was immediate, and the letters' pages of local newspapers reflected the outrage of both servants and mistresses alike.

One critic wrote: "I note with amazement the ignominious slur gratuitously passed upon the hard-working respectable class of girls.

"According to that reverend gentleman's ideas, domestic servants are sinners above sinners.

"But depriving hard-working girls of the small amount of relaxation to which they are justly entitled will no more avert the evil referred to than the confessional or even convent walls.

"I write feelingly, having at the present time a servant who has been with me nearly five years, and from the first being allowed out twice, sometimes three times a week, until 10 o'clock, and always on Bank Holidays, yet has not once, by five minutes exceeded her privilege and whose character is irreproachable.

"If servants were trusted more and treated with the consideration which is their due, they would be found loyal and true."

Another correspondent wrote: "Surely they have as much right to an evening out as the shop assistant. We must bear in mind that when dealing with servants they are not machinery that can be broken and mended at will.

"Many young servants suffer untold distress from being pent up in a stuffy kitchen from one weekend to the next, and not allowed to spend a few hours with those who are known and dear to them."

A servant was so incensed she wrote: "We should find it very hard to stay indoors from one Sunday to another. As it is, we are considered machines, working 6.30am to 9.30pm, with very little rest in between.

We are not street-walkers, and investigations will prove that the majority of street-walkers are not domestics.

"Is it to be wondered that good servants are scarce?"

Yet another stated: "Let the gentlemen themselves try being in a hot kitchen in the summer months, day after day, and see if they would not revel in a walk in the cool of the evening.

"If girls were allowed out more often, we would not see so many pale faces. When will masters and mistresses realise how many girls are ruined in health through overwork and confinement indoors?"

The Reverend Fallowes sought to distance himself from the comments of the Reverend Finch, saying: "I made no reference to domestic servants or their evenings out.

I hope they all have proper outings and enjoy them."

The final word goes to a correspondent identified by the initials J.T.N., who wrote: "We must remember that wearing a white necktie, black coat and round hat is not proof of either wisdom or learning. People should not, therefore, trouble themselves about insolent priestly remarks."

The Reverend Archibald E Glover certainly didn't mince his words in 1935 when it came to the question of exposing bare flesh on Worthing beach.

Preaching the Old Testament, Glover, of 17 Kingsland Road, wrote: "It is with the most serious misgivings that I, in common with a considerable section of the resident community, anticipate the approach of the usual summer season.

"I have spent holiday seasons in a few of our seaside resorts, but never in my experience have I witnessed such shameless indecency as that which has disgraced the streets and shores of Worthing, whose fair name for a clean and healthy morality is rapidly disappearing before the menace of an aggressive and vicious lawlessness which glories in its shame.

"That men and women should be allowed to discard the privacy of the private bathing hut or tent, both before and after bathing, and should even be granted licence to lie about indiscriminately at all hours of the day in a seminude condition and in any sort of attitude is itself an outrage upon the public sense which is nothing short of criminal."

He was also beside himself with fury over the sight of fashionable young women walking on the promenade, or through the town, in trousers.

Glover said: "The matter in question is not to be dismissed as one of mere ignorant vulgarity.

It is patently one of brazen bestiality. Side by side with it is the growing evil of the tolerated degradation of womanhood in those who openly set at defiance the law of Nature as well as the express wish of the Creator by parading in men's attire."

He warned that Worthing's increasing notoriety could soon turn to infamy, destroying the good name of the town.

But the Rev EJ Padfield, another Worthing minister, hit back, stating: "We must remember that sunbathing in itself is no more immoral than sea-bathing.

"On the contrary, it is one of the means by which the Divine Creator would restore to, or strengthen, the health of thousands of people.

"Mr Glover writes of the semi-nudity of these people as if that in itself is wrong. But if the motive is pure, as a desire for physical fitness is, then semi-nudity may even be a positive duty.

"I cannot for the life of me see where 'vicious lawlessness'

comes in, or the 'degradation of womanhood'

in anything that I have witnessed, although I would admit that some things are certainly regrettable.

"The spectacle of semi-nudity need not be morally injurious to onlookers. If there were anything necessarily impure in the exposure of the human form, doctors and nurses would be among the most immoral of people."

Glover's views sparked a lively debate in the letters'

sections of local newspapers, with views split 50-50 for and against his standpoint.

Dennis Earle wrote:

"Apparently, no suggestion of vice is too fantastic for Mr Glover. I suggest that Worthing is a thoroughly clean and wholesome town growing in popularity every year. I think Mr Glover's complaint is not so much against Worthing as against the modern spirit which has invaded it and which likes the sunshine and open-air and requires more freedom and less conventionality."

Dion Byngham wrote:

"When I see the sun blazing from a pure blue sky and the clean sea dancing and laughing with a myriad of reflections flashing, my immediate impulse is to fling off my confounded clothes and enjoy it.

"The truth is, I suspect, that some people are secretly jealous of youth today, which enjoys freedom and privileges they never dreamed of.

"Do they expect our present day girls to go back to bathing machines and voluminous bloomers lest they outrage the public sense?"

But H Kyffin Heyland, of The Birches, Cissbury Road, demanded a cover up "to stop the rot which had undoubtedly set in".

He wrote: "I have seen thousands of women and girls in the slave markets on the East Coast of Africa more decently clad than the groups of men and women I have seen sea bathing and sunbathing on Worthing seafront during the summer months."

I leave the last word to Glover. He concluded: "There is a strong feeling in the public consciousness that the time has come when the scandal of Worthing's open sore, in the ever increasing shamelessness of the foreshore indecencies, should be finally faced and dealt with by the responsible authorities."

Sixty-seven years on, how times have changed.