Monday, 10 April 2017

Bus Stop homicide - surgery efficiency - the wicked vicar


Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978

While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear.  "He demanded that I give him my wife's purse", said Mr Thirsty.  "Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it.  It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died."



Stephan Westaby writes that on obtaining his first junior post as a surgeon at London's Royal Brompton Hospital, he commandeered the rubber boots that had once belonged to the eminent surgeon Lord Brock and later adapted them with a length of tubing and sticky tape to avoid having to take toilet breaks during lengthy operations.

Fragile Lives:  A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephan Westaby
 

Entries from the Parish Register of Seasalter, Kent:

1734  Edward Trice and Mary Acros married at the Cathedral of Seasalter.  A Bowl of Punch was made almost as big as the Caspian.

1734  John Powney Huntsman to that ancient Corporation of crucketsoles the City of Canterbury and Miss Eliz. Johnson, daughter to the Devil's own, commonly called a Bailiff, were married at the Cathedral of Seasalter.

1742  Buried John Ellis, a very strong young fellow and a great smuggler.

1744 John Housden, widower, a young gape-mouth, lazy fellow, and Hannah Matthews, an old toothless wriggling Hagg, both of Faversham, were trammel by Licence at the Cathedral of Seasalter.

1750  William Parnel and Mary Steed, a dolefull forbidding saturnine damsel, married.

These extracts were written by the Rev. Thomas Patten, who was appointed Vicar of Seasalter and Perpetual Curate of Whitstable in 1711, and held the two livings until his death in 1764 at the age of eighty.

A law unto himself, he not only kept a mistress, but drove to church in a butcher's cart, wore ragged, dirty clothes, signed himself "Bishop of Whitstable", refused to read the Athanasian Creed, and would suddenly break off a sermon if he thought that any of the congregation would join him in a visit to the nearby pub.

In Archbishop Secker's visitation of the parishes in 1759, Patten is described as 'half-mad impudent, poor".  When the archdeacon reproved him for not reading the Athanasian Creed, which the archbishop did, "That may be," answered Patten, "perhaps he may believe it; I don't.   He believes at the rate of $7,000.00 per annum: I at less than fifty.

He died in October 1764 and was buried in Old Seasalter Church on the south side of the altar, his grave marked by a stone slab set in the chancel floor.  Here it rested for over 160 years but in 1927 Seasalter received a new vicar, the Rev. Edward Thompson, a short, thick-set martinet with a stentorian voice, straight from the China Mission.  He had Patten's gravestone dug up and thrown out, saying he was not going to have so scandalous a man commemorated in his church.  It languished among the weeds until the 1960s, when in that more tolerant decade (one which might have suited Patten) it was brought back into the church, where it now rests on a window sill.

A Christmas Cracker  -  2008







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