Carry on curate: scenes of modern clerical life

In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself.

The book is an account of a year in his life as a young curate at the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Liverpool. It is loosely structured around the major church festivals, while at the same time making a case for some of the lesser known ones, such as Epiphany. Above all, it is a rich store of anecdotes, both sacred and profane.

Butler-Gallie is careful not to reveal too much personal information. He writes that he is the eldest of five children; his mother is a doctor, his father was an army officer whose forebears fought at Waterloo, and his grandmother was a messy eater. He has been a repeated victim of mistaken identity: on New Year’s Eve, he was taken for a drug dealer and, on Holy Saturday, for a blind man. Such confusions appear to be an occupational hazard. He describes how one of his friends, a ‘strapping rower turned cleric’, was mercilessly groped in a pub by a hen party, who refused to believe he wasn’t a stripper.

The book is replete with such stories, frequently with erotic undertones, as when he presides at a carol service which features the semi-nude performance of the Fire Brigade Dance Troupe, flaunting their ‘bulging pectorals’ to the backing track of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’. Even more surprising is the response of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie to an ordinand who proposed to give up masturbation for Lent: ‘Well, what a wonderful way to spend Easter morning.