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The Full Monty

Nigel Hamilton (£8.99, Penguin)

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St Mark's, Kennington

Bernard Law Montgomery was the third son and fourth child of the Reverend Henry Montgomery and his young wife Maud, née Farrar. Both Henry and Maud came from distinguished Victorian families: Sir Robert Montgomery, Henry Montgomery's father, had been knighted for his service as an administrator in India during the Mutiny, or First War of Indian Independence; Canon Frederick Farrar, Maud's father, was even more celebrated, having become one of the most famous headmasters and preachers in England, and rector of St Margaret's Church, Westminster, opposite the Houses of Parliament. He not only wrote a popular Life of Jesus, but penned a series of morally edifying Victorian novels of rites-of-passage, such as Eric, or Little by Little, Julian Home and St. Winifred's or The World of School, that were as popular in their time as Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Henry - who had been a young curate in Canon Farrar's parish - had met Maud when he was twenty-nine, balding and bearded, she flat-chested and only eleven. They had become engaged when Maud was fourteen, and were married when Maud was still only sixteen.

Though not uncommon in Victorian England, the age gap between bride and bridegroom was mirrored in the gap between their educations, indeed in the gulf separating the sexes. Henry Montgomery had gone to Harrow School - a 'dung-hill' where '[every] boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognized either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's "bitch",' as J. A. Symonds recorded. 'Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences.' Henry had then studied at Cambridge. 'God, who kept me from the temptations of school life, did not desert me at college', he claimed later. But Maud Farrar had never been to school at all.

The difference in their educations - sexual as well as scholarly - was thus marked. Henry had taken holy orders under instruction from the notorious Dr C. J. Vaughan. According to J. A. Symonds, Dr Vaughan had publicly announced he would switch, or birch, a certain boy for indulging in sodomy or 'spooning', but was then found to indulge in the practice himself with one of Symonds' fellow pupils - a practice his wife was well aware of, flinging herself at the knees of Symonds' father when he compelled Vaughan to resign with the plea that 'Her husband was subject to this weakness, but it had not interfered with his usefulness in the direction of the school at Harrow'. The disgraced headmaster of Harrow, who had been forced to turn down the offer of two bishoprics thereafter, had then become a simple teacher of divinity to young men such as Henry Montgomery.

Whether Henry himself was ever importuned by Vaughan is unknown, but Henry certainly attracted the passionate affection of the Dean of Westminster, Dean Stanley, whose secretary he had become, and who in 1879 got him his own living as vicar of St Mark's, Kennington: a large, sprawling parish in south London. It was as vicar of St Mark's that Henry was then able to marry his fiancée, whose engagement had been kept secret even from her sisters.

The wedding, in a chapel of Westminster Abbey, was marred by the sudden death of Dean Stanley, Henry's patron. Worse was to follow. Of their wedding nuptials in the Bull Hotel in Cambridge, in July 1881, Maud openly confided to her youngest son that 'she did not exactly enjoy that first night'. Thereafter, in the turmoil of a busy Victorian parish, dedicated to religious conversion and the saving of more souls, she confessed she was 'not very happy'.

It was hardly surprising. Maud had grown up as one of ten children -five boys and five girls. She missed them, and found the switch from the big, warm, affectionate Farrar family to the cold, formal Montgomerys as great a shock as sexual penetration. She hardly knew Henry; for two years before marriage, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, she had been allowed to see her fiancé only twice per week, under strict supervision -and had no other suitors. At the Montgomery family estate in Northern Ireland, overlooking Lough Foyle in County Donegal, where she spent her honeymoon, she was escorted each night to her bed - by Lady Montgomery.

'The men always came to bed later,' Maud recalled - lamenting that her husband took her for granted, never told her that he loved her or indeed had any feelings for her, but simply imposed on her, as the vicar's new sixteen-year- old wife, sexual obedience and awesome responsibilities; a parish of 14,000 people, administered by her husband, three curates, 250 church workers and 12.5 Sunday school teachers indoctrinating 1,500 Sunday school children.

For this Maud would make her husband, and her children, pay.

© Penguin Books Limited 2002 © Associated Newspapers Ltd., 11 July 2002

(posted 7930 days ago)

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