Harold Davidson - Ordination

Ordination

In May 1903 he had his last professional stage employment and on 21 September 1903 he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. His first curacy was at the Guards Chapel (Holy Trinity) at Windsor and then from August 1905 he was a curate of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Davidson's appointment as Rector of Stiffkey St John with Stiffkey St Mary and Morston was announced in July 1906. Stiffkey and Morston are rural parishes on the north coast of Norfolk. In October 1906 after a six-year engagement, he married Moyra ('Molly') Saurin.

He was popular in his Norfolk parishes where he was the only resident landowner; Marquess Townshend who owned all the land other than the glebe lived in London and rarely came up to his estates in Norfolk. The rector looked after the villagers' needs, whether they went to his church or not. He visited everyone each week and he did special tours at Michaelmas to ensure they all had enough to pay their rents; he would pay the money due if they didn't. His diminutive stature (he was 5'3") led his parishioners to nickname him 'Little Jim'.

He maintained his connections with the theatrical world and kept up with theatre friends all his life. He was the first chaplain of the Actors' Church Union of Central London while he was still at St Martin-in-the-Fields until 1918. At the request of a school friend, Maundy Gregory, he invested in a disastrous revival of the comic opera Dorothy at the Waldorf Theatre in 1909.

He served as a Royal Navy chaplain from 1916-20. When he returned, his wife Molly was pregnant by another man. He accepted a post as tutor to the Maharaja of Jaipur's son for a year and proposed taking his children to India with him. Davidson contracted someone to take on Stiffkey while he was away but his wife then decided she wanted to keep the family together, and the rector's permission to go was cancelled. However, since he had already contracted someone to take over his parish, he remained in London for that year with the family till they could all return to his parish.

When they returned to Stiffkey in 1921, he continued his trips down to London to save young women from prostitution. He would approach girls in the streets and claimed to have saved many from a life of vice by helping them find jobs, particularly in the theatre.