One
Saturday shortly before Christmas 1866, the Rev. Septimus Lee Warner encountered
something that convinced him his life was in danger. There, on public display
in a shop window on the High Street, he was confronted by an
eye-catching montage, full of revolving lights and twinkling mirrors, the
centre-piece of which was his own photograph, pasted provocatively onto an
upright coffin-lid. For many parishioners
the church in their midst was a potent political symbol. Grieving parents
who, for want of access to medical intervention or decent sanitation, found
themselves burying their dead children in the churchyard in the shadow
of a building that had cost £2000 to restore. Tiny coffins were borne to the
grave, accompanied by funeral hymns played on an organ that had cost £250, all
of it donated by the Rev. Lee Warner and his family and friends. Worse, this
was at a time when Lee Warner was widely suspected of using duplicitous means
to get his hands on the parish charities, and of mismanaging them in such a way
that the poor were now deprived of their full benefits. Small wonder that Lee
Warner genuinely feared for his life when he saw the executed effigy of himself
in a High Street window, just a few weeks after his church had been blown up.
There were people in the village with serious grievances against him, and he
knew they meant business.