Improperly invested in vestments

Hertfordshire Mercury, 8th April 1916

Transcript

A deposed clergyman, Llewellyn Davies, and his sister, Esther Isabella Davies, were charged, at St Albans, with obtaining food and goods by fraud.  They had put up at the Peahen Hotel, had ordered goods from different tradesmen but, on presentation of the hotel bill, they had said that they had no money with which to pay.  The prisoners offered no defence.

Det. Sgt. Barnes of the Birmingham police said that the prisoners, together with another sister, had been convicted in Birmingham in 1911 of obtaining credit by fraud and also of obtaining goods by false pretences.  Llewellyn Davies had formerly been a clergyman of the Church of England, was ordained a deacon in 1884, and a priest in 1885, by the Bishop of Lichfield, but he had been deprived of his benefice at Steeple Clayton in Buckinghamshire and deposed from holy orders for immorality.

In 1895, the Archbishop of Canterbury had issued a warning about him to all Bishops.  When he had been charged at Birmingham, there had been 40 or 50 charges against him.  Witnesses had referred to other convictions against the male prisoner who, he said, did not do any work but just seemed to prey on the public.

The Court imposed the maximum permitted sentence of 12 months’ hard labour for each prisoner.

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