Welsh Journals

ST HARMON: BEFORE AND AFTER KILVERT ROGER L. BROWN Little is known of Francis Kilvert's very short incumbency of the parish of St Harmon in Radnorshire. It appears that his diary for that period of his life was subsequently destroyed by his wife. Kilvert had been "sounded out" for the parish by the archdeacon of Brecon via his former vicar, Mr Venables of Clyro. If he noted optimistically that its income would be between three and four hundred pounds after a lease had fallen in, he was not, as David Lockwood observes, particularly enthusiastic about it.' Having met the archdeacon at Clyro, Kilvert travelled by train to inspect the parish. The church dismayed him. Its bare cold and squalid interior with its high ugly square box pews, three decker pulpit, singing gallery with a broken organ, and a roof needing repair, was barely equalled by the complaining schoolmaster of the church school. Even the wife of the parish clerk, though given to hospitality and chatter, told him that there might be another candidate, Walter Vaughan, vicar of Llandegley, who had property in the parish.2 The bishop of St Davids, in whose gift was the living, waited another month before offering it to Kilvert. The offer came by the Sunday post of 1 June, and Kilvert accepted it with a sense of wilful resignation: though its would be hard to leave Langley and his friends, especially his father, "But at my age I feel that I cannot throw away a chance of life and our tenure of this living (Langley) is a very precarious one. It is 'the warm nest on the rotten bough'3 He was collated to the living on the 21 July 1876. The entry is missing. He was probably inducted by the rural-dean in the presence of a few friends and a couple of bemused villagers. There was no vicarage available for Kilvert at St Harmon. Instead he lived at Old Bank House in Rhaeadr. On weekdays he went up by train to his parish the halt erected in 1873 was not far from the church, but unlike the Sunday post there were no Sunday trains, so that on that day he either had to walk or be driven to his duties." Fourteen months after his collation, in September 1877, he was offered the parish of Bredwardine, then in private patronage, and accepted, although his letter announcing his move and indicating the name of his successor to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners was not written until 2 May 1878. If remote St Harmon, without a vicarage, possibly more Welsh speaking than English, a population almost twice the size of Bredwardine (475 to 924) and an income less than half ( £ 163 to £ 400), was a chance he could not throw away, then the same would apply with even more force to Bredwardine. Fifty years later, though, he was still remembered in St Harmon. "A nice, friendly likeable man" is how they described him.6 Perhaps the solitude was worth the compliment? What was the parish of St Harmon like? It is in fact possible to describe it through the eyes of Kilvert's two immediate predecessors and his successor in the letters written by them to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Kilvert's own connection with the commissioners