Five Year's Hell in a Country Parish

You can't beat that title. Five Year's Hell in a Country Parish is the title of a book that I've been trying to track down for close to a decade.

The book was published in the early 1920's by a British clergyman who had endured just that, and unlike most clergy who are installed into a congregation wracked with infighting and name-calling, this fellow decided to fight back. The result was this book, which is rather a legendary one due to its honesty. The Rev. Edward Fitzgerald Synnott, the Rector of Rusper was not a fearful man. He not only told the truth (or at least his side of it), he named names.

I have not yet found the book itself, but a website run by a fellow who is an historian of the area that this all took place. He has a very interesting essay up about the book and its aftermath.

Two things from the essay struck me as interesting:

1) Synnott was a practitioner of what was called "Muscular Christianity" back in the day. An interesting counterpoint to this book then would be Chariots of Fire, which touches on the same movement, in a manner more in keeping with its actual goals.

2) The essayist gives a bit of history that I'd never heard about this book: I had always presumed that the author was writing from a vantage point of having left and was off in a new position, venting into a book while licking his wounds. Nope. After this book was published he remained in the self-same "Hell in a Country Parish" for another thirteen years.

That must have been jolly.