THE Tees Valley was agog with sensation 150 years ago when the new year dawned as word spread that one of the region’s most respected holy man was languishing in jail accused of forgery equivalent to £1.97m in today’s values.
Or, as the more measured tones of the Darlington & Stockton Times in its first edition of 1873 put it: “A flutter of unhealthy excitement has prevailed this week on Teesside owing to the apprehension of the Reverend Vyvyan H Moyle, vicar of Eston.
“Mr Moyle is so widely known, and has been so generally respected by all classes in and around Middlesbrough, that when the report of his arrest was issued on Monday, it was received with incredulity, and it was not until the matter was put beyond all doubt that the public feeling of distrust gave place to a sensation of deep pain and sorrow.”
Headlines from The Northern Echo of 150 years ago telling of the sensational forgery case involving the Reverend Vyvyan Moyle
Mr Moyle was the son of a Cornish surgeon and his wife, Wilhemina, was the daughter of an Inspector of Constabulary in Ireland. In 1868, aged 33, he had been appointed the first vicar of St Helen’s, Eston, when the new ironworking community had grown to become a parish in its own right.
He moved into Normanby House, “a comfortable country mansion” in which he had a collection of Old Masters paintings, and from there he and Wilhemina lived a comfortable, if not extravagant, lifestyle, considering that his earnings as Eston vicar were only £280-a-year.
Helen Price, the Manor House surgery manager, pictured in 2001 outside what in 1873 was Vyvyan Moyle's country mansion called Normanby House
He became involved with the local militia, freemasons and schools boards. He was president of the Cleveland Literary and Philosophical Society, and he advised local MPs.
“Latterly,” said the Echo’s sister paper, the D&S Times, “he appears to have evinced a disposition to mix himself up in commercial affairs.”
At public meetings he loudly advocated that local people, including his parishioners, should join a London financial institution called the Mutual Society, which was trying to break into the booming economy of Teesside.
Shortly before Christmas 1872, Mr Moyle presented the Mutual Society with shares in Jackson, Gill & Company, a firm of Middlesbrough ironfounders of which he had recently become a director. Without any question, because Mr Moyle was such a fine, upstanding pillar of the community and such a prominent promoter of their services, the society advanced him £22,000 in return (nearly £2m in today’s values, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator).
But on Boxing Day, the society in London discovered that the shares were forged.
The society informed Middlesbrough police but requested that Mr Moyle was “not interfered with while he was engaged in discharging his pastoral duties”. The police discretely watched him from a distance as he preached at South Bank and Eston on Sunday, December 29, and then arrested him the next morning in Normanby House.
The 12th Century St Helen's Church, Eston, where Mr Moyle preached with plain clothes policemen watching outside. The church closed in 1962 and was vandalised. In 1998, it was dismantled and re-built at Beamish museum where it reopened in 2015 with the Pockerley waggonway running in front of it
His downfall came with frightening speed. He never denied the fraud, and The Northern Echo explained it by saying that “in an evil hour he fell into temptation”.
But such was the extent of his debts that the Echo reported that over four days in early February, all the contents of Normanby House were auctioned off, including “rich oil paintings by Old Masters”. Then the house, too, was sold.
Mr Moyle was incarcerated in Northallerton jail until his trial at York in early March.
His barrister, and indeed newspapers like the D&S Times and to some extent the Echo, had much sympathy for the clergyman. The only victims, they said, were Mr Moyle and Wilhemina.
“The prisoner’s property and home were gone; every future prospect was blasted; misery had fallen on his wife and family; and everything that could give poignancy to his position had fallen on him with dreadful pressure,” said the Echo. “There were many in that court whose hearts bled and sympathised with him.”
He was given glowing character references by clergymen and politicians, including the Stockton MP Joseph Dodds who himself would fall catastrophically from grace when it was revealed he had been embezzling money, but the prosecution showed that he had perpetrated the forgery with “great premeditation and contrivance”.
He was sentenced to seven years in prison, served in Pentonville in London.
He was released in 1878, and seven years later, became a vicar near Reading.
However, in 1906, he was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud by getting people to invest in a fake company, the South & South West Steam Trawling & Fishing Syndicate. He was sentenced to 18 months hard labour and died, aged 73, shortly after his release.
The Reverend Moyle's rebuilt church, from Eston, at Beamish museum
JUST to complete this amazing story, the Reverend Vyvyan Moyle’s home of Normanby House was built around 1716 for the Pennyman family. It is a Grade II* listed building and is now the Manor House doctors’ surgery in Normanby.
The Reverend Moyle’s 12th Century church, St Helen’s in Eston, closed in 1962 and has been rebuilt at Beamish museum as part of its 1825 landscape – you can even see the pulpit from which he preached 150 years ago while the police were outside.
And the initials of Jackson, Gill & Company, the ironfounders and furnace-makers of which he was a director, have been found cast into iron sections of the Tay Bridge, which famously collapsed on the edge of Dundee in 1879.
The interior of the church at Beamish - it is amazing to think that Mr Moyle preached in here 150 years ago with the police waiting outside
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