A VILLAGE pub became a watering hole for national and local journalists chasing the story of The Second Coming in the 1850s. Jesus had arrived in the West Country village of Spaxton and was making headline news across the country.

 

But when he died, he wasn’t entombed in a cave. He was buried upright in a garden, the Illustrated London News reported. So that he would be ready to climb out and begin his good work again.

 

The Rev Henry Prince was a defrocked priest who ran a religious sect called The Agapemonites, part of the Arc of the Covenant church, based in Clapton, London and with a mansion Somerset. His religion, though, was based on sex and extortion, and he had 400 followers bonking away.

 

Prince proclaimed himself the Messiah and forced his followers, even married ones, to live in single-sex quarters, but made different arrangements for himself, of course, being Jesus. They gave all their worldly possessions and inheritances to their community. Jesus was the Treasurer.

 

Every seven days, the younger women were seated on a giant roundabout; it was given a push by the congregation and the girl who faced him when it came to a stop was his lucky ‘Bride of the Week’.

 

They lived in a mansion, called the Abode of Love, surrounded by high walls, and guarded by fierce bloodhounds next to The Lamb Inn in the village, and spent their time ‘saving each other’. But they would often go on walkabouts to nearby towns such as Bridgwater to spread their gospel.

 

Their mansion had 18 bedrooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms and servants’ quarters. Spacious grounds and gardens, known as Eden were dotted with outhouses, stables, conservatories, gazebos and a series of cottages. In one corner it had its own chapel furnished with easy chairs, settees and a billiard table alongside the hassocks and hymn boards for hymns written by Prince about himself. Needless to say, they ate well and drank only the best wines.

 

Prince had many "spiritual brides," and in 1856 announced that he was the instrument through which the Holy Spirit could be united with the sinful human flesh.

 

To prove this, he made love to a girl in front of the congregation in his chapel, (which doubled as a billiard hall), in an event called The Great Manifestation. She later produced a child.

 

But in one notorious case, he went too far: he arranged marriages for three of his clerical followers with three sisters from a wealthy family. The family rescued a fourth sister, Laura, from the sect and consigned her to an asylum for her own good. She escaped but was recaptured on her way back to Spaxton. The God game wasn’t over though because Laura successfully then sued her family members for abduction and illegal detention.

 

The case put on sales for national newspapers such as The Times and local titles across the West Country. Drinkers and journalists were treated to months of fights and skirmishes at the mansion gates as they supped their beers by the front windows of the Lamb.

 

But Prince won and Laura lived out her life peacefully and in great comfort in the religious knocking shop, dying in 1858. She left everything to the sect. Years later the court fight was still going on.

 

The Times reported on June 12, 1860: “It was a most unhappy conclusion to be told upon the authority of a Vice-Chancellor that as English law stands, a religious impostor — a conscientious fanatic, if you will — might legitimately exercise his spiritual influence over his female devotees so as to induce them to denude themselves and their natural heirs and kinsfolk of their property on his behalf.”

 

The Rev lived happily on until January 10, 1899, declaring himself immortal until he died aged 88. His sidekick, the Rev John Hugh Smyth-Pigott who succeeded him, was defrocked in 1909, but lived on at Agapemone until 1927.

MAROCCO THE WONDER HORSE

 

IN 1590, young horse trainer William Bankes, working in an Essex stable, sold all his possessions to buy his horse Marocco a pair of silver horseshoes and find fame and fortune in London. For this was no ordinary bay gelding as Fleet Street archives show.

 

Muscular Marocco was almost human and could do human tricks. In fact, he was so intelligent people believed he was really a man in some kind of magical disguise.

 

When William and his horse turned up in Fleet Street, he quickly found lodgings at the Cross Keys in Bell Savage Yard, off Ludgate Hill, which had a stable and a small theatre where Shakespeare put on plays. Soon people from all over London were flocking there to see Marocco perform.

 

He could count coins from the pockets of the audience and stamp the number out on the ground with his hooves — then remember who gave him what; walk on two or three legs and play dead at his master’s command.

 

The horse would gently pull people wearing spectacles out of the crowd when ordered to do so and grip hats or scarves of certain colours in his jaws. His favourite feat was to dance upright the steps of Elizabethan routines such as The Canary or urinate when told to.

 

He could also count with hoof taps the numbers of suit symbols on playing cards and distinguish between red and black suits by dragging either his right or left hoof. (Horses were known to be colour blind).

 

He would always curtsy at the mention of the Queen of England but bare his teeth and grunt at the name of the King of Spain.

 

His fame grew even more when hundreds of people turned up to see him and Bankes walk up over a thousand winding steps to the rooftop of the then-flat St Paul’s Cathedral and perform. Even the clergy came out to watch from below and to their astonishment, Marocco walked back down the flight of stairs unaided, sometimes on two legs, and into the street.

 

By the mid-1590s Marocco and Bankes had become two of London's most popular entertainers and Bankes was now so wealthy he had his own arena built in Gracechurch Street. A musician was employed with a singer who played a song called Bankes's Game during the act and entertained the audience between shows featuring other stars, including bearded ladies, midgets and animals with two heads. The song was sung in pubs all over London.

 

But Bankes wanted more fame and went to France where they weren’t as friendly and arrested him for witchcraft. He and Marocco were to be burnt at the stake. But Marocco knelt before a cross held by one of the priests judging him, which proved to them he was not of the devil. The crowd was impressed, and they were set free.

 

The publicity launched them on a successful tour across Europe. They returned to London and shortly after, Marocco died in 1606. Bankes became an innkeeper. And died in 1641. His daughter then revealed that many of Marocco’s tricks were her father’s sleight of hand – but not all.

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

 

A WONDERFUL archive of the entertainment world caught my eye last week … Spotlight, the directory of fame wannabes from the past. 

 

Remember it? A sort of catalogue of budding bedsit stars struggling to make a living on stage and screen in which they advertised their dreams of stardom which was born in 1917.

 

Over the years, it was a must for all Wardour Street film makers, show directors, TV companies looking for talent and reporters hunting phone numbers. A paper Labour Exchange, if you remember those. Today, old copies are pricey and a collector’s item.

 

Some of these Unknowns jump from the pages … Donald Pleasance; Sid James; Nicholas Parsons and Charles Hawtrey to name but a sprinkling of stardust. A massive cast of hopefuls shopping at corner shops from their bedsits for teabags while trying to make it big.

 

By the end of the 1940s a full-page ad cost an actor or his agent £25 and by the end of 1960s the catalogue had recorded over 17,800 performers in their ads with enquiries running at 200 a day.

 

All this is revealed in a fascinating book by historian Andrew Roberts who takes us dancing along this boardwalk of history in Idols of the Odeons.

The curtain goes up on people like Hawtrey who gives his address as 217 Cromwell Road, Hounslow, and calls himself a Leading Man. You could ring him on: HOUnslow 0636. In 1958 Sean Connery appears sporting a black shirt and white tie looking every bit the Soho wide boy.

 

And in 1964 the Corona Academy of Acting pushes fresh-faced Dennis Waterman in the section Actresses and Children. Meanwhile, grim-looking 25-year-old Nicholas Parsons tells us that any B film producer looking for someone to play a spiv should contact him on: HAMpstead 3747.

 

In the smaller ads, one bit-part actor is available in 1964 for a ‘’Town Tour’ or ‘First Class Repertory’. Another could perform his own comedy routine. Wonderful stuff.

 

Spotlight began listing performers online in 1997 and 20 years later the printed directory died.

 

ACTOR’S CAREER GOES FOR A BURTON

 

HOW many times have we looked at an old movie on our TV screens and known the face of the actor, but not the name?

 

Hugh Williams was one of those stars, a great actor who had so many supporting roles as a matinee idol in 1930s movies such as Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier, and David Copperfield with W.C. Fields.

 

But like so many other stars his screen career crashed when the war came, and he was declared bankrupt. His downfall was published in the Daily Express and cruelly the school friends of his son pinned the cutting to the notice board with the scribbled caption: “So Williams Minor will be leaving at Easter!”

 

His son was Simon Williams, who went on to star as James Bellamy in the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs. Now, 80 years later, he has revealed in The Oldie magazine that his father recovered from his misfortune, thanks to secret donations from the acting fraternity … and no one more so than Richard Burton.

 

He takes up the tale: “My father never forgot his kindness,” he writes. “And would go misty-eyed every time he saw the great actor on screen.”

 

Simon never knew Burton and his father knew him only fleetingly. But he sent him an enormous cheque to get him on his feet. The punchline to this wonderful tale is that in 1978, nine years after his father died, Simon was in a restaurant in Vienna, enjoying dinner with the cast of his new film The Prisoner of Zenda, when the room went quiet. “Even Peter Sellers went silent mid-Goon sentence,” he said.

 

Richard Burton had appeared, dressed all in white – polo neck, slacks, moccasins as white as his teeth. His face though was brown as a berry: “The man from Del Monte!” He was in town filming the war movie The Wild Geese at the time.

 

“Burton surveyed the room,” said Simon, “smiling the smile that launched as many ships as Elizabeth Taylor.

 

“Finally, he fixed his gaze on me! And ignoring everyone, he ambled slowly down to my end of the table and squatted beside me. ‘You are so like your father’, he said in his dark chocolate voice. I was speechless. He didn’t know me from Adam. ‘He was a hell of an actor,’ he went on. ‘I loved him’.

“Oh, thank you, I spattered Then, with a pat on my shoulder, he was gone.”

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

14 April 2025

 

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