CANON Evan Burrough was a conscientious clergymen with an unusual hobby – he grew his own tobacco.

What’s more, the long-serving vicar of Summertown claimed his crop was the best in Oxford.

He was regularly seen around his parish smoking a pipe, but few parishioners apparently knew that he grew the tobacco in the vicarage garden.

This was perfectly legal, as long as it was for his own use and he did not sell it.

His cultivating skills were revealed at the Summertown, Wolvercote and Wytham Horticultural Society’s annual show and fete in the grounds of Summerfields School in 1955.

The Oxford Mail reported: “In a luncheon exchange of pleasantries between the vicar and the society’s veteran secretary, George Worth, Canon Burrough issued a challenge that he had produced the best tobacco crop in Oxford.

“After indicating the height to which his plants had grown, Mr Worth conceded defeat.”

In an interview with our sister paper, The Oxford Times, a year later, Canon Burrough revealed that after growing the tobacco, he cured it, then pressed it in an old wooden trouser press.

Interviewer David Peters recorded: “I was much taken with the pleasant aroma of the Havana, White Burley and Monticalme mixture he uses.”

After we briefly mentioned Canon Burrough’s tobacco habit in our 60 years ago column (Memory Lane, August 17), reader David Brown, of Jordan Hill, Oxford, found a picture in his collection of vintage postcards. It shows the ‘vicar of Summertown’ in action at the North Oxford Golf Club in 1914.

But was this Evan or his brother, Charles James Burrough? Both served as vicars of the parish at different times.

Evan ran the parish from 1924. Charles was in charge some years before, with the Rev Robert Hay, later Bishop of Buckingham, holding the post in between. The two brothers came from a church family. They were among 11 children of the Rev Charles Burrough, Rector of Eaton Bishop in Herefordshire.

Charles was instrumental in building St Michael and All Angels Church in Summertown. Evan, using the stone, wood and roofing of the derelict church of St John the Baptist, organised the building of Summertown Church Hall.

When Evan, who served as a Chaplain in the Royal Navy during the First World War, took over the parish in 1924, it had a population of 5,500. By 1956, when he retired, that figure had doubled to 11,000.

During those 32 years, it was always his aim to visit every house in the parish at least once a year. To him, this was a ‘frightfully important’ part of his ministry, although it took almost every afternoon of the year to achieve it.

Many tributes were paid to him at his retirement ceremony, including one from the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Harry Carpenter, who said he had brought ‘great happiness and prosperity to the spiritual life of this important part of Oxford’.

He died in 1965, aged 81.