The Deserving Poor – The episode begins with Father Brown (Mark Williams) and Mrs. Devine (Claudie Blakley) arriving at Thorp’s Almshouses to give spiritual guidance. When they arrive in Adelaide Jenks’s (Ellen Thomas) room, she admits to having trouble sleeping but claims she hasn’t asked for spiritual guidance. After Mrs. Devine asks if someone else perhaps called for her, Father Brown realizes she is housing a man in her single woman’s almshouse.
Jenks claims she let Harold stay with her because he was so nice after the passing of her husband. Harold adds that they had to be so secretive because of Cormac Thorp (Daniel Tuite). Elsewhere, Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood) is teaching Eunice Lytton (Anita Dobson) to play limbo when the dinner bell rings. During dinner, the ladies complain about the condition of the almshouses. Thorp announces that he’s called a meeting with the trustees tomorrow to request that they pay to modernize the houses. When Jenks tries to sneak a piece of bread out of the cafeteria, Thorp tells her that all almshouses are subject to inspections at any time. Father Brown tries to distract him by asking for a tour but fails. Despite this, Thorp fails to find any trace of Harold.
When Thorp finally does give Father Brown the tour it is interrupted by Eunice who is burning her uniform. Thorp confiscates her matches and sends her to his offices. Later that evening, Father Brown, Brenda, and Devine are invited to spend the night at the almshouses after Devine’s car fails to start. The following morning, Devine goes looking for Harold and finds Thorp dead.
Once Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton) and Chief Inspector Sullivan (Tom Chambers) are on the scene, they learn Thorp fell from the roof while trying to mend the leaks. The moss under his fingernails likely rules out a suicide. In private, Jenks tells Father Brown and Devine that Harold went out last night and hasn’t returned. The conversation doesn’t get much further for the moment because Father Brown is asked to lead the 9 o’clock prayers. The prayers are interrupted by a very chipper Eunice.
While Goodfellow searches the roof, Sullivan finds Harold hiding in the bushes. He catches him just as the 9 o’clock prayers let out. Harold is arrested once they find the flask on his that Thorp confiscated from Jenks’s room. Just as Father Brown goes back to the station with the cops, the trustees show up.
At the jail, Harold claims he was too drunk to remember what happened last night and confesses to killing Thorp. At the almshouse, Nora Thorp (Diana Hardcastle) tells everyone that the trustees have rescheduled Thorp’s meeting until tomorrow but they’ll be bringing a sanitation inspector with them. Brenda and Devine rally all the women to get the houses in tip-top shape before the trustees and inspector return.
Father Brown tells Jenks that Harold is cooperating with the police. He also tells her that Harold wanted her to tell him what she found. Jenks not only tells him that she found a dead woman outside the gates of the almshouses one morning, but she also says she saw Eunice going into the church last night right after Thorp.
Eunice claims she was going to pray and didn’t speak to Thorp. She also mentions something about him blackmailing someone for money. Later, Father Brown suspects that the time of the inspection has something to do with Thorp’s murder. When he claims he needs to read the trustee file in order to find out, Devine assigns him the task of cleaning Thorp’s office. While Father Brown is cleaning the office, Nora comes in and gets the money.
Father Brown asks Nora if she feels entitled to the money because she is a Thorp. When she avoids the question he asks her if she perhaps wants to run the almshouses. She says that she doubts she is even capable.
Later that day while discussing the missing trustee papers with Devine, Father Brown notices the syphilis scars on Gladys Carpenter’s (Linda Thorson) hands. In private, she confesses to being a woman of the street. She also admits that Thorp found out and tried to blackmail her, but denies killing him. The conversation doesn’t go much further thanks to Sullivan showing up with a special delivery of cleaning supplies for Devine. When the rest of the women gather around and begin to talk about the murder, Sullivan tells them that Harold confessed.
Jenks overhears this and doesn’t handle it so well because she thinks Harold is taking the wrap for her. Jenks breaks down and tells Devine that she just didn’t find the woman dead, she killed her. In private, Jenks tells Devine and Father Brown the story of how she didn’t do more for the homeless lady after Thorp denied her an almshouse. After asking about the registry list, Father Brown learns that Hannah Boyd wasn’t the only lady he turned away. He later discusses this with Brenda and Devine. This leads to him coming up with the idea for Brenda to search the lady’s quarters during morning prayers.
Eunice catches Brenda searching her room and makes her unclog Gladys’s toilet. While doing so Brenda finds what looks like a torn-up contract. She shows this to Father Brown and they make plans to put it back together. Father Brown visits Harold in jail and tries to get his help but he maintains his earlier claim that he was too drunk to know what was going on the night Thorp died. The conversation goes no further for the moment thanks to Eunice falling while trying to clean the gutter at the almshouses.
By the time Father Brown arrives on the ground, Nora and Gladys have Eunice locked in her room. He eventually convinces them to let her get medically checked out. After doing so, he tells her that he knows she was involved in Thorp’s death and explains how he knows so. While waiting to speak with Thorp in his office, Eunice saw the contract to sell the almshouses. It turns out that Thorp was sabotaging the houses so the trustees would agree to sell them to a company that would convert them into retirement homes. When Eunice shared the news with Nora and Gladys, they all three confronted him on the roof, but it was Gladys who pushed him. She later confesses this to Chief Inspector Sullivan when he shows up.
Shortly after Gladys makes her confession, the sanitation inspector shows up and passes the property, with some repairs. After Harold and Jenks are reunited in Father Brown’s church, he and the ladies at the almshouses give Hannah a proper send-off. This is how the episode ends.
Father Brown Review
I honestly don’t know what else to say about this episode other than it being a typical Father Brown episode. At this point, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Being from America, the whole almshouse aspect was a bit strange and new to me. I am familiar with retirement homes and I am familiar with nunneries, but I’ve never heard of an almshouse before. They almost seemed like a nunnery to me. Either way, I’d have to give the episode a 5.4 out of 10.
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Dude. In the immortal words of Peter Venkman, I’m ready to send you a buncha fruit baskets or something. 😎😎🤣🤣 An almshouse was a great idea—IIRC, they were a holdover from Victorian days before the British Labour party did sweeping social services in the mid-50s. But it sounds like the show messed this up as well.
lol. The show still has a few good ideas sometimes although they’re not always executed well. The pagan lady could’ve been fun as well. However, a lot of the episodes feel nearly identical to the ones before that. In the big scheme of things, FB remains watchable if you are willing to settle and accept what you’re dealing with.
Not what it once was but can still deliver a decent episode from time to time. That’s the bright side of it. 🙂