Henry Frederick Mercer (30 March 1872 – 22 February 1949) was a British priest in the Church of England who became Dean of Perth, but whose career ended in disgrace when he was convicted and imprisoned on numerous occasions for fraud.
[2] He was then Metropolitan Secretary of the Church Army from 1899 to 1907, during which time he obtained a BA degree from the Western University of London, Ontario.
[1] However, by 1916 doubts about Mercer's character and credentials had emerged, and he had incurred debts of over £A2,000, which were cleared by leading laymen, including Septimus Burt.
[11][12] This had followed an incident shortly before in Birmingham, when Mercer was charged with having obtained credit by false pretences at the Stork Hotel, but on that occasion the case was dismissed.
[13] In 1933 he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 18 months' imprisonment for false pretences, where he had induced hotelkeepers to give money for advertisements and photographs in guide books that had never appeared.
[10] In 1939 he was sentenced in Rhyl to six months' imprisonment for paying his rent with a false cheque; in court he admitted to other similar offences.
[8] In 1946 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment at East Sussex Quarter Sessions for having obtained £37 from a hotel licensee by false pretences.
[1][14] His first wife died in 1908; the following year in Geelong he married Jean Miller Tannock, whose sister would become the conservative politician, Dame Elizabeth Couchman.