Petty and Barker on stately homes

Further to the previous revisit to the outcast Black Country writer John Petty, I found a good example of his Angry Old Working-Class Man style: his extremely hostile review of the Duke of Bedford's 1959 autobiography The Sound of Brass, published four years after Duke's opening of Woburn Abbey to the public.

Mrs Aberdein's Papyruseum

Pursuing the trail of enigmatic references... RS Kirby's 1820 piece on Robert Coates mentions that "Mrs. Aberdeen exhibits his curricle in her Papyrueism, and her rooms are crowded almost to suffocation, with the world of taste and fashion. We understand that Mrs. Aberdeen has refused an offer of fifty guineas, which was made her for this elegant little model of Mr. Coates's fancy, alleging that she could not think of lobbing her exhibition of one of its greatest attractions."

The Three Old Maids of Lee

This is Old Maid's Cottage, Lee, near Ilfracombe - subject of a large number of historical postcards - which turned up as one of the Mystery Devon images locations in a recent Devon History Society post. The house still exists, as what looks like an extremely pleasant holiday rental.

Addometer

Ptak Science Books just featured a very nice post - Beautiful Techno-Art & Invention: Circular Adding Machines, 1850-1900 - featuring technical illustrations from US patents for various rotary adding machines. I haven't looked into the background, but patents aren't proof of technical feasibility, and quite possibly many of these devices didn't make it to the stage of practical use. However the W Lang adding machine (pictured above) certainly was feasible, because I have one of exactly this type.

This British-sold "Addometer" works on a straightforward principle; you use a metal stylus to turn a dial to add and subtract, and overflow cascades to the adjacent dial. A slide lever clears everything to zero. (see YouTube demo - I can't show you the workings, as the casing is riveted shut, but the Vintage Calculators Web Museum Addometer page has pictures). These multi-spindle adders were a popular, robust and successful design; they recur in 19th / early 20th century patents, with no clear attribution trail, and continued in use right through to the end of the mechanical calculator era.

This particular one - dating I think from the 1920s-30s - is both technologically and conceptually obsolete: it adds Sterling currency - pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings.  As the front logo says, it's US-made (by the Reliable Typewriter and Adding Machine Co., Chicago, Illinois) but the brass logo on the edge has been milled out, and the device rebadged to "Taylor's 74, Chancery Lane, London": a firm that historically sold typewriters and other office equipment.

I'm mildly puzzled that I don't remember any such devices from my childhood. My mother worked in various offices as a secretary, and took me there sometimes when I was on school holidays (this would be very early 1960s). I don't remember seeing anything but typewriters and duplicating machines. Were these calculating devices so expensive, or so cumbersome, that they weren't widely used?

- Ray

Impractical costume

MetaFilter just had a good compendium of links to articles critical of the sexist conventions of superhero costumes in comics (see "You don't remember anyone named Dick?" "No." "Garth? Dustin? Vic?" "I can't recall." "Lilith? Gar?" "You are boring me.") - to which the antithesis is the excellent Women Fighters in Reasonable Armour.

I finally got a good picture of the lady above, who - apparently suffering from severe hip dysplasia - has clothing highly unsuited to wielding a flame-thrower. She comes from the van of a local firm, who deserve some kind of prize for the most jaw-droppingly naff and sexist trading logo I've seen for years. Some artist actually went to the considerable effort of designing it for them: did he or she not advise them how wildly inappropriate it is as a professional logo in the 21st century? It's tempting to "name and shame" the firm, but that risks giving them better Google ranking.

The design has a strong similarity to this Sony.com wallpaper image of Lucy Liu for the 2003 movie Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. While just as impractical, it's rather more decent; and she at least looks like she's serious about the flame-throwing, unlike the strangely simpering character on the van. In the film - see this filming locations page - she wears a long-sleeved high-necked tunic and gloves.

- Ray

Chinese lunch at St Thomas

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This rather striking Italianate frontage belongs to the St Thomas Building, built as an upgrade in 1861 to the station offices of Exeter St Thomas Station (see Exeter Memories, St Thomas Station, for background). Now no longer part of the station, it's been through a couple of recent incarnations as offices and a Chinese restaurant.

Today: just a recommendation, on the assumption that some readers of JSBlog will be local. We were passing through St Thomas on the way to buy paint at B&Q, and were sidetracked by the Winmede Chinese supermarket underneath the railway arch to the right of the building. It was rather unavoidable to be drawn to have lunch in the Wok Cafe, which opened just two days ago in the adjacent St Thomas Building.

"Authentic" is an overused word, but this Hong Kong style fast-food cafe definitely qualifies. Its style is genuinely Chinese, unlike that of highly Westernised Chinese takeaways; the daily specials included carp head, and the menu has many unusual items such as Red Bean and Sago Delight, Grass Jelly, and Bubble Tea; I noticed that most of the other lunch customers were Chinese. Nevertheless, there's plenty on the menu that won't frighten the horses; Clare had satay chicken with fried noodles, and I had won ton soup with vermicelli noodles (from the fixed-price noodle menu where you can pick-and-mix from half a dozen daily special toppings; several noodle styles, from ho fan to ramen; and a choice of sauce). It's all very affordable, freshly cooked in the open kitchen, and the place has a clean bright cafeteria decor and friendly counter service. If you need lunch while at the St Thomas shopping complex, check it out: wokcafe.co.uk.

- Ray

Mimmit

Tanssi Poika - translation

Check out EviEvone's YouTube channel for examples of tracks by Mimmit ("Chicks"), a double act comprising the sisters Pauliina Lerche and Hannamari Luukkanen, who come from the village of Rääkkylä in Eastern Finland near the Russian border.

Their target audience is actually children ...

The Mimmit band is an exciting mix of danceable world music and animation!

A new and refreshing take on Finno-Karelian world music for children and the young-at-heart with mythological undertones!

Mimmit has a big mission: They want to make children fall in love with world and ethnic music before they get too suspicious about "alternative" music styles!

... but this seems an irrelevant genre classification for this exuberant and refreshing folk-fusion music, some of it quite dark and mystical, such as Tanssi Poika ("Dance, boy"), Pakkasherra (the Finnish equivalent of "Jack Frost", I think) and Hauen sanalla ("The Word according to Magical Pike").

See the official Mimmit website for samples and background; there is an English page. Pauliina Lerche has also done solo work, which I've mentioned before. See her official website for track listings and samples. Other tracks are on YouTube including the brilliant accordion piece Tulikatriili ("Fire Quadrille")

- Ray

Elizabeth Robins Pennell on Margate

I've never been to Margate, but even the barest details have very comfortable resonances for me: resorts set on the chalk coasts of southern England were central to my childhood, and appeal to me wherever I see them (even across the Channel). And yet I think the ones I know best were, to various extents, gentrified by location away from major population centres. Britain has any number of resorts that were historically much more vigorous and downmarket because of their catchment area: day-trip distance from major working-class conurbations. Blackpool, within rapid access of Manchester and Liverpool, is a classic example; and so is Margate, repeatedly mentioned in late-Victorian works as the day-trip destination of "'Arrys and 'Arriets" from East London.

I couldn't resist quoting in full the article - London at play: on Margate's sands - written by Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1897 for the US-published The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. An American who lived for most of her working life in London, she was a wide-ranging writer who wrote on art, food, biographical topics, and travel.

The piece was written for Century as part of a regular commission for travel writing she took on, with her artist husband Joseph Pennell, who provided the illustrations (I'll try to sort these out later). It's a realistic yet affectionate 'outsider' view of Margate and its London visitors - imagine a late-Victorian Bill Bryson analogue. That Margate is long gone, but this vivid piece rather makes you wish you could visit it.

Here it is (usual disclaimers about the period's racist language apply): London at play: on Margate's sands. Due to the vagaries of Google Books hosting, US readers can access it directly via one of the links here. The piece is packed with contemporary and literary references - perhaps labouredly so - and I've annotated ones that may not be self-explanatory.

- Ray

London at play: on Margate's sands

See the following post - Elizabeth Robins Pennell on Margate - for an explanation.

---

A donkey-ride

LONDON AT PLAY
on Margate’s sands

Margate is London’s Coney Island, its big suburb by the sea, only far enough away for a long morning’s voyage in a steamboat. It is easy to forget in town how near the coast is; but already at Charing Cross sometimes, when the tide is high, you can smell the fresh salt air through the London smoke; in winter the white gulls haunt the bridges at Waterloo and Blackfriars; and it is just after the widening Thames has lost itself in the North Sea that Margate stretches out its pier into the water. There are plenty of other places on the same cliffs—Broadstairs and St. Leonard's and Westgate, and a dozen more; but Margate first, with Ramsgate as an alternative, is the cockney's choice. This is why some people agree with Mrs. Tuggs 1 that it is altogether too low—«nobody there but tradesmen!» But then, without the London crowd Margate would not be—well, Margate.

If you wish, you can take a train that starts from Charing Cross or Victoria, and, after a long, rambling tour through Kent, eventually gets to Margate. But half the fun is in going by boat. The lower Thames is supposed to be entirely commercial, but from time immemorial it has been the classic stream for the Londoner's frolic. You remember Dr. Johnson taking water to Billingsgate on the night of his famous « frisk» with Topham Beauclerk; and Hogarth sailing with his four jolly companions for Gravesend; and Elia in the «old Margate hoy,» which he was right in thinking «ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet»; and Boz on so many of those very youthful excursions of his; or, to come down to our own contemporaries, Ally Sloper, that delightful British «Mayeux,» and his party, dancing on deck, as Baxter shows them in one of his wonderful Sloper drawings? Besides, Margate virtually begins when you meet the crowd hurrying down through the narrow, dirty streets leading to the Old Swan Pier, and you struggle with babies and bandboxes at the ticket-office, and you rush down the long gangway, where you get wedged in so tight that you cannot move hand or foot, while a cool official keeps calling: «This wye for the Sovering—the Royal Sovering. Passengers for Southend pass on to the houter boat. Passengers for Margit and Ramsgit on the Sovering—the Royal Sovering! Show your tickets, please! Move on! This wye for Southend! This wye for Margit!» And from rival boats at the next pier come a still louder screaming and yelling. It all sounds like a page out of Dickens or Thackeray.

When you are fairly off, when you have scrambled successfully for a seat, and the Southend boat has steamed away, and the Royal Sovereign 2 has whistled playfully,—as only a Margate boat can, and very much as the bad boy shrieks when he wishes to make you jump,—you gradually discover that this is the way to see the Thames. For there, at the start, is St. Paul's lifting its dome above the grimy warehouses; and you pass under London Bridge, where swarms of idlers watch you safely through, hoping all the time that you will hit the arches and go to the bottom for their pleasure; and you steam by the Tower, and between the open gates of Tower Bridge, which, once well weather-stained, will be as imposing a feature as the river can boast; and on again, between miles and miles of docks, and «plantations of ship-masts and forests of steam-chimneys»; and on every side are the boats—huge ocean steamers, little penny steamboats, red-sailed barges, big sailing-ships, puffing, smoke-belching tugs. And then, presently, it is Greenwich, with the beautiful buildings of Inigo Jones, and the memories of fish dinners eaten by yourself or in friendly books, and Rosherville, and Gravesend with its gardens, and the broad flats that make you think of Pip and his «great expectations.» 3

And all the while, if, you know how to do the thing in style, a sandwich is in one hand and a pot of porter in the other; for everybody on the boat is eating sandwiches and drinking porter. And by everybody I mean precisely the same company you jostle in the third-class carriages of the «underground » on the day of the University boat-race, or travel with by road down to the Derby,—«the mighty London populace,» Mr. James calls it,—its «female contingent» conspicuously sharing Mrs. Boffin's inclination toward fashion, while a baby, apparently, is as necessary to a Margate outfit as an umbrella on a rainy day. Of course there are musicians on board, —«Italians from the Strand,» is Mr. Mourey's description of the Thames boat band—gold laced and tarnished, out at elbows, playing their poor fiddles and harps and flutes first in the bow, then in the stern, up the middle and back again, and taking up an endless collection. And as the breeze grows brisker and the air keener, as the shores recede farther and farther, there seems to be, as in Mr. Punch's music-hall song, a call for «a drop o' something shorter» 4; for the little bar on deck is filled with men—and women, too: has no long practice in the public-house taught the Englishwoman how to take her drink standing like a man? Already by noon, faces are redder, laughs lighter. There are races round the deck. A few figures are huddled up suggestively against the railings. There are wild shrieks and playful giggles. And in the midst of it children are dancing, children are sick, children are yelling, children are sleeping. And the boat stops no more, though the cliffs are dotted with little towns, until all the gay crowd that does not mean to go on to Ramsgate is emptied upon the pier at Margate, where a crowd as gay watches its arrival..

Carried ashore

Margate is fairly big—a substantial town, in fact, not the least like the American seashore place. There is an embankment instead of the familiar board walk, blown away regularly every season by the worst storm remembered for years. There are houses and shops of brick and stone, instead of the wooden cottages and hotels that can be wheeled off at a moment's notice. Indeed, I believe if you explore far enough you can find old gables and markets and assembly-rooms, and probably Baedeker or Murray would chronicle a creditable number of inhabitants. But for London people the only Margate is the beach. Nothing else counts, unless it is the pier in the evenings, or when the tide is in, or when the London boats arrive. I suppose the people do go into the town occasionally, for they must sleep somewhere, and there are not enough hotels and lodging-houses directly on the sea to hold them all. But wherever they sleep, they live on the beach. It is a very good one for the English coast, though perhaps not to be compared to the beautiful sweep of sands at Atlantic City and many another little town on the Jersey coast. However, not a square foot of it is wasted. There the London crowd squats—there is no other word for it; the same crowd, partly small tradesmen, partly swaggering clerks, partly well-to-do workmen, partly professional loafers, and largely their wives and daughters, that you see picknicking and betting on the Downs at Epsom, or scattered over the river-banks at the Henley regatta, or packed into a solid mass at the Lord Mayor's show. The only difference is in the background and the way the holiday is spent.

Oh, I love to sit a-gyzing on the boundless blue horizing
When the scorching sun is blyzing down on sands and sea!
And to watch the busy figgers of the happy little diggers,
Or to listen to the niggers when they choose to come to me.

There you have it in Mr. Anstey's «idyllic» verse 5. Only no one can ever sit« a-gyzing » in romantic solitude. Not even in Santa Lucia in Naples have I seen people herded so close together, and living an outdoor life with such unembarrassed frankness. Rows upon rows, groups upon groups, of men and women sprawl on low steamer-chairs, open-mouthed and snoring without shame. Lovers lie in each other's arms prone upon the sand—the disconcerting spectacle 'Any and 'Arriet always present in their hour of courtship. Family parties sit within neatly dug-out inclosures, mothers with the week's mending, fathers with their pipes. And children by the dozen, by the hundred, by the thousand, barelegged, frocks and knickerbockers rolled well up into little bathing-drawers, are digging and paddling and building; while in a space apart, marked by a gay red flag, poor little pale-faced cripples are hobbling about in the sand, a show for the pennies of the compassionate. And down into this mess of people, too stupefied by sunlight and sea air to seek amusement, come the same beloved negro minstrels who turn up at Epsom and Henley and Hammersmith, and at chance London street-corners on a Saturday afternoon. But they are ten times more gorgeous at Margate: faces shinier, coats and trousers gaudier, sashes wider, buttonhole bouquets huger, hats jauntier, some in tights, some in flannels, with bones, tambourine, and banjo all complete. And a wide space is made for them hours beforehand, and the audience collects, first a circle of children low on the sands; then circle after circle of the steamer-chairs; then people standing behind the chairs, and more people on the Embankment. For the late-comer there is no getting near enough to hear a joke or a song. And when finally the morning's heroes arrive, they bring another audience with them—men, women, and children dogging their every step through the streets, patiently waiting outside every public-house where it pleases them to stop. Talk of the success of a Patti or a Melba: it is nothing to that of the minstrels at Margate!

The crowd

And down, too, on the beach come the seedy German bands, and the unblackened strolling singers, and the men with pianos and concertinas and cornets and harmoniums, and the preachers, and the photographers. And down, too, comes the Punch-and-Judy man, but not the summer I was at Margate; for Mr. Brown, who had the monopoly, was ill, —so I learned upon inquiry,— and not another Punch of such irreproachable morals was to be found in all England. The fact is, though you would not believe it, the police have a strict eye upon the program of the beach performance.

The bathing-machines

Through the crowd boys push and wriggle with trays of nougat or fruit or buns. And over the chorus of noises you hear the ceaseless «Hi! hi!» of the donkey-boys, and the shrieks of giddy young ladies clinging to the donkeys as they gallop full tilt along the sands, and the screams of delighted children in the little goatcarriages on the Embankment above. Away out beyond, standing in a white-and-green line, wheel-deep in the surf, are the absurd bathing-machines; and between them and the dry beach an old cart loaded with people is being continually driven backward and forward; while fat old bathing-women, as out of date as Sairey Gamp herself, wait gossiping in the water; and farther still bathers are splashing, men and women apart—as well they may be, for the costume of the men would be a scandal anywhere save in prudish England.

This is the scene presented by Margate sands every day, and every hour of the day, during the season—serenely domestic at moments, boisterously hilarious at others, especially when a big excursion is let loose upon the place. Then you have the courting that is done by blows and thumps; then you see 'Arry and 'Arriet exchanging hats; then you have horse-play bedlam; and mounted police show themselves in the near streets, and magistrates, the next morning, are officially shocked by the conduct of the «savages» from London.

It is true there is a more elegant end to the sea-front, partly for invalids whose doctors prescribe Margate air, which has the name of being the purest and most bracing in England, the number of Bath chairs proving medical compulsion. There is no promiscuous herding here. Groups take their books and work and gossip into railed-off spaces, with a haughty assumption of the privacy that costs a penny. The very amusements are distinctly genteel: archery, lawntennis, and a lightning draftsman making portraits in a tent while you wait; and as the shore has risen into cliffs, bathers are discreetly screened from public gaze, and the narrow sands are as decorous as in that picture of «Pegwell Bay,» by Dyce, in the National Gallery 6 —a picture of a shingly beach, and two or three lone figures, in the absurd costumes of the fifties, gathering shells in polite isolation.

The pier

But upon the cliff end the real Margate crowd never intrudes. Why should it? There are far better ways of enjoying itself. If you wish to give the Briton a really good time, put him in some sort of vehicle, averaging from the donkey «shay» that «knocked 'em in the old Kent road» 7 to the brake and cornet, and send him off driving. Where the Embankment widens into a great square above the sands, brakes and busses are always ready to start for St. Leonard's or Westgate or Pegwell Bay—above all, for Ramsgate. There's the place for a «'appy day »! The drive over is short,—about half an hour or so,—but quite long enough to need a half-way house, where everybody stops for a drink, and the conductor takes up a collection for no better reason than that nothing can be done in Margate without a collection; the real marvel is that your landlord does not come with his hat instead of his bill! I have always wondered why Mrs. Tuggs, when she found Margate too low, went over to Ramsgate. It is really Margate all over again, but Margate exaggerated, intensified, concentrated. The beach is smaller, the people are huddled closer together, and the crowd is the same, —negroes, strolling players, donkeys, goatcarts, bathers, children, lovers, preachers, photographers, peddlers, sleepers, cockshies, and bathing-machines,—but in so dense a mass that it looks as if a swarm of human bees or ants had alighted upon the sands. The very air seems close, and one would as soon bathe in the Thames at London Bridge as in the sea just here. If Trouville made Flaubert long to hide himself in the Sandwich Islands or in the virgin forests of Brazil, what, what would he have felt here at Ramsgate? Yet not even in an Eastern bazaar or market could there be more dazzling color; and as for character, there is enough to set up a new Dickens or Charles Keene for life.

If you do not care to go to Ramsgate, there are boats in the harbor, with their «boatmen so beguiling,» 8 and the menagerie with its beasts to be fed, and the music-hall attached, with its «stars » from London, who'd «all be in the workhouse should their antics cease to dror!» 9 —an inducement for women and babies and nurses, who would be quite out of place in the palaces of Leicester Square, to flock to this «hall by the sea.» And there are shops full of the indispensable china « souvenirs from Margate.» And first and last and always, there are tea and shrimps! Many things may have changed. Gillray's 10 little phaeton, with the round apron front, and its boy in jack-boots on one of the horses, has disappeared from the beach; the saucer hats and swirling crinolines of Leech 11 are no more: but tea and shrimps are as essential elements to Margate life as the sea and the sky. You are not supposed to need or to wish anything else, and in vain you may try the little restaurants that are perched on the cliffs as delightfully as the Neapolitan cafes on the Posilipo, or those others that set out their tables on balconies looking seaward. If you would dine, you must fall back upon the pompous hotel table d'hôte, which you share with the last theater company down from London. But one other thing you can order at the restaurant, to be sure—champagne. To be in the Margate fashion, you must drink it without so much as a biscuit to eat. On the pier, which is as select as the twopence charge for admission can make it, couples of those stupendously vulgar people you do not believe in when you see them on the pages of papers like «PickMe-Up» 12 —indeed, you hardly believe in them when you see them in life—may be found as early as eleven in the morning pledging each other over a magnum of extra dry. And the Margate swell will bring his friends into one of the restaurants, at any hour after his evening meal of tea and shrimps, and call loudly for champagne, just to let you know that he can do the thing in style when he chooses, and pay for his bottle with the biggest lord or «dook » of them all!

I hesitate to mention beauty as another of Margate's charms, so little has it to do with the popularity of the place. But for all that, very beautiful it is; and its sands every morning and afternoon arrange themselves into a picture as brilliant and gay as you could find at Trouville or Abbazia, at Coney Island or Newport. To follow the cliffs beyond the hotels and villas is to find one's self at once in as pretty English country as Constable ever painted—a country of broad meadows and plowed fields, of hedge-rows and stately elms, of old farm-houses and gray ruins, of cloud-swept skies and misty blue distances. Toward twilight, when the tide is coming in and the beach is deserted except by the small boy kindly giving the necessary spot of black here and there, and the occasional barge left high and dry on the sands, the lines are as lovely as those that the Venetian Lagune make at low water. As for the barges, with their half-furled sails, they are really finer than anything at Venice; while every evening there is the atmosphere for which on the Adriatic you might have to wait a year. And as dusk deepens, lines of light on the Embankment curve with the curving shore, and torches flame from the barrows of the periwinkle-men, and the black, shadowy pier crosses the deep blue of sea and sky as fantastically and decoratively as in a color-print by Hiroshige. And, gradually, what people are pleased to call the vulgarity of Margate is lost in the beauty of night, only broken momentarily by the shriek of 'Arry sporting with 'Arriet in the «shide»!

- Elizabeth Robins Pennell, pp 569-575, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Volume 54, 1897 (illustrations by Joseph Pennell)

1. From The Tuggs's at Ramsgate (Sketches by Boz, Volume 2, by Charles Dickens) in which the Tuggs family make this trip. Her actual quote about Margate is "nobody there, but tradespeople".
2. The Margate paddle steamer Royal Sovereign was still in service in 1919, and the British Pathé archive has this nice clip of it setting sail from Old Swan Pier at Charing Cross:

Margate boat - 'Royal Sovereign'

3. See Noir and the North Kent marshes.
4. A reference to The Poor Old 'Orse, a parody music hall song in F Anstey's 1892 Mr. Punch's model music-hall songs & dramas:

For we 'ad to stop o' course,
Jest to bait the bloomin' 'orse,
So we'd pots of ale and porter
(Or a drop o' something shorter),
While he drunk his pail o' water,
He was sech a whale on water!
That more water than he oughter,
More water than he oughter,
'Ad the poor old 'orse!

5. Also a parody music-hall song from Mr. Punch's model music-hall songs & dramas: The Joys of the Seaside.
6. And still so: Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858. A classic painting of the beach and chalk cliffs further round the Kent coast, it shows in the sky the faint trail of Donati's comet (see previously: Comet apocalypse, 1857).
7. From Albert Chevalier's 1892 music-hall song Wot Cher! or, Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Rd.
8, 9. More quotes from The Joys of the Seaside (see 5).
10/ The caricaturist James Gillray convalesced in Margate in 1807.
11. John Leech, also a caricaturist, was a Margate regular.
12. Pick-Me-Up was a weekly comic magazine with topical articles and cartoons, that ran from 1888 to 1909.

Exchanging 'ats

A social/cultural aside from the previous post: quite a few contemporary references to the 'Arry and 'Arriet subculture refer to its custom of couples exchanging hats to show they were an item.

This is the scene presented by Margate sands every day, and every hour of the day, during the season—serenely domestic at moments, boisterously hilarious at others, especially when a big excursion is let loose upon the place. Then you have the courting that is done by blows and thumps; then you see 'Arry and 'Arriet exchanging hats; then you have horse-play bedlam; and mounted police show themselves in the near streets, and magistrates, the next morning, are officially shocked by the conduct of the « savages » from London.
- London at play: on Margate's sands, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, pp569-, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Volume 54, 1897.

In European folk-custom there are several traces of this, bride and groom exchanging head-dresses and the like. After betrothal the Ainu boy and girl wear each other's clothes. This method of union is a common phenomenon in love - practice, and when a modern 'Arry and 'Arriet exchange hats, the fact is no coincidence, but is due to the same principle inherent in the human consciousness.
- The mystic rose: a study of primitive marriage, Alfred Ernest Crawley, 1902.

Our native 'Arry and 'Arriet, when they " walk out " together in amicable companionship, are accustomed to express their mutual affection by possessing themselves of, and wearing, each other's hats.
- page 953, The Bookseller, Volume 53, 1910.

The courtship of a pair of green parrots is as amusing to watch as that of any 'Arry and 'Arriet. Not possessing hats the amorous birds are unable to exchange them, but otherwise their actions are quite coster-like.
- A Bird Calendar for Northern India, Douglas Dewar, 1916

This would explain why 'Arry is wearing a lady's hat in this Punch cartoon.

Wearing the wrong hat or exchanging hats was a comic staple (the Marx Brothers and the hat-swapping scene in Waiting for Godot spring to mind) - but one with undercurrents. In an era when hat-wearing was near-universal, choice of hat was strongly constrained by, and identified with, social status and role, so 'Arry and 'Arriet wearing wrong-gendered hats must have seemed very edgy.

This leads neatly away from 'Arry and 'Arriet to the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) whose Exchanging Hats, unpublished in her lifetime, touches directly on choice of hat as a signifier of sexual orientation.

Exchanging Hats

Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady's hat,
--oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist

in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.

Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach
with paper plates upon your laps,
keep putting on the yachtsmen's caps
with exhibitionistic screech,

the visors hanging o'er the ear
so that the golden anchors drag,
--the tides of fashion never lag.
Such caps may not be worn next year.

Or you who don the paper plate
itself, and put some grapes upon it,
or sport the Indian's feather bonnet,
--perversities may aggravate

the natural madness of the hatter.
And if the opera hats collapse
and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,
he thinks what might a miter matter?

Unfunny uncle, you who wore a
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can't you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora?

Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
their vast, shady, turned-down brim.

- Ray

Mrs Partington and her mop: Victorian meme

Left (click to enlarge) [Hutchison, William] 1820-1905 :Dame Partington and her mop. No. 44. Whitaker (loq) - I don't think you can manage it. Atkinson - I can mop up the water as well as you've mopped up the land. The "Wellington Advertiser" supplement [8 July 1882]. Reference Number: A-095-042. Reproduced with permission of National Library of New Zealand.

Wayland Wordsmith just mentioned an anecdote of East Devon interest: the story of Dame Partington. This, first told by the cleric and author Sydney Smith in 1831, is a clone of one version of the Canute story, telling of an elderly Sidmouth lady who tried in vain to keep back the encroaching waves during the storm surge of the 1824 'Great Storm'.

"I do not mean to be disrespectful but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm of Sidmouth and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion.

"In the winter of 1824, there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea water and vigorously punching away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused.

"Mrs Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs Partington. She was excellent with a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest."

The context is intereresting. The Rev. Smith's speech, delivered in Taunton in October 1831, was in support of the Reform Bill, whose aim was to reform the corrupt British electoral system of the time, particularly in its undemocratic domination by aristocratic landowners, many operating "rotten boroughs" with a tiny electorate. Smith was speaking at a particularly inflamed time that was seeing rioting after the second attempt to pass the Reform Bill , despite decisive support in the House of Commons, had been blocked by the House of Lords.

To be honest, I'm mildly doubtful of the particulars of the story - Smith's speech seems to be the first account of Mrs Partington - but it was a highly effective parable. The Bodleian Library collection has contemporary prints by "HB" (John Doyle) - the 1831 Dame Partington and the ocean (of reform) and the 1840 Mrs Partington and her mop - both depicting the Duke of Wellington, a noted opponent of reform, as Dame Partington.

The idea went viral, and continued for decades, Mrs Partington and her mop making an outing whenever the unstoppability of causes was being argued: there are currently 3670 hits in Google Books for Partington mop, and a number of other pictorial examples are findable online.

Mrs Partington got to California in 1856, in a "Letter sheet illustration showing satirical sentiments on the opponents of the 1856 Vigilance Committee, San Francisco" (California State Library record / detail). HarpWeek has other political examples: "Tidal Waves" (Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, October 17, 1868) where Mrs Partington is Democratic presidential nominee Horatio Seymour; "Mrs. Partington Hancock Struggling with the Republican Tide" (Thure de Thulstrup, Harper's Weekly, October 30, 1880), showing Democratic presidential nominee Winfield Hancock; and "Our Mrs. Partingtons and the Democratic Ocean" (Charles Jay Budd, Harper's Weekly, November 2, 1912), showing various Republicans attempting to sweep back the sea in the form of Woodrow Wilson.

Nor was it all US politics. The Wellington Advertiser, 8 July 1882, Dame Partington and her mop, showed Sir Harry Atkinson, Colonial Treasure (ie Minister of Finance) of New Zealand; and the Women's Library has nice examples of Mrs Partington in England trying to sweep back the tide of suffrage: this poster from c.1909, Mrs Partington, Coming in with the tide indeed I'll soon stop their tide! (detail) and a postcard from 1910, showing "The New Mrs Partington (of the Anti Suffrage Society)" (detail).

A footnote in the 1856 Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith (ed. Evert Augustus Duyckinck, 1856) does raise the question of the original Mrs Partington's existence:

Did Sydney Smith invent Mrs. Partington? A communication in Notes and Queries (Nov. 16, 1850), may seem to establish Mrs. Partington as a real personage, but the evidence is not conclusive. The writer says, the original Mrs. P. was a respectable old lady, living at Sidmouth, in Devonshire, and her encounter with the ocean, when mop and broom failed, and she was driven to take refuge in the second story of her cottage on the beach, occurred, to the best of his recollection, during an awful storm in November, 1824, when some fifty or sixty ships were lost at Plymouth. He well recollects, he adds, reading in the Devonshire newspapers of the time *, an account of Mrs. Partington; but he may have read only Smith's speech, which he wrongly ascribes to Lord Brougham.

Mrs. Partington has acquired additional celebrity by the pleasant sayings in the vein of Mrs. Malaprop, which have been widely scattered over the world, in the newspapers. This peculiar pleasantry, a humourous dislocation of the English language, with grotesque associations of ideas, has had various imitators; but the original American Mrs. Partington owes her graces to Mr. B. P. Shillaber, for several years associated with the Boston Post, in which tho genuine sayings arc recorded. They were collected into a volume in 1854, with the title, "The Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington, and others of the Family."
- page 316, Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith

* I can add to this that I can find no sign in the 19th Century British Library Newspapers archive of a reference to Mrs Partington before Sydney Smith's 1831 speech. Still, whether she existed or not, it was a durable meme.

There are some detailed contemporary accounts of Sidmouth in the Great Storm, neither of which mention Mrs Partington.

THE STORM OF NOVEMBER, 1824, AT SIDMOUTH.

The great storm of 23rd November, 1824, did much damage to Sidmouth. Bishop Kestell Cornish has forwarded us a manuscript from a diary of a relative of his which will be perused with interest, and Mr. J. Y. Anderson Morshead has sent us the account of the same storm by the late Peter Orlando Hutchinson from his manuscript History of Sidmouth.

Extract from an old diary, November 23rd, 1824:—

"A violent storm all night, quite a Hurricane! I never heard any-thing at all like it! The whole House shook, and our beds were rocked under us, as if they had felt the shock of an Earthquake! . . . (Nov. 24.) A most aweful scene presented itself to us this morning! Such a storm has not been Witnessed in the memory of man! . . . The sea poured in last night, and has very nearly destroyed the whole of the houses in front of it! The water came up as high as Harris'. The grocers, and people were taken out of their beds at night and conveyed in Boats to a place of Shelter: Everyone has lost something, and some poor people Every thing: never was there such a scene of devastation! All the Cottages under the Cliff were washed away: The Beach Walk is entirely destroyed, and covered with Shingle. Wallis' library is nearly knocked to pieces: and old Chit Rock, that gave its character to the Coast Scenery, is thrown down and nothing but its base remains. The rising of the sea was so sudden, that it almost appears to have been the effect of an earthquake! No language can describe the sad and desolate appearance which the Beach now presents, and the poor sufferers walking about, drenched in water, hardly knowing where to go or what to do, is enough to break one's heart

"A Subscription has been entered into, and £300 has been already subscribed, which I hope will relieve them in some degree. Tho' it is the poor Tradespeople and those above the reach of Common Charity that will suffer most. We have been spared any of the effects of this aweful visitation, with the exception of a few Trees, and Slates blown off the House we have lost little or nothing. . . .

"I never was more frightened in my life than during the night. I almost expected the House to have fallen down. ... It was impossible to sleep. ... I can hardly attempt to describe my feelings. . . . The noise of the wind was like incessant Thunder, but there was something in it still more aweful and supernatural. It seemed to rage so perfectly without controul—so wild and free— that nothing I ever heard before could be at all compared to it."

From P. 0. Hutchinson's History, vol. iii 146 :—

"The Chet-rock stood near the S. end of the reef. It was about 40 f high, much beloved by the fishermen as on steering in it was the first mark they made. Annually one of them was crowned as its king. At low tide he & his court marched out & scrambled to its top where they waved their caps, cheered, & drank to the King of diet (including the King of England) in smuggled brandy. Along the reef extended a labyrinth of stakes & nets called the 'Ram's horn.' At 8 a.m. on Tuesday, 22nd November the glass stood at 29-49. It was new moon, & the tide high at 11.45 a.m. The afternoon was fine & calm but freshened towards evening & the glass sank to 28.25. Mr. Stone, grocer Market place had a party, but it began to rain & blow from S.W. so that he offered them shake-downs. But they bundled on old shawls &c and left. There was only rainwater in the street then. So many slates were blown off he could not sleep & at 4 a.m. found his ground-floor full of water to the knees. He began clearing the shop but the enemy reached his armpits & washed papers off the mantelpiece. J. Pile, ironmonger (now Selleks) in Fore St saw it full of water & a door wash past. A bag of nails was rusted into a solid mass. Mrs Mogridge 7 York Terrace found boats &c battering her wall, & bored through a partition into No. 6 for escape. Lodgers at Mr. Pursey's (Canister house) were much distressed. A sick lady had to be taken from a warm bed into a wet boat. The York was much injured. Mr. Hall draper (now Fields) saw sailors row across the Market-place & rescue ladies from (Pepperells) opposite. The cottagers under Clifton-place escaped to the top 10 min. before the houses were washed away. Wallis Library (now the Bedford Hotel) had its Billiard-table broken ag(ain)st the fire-place, & a piano washed into the sitting room. The children were lowered into a drifting boat at the back by blankets—one by mistake into the water, of which he informed them in loud tones. May (gardener) saw it flow up to High St (now Veales) where it was met by a land-flood & a boat rowed up Old & round into New Fore St. The landlord of the London Hotel saw a specially big wave about 5 a.m. burst in the door of the chemist (now Penberthys) sweep round the shop & reappear laden with bottles & pill-boxes. Edmondson of Bond St had opened a shop for costly silks in Marine-place & the bales were found all over the town next day. Mr. Yeates at dawn dragged himself by the railings to the beach, & to his dismay Chet-rock was no longer to be seen. The familiar old mass had been knocked over in the night. Fragments lay about on the reef for two years after. A subscription of £3000 was raised for the sufferers of which Honiton gave the noble sum of £600.

"I only arrived in Jan. 1825 but the most beautiful watering place of England looked still like a bombarded city. A cart was backed against Marlborough place & men were shovelling pebbles out of the windows into it. A naval officer said the wind was stronger than W. Indian hurricanes. The effects long remained. The shrinkage of population (as shown by Registrar's return) & of popularity were due partly to the growth of Torquay, but more to this catastrophe. Depression weighed on our trade for 40 years till it slowly began to revive about 1865. Mr. Hubert Cornish's view of the Rock is inaccurate. It was more like Great-picket."

- page 101, Devonshire Association, Report and Transactions, Volume 35, Sidmouth, July 1903.

- Ray

Edward Capern, the Postman Poet

While browsing some Devon literature (a copy of the long-defunct Devonia magazine) I ran into the work of Edward Capern (1819-1894), the Bideford "postman poet".

There's a good biographical account - The Devonian 'Postman Poet', Edward Capern - at John Lerwill's Devon History site.  Capern was born in Tiverton, and after a difficult early life , he gained the position of Rural Postman of Bideford - not as deliverer, but as a messenger between Bideford and Appledore. These daily treks evidently gave him plenty of time to think, as he took up poetry. Contributions to local publications attracted the attention of the Barnstaple stationer and philanthropist William Frederick Rock, who helped him put together a subscription-based (i.e. benefactor-sponsored) anthology. This was highly successful, and the start of a career that brought him to national attention with a patriotic poem about the Crimean War, The Lion-Flag of England, earning the praise of the then Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, a Civil List pension, and a State funeral at the end of his long life.

The lion-flag of England!
Say, Britons, shall it wave,
The scorn of every base-born serf,
And jest of every slave;
A sign to tell them how they beat
The bravest of the earth,
And teach them by our England's fate
To magnify their worth
"Forbid it Heav'n," the nations cry,
In council gravely met;
"We'll send her aid across the seas,
And she shall conquer yet."

- stanza 1, The Lion-Flag of England

As to the rest of his poetry, most of it falls well into a category I mentioned a while back (see Let me count the ways ...) that is long out of vogue:

The Poem You Must Not Write
...
3. Let Me Tell You How It Is.
This poem states obvious truths or preaches a little sermon urging readers to accept what is already generally believed: God is good, death is deadly, good is better than evil, nature is lovely, etc. Commonplace and preachy poems are never successful

Capern's poems, while perfectly literate, are extremely trite by modern standards. Fields are green, flowers and the countryside are beautiful, summer and love and Christmas are joyful, winter and lost love and death are depressing, and so on. A sample.

Say, my little robins,
Singing on the bough,
Heralding the Autumn
With her yellow brow,
Why the woods are vocal
With your merry lays,
While our summer songsters
Sleep away their days ?

Lovingly I linger'd,
Listening to their tale,
When a gush of music
Answer'd through the vale;
Every hedge was vocal,
Every tree and bush,
Singing, Little Robin
Is October's thrush.

"When the Spring and Summer
Make all nature gay,
Other minstrels warble
Through the sunny day:
Tis their joy and pleasure,
But our office, know,
Is to carol comfort
In the hour of woe."

- The Robins' Chorus, Edward Capern, Wayside Warbles

Even in his lifetime and shortly after, opinion on his work was divided. WHK Wright, in his 1896 West-Country Poets: Their Lives and Works (section transcribed here) was hagiographic; and Capern was praised by writers such as the historian James Anthony Froude, who wrote in Fraser's Magazine ...

Capern is a real poet, a man whose writings will be like a gleam of summer sunshine in every household which they enter

... and Walter Savage Landor, cited in the reviews for Capern's anthology Wayside Warbles, who called him "a noble poet". The Inquirer put him up with the greats:

There runs throughout these Poems that refined tone of thought, to the expression of which a metrical form is a necessary condition—we find rich tissues of imagery, playful fancy, plentiful invention, and above all that translation of thought into representative circumstances that ever characterizes the true Poet—such is the distinguished excellence of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Alexander Smith, in all of whom the true poetical constitution has been pre-eminently visible.

Sabine Baring-Gould was in a minority with his very acerbic summary:

Postman Poet, Edward Capern, has been hailed as the Devonshire Burns, but he has no right to be so entitled. Burns, at his best, sang in the tones and intonation of his class and country, and it was at his worst that he affected the style of the period and of culture, such as it was. Now Capern aspired to the artificiality and smoothness of the highly educated and wholly unreal class of verse writers of the Victorian period, of whom John Oxenford may be thrust forward as typical, men who could turn out smooth and finished pieces, rhythm and rhyme correct, but without a genuine poetical idea forming the kernel of the "poem."
- from Edward Capern, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events, Sabine Baring-Gould

Reading the Fraser's review by Froude is worth reading in full, as it's very enlightening about the popularity of Capern. I think it's more than just poetic taste.

Our readers, however, must judge for themselves whether wo have over-estimated Capern's poems. When an English working man becomes conscious of genius, the effect of it is usually to throw- him into fierce hostility with the social system which depresses him, and, like Ebenezer Elliot or Gerald Massey, he boils over in fierce and stormy fury. We are not to complain of such men. Their anger often is but too keenly deserved, and they are Nature's instruments to avenge the world's injustice. Yet there is something higher, nobler, better, in rising superior to evils of which we cannot see a practicable remedy. It is a sign of a loftier nature, instead of repining at what Providence has refused, to catch with open hand the fair gifts which it offers to all alike,—the enjoyment of the beauty of nature, the indulgence of the rich emotions of humanity, which are the choicest treasures that God has bestowed upon our being.
- Poems, by Edward Capern, Fraser's Magazine, April 1856

There's a similar idea in the Eclectic Review, which notes that he wisely invested the income from his anthology, and is keen that he shouldn't get too rich from his poetry or be promoted.

It [his poetry] has evidently been to him " its own exceeding great reward ; it has soothed his afflictions ; it has multiplied and refined his enjoyments; it has endeared solitude ; and it has given him the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds him." And " an exceeding great reward " it will continue to be to him as long as he keeps it to its present function as a grace and an ornament, and does not endeavour to convert it to a means of living. It has alreadyafforded him, we are glad to learn, substantial help, and we trust it will yield him a good deal more; but let him still regard it as an auxiliary, and not a main source of subsistence. His inspiration is from the fields and green lanes of Devon, and he should not, if he values his happiness, hope to find it in dingy towns, and at the " desk's dead wood." "We rejoice to see that the first edition of his book has produced him £150, which has been wisely invested in an annuity for the joint lives of himself and Mrs. Capern. The Post Office, too, has increased his salary to twelve shillings a week, and relieved him from his Sunday duties. This is better than making a nine days' wonder of him, and relegating him, when the excitement was over, to his old difficulties with a spirit less calculated to encounter them. It is better, too, than taking him out of his accustomed sphere, and placing him in a position where he would find none of those associations which have hallowed his life hitherto, and gilded with their happy radiance his ungenial fortunes.
- Poems, by Edward Capern, review, p559, Eclectic Review, Volume 1, 1857

It seems he was liked because he fitted into his role as a minor cog in the system; was happy with his lot and rocked no boats (unlike the political activist poets Elliott and Massey); was patriotic; was financially prudent; perpetuated belief in a English rustic idyll; and had made maximum use of his limited education, writing in standard English rather than dialect. He was, in short, a poster boy for the deserving poor: the obedient working class that the middle/upper classes wanted.  I believe that was his appeal.

The Internet Archive - see search - has his chief works online: Poems (1856), Ballads and Songs (1858), Wayside Warbles (1870), and Sungleams and Shadows (1881)

As reported in the Exeter Express & Echo, a modern biography is in print - Edward Capern: The Postman-poet, Ilfra Goldberg, Vanguard Press (2009). It was highly commended among contestants for the Devon History Society Book of the Year and Hoskins Award 2009.

- Ray

Anastatic blogging?

In the previous post, I briefly touched on anastatic printing (aka zincography), a form of facsimile printing invented in the 1840s. It involved moistening the printed original with nitric acid - which penetrated the paper but not the oil-based ink - and using it to etch a zinc printing plate. The plus side was that it produced an exact copy; the downside was that it destroyed the original (or at the least damaged it). This was fine if the original was created purely for the purpose of making the plate; not so good if it was a rare volume, especially as the process sometimes destroyed the original without producing a copy.

In the light of the controversy over the Google Books Agreement, it's interesting to look back and see analogous arguments about anastatic printing (arguments that have probably attended any new medium since cuneiform). The chief issue was that anastatic printing offered rapid and inexpensive print production compared to typesetting and hand-engraving of printing plates. In England, Michael Faraday showcased the technique in a lecture at the Royal Institution, showing that it took just twenty minutes to get from original to printing plate: Littell's Living Age enthused. Chambers' Journal, however, worried about the copyright implications in its commentary "New Graphic Wonders":

In contemplating the effect of these astonishing inventions, it is impossible to foresee their results upon the ordinary transactions of life. If any deed, negotiable security, or other legal instrument, can be so imitated that the writer of, and subscriber to it, cannot distinguish his own handwriting from that wliich is forged, new legislative enactments must be made, and new modes of representing money, and securing property by documentary record, must be resorted to. A paper currency and copyhold securities will be utterly useless, because they will no longer fulfil the objects, for which they, and instruments of a like nature, are employed. Again, the law of copyright as respects literary property will have to be thoroughly revised. Let us, for an instant, view the case in reference to ' The Times' newspaper. Suppose an early copy of that powerful journal to be some morning procured, and anastatyped in a quarter of an hour. The pirated pages may hereafter be subjected to printing machinery, and worked off at the rate of 4000 copies in each succeeding hour, and sold to the public, to the ruinous injury of the proprietors. The government newspaper stamp would be no protection, for of course that could be imitated as unerringly as the rest. This, too, is an extreme case against the imitators; for a newspaper would have to be done in a great hurry. Books, maps, prints, and music, could be pirated wholesale, and at leisure.

This proved a short-lived scare; anastatic printing simply didn't catch on. It did, however, have a brief flowering both as a copy process and for low-budget printing. See, for example, The Anastatic Facsimile of the Declaration of Independence ("A Case Study in Records Management in Early American Times") which tells the story of the anastatic copying - unthinkable nowadays - of an early copy of the Declaration. In Praise of Ephemera Fairs mentions the role of the process in creating ephemera. There were also the Anastatic Drawing Societies, which used the medium as a convenient way for amateur archaeology and antiquarian groups to publish and disseminate field notes and drawings (a kind of graphical Notes & Queries). The collections are of considerable historical value, and many of the journals are online, such as that of the Ilam Anastatic Drawing Society (see the Internet Archive) and the Anastatic Drawing Society (whose brief was

to delineate remains of Antiquity; e.g. ancient Ecclesiastical, Military, and Domestic Edifices, Sepulchral Monuments, Fonts, Brasses, Stained Glass, Tiles, Armour, Dress, Jewellery, Plate, Embroidery, Furniture, Carvings, Illuminations of ancient MSS., Copies of rare Prints, Portraits, Seals, Coins, Heraldry, &c. &c., illustrative of the early and middle ages.

A notable proponent of anastatic printing was Edgar Allan Poe, who also enthused about the process in Anastatic Printing, Broadway Journal, April 12, 1845, 1:229-231. A number of commentators have noted the passage ...

... authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do, will be to pay some attention to legibility of MS., arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original conception about him.

... as prescient of blogging, although it's more prescient of self-publishing and samizdat, via technologies such as the mimeograph, hectograph and spirit duplicator. As John Ptak says at Ptak Science Books - Poe and the Internet, 1845 - "Poe’s technology was wrong, but his thought-prognosis was pretty spot-on".
- Ray

The North Devon Savages

Click to enlarge: the Savages' cottage, from S Baring-Gould's An Old English Home and Its Dependencies. Note the naked figure outside; one of many slurs about the "savages".

We tend to think tabloid smears a modern fixture, but not so; I've just been reading a fascinating paper, "The True Story of the North Devon Savages" by Peter Christie 1, in Volume 124 of The Devonshire Association Reports and Transactions (it's sufficiently interesting that I cross-posted it from the Devon History Society).

The story starts with a piece in The Times (page 9, November 17, 1869) headed "Heathenism in Devonshire". Leading from a report about the conviction of two men for trespass in pursuit of game, it goes on to give a highly hostile report of an unnamed farming family living in rough circumstances in and around a tumbledown farmhouse in the parish of Nymet Rowland. The piece says of them:

To the clergyman of the parish and the neighbourhood they behave in a most shameful manner. They sing obscene songs when the reverend gentleman passes, they perform the most disgusting and nameless acts when he is in the company of ladies and those who are noxious to them they pelt with stones and mud as they go by their wretched domicile. Depredations in the neighbourhood are frequent. Gates and gate-posts and other objects of utility often disappear and threats of violence are common. We may add that members of the family have several times been convicted of offences. And yet these people continue their savage habits to the annoyance and disgust of the neighbours, treating the remonstrances of the clergyman with mockery, ribaldry and obscenity and setting the rules of civilised life at defiance.

The story snowballed, and the family - the Cheritons - gained national notoriety as "the North Devon Savages". The Daily Telegraph did a widely-reprinted special on them in October 1871: A Family of Savages in Devonshire. James Greenwood's 1874 In Strange Company: Being the Experiences of a Roving Correspondent gave a detailed account of them (reprinted here) which adds further sensational detail of them going near-naked and overtly suggests their children to be the product of incest because no men outside the family ever associated with the Cheritons. Greenwood had visited various low-lifes and criminals, but awarded the Cheritons pride of place: "Strangest of all strange company was that which, in my journalistic peregrinations, it was my lot to fall in with in North Devon". Reaction grew more and more rabid as the story spread, until you'd think commenters were talking about Sawney Bean. For instance:

Such, adds the Daily Telegraph, are the leading facts accumulated by our Commissioner, literally at the risk of his life.
...
Now that his work has been so successfully achieved it behoves us to ask two very plain questions. First, is or is not the existence of this abominable Cheriton family a disgrace and scandal to civilisation in general and North Devon in particular? Second, is it or is it not possible to devise some legal means for abating the hideous nuisance?
...
Are they to be allowed to reek and fester in their den, defying the laws of God and man? Cannot the law force them to adopt the habits of human beings?
...
Can or cannot certain offences be brought home to the Cheriton tribe? Have the births of their children been duly registered? Have they complied with the requirements of the Vaccination Act? Cannot their den be overhauled under the provisions of the Nuisances Removal Act? Does not the conduct, these forty years past, of the elder Cheriton, warrant the assumption that he is insane, and might not a Commission de lunatico be advantageously held to investigate the matter? There is no need to strain the law; but in a case so revolting and so flagitious, it is surely expedient to ascertain what its provisions are, and then to put them in force with the view of suppressing a scandal which would not be tolerated in any other civilised country in the world.
...
The Cheriton family in Africa would be bad enough; in an English village and under the lee of a Christian church, these creatues become simply unbearable.
- The North Devon Savages, The Leeds Mercury, October 24, 1871

These stories were further fuelled by letters, such as that in the Morning News accusing their women (inconsistently with Greenwood's story) of corrupting local farmer's boys "to which fact medical men in the neighbourhood can bear revolting testimony". Their notoriety even reached the pages of the New York Times: see A Tribe of English Savages, November 11, 1871, which further exemplifies the hand-wringing they evoked:

Many of the more revolting details of this bestial tribe we have ventured only to indicate. Their existence in one of the most fertile and populous districts of one of the most enlightened countries on the globe, is not a reassuring commentary on modern civilization.

Peter Christie's paper takes a fresh look at the subject, and finds a rather different story, one actually raised at the time. The Cheritons did have defenders, particularly the Reverend TJ Leslie from Appledore, who wrote several letters to the North Devon Journal pointing out that many of the anonymous accusations were libellous and that the Cheritons did attend religious services, and particularly arguing the possibility that rich farmers who wanted the Cheritons out of the parish could easily entertain journalists who wanted to 'interview' a poor family.

Christie's research rather bears this out: documented court cases show the Cheritons' crimes were small, but of the kind such as poaching about which landowners were particularly neurotic. He also notes that many of the cases were dismissed. Furthermore, land records of the period do show a consolidation of land ownership around Nymet Rowland into fewer and fewer hands. Ultimately the story may come down to a land feud in which the underclass Cheritons were less able to play the media than their rich and well-connected opponents. As the abstract to the paper summarises:

The 'North Devon Savages' were a notorious family living in the small parish of Nymet Rowland in the nineteenth century whose story has entered the realms of folklore. This study explores the truth behind their reputation and suggests that their notoriety, though based to some extent on fact, was deliberately exagggerated by local landed interests in order to force them off their land.

The Heard Family History website page A Criminal Past has two pictures of the Cheritons' house taken around 1860 by the photographer William Hector. The artist F. Bligh Bond's impression in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1898 An old English home and its dependencies matches one quite closely, and may be based on it. By Baring-Gould's time, the Cheritons were receding from history into folklore; Sarah Hewett's Nummits and crummits: Devonshire customs, characteristics, and folk-lore has another account, which tells of the just deserts inflicted on a sight-seer who went to gawp at them:

Many inquisitive persons went to Nymet Rowland to get a peep at the "Savages." One man, more curious than the general public, approached too near the house, and was at once pounced upon by a couple of Amazons, who demanded a reason for his visit. " Ladies," said he "I have lost my way, will you be so good as to put me on the right road to Dartmoor ? " " Aw, ess, tü be sure, replied Miss Cheriton, " come theāse yer way an' I'll shaw'e.

She took him into the adjoining yard for the ostensible purpose of directing him, and the unsuspecting wayfarer, venturing too near the edge of the horse pond in following his guide, was suddenly thrust into the filthy liquid, as a " There, thicky's the way tü Dartymoor and be — tü you," fell on his ears.

1. Christie, Peter. 'The true story of the north Devon savages'. Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, 124 (1992), 59-85. ISSN 03097994. If you are a member of a licensed UK higher of further education institution, you can listen to a lecture based on his research about the Cheritons: see here at the British LibraryArchival Sound Recordings site.

- Ray