The Sacrifice of Enid: a Dartmoor melodrama

The Sacrifice of Enid (1909) is a romantic melodrama - one, I think, with a strong thematic hat-tip to The Hound of the Baskervilles - set around a paper mill in the fictional Dartmoor village of Willowbridge. I'm just compiling a bio-bibliography for the author, "Mrs Harcourt Roe", who lived in Ryde, Isle of Wight, in the 1890s and wrote several novels (again, more than appear at first sight). Pending that, here's a sampler of one of them.

Ferny Bank House of Rest for Women in Business

Back in 2010 I picked up and ran with the topic of a short piece in the Western Morning News - Holiday retreat offered women a break from urban life – and men (Peter Carroll, WMN, Nov 13th 2010) - where there seemed to be a great deal more to tell. This is the story of the Ferny Bank House of Rest for Women in Business, a holiday home for working women, founded in 1878, that operated on Babbacombe Downs in the last quarter of the 19th century.

JSBlog topic indexes

For your reading and reference convenience, I've compiled post listings for two of the major topic areas on JSBlog:

• Isle of Wight: index (some 140 posts to date)
• Devon history: index (some 110 posts to date)

I chose them as areas where, over the years, I've produced the articles on historical and topographical subjects that I'm most pleased with. You'll find permanent links in the left-hand sidebar.

Lyon's Holt well revealed

A railway station clean-up last year revealed a relatively unsung piece of Exeter local history. At St James Park station, Exeter, if you look to the left from the Exeter-bound train, you can see by the platform 1 access steps a little brick building marking the site of one of Exeter's most important ancient wells.

Devon history: index

It never quite registers with me that Clare and I have now been living in Devon for nearly twenty years. I had a reminder this week with my decision to officially retire as website maintainer for the Devon History Society. What I didn't realise - until looking at the Wayback Machine - was that I've been doing that for 15 years. New blood is long overdue! During that time, and particularly since 2010, I find I've also written many more Devon history posts than I realised, here at JSBlog. While they're findable via the devhist label in the sidebar, readers may find the following explicit compendium of interest.

Thomas Dalling Barleé in Dawlish and elsewhere

I just had a spot of déjà vu on seeing Thomas Dalling Barleé's 1837 Miscellaneous Poetry, where I found the address of Lady Watson for the previous post South Devon Railway: 1844 NIMBY list. The subscriber list is quite a nice window on the great and the good of 1837 Dawlish - James 'Sea Lawn Gap' Powell is there - as well as the author's family in Suffolk and social circuit in Bath. But the name Barleé definitely rang bells from somewhere else.

South Devon Railway: 1844 NIMBY list

A while back I found this interesting list of the petitions objecting to the South Devon Railway Act, 1844, which set up the infrastructure for the building of Brunel's railway link from Exeter to Plymouth, following the now-classic coastal route via Dawlish and Teignmouth. The petitions relate to a number of people and places of historical interest.

Agnes Ibbetson, Exmouth botanist

Another spinoff from Memorials of Exmouth: Mrs Agnes Ibbetson (née Thomson, 1757-1823) was an outstanding self-taught plant physiologist and polymath: the most prolifically-published female researcher on botany of the early 19th century. It's a pity, then, that the most readily-found contemporary biographical description drifts from listing her achievements into portraying her as an insanely charitable opium-swiller surrounded by an entourage of dotards.

The Beauties of the Shore and bogus quotations

I have a regular peeve about misquotations, but I suppose it was more forgiveable a couple of centuries ago when you couldn’t Google sources. Nevertheless, you occasionally run into positively wilful examples that arent explicable by good-faith misremembering, as in DM Stirling’s 1838 The Beauties of the Shore; Or, A Guide to the Watering-places on the South-east Coast of Devon.

The Temple and Tower at Exmouth

If you're in the area of the Imperial Hotel at Exmouth, Devon - on Alexandra Terrace, or its junction with Morton Road and the Esplanade, or the Clock Tower on the Esplanade - you can see an unusual neo-classical building in the grounds of the hotel. This is the surviving member of a pair of Grecian follies built in 1824.

Memorials of Exmouth

Memorials of Exmouth by the Rev. William John Wesley Webb (aka the Rev. William Everitt) is a pleasant and eclectic late 19th century compendium of Exmouth history and trivia - as the author describes it, a "scrap-book ... put together as a History for the Parishioner rather than a Guide to the Visitor. The latter, however, may get from it as much as he cares to know".

The South Devon Coast: #3 of 3

Concluding the gallery of the 70+ images from The South Devon Coast (Charles G Harper, London: Chapman & Hall, 1907, Internet Archive ID southdevoncoast00harpgoog). As I've said, Harper's self-illustrated travelogue is rather more personal and candid than the usual run of such books. The final set of scenes takes us round the coast of the South Hams to Plymouth.

ATURFUQIL: philanthropy funded by snake oil

This is a fairly well-known local curiosity, but as it was a beautiful day, I decided to take an afternoon off to see it for myself: the "ATURFUQIL" memorial in Ringmore churchyard on the grave of William Newcombe Homeyard and his wife Maria Laetitia Kempe Homeyard.

Latin at Anstey's Cove

Pursuing the reference in Harper's 1907 The South Devon Coast to the Latin sign that adorned Mr Thomas's tea-house, formerly at Anstey's Cove, Torquay: here's a transcript and a bit more about its background.

The South Devon Coast: #2 of 3

"Du Zummat"

Continuing the gallery of the 70+ images from The South Devon Coast (Charles G Harper, London: Chapman & Hall, 1907, Internet Archive ID southdevoncoast00harpgoog), a travelogue that's refreshing in giving a rather more personal set of impressions than the usual run of such books. I'll quote a few more highlights en route.

Cliff and Beach at Branscombe: review

I don't normally buy local history books, but I made an exception with Cliff and Beach at Branscombe (Barbara Farquharson & Sue Dymond, Branscombe Project, 2014), as it concerns an area that has particularly interested me since moving to East Devon.

Branscombe: "curious rather than beautiful" petrifactions

The South Devon Coast by Charles G Harper mentions an interesting phenomenon I'd not heard of previously: the formation of petrified moss in the outflow of cliff springs near Branscombe. This led to an associated local vogue for petrifying things deliberately.

The South Devon Coast: #1 of 3

Expanding on a source from the previous post: The South Devon Coast (Charles G Harper, London: Chapman & Hall, 1907, Internet Archive ID southdevoncoast00harpgoog) is a pleasant travelogue illustrated with around 70 line drawings by the author, a prolific travel writer and illustrator who was active between 1892 and 1933 (see bibliography).

Labrador Bay and its Tea Gardens

Major General Chermside's reference to "Big luscious strawberries and cream ... sold at Labradore [sic]" reminded me to pick up a loose thread from a walk in August 2013 (see Ice cold in Shaldon) and check out the background to the strangely-named Labrador Bay, south of Shaldon.

Major General Chermside's misadventures in Shaldon

Some time in the 1870s, Major General Henry Lowther Chermside, CB, retired to Shaldon, the Devon estuary-side village opposite Teignmouth; he didn't enjoy the experience. The result was these two pieces of polemical doggerel, which appear in his privately-circulated 1880 Some "Trial Shots" at Rhyme, 1859-1879. As the note to the second verse mentions, their "-ore" rhyming scheme is based on that of Thackeray's Song of Shannon Shore, or The Battle of Limerick.