Westcountry Studies newsletter. Issue 34. February 2024

 

Westcountry Studies a bibliographical newsletter on Devon and its region Issue 34 February 2024

Devon bibliography, over to you

With the continuing outage of the weekly list of new additions to the British national bibliography, three months after the cyberattack and with the arrival of the 2023 volume of The Devon historian just after Christmas, my resolve to discontinue the updating of the Devon bibliography has been confirmed. Firstly I cannot face massaging three months or more of backlog of Devon items received by the British Library since 23 October and secondly I have not been doing well in gathering material over recent months. The 2023 issue of The Devon Historian received just before Christmas included thirteen book reviews, two for works published in 2021, eight in 2022 and three in 2023. Of these thirteen, I had picked up only seven by the end of 2023, although I knew of one or two further titles but did not have sufficient information to produce an adequate catalogue record. The Devon Heritage Centre had picked up only four, one with the aid of the Kent Kingdon Bequest. Most of the titles should be represented in the Devon and Exeter Institution, the channel through which reviews are organised for The Devon historian. 

My current inability to travel has meant that I have been unable to pick up guidebooks, pamphlets, local authority publications and other items from tourist information centres, libraries and museums, something that in any case was largely confined to the area of Exeter, East and Mid Devon and Teignbridge. The Devon Heritage Centre has lost contact with Libraries Unlimited, which used to acquire such grey literature for information points in branches. In January a search for books with the keyword "Devon" held by the West Country Studies Library found 42 titles published in 2022 and 22 so far in 2023. The figures of 62 hits for 2022 include 20 that are in fact periodical issues or non-Devon items while the 43 hits for 2023 include 21 periodical issues or non-Devon items. Twenty years back in 2002 the Devon bibliography listed 437 items. 

So much is being missed, and my efforts to pick up PDF versions of important documents hardly touch the surface. But  most of the world today cannot see the relevance of traditional bibliography as, after all, the knowledge of the world is at our fingertips or spoken command, thanks to IT and AI, with Siri, Nina, Viv and a host of other virtual personal assistants, or friendly chatbots such as Chat GPT, Bing or Google Bard to help us on our way. But IT+AI=BS, or can do if it is fed the wrong textual data to train its neural networks. Google Bard recently produced a list of completely non-existent titles of Devon books published in 2022 for me, helpfully providing untraceable ISBNs. This merely adds to the terabytes of fake news, conspiracy theories, hate speech or deepfake videos circulated virally through social media. Google Bard's recent change to Gemini has meant no improvement. At least a comprehensive bibliography, properly curated by a librarian or information professional, can help people find more reliable knowledge - and such knowledge, as Francis Bacon and many others have told us across the centuries, is power, and a properly informed power is what is required to help us face the existential threats to communities across Devon today. 

I will continue to update it, but only through working on topics that interest me, such as:

Magdalen Road, Exeter: using historical sources to track Mount Radford village street through time

This appeared in the new year and free copies have already been distributed to each trader on the main drag of the road, the six copyright libraries, libraries in Exeter, and local people who helped. Printing was made possible by a generous grant from Fowler Financial Planning, one of the Magdalen Road traders, and great interest has been generated among recipients. Hopefully it will be a tool for community building and I have already received information to supplement what I had gathered. Remaining copies are available for £10.00, any income after expenses going toward a possible reprint if it goes viral, or to fund other local publications. 

It has been an interesting venture, something that could be undertaken largely at home, and an illustration of the use of historical sources such as directories, newspapers, census returns and maps to build a picture of a street through time, in the case of Magdalen Road back to the 1830s when the street was first built up. It is revealing in a number of ways:

• to show that there is nothing today in print or on the internet that can rival the detailed content on each community that can be found in the county or town directories, 
• to underline the fact that some of the most poorly documented periods in community history lie in the recent past, 
• to advise that sources such as the indexes to the British Newspaper Archive must be used with caution as the information given in the index entries can be misleading because of the software used to generate the database,
• to discover that additional information can be extracted by imaginative searching strategies. 

Of the making of many books there is no end: the story of bibliography in Devon

This was the title of a Zoom presentation I gave to the Devonshire Association on 20 February. Despite its niche interest it attracted an audience of about fifty. I traced the chequered history of the topic from the list of manuscripts that Bishop Leofric gave to Exeter Cathedral in about 1070, one version of which is inserted into the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the remarkable Registrum Angliae, a 13th century union catalogue listing works in 187 ecclesiastical collections, Exeter Cathdral's own inventories of 1327 and 1506, James Davidson's Bibliotheca devoniensis (1852 and 1861), early printed library catalogues, the work of John Ingle Dredge and Thomas Nadauld Brushfield in the 1880s and 1890s, the immense and idiosyncratic compilation of the Burnet Morris index by the Recorder in Bibliography of the Devonshire Association between 1914 and 1940, the Devon union list, compiled by Allan Brockett in 1977 and the Devon bibliography, started by Geoffrey Paley for the Devon History Society in 1981 and continued from 1985 by the Westcountry Studies Library. 

Great concern was expressed at the dire consequences of austerity for the Westcountry Studies Library, the abandonment of bibliographical work, and the loss of a major local studies collection in the centre of Exeter. It was agreed that the Devon bibliography should be safeguarded and maintained and that the Devonshire Association, with its long tradition of work with bibliographers should play a role in this. 

To firm up this working relationship I have been working on a gazetteer and thesaurus and have produced a topographical listing of more than 13,500 local publications for the period 2000-2024. The first fruits of this have just been released onto the Devon communities bibliography. It is hoped that this geographical listing can be extended back in time innto the 16th century.

A significant limited edition for Devon

Mercer, Neil. Spirit of Dartmoor tin / Neil Mercer ; photographs by Peter Russell. - [Somerset?] : [Peter Russell?], [2024]. - 3 volumes (1,800 pages) in box : 3680 illustrations. - No ISBN : £5,000 ; digital edition £250.00. - <a href=”https://www.spiritofdartmoortin.com/”>Accessed January 2024</a>. 

A limited edition of 100 copies was issued on 4 February 2024, signed by both the authors and Tom Greeves, using handmade Dartmoor oak gall ink, and individually numbered, in a lined box which has a tin 'Spirit of Dartmoor Tin' ingot inset in the face. Volume 1 has a hand cut polished disc of Dartmoor tin-bearing rock, created by master stonemason Dominic Hurley, inset in the cover. Volume 2 has a tin '2/4' - the alchemist's symbol for tin - inset into the cover. Volume 3 has a modern copy of a medieval seal of the Devon Stannary in tin metal (a proportion of which is Dartmoor tin smelted by Neil Mercer) inset into the cover. Handcrafted bookmarks, using dyes from plants gathered on the moor, in each volume. 

  Free copies will be lodged in the National Archives, RAMM Exeter, Exeter Cathedral Library, The Box Plymouth, Tavistock Museum and Plymouth Proprietary Library in addition to copies given in compliance with Legal Deposit (British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Library, Trinity College Dublin).

Here's one I made earlier - Exeter's medieval library revisited

Working with Dr James Willoughby, who has compiled the transcript of the medieval booklists of Exeter Cathedral Library, I have been able to fine-tune the layout of the library constructed in 1411-1413 whose contents were listed desk by desk in the inventory of 1506. Dr Willoughby drew my attention to the three early 15th century lecterns which survive in Lincoln Cathedral Library and suggested that, like them, the Exeter lecterns must have been double-sided. I made a 1:12 scale model of a lectern and two benches and managed to place them between the buttresses against the south wall of the cathedral nave which formed the north walk of the cloisters where the library must have been located.

 

Base is marked in one foot squares

The very detailed accounts show that 73 planks, described as “regel”, timber from Riga on the Baltic, which was highly regarded, 350 board nails, 194 chains and twelve iron bars to which they would be fixed. The model shows that it would be possible to construct twelve complete desks of similar design to those in Lincoln Cathedral, each using six “regel” boards, from the 73 “regel” boards that had been supplied. However the 1506 inventory only lists eleven desks plus a small collection of book chained by the west door. Also there are only five bays and circulation is restricted by the stairs at the easternmost bay and the door and books at the westernmost bay. These two bays could be occupied by single-sided lecterns and the 1506 inventory does list less volumes in each of the desks in that area. So, the layout below has been arrived at which seems to fit the bill very neatly. 

At first Dr Willoughby could not accept that the library was constructed on the ground floor because of damp problems, most medieval libraries being on an upper floor, but agreed that it might explain why so many of the manuscripts transferred to Oxford in 1602 had to be rebound on receipt because they had been damaged by damp.  

Navigation charts, motor cars and motor cycles in Exeter during WW2.  

Somerset historian Adrian Webb has for some time been researching the Hydrographic Department's printing activities in Exeter during World War Two and I have been involved in helping him to solve some queries. 

The Admiralty requisitioned five buildings for printing in Exeter in 1939, the printers Wheatons and Pollards being the two companies affected. The Admiralty Chart Establishment in Cricklewood on the Edgware Road was considered vulnerable to  air raids on London, and a new large printing establishment was under construction at the site that had been purchased in 1938 at Taunton. Managers were in Exeter in 1939 and Admiralty staff transferred in 1940. Two thirds of the bindery at Wheaton's printing offices at 143 Fore Street were requisitioned for three years to print marine charts. Paper shortage meant that few books were being printed, so space was available. Later the Americans commandeered Wheaton's two main lithographic presses and installed them at Cheltenham to print invasion maps for US troops after D-Day. While Wheaton's bookshop at 231 and 232 High Street was destroyed, their Fore Street premises remained largely unscathed. 

The Admiralty also requisitioned half of Pollard's printing offices in Southernhay Gardens but these were destroyed in the air raid of 4 May 1942. Some key tasks, such as the weekly publication of Notices to mariners, were transferred together with the specialist staff to the firm of Townsend who retained the contract until the 1980s. 

A mysterious company called Bedfords is also mentioned in reports at the time, but there was no record of them as printers. Besley's Exeter directory for 1941 has thirteen entries for Bedford, all but two of them private residents.  

Of the two businesses, Bedford General Insurance Co. Ltd of 11 Bedford Street has records in Bedfordshire Archives which holds (Z1219/1) the Bedford General Insurance Company Local Board Minute Book covering 1936-1967, so it must have been a local branch, with no links to printing.

The same seems at first to be true of the Bedford Garage, based in Bampfylde Street, High Street and Southernhay. During the war its showrooms were used for exhibitions of model cars in support of the Exeter Spitfire Fund, but there is a caption to a photograph on the Exeter Memories website which reads: An advert for the Bedford Garage, which was at the end of Bampfylde Street behind Bedford Circus and immediately opposite Bampfylde House. It was opened by Pollards the printers who vacated their printing premises in 1931". In that year Pollards relocated to Southernhay Gardens but retained the Bampfylde Street premises, diversifying by opening the Bedford Garage with its showrooms, where they traded until the War. As Pollards retained ownership when the Admiralty requisitioned premises Bedford's was not in fact a separate business. As well as the Southernhay Gardens site Pollards also lost Bedford Garage  in the blitz. It is immortalised, not by the Hydrographic Office, but by Bedford Garage ware, named by archaeologists from a medieval pottery kiln found on the site during the rebuilding in 1931. 

Interestingly, Wheatons also diversified into road vehicles; John Wheaton ran the successful AJW Motorcycles from the Fore Street premises with workshops in Friernhay from the 1920s until the War, when the workshop was destroyed in a fire. 

So, it has been possible to add a government printing office to the directory of Exeter book trade firms. 

Two losses to the world of local history

On 21 February as I was putting the finishing touches to this issue I learned of the death of two fellow workers in the field of local studies.

The first was Peter Christie, "Mr Bideford" who will receive better informed tributes from others. In 2022, after receiving a copy of The story of the book in Exeter and Devon, he generously passed to me copies of the section of his massive index to the North Devon journal which related to printers, booksellers and publishers. I hope that the complete index will be passed to the North Devon Record Office along with the rest of his collections. 

The second was Bernard Nurse who worked in Guildhall Library with me before I moved to Exeter in 1977. He moved on to other local studies collections in London, ending up at the Society of Antiquaries Library. After retirement he worked on the Gough Collection in the Bodleian Library, and I assisted him with some unpublished Exeter drawings which were included in Town: prints & drawings of Britain before 1800 published by the Bodleian Library in 2020. 

A sad note on which to end this issue.