 | Westcountry Studies
a bibliographical newsletter
on Devon and its region
Issue 36
Christmas 2024 |
Celebration of W. G. Hoskins' Devon
On 7 November Simon Timms, President of the Devonshire Association, welcomed a large audience to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the publication of this iconic book, a key work and inspiration for all Devon historians, not only for what Hoskins says, but also for the way he says it. After an introduction by Peter Beacham, a long-standing friend and fellow buildings historian, five members of the DA read extracts and reflected on the impact this book had on their lives and work.
John Allan, a past President, spoke on Topsham and how Hoskins had captured the essence of the port through time. Susan Andrew, Chair of the History Section, spoke on his love of the remote village of Honeychurch, illustrated with photographs she had taken at all seasons over many years. Bridget Gillard, Executive Secretary of the DA spoke on his view of towns, often outspoken, putting in a word in defence of Holsworthy, described as "the dullest town in Devon to look at". She did not mention Okehampton, similarly damned as "a singularly dull town with little to look at". Stephen Rippon, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Exeter, spoke on the open field system, not thought to be widespread in Devon, although Hoskins, who had studied the Midland peasantry, suspected otherwise. Aerial photography and more recently LiDAR surveys had proved his suspicions to be well founded.
The last presentation was by Todd Gray, another past President of the DA, who inspired by a brief mention of his native Newfoundland, set out to expand on this and went on to research a wide range of themes of Exeter and Devon's past, accompanied at every step by Hoskins, culminating in a lament on how it was increasingly difficult to maintain this level of research in heritage collections after austerity had cut resources and above all the knowledge accessible through continuity of staffing.
Speaking from the floor I was able to include the following quote from Hoskins, an atmospheric passage on libraries in country houses:
The big house and the squire
But what atmosphere there is in these old houses where they are still lived in! The past is alive in every corner of them, in every piece of furniture, every turn in the stairs and every window seat.
In the library, looking out over the weed-enamelled drive and a park still timbered with walnut and oak and Beech, the Victorian bookshelves rise to the ceiling and hold copies of Ovid and Horace used at Oxford by Georgian ancestors: dark, calf-bound, the faint spidery brown handwriting. On the bottom shelves is an early edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (an edition published before the Age of Steam, but still occasionally useful. Somewhere near at hand is an old edition of Burn's Justice of the Peace and Parish Officers, perhaps an early run of the Railway Magazine, and row upon row of unreadable sermons, old botany books, bird books, fishing books, parish histories, the proceedings of the local antiquarian society of forty years ago, and a whole shelf on gardening. Papers cascade out of writing desks as old as the room; dogs snuffle quietly in Queen Anne wing chair; photographs of cricket elevens may be observed in obscure corners, close to the stuffed corncrake, of Harrow, Winchester, and Eton long ago.
In the billiard room, still occasionally used, are the nondescript paintings seconded to its walls about the year 1870 and since forgotten, and the assegais sent home from the Zulu Wars by some great uncle. And outside is the high-walled garden, warm in the sun, with its deep black earth spade-turned century after century; and the turret over the hall roof, with its silent bell. And just beyond the garden, among the treetops, one sees the pinnacles of the parish church, and one hears the clock striking the hours, day after day, season after season, for ever and ever, as they once thought. Here, where all is quiet, the lunacy of the outside world, the fate that has overtaken it, is an insoluble mystery. One ruminates over it for a few minutes after the nine o'clock news, heard religiously each evening in the library on an antique and sizzling battery set. With relief the squire turns to the local newspaper, produced in the market town a dozen miles away, and reads the more intelligible and interesting news about the doings of his own countryside.
Hoskins notes: "The description is a composite one. No particular house is intended, but every detail is authentic." And, from my visits to country houses and my work in manor houses like Lewtrenchard, I can confirm that, seventy years on, this gentle, if slightly musty, atmosphere still lingers.
Simon Timms led the assembled audience (Hoskins would have loathed the term attendees) in three rousing cheers to conclude the event.
Archaeological grey literature
I am in the process of adding more than 1780 reports produced by Exeter Archaeology since 2000 and, after their demise in 2012, Exeter based Oakford Archaeology who have taken up the baton. Some of these reports are brief ‒ the archaeologists peered down the hole, said "Oh, nothing much there" and went their way ‒ but others run to many pages and almost all are illustrated with maps, plans and colour illustrations and have some history of the site. They also cover several hundred different parishes in Devon, important for producing communiity bibliographes. They are being converted to entries in RDA format, but it has not been possible to examine them all and place and subject categorisations are largely based on the title, a bit like the pre-publication BNB references, which are still not available after the Russion cyber-attack of October 2023. At least the Devon bibliography was never "down".
Periodicals and annuals in the Westcountry Studies Library
When I get out and about, as I have recently started to do once more, I pick up issues of local periodicals, annual reports and other community literature, which I have taken in to the Devon Heritage Centre for several years. Before taking in my latest batch, heavier than usual because of the lapse of time, I thought I would just check some of the titles to see when I last took them in and update the Devon bibliography records. I was concerned to see no catalogue records for:
Cygnet Theatre
Exeter Corn Exchange
Green news Newtown & St Leonard's
Libraries Unlimited impact report 2022-23
Primary times
Princess Theatre, Torquay
Quay news, Exeter Canal & Quay Trust
Reconnect
Wren Music annual report 2023-24
What's on at Exeter Cathedral
and there are no doubt others. Am I wasting my time?
They are certanly making progress on the stock review. I had hoped by examination of the open access stock to try to reconstruct the dating of the various accession number sequences to put acquisitions in context but find that many of the open access WSL books appear to have been replaced by Devon Record Office copies. I could also find no books for the adjoining counties. Perhaps some will find their way back but in the meantime here is a list of books for communities in Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset:
Cornwall communities:
Advent-Fowey, Germoe-Lynher, Mabe-Otterham, Padstow-Ruan Minor, Saint Agnes-Sancreed, Scilly Isles-Zennor
Dorset communities:
Abbotsbury-Lytchett Minster, Mapperton-Yetminster
Somerset communities:
Location numbers will clearly have changed but staff should be able to locate them.
Exeter Cathedral Cloisters
It is good to see the rebuilt east walk of the Cloisters handsomely completed. There is once more a cafe, now in the former Chapter House, and the former Refectory is now the Cathedral shop. That stocks Archaeological Studies at Exeter Cathedral, 1975–2023. Volume 1: The Chapter House and Cloister, edited by John Allan, printed by Short Run Press in 2024. It is Devon Archaeological Society. Monograph no. 3 and includes my contribution on the layout of the medieval Cathedral library in the North Cloisters.
Exeter History Book Festival
The cloisters book will be one of the titles on sale at the Exeter History Book Festival on 1 February. It will be joined by other local publications, in two of which I have had a hand, the recently published
St Leonard's and the Quay a revision of the Exeter Civic Society's publication by Gilbert Venn, first published in 1981, and
Magdalen Road, Exeter: using historical sources to track Mount Radford village street through time. It was hoped to sell these at the Magdalen Road fair on 7 December, but it was cancelled by storm Darragh.
Celebrating Bath as a City of Publishing
On 9 November a free event was organised by the Society of Young Publishers South West as part of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution’s Bicentenary programme.
Bath has been a city of publishing for over three centuries. Initially, it was mainly medical tracts and tourist guides, but from the mid-eighteenth century, booksellers in the city were publishing literary texts, newspapers, and works of scholarship. Since then, Bath has continued to thrive as a city of publishing and today it boasts a large number of independent publishers and booksellers.
The event celebrated Bath’s importance as a centre of publishing with a day-long event featuring local publisher stalls and career stands; panel discussions with authors, agents, booksellers and publishers; history talks; and a pop-up exhibition of 18th and 19th-century books and other works published in Bath. The event and exhibition was supported by Bath Spa University.
Exhibitors: North Parade Publishing, Raspberry Books. Fox, Finch and Tepper, Peirene Press; Emblaze, Bath Spa University’s Publishing Department
Panellists on Bath Publishers panel: Juliet Pickering (Blake Friedmann), Daniel Ginsburg (Emblaze), Nic Bottomley (Mr B’s Emporium), Tracey Turner and Sidonie Beresford-Browne (Raspberry Books), Megan Farr (Bath Spa University), James Tookey, Peirene Press
Historical talks: Dr Kevin Grieves (Bath Spa University), Emma Louca (University of Bristol), Professor Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University)
The Society of Young Publishers is a not-for-profit organisation aimed at helping young people enter the publishing industry and there was lively discussion about opportunities in the south west. One participant said: "Sometimes it can feel like publishing only really exists in London, so events like this are super valuable for highlighting that actually, there’s some really great stuff going on in other places too." It is good to see that Exeter is not the only city in the Westcountry that can lay claim to be a "city of literature".
The notebook: a history of thinking on paper
I finished this masterful work by Roland Allen as I sheltered from storm Darragh, it being due back at the library in two days time. It is an inspiring review of notebooks of all kinds, starting with the ricordi or account books kept by merchants in Florence and Provence in the 14th and 15th centuries and the zibaldoni, ancestors of the commonplace books, kept in Italy in the same period and the artists' sketchbooks, perhaps starting with Giotto. All of these were made possible through the introduction of paper into Europe in the 13th century. The age of exploration led to accounts of travels and ship log books and developed into scientific records in the hands of Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and many others. Commonplace books developed into diaries in the 17th century in the hands of Pepys and Evelyn and these became universal after the introduction of printed versions by Letts and others in the 19th century, and many of us remember autograph books with their multicoloured leaves, popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers also used notebooks to gather their thoughts and among those discussed is Agatha Christie, whose 73 notebooks at Greenway form an intricate key to the genesis and development of many of her novels. There is a fascinating account of police notebooks where I learned that inspectors, now synonymous with detectives, were originally the officers that inspected the notebooks and signed them off when the bobbies returned from their beats. The picture comes up to date with the patient diaries maintained during covid, not by the patients themselves who were often in an induced coma in intensive care, but by their nurses who gave them to patients when they recovered to help them come to terms with delusional memories acquired while in a coma, or else to their families when they did not come through. The poet Michael Rosen describes how important the diary was to his recovery from covid, and I was very moved by it as it was a situation very close to home for me this year.
The Westcountry Studies Library has a number of these journals. My favourite is "A journal of occurrences with descriptions and illustrations of subjects connected with natural history", four beautifully written and illustrated manuscript volumes by Francis William Locke Ross of Topsham covering the years 1836 to 1844 and obviously written up from field notebooks. This was not picked up in my listing
First person Devon which does include a number of diaries. This list
forms part of the more than 5,000 web pages produced by the Westcountry Studies Library prior to 2005, moost of which have been archived on the Wayback Machine. A more recent publication is the diary of Sabine Baring-Gould. I suppose too that these Westcountry Studies newsletters and similar blogs are digital forms of notebooks but Roland Allen remains doggedly analogue in his coverage, and I am certainly not in the same category as Da Vinci and Newton!
Allen also discusses the development of papermaking, the different forms of notebooks from Moleskines to Filofax, and the therapeutic effect of keeping a written notebook. Appparently studies have shown that students taking written notes remember things better than those keyboarding lectures and presentations. Most such notebooks are of the moment, but I am inspired to produce a retrospective journal, though digital, not analogue. A task for 2025.
And finally
Some seasonal wishes from myself and some past Devonians:
Mary Christmas, baptised 1 April 1697 Barnstaple, St Peter
Mary Christmas, baptised 19 June 1825 Hartland, St Nectan
Mary Christmas, born Jan/Mar 1885 Bideford
Mary Christmas, Hartland resident 1841
Mary Christmas, Bideford resident 1851
Mary Christmas, Hartland resident 1891
and stretching it even more:
