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SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND

THIRD SERIES

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS C. F. CLAY, MANAGER LONDON: FETTER LANE, E. C. 4

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY } CALCUTTA } MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. MADRAS } TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TOKYO: MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND

BY CECIL TORR

THIRD SERIES

CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1923

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

PREFACE

In case this volume should be read by anyone who has not read its predecessors, I am quoting these three paragraphs of the original volume by way of explanation.

And first, about the place itself,

_Wreyland is land by the Wrey, a little stream in Devonshire. The Wrey flows into the Bovey, and the Bovey into the Teign, and the Teign flows out into the sea at Teignmouth. The land is on the east side of the Wrey, just opposite the village of Lustleigh. It forms a manor, and gives its name to a hamlet of six houses, of which this as one._

Secondly, about my writing all these things,

_Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they should have written things down. Fearing that this might soon be said of me, I got a book last Christmas--1916--and began to write things down. I meant to keep to local matters, but have gone much further than I meant._

Thirdly, about my publishing what I had written,

_I wrote this little book for private circulation; and it was actually in type, and ready for printing, before its publication was suggested. I feel some diffidence in inviting strangers to read what I intended only for my personal friends. But it all seems to hang together, and I have not omitted anything._

After that was published I went on writing things down in the same way as before. A second volume was published in 1921. This third (and final) volume has been written in 1922 and 1923.

CECIL TORR.

YONDER WREYLAND,

LUSTLEIGH,

DEVON.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LAYING NEW THATCH (YONDER WREYLAND) _Frontispiece_

THE HALL HOUSE _To face p._ 32

THE AUTHOR’S DESK ” 64

VIEW ACROSS WREY VALLEY ” 96

SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND

III

This slumberous place has had another rude awakening. Five years ago an aeroplane passed over us--the only one that has been seen from here. And now, recently, a cow-boy on a buck-jumper came galloping down the lane here, firing off his pistols in the air. It was for a film; and the rider (as I learned afterwards) was The Thrill-a-Minute Stunt King himself.

The theme was of a cow-boy, born in England, revisiting his early home. Considering the Atlantic, I am not sure he would have come home on a buck-jumper with all his toggery on; but a producer knows exactly what audiences want. A film (I learned) requires ‘love interest’: so a pair of Stars made love outside the Hall House door. And an old inhabitant who came along, was so shamed at their brazenness that he could only gasp out, “Well, Now, There.”

There is a Wreyland theme that would have made as good a film. It is a story of John Dynham, who was lord of the manor here from 1381 to 1428; and, though it cannot be entirely true, it embodies some undoubted facts. Briefly, the Bishop of Exeter admonished him, for the avoidance of scandal, to cease from visiting the lady Isotta, even in the daytime; and as this had no effect, he excommunicated him. Dynham appealed to the Archbishop, which took up a year, and then he appealed to the Pope, which took up two years more: by which time he had voluntarily ceased from visiting the lady Isotta and was visiting the lady Muriel.

Films are dreary things when seen upon a screen; but the making of a film is as good as a play. You hear the heroine told to put more passion into it and look really moved, and then you see her putting in passion and looking really moved. And the villain who kidnaps her, is told to spring out like a tiger and put a sack over her head; and he springs out as like a tiger as he can, and there is no need for telling her to struggle and scream: she does that automatically when the sack drags down her hair. Theatrical rehearsals may be just as funny; but I do not see rehearsals on the stage.

I may just mention here that I was not the author of a Gaiety burlesque called _Cinder-Ellen up too late_. (Ellen was Nellie Farren, and the whole thing was a skit on _Cinderella up to date_.) Fred Leslie wrote it and also acted in it, and he took the pseudonym of ‘Actor’ but had it printed ‘A. C. Torr.’ He also wrote _Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué_, and (I think) some other Gaiety burlesques, with this same pseudonym of A. C. Torr; and people who knew me very slightly, assumed that I had written it all, although the style was not a bit like mine.

This was some thirty years ago, when I was writing solemnly on the chronology of the Egyptian kings--including Tut-anch-Amen, who was not so well known then as he is now. (Most of them deserved the title of the Duchess d’ Agio Uncertanti in _Ruy Blas_.) When my book on them came out, a friend of mine described it to me as a book to be given away with a pound of tea--he said readers would require at least a pound to keep them awake all through; and he could not possibly have said that of these plays. Style, however, is no sure guide to authorship. Think of “The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.” Unless the authorship were known, few people would ascribe it to the man whose travels inspired Tennyson, “Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls ... I read and felt that I was there.” Lear’s travels are forgotten, but his nonsense books are in the memory of everyone who read them when a child.

Looking back to early years, I find the things I have remembered best, have seldom been the things best worth remembering; and other people tell me that they suffer from the same defect. I remember a pump at the Great Exhibition of 1862: many other things besides, but nothing else as clearly as that pump. It was rather like a four-post bedstead with four impervious sheets of water coming down between the posts; and it just took my fancy. I wrote two letters about it to my grandfather, telling him that I would take him round to see it, if he came up to town. Being four years old, and getting on for five, I felt quite capable of taking him about. And he wrote back to my father, 22 July 1862, “I certainly shall avail myself of his very kind promise to take me to the Exhibition and show me that very wonderful pump, for I did study hydraulics one day.”

In a letter of his, 23 February 1862, mentioning his aunt’s first husband, he tells my father, “I remember him coming here to see my aunt before marriage, and he brought down the finest pine-apple I ever saw.” That was close on seventy years before, when my grandfather was a very small boy; and I suspect he had a clearer recollection of the pine-apple than of the man who brought it.

The pump and pine-apple were real things; but the youthful mind will often grip a blunder as firmly as a fact. The first scene in the first piece I ever saw, was described as A Tin Mine in Cornwall. (I fancy it was in the pantomime at Drury Lane at Christmas 1860.) The scene was not like any tin-mine I have ever seen; but when tin-mines are mentioned, this is the one that I first picture in my mind. In another pantomime there was a scene of The Great Pyramid, and King Cheops appeared. My grown-ups laughed about it afterwards, saying Cheops did very well, but it was not his pyramid--the scene painter had got the pyramid of Cestius at Rome; and they looked out an old engraving of that attenuated thing. And in after years when I have seen the thing at Rome, my thoughts have always turned to Cheops rather than to Cestius or to Shelley or to Keats.

There was a Judge of whom I should have said with confidence that I had never seen him except upon the Bench. But in looking through a diary I found that 9 July 1865 ended with a note that he called in the evening; and then I saw it all. It was in London, in our drawing-room, and cups of tea were being handed round at 9.0, as was the custom then; and he came in, took hock-and-seltzer in preference to tea, and then talked away. I cannot remember what he talked about, but I can see him and the room and all its furniture and the other people on the chairs on which they sat, just as I saw it from the chair where I was sitting. That picture had been dormant in my mind for more than fifty years, and then came out quite bright and clear; and I do not know how many thousands of these pictures are lying dormant there.

Though such a picture may be bright and clear, it only shows things from the point of view from which I happened to see them, and at the moment when I happened to be there. I am not like the Reluctant Dragon: he could manage to “think of things going on, and how they kept going on just the same, you know”; and I cannot manage that. I went to Constantinople in 1880--I had not seen an Oriental town before--and I was very much impressed by the great streams of people going along the bridge of boats across the Golden Horn; perhaps, in my small way, as much impressed as Dante was in 1300, when he saw the people streaming across the bridge at Rome, _Inferno_, XVIII. 28-33. But the crowds he saw were only for the Jubilee, whereas the crowds I saw went streaming on year after year; and I can never realize that what I saw was always to be seen there, or that other sights “keep going on just the same” as at the time I saw them.

Before the War I had a notion of repeating all my early travels year by year, beginning in 1917, as that would be the jubilee of my first going abroad. I wanted to go over the same ground again and see what changes fifty years had made; but my last journey was in 1913, and I came home through Châlons, Reims, Laon, Amiens, and other places too well known next year.

I went up to Haytor rocks on 25 April 1922, having noticed in my father’s diary that we were there on 25 April 1862, and that I “climbed up both the rocks with great agility.” I climbed up both the rocks again, but cannot say I did it with agility--the sixty years had told. A fortnight later I was out near there again, beating the parish bounds: a solemnity performed each year on the Monday after Roodmas. It was a long procession at the start, but quite short at the finish five hours later on; and as we went along, I heard men saying things in French and others replying with a word or two of Japanese.

My thoughts again went back to sixty years ago. Saying things in French would have been quite as heinous then as saying things in German now. After being our ally in the Crimean war, the new Napoleon was threatening us with invasion, just as his uncle had threatened our progenitors sixty years before: volunteers were being raised again, as in the old Napoleon’s time, to fight against the French invaders; and the old hereditary hatred was blazing out afresh. It was the Saxon hatred of the Norman, kept alive by endless wars with France. In 1690 the French burned Teignmouth and anchored in Torbay, and all the West was roused by beacon fires from Haytor to the other heights; and the French seemed bent upon another trial. _Buonaparte in Britain_ is the sort of book that people used to read, “a catalogue of French cruelties, and a short appeal to mothers, widows, wives, sisters and daughters upon the brutality of the French armies.” It is full of the same charges that were made against the Germans in the war of 1914. And in 1814 there was the same wild joy when victory came at last.

They had a festival at Moreton, 26 July 1814, with a dinner and a procession like a Lord Mayor’s Show. The programme has been preserved. ‘Smiths at work in a cart, beating weapons of war into implements of husbandry.’ ‘The four corporals late of the Moreton volunteers.’ Blaze led the woolcombers and Crispin led the cordwainers, but the true patron saint was ‘Bacchus on a tun, dressed in character, with a bottle, glass, &c., drawn on a car.’ And at the dinner there was a cask of cider at the foot of every table.

My grandfather got Camden’s _History of Napoleon Bonaparte_ when it first came out, and I have the volumes here. The first volume came out in 1814 with a title-page and preface saying that the history would be continued to the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in the present year. But the second volume has a different title-page, recognizing the fresh start the author had to make at what would otherwise have been the end. “We had fondly imagined that a total end was put to the war.... But, alas! Napoleon no sooner perceived a fit opportunity,” etc. etc.

My grandfather always seemed much satisfied at having seen Napoleon on the Bellerophon, safely under guard. He had no scruples about Saint Helena, but my father had--he was not born till 1818, and Napoleon was no bogey-man to him, but a colossus in the history of the world. He thought Napoleon had been harshly used at Saint Helena, and took O’Meara’s view, in spite of all he heard from an old soldier who had been in garrison there. “He wasn’t badly treated, I assure you, sir, he fared a great deal better than I did.” This old soldier--I can just remember him--said he often saw Napoleon walking up and down the garden, thinking of something and looking at nothing, until he came to some turn where he caught sight of the sentry’s bayonet, and then he would stop angrily and go indoors.

In looking through some notes my father made in 1835, I happened upon this--“France, altho’ vanquished, has materially lost less than England. The finances of France are again the most prosperous in Europe. England bends under the weight of its debt; and the European continent supplies itself with most of the products that England once supplied.” Napoleon had stopped the English exports to the Continent by his Berlin Decree, 1806, and trade is not easily regained when once it has been lost; and this was felt acutely here, as there had hitherto been large exports of woollens from this part of Devon.

In the latter years of that long war there were more than fifty thousand French prisoners-of-war in England, and half of them were sailors. Some three thousand of them were on parole and the remainder in confinement, and six or seven thousand were confined in Dartmoor prison. All prisoners-of-war were under the Commissioners for conducting His Majesty’s Transport Service, and the Commissioners selected various little towns for prisoners on parole, and appointed an Agent in each town to censor the prisoners’ letters and see they did not misbehave. One of the towns was Moreton, and Ashburton was another; and the Agent at Ashburton was an uncle of my grandfather’s. And this, I presume, was how my grandfather got acquainted with so many of these prisoners-of-war.

Another great-great-uncle of mine (on my mother’s side) was a prisoner-of-war in France, and he married a French lady. I remember his son, a country parson down in Wales, and I must have heard the story many times, but cannot now recall much more than the main facts. His ship was captured in the war of 1795, and he was sent to Verdun as a prisoner-of-war. Instead of coming back to England at the Peace of Amiens in 1802, he stayed loitering about, and was still in France when hostilities broke out again and all English were interned. He was interned near Dijon, and thus met his future wife; and he found life so pleasant there that he did not come back to England until 1817, not long before his death.--These mixed marriages were fairly frequent then. One of my great-uncles finished up the Waterloo campaign by marrying a Belgian lady he had met in Brussels.

I can just remember the widow of a French naval officer who had been a prisoner-of-war in England and had made her acquaintance then. It was not quite a happy match, as she was very English; but the family doctor wrote to my father, 15 December 1851, after paying them a visit at their place in France, “Looking at all she endures from himself and his family, one of the most tormenting things (to her) is want of punctuality at meal times.” He died before I was born, but I heard stories of him: for instance, when asked about his health, he always said, “I am much better, but I am not good.” He had received the Légion d’Honneur from the Emperor and the Saint Louis from the King; and when he came to England, visiting, unmannerly young men would sing _The Vicar of Bray_. And he would fret and fume and finally bounce up from his chair, vociferating that he served no Emperor and no King: he only served La France.

When on parole at Ashburton and Moreton and other little towns, the prisoners-of-war were obliged to live in houses which the Agent had approved: they were not allowed out before six in the morning or after six or seven or eight at night according to the season of the year: they might not go further than a mile from the end of the town; and they had to keep to the main roads--if they went further or into cross-roads, fields or woods, it was the Agent’s duty to send them into prison again. However, Agents and others sometimes had blind eyes; and now and then there were escapes. In fact, there were escapes from Dartmoor prison itself--a good-looking sailor-boy once got a country-lass to let him take her clothes, and thus escaped.

According to the Entry-book of French prisoners-of-war on parole at Moreton (now in London at the Public Record Office) twenty-eight arrived in 1807: four of them (a Navy captain and three midshipmen) broke their parole on 27, 28 September--the Entry-book says ‘run’: another midshipman ‘ran’ in 1809, another one remained till 1810, and a general (Rochambeau) and his servant remained till March 1811; but all the rest, and nine new-comers, left in May 1808, and no more came till March 1810. In that month ninety-three arrived, and fifty others before October. One of them died there, and thirty-three ‘ran,’ including eight captains, eight commanders, and fourteen other Navy officers. They mostly ‘ran’ in batches: six on 28 October and seven on 21 December 1810, five on 18 January and four on 26 January, and six on 11 October 1811. Fifteen of the others left in 1810, forty-four in 1811, and the remaining fifty in February 1812.

Up to October 1810 the prisoners-of-war at Moreton were chiefly Navy men; but in that month a hundred and twenty-eight arrived, and these were chiefly Army men. In the Entry-book seventy-one of them are marked ‘General Dupont’s Army, Spain.’ (This army had capitulated at Baylen, 20 July 1808.) Only one of these men ‘ran’--he was a surgeon--and the other seventy left in March 1811 together with thirty-three other Army men who arrived in October 1810 but are not entered as Dupont’s. Of the other twenty-four who arrived then, two died, two ‘ran,’ two left in 1811 and eighteen in February 1812. There were only twenty-eight arrivals from November 1810 to March 1812: four of them ‘ran,’ ten left during 1811 and seven in February 1812, after which date a general (Reynaud) and six others were the only prisoners remaining, and they all left in November 1812. There were no more prisoners there until May 1814: then forty-three arrived, and these very soon left.

This gives a total of 379 French prisoners-of-war on parole at Moreton at one time or another; and the greatest number at any one time was 250 at the beginning of 1811. Rochambeau was the best known of them--he came out in full uniform on hearing of any French successes. He had been commander-in-chief at San Domingo, capitulated there in 1803 and was not exchanged till 1811, and in 1813 he was killed at Leipzig.

The three who died at Moreton were buried in the churchyard, and the tombstone of lieutenant Arnaud Aubry is still there, but I cannot now find the tombstones of the other two, lieutenant Louis Quaintain and midshipman Jean François Rohan. The tombstones were there not long ago, and must have been destroyed or carried off--nothing is safe now from a curiosity hunter in a motor car. Out at Dartmoor prison the graves were all obliterated in the following thirty years while the place was uninhabited and derelict; and the present monument, for all the French who died there, was not erected until 1865.

It has no names; and till these last few years there was no notion of commemorating people individually because they fell in a great war. We see monuments to Wellington and Nelson and other great commanders, and neat marble tablets in old parish churches to officers who happened to be squires, but never any record of the rank and file. We do not know who went from here to serve with Wellington or Nelson or Marlborough or Drake; and this is all the more annoying as we have lists of all the men here who ‘protested’ in 1641: see page 68. There will be lists enough of those who fell in this last war, thanks to all the busybodies who disguised their own pet schemes as War Memorials.

They pulled down the old Market House at Moreton to make way for their War Memorial there. The structure was an upstair room supported on granite columns and sheltering the open space between them; and it was a four-sided room with the corners rounded off, eight of the columns standing at the eight points where the sides began to curve. It was not a masterpiece of architecture; but it looked quite comfortable in its surroundings there until a new public-library was built on one side of it and a new public-house on the other, and then it looked like one of the New Poor between two Profiteers. If they were bent on pulling down the room, they might at least have left the granite columns and the architrave, put on a roof, and placed their War Memorial in the space below; or if the space seemed disproportionately large, they could have moved the columns closer in.

This is a granite country; and if men are to be commemorated here, their names should be inscribed on granite. But cutting names on granite slabs costs more than casting them on metal plates: so an inscription was cast, an ungainly piece of granite was put up, and the metal plate fixed on. That is the War Memorial for which the Market House was swept away. It is like a notice-board. The metal thing at Bovey is like a kitchen-fender. There is an old town-cross there, and this unsightly piece of metal has been fixed on round its base; and the medieval mouldings were chiselled away in order to fit this on. No doubt, the cross was not intact before: it had been restored, removed from its old site, and set up on a new substructure. But that was all done by a gifted architect who saw exactly how to gain a great effect; and this addition just spoils it.