Part 9

Since the passing of the Truck Act in 1831 payments in money have been replacing the old payments in kind. The old system was open to abuses; but I doubt if agricultural labourers have benefitted by the change, as there now are middlemen’s profits to be paid. Under the old system (as mentioned by Vancouver on pages 361, 363 of his report) farm-hands could buy their bread-corn from the farmer at fixed rates--two bushels a month of barley at 3_s._ a bushel, or a bushel of wheat at 6_s_.; and now they say the baker charges too much for their bread, whilst farmers say the miller pays too little for the wheat. So also with drink, the labourer did better with the cider he had helped to make, than with a small increase of wages for buying something else. He now buys tea or beer at prices that allow for profits and taxation, whereas his cider was taken at cost-price. No doubt, political economists would like to see all wages paid in cash, to save them trouble with statistics; but ‘real’ wages might be higher, if partly paid in produce of the farm.

A little while before the War I listened to a long dispute between two brothers, one a railway man at 30_s._ a week and the other a farm hand at 15_s._ The railway man maintained that he was worse off than his brother; he was paying 7_s._ a week for cramped accommodation in a town, whereas his brother had a cottage, free, and ground enough for growing vegetables and keeping poultry and a pig. And he went on comparing town and country prices, and town and country needs; and, on the whole, I think he proved his case. But there is an outcry against free cottages now, as a farm hand must vacate his cottage if he ceases working on the farm, the cottage being wanted for the man who takes his place. There is a great deal in a name. If these ‘tied cottages’ were called ‘official residences,’ less nonsense might be talked.

A slovenly housewife soon gives her cottage the aspect of a slum, and often gets it into such a mess that it can never be made quite nice again without almost rebuilding it; and at one time or another most of the old cottages have suffered in that way. Good housewives did their best, and scrubbed; but there was no such scrubbing here as I have seen in Holland. I stayed a night at Delft, 22 August 1872, at a hotel that looked out on a wide street with a canal running down the middle of it; and in the morning I watched the house opposite being cleaned up for the day. After all the windows had been cleaned inside and out, the front door was taken off its hinges and well scrubbed and then was carried over the canal and dipped in it.

After doing repairs, my grandfather notes, 29 October 1843, “Such is ever the case with house property: it is but a nominal income.” Matters have not improved since then; and I therefore try to build things that will never need repair. After viewing an addition that I was making at the Hall House, a village elder justly said, “There: ‘tbe everlastin’: and everlastin’: and everlastin’ after that.” It was a big granite staircase with granite walls laid in cement. I wish that former generations had used cement here: they used bad mortar with a core of rubble between the inside and outside stones--their walls were seldom less than three feet thick--and when the mortar has decayed, there is nothing to keep the outside stones from falling off and the rubble from going after them. When they were building ‘dry walls’ (that is, with neither mortar nor cement) they took more pains to get the stones to fit.

These ‘dry walls’ abound here. The countryside was strewn with granite boulders: when a piece was cleared to make a field, the boulders were broken up and used for walls enclosing it; and the walls were sometimes made immensely large, to use up the material. It is marvellous to see a skilled man building such a wall. The stones are of all shapes and sizes, from half a hundredweight to three or four, just as the rock or boulder happens to split up; and there may be many dozens of them lying about. He glances round and selects a stone, perhaps fifty feet away, and has it brought to him; and it fits in exactly with the stones he has just used, or only needs a single blow to knock off some protuberance. This all looks so easy that I have tried selecting stones myself; but they have never come right.

While I was having one of these walls built, I had a letter from a friend in London asking me if I could give a man a job: the man was strong enough for anything, but had been ill; and the doctor said he needed six weeks in the country, out of doors all day. I had him down for the six weeks, and set him to work at picking up the stones the skilled man wanted, and carrying them over to the wall. He happened to be a prizefighter, and he was still here at the time of Newton fair, and there happened to be a booth for boxing. He went in and boxed, and local men came in and boxed with him, not knowing who he was. They gained experience, and he brought home the stakes.--In his solicitude for my education, my father sent me to a prizefighter when I was twelve years old. I went twice a-week, but did not know enough to profit by his teaching--his gloves were always up against my eyes, and I saw nothing else. I did, however, learn a little of the language of the Ring.

A dozen years ago some people were talking to me here about the good old times, and their children meanwhile were giving the donkey and the dog some bits of bread. I said, “These are the good old times, and people will look back on them and say, in those days dogs and donkeys might eat wheaten bread.” I was looking ahead, a century or more, and never thought that in a few years time bread would be rationed out in England and made of other things than wheat. In what we call the good old times the labourer had no wheaten bread. In a letter of 3 December 1844 my grandfather remarks that wheat was then so cheap and oats so dear that wheat was being given to horses; and he calls wheat “food for Christians,” but then corrects himself, “when I say wheat is food for Christians, I do not mean to say the labourer is not a Christian,” although the labourer had only barley bread, not wheat.

Though wheat is so esteemed, a vast amount is wasted here in reaping and in threshing and with rats in ricks and barns. I have seen the ears gathered by hand in Turkey and in Spain, and with astonishing speed; and nothing is wasted then. And there is, I believe, an American machine which cuts the stalks so high that it reaps hardly anything below the ears; but I imagine that it does not get the ears off any of the shorter stalks.

After living in Long Island (New York) in 1817 and 1818, Cobbett says in his _Cottage Economy_, section 82, “Few people upon the face of the earth live better than the Long Islanders, yet nine families out of ten seldom eat wheaten bread. Rye is the flour that they principally make use of. Now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the price of wheat, and barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat. Half rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very good bread. Half wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, make bread that I could be very well content to live upon all my lifetime.” Of course the Americans also had what they call ‘corn’ and we call ‘maize.’ We grow this for fodder, as it seldom ripens here; and we import the product as cornflour. Cobbett tried the American sort here, but found another sort near Calais--a dwarf plant--and tried this in 1827 and the following years; and in 1828 he reckoned that he had eleven thousand quartern loaves upon eleven acres, though three of the eleven had failed. These experiments of his were made at Kensington and Barnes; and in 1828 he says in _Cobbett’s Corn_, section 155, that he was paying his men three shillings a-week with board and lodging. They had porridge for breakfast: as much hot mutton as they could eat for dinner, and also apple-dumplings: bread and cheese, as much as they could eat, for supper: a pint of beer at dinner and another pint at supper. He lived on the same diet himself.

My grandfather had most of Cobbett’s agricultural books, and read them with respect, as Cobbett never recommended anything without trying it himself or having seen it tried. These books of his are shrewd and sensible, and may be right in what they say of that “degrading curse,” the “pernicious practice of drinking tea,” _Cottage Economy_, sections 23 to 33. “But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England?” Parson Davy was preaching against tea-drinking here in 1803, and as early as 1748 Wesley was exhorting his followers to abhor tea as a deadly poison. (A prophet is without honour in his own chapels.) Cobbett likewise talks of “the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers” of tea. “Tea has no useful strength in it: it contains nothing nutritious.... It is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards.”

The fault may not be in the tea itself, but in the way of making it and leaving it to ‘stand’ or ‘draw.’ A cynic said that tea was the salvation of the people here; it so damaged their digestions that they could not assimilate the food they ate; and this really was a mercy, as they over-ate themselves so much. Even in this house, I fear, tea was allowed to stand too long. I remember my grandmother being chaffed about a letter she had written, “Jane has drunk tea here. Poor soul, she has drained the cup of bitterness to the very dregs.”

In my early days here the cottagers all kept pigs; and the sties abutted on the cottages and drained into the lanes. There were sties on each side of the lane between Bowhouse and the Tallet; and as the lane is steep, the drainage made a stream downhill and joined the drainage from a sty at Souther Wreyland just outside the kitchen door. Then came a time when pig-sties were prohibited within a certain distance of a house; and the old granite pig-sties were utilized in other ways--that Souther Wreyland sty became a coal-cellar, and a double sty at Lower Wreyland has now become a sitting-room. But in War-time all restrictions were removed; and pig-sties could be set up close to dwellings, as before. Restrictions on building also were removed. Some years before the War I wanted to turn a barn into a house; but this was not allowed, although the barn had well-built granite walls--few houses have as good. And now a barn near here, not built so well as that, has just been turned into a house. If restrictions were necessary, they should not have been removed: if they were capricious, they should never have been made.

In those good old pig-sty days there were some powerful smells here, but they did not carry far, and the air was always fresh; and there were much worse smells in towns, with no fresh air to counteract them. A builder writes to my father about a house in London, 12 October 1862, “I beg to acquaint you that the works are going on, and on opening the ground I find a large cess-pool in the front area under the steps, a most improper situation for such a place.” That house was not built till 1820, and older houses usually were worse.

There were no sewers here, at Wreyland or at Lustleigh, until 1892, when a joint sewer was laid down for the sewage of both places. A joint water-supply was included in the scheme; but that part of the scheme fell through, and sewer-gas was thus laid on to every house that had no water of its own. This state of things continued for ten years, although there was no practical difficulty about the joint supply. The great Torquay reservoir is less than two miles off; and the engineers were ready to lay the water on, just as they had laid it on to other places between here and Torquay. But water-supply is in the jurisdiction of the Rural District Council; and the Council appointed Parochial Committees without experience of anything much bigger than a parish pump. The joint supply was rejected, as Wreyland is not in Lustleigh parish. A separate supply was found for Lustleigh; and when that failed, a further supply was found, as far off as the Torquay reservoir. Being in Bovey parish, Wreyland was supplied from a Bovey reservoir as far off on the other side; and this reservoir was a futile thing--intended as storage to supplement a small supply in drought, needless when a big supply was brought in from another source, and ineffective now, because the mains are nearly choked with rust. With their ineffective schemes and alterations and additions, these two rural parishes incurred a debt of about £24,000 for water-supply, besides about £8000 for sewage; and there are special-expenses rates for interest and sinking-fund, and water rates as well.

Moretonhampstead was provided with a sewer in 1905. The main part of the town is on a hill between two little valleys that converge into the valley of the Wrey; and a nine-inch sewer-pipe was carried down each valley to the junction of the two, and a nine-inch sewer-pipe from that point to the sewage-tanks some way further on, as if one nine-inch pipe would take the full contents of two of that same size. Moreton is a great place for thunderstorms--the conformation of the country brings the clouds that way--and the storm-water comes rushing down the sewer-pipes and drives the sewage along; and of course the sewer-pipes were always bursting where these torrents met. Instead of laying a larger pipe from the junction to the tanks (which would have been a costly thing) the District Council placed a sort of safety-valve above the junction; and now, whenever the pressure is sufficient, the sewage throws up a fountain there. I have gone to see the fountains at Versailles and Peterhof and other places celebrated for them, but I have never seen another fountain quite like this. And nobody need go out of his way to see it, as it splashes out on the high road from Moreton here.

In going from Moreton to Hurston, I pass a guide-post with an arm that says, ‘Chagford. 1½ miles.’ Taking that direction, I pass another guide-post (at Stiniel cross) less than a hundred yards away; and this has an arm that says, ‘Chagford. 2 miles.’ A foreigner noticed it and said, “Aha, you advance one hundred metres and you retreat one half-mile? How shall you arrive?” I said, of course, “We muddle through,” and he said “You are a wonderful people”; and he said it as if he meant it as a compliment, but I think he had some reservations in his mind.

There is a new guide-post at Lustleigh. Instead of getting a larch pole that might have cost about five shillings, the District Council got an iron post that cost five pounds; and on that post the sockets for the arms are at right-angles to each other. One arm is marked ‘Cleave,’ and points along the road there. The other is marked ‘Station,’ but (being at right-angles to the first) it points along the path to Wreyland, which path does not go anywhere near the Station. Hence, many objurgations from excursionists when they have missed the train. With a larch pole, the arm could be nailed on to point the proper way; but our Council would not be satisfied with anything that did not combine extravagance with inefficiency.

Inefficiency is said to be a sign of honesty in public bodies. When a public body is corrupt, the members take good care that everything is managed so efficiently that nobody would like to turn them out--they take no risks of losing a position that they find so profitable. On this hypothesis the Local Authorities in Devon cannot possibly be corrupt; and yet I sometimes feel a passing doubt when I see what schemes they sanction and what tenders they accept.

Corruption may be beneficial if it implies efficiency. The amount of money that is misappropriated will seldom be as much as would be muddled away by honest, inefficient men. We usually have some very able men in Devon, astute financiers whose abilities are thrown away in the routine of penal servitude on Dartmoor. We might entrust our Local Government affairs to them, not quite with a free hand, but with a reasonably laxity allowed in matters of finance.

Our present system of Local Government has the defects of bureaucracy without its merits. There are County Councils and District Councils and Parish Councils. These are elected by the ratepayers; and the people who are elected have not always got the necessary ability, and those who have the ability cannot always give the necessary time. The result is that the clerks and other officials have to do the Councils’ work, if it is going to be done at all; and they are not invariably the sort of men to whom such work would be entrusted. Under the bureaucratic system the Councils would be abolished and their work entrusted to officials of high standing, who would be qualified men; and they would do their best, as they would have full credit for successful work and be responsible if things went wrong. The officials have no such incentive now, as their acts are nominally the Councils’ acts, and they have neither credit nor blame.

With such administration it is not surprising that the rates in Bovey parish have risen to 8_s._ 10_d._ and 9_s._ 5_d._ in the £, or 18_s._ 3_d._ for the year--an inordinate sum for any rural parish. And no drastic reductions can be made now, as £1600 a year is required for interest and sinking-fund on loans, which will not be completely cleared till 1952. All the money that is squandered by the Councils is charged upon the rates; and nobody is ever punished for his blundering.

Take one case as a specimen of what is going on. A retaining-wall was being built, half a mile from here, under the direction of a District Council official. There was plenty of granite close at hand, but he was having stone of an inferior kind brought down there by steam lorries from a quarry nearly three miles off; and it came in lumps of insufficient size for a retaining wall. On seeing how the wall was being built, I wrote to say that it would certainly fall down, and the work had better be stopped, especially as there was scandalous waste of money in sending to a distance for inferior stone. But the work was carried on; and a few days after it was finished, the wall fell down exactly as I said it would. It was rebuilt in such a way that part of it will probably fall down again. The ratepayers are paying for the building of that wall and for its rebuilding, and the official goes scot free.

To take another case. Four years ago the District Council laid a water-main across some private property without complying with the forms prescribed by law; and as soon as it was laid, the owner told the Council to take it up, though it had cost about £240 to lay. He was within his rights; and he frightened the Council into an agreement to pay him a way-leave if he would allow it to remain, and to take it up if he gave six months’ notice. He has given notice and then withdrawn it on condition of the Council’s doing something for him which the Council was not really bound to do; and, so far as I can see, he may repeat the process as often as he likes. The ratepayers find the money for it all.

If a District Council needs a loan for carrying out large works, the plans and specifications and estimates have to be submitted to the Ministry of Health before the loan is sanctioned. In these matters the Ministry follows the practice of the old Local Government Board; and when a loan was needed for the Moreton sewage scheme, the Board sent down one of its inspectors. He held an inquiry at Moreton, and went over the ground; and he passed the plans and specifications containing the outrageous blunder I have mentioned. Hence the sewage fountain on the road.

In spite of all formalities, works are not always carried out according to the plans passed by the Ministry or Board. On the plans of the joint sewer here (Lustleigh and part of Bovey) there is a settling-tank for the sewage and an effluent to irrigate the fields below; but the tank has never been built, and raw sewage is run out upon the land. The tank appears upon the plans that were endorsed on the agreements with the landowners; and they can compel the Council to build it--at the ratepayers’ expense. The ratepayers imagined that the tank was there, and had been paid for from the loan the Board had sanctioned for carrying out the plans.

Amongst the works for giving Bovey more water (at a cost of upwards of £11,000) there are three horizontal shafts, or ‘adits,’ driven into Haytor down; and one of them is more than a quarter of a mile in length. The work was carried out in lavish style--these shafts remind me of the entrances to royal tombs that I have seen in Egypt. The water from the shafts must be quite pure; but water was also taken from an open stream that runs through Yarner wood, and may have dead rabbits and other unpleasant things in it; and this water goes into the same main without filtration. That being so, the shafts were hardly worth their cost. And although the water from them is so very pure, it is a little ‘sour’ (as moorland water often is) and therefore picks up lead in passing through lead pipes. As lead pipes have been laid, there is now a danger of lead-poisoning in Bovey, and so also in Lustleigh with its moorland water and lead pipes. And in both these places the lead pipes are in accordance with the plans and specifications passed by the Ministry of Health.

In the old days here, when drinking-water mostly came from wells, the population must have swallowed masses of unwholesome stuff. There is a well (now closed) in Lustleigh town-place just where the ground slopes downward from the churchyard to the Wrey. Here at Wreyland there is a well in front of the Hall House, now used for horses drinking at a trough, but formerly for all mankind. There were two pig-sties five yards from it and a third within ten yards; and it was on the lowest ground here, so that things would easily drain in. This house is higher up, but the well was on the lower side of it; and my grandfather had the present well sunk in 1839.

His well received great praise, as I am told. “Th’apothecary man come here and saith as he must anderize the well. And I saith, ‘Well, if you must, you must.’ And then he come again and saith, ‘I’ve anderized that well, and if you drink of that, you’ll live for ever.’” That was the substance of what he said, but not (I believe) the form in which he said it. People here are apt to put things in the form they would have used themselves. A lady of great dignity once noticed a donkey here, and remarked what a fine animal it was; and she was perturbed at hearing that the villagers were saying she had praised the animal in detail, ending up “and if there be one part of’n as I admire more than another, it be his rump.”

From time to time the County Council appoints a ‘rat-week’ for a general attack on rats. Rats have a good deal of sense: they abandon places where they are hunted down, and congregate in places where they are left alone. A rat-week frightens them away from these infested places; and in the following week there are more rats than can be managed in the places that were nearly free of them before. So a rat-week is rather a nuisance to anybody who has always kept rats down.