Memories of the Victorian Parish

In 1925 Fred C. White, a local writer, wrote an account of his childhood memories of St David’s parish entitled SOME FEW YEARS AGO. In it he mentions the sinking of SS Primrose Hill in 1900 with the loss of all but one crew member. White refers to his childhood friend, Herbert Huggins, whose family lived at Elmside in St David’s and was fifteen years old when he drowned.

White also mentions Reverend Cyril John Valpy French who was the vicar of St David’s from 1894 until his death in 1914. Described as of `a charming, genial disposition’, French was instrumental in the erection of a new parish church.

‘Fortunate was I, as a boy, in having two playing centres, each of which I was equally at my ease. One, as my friendly readers know already was St Thomas. The other was St David’s. There lived my cousins, the Strangs. Bob Strang, an only son, was my senior by but four years, and was a real sport as a playmate.

Very young indeed, I must have when, on one occasion, having stolen away visit Bob, and seeking entrance by the back entrance to his house, somehow got to that of the Eland’s house, and was inveigled into joining in the games of the sons of that family.

Every town possesses, in some sort, a soul, and sometimes a district of a town has a soul of its own. Certainly St Thomas had, as had St David’s. It is an indefinable something.

All roads lead to Rome, and many lead to St David’s, and I became conscious of being within the scope of the soul of St David’s on reaching Exe-street in Bonhay Road, on turning out of Bartholomew Street to go down towards the Iron Bridge, on passing the Victoria Hall in Queen Street to go on to Richmond Road, or on going from Bonhay Road up the steps and along the steepish pathway cut across the hillside by which one reached the closed-up end of Haldon Road, or, continuing, passed the Episcopal School and came out into the road leading to St Michael Church.

To vary the routes by which I reached St David’s was a thing that gave me joy, but by whatever route I came I loved being there. If I came by the Bonhay Road end of Haldon Road, as likely as not I should meet either the Huggins boys, Mr Samuel Steer’s youngest son or Arthur Hewish, for all of whom I cared for greatly.

There were two little Huggins boys and their big brother, I remember my mother telling of her having seen the big one at a dance, where someone asked him in her hearing what he intended to be. He was a slim, fair boy, innocent as the dawn, and laughingly, proudly, how well I could visualise him! He said he was going to be a middy and wear gold buttons, which latter touch was a characteristic one. Poor kid! he realised the ambition of his heart, after all, only to go down in the wreck of the Primrose Hill.

When I read the details of that calamity I endured all the terror that was his at the last. For I knew him as well as he knew himself, perhaps. And because I liked him, I was fond of teasing him, in that way by which some boys mask their regard for others. But never a teasing word should he have had from me had I sensed the fate towards which his smiling face was set, all unknowingly.

Yet I am sure that, in the nurseries of Heaven, dozens of adventure-loving young souls clustered around him when he was ushered in to introduce himself. He’d have dispensed with formal introduction, and have won instantly a place in the affections of his new-found friends. No one who knew him could doubt that.

In Richmond Road there was Jimmy Carpenter, happy as a skylark. Somehow I associate him specially with the winter season, and see him in my mind’s eye briskly, merrily, keeping the pot a-boiling over as fine a slide as mortal boy ever came a cropper on, along the sloping pavement between the Devon and Exeter Institution for the Blind and Haldon Road. Jimmy and other boys often invaded the back garden of the Strang home, and rare old larks we had there!

Ambrose Gauntlett was another boy who was in with us; whilst, on my own account, I knew Aubrey Brown and Wilfred Dark, and every boy worth knowing who played in Bury Meadow.

Getting away for a moment or two from my subject, through the mention of the Devon and Exeter Institution for the Blind, I may say that when I am in North Devon on my annual holiday I usually have a little talk with one of the former pupils of that wonderful training place—Georgina Avery, of Bideford, whose aged mother I had the happiness of visiting there a few weeks before her death three years ago and at Barnstaple called to see another blind woman, Janie Hawking , to whom, last year, I read Jan Stewer’s account of Maria Mudge’s journey to London to see the ole Wembley. These two good, cheerful blind folk are known far and wide.

When first knew St David’s the old parish church was standing, indeed, I believe it stood at the time my grandmother was buried in the churchyard by the Rev. J. Valpy French, as great and fine a Christian man as ever graced Exeter. While it was there, too, I was in the churchyard one Sunday morning with my father looking at a large memorial which had been put in memory of the previous Rector, the Reverend W. H. Toye, when we saw also two of the oldest inhabitants of the parish, one of whom gravely informed the other that that there stone weighed many sutt! Young I was I knew at once that this was the old man’s pronunciation of the abbreviation cwt.

As curate, Mr Valpy French was privileged to have as white-souled a young being as could well be imagined in Mr Tudor.

With his fair, open, smile-lit countenance, and the flaxen curly hair above it, somehow I thought of him as an angel rather than a man. He would, in fact, have made an ideal subject for the brush of Fra Angelico, and it was not his to abide for a long space of time, in hac lacrimarum valle [in this valley of tears]. His hand often caressed my head, and on one occasion, in the Exe Street schoolroom, when an audience was awaiting the arrival of the lecturer for the evening, who was, I fancy, Harbottle Reed, he persuaded my young steps to the platform, there to charm the imagination of the assembled parishioners by recounting the deathless story of how Horatius kept the bridge!

Better would it have pleased me to recite The Building of St Sophia a piece which the boys in the higher standards at Mint Wesleyan School were learning at the time; but only chance lines of it did I know, and strange to say have never come across that appealing in print, and have failed to trace its author.

Exactly when it was, I don’t know, but St David’s, and Exeter in general, never was at so great an advantage as in that year when [in 1897], on the actual site, was raised a replica of the old North Gate, whilst all the other gates of the city again took form and substance, though the latter was not of so lasting a kind as the original gates had possessed. The occasion moved me deeply, and I acquired an almost complete acquaintance with all the past history of Exeter, living it all over in the pages of Exeter’s historians.

I had loved St David’s and the whole city before; ever afterwards I venerated them, for their colourful past had become to me a thing with which could hardly have been more intimate had I lived right through it century by century.

For St David’s, too, had its history, as well as the city within the walls. It was a parish by about the year 1400, it would seem. St Thomas’s Church may have been older, but it was merely a church to meet the needs of a scattered district and was served by the monks of Cowick Priory’.