THE ACCOLADE

It's great to have a pat on the back every now and again. Last year I discovered the passage below in a book, Channel Shore, written by the bestselling author, Tom Fort, and published by Simon and Schuster in 2015. It pleased me too much not to blog it. In the family we call it the Accolade.

“There is a fine chronicler of Exmouth and its estuary who calls himself Wayland Wordsmith. I have no idea who he is – except that he is a poet, a historian, an antiquary of the old kind, a sailor, a fisherman, an explorer, a lingerer over sunsets and dawns, a fierce enemy of the enemies of his town, a philosopher and a gifted writer of a terrific blog. From it I gather that he is around my age, early sixties; that he used to do some netting for salmon when there were still enough salmon seeking the Exe to make it worthwhile; that he has a boat and a family; that he spends a good deal of his time hunting out arcane stories and nuggets of information from piles of old newspapers and books. I confess that I have borrowed freely from him, and without shame, because I am pretty confident he won’t mind. I’d like to meet him and tell him what a debt I owe him.”

Tom Fort got most things right although maybe he overdid the compliments and I am a decade older than he thinks. He, and anybody else, is always welcome to borrow from the blog. I'm working up the courage to contact him and tell him that the debt is all mine.

DEATH IN THE PRIME OF YOUTH: OFF SIDMOUTH 1817.

This blog intends primarily to concern itself with tales of the coast, the estuary, boats ,ships, sailors, fishermen and sea creatures.  There are now over 300 posts published.  For some years, largely out of idleness but for other personal reasons, I have stopped digging for items of interest,  I have resolved to be somewhat more productive this year.  In 2013, I left the busy village of Lympstone and the Exe Estuary where there is a wealth of salty history and where I had lived for fifty years.  Now I find myself in a quiet hamlet half a mile from the sea.  It is more difficult to find 'copy' in these parts but I have only recently made some effort.  It therefore pleased me to find this record of a midshipman of the Royal Navy who drowned off Sidmouth, not that I was pleased to think of his untimely death.

There is a white memorial tablet framed in black to him in Saint Gregory's church, Seaton.   His story is soon told.  His name was William Henry Paulson  and he was a midshipman aboard HMS Queen Charlotte but on 13th June 1817 he was commanding a galley with eight men with orders to cruise 'for the prevention of smuggling.'   A 'galley' in Navy parlance, if it is not the place where you get a square meal, is an open boat like a whaler, rowed by, usually I think, six men.   Given a big enough sea such boats can fill and sink.  Henry William Paulson met with a gale, the boat turned over and all nine were drowned.  The men were all volunteers and presumably local men.  They, as one might expect, seem to be nameless and have no memorial,. Their 'commander' was only twenty-two years old.

There is a verse, better than many, on his memorial which reads;

'Twas God's high will that in the prime of Youth
The hand of Death should whelm him in the wave.
His will be done but know the eternal truth,
Redeeming Mercy triumphs o'er  the Grave."

I like the word 'whelm'.  It is one of Shakespeare's words.  In The Merry Wives of Windsor,  Pistol says, of Mistress Quickly, "She is my prize, or ocean whelm them all!"   At twenty-two, poor, lost William Henry Paulson was quite old for a midshipman.  He was probably worrying about examinations and promotion when his cruise for the prevention of smuggling put an end to all that.

A MAN CALLED TRUMP

The, as from tomorrow, president of the United States, is said to be a Scottish Trump and, therefore nor likely to be related to the East Devon Trumps.  (Well, it would seem I got that wrong.  It was Donald.s mum who was Scottish.  Someone said on radio today that his grandfather was a German,  a Trumpf perhaps!!)   'Trumps' was the fine old grocer's in Sidmouth which, when it closed in September 2014 was two hundred years old and said to be the oldest in the country and the Trump of this blog was probably related to him, her or them.

My source for this story is the diary of the wonderful Sidmouth antiquary, Peter Orlando Hutchinson  (1810 - 1897) as recorded in a fine book called "Travels in Victorian Devon" compiled by Jeremy Butler and published by Devon Books in 2000.   In 1869 Hutchinson wrote:

"There used to be (and still is) a tradition that a man called Trump found a crock of gold many years ago when ploughing a field between the pound and Trow, but his nephew some decime or duodecime of years ago laughed at the story when I told him I had heard so, and assured me his uncle made his money in other ways."

Trow, for those who do not know it,  is the name given to a house or two and, close-by a farmhouse just inland from Weston Mouth.  These days the old farmhouse is part of the famous Donkey Sanctuary.

'Decime' and 'duodecime' are lovely words are they not?   (They don't appear in any of my dictionaries) with the meaning 'ten and twelve years.'

So the 'crock of gold' was found some years before 1859 which puts it fairly into the age of smuggling.  If, as I suspect,  Farmer Trump was using Trow Farm to store smuggled goods and telling the tale of the crock of gold to account for his making too much money from that moonlight trade, the story makes sense.   No wonder then that his nephew laughed.

This is of course a fancy with no evidence to back it up but I have read elsewhere (I don't have the source) that Trow Farm was for a long time said to be haunted and that this tale was put about by the smugglers to keep good people away from it at night.   It would seem, perhaps that Mr Trump and  the Weston Mouth smugglers were prepared to tell fibs to achieve their ends.

Which perhaps brings us back to the President Elect of the United States.