Raymond Cattell, who grew up in Torquay and was at one time, before moving to America and making his reputation as a world-leading psychologist, a teacher at Exeter University, published a book (1937) called Under Sail through Red Devon. I revisited his book to read what he had to say about Exeter. He clearly loved the city but he had one or two dry comments to make about it. viz:
"The accumulation of bovine intelligence has perhaps been going on in the Exeter region for centuries. In 1549 a great rabble of objectors to the new prayer book (who also believed that the 'gentry' wished to kill them, or grind the faces of the poor or wash them) swarmed around Exeter and laid siege to it. Foiled, they fetched sticks and barrels of gunpowder to the gates and set them alight; but their bonfires were so poorly constructed that the defenders were able to pour water on them and put them out. History relates that they were sent about their business; but when I look at Exeter to-day I think they must have got in after all."
and elsewhere:
"Its motto is 'ever faithful', not to Truth, Goodness and Beauty, to judge by its present repute, but to the Past. When William of Orange landed at Brixham, to the relief of all progressive opinion, and marched London-wards to replace the Stuarts, he was met at Exeter by the surliest suspician and ill-will. The Dean refused to see him, and the canons, in agreement, stayed away from his Te Deum service. Even forty years later they had barely got accustomed to a new idea, for no Exeter man seems to have accepted an invitation to the ball celebrating the king's birthday. Exeter is distinguished by having the world's narrowest street - Parliament Street, 27 inches wide: it runs the risk of having Britain's narrowest mind.."
Young Cattell liked his little jokes and he was no great historian but he was not the only one to point to the capital of Devon as a city of lost opportunities: and this was before the disastrous bombing of 1942 and the equally disastrous re-build.
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