MUCK TURTLE SOUP, EXETER, 1841

"The Right Worshipful the Mayor, Sir W. W, Follett, and a select party dined with W.H.Furlong, Esq., on Friday last, at his residence on Northernhay.

"A sad mishap occurred in relation to this dinner.  Billy Nokes was carrying a jug of turtle soup, going carelessly along as boys will, and when he came up to the New Dispensary, of which Mr. Furlong is Vice President, he tripped against a stone, fell, and spilled the soup,   

"He was in a terrible state of consternation, roared as if he had broke his leg. One of the Town Councillors happening to be passing enquired the cause of his grief.  He said he'd broke 'Turney Furlong's pitcher of turtle soup - twelve shillings worth.'

"The boy was inconsolable at first, but reflecting that crying would not create more soup, he gathered up the force-meat balls in one of the shards, and going to an itinerant pieman who was very fortunately at hand for gravy, they soon compounded some muck turtle out of the dregs but what he did with it we have not learned."

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And did his Worshipful the Mayor and W.W. Follet, Exeter's MP and Her Majesty's Attorney General, and Turney (Attorney) Furlong eat Billy Nokes' muck turtle soup?   I'd like to think so.

12 shillings in1841 would have been two days wages for a skilled worker and therefore equates to at least £250  today.  I have the impression that the 'itinerant pieman' supplied Billy Nokes with the gravy gratis and for the fun of it.

The New Dispensary had not yet been completed but the foundation stone bearing Mr Furlong's name had been laid.  It is now the 'music centre' of Exeter College where young people learn to play guitars  and perhaps , but I do not see them, other instruments.  Mr Furlong's house would have been the old Northernhay House.  The only 'residence' on Northernhay' these days is mine. 

I note that the inscription-stone  of this sometime Dispensary, where once doctors cared heroically for the city's cholera and fever patients,  has been overpainted by Exeter College and is now barely legible.   I suspect that the respect of this educational establishment for Exeter's history is on a par with its music centre's respect for, let us say, J. S. Bach..

Source: The Western Times,  18th September , 1841.

"THE SAILOR LASSEY", BRIXHAM, 1841.

Brixham is a long haul from Exeter but this curious and thought-provoking report in The Exeter Flying Post of  22nd July, 1841, surely deserves to be remembered.  I hope young Ellen Watts found  joy in her later life and I subscribe her story without further comment:

"A considerable degree of excitement was caused last week in the town of Brixham, by the discovery of a female sailor, on board one of the trawler boats, in which capacity she had been employed for some time with much credit, and in which she would have continued but for the exposé which discovered her sex.

"It appears she was left an orphan, and was bound an apprentice to a farmer, whom she served as an out-door male-servant; before her term expired, she determined to leave the plough to plough the deep, and having dressed herself in a deceased brother's clothes, who had been unfortunately drowned, she entered on board a trawling sloop as an apprentice, to serve three years; she performed her duty manfully, enduring all the privations of such a precarious calling with a degree of hardihood and recklessness necessary to such a life, and her exertions were such as to cause a degee of envy in the other lads.

"On Sunday last she accompanied two lasses to a fruit garden where she treated them, behaving with all the gallantry imaginable; there  a tailor who was enjoying his otium, attempted to interfere with our hero's girls;  the sailor boy resented it, high words ensued and blows followed; Snip showed fight like a man, while the pretended sailor was no less active, but alas fortune does not always favour the brave; the tailor was too much for his opponent, and the sailor lassey was so beaten that she was obliged to give in, and on several persons coming around her, her sex was discovered, to the great surprise of every one, the tailor not excepted.

"She is now dressed in apparel more becoming her sex:  she is an interesting and rather good looking girl.  The reason she states for adopting her late mode of life, was that she could enjoy more freedom than in domestic servitude.

"She is sixteen years  of age, and her name is Ellen Watts; she adopted the name of Charles Watts, and stated that she was a native of Plymouth.

A CART-AND-CARRIAGE-CHASE, NEAR NEWTON ST. CYRES, 1841.

 The Exeter Flying Post of June 24th, 1841" reported:

"On the evening of the 12th inst as the Hon. Newton Fellowes was on his return to the city to his seat at Eggesford; when near Newton St. Cyres, he met a farmer's boy driving an empty cart at a very furious rate.

"Although the hon. gentleman had ladies with him, he turned his carriage, gave chase to , and, after pursuing hem some distance, took the offender into custody; and bringing him to the Magistrates' Clerk, at Crediton, convicted him on his own view, and fined him £2.

"The most serious accidents are constantly occurring from the wild and furious manner in which empty vehicles of all descriptions are driven on our roads." 

*

One of the joys of reading stories in old newspapers is that one can label people as goodies ot baddies to one's own satisfaction without much thought and without further ado.   One can take sides.   In this case the Hon. Newton Fellowes, who was only a couple of weeks off his 69th birthday, is, for me, a vicious old aristocrat with no  sense of humour and I rate the farmer's boy as an unfortunate lad who must have suffered from being so strangely pursued and judged and fined.

I should have liked to have been an observer when this cart-and-carriage-chase took place. 

It seems to me that the Hon. Newton Fellowes sweating his horses, and with ladies aboard, in pursuit of a happy farmer's boy was the more irresponsible of the two speed-hogs.   And then for the old man to judge the case 'on his own view' seems to me to have been a travesty of justice.

It is no surprise, however, that The Flying Post found the actions of Newton Fellowes to be altogether in the public interest. 

Some twelve years after this incident the Hon, Newton Fellowes, politician and an 'energetic supporter of Liberal policies' succeeded to the peerage as the 4th Earl of Portsmouth  but had only a few weeks of life to enjoy being an earl.  

  

PLUMPERS AND HIRELINGS, EXETER, 1841.

Mr. Edward Divett was a Radical Member of Parliament for Exeter from 1832 until his death in 1864.  

The description below, from The Western Times of  June 1841, is of one of a great many meetings, often in poblic houses, that took place in the lead up to the Election of that year:

"On Tuesday evening, at eight o' clock, another large meeting took place at the Black Dog Inn, North Street, which was addressed by Mr. Divett, and Mr. Wilkinson, at great length.

"The meeting was disturbed by the presence of some of the drunken hirelings of the tories, who, having swilled of beer to repletion, came there for the purpose of indulging their swinish propensities with a few groans and grunts.

"Mr. Wilkinson happily told them to groan away, for theirs was a 'groaning cause.'  The insulting behaviour of these fellows was met with perfect good humour,  and their object being thus defeated, they soon after slunk away. 

"The meeting then proceeded with perfect harmony, and terminated amidst the enthusiastic cheering of the whole assemblage."

This was the same election in which Mr Jorrocks (R.S. Surtees,  Hillingdon Hall) was elected to Parliament.  In Exeter the run-up to the voting seems to have been carried on with the same vigour and with similar machinations to those that were practiced in Hillingdon.

The Liberals/Radicals looked for support to the many teetotalers and to those citizens who did not swill beer to repletion,  hence, perhaps the emphasis here on the swinish propensites of the tory hirelings who  disturbed the meeting at the Black Dog Inn.

At The Victory in St Sidwell's, it was reported in this same newspaper article, "a number of plumpers for Mr. Divett assembled."  Now there's a nice word for you!  A plumper was a voter who, in multiple elections - which this was -  gave his vote to only one candidate, thus increasing the chance of his election.