A "WEY GOOSE", EXETER, 1841.

We learn from The Western Times of 26th September, 1841, that a Miss Channing was the mistress of a tobacco-pipe manufactory in Exeter.   She employed a number of girls at her manufactory one of whom was "a young woman called Hookins".

One Monday morning Hookins , The Times grants her no further name or title, did not turn up for work and her absence continued.    Miss Channing had a "written agreement" which bound Hookins to her bench.  She was brought before the magistrates at the Exeter Guildhall charged with  "neglecting her work and leaving it in an unfinished state". 

Poor Hookins tried to defend herself.  She denied having made the "written agreement".  She claimed she was bullied by the other girls and then:

"The next reason appeared  a much more plausible one - namely that they had had a 'Wey Goose' on the previous Saturday night and had kept up the jollifications to a late hour, or rather an early one the next morning - the consequence of which was that the lady's 'coppers' were rather hot and she had recourse to the usual means of cooling them by a drain of 'the dew of the valley' or 'Prince Albert's own' vulgarly called gin.

"Mr Blackall advised her to go back to work immediately, But the effects of her libations did not appear to have left her yet, for with a most outrageously squinting twinkle of the eye, she insisted she would not and would rather go to prison.

"'Very well' said Mr.Barton 'we'll endeavour to accommodate you that way - how long would you like to go for?'

"'As long as you please, sir - I'd rather stay in prison altogether than go back there again - if I wouldn't I'm blessed!'

"In kind compliance with her desires the Bench sentenced her to a fortnight's imprisonment.  She was walked off by the officers but scarcely had they got her to the bottom of the stairs before the lady's valour had evaporated and springing away from the grasp of the officers she darted upstairs to lay her recantation before the Bench; but to her great mortification, the door of justice was closed in her face.

"She was recaptured by the officers, and marched off in a more penitent mood to her solitary quarters in the city prison, where the glorious associations of a 'wey goose' were, alas! never understood or dreamt of."

*

A travesty, it seems to me, of justice.  But neither the Court nor the newspaper had any sympathy for the pathetic Hookins,  hung-over, bullied, no doubt over-worked and, it might seem, with a bit of a squint.

The popular names for gin, 'dew of the valley' and 'Prince Albert's own'  are intriguing.  Did the Prince Regent have a penchant fot gin?

"Wey Goose" is these days usually written "way-goose" but there are several variations.  It is said to derive from a Dutch word  meaning a road-house and thence a jubilation.   It might well have come to Devon with the Dutch traders who landed at Topsham and other ports.  It was one of those many popular terms which came from Britain but which are now more common in her sometime colonies, America, Australia &c. 

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."

*

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.

 

HUNTING IN HAPPY HEAVITREE, 1841

 "On Saturday last Mr. R. Cockburn's hounds met at Sandy Gate, at half past ten,, when many of the knowing ones who were let into the secret, were on the qui vive.  The dogs were soon in Mr Salter's brakes, and the music of the full-toned hounds gave notice of what we might expect if we looked sharp out - and so it was, for Reynard, after dodging about the furze, made a bolt through the fir plantation, up the quarry lane by Mr Tuckett's farm, in a line to Heavitree Church, as if he were about to take sanctuary, but finding his friends too close at his heels, he made towards Mr Yard's, and there we were at fault, we thought he was gone to the Tanner's to change his coat, but shortly, after he was discovered crossing the gardens, thence over to Mr. Eardley's chapel to Miss Blunt's gate - finding that shut he went away into the adjoining garden where the hounds fresh found him.  He seemed so  taken with the happy village of Heavitree, as to be determined to end his days therein for he scampered away across the church path to Mr.Swale's to the great amazement of the villagiers;  the dogs were close to his brush, ands he once again reached his brake, but with all the appearance of having had more to do than he had anticipated on his first set out from home, which he never again quitted, the dogs having mawled him at the end of the brake."

*

I find it odd that this report from The Western Times of 10th April, 1841 makes no mention of horses leaping over gates or horsemen falling off and breaking their bones or whatever.  Presumably there were  horses galloping in and out of the gardens of the happy village of Heavitree in 1841.  In any case the sporting citizens of Exeter, the 'knowing ones', our hunting fathers, did not have far to go to watch the unspeakable pursuing the uneatable.

What an amazing contrast can be sensed between the spirit of community that is here and the anonymity of our modern life.   Mr. Cockburn and the Salters,  Mr. Tuckett a farmer, Mr. Yard,  Tanner, a tailor?, Mr Eardley, a dissenting minister, dear Miss Blunt,  Mr. Swale, Uncle Tom Cobley and all:  all  (okay, except the last!) have their names casually dropped with the assumption, it seems, that much of the readership, in the city and in towns and villages other than Heavitree, might have some acquaintance with these neighbours.

Mauled, spelled above with a w, - a typo I imagine, as with villagiers, is the just word,  The dogs would have smashed the fox as with a mallet,  not, as the word tends to mean nowadays, leaving the job half finished.   

 

"CHUGGY," EXETER, 1841.

 The Exeter Flying Post for 8th April 1841 reported how, at the Guildhall in Exeter a master-butcher, Mr. Slocombe sought damages for assault from a butcher's assistant called Lang.  The assault had occured at the slaughter house.   Mr Slocombe was leading two calves to their doom and Lang, who was butchering a pig, was blocking his way.

Lang, "not removing  when requested to do so, Mr. Slocombe capsized chuggy and the whole concern.  Enraged at which Lang struck and abused him.  

"William Palmer, a witness, said, 'I saw Lang strike Mr. Slocombe twice.'  On which Lang rejoined, 'I'll bring a witness to prove you were out of sight when I did strike him.' - This admission, of course, put the assault out of all question; and Mr. George Manning, and Mr James Spark, who were called on the part of Lang, could only speak to mitigatory circumstances.   These, however, so operated  that Lang was fined 1s. only, and expenses, making  4s. in all."  

*

I am fascinated how scrupulously The Post, here and in general, finds the epiphet 'Mr.' for 'respectable' citizens like this master-butcher, and omits it for base mechanics like the not-very-bright butcher's assistant, Lang.

 Clearly the readers of the newspaper were expected to recognise this pig under the name 'chuggy'.   I have as yet found no other chuggies.

Chuggypig or chuffypig is a south--west dialect name for the wood-louse and wood-lice look uncannily like pigs if you look them in the snout.  Of the eighty or so 'country' names for woodlice many have a piggy connection.