SLANDER IN TOPSHAM, 1888.

In the year 1888 there lived at Topsham a villainous reprobate who spread falsehoods blackening the name of a young woman called Harriet Louisa Finch Pearce. Harriet was the daughter of a market gardener who lived on the High Street. She was thirty three and engaged to be married to a Topsham baker called Louis Ware.

The scandal was so foul that poor Harriet could find no better solution than to drown herself in the Estuary. She told her brother that rather than see her name in the paper she would 'make a hole in the water' but he could not believe that she was serious in her intention.

On the morning of June 18th she rose up early and this time told her brother she was off to Devonport because she could not bear to stay in Topsham to hear the awful scandal which had been circulated about her. Her journey that day should have been by way of the ferry across the Exe, there to catch the early train to Plymouth but events proved that Harriet had been planning a longer and a sadder journey.

A passing stranger found some of her clothes and jewellery on the public footpath opposite the stable yard of the Retreat. Later a fisherman called Edward Hall found her corpse below the summer house and brought her home.

'Touchstone' who in those days wrote up the local news for 'Trewman's Exeter Flying Post' reported as follows:

"The spirit of the poor young girl at Topsham who has gone down to her death will surely haunt those who started against her the foul slander which was the cause of her broken heart and unhinged reason. She was, as Shakespeare says:
'slandered to death by villains,...
boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops!'
I need scarcely say that I would not stand in the shoes nor feel the remorse of the individual who aspersed the good name and fame of Miss Pearce for all the gold that could be gathered together within the limits of the little town on the Exe."

Touchstone's 'only regret' was:

"that the name of the creeping snake in human form who first assailed her character should be kept from the eyes and ears of the outside public."

I don't think there are many young women in Topsham these days who would 'make a hole in the water' if they were libelled. More 'suing' than 'suicidal' perhaps. Nor these days are there many local reporters quoting from Shakespeare, more's the pity.

But shed a tear with me for unhappy Harriet Pearce!

SALMON HAULS

The Topsham names for the Exe salmon hauls, “salmoning holes”, are well documented by Sara Vernon in ‘Talking about Topsham.’ On page 99 there is even a chart of the Estuary mapping some of them. Bill Pym tells Sara Vernon:

“ These are the names of the salmoning holes, starting from Church Causee on the right hand side: West Mud, under the Drifters; The Bightway; Black Oar Mud; Ting Tong; The Cupboard just above the Turf; Jan’s Cove; Range Banks; Out Over the Neck; the Drain of the Neck; Scot’s Pool; Pool Mud; Canal Hard and down to the Warren.

Then if you start the other side, from Shapter Street and the Goat Walk, the first one is Withies Mud, then Black Oar Hard; The Reach; The Spit; The Nob; then Eastern Side; the Sands; the Hookers and down to Bull Hill.”

There’s poetry for you!

In ‘Devon Life’ for January 1979, some ten years before Sara Vernon’s book was first published, Marc Millon wrote about his day out with a salmon crew. The skipper is called Pym:

“Undaunted, the long net is regathered into the boat, and Pym heads further downstream, through the main channel to one of the many bends in the river where the salmon range – bends which have strange names centuries old – Black Ore , Ting Tong, the Spit, the Stile, In through the Mud, Out through the Drain, the Clock, and many others.”

Strange names indeed, but centuries old? That’s a guess. Some of them might yield to research. Scot and Jan and Withie would appear to be men's names. I doubt if the names of the hauls were ever written down before 1979 but would like to be proved wrong.

To me “Ting Tong” is the strangest name of all. There is of course the hamlet up on the commons near Budleigh Salterton. The name would seem to be ancient and to do with parliaments, but then it would have to be Danish, wouldn’t it?, and that seems unlikely..

When I was young and foolish I used to say that I hoped one day to live in one of the big houses at Ting Tong and rename it ‘Far Ting’.

I think I prefer Ore to Oar, but am not sure why. 'Black Haw' would make more sense, the Old English 'haw' being a fence, hedge or enclosure.

JOSIAH NISBET'S YACHT

The image is of a gallant, young, Josiah Nisbet more or less saving Horatio Nelson's life at Santa Cruz.

Yesterday my eye was caught by a memorandum concerning a yacht called the ‘blank’ and listed as No 13 and for the year 1818, in the Memoranda Book of the famous Topsham shipbuilder Daniel Bishop Davy, as published by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society’s Shipbuilding on the Exe, 1988, with an introduction by Clive N Ponsford. Mr Davy had written:

“A yacht built at Topsham called the [blank] for Captn Nesbitt R.N. of Exmouth, composed by myself. She was a foot to(o) narrow and a foot to(o) low to have any accommodations. She was a very good model but very sharp. She had an alteration from the drawing which was a quarter deck aft 18 inches higher then [than] the other part of the deck & 8 feet long from the fore part of the stern post.”

Then are listed the measurements which would seem to indicate that she was a thirtyfooter with a ten foot beam and a mast height of thirty foot and with six foot depth in the hold.

The connection that sprang to my mind, and I like to think no one else has spotted it, is that this is the yacht of Josiah Nisbet, Nelson’s stepson, who is buried at Littleham and who regularly sailed to France out of Exmouth in his own boat, sometimes, ‘accommodations’ or not, taking his wife, Fanny, with him. Irregular spellings, of course, were commonplace in the Age of Orthographic Chaos.

So, at Topsham in 1818 was built a yacht for Lady Nelson’s son. Is this a significant footnote to history? Well, maybe not. But I am still feeling pleased with myself and, if they don’t know already, I shall let the armies of Nelson scholars know about it.

MR TROUT'S BITTEL

Daniel Charles Trout was the Harbour Master at Topsham Quay from 1902 to 1918. In May, 1918 he fell to his death while working in the hold of a three masted schooner. In the words of his grandson, Daniel, as recorded by Sara Vernon in the nineteen-eighties, “he was killed alongside the Quay, fitting new beams into the Leader, standing on a twelve-inch wide beam to drive the top one in with a bittle. They think there must have been a bit of rope hanging out over and it hitched in the bittle so that he lost his balance and fell six feet and broke his back. He died twenty-four hours later.”

Jim Voysey, then eleven years old, witnessed this tragedy. He remembered walking home from school on that fatal day with Daniel’s son Les, and seeing the broken man being carried from the hold. They were “bringing him in on a plank of wood.”

‘Bittle’ ,or perhaps better ‘bittel’, is another word of the Estuary not to be found in dictionaries and in danger of being lost. It means a wooden mallet. Standard English has the word as ‘beetle’ but this kind of beetle is a rare species. A few trades still recognise beetles and the tautologous ‘beetle mallet’ but the word ‘bittel’ was until recently the preferred word for a mallet in these parts.

Shakespeare uses ‘beetle’ once, but only once: “fillip me with a three man beetle.” exclaims Falstaff. And the groundlings would have laughed at the image of that great tun of a man on his back and being battered by the Elizabethan equivalent to a tamping rammer! But the Devon word is more recognisably descended from a standard Anglo Saxon word for hammer, bītel. As so often, the Devon word more closely echoes the meanings and the language of the Old English.

The Leader ended up, like many another vessel, stranded and left to rot in the mud on the far side of the river from Topsham. Some think of her as being Daniel Charles Trout’s memorial.

THE VIEW FROM TOPSHAM CHURCHYARD

The writer, George Gissing, "poor harassed George Gissing, who had so little peace in his life" Professor Hoskins called him, came to live in Exeter from 1891 to 1893. He used to walk to Topsham from Exeter and he wrote of his feeling for the churchyard view in the largely autobiographical The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

"A whole day's walk yesterday with no plan; just a long ramble of hour after hour, entirely enjoyable. It ended at Topsham, where I sat on the little churchyard terrace, and watched the evening tide come up the broad estuary. I have a great liking for Topsham, and that churchyard, overlooking what is not quite sea, yet more than river, is one of the most restful spots I know. Of course the association with old Chaucer who speaks of Topsham sailors, helps my mood."

The joke about this last sentence is that Chaucer never gave Topsham so much as a mention. George Gissing is thinking of the Shipman who hailed from Dartmouth. But neither Chaucer nor George would have minded. George was all for careless writing "scribbled as fast as pen could go." and with "the zest of life."

Professor Hoskins also enjoyed this view, "The view from the churchyard, set on a small cliff overhanging the river, is incomparably beautiful when the evening tide is coming in."

And I, Wayland Wordsmith, have loved it too, ebb and flow. When, in the sixties, we lived behind the Post Office in Topsham it was good for the soul to wander over to the churchyard in the evening and watch the sun set.

And there is a fine old wall to lean on.

ROMANS

A good century after Julius Caesar came to Britain the Romans came to the Estuary.

The legate,Titus Flavius Vespasianus aka Vespasian, whose legions maybe invested and captured Exeter in AD50, went on to be a Roman emperor and a good one too. Barbara Levick has written a biography of him, (Vespasian, Routledge, 2005) in which she writes that the campaign to conquer the South West was, "a combined land and sea operation with the troops being supplied by the fleet at such bases as Hamworthy in Poole Harbour and Topsham on the Exe."

If Dr Levick is right the Roman fleet, the Classis Britannica, was sailing, or rowing, up and down the Estuary from the earliest days of the conquest and Topsham was visited by Romans perhaps even before Exeter had been besieged. For three hundred and fifty years or so after this, Roman ships came and went to and from Topsham.

From the beginning Roman ships' captains must have needed pilots to guide them in and around the banks and channels of the Exe. By chance in York there survives an altar inscription that shows that a high ranking river pilot, gubernator, was employed by the VI Legion to bring ships up the Humber and the Ouse and no doubt the legions at Exeter too would have employed pilots to ensure that precious supplies reached the army.

At the time of Caesar's invasion the ships of the Roman fleet were famously ignorant of the movement of the tides. But by the time Roman ships were navigating the Exe they had probably got the hang of things.

EXMOUTH CARGOES

The Estuary port of Exmouth was busy in the year 1814. Below are listed just some of the cargoes reported in the Exeter Flying Post that were unladen in the spring of that year.

From Newport,coals; from Liverpool,salt; from London and Bristol,groceries ; from Teignmouth, slate and pipe clay; from Neath, culm; from Plymouth old junk; from Guernsey,cork and passengers; from Milford, stone; from Stockholm, deals and pitch tar; from Oporto, wine; from Lisbon, bale goods; from Portsmouth, potatoes; from Bridport, timber; from Portland, household furniture. And more, much more!

Culm, as well as being the river on which Culompton stands, is a second rate coal. Junk is old rope, the hemp to be reworked, not smoked! Each of these many cargoes argues a business enterprise. And imagine, O glory, the tarry crews ashore!: the proud captains and the happygolucky sailors, Scots and Welshmen, Spaniards and Swedes. Not too many Frenchmen and Americans because we were still at war with them. Most of the ships that came to Exmouth sailed in convoy under the protection of the Royal Navy's gun brigs and therefore arrived in port at much the same time. The harbour must have been a lively, busy place with tall ships jostling for a place to land their cargoes.

Meanwhile at Topsham on 27th April 1814, Mr Pridham informed the nobility, gentry and others that his TEPID and COLD sea baths were ready for their Accommodation, and that he had the addition of a Pump, for such as required Warm or Cold bathing.

Now what was all that about? Rolling about in Topsham mud? Ugh!

CELIA FIENNES GLIMPSES STARCROSS

Celia Fiennes who famously travelled side-saddle throughout England in the seventeenth century had a glimpse of the Estuary in the year 1698. She was thirty-six and had been travelling and writing the account of her travels for some thirteen years already. Celia had stayed with friends in Exeter and had noted how the Exonians slew the leaping salmon on the river there with spears. I suspect that this already seemed to her to be archaic but in fact fishing spears were still being used in the estuaries well into the nineteenth century.

From Exeter she went to Topsham, “which is a little market place a very good key; hither they (the Exonians) convey their serges and so load their shipps which comes to this place all for London, thence I saw Starre Cross where the great shipps ride and there they build shipps, this was up the river, 5 or 6 miles up the river, but the tide being out could not goe and it was ten mile by land and their miles are soe long here I would not goe it, seeing almost as well the shipps that lay there as if at the place.”

What a heroine was Celia! She may not have known her uprivers from her downrivers but she was a noble noblewoman nonetheless.