The trouble with history.....

The trouble with history is that it is infectious. Contagious. Bloody dangerous (this is not a descent into gratuitous swearing, history is often bloody and frequently dangerous). Like MRSA or Clostridium difficile you can catch history from almost anything. People you meet shed history like dandruff and history leaches out of old stone walls and blackened brickwork by some strange and powerful osmotic force. It will get us all eventually: history will have me and history will have you.

Only the other day I had occasion to visit someone in our church and I brushed against a large slate sarcophagus on my way in. I paused to take a photograph of the offending object, and in that brief moment I must have been infected. By the time I got home, sepsis had set in and I just had to download the photograph and set about transcribing the inscription.

"In memory of Mr Thomas Calvert, late of this parish who, in the year 1746, first introduced into this church four part psalmody and with indefatigable pains and perseverance not only encouraged but in a great measure supported it with great reputation upwards of 30 years. He was an honest man, a kind master, a sincere friend and a good Christian. He departed this life in Plymouth, June 3rd 1781 in the 71st year of his age".

The problem with an inscription like this is that there is enough intrigue in it to keep you blogging for ages. Who was Thomas Calvert? What was his role in the church? What was four part psalmody? What caused him such pain and needed perseverance? The questions become what the microbiologists call systemic. They take over your being and they dominate your life. Like an intellectual tsunami they wash away all other thoughts.

I have begun to gather answers: Thomas did not die in Plymouth but in St Germans; he married Honour Stacey in our church in 1745 and I have an inkling that I may be able to get hold of a copy of his will. But the fever that is history has a long way to go before it burns itself out. In the meantime my hair is unbrushed, my dog is unwashed, my fish are unfed and my next blog post is unwritten. That's what history does to you.

Tale of a Cornish shipwreck

Taking a break from solving the UK's political problems, my ITC and I headed down west to meet up with some friends at Mylor Quay. One of them has a small yacht and we were treated to some sailing in the Carrick Roads stretch of the Fal Estuary. The weather was excellent and it was rather pleasant skimming gently over the nicely calm water.

Back on land we took the opportunity to visit the nearby parish church dedicated to St Melorus. An interesting Norman building, with its original door still in place, but we couldn't really get to grips with the inside because everywhere was bedecked with the products of the Falmouth Quilters' Group. They made for a very colourful interior and, whilst I can admire the undoubted skill that was on display, I was disappointed that what I really wanted to see was obscured. Fancy moaning about something like that: I really can be a miserable old git, can't I?

However, all was forgiven when, as we wandered amongst the headstones in the graveyard, we came across a fascinating memorial. Underneath a rather dramatic carving of a shipwreck is the inscription:

To the Memory of the

WARRIORS
Women and Children
who on their return to England
from the Coast of Spain
unhappily perished
in the wreck of the
Queen Transport
on Trefusis Point Jan 14 1814
This stone is erected as a Testimony
of regret for their fate
by the inhabitants of this Parish

We immediately thought "What was the story behind this memorial?" Back home and after a little Googling, all was revealed. The Queen was one of the many transport ships bringing home Wellington's troops (and camp followers) as the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal was coming to an end. She had been moored off Mylor for several days when an atrocious storm blew up and she sunk off Trefusis Point in the resultant high seas. About 360 men (principally invalids of the Artillery), women and children were on board and only 100 were saved. The disaster was widely reported in 1814 and has, apparently, been regularly retold ever since with varying degrees of accuracy and embellishment. There are tales of the looting of corpses and suspicions of incompetence counterbalanced by tales of the compassion of the local community.  It's a story well worth reading about and a detailed investigation has been recently published by the National Maritime Museum of Cornwall. It's entitled "In Search of the Queen Transport" and was written by Sue Kruk.  It can be downloaded from this link. 

 

It's amazing what you can come across when you wander around the land of the dead.

 

There's a slow train coming...............

I am in the process of (slowly, oh, how slowly) writing a book about the servicemen who died in WW1 and who are listed on our local War Memorial. Attempting to track down a relative of one who had worked on our nearest railway line in the early 1900s, I did the obvious and Googled under a number of railway relevant terms. Hooray! I found what I was looking for - eventually and after some smugly satisfying lateral thinking. Having been successful, I rewarded myself with a rummage in the 'Related Items' collection and came upon an excellent interpretation of a Flanders and Swann song I'd long forgotten, "Slow Train". Michael Flanders and Donald Swann wrote and performed the song back in the 1960s and although the events it records (the closure of almost 50% of the small railway stations in Britain following the Beeching Report on the future of the railway network) are now long gone, the song remains as a triumphal celebration of nostalgia. To illustrate the cultural loss resulting from the Beeching Axe, they simply strung together a list of the names of just a few of the 3,000 small stations and halts that were closed during this period. The result is, I think, musical poetry at its best. And it's accompanied by some lovely old photographs of steam trains and sooty platforms.

The Beeching cuts hit all parts of the country. Both rural and urban lines were decimated and by the end of the decade a quarter of the original trackway mileage and a half of all stations had been cleaved from the system. Here in the West Country, as in the rest of the UK, many of the most romantic small stations and desultory branch lines vanished almost overnight. They remain only as ghostly markings on OS maps: look for faint dotted lines annotated with 'track of old railway'.
 

One of the more weird things I came across in my searches was the post-Beeching fate of the station at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire. It was stolen! Following the closures, British Rail issued contracts for the demolition of the buildings, the clearance of the sites, and the sale of the recovered material. When the appointed contractor turned up at Cleckheaton Station he found the entire station - every stone, wooden fence, metal frame, and tin signpost - had already been dismantled and removed. Eventually the person who had dismantled the station was arrested and taken to trial (the only case in British legal history concerning the theft of a railway station). He was eventually acquitted as the court accepted his defence that he had been following the orders of what he thought was the legally appointed contractor. The company that masterminded the plan was never identified, and the station was never recovered.

And finally: whilst we are talking about slow trains, how about this live version of 'Slow Train' by Joe Bonamassa? Listen and compare and contrast with the more sedate music of Flanders and Swann. I enjoy them both, but they are very, very different.