i
William Cookworthy is twenty-one in 1726 and after six years in London he is set on his way to Plymouth.
In the established Quaker way, Silvanus is setting William up with a modest loan as Bevan and Cookworthy, Chemists, in Notte Street: ‘That part of the Town where Merchants do most congregate, a street that runs down towards the Quays, Customs House, Exchange and other offices connected with the Port.’
It could not be a better start for this young man.
The house is in a garden, useful for herbs, on one side of which stand the chemical laboratory with its benches, shelves and still, and a dispensary. It is seven windows wide, four storeys high, dressed in Portland Stone with a steep flight of steps to a beautiful pedimented door with an eagle about to take flight.
I am following William. We’re on first-name terms.
I’ve had Jingdezhen and Versailles and Dresden. I’ve had my fun and I’m off into the West. Plymouth is a busy port, set within the folds of grey-green wooded hills, the rivers running deeply out to the Channel, the grey-green town hugging the crescent of land. Dr John Huxham, William’s new neighbour, writes of the place:
The town of Plymouth is situated at the Bottom of a very large Bay, lying quite open to the southerly Winds; on the East and West it is sheltered by very high Cliffs, at the Bottom it is terminated by Marble-Rocks, yet so as that an Arm of the Sea runs up a great Way into the Country on each Side of it … From the Bottom of the Bay the Country rises continually till you come to the Dartmoor Mountains at about ten Miles distant from the Town. – I have therefore described the Situation of the Town, that, amongst other Things, some Reason perhaps may be assigned why there falls such a Quantity of Rain here yearly.
This is not so much a landscape as a weather system.
It is a place prone to ‘sudden and sometimes severe changes of the weather’, writes Dr Mudge of Plymouth. The sky is lead, pewter, tin, sometimes mackerel, while the ground is ‘very dirty in wet weather, from the currents which pass along the middle of the streets’. In the British Library I spend a happy morning with Dr Huxham, who has used his barometer three times every day to record Observations on the air and Epidemic diseases from the year [1727] to [1737] inclusive, so that I know just how damp William gets in the morning, as he walks out at noon and as he takes his dinner and falls into bed in this new place.
His days are to be marked, charted either as ‘Some Quantity of Rain’, ‘A considerable Quantity’, ‘A greater Rain’ or ‘Continual and heavy Rain’.
ii
The town and the dock are congested, febrile with sailors and whores, pressgangs and navy fixers, chandlers for sailcloth and spars, rope-makers and block-makers. There is a constant stream of carts for the merchants in the woollen trade handling the coarse wool from West Country flocks and serge cloth for export, and boats coming in from Cornwall with tin and copper. There are the morning sales of pilchards caught with seine nets, and then three times a week there is a market of produce, butter, chickens and corn. Plymouth has rare and wonderful auctions on the quayside of prize goods, seized from whoever we are currently fighting – Havana snuffs, notes William – and there are hogsheads of sugar, rum, rice, tobacco, and every colonial produce landed here.
Wherever there are ships and cargos there are disputes, so this town has its attorneys. Then there are the doctors Mudge and Huxham, surgeons, bankers, auctioneers, the officers of the Royal Dockyard, and the clergymen they keep to preach respect and temperance to their sailors, and sundry ministers for the growing numbers of Dissenters, for Plymouth, like all ports, is a dangerous quivering balance of respectability and mayhem.
William is to be a retailer and a wholesaler to doctors and apothecaries throughout Devon, Somerset and Cornwall and to the immediate population in Plymouth. He rides out on his grey mare to Plympton, Plymstock, the South Hams, Buckland, Tamerton Foliot, Bere Alston, villages whose names read like the lists of esoterica for his apothecary’s cupboard.
William Cookworthy Esq. is already a little stolid in his Quaker broadcloth, a white cravat at his neck, his wide-brimmed black hat and the steady pace of his horse.
William has called her Prudence.