10
DEVON EXPLORERS & ECCENTRICS
EXPLORERS
Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540–96), born at Crowndale, near Tavistock, is arguably Devon’s (if not Britain’s) most famous sea dog. His achievements included completing the first circumnavigation of the world by an Englishman, from which he returned in 1580, and as one of the captains instrumental in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. Perhaps appropriately, he died of disease off the coast of Panama during an expedition to the Caribbean. His statues are to be seen on Plymouth Hoe and at Tavistock. His cousin Sir John Hawkins (1532–95) took part in several of the same overseas ventures, and died of a similar illness on the same expedition. Drake took a snare drum with him, emblazoned with his coat of arms, when he sailed round the world. It was with him as he lay on his deathbed off the coast of Panama in 1596, and he ordered that it should be returned to his home at Buckland Abbey (where it remains to this day), so that it could be beaten to recall him from heaven when he should be needed to come to the nation’s rescue whenever England was in danger. Since then, people have claimed to hear it beating when the Mayflower sailed from England in 1620, when Napoleon was brought into Plymouth Sound as a prisoner, and on the outbreak of the First World War. When the German navy surrendered in 1918, a drum roll was heard on board the battleship HMS Royal Oak as she escorted German ships from the high seas fleet to their internment in Scapa Flow. The ship was thoroughly searched but no drum was found, and everyone assumed that it must have been Drake’s Drum. It was also heard in 1940 at the time of the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert (c. 1539–83), born at Greenway, near Galmpton, was a pioneer of colonisation in England and North America. The majority of his maritime expeditions were failures, and he was lost at sea when his ship sank in a storm near the Azores.
Sir Richard Grenville (1542–91), born probably at Buckland Abbey, was charged with maintaining a fleet at the Azores to waylay Spanish treasure fleets. At Flores he was taken by surprise by a large fleet from Spain. His crew had just been depleted by sickness and he had an opportunity of escape, but chose to try to fight his way out of the impasse. He died from his wounds, with his ship sinking soon afterwards.
John Davis (c. 1550–1605), born at Sandridge, near Dartmouth, navigator and explorer in mainly polar regions, is sometimes credited with discovering the Falkland Islands in about 1592. He was killed by Japanese pirates off the Malay peninsula.
William John Wills (1834–61), born at Totnes, was surveyor and later promoted to second-in-command on an expedition across Australia led by Robert O’Hara Burke. Setting out from Melbourne in August 1860, they succeeded in crossing largely uncharted territory to the north coast, thus completing the first overland crossing, but through a combination of poor leadership, bad planning and misfortune, both men perished from exposure and malnutrition ten months later on the return journey. One man from the expedition, John King, lived to tell the tale and was found by a rescue party just in time.
Sir Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), born at Outland House, Plymouth, led the first British Antarctic expedition on HMS Discovery between 1901 and 1904, during which time he made the first balloon flight on the sub-continent. In 1911 he led a team which aimed to be the first to reach the South Pole, but were beaten to it by an expedition led by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in January 1912, by about a fortnight. Scott and his surviving team perished at the end of March, and their bodies were found by a rescue party eight months later.
Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867-c. 1925), born at Torquay and thought to be the original inspiration behind movie character Indiana Jones, as played by actor Harrison Ford, was both explorer and eccentric. A couple of expeditions undertaken in Bolivia and Brazil for surveying for minerals on behalf of both countries’ respective governments were interrupted by service during the First World War. Several years later he returned to Brazil to search for ‘Z’, in pursuit of ‘hidden cities’ and more minerals, but no trace of him, his expedition or the missing cities has been found to this day.
Frank (Francis) Bickerton (1889–1954), born in Oxfordshire, moved to Plymouth during childhood and lived there until 1920. He took part in an Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911–14 as an engineer, was responsible for the pioneering use of an aeroplane and wireless telegraphy in the Antarctic, and led a sledging expedition which discovered the first meteorite found there. He fought on the Western Front during the First World War, and later served with the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force.
ECCENTRICS
Joanna Southcott (c. 1750–1814) was born in Taleford near Ottery St Mary. For some years she worked as a domestic servant. Having been brought up as a Methodist, when she was about forty she claimed to have heard a voice foretelling a solution to the world’s problems with the imminent arrival of the second coming of Jesus Christ. She was almost illiterate, and the messages she received were generally dictated to and copied by the friends and supporters she called her secretaries. She was ignored by the established church, representatives of which were convinced she was a fraud. Their suspicions were doubtless justified by her remarkable ability to make a healthy sum by selling ‘Certificates for the Millennium’, and ‘Sealings for the Faithful’, passports to heaven, at prices between 12s and 1 guinea. The writer Sabine Baring-Gould called her ‘a shameless impostor’, and regarding the books, manuscripts and letters she wrote (or dictated) and published, his verdict was that ‘it is not possible to conceive that any persons could have been deluded by such rambling nonsense.’ Yet there were enough gullible souls around, and she attracted a following of several thousand. In 1792 she had published a prophecy stating that one day she would give birth, prior to which she would be dead for four days, then revive, and be delivered.
In 1814, after she had moved to London, she proclaimed that the Spirit had told her that ‘in the sixty-fifth year of thy age, thou shalt have a Son, by the power of the Most High’. In preparation for her virgin birth she was examined by over twenty doctors, some declaring she was pregnant while others dismissing the idea as absurd. The birth was due on 19 October 1814, but the day came and went, and it was announced that she had gone into a trance. She died at her home on 26 or 27 December, and her disciples retained her body for four days, wrapped it in flannel and kept it warm with hot water bottles. They expected her to come to life, but after four days the corpse stubbornly not only refused to breathe, but also showed signs of discoloration. Only after signs of visible decay were no longer in doubt did they agree to the burial of her body. It was rumoured, though not confirmed, that a post-mortem had been conducted and revealed that she was suffering from dropsy.
The architect John Foulston (1772–1841), creator of some of the most striking Plymouth and Devonport buildings of the early nineteenth century (see p. 23), who lived at Mutley, Plymouth, not only loved ancient classical civilisation but did his best to live up to it as well. He used to drive around the streets of the town in a gig disguised as a Roman war chariot.
The Revd William Buckland (1784–1856), born at Axminster and educated at Blundell’s School, Tiverton, was a noted geologist and palaeontologist. He was the first ever Professor of Geology at Oxford University, and was later Dean of Westminster. He was also famous for keeping a variety of animals, some dangerous, inside his house. Some of them probably met an early death before going into the oven, as he was apparently determined to try to eat every animal ever discovered at least once. He generously found praiseworthy qualities in all of them except the mole, which he found disgusting. It was said that his breath sometimes smelt of crocodile, hedgehog and roast joint of bear and puppy (please do not trust this man with your pets). John Ruskin once regretted, probably with tongue-in-cheek, having missed the chance to eat mice on buttered toast. He was the world’s leading authority on coprolites, or fossilised faeces, but as he had coined the word himself, there was not much competition for the honour. A dining table made entirely out of said matter was one of his prized (by him if nobody else) possessions. He claimed to have eaten the heart of King Louis XIV of France, which had come from his grave during the French Revolution and into the possession of his friend the Archbishop of York. His sole comment was that it would have been improved with gravy made from the blood of a marmoset monkey.
By the time he reached his sixties he began to behave oddly, though some felt he had been doing so for years anyway, beating himself around the head and scratching himself until he bled. He ended his days in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, though posterity does not relate whether he was still allowed to do his own cooking or order his choice of meat.
The mathematician and scientist Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) was born in London, but spent most of his adult life in Devon.
He had worked briefly as a telegraph operator at home and abroad before deciding to devote the rest of his life to research and writing technical papers. His books were well respected but well nigh unintelligible, and when it was pointed out to him that they could do with editing as they were so hard to read, he pointed out that they were even harder to write. His brother Charles was a partner in a music business in Torquay, and when another store in Paignton was opened in 1889, he invited Oliver and their parents to leave London and come to live above the shop. Oliver himself took over the second floor as a laboratory for his daily experiments, and took up cycling on a machine which used metal spoons for brakes.
After his parents died in 1897 he moved to Newton Abbot. By now strange stories about his odd behaviour began to circulate. Always a very private individual, and convinced that neighbours were prying into his affairs, he described them in a letter to a friend as ‘the rudest lot of impertinent, prying people that I have ever had the misfortune to live near. They talk the language of the sewer and seem to glory in it.’ He lived for some time on a diet of tinned milk and biscuits, and claimed that he suffered from ‘hot and cold’ disease, turning the gas fire up full in winter to keep warm enough. Visitors to the house, who became more infrequent as time went on, found it unbearably hot. As his health declined, he was less able to look after himself properly.
In 1908 he moved back to Torquay, in a house owned by his brother’s sister-in-law, Mary Way. Mindful of his strange ways, she agreed to take him as a paying guest, but some years later she had had enough and moved out, leaving him on his own. Visitors would find his door and trees covered with documents, many of them summonses for non-payment of rates and outstanding accounts from what he called ‘the Gas Barbarians’. His scientific achievements did not go unrecognised, and in 1922 he became the first recipient of the newly established Faraday Medal. When he was advised that a delegation of four would be visiting him at home to present him with the award, he wrote back to insist that they should all come separately on different days. In the end they agreed to send just one.
Three years later he fell off a ladder, was rushed to hospital and died from complications to his injuries. He was buried in the family grave at Paignton Cemetery. Later several unpublished scientific papers in his own hand were discovered under the floorboards at his house. He had put them there to act as insulation.
The Dartmoor author and campaigner Beatrice Chase, whose real name was Olive Katherine Parr (1874–1955), was born in Middlesex, but moved to Widecombe-on-the-Moor as a young woman. She wrote several titles, including The Heart of the Moor (1914), Through a Dartmoor Window (1915), and Pages of Peace from Dartmoor (1920), which were very popular for a brief period. Her fiancé was killed in the First World War, and she became increasingly religious. She maintained a personal chapel at Venton House, her home, where she initiated her Knights of the White Crusade, encouraging all servicemen to be ‘pure and noble’. When she took up photography, she signed a contract with postcard publisher Raphael Tuck to produce local views for his cards. Later she became embittered and reclusive, suffered from persecution mania, accused booksellers (and Tuck) of profiteering, and took to selling books and postcards directly to visitors to her home, but as her fortunes dwindled and her style of writing fell out of favour, she was reduced to selling signed books to friends at a large discount. She was eventually diagnosed with cancer and taken to Newton Abbot Infirmary, and according to locals she was removed in a straitjacket, after the loaded revolver she kept by her bedside was removed.
The artist Robert Lenkiewicz (1941–2002), who spent most of his working life in a studio in the Barbican, Plymouth, was legendary for his unorthodox methods. He once painted a large mural on the waterfront in which he got his own back on some council officials who had thwarted or irritated him in various ways, by portraying them prominently – in the nude. In 1981 he prematurely announced his own death in The Times because he was preparing for a project of paintings on the theme of death, and although he could not know how it felt to be dead, he wanted to see how it felt if others thought he had died.
One of his friends and models was Albert Fisher, whom he called ‘The Bishop’. The artist called him ‘an extraordinary man with large hands and a great red beard, who slept beneath a tree in Stoke Damerel graveyard and believed he had had mystical experiences. He came rushing in one day and said that the sun had been shining through the tree, that every single leaf had turned into a man with a top hat, that each man with a top hat had a pint of beer in his hand and that each and every one of them had wished him ‘Good morning!’ In the posh Oxford accent he had cultivated, he said, ‘I had a vision there. Not a dream, not a nightmare but a vision there!’ The present author, who was an assistant in Plymouth Central Reference Library during the early 1970s, recalls ‘The Bishop’ as a very ruddy-faced, regular visitor to read the papers and occasionally cross verbal swords with the then Head of Reference Services, who objected to the pungent aroma of alcohol which emanated from his direction and his unmistakable loud voice. There was no love lost between both men. Another friend was ‘Diogenes’, whose real name was Edward McKenzie. Lenkiewicz gave him his new name after a Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel, after finding him living in a concrete pipe at Chelson Meadow rubbish tip while working on a project about down-and-outs. Shortly before his death in 1984, aged seventy-two, he was promised by the artist that he would preserve his body as a ‘human paperweight’ and not hand him over to the authorities for burial. He was as good as his word. Not only did he have Diogenes embalmed, but he stubbornly refused to tell officials from Plymouth City Council where the body was, despite the environmental health department’s determination to have him properly buried. He invited them to his studio where they found a coffin which they expected to contain Diogenes’ body – until Lenkiewicz himself jumped out. A spokesman said the affair had degenerated into music-hall farce, yet they still meant to find the body. One year later the council admitted defeat.
Ten days after Lenkiewicz died in August 2002, in a secret drawer in his studio was the supposedly missing enbalmed corpse. Also in the artist’s ‘death room’ were the skeleton of Ursula Kemp, a sixteenth-century midwife who was hanged for witchcraft and nailed into her coffin, kept in a long wooden box on top of the piano, and a parchment lampshade (don’t ask any further) which he claimed had been brought out of Auschwitz in 1940, on the desk. On 11 October Nigel Meadows, the Plymouth Coroner, revealed that Lenkiewicz had been as good as his word. Since its discovery, the body had been kept in a hospital mortuary awaiting a decision on what should happen to it. Mr Meadows conceded that Diogenes was ‘nicely preserved’, and said it was up to the executor of the Lenkiewicz estate to have the body cremated or transferred to the Lenkiewicz Foundation, the charity responsible for the artist’s paintings and books, and then up to the foundation to decide what to do with the body. ‘Provided they comply with health and safety regulations and don’t outrage public decency,’ he said, ‘it is possible that they could retain the body on some sort of public display.’
In September 2010, the national press reported that an elderly, bearded gentleman, calling himself Moses-Peter, was doing his bit to make the world a better place. Every day, for some years, he had donned beads and a headband, and sat on a chair on the A3022 between Torquay and Paignton, waving and smiling at drivers and bus passengers. During the Christmas season he also wore a Santa hat and tinsel on his stick. Motorists set up a site on Facebook for him, called ‘Strange old man who sits on a bench on the road between Torquay and Paignton’, which attracted thousands of supporters and messages from admirers who said he had made their day. When it was revealed that he did not have a computer and therefore could not access the internet, a comment was posted suggesting that he ought to be given a BlackBerry for Christmas. Very publicity-shy, when asked why he was doing this, he merely answered, ‘I am spreading a message of joy, love and happiness.’
JOLLY JAPES
On 1 April 1949 a Plymouth solicitor received a telegram, purporting to come from a well-known local agricultural firm. It informed him that ten tons of farmyard manure were going to be delivered at his house that morning and would he kindly make arrangements to store it. He was horrified – until his wife reminded him what the date was.
In 1997, exactly 48 years later, the Western Evening Herald announced that M. Poisson d’Avril, of La Pofloir, was planning to set up a French vineyard in the St Budeaux area of Plymouth. He had discovered that he could beat the quota system on vine production if he chose a district outside France which sounded suitably French. The gentleman’s name, and a swift rearrangement of the letters in ‘La Pofloir’, revealed all, and several readers saw through it at once.
In the 1960s, a pathway in South Brent which led to a path alongside the River Avon used to have a NO THROUGH ROAD sign near the entrance. In due course somebody either rearranged the letters or did a skilful repainting job, with the result that it then read NO ROUGHTOAD. At around the same time, a short-lived local community journal, Bravo Brent!, carried a few verses from a local contributor, about ‘Roughtoad’, in which the eponymous beast was portrayed as a demon who would come and get naughty children if they did not do as they were told.
On a similar theme, in March 2011, a skilled signwriter with a sense of humour overpainted a triangular GIVE WAY sign with the words WAKE UP, and attached beneath it a rectangular sign saying WORLD CRISIS AHEAD. The 10ft sign was placed on the road from a bridge at Staverton, near Totnes, just before the junction with the A384 near Huxhams Cross. A spokesman for Devon County Council said they were looking into what could be described as a vandal attack, and that it would be removed as soon as possible. ‘We weren’t aware of it until you told us about it,’ he told a press reporter who asked for a statement, ‘but it sounds like it shouldn’t be there.’
In February 2011 Dr Geri Parlby, a lecturer at Exeter University, suggested that recent claims that 8,000-year-old Cornish cave paintings showed prehistoric women eating pasties were no more than ‘a fine example of the Cornish practical joke’.