He writes on 12 December 1847:—“They are killing truff [bull-trout] in all directions. I looked in the little stream near Forder, where many fires had been made, and saw three huge fish in work.” Fires were made to attract the fish to points where they could easily be speared.
On 13 December 1841 he writes:—“The poachers are catching the salmon—two have been taken in the meadow going to Lustleigh town, not large, about 10 lbs. each. I hear many truff have been taken also. I believe they go further up, and are mostly taken by the Moreton men.” On 18 March 1844 he writes that Mr Wills of East Wrey is making a leet from the Wrey to irrigate his land. And on 9 April 1853 he writes:—“Mr Wills’ man told me this week that they take up lots of fish on the grass at East Wrey that get out in irrigating the meadows, and that they took up one as big and long as his leg. I should say it was a salmon that went up at Candlemas: what they call Candlemas fish.”
And then on 8 April 1868 he writes:—“No wonder the fish are scarce in our brook, for they have embankments for irrigation, which destroys such numbers of fish in spawning time that truff and white fish [bull-trout and salmon-trout] are rarely seen now. One of the old poachers tells me that he does not know of one being taken for three years past—except those that do succeed in going up are sure to be seen on the grass returning. Since my remembrance they had a free course up to Bughead in Moreton, and the Moreton fellows used to take them with their hands, and plenty left after. But all that is stopped: none to take.”
From 1866 until his death in 1878 my father had some fishing on the Wandle a little way from Mitcham, which was then a quiet country village with fields of lavender and roses for making scented waters. The level country and the broad and sluggish stream seemed very dreary, when one thought of the little rivers that come tumbling down the valleys here. And the sport was of another kind. Here there was a chance of a dozen or twenty trout, none of them more than a pound in weight. Fish of that size were thrown back in the Wandle, to let them have a chance of growing bigger. There were trout of two and three pounds there, and a few such fish made a good catch. As a matter of fact, the catch depended much more on the landing-net than on the rod and fly. I had to take the landing-net, while my father played his fish; and that cured me of what little love I had for fishing.
Friends of my father’s came down now and then to fish with him; and amongst them Robert Romer, who was afterwards a Lord Justice. He had been Senior Wrangler; so my father led him on to giving me a little good advice, when I was going up to Cambridge. He began:—“Whatever you do, never work more than five hours a day.” I noted the expression on my father’s face—that was not the sort of advice that he wanted anyone to give me. But the advice was really good. Romer held that nobody could work at high pressure for more than five hours in the day; and it was better to put on high pressure for the five than low pressure for eight or ten or twelve. It gave more time for other things.
In those days George Bidder lived in a large house near Mitcham. He was then a very eminent civil-engineer, but in his early days he was The Calculating Boy. He was born at Moreton in 1806, and was well known to my grandfather. There is a book here, dated 1820, giving calculations that he made, always correctly, and generally in less than a minute. They include such things as finding the cube root of 304, 821, 217—answered instantly—of 67, 667, 921, 875—answered in ¼ minute—and of 897, 339, 273, 974, 002, 153—answered in 2½ minutes. I had the cheek to ask him how he did it. And he told me that he used his mind’s eye, and could see the figures manœuvring in front of him.
I found it was unwise to talk at random in his presence: there were snubs at hand. When I was about ten years old, I was talking about the well at Grenelle, which I had lately seen. The well is 1800 feet deep, and the water rises 150 feet above ground level: temperature 80° Fahrenheit. I said I could not make out what sent it up like that. Between two puffs of his cheroot Bidder grunted:—“Steam.”
Parson Davy was always asking Bidder questions, when he was still The Calculating Boy. But the Parson always got the worst of it, although he had some gifts that way himself, and might have been more eminent as an engineer than as a theologian.
Davy was born in 1743 near Tavistock, but passed his early years near here at Chudleigh and at Knighton, went to the Grammar School at Exeter and thence to Balliol College at Oxford, was then ordained, and held the curacies of Moreton, Drewsteignton and Lustleigh, remaining in the last from 1786 until about six months before his death in 1826. For that space of nearly forty years he was practically the parson of the parish, the rector being a pluralist and rarely visiting the place.
In his sermons at Drewsteignton “he denounced the vices of his congregation in such terms that the people fled from the church and complained to the bishop.” But he set the bishop’s mind at rest by showing him twelve volumes of manuscript, containing the sermons he had preached. I have those twelve volumes in my library here. They have an expensive binding of that period, and the penmanship is good, but antiquated, e.g. vol. xi, p. 333, “& carry yʳ youthful Vices wᵗʰ yᵐ to yᵉ Grave.” The dates are 1777 in the first volume, 1779 in the next five, and 1781 in the remaining six. The first four volumes (of six sermons each) are “on yᵉ Attributes of God,” the fifth and sixth (of seven sermons each) are “on some of yᵉ most-important Articles of yᵉ Xⁿ Religion,” and the last six (of fourteen sermons each) are “on yᵉ several Virtues & Vices of Mankind.” These were the sermons that upset the people at Drewsteignton. But clearly he was making a general survey, and no more charged them with all the vices than he credited them with all the virtues.