Small Talk at Wreyland. Third Series

by Cecil Torr

Sir Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton, and in the zenith of his fame the Corporation made him Mayor. He acknowledged this by sending down his portrait, painted by himself, to be hung in the Town Hall. Finding it was worth a good round sum, the Corporation sold it.—Of course, Parson Davy was not as eminent a man as Sir Joshua, but he was the only man of any eminence who ever lived in Lustleigh, at any rate, the only one in the Dictionary of National Biography. It was at Lustleigh that he did the work on which his reputation rests—I have described it in my first Small Talk, pages 32 to 34—and for forty years, as curate for an absent pluralist, he was devoted to the interests of the place. It was as scandalous for Lustleigh to sell a gift of his as for Plympton to have sold Sir Joshua’s.

The strange thing is that Davy should have made a gift to Lustleigh, knowing what had happened to the gift of Robert Phipps. By his Will (2 October 1676) Phipps gave £40 to be bestowed in lands of inheritance, the rents and profits whereof were to be employed to buy linen cloth at Easter for such old men and women of the parish of Lustleigh as had none or little relief from the parish, the linen cloth to be dowlas of 10d. per yard or thereabouts, and each poor man or woman to have three yards. The linen was distributed until 1802, and then the trust-fund disappeared, and has not been heard of since. It had not been invested in land; and this may have been the reason why Davy chose to give a piece of land in his own lifetime rather than bequeath a sum of money by Will.

He could have given the school a larger income by putting his £325 into the Three per Cents. at the price they stood at then. As he did not do that, he would hardly have approved of selling the land and putting the proceeds into Funding Loan, though this will give a larger income than the rent in recent years. The present rent is not the only thing to be considered in trusts that are in perpetuity. Harrow accepted a fixed annual sum in lieu of the rent of land that then was farms and now is part of London.

At the Parish Meeting there was an overwhelming majority against the sale—only five people voting for it—and nearly the same majority for a resolution calling on the trustees to resign. But the sale was carried through by a majority of the trustees in spite of every protest. Three of the trustees in the majority were people who had only lately come to live in Lustleigh, and the most active of them was a new arrival who soon went away. Things have changed since Parson Davy’s time. He was here for forty years himself: the living of Lustleigh was held by two Rectors for ninety-six years, 1791 to 1887; and the living of Bovey was held by two Vicars for a hundred years, 1735 to 1835. In the present century there have already been four Rectors of Lustleigh, and the vacancies have not been caused by death.

These people who come and go, will never take the same amount of interest in a place as those who spend the best part of their lives there; and they may even take delight in doing some lasting damage to a place that has not quite appreciated them. That is a kindly view to take. Unkind people called the sale a job; and nobody believed the talk of getting more money for school prizes—Lustleigh is some miles from Buncombe. If more money was wanted for the prizes, there were plenty of people who would have subscribed the few pounds’ difference between the rent of the meadow and the interest on the Funding Loan.

The new-comers at Lustleigh always call the old school-house ‘the old vestry’ for some reason that I cannot comprehend—vestry-meetings were held in one of the rooms there, but the building was always called the school. What they call ‘the new vestry’ is an excrescence from the church: it is in the angle between the chancel and south transept, spoiling the exterior of the church, and making the interior dark by blocking windows up. It contains the organ; and organs are not always worth the space they take and the disfigurement they cause. The south transept of Exeter Cathedral is disfigured by a row of 32-foot pipes, standing by themselves; and this bit of hideousness only gives a dozen extra notes. I do not think the extra notes are worth the sacrifice.

Churches suffer badly from additions and improvements and injudicious gifts, and Lustleigh church has suffered very badly in that way—there is always something being done. A pavement of coloured marbles has just been laid down in the chancel there, to replace a pavement of encaustic tiles that was laid down sixty years ago in place of the old pavement of rough granite slabs. The tiles were an Albert Memorial, and had the monogram of V. and A.; but they were very slippery, and it looked undignified for any cleric to sit down unexpectedly upon the chancel floor. The marble pavement is a gift, and people consider it unmannerly to look a gift-horse in the mouth, even if the beast is not worth stabling. Nevertheless, there is a way of saying courteously that your stable is unworthy of such a noble steed, and the steed might find some better stabling in another place.

When a building has a character of its own, you ought not merely to abstain from putting in things that are out of character with it: you ought to put in things that will bring its character out. Siena cathedral is a gorgeous building, and it has the finest pavement in the world; and the pavement makes the building look more gorgeous still. You can tell exactly how much the building is indebted to the pavement, as the pavement is covered over with boarding (to protect it) during a great part of the year, and then the building looks comparatively poor. If the Siena pavement could be laid in Lustleigh church, it would not give splendour to the church: it would only make you discontented with the roughness of the pillars and arches and the effigies of the old knights who held the place six centuries ago. The old pavement of rough granite slabs was far more suited to the rugged grandeur of the church.

There may, of course, be additions to a church which are so splendid in themselves that the church itself sinks into insignificance beside them: such, for example, as Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant statues in the church at Innsbruck. Had there been anything of that kind here, few people would have cared what happened to the church itself. But the additions here have only been the ordinary things in marble, brass, mosaic, painting, coloured glass; and they have made this rugged moorland church look quite suburban.

There are two great monuments in Bovey church, one to Nicholas Eveleigh, who died in 1620, and the other to Elizæus Hele, who died in 1635. Elizæus was better known as Pious-Uses Hele, having given his estates away for pious uses—amongst other things, Blue Maids’ Hospital at Exeter had £50 a-year from Bovey mill. He married Eveleigh’s widow; and she erected these monuments to her two husbands, though both of them were buried elsewhere. There is a recumbent figure of each husband, and in Hele’s case there are also kneeling figures of the wife and a former wife and a young son who had died. Over the recumbent figure there is a rounded arch with columns, architrave, etc., as if it were a gateway; and in the earlier monument the style is pure Italian of a hundred years before, whereas the later monument is what is called Jacobean, with the Italian style debased by Flemish and German methods. The change is curious: after the Italian of 1620, one would expect the Palladian of Inigo Jones in 1635 rather than this belated Jacobean.