Bideford has enjoyed a minor fame in more modern times as the home of Edward Capern, the “postman-poet.” Capern was born at Tiverton in 1819. His father was a baker in that town, but removed two years later to Barnstaple. When eight years of age, the boy was sent to a lace-factory and made to toil long hours, until his health gave way. Injured in eyesight and in general health, outdoor occupation became necessary, and he at length found employment as rural postman, between Bideford and Buckland Brewer and district. It was a healthy occupation, but not an easy round—thirteen miles’ walking, daily—and the pay, half-a-guinea a week, certainly was not lavish. On his daily rounds he thought in rhyme. Himself said of himself:
“He owns neither houses nor lands,
His wealth is a character good;
A pair of industrious hands,
A drop of poetical blood.”
By subscription, in 1856, a volume of his verses was published, followed in 1858 by a second; and in due course by two others, “Wayside Warbles” and “The Devonshire Melodist,” the songs set to music also composed by him. A final volume appeared in 1881. None of these had much wider publicity than that of the friendly subscription-list. In 1866 he left Bideford and went to live at Harborne near Birmingham, but returned to Devonshire in 1884 and settled at Braunton. A Civil List pension of £40 a year which had been obtained for him was increased to £60, and on this his modest wants were sustained until his death in 1894. He was buried at Heanton Punchardon, near by, where his old-fashioned postman’s hand-bell is placed on his grave.
Capern was sometimes moved by the warlike memories of his neighbourhood, and wrote
“Whene’er I tread old By-the-Ford
I conjure up the thought
’Twas here a Grenville trod
And here a Raleigh wrought.”
But most characteristically Devonian is the hymn to clotted cream, written in 1882, at Harborne, in reply to a present of some sent to him.
DEVONSHIRE CREAM
“Sweeter than the odours borne on southern gales,
Comes the clotted nectar of my native vales—
Crimped and golden-crusted, rich beyond compare,
Food on which a goddess evermore would fare.
Burns may praise his haggis, Horace sing of wine,
Hunt his Hybla-honey, which he deem’d divine,
But in the Elysiums of the poet’s dream
Where is the delicious without Devon-cream?
“Talk of peach or melon, quince or jargonel,
White-water, black-hamburg, or the muscatel,
Pippin or pomegranate, apricot or pine,
Greengages or strawberries, or your elder-wine!
Take them all, and welcome, yes, the whole, say I,
Ay! and even junket, squab- and mazzard-pie,
Only let our lasses, like the morning, gleam
Joyous with their skimmers full of clouted cream.
“What a lot of pictures crowd upon my sight
As I view the luscious feast of my delight!
Meadows fram’d in hawthorn, coppices in green,
Village-fanes on hill-tops crowning every scene,
Buttercups, and cattle clad in coats of red,
Flocks in daisy-pastures, couples newly wed
Happy in their homesteads by a flashing stream;—
But what can be this golden, crimp’d, and bonny cream?