In the middle of the last century Blackborough House was a warren of young students professedly reading with the Rev. William Cookesley Thompson, most of whom were of Irish nationality. They were a wild set, and enjoyed nothing so much as sharing in one of the country revels, which were then so common in Devonshire. On one occasion they made their way to Kentisbeare Revel, where an old woman had a gingerbread stall. Evening came on, and to avoid a slight sprinkling of rain, the dame took refuge in the doorway of the inn. At the same instant a wagonette or some such vehicle emerged from the adjoining passage, and turning a sharp corner, overturned the old woman’s stall, whose contents, tilted into the roadway, were eagerly scrambled for by children. Of course there were profuse, if not very sincere, apologies, and sympathetic promises of compensation, but whether they were ever honoured in the sequel my informant is inclined to query.
One great feature of a revel was wrestling, and this reminds me that at Kentisbeare there are about fifty acres of common, which were once the subject of debate between that parish and Broadhembury. After much bickering it was agreed to settle the point by “fair shoe and stocking,” with the result that the men of Kentisbeare were victorious, and acquired firm possession of the disputed territory.
CHAPTER IV
BLACKMORE’S SCHOOL
In 1837 R. D. Blackmore underwent a momentous experience, that being the year in which he entered, a trembling novice, the portals of the famous school, founded by Mr Peter Blundell, clothier. With all its many virtues as a place of learning, Tiverton School long maintained a reputation for roughness, and those days were among its roughest. It might have appeared, therefore, a providential circumstance that the boy had a sturdy sponsor in Frederick Temple, with whom he at first lodged in the simplicity of Copp’s Court, though afterwards he became a boarder inside the gates. Nor can it be doubted that Temple, ever “justissimus unus,” must sometimes have interposed to prevent any unconscionable bullying of his delicate charge. Unfortunately he seems to have taken a severe view of his duties as amateur father; and on one occasion, many years later, when he handed to a prize-winner a copy of Lorna Doone, he mentioned, with a humorous twinkle, that he had often chastised the author by striking him on the head with a brass-headed hammer. We have it on the authority of Mr Stuart J. Reid that Blackmore neither then nor subsequently felt the least gratitude for these attentions, and was wont to refer to his distinguished contemporary in language the reverse of flattering. And what he felt about his schoolfellow, he felt—or Mr Reid is mistaken—about his school, the retrospect of the misery and privations of his boyhood affecting him to his latest hour with a lively sense of horror and reprobation.
One would not have thought it. The opening chapters of Lorna Doone, though candid, seem written with relish of the little barbarians at play, just as if Blackmore had settled with himself that the trials of child’s estate were goodly exercises for the larger palæstras of life and literature. The filial note is never wanting, and those classic pages, so redolent of the place, and so descriptive of its customs, even to the verge of exaggeration, appeal to the younger generation of “Blundellites” as a splendid and enduring achievement, to which Mr Kipling’s Stalky and Co., and Mr Eden Phillpott’s Human Boy, and even Tom Brown’s Schooldays, must humbly vail.
It would be a considerable satisfaction to report that the scenes which Blackmore pictured are still in all respects as he painted them; but to do so would be to tamper with truth, and lead to unnecessary disappointment. In the first place, the school, as a society of men and boys, was removed in 1882 to a new and more convenient abiding-place about a mile distant, where it has renewed its youth, and flourishes with such a plentitude of numbers as was never known on the traditional site by the bank of the Lowman. The venerable buildings—it moves a nausea to tell—have been remodelled into villas. Apparently there was no remedy, for, although there was talk at the time of acquiring them as a local museum and library, like the Castle at Taunton, nothing came of it all, Tiverton being a small town, and philanthropists few and far between. To be sure, some stipulation was required that the elevation should be preserved in statu quo; but this has been only partially observed. The new residents could not be expected to live in dungeons, and so, for the admission of air and sunshine, the Jacobean windows have been extended and deprived of their pristine proportions. Within, the carved oak ceilings and panels have fled before an invasion of varnished deal, and the whole of the beautiful interior has become a memory.
Would that I could stop here, but stern Clio bids me go on and declare that, a quarter of a century ago, might have been seen over the outer gateway an original brass plate with a curiously inaccurate inscription, recording the circumstances of the foundation in 1604, with a pair of ambitious elegiacs, which not even the most lenient Latinist could with safety to his soul pronounce elegant. This brass is now at Horsdon, in charge of the new school, which has also the mystic white “P.B.” pebbles that adorned the pathway outside the boundary wall. The pathway is another ghost. Not only have the pebbles, both white and black, been uprooted, but sacrilegious hands have been laid on a most sensible and delightful old barricade, formed of heavy posts and heavy angular beams, which ran the whole length of the wall, and was closed at each end with a gate. How Dr Johnson would have loved it!
But the zeal for improvement, which set in during the seventies, is not accountable for all the changes that have marked the spot since Blackmore’s time; and without more explanation, many of the allusions in Lorna Doone must appear mysterious and unintelligible. When Blackmore was at the school, the converging lines of railway, with their passengers and goods stations, and multiplex ramifications, and the adjacent coal-yards and slaughterhouse, were still in the future, and the sites they now occupy were pleasant meadows. At the north-west corner, the point nearest the school, was a “kissing”-gate, whence a footpath, traversing the first meadow, led to another gate of the same amorous description. The main path then struck across to the right and joined the coach route, afterwards called the “old” London road, opposite Zephyr Lodge. Another track pursued an easterly direction to a pretty white timber bridge, which spanned the Lowman with a shallow arch, and near which was the celebrated Taunton Pool. This bridge afforded access to Ham Mills, remembered as a couple of low, white thatched cottages, very picturesque, whither it was the custom of the inhabitants to repair for Sunday junketings.