A portrait of the inventor, by Opie the younger, is in the possession of the family at Helston, as is also the picture of the wreck of the Anson sketched at the time by Mr. Trengrouse. For permission to reproduce both I am indebted to the courtesy of the grandson of the inventor.
THE BOTATHAN GHOST
IN April, 1720, Daniel Defoe published his History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell. In August a second edition was called for, of which some copies included a pamphlet that had been printed in June: "Mr. Campbell's Pacquet, for the Entertainment of Gentlemen and Ladies," and this "Pacquet" contains "A Remarkable Passage of an Apparition, related by the Rev. Dr. Ruddle, of Launceston, in Cornwall, in the year 1665."
It has been assumed that this ghost story was a bit of invention of the lively imagination of Defoe. Mrs. Bray in her Trelawny of Trelawne stated that the story could not be true, as no such a name as Dingley, which was that of the ghost, was known in Launceston. As it happened, James Dingley had been instituted to the vicarage of the very parish of South Petherwin, in which the ghost appeared, in the same reign in which the apparition occurred, and he assisted Ruddle in his ministrations in Launceston, and the name occurs to this day in the town and neighbourhood. In fact, Dingley, Pethebridge, and Dingley are bankers there.
In the same heedless fashion Cyrus Redding wrote in 1842 that the story was "told with so much simplicity of truth that it is difficult to believe that the tale is not, as novel writers say, 'founded on fact.'" And he goes on to state: "No clergyman of the name of Ruddle had been incumbent in Launceston for two hundred years past, at least in S. Mary's Church." Yet the monument of Parson Ruddle is in the church, and he occupied the living from 1663 to his death in 1699.
"PARSON RUDALL"
From a painting in the possession of the Rev. S. Baring Gould