Zachary Mudge was one of several children born to Dr. John Mudge and his third wife, Elizabeth.  John  himself lived and worked as a physician and surgeon in Plymouth and was the fourth son of Zachariah Mudge, thus making Zachary his grandson.  Various older relatives had already achieved a degree of prominence in their chosen careers, and Zachary was to be no exception.

Perhaps because of his Plymouth upbringing, he decided on a career in the Navy, which he duly entered as captain’s servant aboard the 80-gun ship, the Foudroyant, in 1780, under the command of Captain John Jervis.

At this time, Great Britain was fighting against the American colonies in the American War of Independence, who were supported militarily by the French.

Zachary’s first experience of warfare was in April 1782, when the Foudroyant captured the 74-gun French ship Pegase in an action which lasted nearly an hour.

He then served as a midshipman aboard various ships on the Home and North American stations, including the Pegase itself, but also the Sampson, the Perseus, the Leander and the Bombay Castle.

In May 1789, he was promoted to lieutenant aboard the Centurion, the flagship at Jamaica, under Rear Admiral Philip Affleck, but then returned to Plymouth aboard the Carnatic under Captain Ford.

In December 1790, Mudge joined the Discovery as second lieutenant.  The ship had a double mission: to implement the Nootka Sound Convention, which had originated in a dispute between Britain and Spain about who should have access to the area in and around Nootka Sound on the Western Canadian coast, which had an excellent natural harbour, and also to explore that coastline with the ultimate aim of finding the western entrance to that most elusive of entities, the North West Passage. After the Nootka crisis, he was promoted to first lieutenant, under Captain George Vancouver.

We treat Captain Cook as one of our national heroes, because of his exploits in the South Pacific, and George Vancouver tends to remain in his shadow: but in his day his career and achievements were on a par with that of Cook: he was to the North Pacific what Captain Cook was to the South Pacific.

So, in 1791, the Discovery set out on the long voyage to Western Canada, travelling via Tenerife, Cape Town, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and North America, eventually arriving at Nootka Sound.  However, the British and Spanish commanders had been given conflicting instructions, and Mudge was sent back to England with despatches, biological specimens, and further orders.  He did this by travelling across the Pacific to China, in an open boat, only 15 feet long with a crew of 14, and then travelled from the Far East in an East Indiaman.

Having received new orders, he then made the return journey on the Providence, but when he reached Monterey in Mexico, he received news that Vancouver had already left for England.  Not ones to waste time or miss opportunities, he and his captain travelled westward again and surveyed the east coast of Asia instead.

At this point, Mudge had been away from home for six years, and this had held back his career advancement.  One of his duties on the Vancouver expedition had been to look after 16 year old Thomas Pitt, later to become Baron Pitt, whose family he knew, but on one occasion was forced to flog him, when  he used the ship’s stores to purchase romantic favours in Tahiti.

This did his career, no harm, however, for, at the insistence of Pitt’s mother, Lady Camelford, he was promoted to commander in November 1797, and the following year took command of the 16-gun sloop, the Fly.    As captain of the Fly, he was employed up and down the American coast, harassing enemy shipping.  We are of course now well into the period of the Napoleonic Wars.

It was not all plain sailing however.  On one occasion, on his way home from Halifax, Nova Scotia, his ship hit an enormous iceberg.  He disembarked onto the iceberg, and actually got lost on it, but eventually made his way back to the ship, and continued the journey.

On another occasion travelling from Jamaica to Barbados with dispatches for Lord Nelson, his ship, the Blanche, came across a French squadron of four ships.  The Blanche put up a stout resistance, but the French set alight to it, and Mudge and his crew had to abandon ship, which eventually sank.  Only one life was lost.  Nevertheless, this incident led to a court-martial, to make sure that Mudge had made the best defence that he could: he was not only acquitted, but complimented on his very able and gallant conduct.

Otherwise, he played a very active part in encounters with French ships during the rest of the war.  At one point, in the space of less than a month, he captured and destroyed 24 of the enemy’s vessels.

His last command was of the 74-gun Valiant on the Brazilian station, from July 1814 to August 1815.  He saw no further active service, but was promoted to rear admiral in 1830, vice-admiral in 1841, and full admiral in 1849.

He died in Plympton on 26 October 1852, aged 82, and was buried at Newton Ferrers near Plymouth.

Mudge married Jane Granger, a daughter of the Rev Edmund Granger of Sowton, near Plymouth, and they had several children.

One of the perks of being an officer on a voyage of exploration is that if you are the first to spot a particular landmark, then it gets named after you.  Point Mudge on Quadra Island is named after Zachary, as he was the first European to sight it, from a nearby mountain.

In 1855, a memorial window to Zachary Mudge, known as the “Mudge Window” was placed in St. Andrew’s Church, Plymouth.

Zachariah Mudge was born in 1693 in Exeter of humble parentage.  His father, also called Zachariah,was a carpenter, but died when he was very young. and his mother, Katherine, attnded women who were lying-in  He attended Exeter’s free Grammar School and then the non-conformist Academy of Joseph Hallett III, where he trained as a Presbyterian minister  He became a protege of a Mr George Trosse, who paid for his education, and, when he died, left him half his library, including books on Hebrew, in which language he became particularly proficient.  On leaving  the Academy,  he got married, and needed an income to support a family so he became the usher or second master at  Exeter Grammar School, which at that time was run by Sir Joshua Reynolds’ uncle, John Reynolds.  He taught there for three years before taking  up a post as headmaster of Bideford Grammar School, at the young age of 24.  John Reynolds stated that he believed Mudge ‘to be perfectly well qualify’d thereto by an extraordinary knowledge of ye Greek and Latin tongues, & a person of great application and diligence in ye teaching of boys’.

Of course, the Grammar School then was a far cry from what it later became.  It was situated where Bridge Buildings are today, and consisted of one classroom, with a dozen or so pupils in attendance,  sponsored by local wealthy patrons, who saw some promise in them as scholars.  Latin and Greek would indeed have been the order of the day.  Mudge was by all accounts a successful headmaster, and among his pupils were John Shebbeare, the satirist, also from Bideford, and two of his own sons.  His income, however, needed to be supplemented by the Bridge Trust.  Whilst at the school he fell into a long correspondence with the Bishop of Exeter on matters of church doctrine.  This resulted in his giving up his non-conformity and entering the Church of England, and having been ordained as an Anglican priest in 1729, was later that year  appointed Vicar of Abbotsham as well as Headmaster of the Grammar School, which would further have augmented his income.

He decided then that the Church, and not teaching was his true vocation, and left Bideford in 1732, to become Vicar of St. Andrew’s in Plymouth, with a salary of £2000 per year, a princely sum in those days.  He ended up as Prebendary of Exeter in 1736. 

He was well-known for the quality of his sermons, and they were still recommended reading for students at Oxford fifty years later.  He was a quiet, thoughtful man, of placid temperament, and upright character, well-liked by all who knew him, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, a fellow Devonian, who painted his portrait three times.  He was loved as a preacher throughout the Westcountry.

When he was very young he fell passionately in love with a Mary( also known as Moll) Fox, but when she rejected him, he ran off to London in a state of despair intending to get aboard a ship, and leave England forever, but he was unable to to persuade any captain to take him, and spent his first night sleeping in a sugar barrel at the dockside, but nine days later he was home again, hungry, penniless and bedraggled.  Four years later, however, aged 20, he actually married Mary Fox, and they had four sons and a daughter. He married again in 1762  an Elizabeth Neell, who outlived him by 20 years.

Zachariah died in 1769, at the age of 76, and is buried in Coffleet, Devon, where he died at the beginning of his annual visit to London.

W.N.P. Barbellion was the nom de plume of Bruce Cummings, best known for writing “The Journal

of a Disappointed Man”.  When it was first published in 1919, it was a literary sensation, but both

Barbellion and his diary have now fallen into almost complete obscurity.

He was born at 14 Cross Street, Barnstaple on 7 September 1889.  His father, John, worked as a

columnist for and manager of the north Devon office of the Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette

at the same address, and his mother Maria would later run a sweet shop from these premises.

Perhaps it ought to be explained from the outset, that Cummings derived the pseudonym Barbellion

from the name of a sweet wholesalers, but the initials of his first three names, W.N.P., stood for

Wilhelm (as in Kaiser Wilhelm), Nero and Pilate (as in Pontius), whom he considered to be the three wretchedest men who ever lived, except,of course for himself, for reasons we shall see as the narrative unfolds. He used a nom de plume in the first place to protect the the identities of family, friends and locations mentioned throughout the diaries, which only at a later stage did he consider worthy of publication.

He was the youngest of six children, was a small and sickly child, and was somewhat mollycoddled

in his early years by his parents, starting school at a later age than most children, eventually

attending Rock Park School in Victoria Road and then North Devon School at Trafalgar Lawn.

He was a shy and retiring child to begin with, but his keen intelligence soon shone through, and he

showed a special talent for mathematics and composition.

Whilst still at school, at the age of 13, he decided to start writing a diary, which in those early

years was largely filled with entries relating to his two main interests in life, the natural

world, especially ornithology, and girls.  As the diary develops, so does his interest in nature,

and his main ambition in life is to achieve fame as a zoologist.

The diary also shows a developing literary talent, and as it progresses, the range of subjects it deals with expands, sometimes reaching rhapsodic heights of  philosophical comment on life in general,

and his own life in particular.

From an early age, though, he is destined to a life full of disappointment.

In order to make a living, he is obliged to follow in his father’s footsteps as a hack reporter, in which he has little interest, still harbouring a desire to  to succeed as a zoologist.  He takes an examination for one of three posts in the Britsh Museum’s Natural History Department, but comes fourth.  He is

offered a post at the Plymouth Marine Laboratories, but his father dies before he is able to take up the post, and has to resign before he even starts work there.

Eventually, he does get his cherished post at the British Museum, only to find that because of his lack of formal academic qualifications, he has been consigned to a lowly department, specialising

in the study of lice.

Life in London is lonely too, and he craves to get married.

But there is another strand in the diary which becomes evident, and that is, his increasingly poor health, but no diagnosis as to what is wrong.  Because of this, he wonders if he should in fact marry, but eventually , in November 1914, marries a fashion designer and distant cousin, Eleanor Benger,

at Kensington Registry Office.

Of course, by this time the First World War has broken out, and , a year later, Barbellion is asked to attend the recruiting office in order to enlist, so, armed with a sealed  letter from his doctor, he goes along only to be given the most cursory of examinations, and fails the medical.  Barbellion is puzzled why he is dismissed so peremptorily, and on the way home decides to open the doctor’s letter.  To his astonishment, he finds that he has been diagnosed with what we would now call multiple sclerosis, and has been given only five years to live.

He tries to hide all this from his wife, and becomes quite angry when he discovers that she has known all along, even before they married.

Barbellion mentions all this in his diary.  He appreciates that it is of sufficiently high literary quality to warrant publication, and now that he knows that he has not long to live, is anxious to see his

journal in print.  Even here, he is thwarted.  Collins originally agree to publish it, but, schoolbooks

and Bibles being their specialities, they don’t want to upset their usual clientele with what they deem to be an immoral book, and decline it.  Eventually, Chatto and Windus agree to publish it, with a foreward by H.G.Wells, who is enthusiastic about it, probably because  he sees echoes of

his own younger life in the book.

The journal is finally published on 27 March 1919, and by mid-summer has run through a third

 impression.  However, by October, Barbellion is dead.  His fame is very short-lived.

The critics were very divided on its merits, one asking why anyone should find the ramblings  of

such an ordinary mortal so interesting.  Some dismissed it as a work of fiction, even claiming that H.G.Wells himself had written it.  Others, however, saw in it signs of genius, calling it a  masterpiece, plumbing as it does the depths of the human heart with great skill and psychological insight,  “ a wonderful record of a great spirit and a great fight”.

Some have compared his work (the Journal was followed by two shorter volumes) to Kafka and Joyce.  The French novelist, Raymond Queneau, was a particular fan, and included it in his top

99 books of all time.  Ronald Blythe called it “among the most moving diaries ever created.”

“The Journal of a Disappointed Man” has largely been forgotten about nowadays, although it is still in print, and is particularly favoured by multiple sclerosis societies, who see in it a faithful account

of the progress of the disease, and one man’s reaction to it.

The Journal, if nothing else, is very quotable.  One of the most poignant passages is the very last

one:

“I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped in those few years a tolerably long life.  I have

loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed, struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes, I shall be content to die.”

He was cremated at Golders Green in 1919, his daughter, Penelope, later moving his ashes to Old Basing in Hampshire where she lived.  His wife, Eleanor, who later remarried, outlived him by 60 years, dying aged 89, in 1979.

I’ve discovered another Mudge, not part of the canonical Mudges, but whose tale is well worth telling.  He’s not a Bidefordian, not a Devonian, not even English.  This is William Tertius Fitzwilliam Mudge, who was the son of Zachary Mudge, the admiral.  In fact, his career was in some ways very similar to that of his father.  He was born in Dublin in in 1831, and entered the navy as a 13 year old cadet.

Just as his father had been first lieutenant to George Vancouver on his expedition to the north-east Pacific at an earlier date, so William found himself in the same general area in 1858 when Captain George Richards charted the coast of British Columbia and surveyed Vancouver Island.  Apart from surveying, naval officers had many other functions and duties including carrying supplies and mails to the scattered coastal settlements and the various outposts of the Hudson Bay Company, as well as  enforcing British law, as police officers and judges, resolving land disputes, negotiating with the indigenous population, and carrying out various scientific observations in the lands they explored.

In 1858, gold was discovered in the Frazer River, and there was a sudden influx of gold-diggers from California into the area, and the Governor of the newly-founded Crown Colony of British Columbia, James Douglas, called for the Royal Navy to prevent this flow of immigrants into Canada, in case this led to the United States claiming the land for itself, so the Navy dispatched HMS Pylades to Victoria, its capital, from the China Station.  In command was Capt Michael de Courcy, and William Mudge was one of his officers.

Somewhat later, William Mudge was involved in the San Juan dispute, where a group of islands called the San Juan Islands was occupied by British forces in the north, and American forces in the south, with neither giving way to the other.  The stand off went on for twelve years.  In the end, the British government, asked Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to arbitrate, who promptly awarded the entire San Juan archipelago to the United States, a sign of things to come, perhaps. Incensed at this decision,  the Canadian government  never referred any territorial disputes  to London therafter.

Before we leave the area, it is worth noting that William Mudge himself was honoured by having a whole island named after him, as a result of his surveying work, even if it was small and sparsely inhabited.

After leaving this area, he took part in surveying 13,000 miles of the African coast, including Mozambique and Madagascar.

However, the final episode of his naval career was to take place thousands of miles away, in New Zealand.  By this time, early settlers were starting to infiltrate the Maori homelands, which led to a series of Maori Wars, which  in turn required the intervention of the Royal Navy.  In 1861,  Thomas Mudge was appointed flag lieutenant of HMS Orpheus, the flagship of the South Pacific squadron, trying to repress the resistance of the Maoris to British occupation.  In February of 1863,  the Orpheus sank off the west coast of Auckland after hitting a sandbank, and being smashed to pieces by the oncoming waves.  Not all the crew were drowned.  Out of a total of 259 sailors, 70 were saved, but at least 189 officers and crew were lost.  To this day, it remains the worst disaster in New Zealand’s maritime history.  What made it even more poignant was that many of the sailors were boys, still ‘learning the ropes’. The average age of those that died was 25.  And, of course, one of the officers that drowned was William Tertius Fitzwilliam Mudge.  Such is the price of empire.

William Mudge was a son of Dr John Mudge of Plymouth, and a grandson of Zachariah Mudge; and was himself born in Plymouth on 1 December 1762.  He early on showed some interest in joining the Army and entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1777.  In 1779, he received a commission as second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, and fought in the American War of Independence under General Cornwallis in Carolina, where he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1781.  On his return home, he was stationed at the Tower of London, where he also lived, but found himself with an excess of spare time, and asked his superiors if he could use this time to study ‘ the higher mathematics’ and mechanics, and, in doing so, became an expert mathematician.

At about this time, the Revolution in France was making it an urgent necessity to accurately map for military purposes, the geography and topography of Great Britain, and the idea of the Ordnance Trigonometrical Survey was born.  Mudge did not originate the idea: this was a General Roy, who then asked what officers of the Artillery and Engineers were best qualified to do this work, and the names of Lieut.Colonel Edward Williams and Lieutenant Mudge were immediately put forward, as easily the best qualified to do so. Col. Williams, as the senior officer, acted  as head of the Ordnance Survey, with Mudge working under him, but Williams died in 1798, and then Mudge took over as director.

Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society at that time, who was so impressed by the ‘zeal, diligence and ability’ of Mudge in the work he had done so far, said that there would be no doubt about his being elected to the Royal Society that year, and he was duly elected.

So,  William now set about the triangulation of Great Britain, a job that required him to be out in the field most of the time, and a project that took him thirty years to complete.  Thus, it was largely due to William Mudge that the foundation work for the Ordnance Survey was done.

He was promoted brevet major in 1801, regimental major in 1803, and lieutenant colonel in 1804.

While working on the Survey, he actually lived in the Tower of London, where the work was based, but in 1808, he bought a house in Holles Street, where he lived for the rest of his life.

In addition to the work of the Survey, in 1809, he was appointed Lieutenant Governor of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and public examiner at the newly founded Addiscombe Military Seminary, and he made sure that surveying was part of the curriculum at both establishments.

In 1813, it was determined to extend the meridian arc of longitude into Scotland.  Mudge superintended this, sometimes doing the measurements himself, sometimes helped by his son, Richard Zachariah Mudge (q.v.).

On 4 June, he was promoted brevet colonel, and in 1814 regimental colonel.  In 1817, he was awarded a degree of LL.D from the University of Edinburgh.  In 1818, he was appointed a commissioner to the new board of longitude.  In 1819, he was visited at work by the King of Denmark, and he presented Mudge with a gold chronometer, a fitting climax to an industrious life.

In the same year, he began the survey of Scotland, and was finally promoted to major-general. He died on 17 April, 1820, aged 57.

Thomas Mudge was born in 1715 in Exeter, the second son of Zachariah Mudge, at that time a teacher, who was later appointed the first Headmaster of Bideford Grammar School, where Thomas became one of his pupils.  However, young Thomas showed no aptitude or enthusiasm for the academic life, but instead had a bent for mechanical things, especially watches.  He liked nothing better as a child than taking apart clocks and watches, and then putting them back together again  So, when he was 14, his father had him apprenticed to George Graham, an eminent clock and watch maker, in Fleet Street, London.  After doing his apprenticeship, he set up privately: at first, on his own, but later, with a fellow ex-apprentice, William Button.

He was noted for the quality of his workmanship, and soon picked up commissions from important patrons, including John Smeaton, the engineer, Dr. Johnson, the man of letters, Count Bruhl of Saxony, and King Ferdinand VI of Spain, all of whom were delighted with his work.

In 1755 or thereabouts, he invented the lever escapement, which allowed for much greater accuracy than hitherto in clocks and watches, and has been described as ‘the greatest single improvement that has ever been applied to watches’, and which is is now an essential component of every mechanical clock or watch, and is the part whose movement gives clocks and watches their ticking sound.

Due to ill health, Thomas eventually retired to Plymouth, to live with his younger brother, John.  However, he kept up his interest in chronometers (accurate time-pieces). 

The Board of Longitude had earlier in the century held a competition to find an accurate way of measuring longitude, the lack of which had had a grievous effect upon shipping and trade, and was famously won by John Harrison.  However, the Board was sure that even better accuracy could be achieved, and launched a second competition, which Thomas entered.  One of the rules of the competition was that two chronometers had to be built, one testing the accuracy of the other.  For total accuracy, Thomas built three.  The chronometers were sent off for testing, including to the Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, who declared them satisfactory.  But objections were raised by Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, the same man who had queried the accuracy of Harrison’s design earlier, and who argued again that the degree of accuracy of Thomas’s chronometers was not sufficient to win the prize.  There was much toing and froing of correspondence between the Board, and Thomas’s elder son, also called Thomas, who had become a lawyer, and who argued that as they were the most accurate chronometers available, then they should win the prize.  A committee was set up in Parliament to settle the issue, which decided in favour of Thomas, and he was eventually awarded £2,500 for the work he had done.  One can only surmise that Maskelyne thought that his own ideas involving lunar calculations were superior to those submitted by Harrison or Mudge.

Thomas Mudge was thus one of the pioneers in the making of marine chronometers, which, over the course of time, helped save many lives at sea.

In 1770, George III purchased a large gold watch made by Mudge that incorporated the lever escapement, and which he presented to his wife, Queen Charlotte, and which can now be found in the Royal Collection at Windsor.  In 1776, Thomas was appointed watchmaker to the King.

However,  Thomas’s fame and fortune were short- lived, as he died two years after winning the prize, at the house of his elder son, Thomas, at Newington Place, Surrey on 14 November 1794, and he was buried at Dunstan-in- the- Wood, Fleet Street, his wife Abigail having predeceased him in 1789.

Thomas Arthur was one of only four North Devonians who have been awarded the Victoria Cross.

Born in Abbotsham, near Bideford in 1835, to Thomas and Jane  Arthur, he appears to have worked as a farm labourer for a  short while for a John Beckalick at Parkham, before joining the Army at the age of 18 at Devonport for service in the Royal Regiment of Artillery.  He was sent to the Royal Artillery Depot at Woolwich, where he earned the princely sum of  one and three pence per day (the equivalent of 6p today) as a gunner.  In November 1854, he embarked on the HMS Niagara from Liverpool, bound for the war in the Crimea.

Conditions in the Crimea were atrocious, and more men were dying from infection, fever,

poor sanitation and hunger, than from deaths and injuries sustained in battle, and it was to rectify this situation that Florence  Nightingale was  famously sent, with 38 nurses to help her.  Though

she was largely based in Scutari Barracks, she did make two visits to Balaclava, where at one time

Thomas was briefly hospitalised.

He was eventually stationed at Sebastopol, where the Russians were dug in at the Quarries.

The 7^th Fusiliers attacked the position, and gained it, but Thomas could see that that the infantrymen were running out of ammunition.  When night fell, he ran, on several occasions, under heavy enemy fire, with barrels of ammunition on his head, and at obvious great danger to himself,

to keep the infantry supplied.  He was said to have thrown the ammunition down at the soldiers’ feet, shouting “Here you are, my lads, fire away!”.

The Quarries were little more than holes in the ground in front of a fort called the Redan, the capture of which was the object of the exercise, and against which the Commander-in Chief, Lord Raglan, threw about a thousand troops, but without success, and only half survived the attack.

It was at this point that Thomas volunteered to form and lead a spiking party, to disable and

sabotage the enemy guns, an extremely hazardous operation.

On other occasions, he was seen, lifting up and bringing back wounded officers and men

 to the trenches.

For all these acts of bravery, he was later awarded the Victoria Cross.

He left the Crimea with his Battery in February 1856, and arrived back in Woolwich in the middle

of March.

Uncharacteristically, he took two separate days off without leave soon after his return.  He was court-martialled and ended up having to serve  a twenty-eight day sentence in Weedon Military Prison in Northamptonshire.

Fortunately, he was released nine days before he was ordered to march to Hyde Park, where, together with 62 other Crimean War heroes, he was awarded the Victoria Cross by Queen Victoria .

The Victoria Cross was specifically created at this time to commemorate the deeds

of those servicemen who had acted  with valour under enemy fire, above and beyond the

call of duty, and this was the first investiture of its kind.  The medals were awarded in strict order of seniority of service and rank.  Thomas was the twenty-third, being one of five Royal Artillery members – four officers, and Thomas.

A few days afterwards, on 6 July, he got married to Ann Goddard, from Hornstead in Berkshire.

In 1861, his first child was born, and in 1863, a second, both in Plymouth.  After this,

he was stationed in Ireland.  In 1866, his unit was sent out to India, where his wife had a further four children, and where for some reason, he changed his surname to McArthur, and his wife

changed her first name to Britannia!

In 1874, after serving at Lucknow and other Bengali posts, he finally retired from the Army.

By 1876, he was back in Bideford, where another daughter, Sophia ,was born.  His last child,

Nelly, was born in Pucklechurch, Bristol in 1880.

He finally settled in Savernake, Wiltshire, where he died, of unknown causes, on 2 March 1902, aged 67.

He is buried at Cadley Churchyard in that town.

Proud of Thomas’s exploits and medal, many of his descendants have included the name Arthur

in their sons’ name,  one relative even calling her daughter Mabel Arthur!

It is well-known that  Victoria Crosses are made from the gunmetal of one of two Chinese cannons, used by the Russians and captured by the British at the siege of Sebastopol.

Thomas’s own medal was purchased  on 19 July 1902 for £47, and purchased again at a later date by the Royal Artillery Institute, and is now displayed at the Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich,

for all to see.

A few year ago, a film, The Eagle of the Ninth, about a lost Roman legion in what is now Scotland, was released.  The book upon which the film was based, was written by an author who spent a significant part of her life in the Bideford area.

Rosemary Sutcliff was born in West Clandon, Surrey, in 1920.  In her autobiography, Blue Remembered Hills, which deals with her earlier years, she apologises for being born in Surrey, and grew up with the feeling ‘that the West Country is the only right and proper place to have made one’s beginnings.’

Her father was indeed a naval officer from the West Country, working at the Admiralty when she was born.  Unfortunately, at the age of three, she was diagnosed with Still’s disease, a rare form of juvenile arthritis, so her father was posted to Malta, in the hope that this would have a positive effect on the child’s health.  This lasted for three years, after which the family returned to England, where she lived a peripatetic existence, following her father’s various career moves, eventually ending up in Netherne, an isolated house about two miles from Yarnscombe, the nearest village, and six miles from Bideford, the nearest large town.

She seems to have had a happy childhood, in spite of her disability, though she had to make numerous visits to the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter, and spent much of her life in a wheelchair.  She didn’t learn to read until she was nine, but said that this was deliberate on her part, because her mother would read  to her stories which would have been well in advance of her own abilities at the time, so reading herself would have been a backward step, or so she thought.  She did complain of occasional loneliness.  It never seems to have occurred to her parents that she might like company of her own age.

She finished her general education at 14, but then went to Bideford Art School, where she developed a talent as a miniaturist, and, at a later date, had some of her miniatures shown at the Royal Academy.  After leaving college, she was busy painting miniatures for a living, especially of young men who had died in the war, but found the medium somewhat limiting, needing, as it were, a broader canvass for her talents, and started writing for pleasure.  Eventually, she decided to submit her work for publication, and, after the war, two of her manuscripts were accepted by the Oxford University Press.

After twenty years in North Devon, she moved on to live in Walberton, near Arundel, in Sussex, where she became a prolific writer of children’s stories, and other works.  She specialised in writing historical novels, and won many literary awards, including the Carnegie Medal (1959), the Horn Book Award (1972), and the Phoenix Award twice, in 1985, and posthumously in 2010.  She was awarded an OBE for services to children’s literature in 1975, and promoted to a CBE in 1992, shortly before she died, later that year, aged 71.  She was still writing on the day she died.

Her work was of a high literary standard.  The Eagle of the Ninth series remains her best-known  literary achievement.

Her life was not without romance, but she died unmarried and without children.

She appeared on Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in October 1983, and you can hear the recording  from the archives on BBC iPlayer.

Chris Trigger

Rosalie Chichester was the only daughter of the flamboyant Sir Bruce Chichester of Arlington , ten miles north of Barnstaple.  The Chichesters can be traced back to the Norman Conquest, and have owned property and land all over North Devon, but the largest estate is Arlington Court, a Georgian country house, built in the neoclassical style, by local architect Thomas Lee in 1822.   In the mid-nineteenth century, the grounds covered 5,300 acres, but this is now somewhat reduced to 3,500 acres.

Rosalie was born at Arlington.  She was fortunate enough to travel extensively all over the world on two separate trips before she was out of her teens.  Her father was a keen yachtsman, owning two yachts, the ‘Zoe’ and the ‘Erminia’, and used the latter to sail down with his family into the Meditteranean, where amongst other places, they visited Sintra (in Portugal),Malaga, Malta and Naples.  Whilst in Naples, her father was taken ill and had to return to England to recuperate.  She had to spend the next 48 days in Naples before her father returned. 

On another occasion, she, with a female companion, Miss Chrissie Peters , literally travelled around the world, visiting Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.  In those days it was almost unheard  of for two unaccompanied young females to go globe-trotting in this way.

She made extensive sketches of her travels, and her sketchbooks are still extant.  She was an animal-lover, and many of the animals on the estate today, including the ponies and sheep, are descendants of the stock that she introduced.  She also kept caged birds, including canaries, budgerigars and parrots. She abhorred fox-hunting, and banned it from her estate, much to the chagrin of the local huntsmen.  The ban was not always observed, and on several occasions, to their further annoyance, she took people to court for trespassing on her land.

Her travels probably started her mania for collecting.  Amongst other things, she collected costumes, model yachts and boats, British and foreign shells, pewter, snuff boxes, tea caddies, paperweights, examples of scrimshaw (pieces of ornately decorated whalebone), and fossils.

Her favourite piece was a red amber elephant from China.  After her death, when the National Trust came to do an inventory, they found an original William Blake painting gathering dust on the top of a cupboard.

She spent much time managing the estate, but she was also an avid painter, photographer and gardener.

She never married, and two years before her death, willed the house and its grounds to the National Trust, which has run it since 1949.

Since 1966, Arlington Court has housed the National Carriage Collection, and is also well known as a bat sanctuary.

Of course, her early adventures may have inspired her better-known nephew, Sir Francis Chichester, the famous aviator and yachtsman, but Rosalie deserves to be remembered in her own right for keeping her estate in good condition for posterity to enjoy.

Her ashes are buried beneath an urn near a lake in the grounds, but her real monument is the house and grounds itself.

Chris Trigger

Roger Garde was born in Bideford in about 1585, although his parents may have come from Alwington, and he married a Phillippa Gist on 4 July 1610.  They had at least six children, though only two survived into adulthood.  Roger was a woollen draper by trade.  However, after twenty four years of marriage, his wife died (in about 1610), and some while after, in 1623,  he left England, and settled in York, Maine, where he bought some land from the local proprietor, Thomas Gorges.  He must have been a diligent and upright character, because Gorges made him his agent on his own return to England in 1643.  Garde then served as Alderman, Town Clerk and Recorder of the York Court in the early 1640’s, eventually becoming Mayor of York in 1644-5, and, in doing so, became the first ever Mayor in New England, though it has to be said that at that time York, (then called Agamenticus) was little more than a village.  In fact, it was granted a municipal charter in 1641, thus making it a city before it became a town!

However, in his capacity as Mayor, he presided over a famous trial, where a woman of ill repute, Catherine Cornish, was accused of murdering her husband, Richard, his body having been found floating in a nearby river.  The trial was conducted in an apparently impartial manner, and she was eventually found guilty, and sentenced to death.  Before the sentence was carried out, though, she accused Roger Garde and another townsman, Edward Johnson of having illicit affairs with her.  Johnson admitted that he had had such an affair, but Garde denied any involvement with her.  She maintained that his need to keep quiet about the affair, in those puritanical times, provided him with sufficient motive for wanting her executed, but he was adamant that no such affair had taken place, and she was duly hanged.

The townsfolk were never entirely convinced of his innocence.  This weighed heavily upon him mentally and physically, and a year later, he was dead.  Even the Governor of Massachusetts was not convinced of his innocence, and thought he might be lying, pointing out that “he was a carnal man and had no wife in the country”.  As his death approached, Garde was reputed to have said, “The people have broken my heart”.

The authorities, however, did not take sides.  In the end, he was exonerated by the people of any wrong- doing and he was treated after his death with the honour that a man of his status would normally receive.

A brother, John, seems to have followed him to America, where he became a trader on Rhode Island.

In spite of his unfortunate end, Roger Garde was one of the pioneers who founded  America, becoming the first ever Mayor in New England. A surprisingly large number of other Devonians emigrated  to New England at around this time, including others from North Devon, but whose lives have now been largely forgotten.                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                          Chris Trigger