Annie Coughlan (1872-1936),  Titanic survivor: the Bideford Connection

This is the intriguing story of a Mrs Annie Coughlan, who survived the Titanic disaster, and eventually came to live in Bideford, together with her sister, Phoebe.

She was the daughter of Alfred William Woodland (1838- 1899) and Sarah Saunders (1842- ?).  The couple were married in Netherbury, Dorset in 1860, where Alfred worked as a butcher.  They later moved to Guernsey, where he worked part-time as a butcher, but also ran his own pub, the Half Moon, in Les Caches Road, St. Martins.

Annie Woodland was born on Guernsey on 17 November 1872, and had two older brothers, and an older sister, and two younger brothers and a younger sister.  She married a soldier, called William

Henry Martin, in Ireland in 1893.  The marriage didn’t last, but she never divorced, and by 1912 was calling herself Mrs Coughlan, having presumably entered into a common-law relationship with a Mr Coughlan but unable to get divorced..  She gave her surname as Martin when registering for work, but is also described as the widow of William Martin on her death certificate. Her legal husband died on 19 October 1918 in Wallasey, Cheshire of pneumonia and heart failure.

In the meantime, she had gained employment with the White Star Line as a stewardess on the Olympic, a sister ship of the Titanic.  The Olympic was, in fact, the same size as the Titanic, but the latter had greater tonnage because of its heavier interior fitments.  Whilst employed in this capacity, she was believed to be on board, when it collided with HMS Hawke in the Solent in 1911.  The Olympic, unlike the Titanic, and its other sister ship, the Britannic, survived to serve a full working life, and finished its active career in 1934.  The Britannic was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1915.

In 1912, Annie became a stewardess on the Titanic, giving her last address as Posbrook Road, Portsmouth, which was also the address of her younger sister, Phoebe.  She was paid £3/10/00

a month.  She embarked on the Titanic on its fateful voyage at Southampton, when she was 39 years old.  A few days later, as everyone knows, the Titanic was hit by an iceberg, and sank within a  few hours, with the loss of  more than 1500 lives.

At first, Mrs Coughlan, as she now liked to call herself, was thought to have perished, and appeared on the official list of the missing.  She did, however, manage to get a place on one of the lifeboats

(Boat 11), was picked up by the Carpathia, and disembarked in New York City on 12 April 1912.

Nothing is known of her whereabouts immediately after this.  However, in the mid- to late 20s, she was known to have worked at The Royal Hotel in Bideford.  It was also known that one of her sisters lived in Northam.  This is assumed to be Phoebe Humby, her younger sister, with whom she was very close.  After she left the Royal, she appears to have moved to Combe Martin, where she lived a quiet life, and where she died in 1936.  A local newspaper at the time reported her death,

mentioning that her husband (presumably Mr Coughlan), had drowned with the Titanic, adding that

she had lived in Bideford, before moving to Combe Martin, and had a sister who still lived in Northam.  Her sister moved to Barnstaple after this date, and died there in 1951.

If anything, the story of Phoebe is even more interesting.  When she was a young girl of 14, she was convicted of attempting to murder her father.  Her father, as mentioned above, brought up his family in Guernsey, where he worked as a butcher and a publican.  At this time, he was separated from his wife, and he would often leave Phoebe alone at the bar, which  she hated.  Eventually, she struck up a relationship with a soldier, and they both decided to run away.  However, her father found out about this before they had the opportunity to do so, and gave Phoebe a serious thrashing.  In retaliation,  Phoebe attempted to murder her father by poisoning his tea with oxalic acid.  However,

William felt nauseous after sipping it, and decided not to drink it.  Apparently, there was enough

oxalic acid in the tea to kill three or four people.  Phoebe was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for her crime, and this was widely reported in the national press at the time.

Phoebe died in Barnstaple in 1951. 

Reverend Jack Russell (1795-1883), the Dog Breeder with a Dog Collar.

Most people will have heard of the Jack Russell dog, and that it was named after a Westcountry parson. Here is the full story.

The Revd John ‘ Jack’ Russell was born in Dartmouth in 1795. His father was also a clergyman, and had his son educated at Plympton Grammar School, Blundell’s School in Tiverton and finally at Exeter College, Oxford. He was said to have kept a small pack pf hounds whilst at school (though obviously not on the school premises), but it was while he was out walking in a village near Oxford one day that he came across ‘Trump’, a white terrier bitch, which later became the progenitor of the Jack Russell terrier. It actually belonged to the local milkman, but Jack insisted in buying it on the spot.

Keen on fox-hunting, he was in search of a fox terrier that was easily distinguishable from its quarry, could keep up with the hunt, and chase out the foxes that had gone to ground without in fact injuring them, thus giving them a ‘sporting chance’ above ground. He prided himself in the fact that his own dogs never tasted blood. He was a founding member of the Kennel Club, though never showed his own dogs, on the grounds that his dogs and the show dogs were ‘as the wild eglantine differs from a garden rose’.

As well as being an enthusiastic hunter and dog-breeder, he was also well-known as a clergyman.

He was nominated to the curacy of Georgenympton and ordained in 1819, became a priest in 1820, married an admiral’s daughter, Penelope Incledon-Bury, in 1826, and , in 1832, he became rector of the parish of Swimbridge, in North Devon, where he remained for nearly half a century, and where he continued to hunt, until a year before his death.

He was renowned for his kindness, particularly towards gypsies, who were not universally liked, but who wandered into his parish from time to time. On one occasion, in return for his support, gypsies guarded his house when it was rumoured he was about to be burgled; and when Edward Boswell, the King of the Gypsies, was on his death-bed, asked that a Spanish silver coin of the reign of Charles III, that he had greatly prized, be given to the Rev Jack for the sympathy he had shown over the years to himself and his fellow travellers.

His sermons were notably short by Victorian standards, but this was probably due to the fact that he kept a horse tethered outside the church during the service.

His reputation as ‘The Sporting Parson’ gave him national fame, and he became friendly with the Prince of Wales ( later to become Edward VII) and his wife, and was once invited to Sandringham for Christmas one year, where he danced with Princess Alexandra at the New Year’s Ball, while the midnight bells chimed.

In 1879, he moved to Black Torrington, also in North Devon, where he received greater pay, but regretted moving, and died three years later, aged 87. He was buried back in Swimbridge, where his funeral was attended by huge crowds.

Such was his fame at his death, that even the New York Times carried his obituary.

He was buried in the churchyard opposite the pub, next to his wife, who predeceased him by five years. There is even a signpost in the churchyard, pointing to his grave, as many people, including owners of Jack Russell terriers, like to visit it today. His expensive sporting pursuits meant that his estate was much depleted at the time of his death

Some time after his death, the name of the local pub, which he was known to have frequented, was changed to ‘The Jack Russell Inn’, which still flourishes, is filled with memorabilia of Parson Jack, and has a sign outside which features ‘Trump’, the original Jack Russell terrier.

Ironically, the churchyard has a sign outside saying, No Dogs Allowed.

Bruce Tulloh (1935-2018), Britain’s first barefoot runner and athlete of distinction

In the early 1960s, Bideford used to hold a Sports Day in the same week as the Regatta, and it gave local people a chance to see their local sporting hero, Bruce Tulloh. in action.

He was actually born in Datchet, Berkshire, but his mother got divorced when he was young, so she bought a cottage in Instow, and moved there with her son.

He was educated at Wellington College, paid for by his grandfather. He went on to study botany at Southampton University, where he got his degree (his mother was a botanist).

Bruce got his inspiration for running from watching Czech runner Emil Zatopek in the 1948 London Olympics. He won his first long distance race at age 12, and decided to dedicate himself to the sport from there on. He became the British record holder at one, two and six miles. He gained international fame in 1962, when he won the gold medal for the 5000 metres at the European Championships in Belgrade.

He was famous also for running barefoot, a habit he developed running along North Devon’s sandy beaches in boyhood, a long time before Zola Budd and the other African athletes did the same. Asked why he ran barefoot, he said that it was easier to accelerate without shoes, and of course you did not have to worry about the weight of your shoes slowing you down.

He failed however to find success in the Olympics. In 1960, in Rome, he found the heat oppressive, and failed to get into the finals by one place; In the 1964 season, he felt on top form, but then contracted measles from his young son, Clive, and wasn’t feeling well enough to compete in the Tokyo Olympics. In the 1968 Mexico Olympics, he, like many athletes at the time. felt that the high altitude runners had an unfair advantage, and did not compete.

He then felt that he needed to change tack. Whilst reading the 1968 Guinness Book of Records, he discovered that there was a competition for running across the USA, so the following year, he entered this, with wife and child accompanying him in a caravan along the route. He ran the 2,876 miles from Los Angeles to New York, knocking eight days off the record.

At a later date, he settled into a career teaching biology at Marlborough College, whilst continuing to coach younger athletes, including his own two daughters, who also ran barefoot and achieved considerable success in the 1980s, and Richard Nerurkar, who was the World Cup Marathon winner in 1993. He continued himself to run marathons and other long-distance races into old age.

Bruce’s original ambition was to write, and in the end he wrote 23 books, all on the subject of running, including his book about his American epic journey, ‘Four Million Footsteps’, which became a best-seller. He wrote many articles for running magazines.

North Devon played a significant part in his life. Apart from living here as a youth, he trained as an athlete on the local beaches, and, as a coach, would set up training camps at Braunton and Croyde.

When he retired, he continued to live in in Marlborough. What many people may not have appreciated is that he kept on his mother’s Instow cottage, and would return to Instow frequently throughout his life, until a few weeks before his death in late April of this year, of cancer, aged 82, where he continued to support and inspire younger local athletes.

He is survived by his wife, Sue, and his three children. Chris Trigger.

Humphrey (1711-97) and John (1758-96) Sibthorpe, eminent botanists.

Humphrey Sibthorpe was born in 1711 at Canwick near Lincoln. He went to Oxford, where he gained his degree in 1737, and ten years later, in 1747, became the Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford. The great Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, named a plant after him, Sibthorpia Europa, commonly known as the Cornish Moneywort, in recognition of his botanical expertise. However, he was said to have taught only one course, repeated each year, in his 37 years as a professor, and that, of no great merit. He married twice, the second time to Elizabeth Gibbs, in 1757, who owned property in Instow. They had a son, John, born at Oxford in 1758, who eventually succeeded Humphrey as Professor of Botany, in 1784. In fact, Humphrey voluntarily stood down to make way for his son, and retired to the Instow estates that his son had recently inherited. It was said of Humphrey, rather cruelly, that he did much more for science by raising his son, than ‘by any writings or investigations of his own’.

John Sibthorpe’s main claim to fame was that he produced a monumental book on the plants of Greece, for which he collected more than 3000 specimens; and for employing an Austrian botanical illustrator, Ferdinand Bauer(q.v.) then as now considered to be amongst the world’s greatest such artists. The work was entitled the ‘Flora Graeca’, which ran to twenty volumes, required 3 years of field research, and a further 2 years to complete, containing nearly 1000 hand-coloured illustrations by Bauer. Because of its size, only 25 copies were initially printed, and was very expensive to buy. A second edition of 40 copies was later produced, but that was all. One can hardly describe it as a commercial success. However, such is the quality of the illustrations that it is considered to be a masterpiece of its kind, and would now cost more than £20,000 to purchase.

Unfortunately, John died very young from consumption, brought on by a cold, unmarried, and pre-deceasing his father, who had, in the meantime, spent his retirement managing and developing the estates his son had inherited, seeing the potential for Instow as a holiday resort, and had some houses built along the front.

Humphrey himself died the following year, and the estate passed on to the son of his first wife, Humphrey Waldo Sibthorp. He sold off some of the land before returning to Lincolnshire to live, where he died in 1815. His descendants proceeded to sell off the rest of the land, encouraged by the steep rise in the value of land during the Napoleonic Wars. The Manor of Instow was eventually bought by Colonel Augustus Saltrens Willett, who fought at the Battle of Waterloo, and who had inherited the neighbouring Tapely Estate from his great-uncle, John Clevland, on the condition that he changed his name to Clevland, which he did, but with some reluctance. He bought the Sibthorpe estate for £23,000, enough money to allow the Lincolnshire Sibthorpes to take seats in Parliament for many years to come.

John Sibthorpe couldn’t get on with the damp Devonshire air, so on returning from his European travels, retired to Bath, where ironically he died from consumption, as mentioned earlier.

Humphrey Sibthorpe’s monument is in Instow Church, where it is decorated by garlands of Sibthorpia.

Haile Selassie I (1892- 1975), an Emperor in Exile.

If you have ever visited St. Nectan’s Church in Stoke, near Hartland in North Devon, you will no doubt have noticed a chair there, which has a plaque attached to it, indicating that it was once sat upon by Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, who visited that church on 17 August 1938.

You may well ask why Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Lions, Lion of Judah, was visiting such a remote part of the British Isles at this time.

The answer lies in the date. After serving as regent to his cousin Zaudata, Haile Selassie (originally called Lij Tafari Makonnen, and who was born in a mud hut), became Emperor in 1930. Soon afterwards, in 1934, Mussolini decided to invade the country in an attempt to create an Italian Empire in the Horn of Africa. It was no minor skirmish. Poisoned gas was used by the Italians, and by the end of the war, a quarter of a million Ethiopians had been killed. The Emperor himself, after going round the world pleading for peace, took an active part in the fighting, but to no avail. In the end the Ethiopian royal family were forced to move into exile, going first to Djibouti, then to Palestine, and finally arriving in England, where they originally set up house near the Ethiopian legation in London.

The government were somewhat embarrassed by his presence, as it was proof of their inability to control the actions of the continental dictatorships. However, after going on holiday to Bath, the Emperor was impressed by the friendliness of the local people, who, of course, treated him as a celebrity, and he eventually bought a house there, called Fairfield, and moved into it with the rest of his family and entourage.

He had brought some money with him (about £25,000) but there were legal disputes as to what was personally his, and what belonged to the nation. Although they were generally sympathetic to his plight, the British Government only granted him ‘visitor status’, and he received no official financial support from the state, though, at a later date an anonymous benefactor, whose identity has never been revealed, did give him some financial help.

In the meantime, however, with his large family (a wife, five children, five grandchildren from his elder daughter), not to mention the rest of the staff, his finances ended up in poor shape, and he was obliged to earn money in any way he could, and this included opening fetes.

In 1938, he accepted one such invitation to open Hartland Church Fete, and this is how he came to visit St. Nectan’s Church, staying down the road at Hartland Abbey, by courtesy of the Stucley family.

Of course, as the legitimate ruler of one of the oldest Christian nations on earth, and having a three thousand year old ancestry that stretched back to King Solomon, he was treated with the utmost dignity and respect.

The opening ceremony was quite a formal one (as fetes go), with many local clergymen and dignitaries attending, the formalities taking place in the church, and thus the reason for the special chair. He was praised for his attempts to modernise his own country, and for giving encouragement

to other nations to do the same, for his attempts to keep the peace, especially via the League of Nations, and ‘ when the demons of war were unleashed’, for his bravery in battle.

In return, he said in Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia), and using an interpreter, that he hoped that his presence in Hartland would raise the profile of Christianity in the area, help to improve the church’s finances, and thanked the British people as a whole, who had been his most faithful supporter whilst in exile.

He eventually persuaded the British Government to send him back to Ethiopia to help with the war effort, and he regained his power as Emperor in 1941.

He was regarded in the West as a progressive leader, especially in the fields of education and law and order, but eventually famine, unemployment and a mutinous army undermined his rule, and he was overthrown by the Marxist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in 1974.

He was kept under house arrest until his death, in dubious circumstances, in 1975, aged 81. At first, he was thought to have died of natural causes, following a prostate operation, but, in 1992, his body was found buried under a toilet in the imperial palace, an ignominious end to a distinguished life.

In November 2000, his body was properly laid to rest in Addis Ababa’s Trinity Cathedral.

Of course, as Emperor, he was the last monarch (the 225th) in an unbroken succession that went back three thousand years to Menelik I, said to be the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and who was treated in his lifetime as a living god and messiah by adherents of the Jamaican Rastafarian movement, partly because of his ancestry and partly because he was the only black African leader not to be deposed by white imperialists.

Rastafarians see Ethiopia as their spiritual home, and there is a small Rastafarian community there.

They are now about a million-strong, and St. Nectan’s Church, because if its connection to Haile Selassie, has now become a place of pilgrimage for his followers.

Ferdinand Bauer (1760- 1826), eminent botanical illustrator.

Ferdinand Bauer was born in Feldsberg, Austria, in 1760. His father was court painter to the Count of Lichtenstein, who unfortunately died when Ferdinand was only one year old. His eldest brother followed in his father’s footsteps, but he and two other brothers, Joseph and Franz, were taken in by the Prior of the monastery at Feldsberg, who was a physician and botanist, and who trained them in the art of botanical illustration. Both Franz and Ferdinand excelled at this, and they were sent on to Vienna to work at the Royal Botanical Garden at the Schonbrunn Palace.

It was here that Bauer was recommended as a botanical illustrator to the Oxford Professor of Botany, John Sibthorp, whose family estate was at Instow, and who was on his way to Greece and Asia Minor to make a comprehensive record of the flora and fauna of that part of the world. They returned to England in 1787, with over 1500 sketches of plants, animals, birds and landscapes of the area, of which 966, all beautifully hand-coloured, were used in a twenty-volume study, called the ‘Flora Graeca’, and which Joseph Hooker, the famous scientist, described as “the greatest botanical work that has ever appeared.”

At some point, John and Ferdinand returned to Instow, where the latter was commissioned to execute a series of paintings of Instow, largely of the houses on the Sibthorp Instow estates. John invited Ferdinand on another European trip, but Ferdinand declined, as he felt that John had treated him as a servant, rather than a fellow professional, on the first trip. John died soon after returning home from this second trip, when he caught a cold, which developed into consumption, but he had left enough money in his will to make sure that the ‘Flora Graeca’ project came to fruition.

Ferdinand, on the other hand, went on to accomplish even greater things. In 1801, he travelled with Captain Matthew Flinders, aboard HMS Investigator, to newly-discovered Australia, as botanical draughtsman, on an expedition to circumnavigate the continent.. In 1805, he returned with 11 cases of drawings, containing nearly 2000 illustrations of the flora and fauna of Australia and nearby islands.

Part of Ferdinand’s technique was to draw the plant first, then colour-code it, so that he could paint the detail in at his leisure. The Admiralty continued to pay him a pension after his return, so that he could produce the “Flora of New Holland’, which took five years to complete.

Some time after this, he made another visit to Instow, probably at the invitation of Colonel Humphrey Waldo Sibthorp, John’s older half-brother, who had since become Lord of the Manor, and who had built a large new house, ‘Marino’, on the seafront, and which he commissioned Ferdinand to paint. This thus completed a series of paintings of Instow by Bauer, which remains in the possession of the Tapely Estate. (The house later became the Marine Hotel, which has now been converted into a block of flats.)

The “Flora” was not a commercial success, however, and Ferdinand returned to his native Austria, where he continued working as a botanical illustrator, making regular trips to the Alps in search of specimens, right up to his death in 1826, when he died of dropsy.

Although a short biographical sketch of him by John Lhotsky appeared in 1843, predicting that he would be long-remembered by posterity, he was almost forgotten for more than a century, partly because his work never reached a large audience, but also because he was generally too busy to promote his own work. However, at the time of Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, a major exhibition of his work took place at the Australian Museum. This was the first time that his work became known to the general public, and his reputation as, perhaps, the world’s greatest botanical illustrator was re-established.

Most of his painted illustrations are now housed in the British Museum. A genus of plants, Bauera, was named after him, and Flinders named Cape Bauer in South Australia after him.

The irony is that for all the thousands of sketches he made, no-one ever made a sketch of him, although a commemorative plaque of him and his brother, Franz, can be found in Kew Gardens, where his brother followed an equally illustrious career.

Chris Trigger