In her later years my mother wrote about her own love of the fishing-village, a home which she left when she was eleven:
Her childhood in the town was spent many years before Flora Thompson moved there, in 1940, but my mother's own memoirs about her years in Brixham are detailed and poignant, in a way reminiscent of the style of the well-known Thompson.
I had the criss-crossing meeting-points and places of personal family and well-known writer in Brixham in mind when I drafted a poem about Flora Thompson. I decided to create a layered text, with the poem about the author superimposed on a description of my family in the town. The poem reflects the multilayerings of life and text. Here is an extract from the under-layer of
Flora and the Family, reinventing my own family in the town:
Brixham home of my maternal forbearers, whose lives and bodies are now shadows weaving in & out of Burton Street up across to Bolton Street - shapes coming from doors - they're waving back up to us - feet stepping towards the harbour - linking houses and family lines across time - some lost & forgotten for ever - a few resurrected here and given space-in-print to exist in this text-in-time. Walk the streets of this their seaside town and walk into the margins of darkened lanes, merge lines of text into the C21 virtual version where fisher and farming folk live again - throw the fishing net and catch them against a background of brimming Brixham red skies and silver seas. the fleet coming in skimming the waves and preening glorious sails.
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Brixham's mysterious C19 personal journalist/diarist, Miss Green, in complete contrast to the well-known C20 Flora Thompson, has not left any published works and remains obscure and unknown. She is one of the invisible woman writers of Devon who I wanted to include in this blog.
Miss Green was probably born and lived most of her life in Brixham, whereas Thompson only spent the latter part of her life there but the chances you have heard of Miss Green are remote. (I call her Miss because as yet I have not been able to identify the diarist's christian name and because the manuscripts that do exist by her are in that name. Happening through serendipity on the existence of the manuscript of Miss Green's journals in an archive far away from Devon
(Birmingham University - also see
Diaries for detailed commentary on Green's writings), was a real discovery, for my grandfather was a Brixham 'Green' and to begin with I thought the two families might be related. Concerning the journalist's identity, the
Birmingham archive notes:
From internal evidence, it is likely that the writer is a Miss Green, daughter of Joseph Green of Parkham Cottage, Brixham, Devon. A record of the marriage of Joseph Green nd Elizabeth Adams at Brixham on 23 January 1791 is listed in the International Genealogical Index. The writer spends several months with her uncle Robert Adams, of Brompton, near Chatham, Kent who is possibly her mother's brother.
Sometimes, the complications re establishing writer identity and my other co-passion for family history research, as with Miss Green, took me off on tangents into the mires of online genealogical sites, away from the main thread of this project. Apropos Miss Green, I'm afraid I'm still floundering amongst the C19 higher Brixham lanes, up in Burton Street with Parkahm Villas, or New Road, St Mary's church and surrounding area, with various C19 censuses details laid out on my desk concerning the various branches of Green families, rope-makers, ship-owners, bankers and other fisher-folk kith and kin. If and when I establish exactly how Miss Green fitted into the Brixham Green family trees I will update this later. Meanwhile, if any of you finding this blog can bring any fresh insights, please do let me know.
Before we depart from Brixham and Miss Green I must briefly comment on her writing and its importance to the area in which she lived. For although, yes, her journals are for the most part intensely religious and parochial, focusing on the immediate locality of her home parish, the specifics of Green's writing provide the C21 reader with a social history of the mid C19 in that town and indeed, probably the whole country. She conjures a contrasting world to the one we are now familiar with, a world in which families left their homes every day to walk, rather than drive, out and about their locality, to go to church, to church and other social meetings, to meet with neighbours, family and friends for walks into the surrounding countryside and then shared tea and meals; a world in which death was a persistent concern and experience in an individual's life, not a topic to be avoided; a world in which church, caring, community and charity were accepted as the norm of life.
Miss Green's diaries also tell us about the topography of the local landscape and illustrate the huge differences in the locality between then and now. Miss Green knew a few of the local leading lights of her time, including particularly
Revd. Henry Francis Lyte, famous writer of the now popular hymn Abide with Me. Green, who seems to have been a Sunday school teacher, evidently knew him well as she attended many of Lyte's services and provides descriptive commentary about each sermon or lecture she heard. Miss Green's church was
St Mary's at Higher Brixham.
Here's just a couple of excerpts from her journals:
'We took a walk to Parkham just before dinner in the evening went to see John's wife after that to church they sang the 55 psalms 2 versions poor Elizabeth's favorites the music was to me beautiful and the words brought many things to my mind which I cannot forget, Mr Lyte's lecture was very good on the Epistles for Trinity Sunday.' (26 May 1841)
After looking at the old church we proceeded to the iron mines the view from there was very good. William accompanied us now and then we passed Mudstone but did not go down on the beach we reached home just before dark not a little tired with our long walks. (28 May 18410.
The journal entry that stays with me is Miss Green’s affecting
farewell to a beloved cousin, and Uncle and Aunt, in June 1841, as they left
Devon on the Steamer to return to their Kent home after a holiday with Green's family, in
Brixham. To our fast-paced C21 minds the woman's intense gaze over the water, watching the steamer pass across the bay seems tedious and slow, How could it have been like this? Yet perhaps she was the lucky one, experiencing a luxury we, with the rush of our C21 lives, do not now have.
… after tea Harriet Fogwell kindly went up on Parkham with Priscilla and I to see the Steamer come out. We saw her pass across the bay at a little before 6 in the evening we waited until nearly ten past 7 when she came out and glided very quickly along we had he glass but could not distinguish one person from another the distance being considerable, we tied a white pocket handkerchief on a pole that was our flag but I can hardly think they saw it … all seems very lonely. (Extracts from Miss Green, Journals of Miss Green, from Brixham, 1840-1: Special Collections, Birmingham).
B for Budleigh Salterton
Now we're going to zip along the south Devon coast to the east of the county and meet up with another C19 woman writer who in her life-time seems to have become a well-known figure in the town of Budleigh Salterton, or in the nearby village of East Budleigh. Just as with Brixham this east Devon district harbours the bones of a branch of my own ancestors, so similarly to the south Devon resort finding this writer has provided me rich research material. But that belongs to another story (blog).
Maria Susannah Gibbons wrote novels and travel books about Devon. She was apparently born in Middlesex, in 1841 (the same year in which Miss Green was writing most of her Brixham journals), but by the 1880s had moved to
Vicarsmead, in East Budleigh. Gibbon died in 1900. The main texts which are associated with the author are
We Donkeys in Devon and
Travels in a Donkey, 1887. Maria Susanna Gibbons makes a brief appearance in
SouthWestWomenWriters and there was mention of her in an old
Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries (3:2 1904 49-52). There is not much information easily available about the author on the internet, except that
The OVA (a civic society founded in 1979 to interest residents and visitors in the history, geography, natural history and architecture of this area of Devon), contains a wealth of material on the Otter valley, which includes some valuable snippets about
Maria Gibbons. My comments on the writer are indebted to that site. The author is described thus:
A most delightful character who epitomised the Victorian scene in this town was the writer Maria Gibbons who, with her mother, moved from East Budleigh to live at the top of Victoria Place. Her charming reminiscences of Salterton have already been quoted in this chapter. She drove a donkey tandem, and was quite eccentric in her attitude towards animals. She once had a wooden leg fitted on her broken-legged cow. Maria was the author of 'We Donkeys in Devon', and several novels, now forgotten. When past middle age she took up nursing. There have always been 'characters' in Salterton (See Ova)
Maria was evidently not without eccentricity for we learn that
In 1886 the old vicarage was the home of two ladies of great character; Mrs. Gibbons, who allowed her hens to roost on her drawing room chairs, and her daughter Maria. (ibid.)
I also learn that Maria Gibbons wrote an account titled
Budleigh Salterton in 1809, a transcript of which is in
Fairlynch Museum.
Before I leave Budleigh and Maria Gibbons I must just mention another Budleigh woman writer who I would not have known about if Roger Lendon (
TheOva) had not written about her on their website.
Miss Jane Louisa Willyams (1786-18780 was apparently born in Cornwall and moved to Budleigh forty years before her death, where in 1841, 'she lived at Prospect (now East Terrace). Willyams with her sister wrote a three volume novel called
Coquetry which was published in 1818'. (See
Ova for more about Willyams). This is yet another writer from the south west who has disappeared from the radar, but one to watch out for.
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| By the sea at Budleigh |
For introduction to this blog see Women Writing on the Devon Land
