Rev Stephen Hawker, Morwenstow
There are countless books written about Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow from 1834 to 1874 – Passon Hawkers as he came to be known by his parishioners. So, this account cannot hope to do justice to his achievements or his incumbency. This account will therefore try to convey the story of a humanitarian who was uniquely qualified to administer to a small parish from his church situated on an exposed cliff on the north Cornish coast, during desperate times.
This first paragraph of this summary could be filled with adjectives describing his character but, perhaps eccentric, humanist, poet, humourist and intellectual will suffice for now; maybe to which could be added, what might be a Cornish expression, “a square peg in a round hole”. That is to say he was an Oxford educated intellectual appointed to minister to a very small community of hardworking countryfolk, with the complication of he being of High-Church in a community largely of dissenters. More of that later.
Robert Stephen Hawker was born on 3rd December 1803 at 6 Norley Street, Plymouth, Devon. He was the first of nine children of Jacob Stephen Hawker, a surgeon who later took Holy Orders, and Jane Elizabeth Drewitt. When Robert was about ten years old his father moved to take up a position as curate at Altarnun in Cornwall, leaving his eldest child in the care of his grandparents. His grandfather, Reverend Robert Hawker was vicar of Charles Church, Plymouth, and writer; he played an important part in his upbringing.
A high-spirited youth, he ran away from several preparatory schools. His habit of playing practical jokes, both at home in Plymouth and during holidays with his parents, who by this time had moved to Stratton, also got him into a considerable amount of trouble. Practical joking would continue in later life. However, his aunt, Mary Hodson, paid for him to attend Cheltenham Grammar School where he applied himself more successfully to his studies and to qualifying to become a clergyman.
In 1923 he was admitted into Pembroke College, Oxford, and on 6th November of the same year he married Charlotte L’ans. They had known each other for many years, as Charlotte was the daughter of Colonel Wrey l’ans who lived nearby at Whitstone, Cornwall. She was twenty years older than Hawker, but a friend of Hawker, a local Bude resident, William Maskell wrote that, “Charlotte was a person of considerable attraction, well educated, fond of literature, a good companion, and in every respect a lady”. “She was ideally suited to be the wife of such a man, and they lived together for nearly forty years in harmony and affection”. Maskell concludes, “Hawker never seemed to tire of paying her every attention and kindness in his power”.
Thorn Photo
During the early years of their marriage and while still studying at Oxford, the couple came to spend a period at a cottage in the hamlet of Coombe, near Morwenstow. They loved the area, and it was here in 1825, under a stag-horned oak, in Sir Bevill’s walk in Stowe Wood, that Hawker wrote the work for which he has since become best known, the Trelawny ballad, “Song of the Western Men – otherwise known as the Cornish Anthem. He graduated from Oxford with a BA degree in 1828.
Details of the next few years are sketchy, but it is known that he stays at his wife’s house at Whitstone and builds ‘a kind of log hut in the wood, a mile from any house’, where he spent his days studying for Deacon’s orders. He then served as a deacon in 1829 and ordained as a priest in 1831 and served as curate at the remote village of North Tamerton, where the Rev. Mr. Kingdon was non-resident incumbent.
In 1834, Bishop Phillpotts offers him the post of Vicar of Morwenstow and Hawker accepts. However, there had been no resident incumbent at the church for some years and the vicarage was uninhabitable. The couple therefore chose to live in a cottage at Coombe while Hawker built a new vicarage just to the north of his church. He chose the spot for the vicarage where he saw that sheep nestled out of the wind. An observation that later proved to be incorrect! Building of the vicarage started in 1837 and was built in a Victorian Gothic style. His idiosyncrasy embellished it with chimneys modelled on the towers of churches he had known.
The cottage at Coombe is today known as “Hawkers Cottage” and in the care and ownership of Landmark Trust. It was also at this time that Hawker applied himself to concerns within his new parish. The crossing of the stream that runs towards the sea at Coombe proved dangerous to man and beast at times of flood. Hawker wrote to the King asking for a contribution towards the building of a new, more substantial bridge, King William obliged with a contribution of £20.00. Hawker also contributed £2.00 of his own money. The bridge has an inscription built into its structure commemorating this fact.
For Hawker, this was no rural idyl. This was a beleaguered, wild and for the most part a poor parish and, like many Cornish churches, Morwenstow served a group of hamlets without any real centre. Hawker later wrote, “my people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers, and dissenters of various hue. A few simple-hearted farmers had clung to the grey old sanctuary of the church and the tower that looked along the sea”.
Writing in much later life in, “The Remembrances of a Cornish Vicar” Hawker revealed, perhaps inadvertently, his true feeling about his situation here in this remote, “less refined civilisation”. He wrote, “It has frequently occurred to my thoughts that the events which have befallen me since my collation to this wild and remote vicarage, on the shore of the billowy Atlantic Sea, might not be without interest to the reader of a more refined and civilised region”.
However, this reflection, does an injustice to his innate humanity. He grew to understand his people, to sympathise with their plight, to recognise that their actions and customs reflected the realities of the time. Again, from Reflections of a Cornish Vicar, he relates: “Among my parishioners there were certain individuals who might be termed representative men —quaint and original characters, who embodied in their own lives the traditions and the usages of the parish. One of these had been for full forty years a wrecker—that is to say, a watcher of the sea and rocks for flotsam and jetsam, and other unconsidered trifles which the waves might turn up to reward the zeal and vigilance of a patient man. His name was Peter Burrow, a man of harmless and desultory life, and by no means identified with the cruel and covetous natives of the strand, with whom it was a matter of pastime to lure a vessel ashore by a treacherous light, or to withhold succour from the seaman struggling with the sea. He was the companion of many of my walks, and the witness with myself of more than one thrilling and perilous scene”. Peter Burrow and many other local men and woman would share dangerous moments on the shore and experience the horrors wrought on unfortunate seamen following storms at sea.
Hawker’s early incumbency coincided with what has been termed the “Hungry Forties” and people were starving and wages were inadequate to meet the cost of living, especially that of flour for their daily bread. Hawker wrote during this period; “they are crushed down, my poor people, ground down with poverty, with a wretched wage”. He also said, “if I eat and drink and see my poor people hungry and thirst, I am not a minister of Christ, but a lion that lurketh in the den to ravish the poor”.
Hawker believed strongly in symbolism and, perhaps to help him to communicate with his people, perhaps to identify with them he wore the vestments, as he claimed, of “an Armenian archimandrite” and for everyday use he wore a long purple cloak, a bright blue fisherman’s jersey and pink brimless hat and red trousers stuffed into huge waterproof boots. If it rained, he added, a bright yellow poncho made of horsehair which he named the “habit of Saint Morwenna”. Others say he called it the “ancient habit of St Padarn”. He considered himself, a fisherman of men. (Thorn Photo)
Early in his incumbency he would realise that in this remote corner of Cornwall he was not protected from the realities of the hard, unforgiving, times. During the period 1824 and 1872, on the North Cornish coast alone, there were more than 80 shipwrecks. Hawker describes the nervous wretched state in which we listen all day and all night for the frantic knocks at the door which announces the advent of the dead. He was determined to give all the wretched sailors a decent burial. Once a woman parishioner brought him a man’s foot; he gave it a funeral; “this we have laid in the ground till perhaps the rest of his body may come.
In fact, Hawker went to extraordinary lengths and exposed himself and others to danger recovering bodies on stormy shores. Sometime the bodies were decomposed, and he and his helpers were obliged to dose themselves with plenty of gin. This account of Hawker must include the wreck of the Caledonian. The 200ton ship sank in a terrible gale in 1842, there was only one survivor. Hawker located the bodies of the lost and gave them a burial. Their grave can be seen as you enter the churchyard at Morwenstow. It is marked with the figurehead of the ship – in fact, the present figurehead is a replica as the original has been removed for preservation.
The site of the figurehead in this remote churchyard attracted the attention of the author Jeremy Seal. Intrigued, Seal begins to investigate, but soon uncovers strange discrepancies in Hawkers stirring eye-witness account. Jeremy Seal charts the full story in his book, “The Wreck at Sharpnose Point”. Hawker, it is recognised, was not averse to some embellishment of the facts if it told a good story. But this should not detract from all the good things he did for the sailors who died and those who survived.
Returning briefly to the “Hungry Forties, the year of 1842 was a particularly bad year. However, the next year turned out to be a good year and special thanksgiving prayers were decreed by the authorities. On September 14th, 1843, Hawkers issued a summons to the parishioners of Morwenstow to meet him in the chancel of the church on the first Sunday in October for a service of Harvest Thanksgiving. The idea was taken up by others and so the modern Harvest Festival began.
Faced with the traumas and concerns of the times, it could be argued that Hawker sought solace and distractions in various ways. With wood taken from the wreck of the Caledonian he built a wooden hut on the nearby cliffs. Here clad in seaman’s jersey and sea boots, with his cassock he smoked pipes of opium, meditated and wrote poetry. It is also possibly that it was at this hut that he wrote the “Quest of the Sangraal”, which although unfinished is said to bear comparison with some of Tennyson’s Arthurian verse. In fact, Tennyson ruefully said, “he has beaten me on my own ground”. Today Hawkers Hut is the smallest possession of the National Trust.
He was also known for carrying out pranks on the gentries of the area and on local people. One gentleman disbelieved the tale of someone who had said they had seen a ghost in the area. Hawker decided to dress up as one and hide until this gentleman passed by – needless to say, this resulted in momentary panic on his part and much hilarity later on. Hawker also relates how he had a conversation with one of his parishioner acquaintances who very much believed in Mermaids. This individual was clearly not alone in this belief. It would appear that in Hawker’s early days, while still a student, he had carried out a “mermaid” prank on the people of Bude.
His biographer Sabine Baring-Gould wrote: “One absurd hoax that he played on the superstitious people of Bude must not be omitted. At full moon in the July of 1825 or 1826 (aged 22 or 23), he swam or rowed out to a rock at some little distance from the shore, plaited seaweed into a wig, which he threw over his head, so that it hung in lank streamers halfway down his back, enveloped his legs in an oilskin wrap, and, otherwise naked, sat on the rock, flashing the moonbeams about from a hand-mirror, and sang and screamed till attention was arrested.
“Some people passing along the cliff heard and saw him, and ran into Bude, saying that a mermaid with a fish’s tail was sitting on a rock, combing her hair, and singing. A number of people ran out on the rocks and along the beach and listened awe-struck to the singing and disconsolate wailing of the mermaid.
Presently she dived off the rock and disappeared.
“Next night crowds of people assembled to look out for the mermaid; and in due time she re-appeared and sent the moon flashing in their faces from her glass. Telescopes were brought to bear on her; but she sang on unmoved, braiding her tresses, and uttering remarkable sounds, unlike the singing of mortal throats which have been practised in do-re-mi”.
“This went on for several nights; the crowd growing greater, people arriving from Stratton, Kilkhampton, and all the villages round, till Robert Hawker got very hoarse with his nightly singing, and rather tired of sitting so long in the cold. He therefore wound up the performance one night with an unmistakable ‘God save the King’, then plunged into the waves, and the mermaid never again revisited the ‘sounding shores of Bude’.”
Life at his church was not always as he would like. It was not frequented during the weekdays by his parishioners – possibly because they were working on the farm, and many were Wesleyan chapel goers. He writes, rather jokingly, that he recited the office daily in the church, only his wife being present; he would begin the Exortation with “Dearly beloved Charlotte”.
Hawker was not always charitable towards members of his community, particularly the Dissenters. When one came to him asking to bury a relative, he is reported to have snorted, “bury a Dissenter, I shall be delighted; I should like to bury the lot”!
Hawker was not always kind to his relations either. His brother-in-law was William Kingdon who lived locally at Stratton. Hawkers is reported to have said. “but he is a Kingdon and I know not a word so expressive of what I call brutishness of mind. They are, I believe, seventy persons of that name now in the neighbourhood and not one of them fit to associate with a Christian man’s swine”. As if to press this point, Hawker used to bring his pet pig Gyp with him when he visited relatives, insisting that the pig, which he said was highly intelligent, be given freedom of the house!
Hawkers had a love of animals as well as people. He would close down all fires in his vicarage if he knew that rooks were nesting in the chimneys. His other pet included a stag called Robin, which was in the habit pinning visitors to the ground, despite Hawker declaring it “tame”.
So, this is something of the colourful, complex, Hawker character. Unfortunately, after twenty years of a very happy marriage, Charlotte died in 1863, aged 81; and to the surprise but satisfaction of the villagers, who had witnessed his distraught state, he married a year later a governess of Polish extraction. Pauline Kuczinski had visited the village with the family of a fellow priest from Yorkshire and loved this area and was fond of riding about the valley. She had grown attached to this elderly poet-priest, ultimately agreeing to marry him. However, whereas Hawker had married his first wife, who was twice his age, he was now marrying a young woman 41 years his junior. They were married on 21st December 1864 and the couple had three children which was a source of pride, happiness, and anxiety to Hawker. His health was declining, and the family’s financial circumstances were a constant concern. His attempts to provide an income through his writing proved largely unsuccessful and his sense of discouragement and exclusion from the world of literary reputation grew ever more burdensome.
The photo opposite, courtesy of David Thorn, shows Pauline with one of their three daughters.
Hawker’s poor state of health by 1875 affected his ability to perform his duties and he installed a curate to take care of the parish. He went to stay with his brother in Boscastle, but he too soon became seriously ill, and Hawker and his wife were obliged to move to Plymouth where they took lodgings. Hawker’s health deteriorated further over the coming three months and was never able to return, as he had hoped, to Morwenstow. Hawker was known to have Catholic sympathies and when he was on his death bed his wife arranged for him to be received into the Roman Catholic church on the 14th August, 1875 and he died the next morning.
Hawker had great writing skills and an acute understanding of people, had he lived elsewhere, his works would have been better known during his lifetime. But Hawker could never imagine himself living anywhere else other than among his people in the lonely valley by the cliffs within the sound of the sea. But it is as if he knew that one day he would be appreciated. He might also have intended a biblical meaning, but around the base of the cross erected on his tomb were inscribed the words of Arthur, as written by Hawkers his book “The Quest of the Sangraal: “I would not be forgotten in his land.