Overlooked Britain: Old Vicarage, Morwenstow, Cornwall Lucinda Lambton
The Rev Stephen Hawker designed his own Cornish vicarage, was friends with Tennyson – and liked dressing up as a mermaid
At first glance, the Old Vicarage at Morwenstow in Cornwall appears to be a pleasing but somewhat ordinary 19thcentury stone house.
Find out more and you will be entranced to learn that its five chimneys are models of church towers. Furthermore, they are the favourite church towers of the renowned prelate poet the Rev Stephen Hawker, who built and lived in the house from 1837 until his death in 1875.
A most magical figure, a most winning eccentric, this was no ordinary man of the cloth. Considered to be ‘a picturesque exception to the Tractarian tradition of formal churchmanship’, he kept company with the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Kingsley. Longfellow also greatly admired him, although Hawker was somewhat dismissive about the American poet and his fellow countrymen.
He complainted, ‘Certain it is that there is something naturally narrow and meagre in the American mind. There is not, it is said, one original book among their publications; not a single master mind as an orator or a poet (Longfellow is tuneful but mediocre) or statesman or divine. They copy England with a second-rate power.’
Hawker won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford. Tennyson delighted in admitting that, as far as poetry went, ‘Hawker has beaten me on my own ground with his Quest for the Sangraal.’ He was also responsible for The Song of the Western Men, a patriotic song, considered to this day to be the Cornish national anthem.
He built a tiny hut nearby, on the cliff’s edge, rearing up over the sea. There he would plunge into talk with his distinguished pals. Today, it’s Britain’s smallest National Trust property.
In 1843, Hawker introduced the first Harvest Festival into the Church of England, as well as introducing regular and engaging innovations to church life.
At Morwenstow, he would process up the aisle – laid ankle-deep with thyme, southernwood, sweet marjoram and wormwood – accompanied by nine cats and his dog. They had all walked with him from the vicarage, so as to be affectionately patted and scratched throughout the service. He excommunicated one cat for devouring a mouse in the midst of prayers. For some reason deeming it essential that the congregation should see the priest’s feet – as well as having a good view of the dog – Hawker removed the bottom panel of the pulpit.
Pacing up and down the aisle, as well as to and fro behind the screen, while orating half in Latin and half in English, he would suddenly appear before the congregation and prostrate himself on the floor in front of the altar.
Let us dwell for a moment too on his pet pig, written of in glowing terms by his biographer, Anglican priest and eclectic scholar the Rev Sabine Baring Gould – author of Onward Christian Soldiers and Now the Day Is Over: ‘He had a pet pig of the Berkshire breed, well cared for, washed and curry-combed, which ran beside him when he went out for walks and paid visits. Indeed the pig followed him into ladies’ drawing rooms, not always to their satisfaction.’
Gyp the pig was intelligent and obedient. If Mr Hawker saw his hosts were annoyed at the intrusion of the pig, he would order it out; and the black creature slunk out of the door with its tail out of curl. Beat that for charm!
Hawker restored the church, insisting that the roof be covered with oaken shingles – ‘tiles of wood, the material of the ark and cross’.
The vicarage was to be built from scratch, with a plan whereby ‘frugality may be exercised without the appearance of poverty’. He found the plan in T F Hunt’s Designs for Parsonage Houses and then applied himself to his own spirited architectural additions, with five of the six chimneys modelled on the church towers where he had had the living: Stratton, Whitstone, North Tammerton and two in Oxford.
‘The sixth,’ he wrote, ‘perplexed me very much, till I bethought me of my mother’s tomb; and there it is, in its exact shape and dimensions.’
Inside the church, there was a tiny door in the screen that led to the pulpit and could be squeezed through only with considerable difficulty. Hawker refused to enlarge the door, saying it typified ‘the camel going through the eye of a needle’. It could be passed through only backwards on leaving the pulpit. One of Hawker’s great pleasures was to release a trapped visiting preacher with the whispered words, ‘It is the straight and narrow way and few there be to find it.’
His clothes positively sang a hymn to originality, with a coat described by one admirer as ‘a long-tailed affair of a claret colour.’ He wore a blue fisherman’s jersey – showing that he was ‘a fisher of men’ – knitted with a red cross to mark the entrance of the centurion’s spear. On his head, he wore either ‘a Wide-awake Beaver’ or a pink fez hat. He had bloodred gloves and anything black was out of the question: ‘I don’t make myself look a waiter out-of-place or an unemployed undertaker.’ His hessian boots up to his knees added another picturesque touch.
Shipwrecks were the curse of his life at Morwenstow, ‘with the breakers roaring after their prey to seek their meat from
God’, smashing ships against the great boulders beneath his house.
He would stand helpless as bodies, alive or dead, were hurled onto the rocks around him. But he was always there, to save lives or bear the corpses in mournful procession up the cliffs to conduct a proper Christian burial.
Hawker was grimly meticulous in his accounts of what he saw: ‘The search for the bodies still goes on. Limbs are cast ashore. Lumps of flesh have floated above high water and been buried in the ground. Five out of seven corpses had no heads – cut off by the jagged rocks.’
He wrote that, one daybreak in autumn, ‘I was aroused by a knock at my bedroom door, followed by an agitated voice: “There are dead men, sir.” ’
In a moment he was up ‘in my cassock and slippers’. In front of him ‘stood my lad, weeping bitterly and holding out to me in trembling hands a tortoise alive. He had grasped it on the beach, and brought it in his hand as a strange and marvellous arrival from the waves.
‘I ran across my glebe, a quarter of a mile, to the cliffs, and down a frightful descent of 300 feet to the beach. It was indeed a scene to be looked on only once in a human life. On the ridge of rock, just left bare by the falling tide, stood a man who had found the wreck, with two dead sailors at his feet, whom he had just drawn out of the water, stiff and stark.’
It was said that Hawker’s deep voice could vie with the sea and was to be heard a valley away.
He delighted in his congregation: ‘My people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hues.’
One Mary Cloutman was his first pauper from the Union Workhouse. ‘A meek and humble old creature’, she told
Hawker that she had never had any parents. ‘No, sir, I was found in a basket tied up to the Mayor of Torrington’s door, with a little pink frock on. I never knowed who my mother was. The woman they got to nuss me was called Cloutman and so I took her name.’
‘Is that not a strange history?’ wrote Hawker, gleefully chronicling his Cornish life.
One of his most startling departures from the everyday was that the Rev Stephen Hawker would dress as a mermaid, with oilskins on his legs and seaweed dripping from around his head.
He chose Bude for this display where, perched on a rock, he would comb his locks with feminine allure while he flashed mirrors at the gaping crowds who had gathered to see the sight.
Just as suddenly as this apparition appeared, it would vanish and, with a spirited rendition of God Save the Queen, Parson Hawker would dive into the sea.