When eighteen members met at the north front of Wimborne Minster the jacket piercing wind gave us an experience of “weather life can scarce endure” albeit that it was Saturday 5 March 2005 and not early January. As we huddled around the War memorial John Pentney, our leader for the day, reminded us that it was in Wimborne that Hardy wrote Two on a Tower and gave the town its fictitious name of Warborne. Here also Hardy arranged the publication of the first volume edition of A Laodicean.
John read from his comprehensive handout Hardy’s poems The Levelled Churchyard and Copying Architecture in an Old Minster, suggesting that the former probably owed much to Hardy’s experience of supervising the removal of bodies from the Old St Pancras churchyard in 1866. From the latter we saw “how smartly the quarters of the hour march by that the jack-o-clock never forgets”, when the Quarter Jack, high on the north wall, struck his bells on the quarter hour. At one time a monk, from the day of his carving in 1613, he has, since Napoleonic times, been a brightly coloured Grenadier. But whatever form he takes he does need winding up once a day.
It was a relief to move away from the Minster to the nearby red brick and Bath stone former Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, where Swithin St. Cleeve was educated in Two on a Tower. Dating from 1851, and having been dismissed by Pevsner as being “of no particular merit”, it is now flats.
Returning to the warm interior of the Minster John and Jo took us on a tour drawing our attention in particular to the monuments alluded to in the fourth stanza of Copying Architecture in an Old Minster. We looked at the Courtenay tomb, the Uvedale monument and the brass for King Ethelred (not the Unready one), elder brother of Alfred the Great, the only memorial brass effigy anywhere of an English king.
John suggested that the use of the name Constantine in Two on a Tower could have been prompted by a memorial here in that name. Jo remarked upon the now wall mounted and foot worn tablet for Isaac Gulliver, a reformed smuggler who had taken advantage of an amnesty in 1782 to serve in the Minster.
Climbing a narrow spiral staircase to the Chained Library we were met by Frank Tandy the author of a newly published guide to the library. Mr Tandy gave us a very detailed summary of the contents of some of the 350 volumes in this, the second largest such library in the country. The Chained Library in Hereford Cathedral is the largest in the world. Library etiquette allows a user to peruse a volume for a maximum of one hour.
It is quite in keeping with the general tenor of Hardy’s 1906 Memories
of Church Restoration that his reference
in them to Wimborne should be one of regret. “At Wimborne Minster fine
Jacobean canopies were removed from Tudor stalls for the offence only of
being
Jacobean.”
Hardy would have admired the young man running single-handedly the bar at the White Hart where we all pleasantly lunched. Our sudden deluge of differing orders in an otherwise quiet pub brought out the best in him rather than the reverse.
Our next viewing was of Lanherne in Avenue Road to which we walked. Hardy and Emma lived here between 25 June 1881 and 30 June 1883, when they moved to Shire Hall Place, Dorchester. The move here from Tooting had been necessary for Hardy’s health. The then proximity of the railway would have been an inducement to move to this particular house, built in 1872, or “cottage” as Hardy referred to it in a letter dated 20 October 1881 to C G Vinall, secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In that same letter Hardy wrote that “I shall stay in the place for the next six or nine months”, evidence that his tenancy was twice as long as he had envisaged. John told us about Hardy’s stay and referred in particular to Hardy’s sighting of a comet whilst at Lanherne.
Before returning to the town centre John showed us the
nearby site of the former railway station, closed to
passengers since 1964, now demolished and currently an industrial estate.
The elevated railway embankment
was still clearly visible. Our walk back took us along New Borough Road where
we bravely ignored a notice on a gate telling passers-by to “beware
angry cat”; an animal obviously in need of some of Hardy and Emma’s
brand of t.l.c.
Our day ended with our thanks to John and I’m sure a renewed appetite for us to return perhaps to Two on a Tower and certainly to Michael Millgate’s recently revised biography and his chapter in it on this interesting period in Hardy’s life.
Mervyn Scamell