Toplady and Broadhembury

The Toplady Trail; A visit to Broadhembury, Devon; 13 July 2011.

A few months ago I heard someone mention that Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-78) ministered at Blagdon in Somerset. I think the speaker had Blagdon near Taunton in mind which is the wrong Blagdon because Toplady from 1762 to 1764 was a curate at Blagdon in north Somerset. The legend is that while taking a walk in Burrington Coombe not far a away he was caught in a storm and took shelter in a cleft in the rocks and jotted down the famous hymn, ‘Rock of Ages’. That may be how the hymn began though scholars debate its historicity. It seems that Charles Wesley had written something similar in 1759 and Toplady certainly had the idea at the time because he used the expression ‘Rock of Ages’ in his farewell sermon at Blagdon in 1764. However, he didn’t actually publish the hymn until 1776 when he was well established at Broadhembury in Devon and had published many other hymns. That may not be relevant because we know he delayed publishing other things that he had written. It was, and is, a wonderful hymn.

The fact that he had been vicar of Broadhembury for most of his ministry prompted us to go there on 13 July for it is only about 15 miles from where we live. We turned off the main road from Cullompton to Honiton and after a mile along a very narrow lane crossed the 15^th century bridge and went up a wide street with many thatched cottages. Broadhembury is a very picturesque village. All those thatched houses must help to keep thatchers in business as well as preserving the charm of this village. We were puzzled that there were so many cars around the centre of the village but managed to park near the delightful tea room www.broadhemburytearoom.co.uk/ which is part of the Post Office cum village shop. We enjoyed cake and hot chocolate at very reasonable prices and then headed for the church. With all the parked cars we wondered whether there was a funeral but no it was the sports day in the school field just beyond the church and families had come to support the children.

St Andrew’s Church dates from at least 1259 but most of it is from the 15^th century. The tower has 6 bells and is about 100 feet high. There is a 15C font and many memorials to members of the Drewe family who were prominent in the village for about 300 years. In 1903 the unrelated Julius Drewe bought most of the village. He made his fortune by founding the Home and Colonial stores and built Castle Drogo which is about 15 miles west of Exeter near Drewsteignton and also has a Drewe Arms.

Toplady was at Broadhembury for 10 years though ill health forced his eventual withdrawal and death in 1778. Sheldon, a few miles away was part of his parish and he would walk there on a Sunday morning and return for later services at Broadhembury. He did not like horse riding which he thought was dangerous. He was a brilliant scholar, speaker and hymn writer and usually courteous and polite. Unfortunately he rather lost his cool in the controversy with John Wesley and his followers over the issue of predestination. Toplady believed in predestination and other Calvinistic teaching and Wesley and others opposed him and the exchanges became vitriolic and did not reflect credit on any of the parties concerned. Toplady had a ‘vocabulary-exhausting’ gift for words which was employed to the full in this controversy. Strangely, when he met Thomas Olivers one of Wesley’s staunchest supporters, the discussion was cordial and friendly but when went back to print the bitter invective returned. That was all very unfortunate and I think it best to remember him as the writer of ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘A debtor to mercy alone’ or these lines:

Happiness, thou lovely name,

Where’s thy seat, O tell me, where?

Learning, pleasure, wealth and fame,

All cry out, “It is not here:”

Not the wisdom of the wise

Can inform me where it lies,

Not the grandeur of the great

Can the bliss I seek create.

Object of my first desire,

Jesus, crucified for me!

All to happiness aspire,

Only to be found in thee:

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On Toplady:

Wright, Thomas, The Lives of the British Hymn Writers, Volume II, Augustus M. Toplady and contemporary hymn-writers, London: Farncombe & Son, 1911.

Golitha Falls

Golitha Falls

Last week we stayed with our son in Cornwall and visited the Eden Project. That, of course, has become famous and we enjoyed going there again. However, Golitha Falls is not as well known and we have enjoyed seeing it for more than 20 years. It is on the edge of Bodmin Moor where the river Fowey flows down from beyond Jamaica Inn. The narrow road from the A30 at Bolventor follows the river for much of the six miles to the Falls. Then, a right turn leads to a substantial car park with public toilets on the other side of an old bridge. Alternatively, one can come from the A38 at Doublebois or Dobwalls and after about three miles a left turn and another left after ¼ mile leads to the bridge and car park mentioned above.

The river was flowing gently when we went there last week. It has been very dry for several weeks but last November there were floods and the car park was under water. The bridge was not washed away, though, and all was calm and pleasant as we made our way along the path lined with beech trees beside the river. This area is heavily wooded but cows were grazing in a field on the other side of the river. The field is fenced off except for a short section where the cows are allowed to come into the river to drink. The river makes a big pool as it turns sharply to the right and soon heads into the wooded gorge cut out of the granite hills as the river rushes down a long series of waterfalls and splashes over and round granite boulders.

We had to scramble over rocks and tree roots to get down the river bank again. Some keen photographers were there with their tripods and experimenting with a variety of filters. Other people were clambering over the rocks or paddling in the pools that formed here and there.

We walked back from the river along higher paths through the woods. There were many birds around. We heard chiffchaffs and I heard and then saw a buzzard gliding over the treetops. It was warm – about 25C; exceptional for this time of the year and we were glad of a cup of tea when we got back to our son’s house.

Thomas Young

As far as I know I am not related to Thomas Young (1773-1829) who was born in Milverton in Somerset and became such a remarkable man that the District Council has put a plaque on the Young home, The Old Bank House in North Street.

Thomas was a child prodigy, he could read by the age of two and a couple of years later had read the Bible through twice. His parents probably realised that their brilliant child would have better opportunities elsewhere and Thomas stayed with his teacher aunt at Minehead and later went to a Quaker school in Dorset. He learnt many languages and became interested in science. From the age of 12 his voracious thirst for knowledge continued at the home of a rich Quaker at Ware, Herts. After recovery from illness he resolved to become a doctor and found a willing sponsor in a great-uncle, Dr Richard Brocklesby.

In London he studied the eye and was elected to the Royal Society at the age of 21. His medical education continued at Edinburgh, Gottingen and Cambridge but he had to wait several years for his qualifications to be recognised. During that time he concentrated on physics and made significant discoveries. He showed that the eye lens changes shape to focus at various distances, suggested that 3 kinds of receptor are responsible for colour vision and his two slit experiment established the wave theory of light. The latter was controversial at the time because most physicists followed Newton’s theory that light consists of particles. From 1801 to 1803 he was the Professor of Physics at the Royal Institution and his lectures covered all aspects of many topics along with their applications and history. I found the printed lectures fascinating when I read them recently and was reminded that he is the Young of Young’s modulus. In acoustics he worked out Young’s temperament for proper tuning of organs and this features in some new organs to this day.

After publishing his lectures Young concentrated on his medical career. He had a small summer practice at Worthing, gave lectures in London which surveyed the whole subject and in 1811 was elected to a post at St George’s Hospital. He was too aware of the deficiencies of medicine in those days to be a popular physician but continued his hospital visits for two decades. Nevertheless, Young’s rule for calculating the dose of medicine for children was used long after his time.

In 1814 he was distracted by the Rosetta Stone with its inscriptions in three scripts and tried to decipher its hieroglyphics. He made some important breakthroughs but the hieroglyphic translation was completed by Champollion, a brilliant Frenchman. Young, however, worked out the demotic script on another part of the Stone.

Young was called on for articles by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and among his 63 contributions there were notable pieces on Egypt, languages, bridges, tides and many biographies included one on Porson, a great classical scholar. He was the first scholar to identify Indo-European languages as a distinct group.

He was secretary to the committee that made recommendations on weights and measures and, among other things, standardised the Imperial Gallon which lingers on to this day. For the last decade of his life he was superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, an onerous task with its intricate calculations and the need to iron out errors that had crept in before he took over.

Altogether, he was a very remarkable man and what I have written above just gives a taste of his abilities and achievements. He died in 1829 at the age of 55 and his wife, Eliza, a great supporter, made sure that there was a memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey and after much badgering from her a biography was produced in 1855. The excellent 1954 biography by Alexander Wood and Frank Oldham is now superseded by The Last Man who Knew Everything by Andrew Robinson (2006). Here is the conclusion of this splendid book:

‘Thomas Young really did approximate to “the last man who knew everything” – however much he himself would have denied this - and we can safely say, with the endless expansion ... of knowledge, that no one will be able to stake this awesome claim ever again.’ (p. 239)

Remembrance

Revd Edwin Smith, his brothers Fred (an aircraft engineer) and Sydney (killed in 1916) and their mother.

This year I have been looking at Edwin W Smith’s diary for 1915. At that time Britain was in the thick of war and his denomination, the Primitive Methodist Church, was part of a United Board of Nonconformist churches which was created to provide chaplains to serve their members in the armed forces. Smith volunteered and spent a few months in France and Belgium before his health broke down and he returned to Britain for lighter duties. It was a harrowing time. His work included ministering to wounded soldiers, some of whom were dying, others were shell shocked. He conducted services, censored letters, supervised cemetery work, buried the dead and wrote letters of condolence. The second week in July when he was in the area north of Ypres was particularly intense and this is how I have written about it; quotations are from Smith’s diary.

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Monday 12^th July. He went round the wards after breakfast. A young lieutenant (Hobson) was unconscious and dying from serious neck wounds. Another man (Private Lane) was badly wounded in the stomach and asked him to pray and ‘if I would tell him honestly whether he would recover: I had to tell him that he was very bad, but had a chance.’ He spent the rest of the morning censoring letters and supervising work in the cemetery. After visiting the Divisional HQ in a beautiful Chateau (presumably Elverdinghe) he returned to the hospital. Several men had been buried, including a Congregational lad from Swinton. In the evening he was taken on a fool’s errand to bury a man who had died at the dressing outpost only to find that the man had been buried already. Bullets were flying around as they returned with some wounded soldiers. News came in that Lieutenant Hobson (aged 19) had died.

On Wednesday 14 July Private Lane died. Smith had seen him in the night and spoke from Psalm 23 which the man valued and said every day. ‘This war is sheer madness’ said Smith. At 2.30 he took the funeral of Lt Hobson. Other funerals would follow; Private Lane of Y&L on Thursday 15 July and two more on Friday 16 July.

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There were many incidents like those until he went on home leave on 18 August. He did his bit but could see at first hand the terrible waste that was World War One.

Circuit Weekend 2010

We had a very happy time at Sidholme Hotel over the weekend 22-24 October. We had good fellowship and discussions and met a group from North Somerset on a similar weekend. We also met a couple from the Dorset village where both my parents lived about 100 years ago.
I wrote a poem to encapsulate some of it:

At Sidmouth on the Devon coast,

With Alan Rothwell as our host,

We met to live distinctively

With guidance from a DVD;

It raised some matters of concern,

What is God like? And where to turn

In war and peace, and life and health,

Environmental matters, wealth.

And so the DVD began

Led by a clever ethics man,

In English of the estuary,

The glottal stop his specialty.

And ‘volunteers’, Gill, Liz and Pru

Led us in prayers to help us through,

For when we start to tire and flag,

And arms of prayer begin to sag,

It’s then that fellowship kicks in

Lets mutual support begin.

So session two, fighting and war,

A topic now much to the fore;

That took us off to Liverpool,

The Commodore up there was cool,

His ship, the Albion, deploys

Some choppers and our soldier boys.

A Christian man, the Commodore,

Who fights, he says, a needed war,

Accepts the forces discipline

To help the weak and combat sin.

And we discussed, as Christians must,

The issues raised, can war be just?

Do Jesus and OT make sense?

And can we make a difference?

Then after all that talk of strife

Mildmay helped us think of life.

The DVD took us to see

How Mildmay deals with HIV,

Compassion for the suffering,

The human dignity they bring

By valuing the stigmatised

Who otherwise are ostracised.

And Alan said that we should fancy

A book on grace by Philip Yancey.

Then freedom; off to Sidmouth town

To see its features of renown.

Pete said, ‘at Fields, let’s take a peep’,

No grass was there, no cows, no sheep!

Instead, and that was quite enough,

Shoes, skirts and jackets, all that stuff!

Also, to lubricate our brains

The intermittent autumn rains.

Back next for tea and session four,

But first the Oxford football score,

Then Bob, his name is quite a clue,

For he is worth a bob or two,

In fact a multi millionaire

Who gives away an ample share,

And that provoked a lot of thought;

Should foreign aid be brought to nought?

Another feast was followed by

The social evening, DIY,

With poems, stories, jokes and song,

And sketches and all helped along

By Alan who compèred the show.

Indeed, he made the programme flow;

His questions helped us to discuss

Great issues, what they mean to us.

Then Sunday morning finally

We thought environmentally;

This world, a gift to us from God,

Not to be trampled on roughshod.

And living life responsibly

Improves the future certainly;

To make our mark is our desire

Modelled on one we all admire

And so we closed with bread and wine

The signs of Jesus, man, divine;

With him this world we’ll infiltrate

More Christlike actions we’ll create.

Oberammergau

We went to the famous Passion Play on 29 June 2010 and had a wonderful time there and later in Austria. I wrote a poem which was read at a service the following Sunday for our group and another group running parallel with us. Here it is.

Oberammergau Passion Play, 29 June 2010.

Now let me tell you briefly how

Things went at Oberammergau,

A tourist village, busy, clean,

With all around a mountain scene.

We went, of course, to see the Play

The twenty ninth of June our day,

And so we did, and it was great,

No matter that it went on late,

We saw the Passion tale unfold,

That story on the stage was told

By locals playing all the parts,

Excelling in performing arts

With livestock and that great big horse

Unfazed by noise, a tour de force;

Great drama, music, tableaux too,

Helped by the able backup crew

Who made the costumes skilfully

Or did the choreography.

Their efforts told of Jesus’ life,

Especially the final strife,

When his prophetic ministry

Conflicted with authority;

Betrayed, arrested put on trial,

That Pilate man was really vile;

And darkness came – as if to stay -

The cross, and Jesus whisked away.

But then a little glimpse of light

The Risen Lord returned to sight.

As light was passed from youth to age

He led his people from the stage.

Applause was loud but none returned

For accolades that they had earned;

And stunned we left the Passion Play

With much to ponder on our way.

A grand performance, marvellous,

But how has it affected us?

As lost for words we may well be,

For moments in eternity,

But from the Play this much is clear

The crucified now lives, is here!

W. John Young July 2010