Exeter Blitz Project

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Exeter Blitz, this month the Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter, in collaboration with the theatre company Viva Voce, is hosting The Exeter Blitz Project, a new production based on the eyewitness accounts of survivors. 



From the promotional description:

Between 1940 and 1942 Exeter was raided by the German Luftwaffe 19 times. The worst raid took place in the early hours of May 4th, 1942. This event dramatically altered the landscape of the city of Exeter.

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Exeter Blitz in May 2012, Viva Voce, in collaboration with the Bike Shed Theatre, have created a theatrical blitz experience, which will share and celebrate the real-life stories of those who experienced the Blitz here in Exeter. Viva Voce have interviewed over 20 individuals who were between the ages of 6 and 25 in 1942. This play is a testament to their extraordinary stories.
The Exeter Blitz Project runs until May 19th. See the Viva Voce or the Bike Shed Theatre for further information.


For readers unfamiliar with the background: the early hours of May 4th 1942 saw the worst of a series of Luftwaffe bombings of Exeter as part of the 'Baedeker Blitz' (named for the reputed selection of targets from the Baedeker travel guide) that targeted historic British cities in retaliation for the Allied bombing of the mediaeval port of Lübeck. Apart from the loss of lives (265 over the 19 raids) the bombing, especially that of May 4th, razed large segments of central Exeter, effectively destroying it as one of Britain's most picturesque and historic centres.

The post-war redevelopment remains controversial even now. The architect Thomas Sharp's bold 'Exeter Phoenix' rebuilding plan was largely ignored (including his recommendations for buildings that could be saved, such as the elegant Bedford Circus) in favour of now notoriously unaesthetic 1950s architecture exemplified by the now-redeveloped Princesshay precinct. It's interesting to consider what might have been:
Sharp estimated that the city had lost something like half of its buildings of architectural merit through bombing. The report discusses at length those buildings destroyed, especially the Georgian buildings, such as Bedford Circus, to the east of the Cathedral. However, the purpose of his discussion was not to propose reinstatement of similar buildings or even the retention of the street plan. On the contrary it was used to mobilise support for Sharp's proposals for clearly contemporary interventions, built to a new street plan. First, Bedford Circus was cited as a successful contemporary intervention of its day, an area of frankly new architecture constructed on a new street plan that had become one of the most valued areas of the city. Second, Sharp argued that the popular perception of Exeter as a medieval city was misplaced and that, the cathedral apart, the principal architectural merits of the city were Georgian. He outlined four possible forms rebuilding might take. Firstly restoration, which he argued would produce a dead museum. Second and thirdly, a functionally modern city with medieval imagery or with eighteenth and nineteenth century dress; i.e. a functional modern city cloaked in historic styles of architecture. He thought that these approaches might be popular with the public but would be contemptible. Finally, and his strongly favoured option, was modern renewal, sympathetic to, but not imitative of existing forms. New development should be of a similar scale to the buildings that had been lost, and be intimate rather than monumental in form.
- commentary on Exeter Phoenix: A Plan for Rebuilding, Town and Townscape: The Work and Life of Thomas Sharp. Pendlebury, Wood & Fernandez.
Further information:
- RG Read more ...

Edward Capern, the postman poet

Edward Capern, the Bideford "postman poet", is one of a number of authors featured in WHK Wright's 1896 West-Country Poets: Their Lives and Works. 

I first ran into Edward Capern (1819-1894) in a copy of the long-defunct Devonia magazine, but there are fuller accounts in West-Country Poets: Their Lives and Works (pp 71-73) and at  at John Lerwill's Devon History site: The Devonian 'Postman Poet', Edward Capern.

Capern, born in Tiverton, is an interesting character who rose from very humble beginnings to national recognition. After a difficult early life, he gained the position of Rural Postman of Bideford - not as deliverer, but as a messenger between Bideford and Appledore. These daily treks evidently gave him plenty of time to think, as he took up poetry. Contributions to local publications attracted the attention of the Barnstaple stationer and philanthropist William Frederick Rock, who helped him put together a subscription-based (i.e. benefactor-sponsored) anthology. This was highly successful, and the start of a career that brought him to national attention with a patriotic poem about the Crimean War, The Lion-Flag of England, earning the praise of the then Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, a Civil List pension, and a State funeral at the end of his long life.
The lion-flag of England!
Say, Britons, shall it wave,
The scorn of every base-born serf,
And jest of every slave;
A sign to tell them how they beat
The bravest of the earth,
And teach them by our England's fate
To magnify their worth
"Forbid it Heav'n," the nations cry,
In council gravely met;
"We'll send her aid across the seas,
And she shall conquer yet."

- stanza 1, The Lion-Flag of England
Personally, I find Capern's poems, while perfectly literate,  extremely trite by modern standards, expressing rather conventional observations on nature and life in general: fields are green, flowers and the countryside are beautiful, summer and love and Christmas are joyful, winter and lost love and death are depressing, and so on. For example:
Say, my little robins,
Singing on the bough,
Heralding the Autumn
With her yellow brow,
Why the woods are vocal
With your merry lays,
While our summer songsters
Sleep away their days ?

Lovingly I linger'd,
Listening to their tale,
When a gush of music
Answer'd through the vale;
Every hedge was vocal,
Every tree and bush,
Singing, Little Robin
Is October's thrush.

"When the Spring and Summer
Make all nature gay,
Other minstrels warble
Through the sunny day:
Tis their joy and pleasure,
But our office, know,
Is to carol comfort
In the hour of woe."

- The Robins' Chorus, Edward Capern, Wayside Warbles
This perhaps explains why, even in Capern's lifetime and shortly after, opinion on his work was divided. WHK Wright was rather hagiographic; and Capern was praised by writers such as the historian James Anthony Froude, who wrote in Fraser's Magazine ...
Capern is a real poet, a man whose writings will be like a gleam of summer sunshine in every household which they enter
... and Walter Savage Landor, cited in the reviews for Capern's anthology Wayside Warbles, who called him "a noble poet". The Inquirer put him up with the greats:
There runs throughout these Poems that refined tone of thought, to the expression of which a metrical form is a necessary condition—we find rich tissues of imagery, playful fancy, plentiful invention, and above all that translation of thought into representative circumstances that ever characterizes the true Poet—such is the distinguished excellence of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Alexander Smith, in all of whom the true poetical constitution has been pre-eminently visible.
Sabine Baring-Gould was in a minority with his very acerbic summary:
Postman Poet, Edward Capern, has been hailed as the Devonshire Burns, but he has no right to be so entitled. Burns, at his best, sang in the tones and intonation of his class and country, and it was at his worst that he affected the style of the period and of culture, such as it was. Now Capern aspired to the artificiality and smoothness of the highly educated and wholly unreal class of verse writers of the Victorian period, of whom John Oxenford may be thrust forward as typical, men who could turn out smooth and finished pieces, rhythm and rhyme correct, but without a genuine poetical idea forming the kernel of the "poem."
- from Edward Capern, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events, Sabine Baring-Gould
The Fraser's review by Froude is worth reading in full, as it's very enlightening about the popularity of Capern, which seems as rooted in his personality and lifestyle as in poetic taste.
Our readers, however, must judge for themselves whether we have over-estimated Capern's poems. When an English working man becomes conscious of genius, the effect of it is usually to throw him into fierce hostility with the social system which depresses him, and, like Ebenezer Elliot or Gerald Massey, he boils over in fierce and stormy fury. We are not to complain of such men. Their anger often is but too keenly deserved, and they are Nature's instruments to avenge the world's injustice. Yet there is something higher, nobler, better, in rising superior to evils of which we cannot see a practicable remedy. It is a sign of a loftier nature, instead of repining at what Providence has refused, to catch with open hand the fair gifts which it offers to all alike,—the enjoyment of the beauty of nature, the indulgence of the rich emotions of humanity, which are the choicest treasures that God has bestowed upon our being.
- Poems, by Edward Capern, Fraser's Magazine, April 1856
There's a similar idea in the Eclectic Review, which notes that Capern wisely invested the income from his anthology, and the reviewer seems very keen that he shouldn't get too rich from his poetry or be promoted.
It [his poetry] has evidently been to him its own exceeding great reward ; it has soothed his afflictions ; it has multiplied and refined his enjoyments; it has endeared solitude ; and it has given him the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds him." And "an exceeding great reward" it will continue to be to him as long as he keeps it to its present function as a grace and an ornament, and does not endeavour to convert it to a means of living. It has alreadyafforded him, we are glad to learn, substantial help, and we trust it will yield him a good deal more; but let him still regard it as an auxiliary, and not a main source of subsistence. His inspiration is from the fields and green lanes of Devon, and he should not, if he values his happiness, hope to find it in dingy towns, and at the "desk's dead wood." We rejoice to see that the first edition of his book has produced him £150, which has been wisely invested in an annuity for the joint lives of himself and Mrs. Capern. The Post Office, too, has increased his salary to twelve shillings a week, and relieved him from his Sunday duties. This is better than making a nine days' wonder of him, and relegating him, when the excitement was over, to his old difficulties with a spirit less calculated to encounter them. It is better, too, than taking him out of his accustomed sphere, and placing him in a position where he would find none of those associations which have hallowed his life hitherto, and gilded with their happy radiance his ungenial fortunes.
- Poems, by Edward Capern, review, p559, Eclectic Review, Volume 1, 1857
I think that he was liked because he didn't frighten the horses. He fitted into his role as a minor cog in the system; he was happy with his lot and rocked no boats (unlike the political activist poets Elliott and Massey); he was patriotic; he was financially prudent; he perpetuated belief in a English rustic idyll; and had made maximum use of his limited education, writing in standard English rather than dialect. He was, in short, a poster boy for the deserving poor.

The Internet Archive - see search - has his chief works online: Poems (1856), Ballads and Songs (1858), Wayside Warbles (1870), and Sungleams and Shadows (1881)

As reported in the Exeter Express & Echo in November 2009, a modern biography is in print - Edward Capern: The Postman-poet, Ilfra Goldberg, Vanguard Press (2009). It was highly commended among contestants for the Devon History Society Book of the Year and Hoskins Award 2009.

Further reading: West-Country Poets: Their Lives and Works: Being an account of about four hundred verse writers of Devon and Cornwall, with poems and extracts (William Henry Kearley Wright, pub. London, E. Stock, 1896, Internet Archive ID westcountrypoet00wriggoog)

- RG Read more ...

1952: children's food ration

Karen Histed-Todd has sent us a research enquiry regarding historical authenticity for a Jubilee-themed school fete. 

From her e-mail:

I am secretary of Friend's of Widecombe School and we are helping school to organise the school fete on Friday 1st June afternoon. We are incorporating the Queen's Diamond jubilee celebration into this and want the children, teachers and friend's members dressed as per the era and want games that would have been played for the children. We also want to put out a table with a child's weekly ration as per 1952 and end with a tea party offering typical food of the time.

I have been trying to research via the internet but require some further help.

I was wondering if either yourself or another member of the society could help with some information that could help us to create the right atmosphere and to ensure we are "historically accurate".

I would also be interested to know if there was somebody who would be willing to come along to talk to the children about what it was like during the Queen's Coronation year.

If anybody has any suggestions to make the fete authentic we would welcome any suggestions.


If you can help or advise, please contact Ms Histed-Todd (karenht@hotmail.co.uk).

For those unaware of the historical context: following wartime shortages, food rationing was still in force in the UK in 1952. Although rationing had ended in 1950 for canned and dried fruit, chocolate biscuits, treacle, syrup, jellies and mincemeat, sweets and sugar were still rationed (this ended in 1953); the end of all food rationing didn't happen until July 1954.

- RG Read more ...
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