THE ALTOGETHER AMAZING TOM POOLEY

  “Judge Coldridge And His Son with the Clergey magastrates And jurey men of Cornwall Have Learnt A Wise Lesson.  They know what they Houte to Have known Before they Had Eny Thing to Doe with T. Pooley. They know now that Thir is A one Allmighty Being that Brought All Things Into Being And judge Coldridge would Have Saved ‘is Chariter from Shame and Disgrace if He Had Sed:  ‘Pooley, Doe you Believe that thir is a one Allmighty Being that Brought All Things Into Being?’”     T. Pooley. Tom was soon congratulating himself on his escape from the prison and the asylum. Once safe home in his house in Moon’s Court, he gloated like the Toad at Toad Hall.  “ The battle is fought and the victory is won.  The Cornish Infidel is left go free from Christian traps and Christian snares.”   In his fevered imagination the Church in Cornwall was reeling from the blows that he had struck. “ The Christian Clergy have had their misery!  They have caught a strange fish in Thomas Pooley!”  Had he not put hi

 THOMAS POOLEY IN THE ASYLUM “So if mines His a Delusion, it Carried me into the Christian Heaven that is the Asylum wear they say mad People are Bound.  This I sternley Deni.   They may Be mase or, like the Christain Christ, insane But I will give Honest justice to All men.  Thir is madder and unjuster men and women Left Loose on the face of this Globe that are worthy of a mad House.”   T. Pooley  It was on Thursday the thirteenth of August that Tom was taken out of Bodmin Gaol and transferred to the County of Cornwall Asylum, also in Bodmin.  He had been in the ‘Christian dungeons’ for less than a fortnight but for such a childlike spirit the experience had been harrowing.  He was more than ever excitable and incoherent.  He was unsure whether to triumph or to despair, whether to be happy or sad. From George Holyoake’s brief description of the Cornwall Asylum in ‘ The Case of Thomas Pooley’ one might take the impression that this asylum was an intimate enough place, cosy even, where

  “O the Horrid touchers I Have Seen!  So, if mines His a Deluson it Carrid me into a Christain Hell, or the Goal, wear the Christain Governer Played the Part of the Christain Divil Compleat and the turnkeys wear the Divil’s Engles Compleat.”    T.  Pooley So that was that!   The blasphemer had been dealt with and the busy judge and barrister had washed their hands of him and there were other cases to be tried and heard.   John Duke later wrote of the jury and the audience in the Crown Court at Bodmin that he was “well convinced that if the punishment of the prisoner had been left to them , he (Pooley) would have ill exchanged what is called the severity of the judge for the mercy of the people.”  He, publicly at least, always maintained that Pooley had only been dealt with according to the fruits of his doing.    To Sir John Coleridge, bewigged and gowned, the very thought that the pathetic, ragged  blasphemer Thomas Pooley whom he had seen only  briefly in court, dirty and dishevelle

  “Duloe Stinks of the monster Christ’s Bible.  Blasphemy! -  T. Pooley”   Tom Pooley, the Cornish Well-sinker, was so much like a precocious infant, a terrible child, that still today, nearly a century and a half after his death, he amazes and gently amuses; at least, he amazes and gently amuses me.  Child-like and confused, he struggled to be a serious man and, more than that, he presented himself as a prophet, a chosen one and as the saviour of mankind.  In his writing and in what we know of his spoken language he expressed himself badly. He struggled to present his limited gospel with tedious repetition  in a style vaguely imitative of the translators of the King James’ Bible, a book with which he was none too familiar.  At the time he came to public notice some people saw Tom Pooley as a malevolent Antichrist.  Others saw him as an example of what happens when a truth-seeking man is denied a decent education.  Many who came to know of him dismissed him as being a madman.  Certainl