A PLACE CALLED DULOE.

 “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.  Certainly, it is difficult nowadays to believe that any sane person could be as disconnected, ignorant and disorganised as was Tom Pooley.  The authorities, however, at Bodmin Lunatic Asylum did not think him mad, nor did the judge, the barrister, the jury that convicted him of blasphemy, think him mad, nor did his ‘rescuer’ George Holyoake.    

I have tried not to let my opinion of the rights and wrongs of Pooley’s case get in the way of Tom’s story and of course I have failed at times.  The reader will make his or her own judgments. It is not a story that can be read without a degree of partisanship and along the way I found myself changing sides from time to time.   The literary scholar, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in 1904 wrote in the life of his uncle,  John Duke Coleridge, the barrister who prosecuted Tom and who became the first Lord Coleridge:  “now that the actors in this morality have passed away, and can no longer be cross-examined it is impossible to get to the bed-rock of fact.”   The opinions and arguments that divided people a century and a half ago would divide people still.  The story is the thing!  Like that hero of our nation, Alice, Tom Pooley passed through a wonderland of changing scenes, meeting and influencing remarkable characters and finding Victoria’s England curiouser and curiouser until at last, in his way, like Alice, he triumphed

The village of Duloe, a few miles from Tom’s home in Liskeard,  was the village where, in 1857, Tom wrote the blasphemous words that brought him to the attention of the nation.  It was also the place where, by coincidence, twelve years earlier on a summer’s day, it was Friday, the twenty-second of August 1845, an earnest young man who was on holiday in Cornwall sat at a desk in the grand rectory penning a letter to this same future Lord Coleridge who would  affect and be affected by the pauper, Tom Pooley, to an alarming degree.  

The writer of the letter, the twenty-three year old Frederick Temple, was already  a Fellow of Balliol College and the Lecturer in Mathematics and Logic there,  later in life he would shine as the Bishop of Exeter and eventually as a famous Archbishop of Canterbury.  He was reading and ruralising with his friend and mentor, the Tutor of Balliol, who was also, these were the days of unbridled pluralism, the Rector of Duloe.  Tom Pooley was never to meet Frederick Temple, which was a pity because Temple was perhaps the one clergyman in the South West who might have known how to handle him.

At Oxford, young Temple was much loved.  He was “broad-browed, with open face, and frame for toil compacted”,  at least  he was so described in verse by John Campbell Shairp, another famous Balliol man, and he was writing to his friend, his senior by one year, another Balliol man and the future Lord Chief Justice of England.  A future Archbishop writing to a future Lord Chief Justice!   Since leaving college, John Duke Coleridge was having a dull time of it, trudging behind, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, his father and the judge who twelve years later would send Tom Pooley down.   Yes, the father was to be Tom Pooley’s judge and the son the prosecuting barrister!   It had been dull for John junior travelling from Assize to Assize and acting as judge’s  marshal but, less than a fortnight before Temple wrote to him, his life had been enriched and enlivened by marriage.  Temple seems not yet to have been aware of his friend’s new state.  Temple and Coleridge, golden youths destined to greatness, had met some five years before at Balliol, arguably, at that time, the most brilliant wellspring of great and famous men in all the land.  Temple was a Cornishman and Coleridge, a Devonian but despite this they became good friends.

On, however, a fateful day twelve years later, in August 1857, Pooley was to meet the two John Coleridges, judge and barrister, father and son, face to face.  He was never to forget them nor they him and the word ‘Duloe’ was to lie until death in all three of their hearts. It was in that same year that the name of Tom Pooley became widely known and, two years after that, opinion about his case divided the literate nation.

The East Cornwall parish of Duloe lies between the luxuriant valleys of  two rivers, the East and West Looe.  It is a gentle, lovely country far enough distant from the mists and damps of Bodmin Moor.  There are many small villages within the parish and, except in the tourist season, it is quieter now than when Temple came there. Duloe, the village, is an unprepossessing place, stretched out along a country road.  The old Rectory stands at a distance from the church and apart from the rest of the village but nowadays, so passes the glory of the world. it is altogether surrounded and hidden by twenty-first century holiday homes, A sign announces it as “DULOE MANOR: The Cornish Home of the Holiday Property Bond”.  In its day it must have been a jewel in the crown of the Church of England but the Church has long since abandoned it and has built a depressing modern Rectory close by, but even that is now a sad shell, empty of furniture, or was so when this book was being written.  At Duloe the sea of faith has certainly been in retreat since 1845.

 In 1857, when the atheist, George Holyoake, of whom much more hereafter, described Duloe as a village overrun by pigs.  “The pigs enjoy the freedom of Duloe,” he wrote, “tribes of that indelicate, and, in a sanitary sense, unscrupulous race, were prowling about the cottage doors, where they had created detestable puddles of most inodorous perfume.”   It was perhaps the stink of pigs that inspired Tom Pooley to write the words that form the heading to this prologue.

 In 1845, eight hundred and fifty souls lived in the parish shepherded by a Rector who was all too often two hundred miles away.  Duloe village was smelly and remote and obscure but the country around was as beautiful as the land, at least in good years, was bountiful and with such a grand church the village could not be said to be godforsaken.   The old Rectory standing proud at a good distance was defended from the smell of pigs and other nuisance by walls and gates. There, where the two talented Balliol scholars were ‘ruralising’, was the comfortable house with its notable neat avenue of trees leading from the double gates to the Rectory windows.  The gardens were well tended and, in August, were full of flowers.  The Rector’s fields beyond were fruitful even at a time of general hunger.   The church, across the fields, was, and still is, a fine, imposing building. 

This would not be the first letter that Coleridge had received from this friend, for Temple and Coleridge were correspondents throughout life.   The ambitious cleric in his various advancements as Bishop of Exeter, Bishop of London and Bishop of Canterbury relied on the ambitious lawyer to advise him in all matters legal.  Coleridge enjoyed from this correspondence, not so much spiritual guidance, of which there was little or none, but the valued friendship of one of the most respected clergymen of the age.  

The name of Duloe was well known to Coleridge and to all Balliol men as a most desirable benefice in the gift of Balliol College with its fine house and a Glebe of seventy acres and an income of nearly seven hundred pounds a year.   The then incumbent who was Temple’s host was another brilliant young Balliol scholar, a married man called Robert Scott, not yet thirty, who, because he was a tutor of his old college, was also well known to Coleridge.  Scott’s name was by now familiar to a fast-growing number of students of Greek as one of the compilers of the first comprehensive Greek-English lexicon, “Liddell and Scott”, which had been published to great acclaim in 1843.   The other and apparently more competent lexicographer being Alice of Wonderland's father, Henry George Liddell, the Tutor of Christ Church.  Student doggerel immortalised their joint effort thus:

“Two men wrote a lexicon, Liddell and Scott

Some parts were clever but some parts were not.

Hear all ye learned, and read me this riddle

How the wrong parts were Scott

and the right parts were Liddell.”

Temple’s letter to Coleridge was filled with small news of their mutual acquaintance at Oxford, all, in their day, famous names!   Jowett was in Germany and had there drunk tea with Schelling and discussed the philosophy of John Coleridge’s  great-uncle, the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Shairp surprisingly in view of the fact that he was a Scots Presbyterian, was hoping to become chaplain to John Mackarness,  a  young man the same age as John Duke Coleridge to the day,  who had come to Eton on the same day, who had followed him to Balliol and who four years later would marry his sister, Alathea, and rise in the Church of England to become Bishop of Oxford.  Robert Scott had just been required by the unloved and unlovely Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, to publish those sermons he had delivered in Liskeard at the Visitations of the Bishop in May and June of that year. 

Frederick Temple’s letter gave a snapshot of a remarkably snug and assured society, a society, only of men, at the very centre of a world which held out glittering prizes, where everyone imagined that he knew everyone of any importance and no-one admitted to having any doubts whatsoever as to his own superiority, sanctity and worth,    When, three years before, John Coleridge had written to his father from Oxford,  “I deny in toto that there exists anywhere a greater man than a scholar of Balliol,”  he probably meant this in all seriousness.  

Over the years, Coleridge had many times asked Temple to visit him at his Devon home in Ottery St Mary but Temple seems often to have had some prior engagement that stopped him from doing so. There is no doubt that John Duke Coleridge, though very clever and conscientious, was felt by many to be an arrogant and humourless man throughout life.   His otherwise sympathetic biographer, and cousin, wrote of him, “He set up for himself, and placed before others, a higher standard than a difficult temper, an impetuous temperament, could always reach.   He was not a good judge of character.  He allowed himself, on mistaken or insufficient reasons, to look down upon, or to look askance at public and private persons who had incurred his displeasure or dislike.” 

Temple had a sweeter nature by far.  Unlike Coleridge, he had not come to Balliol from one of the great public schools but from Blundell’s School at Tiverton.   His childhood, he did not go to Blundell’s until he was twelve but was schooled at home by his mother, had been spent on one of the Ionian islands where he had grown up speaking Italian and modern Greek as well as English and then he lived with his family, from the age of nine, on a Devon farm called Axon, near Culmstock, eight miles away from Blundell’s School.  Here, as a boy, he had been obliged to work removing stones from the fields and later to earn a few shillings as a thresher of corn and, at times, as a ploughboy.   He retained, all his life, a sympathy with, and a love for, labourers in the fields and in the towns which most of his friends and certainly John Coleridge altogether lacked.  It was therefore typical of Frederick Temple to find space in his letter to consider the poor beyond the Rectory gate.  He closed his letter to Coleridge with the following query: “How are the Potato Crops about you?  Do not laugh, for the question is most serious.  The failure here is so complete that downright famine is staring the poor people in the face and even several of the Farmers, it is expected, will be ruined:  What on earth is to be done if the failure is general I cannot tell.  Scott is planning and thinking of it but to relieve all Cornwall (and it depends on Potatoes and Fish) is no easy task.” 

1845 is well remembered as the year of the Great Famine in Ireland but in Cornwall there was also to be a great famine, barely recorded.  Just four miles to the North of Duloe is the market town of Liskeard and there, in one of the crowded courts that had not yet been cleared away from Dean Street, lived a bearded giant, Thomas Pooley, pauper, thirty-eight years old, the subject of this work.   His world offered few prizes and his main concern was to avoid the traps that he perceived to be around him. In the Liskeard low society in which the Pooleys moved, there was always a chance that a poor man or woman might be “took to Bodmin” or “put to Bodmin”.  The former meant serving time in gaol, the latter, being confined in the lunatic asylum.  The third institution of ill-fame was the Union, which is to say the local workhouse, just half a mile from Tom’s home, on the Lamellion Road in Liskeard.

These three significant traps, the workhouse, the prison at Bodmin and the County Lunatic Asylum were all to Tom’s mind, the contrivance of oppressive Bible tyrants and a malevolent Christian clergy: “the Christian clergy, magistrates and jurymen of Cornwall are trying to keep their poor followers in the dark that their Unions, Gaols and Asylums may be crowded to make work for judges, counsellors, lawyers, parsons, doctors, policemen and governors with high salaries to prove practice on the human frame.  O the horrors of Christian tyranny!”

Tom was to experience all three of these horrors for although by and large he seems to have managed to keep himself and his wife out of the Workhouse he claimed that he had experienced it “But if mine is a delusion it has carried me through the Christian purgatory that is the Union where one Christian punishes or starves his brother Christian.”   For a poor man the threat of these dreaded institutions was always there: “The poor man is robbed of his honest labour and he can’t get no redress but laughed and scoffed and threatened if he does not hold his tongue they will send him to the Union or prison. Is this the spirit of Christianity?”  

Tom, at this time, was struggling to feed his family despite higher bread prices and rotted potatoes.  His home was in the poorest part of town and he had a wife and four little children to care for.   His plight deserved sympathy but Thomas Pooley was a difficult man. He could be, let it be said once and for all, an infuriating man.  You would probably not have enjoyed meeting him at a public house.  Apart from anything else he must have been a frightful bore.   He was pathologically opinionated. His repertoire was strictly limited. He knew no history, he had no philosophy and he could not not think straight.  He was as unlike the two polished young men in the Rectory at Duloe as chalk is to cheese and he would have lived an altogether obscure life but for the fact that he had learned to write and he was obsessive in his wish to convey his few simple and misguided opinions in writing.  In other ways, however, Tom can claim our sympathy.  He was a sensitive, child-like man, easily moved to tears and he dealt with his own simplicity and impotence with panache. He was wise enough to perceive that he lived in an imperfect world and he was bold enough to try to change that world for the better.  He had his own kind of courage and he was not afraid to be a great individual in an age when it was dangerous not to conform.  He, like Don Quixote, was subject to delusions and yet was not mad enough to need to be locked away.   He felt summoned to fight with tyrants and giants. The tyranny against which he rode out was the tyranny of the Christian Bible.  The giants were Christians in general and the powerful local clergymen in particular. His weapon was a lump of chalk.  

Tom was certainly poor.  In his later writings we hear from him the cry of poor men through the ages: “for many a days I have worked hard on one meal a day and forced to do so for to live an honest life.” He worked hard but his status as pauper was official; he is so recorded in the National Census of 1851.  He was certainly pitifully poor at times.  It is recorded how, some months before Frederick Temple came to Duloe Rectory, Tom’s wife Mary had given birth to their fourth child, William, and she had then fallen ill of a ‘malignant fever’. The slums of Liskeard were nests of infection.  The water sources were suspect and now and again the cholera came to call and to kill. Tom’s neighbours avoided his sick wife for fear of contagion and he had taken weeks off his work to care for his Mary while she lay in a critical state. Because he was without work he was without wages and was forced to apply to the Parish.   He was allowed by the Guardians one shilling a week and a loaf of bread. The day Tom went back to work there was in the house only a pilchard and a black bread which Mary, in her delicate state, could not bring herself to touch. The promised shilling, however, and the white loaf from the parish were expected at any moment.   Tom came home that night, wet and tired, to find his wife had eaten nothing all day because that grand personage, the Relieving Officer, had stopped his dole.  What he did next might not today seem unusual but, in Victorian Liskeard, it demonstrated a courage as memorable as Oliver Twist’s when he asked for more gruel in the Workhouse. Tom marched through Liskeard to the Relieving Officer’s door and hammered upon it and thundered such terrible reproaches that the shaken man found for him his shilling and his loaf.  “Pooley you are mad!” cried that hapless official but Tom did not heed him.  He marched home triumphant and he and Mary had their supper.

Already, when Frederick Temple came to Duloe Rectory in 1845, Tom Pooley had started to write his eccentric and defiant messages upon gates and walls throughout the district.  The two rusticating clerics at Duloe, Temple and Scott, may well have strolled past Pooley’s scribbles.  Tom wrote in chalk and his writings went largely unnoticed; they soon washed away in those rains which can be depended upon to lash that part of Cornwall.  There exists therefore no record of all that he wrote in the great outdoors except, allegedly, the ten words at the head of this chapter but from his subsequent writings on foolscap we can well guess the tenor of his messages.  His was a very repetitive Gospel.   One of his pet writings was on the subject on which Temple had written to Coleridge, the potato blight.  This was Tom’s considered opinion: “For redeeming that grand root that the Christians and the Bible despises, that is the potato, Bible ashes is a safe and certain remedy.”  It is typical of Tom’s general ignorance that he should have expected the Bible to have had something to say about the potato.   It is also a typical Pooley conclusion that because the potato blight was clearly a great evil, it must have something to do with Bible Tyranny and Christians.

Tom Pooley, the infidel advocator of burning Bibles and scattering the ashes on the potato crop, was never to meet Frederick Temple,  which was a pity because Temple was perhaps the one clergyman in the South West who might have known how to handle him.  On, however, a fateful day twelve years later, in August 1857, Pooley was to meet the two John Coleridges, father and son,  face to face.  He was never to forget them nor they him and the word ‘Duloe’ was to lie until death in all three of their hearts. It was in that same year that the name  of Tom Pooley became widely known and, two years later, opinion about his case divided the literate nation.