Review of The West Country: A Cultural History by John Payne, published by Signal Books, £12; part of a series called Landscapes of the Imagination

THERE are two chapters in this book on Dorset and they get off to a cracking start: “Dorset has a northern fringe that scarcely seems to belong to it at all, a chalky, dusty hinterland that gathers itself suddenly in a wild surge up to the heights of Shaftesbury” –  yes, that’s so true. You may disagree, but places like Gillingham and Bourton always seem to me to belong more to the A303 than they do to Dorset. The real interest of the county lies elsewhere:

In the memorable lines of the Cerne Abbas giant, for example, before which Payne comments: “Dorset tries hard to be respectable… but the county never quite manages to be respectable.”

Or the lines engraved outside Blandford Town Hall (Blandford was rebuilt in the 18th century after being almost completely destroyed by fire. Chief re-builders were John and William Bastard):

Recipe for regeneration;

take one careless

tallow chandler and

two ingenious Bastards.

(Regeneration has always been controversial.) 

Or the lines of religious dissenters who spraggled across Dorset and beyond to their lowly, and often deliberately obscure, chapels. Dorset, writes Payne, “and indeed the whole West Country, is a hot-bed of non-conformity”. He’s good throughout this whole book on unfashionable but fascinating sects – Congregational, Unitarian, Methodist, Baptist, Moravian – and as part of this theme he deals, rather unexpectedly, in his Traditional Dorset chapter, with the Loughwood Meeting House in Devon, west of Axminster. Nowadays it’s not far from the A35, but when built by Baptists in the 17th century it was much more remote. Its “isolated spot reflects the social and religious isolation felt by the 219 members of the congregation who sought refuge there in 1653… Eventually Loughwood was to become the mother church for Baptists meeting at Chard in Somerset, Lyme Regis in Dorset and Honiton in Devon… The National Trust booklet available at the chapel notes that persecution was especially harsh in the years 1684-88, when ‘men and women were ostracised, ridiculed, imprisoned, transported and sometimes killed’… Not until 1688, when William of Orange was invited to take over from James II in the so-called Glorious (and bloodless) Revolution, were acts passed by parliament granting freedom of worship to non-conformists.” It’s a weirdly persistent myth that the Glorious Revolution was bloodless; Payne himself, remember, has just been talking about Baptists sometimes being killed. To quote a piece by Bernard Bailyn in the current New York Review of Books, “Death and devastation were everywhere, not only in the cities but in the countryside as well.”

 

Payne’s word “transported” is also resonant. Later he writes about the six Tolpuddle Martyrs, transported to Australia in 1834 for setting up the Tolpuddle Grand Lodge of the Agricultural Labourers Friendly Society and for swearing an oath of loyalty to each other. Five of the Martyrs were Methodists, two of them lay-preachers. Payne thinks it’s “sad that the names of the twelve labourers transported to Australia after the Swing Riots in Dorset [1830 agricultural riots] have not been kept in the general memory, while those of the men of Tolpuddle have been kept in the public consciousness ever since.”   

So, all in all, this is a thought-provoking book, well-written and sturdily produced. It has errors – Mary Anning was not born in 1811, but 1799 - and it has faults – the photographs are disappointing. One picture of the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs festival shows what could be David Partridge, check-shirted stalwart of the Bridport Peace and Justice Group and the Saturday morning queue for the Bridport Country (WI) Market, but the reproduction is so bad it’s impossible to be sure. But still, this book is well worth reading, for it does have some very unusual elements, such as an account of a trip to Netherhay Chapel near Drimpton (north of Broadwindsor, north-west of Beaminster). Hardly anybody ever writes about Drimpton, yet Payne goes there to hear the Purbeck Quire and modern-day Methodists happily singing old hymns:

I have fought my way through

I have finished the work

Thou didst give me to do

Note: John Payne visited The Book Shop in South Street, Bridport, in September, and more about his visit and about his book can be read by clicking on this link. In his book, Payne refers to Bridport, “with its Arts Centre and its Local Food Centre,” as  ”a phoenix rising from centuries of decline.”

 

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