The primary reason for this visit to England is for our family, the one in the here and now. As a secondary mission, though, DW and I were keen to follow up on our families from the past. Knowing where you've come from is important when you're finding out where you're going, so being in Plymouth specifically and Devon more generally, has given us a great opportunity to explore our roots. And the word roots is apt, because although we have moved away, we both have roots firmly in this part of the world.
DW was born in Plymouth, and while her father's side hail originally from Birmingham, and before then Herefordshire, that side of her clan is firmly fixed in Devon. On her mother's side, it's pure Plymouth. For myself, I discovered that one of my great-grandmothers was born in Plymouth, but the bulk of my mother's family was from north Devon, and of course Exeter, Newton Abbot and Torquay. But back to Plymouth.
Without being too specific, because unless it's your family, the details are not of much relevance, I can say that a fair old chunk of DW's family lived and worked within the square mile or so that is known today as the Barbican. Barbican of course means gate into a castle, and that's what the area was in medieval times, when the old castle guarded the mouth of Sutton Pool, the city's original port area. Nowadays it means the old port area in general, stretching up and around the hills that lead to the River Plym. Our family records reliably go back to the turn of the nineteenth century (unreliably they go back further), when the Barbican was a bustling port and surrounded by warehouses and homes, densely packed into the ancient streets around the harbour.
Plymouth is world renowned for being the last stopping point of the famous Mayflower, the ship that took the pilgrims, shockingly unprepared as it turned out, to the New World. Plymouth Massachusetts is noted as their stopping point on mainland North America, named with no small nod to England's Plymouth. The city is also known for it's links to Sir Francis Drake, explorer, pirate, slaver and supposed saviour of Elizabethan England when he chased the Spanish Armada away from its shores. The legend goes that Drake himself watched the Spanish fleet sail past Plymouth Sound while he played Bowls on Plymouth Hoe, before he set his own fleet to sea to harass the Spaniards and apparently prevent an invasion. Drake wasn't a Plymouth boy, he's from Tavistock, a little way up the River Tamar, but Plymouth loudly claims him as its own.
More recently, and in the time span that covers our family researches, Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912), Scott of the Antarctic, was a Plymouth lad. All three of his expeditions to Antarctica set off from Plymouth, although Scott himself never made it back to his home town because died where he worked, on the Ross Ice Shelf, during his final expedition. Darwin set sail on at least one of his voyages on The Beagle from Plymouth and is known to have stayed in the city while preparing. You'll gather that Plymouth has quite a history.
Not a huge amount of buildings in those teeming streets survive on the Barbican these days. There are some warehouse buildings along the harbour, and dotted around are some fine Elizabethan buildings, beautifully restored and still in some use or other. The old port was superseded to a large extent by the Georgian and Victorian development of the larger deep water port on the western side of the city, on the Devon side of the River Tamar, that came to be known as Devonport. But judging by the railway lines along the old ports quays, it did remain in use for some time alongside Devonport. Urban renewal in the Barbican area had already started prior to the Second World War, but Plymouth took a terrible beating in one single week in 1941 as the Germans took aim at Devonport dockyard, a key Royal Navy base. The Barbican was hit, but not like the centre of the city, which was reduced to rubble in those five raids. After the war, Plymouth necessarily needed to rebuild, and the City Fathers decided to set to work on clearing a lot of the Barbican's older residential streets to build new and modern housing for the people who lived there.
All this background leads up to the fact that while many of DWs family lived and worked around the Barbican, there is precious little left of the nineteenth century warren of streets and ancient houses. Indeed, while much of the original street plan has been retained, so many streets have adopted new names. Thank goodness for the historical projects available through the Internet that document the old against the new.
Our first place to visit was Looe Street, on a hill rising up from the harbour. Records show family living the City's Corporation Dwellings on Looe Street, an early attempt at Urban renewal by the City. One side of the street is stout Corporation buildings, the other still a mix of Elizabethan and Georgian buildings, all of which survived the war. Batter Street, which crosses Looe Street, didn't fare so well and I doubt that members of DW's family who lived and worked there would recognize it now. Indeed, all of the streets on that side of the harbour bear little resemblance to those streets marked out on maps drawn in the late nineteenth century, with the exception of Looe Street.
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| Looe Street past and present |
When we ventured into the area on the west side of the harbour, where we're staying, we walked the old street pattern, and saw some wonderful Elizabethan houses, but the streets in which DW's family lived had all been cleared and were now filled with City built post-war flats and houses. We did find what remains of the old castle, and enjoyed some fabulous views over Plymouth Sound, though.
Throughout our research, and wandering the streets, we did find churches. The English Census is organised using ecclesiastical boundaries, and as baptismal, marriage and burial records refer to churches as well, churches tended to jump out at us. In old English towns, there are churches seemingly on every street corner, and our walks around Plymouth have highlighted many churches mentioned in family records. Churches may not have survived German bombs, but they did survive most urban renewal, which is why so many still exist.
My own family, my great-grandmother, was born on the Barbican, was baptised in St. John's church and lived on Stillman Street, before she moved to Exeter with her family. It's an intriguing prospect to think that my family may have known DW's family as they lived just one street away from each other. They would certainly have drunk in the same pubs, one of which still stands and in which we sat and had a drink while we soaked up the atmosphere.
One thing that were able to do was visit the monument to Britain's Royal Navy, situated on The Hoe. On one of the bronze plaques that line the base is the name of one W C Fast, a Petty Officer Stoker who died at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. He's related by marriage to DW's family, people that lived and worked in the Barbican area. There are similar memorials in Portsmouth, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and on each of those is listed the names of at least two of my family members. Maybe we'll visit those places in the future.
Further afield, we took a drive with current family out to the North Devon village of Dolton. If I said it was in the boondocks, that would be understating things. Once off the main roads, we were in a maze of tiny lanes, at some point barely wide enough for one vehicle. We twisted and turned for a while, then at probably the narrowest point, met a pair of huge tractors coming towards us, both towing trailers, and both filling the road between the hedgerows to the extent that even on foot you'd have had to go back and find a passing place. I wasn't driving, but we backed up about 400 yards to a point where we and another car could get out of the way of the tractors. Driving in rural Devon is such fun.
Arriving in Dolton, we went into the graveyard of St.Edmund's Church and had a happy half hour perusing the gravestones and looking for my family names. We found a few, too, especially with the handy list of burials and the maps of the burial sites that were inside the church. Baptisms, marriages and burials of my family had all happened here. That said, there were not as many as I had anticipated but I suspect that many of my ancestors were Non-Conformists, that is not Anglican, so had I located a Methodist's chapel I may have found more. It didn't matter, though, because that village and it's environs were the epicentre of the Bater family, one that had spread far and wide in the late nineteenth and early 20th Century. It was from Dolton that people had gone to the New World and settled in Guelph, Ontario, not so far from home in Canada, as well as Alberta and Newfoundland. I have been following in my family's footsteps.
Back in Plymouth, we've discovered yet more of DW's family locales, this time in Devonport on the east side of the city. Like so many other places, pre-war Devonport was largely reduced to rubble by German bombs that were aimed at the adjacent Naval Dockyard. With the help of the National Library of Scotland's free, digital, historic maps we've been able to search out street after street mentioned in Census records that simply don't exist today, but we will take time to run out and visit the area. Similarly, we'll take a run into Exeter next week to have a look at the places my family came from in that fine City, my home in my formative years. But that cam all wait for another entry in this journal.
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