Dovenby – a rural village past and present
One of the old Cumberland towns. it has seen much fighting round its proud castle on a little hill ; it has seen three churches rise in succession on another hill; and it has a name standing out in its list of sons, the name of William Wordsworth.
In the ceaseless border warfare the castle played its part for centuries and in the Civil War it was first besieged and then dismantled. Some of its foundations are Norman. and some are built with material from the Roman station a mile away.
Most of what we see was built in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the structure is divided into two wards by a group of buildings in the middle. The lower ward has the flag tower and the great gatehouse, with its barbican walls seven feet thick, and its arms of famous families. The ruined walls of the upper ward are shaped like the bows of a mighty big ship, with three storeys of windows at the tip looking out over the Derwent far below.
The central buildings include an inner gatehouse and a roofless tower with two storeys. The upper storey was the kitchen and has still two wide fireplaces. The lower seems to have escaped damage and is the best complete room in the ruins, with a finely vaulted ceiling supported by a single column in the middle. There are also two little vaulted dungeons.
Full of history these broken walls and towers seem to be, but they are not quite all the history written in stone in Cockermouth. From the marketplace we can step aside into a little cobbled court yard to see what is left of the house called The Old Hall, with its memory of the most tragic figure in Elizabethan England. Here came Mary Queen of Scots, fleeing with 16 followers from her defeat near Glasgow; and here she was received by the wealthy merchant Henry Fletcher, who gave her 16 ells [sic] of rich crimson velvet to replace the poor clothes in which she stood. With Darnley murdered, Both· well taking refuge far away, her throne gone and her cause lost, we may think of Mary’s visit here as among her last days of freedom before the long years of imprisonment.
Two things take our interest in the wide main street of the town. One is the statue of the Earl of Mayo, for ten years M.P. for Cockermouth, who became Viceroy of India and was assassinated on an official visit to the Andaman Islands. The other is the, house of many windows where William Wordsworth opened his eyes in 1770 and his beloved sister Dorothy the year after. In memory of their childhood here is a fountain in the park above the town, with a charming sculptured figure of Dorothy as a child.
Many times in Cumberland we think of Wordsworth, but never more intimately than here where his first years were spent. He grew up to remember the joys of the castle, to tell us in The Prelude how the Derwent,
The finest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
and to write in the magic music of the Intimations of Immortality his recollections of early childhood here.
A few months after Wordsworth died the church he had known in Cockermouth was destroyed by fire. On its foundations the new All Saints rose up, big and high and dignified, with a Wordsworth memorial window showing Our Lord with prophets and evangelists. The glass is unfortunately in the glaring style of the middle of last century, and much better as a window is that in memory of the town’s last M.P., which has good figures of eight saints.
The churchyard is a place of many memories. It has the grave of Wordsworth’s father John, and the gravestone of an old hand-loom weaver has the name of the weaver’s clever son, who died across the globe. The boy was Fearon Fallows, whose friends sent him to develop his genius at Cambridge, and who in 1820 became the first Astronomer Royal at the Cape of Good Hope. He planned the first observatory there and saw it built; he made a catalogue of southern stars; and he died far from home at only 43.
And there is a third stone we can see, full of the quaintness of the 18th century. with an inscription already crumbling away. It was put up by Joseph Gilbanks in memory of the three faithful and affectionate wives he hoped to meet again in the next world, all three having died within 11 years. He was minister here for a generation, and schoolmaster for many years of an old grammar school close by. Some of its famous pupils he taught, and the list of those who came here as boys is a remarkable one.
Within a few decades there were William Wordsworth, Fearon Fallows. and Christopher Wordsworth (who became Master of Trinity at Cambridge). There was Fletcher Christian who led the mutiny on the Bounty. There was the father of the three Queketts [sic]of whom two are remembered in science and the third in Dickens as a model London curate. And there was John Walker, who was blacksmith, engraver. schoolmaster, and doctor. and has been called the Apostle of Vaccination.
Pioneer 0f a Great Idea
John Walker was born here in 1759, educated at the grammar school, and followed his father’s calling as blacksmith until he was 20. Then he turned schoolmaster.
Before he was 30 he had published a volume of geography and history, the success of which led to his travelling widely to prepare a Gazetteer. This ran through six editions in 20 years. Publishing having brought him to London, he studied at Guy’s Hospital, after which he took his medical degree, and in 1800 visited Naples with an English doctor and helped to introduce vaccination there.
Jenner had been experimenting with vaccine for a quarter of a century. and had been violently opposed until 70 physicians and surgeons signed a declaration in his favour. Walker, having in the meantime accompanied Sir Ralph Abercromby on his Egyptian expedition, settled in London in 1802, and began a campaign for the new treatment, to which he gave the rest of his life. Eventually a national vaccine board was set up, with Jenner as president and Walker as director, and for 17 years the two men worked together in amity, twin stalwarts in a great work for a pest-ridden nation. Admitted to membership of the College of Physicians.
Walker, a man of simple earnest character, devoted his whole strength to the task, and was able to boast that he had vaccinated more than 100,000 people.
A man of liberal ideas, he was among the pioneers of the anti-slavery crusade, and did much to awaken public opinion to the horror of sacrificing widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.