Cornish Rhapsody

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 386, 15 November 1946, Page 15

Cornish Rhapsody

"7 HE ENGLISH ECCENTRICS," I have ventured to suggest before, make a curiously up-and-down series. The other day it was William Blake, a programme with the most intoxicating subject imaginable treated with a far from steady hand; this week we have a certain Reverend Stephen Hawker, 19th Century vicar of Morwenstowe in Cornwall and author of the song "And shall Trelawney die?" written to support a candidate in a by-election of 1832 but referring to one of the seven bishops put on trial by James II.-from which Lord Macaulay has imprinted on. the minds of generations of schoolchildren the picture of a Cornwall seething with revolt against James and singing this identical song. But that was no more than an incidental opening to the programme. We had two unidentified persons wondering why so brilliant a man as Stephen Hawker should bury himself in a forsaken hole like Morwenstowe. Being removed to this spot, we had a shipwreck and the Vicar conducting a very long argument, bellowed above wind and wave, with the barbarous Cornish as to whether the drowned men should be buried in the churchyard, He then recited a great deal of his own singularly uninspired poetry, instituted the harvest festival to the grunting of his tame pig, recited some more poetry. And that was all. No more was heard of his brilliance, or of his flight to Morwenstowe, or of his feelings for the place and his acutely unlovable parishioners. There was in short no picture whatever of the man, his life or his mind, let alone his eccentricity (query-the pet pig?). Surely, in a programme devoted to eccentricity, which is the flowering of personality too abundant for its surroundings, we are entitled to ask for a definite and consistent sketch of the individual subject.