Willard Watts, Spring 1841

Briar Cottage, Chapel Street, Buckfastleigh, May 21st 1890

Dear Aunt Adelaide,

Thank you for the socks you knitted me for my birthday.

They get less itchy with every wash, and divert me from my too-tight school trousers when I’m going over the fence stiles. I tell Mother I’m bigger than John and Bill and Freddie who wore them before me, but she says, why would she go blind stitching a new pair when I’ll be in the mill come September.

Thank Goodness summer is on the way and we’ll be swimming in the Mardle and Dean Burn before long. Do you get summer in the Northern Wastes or is it icicles all year round? Dad said you and Uncle Harold wouldn’t have made my cousins Gertie and Pru if it weren’t for the Manchester climate and the exorbitant price of coal. Then mother knocked the back of his head with the braising pan. Luckily it had been off the heat, for a few minutes at least.
May is the only time it’s worth showing up at school because you get right good odds on the Whitsun Week races. I was about to put six to four on Harebell in the playground when Clicky Abbot loomed out from the privet and sent me inside for a caning. I wouldn’t mind but Harebell only went and won it by a nose. Clicky Abbot says the Buckfastleigh Races exert a most evil influence on our young minds, but how can we fail to gasp as the big horse boxes are unloaded off the South Devon Railway, and those girt shiny stallions trot up Fore Street for stabling at the Kings Arms?
Abbot loves to rave on about the monks who put this place on the map and how we should follow their righteous example, but Dad says King Cnut only set them up here in the last millenium to make himself look good and all the poor sods like us had to till their land.
What’s more, the landlord at the Kings Arms said the Abbot and seven monks got into hot water, not the holy kind, for looting and smashing up the fishery back in medieval times. So monks ain’t always as good as they ought to be. Maybe they loomed out the privet too.
In church on Sunday we was warned about the peril of women’s suffrage and mum tutted and asked why the weaker sex couldn’t rest happy as mild-mannered subservients like herself. She says these suffragists will surely burn in hell. Dad says that Hindus of the heathen subcontinent don’t do hell or heaven but believe in reincarnation. This is an appealing philosophy to father as he’d like to come back as a Whitsun race horse with his choice of the fillies. Mum said he’s too hairy-heeled by far and would be more likely to find himself pulling a barge of coal along the Manchester canal.
They both send their regards.

Your loving nephew

Willard Watts

Willard Watts, Winter 1891

Briar Cottage, Chapel Street, Buckfastleigh, January 21st 1891

Dear Cousin Gertie,

Thank Aunt Adelaide for the socks she knitted me for Christmas. Not too itchy and just the ticket for frosty starts at Berry’s Mill.

Warp, weft, cam, tappet, dobby, single, ply, corded…Sometimes it has felt like John, Bill and Freddie are speaking a foreign tongue over tea. Now I know what all these things mean: hard work.

The mill siren goes off at 8am and if you ain’t inside the gates pretty sharpish you’re locked out with wages docked. Kick out ain’t till 6 and the week don’t finish till Saturday lunch. It ain’t all bad waiting for the gates to open of a morning. All the workers crowd the street huggamugga and there are some right pretty wool combers at Berry’s. Mary Attewell who I used to trot round Clicky’s school yard with, on an invisible racehorse, has developed in all sorts of surprising directions. She is responsible for checking the textiles for wear and tear and says best I don’t try anything funny or she’ll throw me in the Martindale Abrasion Tester.
Mum and Dad are at each others’ throats again. Mum has decided women’s suffrage is a good thing because she is sick of earning 7 shillings when Dad gets 12 and she can comb twice as fast as him. Dad says what difference do it make when it all comes together to go down the same black hole but mum says next Whitsun Races she’s liable to streak the course in purple and green bloomers. Reckon I’d get good odds on that.
Of course mortal enemies living tooth by jowl is nothing new in these parts. Dartmouth and Plymouth backed the Parliamentarians in the Civil War, but many of the folk round here and Totnes way were more for the King, never mind he was a right daft bugger. Course they signed the protestations soon enough once he lost his head.This town may be the home of the peace-loving Benedictine monks, and we watch with interest as their new abbey rises higher in its scaffold, but the hoi poloi of Buckfastleigh still love a scrap. The mill owners are convinced they are diverting each other’s water supply and have been exchanging angry letters it’s said.
What I wouldn’t give for a freak river drought and factory closure this Saturday, to catch up on my beauty sleep. I fully intend to get Mary Attewell to test my resilience to wear and tear before I’m very much older.

Your fond cousin,

Willard Watts

Mary Watts, Summer 1937

Briar Cottage, Chapel Street, Buckfastleigh, July 14th 1937

Dear Sir,

I don’t doubt you are an eminent academic, and even though you live in London, I shan’t hold that against you, but I have a few frank sentiments to impart in this missive.

My name is Mary Watts nee Attewell. Now if you ever worked at Berry’s mill, where I was once in charge of testing for wear and tear, that name would inspire fear to your very core, ‘cause no weaver got away with shoddy workmanship on my watch, and shoddy workmanship is what I accuse you of now! Of course, I’m 63 now and my own bones feel pretty prehistoric themselves these days, but my dear departed husband, Willard Watts did not die during the war protecting King and Country to have you underestimate the achievements of Buckfastleigh.

We are rightly proud of Edgar Reed and Squeak Joint and what they have dug up in our limestone caves. I don’t know what possessed them to go poking around in dark damp places, but that’s men for you. I knew them when they was knee high to a grass hopper. They played with my sons Willard Junior, Jim and Charlie; always up to some scrape or other but always honest. If they’ve sent you a load of bones saying they was once sabre tooth tigers, bears, cave lions, rhinoceri and wotnot, who are you to disbelieve them? Tell me that.

They found them bones under six inches of stalagmite. Now I didn’t always attend as close to Clicky Abbot’s geography lessons as I should. I admit I found my Willard six desks across a little distracting, but it takes 10,000 years to make a stalagmite that long, so if they was under that, how do you make out those bones come from some sheep drowned in last year’s flood?
Happen you can’t picture prehistoric lions, bears and tigers and all manner of wild slavering beasts roaming loose in these parts, but you ain’t seen kicking out time at the Valiant Soldier.

I hope you won’t find this letter impertinent, but my mother in law always stressed the importance of setting a gentleman straight. The bones have been sent on to the British Museum, from which establishment Buckfastleigh awaits a more favourable estimate of their importance.

I will forward on any documentation we receive from Kennington, affirming the true age of them bones, and will be quite satisfied, by return of post, with a photograph of you eating your hat.
Yours faithfully,
Mary Watts