Ten Views of a Landslip

A personal appreciation and analysis of the Great Bindon Landslip in its historical and scientific context

Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & Lyme Regis Museum

Detail from: View of the Axmouth Landslip from Dowlands – Plate V of Ten Plates etc., Mary Buckland, 30 December 1839 (LRM)

Prologue

The Land-slip has now become an object of so much curiosity and interest, not only to the idle tourist, but also to the philosopher and geologist, that some description of it in a compact and collected form, appears desirable and indeed absolutely necessary. P.O.H. Sidmouthiensis A Guide to the Landslip Near Axmouth Devonshire1

Coincidence has a powerful effect on the human imagination. Explanations based on the incontrovertible laws of probability are often less appealing than those invoking the occult or a vague feeling that ‘it was meant to be’. From the time of the Ancient Greeks the enterprise we now call ‘Western science’ has worked to establish rational causes for seemingly inexplicable natural events. But old habits die hard, and throughout history catastrophic events have been interpreted as punishments for sin or portents of a greater reckoning to come. The 1839 Christmas landslip or ‘earthquake’ at Bindon a few miles to the west of Lyme Regis on the South Devon coast, was no exception. It was a time of great change and uncertainty, a time of political reform. Cholera and insurrection were in the air, and now God was speaking. For many it could be no coincidence. This account of the event and the people connected to it is inspired by two more mundane coincidences occurring over a century apart. The remarkable circumstance that two renowned Victorian geologists were quickly on the scene made this an important event in the history of science, and the unexpected discovery of the later involvement of my own early and influential teacher gave the project a distinctly personal dimension. It was a project that truly began when I discovered the book. In 1840, the publisher John Murray produced a slim, but large-formatted volume comprehensively entitled Ten Plates comprising a Plan, Sections, and Views representing the changes produced on the Coast of East Devon, between Axmouth and Lyme Regis by the Subsidence of the Land and the Elevation of the Bottom of the Sea.2 The company, whose list included Jane Austen and Lord Byron, often favoured works that affected the way humankind perceived the world and its place in it. Ten Plates was by no means the firm’s first or only scientific work. Earlier in the decade it had issued the three volumes of Charles Lyell’s seminal Principles of Geology, and twenty years later it was to publish Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Ten Plates was nothing like these great publications, either in scope or importance. Nevertheless, it was significant, for it was the first publicly available account of a spectacular geological event that was based on truly scientific principles. When the great Axmouth landslip occurred, William Daniel Conybeare and William Buckland, two of the leading geologists of the day, happened to be within five miles of the site and wasted no time before attending the scene. Ten Plates is a comprehensive report of the event itself and the findings of their investigations. It is a beautiful document of great scientific and cultural value. The Ten Views in this essay give a different perspective. They are a collage of studies using dramatic re-construction, reportage, biographical notes, correspondence and

1 P.O.H. Sidmouthiensis, A Guide to the Landslip, near Axmouth, Devonshire, (Sidmouth, 1840), 3. 2 William Conybeare et al., Ten Plates … etc., (London, 1840).

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 2. even a little memoir. The intention is to create a picture of this important and, in its day, widely reported incident in English history, setting it into the context of its time and exploring its resonances down to the present.

Ten Views of a Landslip 1. First Views: The Witnesses It is past midnight on Christmas morning 1839.3 Farmer Chappell has bid his guests goodnight and gone up to bed, leaving his parlour maid to tidy away the empty flagons. He will rest easy, satisfied that he has ‘done aright’ by his nineteen men and their wives.4 As he prepares for sleep, a half-remembered verse of rhyme runs through his head: The pond-rous Ashen Faggot from the yard The jolly farmer to his crowded hall Conveys with speed; where, on the rising flames (already fed with store of massy brands), It blazes soon; nine bandages it bears, And as they each disjoin (so custom wills), A mighty jug of sparkling cyder’s brought, With brandy mixt to elevate the guests.5

For they have indeed been burning the ‘ashen faggot’ at the farmhouse, and, as each of the withies binding the bundle burnt through and snapped, traditional toasts were raised and much good cider was drunk.6 The old stories were retold, and also recent gossip: local indiscretions, tales of tricks played on gullible farm boys by older men… and, of course, there was talk of the weather – the rain that had been a constant nuisance since harvest. Someone had mentioned the cracks opening in the fields along the clifftop, but since there are often cracks in the land round here, it is nothing that Chappell needs to worry about – Bindon is a full half mile from the cliff. He will sleep soundly. As the farmer prepares for bed, farm labourer William Critchard and his wife, Charlotte, are making their way home. Will’s legs are unsteady and he is glad of his wife’s supporting arm. They have been the guests of his master at Bindon Farm. As they negotiate the stony pathway down the cliff side towards their house, Will’s foot fails to find solid ground. He lurches forward with a loud curse. Will knows this path; for two years, he has passed this way morning and night on his way to the fields. He is sure there shouldn’t be a step here. He struggles to regain his footing, leaning heavily on his wife.

3 The dramatizations of the events of Christmas 1839 are based on contemporaneous reports recorded in the ‘Geological Memoir’ by Rev. W.D. Conybeare in Conybeare et al., Ten Plates etc. and in George Roberts, An Account of and Guide to the Mighty Land-slip of Dowlands and Bindon, (Lyme, 1840). Dialogue is imagined. 4 Based on 1851 census information. 5 1795 – Anon., from www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk. 6 The West Country tradition of burning a specially constructed bundle of ash sticks in the hearth on Christmas Eve has been revived in recent years at the Harbour Inn in Axmouth, see Devon Talk, Winter 2005, 13, and Neil Henty, Burning the Ashen Faggot, (2008).

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 3. Charlotte Critchard curses the gallon or so of cider that her husband has taken in the last few hours. But she too is surprised by the new step in the path and, her mind being less befuddled, she starts to worry. She and Will are proud of their home. It’s two years since the farmer built it for them on a flattish depression in the area they call the Undercliff. Rock Cottage is one of a pair, its partner occupied by another Bindon labourer and his family. A further neighbour occupies the single cottage a hundred yards or so to the west. Though the houses are isolated, this is a wonderful place to live, surrounded by orchards and small copses set among the uneven ground of the Undercliff. However, just this last fortnight strange things have started to happen - lumps of plaster have fallen from the ceilings, and the doors and windows have become hard to open, and once opened, almost impossible to shut. ‘It’s just the new house settling down,’ Will had reassured her. Charlotte was not so sure - she’d seen the cracks in the cliff above them. But now she tries to put these disquieting thoughts from her mind. It is very late and she encourages her husband to hurry home to bed. When they reach the cottage Charlotte’s mother, still awake despite the lateness of the hour, meets them at the door. She had been left to care for the children, and she is agitated. ‘There’s something coming upon us,’ she cries. ‘The house is cracking up.’ Her son-in-law, suddenly sleepy from his walk in the clear air, dismisses her concerns. ‘It’s alright Mother, it’s late. We’ll look in the morning,’ and so saying, he makes his way, unsteady, up to bed. Barely three hours later Will, stretched out on his back, mouth agape, is roused from sleep by a loud crack. It is cold, and dark, and his head is hurting. He turns onto his side and pulls the blanket over his face. For an hour he lies still and uncomfortable, listening. His bladder is full, and that together with the steady succession of lesser creaking sounds, makes further sleep impossible. At five o’clock discomfort prevails; thinking first to relieve himself and then to investigate the strange noises he staggers down and pushes at the front door. It is jammed. He applies his shoulder, but to no effect. Looking about, he sees the hazel stick hanging amongst the coats on the back of the door. He takes it down and pushes it between door and frame. Eventually, with some effort, he prises the door ajar. At once it swings back towards him. He pushes at it and uses the stick to prop it open. He peers out. William Critchard will never forget what he sees that Christmas morning. The moon, now high in the southern sky, illuminates the space where his little garden once was, neatly dug and awaiting its spring planting of beans and cabbages. But the garden has gone. Huge rifts run across the area and oddly shaped sections of soil have sunk a foot or two, while others are tilted at extraordinary angles. Even as he stands, incredulous, on his doorstep, he sees deep crevasses opening all around the cottage. He clutches at the doorframe and feels it shudder beneath his fingers. Forgetting his urgent need to pee, Will rushes back in to find that his wife and mother-in-law have already gathered up the children. Without speaking, they throw on coats and boots and emerge through the propped-open door into the moonlight.

* * *

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 4. Axmouth, 2 March, 1840 There having been strange and unsettling reports relating to the late landslip, Mr Thomas Spenser and Mr Johns, both of Her Majesty’s Coast Guard, present themselves to Colonel Charles Macalister and the Revd. G.T. Comyns, Magistrates, to make a deposition concerning the events of the night of 25 December last.7 The Colonel opens the proceedings. ‘We all know why we’re here. Now, please tell us, Mr Spenser, in your own words, what you saw and heard on that dreadful night.’ ‘Well Sir, we were patrolling on Culverhole beach, just below the cliffs. There was a three-quarter moon and we were on the lookout for rockfalls.’ He looks at Johns, who adds helpfully: ‘It was fearful cold, the wind was rising and we was wrapped up well. I had a new jersey, a gift, just that morning, and…’ ‘Thank you, Mr Johns…, please let’s keep to the point.’ The Colonel turns back to Spenser, ‘Tell me, why were you looking for rockfalls? ‘We’d had word of the goings-on up at the Critchards’. The land was cracking up and we was a-feared of getting buried down on the beach. As Mr Johns here says, it were a mighty uncomfortable night to be abroad.’ Now it is the turn of the clergyman to become impatient, ‘What happened, tell us what happened! – Mr Johns, perhaps…what did you see?’ ‘Well, suddenly there was this great noise from the cliff. That really scared me.’ ‘Aye, that were a loud rumbling noise, but as we looked back at the cliffs nothing much seemed to be happening.’ ‘Then the noise started on the other side, out at sea like.’ ‘Yes… and then, when we turned to look, there it was. A great pertur…perturb… a great swirling of the water, then a mass of solid rock heaved itself up before our very eyes. I thought it was a great whale at first, a-heaving up out of the deep. There was a strange, awful fishy smell. And then the ground under our feet started to shift. Up and down it went, slow like, but enough… ‘Cor yeah, I tell you, we near shat ourselves…’ The Revd. Comyns coughs loudly. The Colonel glares. Johns realises his mistake. He is saved from further ignominy by Spenser, ‘Pardon my friend here, gentlemen. He gets a bit over-excited.’ The cleric smiles awkwardly, ‘Go on, Mr Spenser.’ ‘Well, we didn’t rightly know what to do. We thought it best to get up onto the cliffs, so we ran. And that’s when we saw the lights – flashing lights all along the beach.’ Johns, unable to contain himself despite his recent shame, ‘Yeah, flashing lights and a sort of eggy smell, I thought the devil was coming up through a hole in the ground.’ Again, Comyns coughs, ‘Pray let me be the judge of that.’ He looks at Spenser, ‘Go on – these lights you say you saw, what were they like? Bright?’ ‘To tell the truth, they weren’t so bright – more sparks really, but all along the beach as that great rock slowly raised up in the sea.’

7 This account is based on information in Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 13. Again, dialogue is imagined.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 5. At this, Colonel Macalister leans forward thoughtfully. ‘Tell me, have you ever been on a pebble beach?’ ‘Why of course sir, many times.’ ‘And have you ever been on a pebble beach at night?’ ‘Ye…s.’ ‘And have you ever picked up a handful of pebbles and thrown it down onto the beach?’ ‘Why, yes Sir, I have. It made little sparks.’ ‘Good. And were these “little sparks” like those you saw on Christmas night?’ Spenser is thoughtful for a moment. ‘I think they were. Yes, I do believe they were.’ ‘And Mr Johns,’ he turns to the other man, ‘these “eggy” smells, could they have been the smell of seaweed and other marine productions suddenly brought up into the air?’ ‘I suppose they might…’ ‘Thank you.’ He turns to his clerical colleague, ‘Well Mister Comyns, there we have it. These splendid officers didn’t see a volcano, and certainly not the devil. Let’s have no more of this ridiculous scaremongering. We’ll call in the gentlemen of the press – we have a statement to make!’

2. Views from the clifftop: The Sightseers Eyewitness accounts of the course of events at Axmouth at Christmas 1839 are partial and confused. The area was thinly populated and much happened in darkness. By his own admission, Will Critchard hardly had a clear head; and the two coast guards, scared and emotional after their ordeal, were muddled and prone to exaggeration. But if accounts of the events themselves are necessarily incomplete, the resulting transformations to the landscape were the most clearly recorded of any in the history of the British Isles up to that date. Although some of the changes were transient, lasting just a few months, others remain visible today, nearly 180 years later. The spectator rushing to the clifftop on the morning of 26th December would have seen at his feet a great chasm formed by the subsidence of productive farmland. Across the chasm, which varied in breadth between 200 and 400 feet, lay an area of about 15 acres, bounded on all sides by steep cliffs like an island rising from a sea of rocks. Its top, a few feet lower than the viewer’s own position, was a little riven with cracks and fissures but still recognisable as belonging to the fields from which it had been torn away. The view down into the chasm itself revealed an extraordinary landscape of chalky ‘towers and pinnacles covered with mould and vegetation’.8 Looking further to the east, the adjoined cottages so recently vacated by the Critchards and their neighbours, might be seen; though at a precarious angle, they were not entirely lost, but, a little further on, the third tenement was nothing but a heap of rubble. Spectacular as was this scene, there was more. Those who braved the precarious path past the derelict cottages and down to the beach were rewarded with a view of the eruption that had so upset Thomas Spenser and his companion. The morning light made clear that this was indeed no great cetacean, but a huge up-heaving of rock from

8 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 7.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 6. beneath the sea. It formed a reef some 40 feet high and three quarters of a mile long, inside of which lay a lagoon, 400 feet wide and containing 20 feet of water. A narrow entrance connected this pool to the sea, creating a natural harbour quite as large as that protected by the Cobb three miles to the east at Lyme Regis.

Plans of the Landslip: (l) from G. Roberts’ Account of Landslip and (r) W. Dawson’s Plan and Sections – Plate II of Ten Plates etc. (LRM)

As the news passed by word-of-mouth in local inns and taverns, it was embellished with speculation about the nature and cause of the incident. Spenser and Johns were widely reported to have seen ‘flashing lights attended with an intolerable stench,’ phenomena known to be associated with volcanic activity.9 The local press was soon on the scene and within little more than a week the story had spread across the country. Those who could hurried to see for themselves. ‘Multitudes of persons from all parts have been for several days past rushing into Lyme, Seaton, and Charmouth, eager to ascertain the nature and extent of the catastrophe.’10 George Roberts, the Lyme Regis antiquarian whose contemporaneous Account of and Guide to the Landslip remains so useful to the modern historian, wrote that ‘Thousands on foot and in vehicles hastened to the spot, and traversed the tract of the great disturbance.’11 They were not disappointed: Scarcely anyone, a travelled person or not, fails to be greatly struck, and to have his expectations more than realized at this view. Many are breathless and bewildered at the sight. One individual from Honiton, was taken home to a sick bed, from which he was with difficulty recovered.12

* * *

With modern transport, given favourable conditions, a working man might journey from Axmouth to London in a little over three hours at a cost equivalent to two or three hours’ labour. In 1839, twenty years before the arrival of the railway at nearby Axminster, such a journey would have cost the labourer two or three weeks’ wages. Even by the fastest coach it would have taken a whole day: a considerable undertaking, but still a vast improvement on the almost six days necessary before the turnpike trusts began to improve the roads in the latter half of the eighteenth

9 Conybeare et al., Ten Plates etc., 4. 10 ‘Earthquake near Lyme’, Standard, January 3rd, 1840, 1. 11 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 17. 12 Ibid., 7.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 7. century.13 For most of the 200 or so inhabitants of Axmouth, a visit to the capital was as remote a possibility as a journey to the Indies. Their world was narrow and their experience confined to the area around their homes that could be reached on foot. Other opportunities for intellectual enrichment or education were also limited; young children still regularly worked a full day in field or factory; not until 1870 did elementary education became compulsory for those between the ages of five and ten. Amongst the farm workers and domestic servants who lined the Bindon and Dowland cliffs that December there would be few who had enjoyed any schooling at all, and for those that did it would have been strongly overlaid with religious sentiment. A typical National School, of the kind founded by the Church of England after 1811, might have aimed to confer upon the Children of the Poor the Inestimable Benefit of Religious Instruction, combined with such of Acquirements as may be suitable to their Station in Life, and calculated to make them useful and respectable Members of Society.14

If, by a combination of diligence and good fortune, an ambitious ladies-maid, say, had managed to learn to read, the major part of her literary diet would have been provided by the Bible. Books were still expensive in the 1830s. The steam-driven presses that would make a range of literature available at affordable prices were only just rumbling into production and there was still a penny tax on every newspaper printed – reduced from four-pence in 1836.15 In an age when the widest variety of information and influence is so readily accessible, it is difficult to appreciate quite how limited the worldview of the rural population in early Victorian England was. It was a society where the clergy were effectively gatekeepers to the mind; where, for most, the Sunday sermon was the sole medium for the spread of ideas. Moreover, it was a society that still largely looked to the church for explanations of phenomena beyond common experience – phenomena like a great landslip occurring on Christmas Day. The clergy themselves had mostly been trained in the classics and theology, with possibly some mathematics, at the ancient universities of Oxford or Cambridge; they too had an outlook founded on the holy scripture. Even the few who had voluntarily attended lectures such as those given by the geologists, William Buckland (1784-1856) at Oxford or Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) at Cambridge, would, for the most part, have striven to reconcile what they heard to the tenets of their biblical faith. For most of them, the cosmogony laid out in the book of Genesis was as sufficient as it was necessary. God had made the world in six days; He had seen that it was good. What is more, He had created man to have dominion over it. Questioning such fundamental truths was not only blasphemous; it was dangerous. The results of such presumption could be clearly seen just across the Channel, where the widespread adoption of rationalist ideas had been followed by revolution and the guillotine. It is therefore unsurprising that the message from the pulpit tended to be conservative and based uncompromisingly on the scriptures.

13 George Roberts, The History and Antiquities of the Borough of Lyme Regis and Charmouth (London, 1834), 155; quoted in Geoffrey Chapman, A History of Axminster to 1910 (Honiton, 1998), 132. 14 Statement to the Inhabitants of Kennington, South Lambeth ... Disposed to Assist in the Instruction of the Infant Poor, 1823. Cited in Lawson and Silver, Social History of Education, 1973, p. 243, and quoted in Norman Dennis, The Uncertain Trumpet: a History of Church of England School Education to AD 2001, (London, 2001), 23. 15 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation (Chicago, 2000), 32-3.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 8. The thousands of sightseers who flocked to the site of the great landslip did so with a mixture of feelings. For a few, readers perhaps of Wordsworth or Coleridge, the scene carried deep, romantic resonances; several artists rushed to capture the dramatic views. For some, the raw power on display was deeply troubling, adding to their insecurities, concerning both this world and the next: locally, some feared for the stability of their own homes, and, across the nation, there were those who saw it as the work of a vengeful God. Although no lives were lost, and very little property was damaged, so unaccountable an event on so holy a day must surely be a signal of divine displeasure. But for others, perhaps a majority, this spectacular display of nature was little more than the opportunity for some wholesome and inexpensive entertainment, a rare diversion from the rigours of their harsh working lives.

* * *

The landslip caused about 26 acres of land to slip away and it destroyed three dwellings and some orchards in the Undercliff; newspaper reports valued the overall loss to the estates’ owners at about £6000.16 It was however the tenant, Mr Chappell, who was most immediately affected, facing both a reduced yield and the inconvenience of the crowds coming to see the spectacle for themselves. But in an early example of agricultural diversification this resourceful man soon turned the event to his advantage. Writing in September 1840, George Roberts explains how, on arriving at Dowlands farm, the visitor would find that persons are ready to take charge of horses, and dinners are prepared on reasonable terms at the house, where Lemonade and Soda water can be procured, as well as tea made for parties. An admission fee of sixpence a head is demanded, for which a ticket is given: no further payment has to be made, till, in roaming about, the visitor comes to the bounds of Bindon farm, when another sixpenny ticket is required.17

Nor was this enterprise short-lived; interest in the landslip lasted well into the next century. In 1903 the Axminster and Lyme Regis Light Railway Company opened a line between those towns with one intermediate station at the hamlet of Combpyne.18 Muriel Arber, who frequently visited the area as a girl in the 1920s, remembers alighting at this station where, until the Second World War, the platform sign announced ‘Combpyne for the Landslip’. From the station, Miss Arber and her mother would walk through the lanes to Dowlands farm where, like visitors eighty years earlier, they bought their sixpenny tickets before setting off for the Undercliff.19 Another local person to wrest a little advantage from her adversity was Charlotte Critchard, whose house had been made uninhabitable by the slip. Seeing the potential for business, she often returned to the remains of her former home to offer refreshments to the passing crowds.20 This custom too was maintained well into the next century; eventually Stone Cottage and its neighbour were demolished, and the materials used to build a new house, aptly named Landslip Cottage, for many years the home of Richard and Mary Gapper and their ten children. Muriel Arber visited in 1928:

16 ‘Earthquake near Lyme’, Standard, 1. 17 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 6-7. 18 Although the six-mile line was not commercial successful, it lasted until 1965, when it closed after Dr Beeching’s 1963 report, Reshaping British Railways. See www.disused-stations.org.uk. 19 Muriel A. Arber, Lyme Landscape with Figures, Exeter, 1988, 23. 20 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 9.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 9. Rough wooden benches and tables stood under the trees, and Mrs Gapper’s daughter, Annie came to take the orders and returned with trays laden with tea, bread and butter, jam and cake, all of which she must have fetched from Seaton or Axmouth several miles away along the paths.21 Of all the enterprises connected with the landslip the most remarkable occurred on 25th August 1840 when, amid great celebrations, crops were harvested from the land which had broken from the cliff. Farmer Chappell followed the four-crop rotation system advocated by Lord ‘Turnip’ Townshend (1674-1838) and two fields of winter wheat and one of turnips had fallen away.22 Chappell arranged for several ‘young nymphs, as attendants of Ceres’ to reap the corn.23 William Dawson, the Exeter surveyor, was there: It was a really beautiful sight – the day warm and bright and I should think full six thousand spectators. They got up a procession which in my humble opinion was not quite in good taste - six lady reapers in white kid gloves and wreaths of artificial flowers, the sickles tied with Blue, and six gentlemen to match in Blue vests and white trousers. [There was] a good band of music [and] Sir W. Pole was there and furnished a Battery of Four Guns from Shute. I heard of no accident whatever and all looked pleased and happy – the young ladies reaping however, was a failure – with Poster for Harvest Celebration the first stroke of the sickles one of them cut her (Courtesy of Roderick Gordon & Diana Harman) hand [and] the corn was subsequently reaped by the labourers.24

Reapers - W.Dawson(?) (Courtesy of Roderick Gordon & Diana Harman) Certificate with ears of wheat, from the Harvest of 1840. (LRM Photo of object loaned by Dorset County Museum)

21 Arber, Lyme Landscape, 23. 22 The other crops in the rotation were spring barley and a grass/clover mix, see The Lady, 26 August 2014. 23 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 25. Ceres was the Roman goddess of agriculture. 24 Letter from William Dawson to William Buckland, 25 August 1840, quoted in Peter Jackson, The Famous Axmouth Landslip of 1839 Between Lyme Regis and Seaton, (Axmouth, 1997), 16-17.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 10.

George Roberts’ report was more subdued, stating that although the event was attended by ‘several persons of title’, the crowd was only ‘three or four thousand’. Later, Chappell, making the most of every commercial opportunity, would produce a commemorative certificate suggesting that ‘upwards of ten thousand’ people had been present. Whatever the true numbers, the event made an exciting day out, although, as Roberts points out, it was not without its disappointments: ‘Booths were erected, and inn keepers were there; but had not made provision for so many, as hundreds could not procure refreshment.’25 He later adds, somewhat cynically: ‘The reaping in honour of Ceres, or as others suppose, prompted by Plutus, the god of riches, could only be seen by a few.’ And despite William Dawson’s optimistic assessment, the day had not passed without accident. Lord Bridport’s butler and three female servants had driven down in a fly from Cricket St Thomas, fifteen miles to the north. Perhaps they celebrated a little too well, as, passing through Lyme on their return, the carriage was imprudently driven by the butler on the wrong side of the road, and coming in contact with a wagon, the carriage was upset and broken, and every individual in it was thrown out, and when taken up were found to have met with such serious fractures and contusions as to render the recovery of any of them doubtful.26

3. Views from afar: The Reporters News of the landslip travelled fast. Within a week West Country newspapers were carrying reports, which were quickly relayed to the London press. By 3rd January 1840, The Standard had a front-page article uncompromisingly headed ‘EARTHQUAKE NEAR LYME’. The story itself rather belied its sensational headline: ‘Whether the occurrence above-stated be attributed to an earthquake or considered as the result of the slow- working processes of nature, […], is at present problematical.’27 Four days later, across the Irish Sea, an edited version of the same story appeared in The Belfast Newsletter; now more cautiously headed: ‘SUPPOSED EARTHQUAKE NEAR LYME’. Such circumspection reflects the uncertainty felt amongst educated people at the time. Lyell’s Principles of Geology had appeared earlier in the decade. This widely read work provided a prospectus for the establishment of geology as a truly scientific study. In the most tactful way Lyell assumed throughout that the Earth had existed long before the year 4004 B.C., the date of the Creation as noted in the margins of the King James Bibles found in homes and churches across the land.28 Moreover, he suggested that during this vast and undefined period the Earth had been shaped, not by unknowable and divinely inspired catastrophes such as universal floods, but by processes more akin to those occurring in modern times. Although the first of these ideas caused some alarm to a conservative population, the second merely suggested that geological processes themselves might be rationally analysed and understood. Many were attracted to the possibility that an earthquake had occurred at Axmouth, but the better informed among the newspaper editors had little doubt that the event would eventually

25 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 25 26 Standard, September 4th, 1840. 27 ‘Earthquake near Lyme’, Standard, 1. 28 J.M.I.Klaver. Geology and Religious Sentiment. (Leiden, 1997), 7-8, 43-47.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 11. prove to have been the result of ‘the slow-working processes of nature’. Their suspicions were justified; five months later, belatedly reporting the explanation given by William Buckland to the Ashmolean Society in Oxford, the Exeter Flying Post headed its article ‘THE LATE LANDSLIP AT AXMOUTH’: no mention of an earthquake at all.29 But not all commentators concurred with the expert view. A Brief Account of the Earthquake, the Solemn Event which occurred near Axmouth was a two-penny pamphlet, published in London in 1840. It begins: The striking event of the Earthquake […] has a voice which loudly sounds in the hearts of those whose feelings are not quite given up to the hardening effects of sin and infidelity, which are so boldly striding through the length and breadth of the land.30

The anonymous author, secure in his conviction that earthquakes are ‘attributed distinctly or emphatically, in the unerring Scripture of truth, to God Himself,’ asserts that the event at Axmouth, like other recent natural disasters, including a devastating flood at Preston in 1838, was a sign of the impending second coming of Christ. ‘Geologists […] attempt to account for it by natural causes, for, “professing themselves to be wise, they have become fools”’.31 He goes on to say: Vast numbers of people have been to behold this work of wonder; but in this infidelic [sic] day the generality seem to me entirely to overlook the Divine hand that is the worker thereof…and will feel the weight of his hand in wrath and vengeance. The section of this strident publication which described the landslip was derived from a communication from a local resident signing himself ‘J.H.H.’ This must surely have been the man identified in Roberts’ account. ‘I.H. Hallett, Esq. of Haven Cliff, has just put forth the letters under the now acknowledged signature of I.H.H. … mostly to impugn the theory proposed by geologists’.32 Whether John Hothersall Hallett truly concurred with the views of the pamphleteer is unclear. He might simply have been advocating an alternative explanation for the landslip – several were circulating, based on rumours of volcanic activity in the vicinity.33 Hallett was a practical man; one who, it might be assumed, would readily appreciate a rational explanation. In 1835 he had been granted a patent for the design of a tap.34 He had, at his own expense, ordered the re-construction of the ancient harbour at Axmouth and only in 1838 had the British Association for the Advancement of Science commended him for his help in the tidal investigations being undertaken under the leadership of William Whewell.35 Also, as Lord of the Manor, he was the patron of Axmouth church where an organ he had built was installed after his death.36 That so well-placed a figure, a practical man of affairs and part of the Anglican establishment, should be associated, even erroneously, with such an apocalyptic

29 ‘The Late Land-slip At Axmouth’, Exeter Flying Post, 14 May 1840. 30 Anon., A Brief Account of the Earthquake, (London, 1840), 3. 31 Ibid., 4. 32 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, iii. 33 Thirteen years previously the spontaneous combustion of oil-shale deposits near Weymouth had resulted in so-called ‘burning cliffs’, widely attributed to volcanic activity. 34 Repertory of Patent Inventions, and other Discoveries and Improvements, New Series, Vol III, January- June 1835, (London, 1835), 272-3. 35 D.M. Stirling, The Beauties of the Shore; Or a guide to the Watering-Places on the South-East Coast of Devon (Exeter, 1838), 22. Report of the Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Vol. VII, (London, 1839), 6. 36 www.axmouthcommunity.org.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 12. publication indicates something of the tension between revealed religion and science at the beginning of the Victorian age. But the views of the pamphlet were extreme, and not supported by most churchmen. Even the evangelical editor of the Christian Observer prefaces a letter concerning it with the admonition that this ‘ill-judged tract […] is not worth the notice [the letter-writer] has given to it.’37

4. A View from Axminster Vicarage: The Rev. W.D. Conybeare (1787-1857) Axmouth lies towards the western end of a 96 mile stretch of shoreline now known as the Jurassic Coast. In 2001 this area, where the rolling fields of Dorset and East Devon meet the sea along a succession of imposing cliffs, was inscribed as a World Heritage Site. It displays an almost continuous sequence of […] rock formations […] documenting approximately 185 million years of Earth history. It also includes a range of internationally important fossil localities [with] well-preserved and diverse evidence of life during Mesozoic times.38

The area’s importance for geological teaching and research is recognised throughout the world. Five miles to the east of Axmouth is Lyme Regis, where Mary Anning (1799-1847), the ‘greatest fossilist the world ever knew’, secured her place in history by scouring rockfalls to find ‘curiosities’.39 The collection and interpretation of the fossilised remains of fantastic creatures was not just fashionable, but, like Lyell’s book, was forcing a reappraisal of ideas concerning the history of the Earth. With so much of interest in the area, it can have been no mere coincidence that a clergyman with a serious interest in geology should be found in the vicarage at Axminster, some five miles inland. William Conybeare was from a long-established clerical family; his grandfather had been Bishop of Bristol. Born in the rectory at Bishopsgate, London, William attended Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford where he studied classics and mathematics, and pursued the interest in geology which he had developed during childhood fossil hunting excursions from his parents’ summer home in Bexley.40 He was ordained deacon in 1813, and married in Revd. William Conybeare 1814, leaving Oxford to serve in a number of parishes, first (Wikipedia, Public Domain) as curate and then as incumbent. Despite his clerical commitments, he continued to make substantial contributions to the new science of geology, often travelling and working closely with many of the leading figures in the field. It is said that he was the ‘most impressive intellectually’ of all the Oxford geologists, and certainly both William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, professors of the

37 Anon. Editorial introduction to “Physical Phenomena and Prophetic Interpretation – The Axmouth Land- slip,” The Christian Observer, July 1840, 400. 38 UNESCO, Report of World Heritage Committee, Dec 2001, (Paris, 2002), 50. 39 Hugh Torrens, “The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew,” BJHS, 28 (1995), 258. 40 Hugh Torrens, ‘Conybeare, William Daniel (1787–1857)’, ODNB, (Oxford, 2004).

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 13. subject at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, were indebted to him for advice and guidance in the early stages their careers.41 In 1822 Conybeare collaborated with William Phillips (1775-1828) to publish Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, Part One, an extensively revised and augmented edition of Phillips’ earlier work from 1816-18. It comprised a full stratigraphic survey of rock types and included details of the different fossils found at each level. The book was widely acclaimed, stimulating the ‘study of descriptive geology’, both in Britain and further afield.42 After Phillips’ death in 1828, Conybeare had planned a Part Two, this time working with Adam Sedgwick; but in 1829 he suffered severe concussion in a carriage accident and the projected work was never written. Although Conybeare remained an important figure in the English geological landscape, his clerical duties increasingly took precedence. Only a few months before the Axmouth slip he had preached the prestigious Bampton Lectures in Oxford, choosing as his topic ‘the writings of the Christian Fathers during the Ante-Nicene period’.43 Ecclesiastical preferment was to follow - in 1845 he was appointed dean of Llandaff, where he devoted his talents to overseeing the restoration of the cathedral.44 Although by the early 1840s, Conybeare’s geological career was effectively over, he did make one final contribution to the science at the very start of the decade. In 1831, he had, through family connections and the arcane processes by which these things were managed, ensured his right to nominate himself as the next vicar of Axminster.45 The current incumbent had been in post since 1782 and it seemed unlikely that Conybeare would wait long before to moving in. In the event, it was five years before the vicarage became vacant. As we have seen, Axminster was a congenial location for a geologist, within walking distance of interesting cliffs and well-placed to receive early news of any promising discoveries by Mary Anning at Lyme. We can only guess at the excitement at the vicarage when reports of a landslip at nearby Bindon reached it during Christmas 1839. Like many others, Conybeare rushed to the scene. He already knew the area well; he had walked and climbed amongst the rocks of the Undercliff, and had even studied them from the sea, sketching and labelling the strata that formed them. He also knew that his friend, William Buckland, was spending Christmas with his family at Lyme Regis. The two geologists soon met to discuss and further investigate the spectacular occurrence.

Sketch of Bindon Cliffs – W.D. Conybeare (detail) (Courtesy Oxford University Museum of Natural History)

41 Nicolaas Rupke, The Great Chain of History, (Oxford, 1983), 10. 42 Torrens, ‘Conybeare,’ ODNB. 43 www.anglicanhistory.org. 44 Torrens, ‘Conybeare,’ ODNB. 45 James Davidson, The History of Axminster Church, (Exeter, 1835), 28.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 14. The devastation, they noted, could ‘without exaggeration be said to surpass the ravages of the earthquakes of Calabria’.46 However, it was apparent that this was no earthquake. Investigations soon showed that a huge block of intact farmland had separated from the cliff and somehow simply slipped towards the sea. The area behind it had fractured and subsided, forming the great chasm, and in front of the moving block the Undercliff and former beach had, like a rucked carpet, been pushed up before it to create the reef and the lagoon. The question was, why? As they made their way down to the beach, Buckland pointed out several springs issuing from the sandy soil at the foot of the cliffs. Knowing that the past months had been exceptionally wet, they surmised that the water had percolated through the upper layers of porous chalk and greensand and become trapped by the impervious clay of the lias underneath.47 This water, they believed, would turn the lower, friable, part of the greensand – known locally as ‘fox mould’ – into a sort of quicksand, enabling the mass of rock above it to move in the way described above.48

Diagram explaining landslip, Ten Plates etc., Page 5 (LRM)

Having, as they thought, deduced the true cause of the convulsion, they saw in it an opportunity to educate, to allay ungrounded fears and, at the same time, to enhance the public perception of the science of geology. The widespread excitement caused among the people by apocalyptic descriptions of earthquakes and divinely ordained volcanic forces should be countered by a clear scientific analysis of the event.

46 Conybeare et al., Ten Plates etc., 2. The 1783 earthquakes in Calabria, Southern Italy, caused widespread destruction and many casualties. 47 The ‘lias’ (a local pronunciation of ‘layers’) is a series of clays, shales and limestones. These rocks reach the surface and form the celebrated fossiliferous cliffs at Lyme Regis. 48 George Roberts, local historian and author, defined the term ‘Fox mould’ thus: ‘a provincial name for the green sand when coloured like the fox by an oxide of iron.’ George Roberts, An Etymological and Explanatory Dictionary of the Terms and Language of Geology, (London, 1839), 63.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 15.

Part of Plate I of Ten Plates etc. – Conybeare’s ‘Geological View’ after the Landslide W.D. Conybeare 1840 (LRM)

Of course, they would present the usual papers to learned societies, but, with the help of an enthusiastic and intelligent local surveyor they would also produce a book for the wider public: an illustrated account of the event setting out in simple terms the true scientific explanation. Conybeare was entrusted with the text and Buckland’s wife, Mary, a talented artist, would contribute her own pictorial impressions of the spectacular scene.

5. An Artist’s View: Mrs Mary Buckland (1797-1857)

Rebecca his wife had often wished To sit in St Michael’s chair; For she should be the mistress then If she had once sat there. St Michael’s Chair: Robert Southey (1774-1843), 1798.

From the diary of Miss Caroline Fox: Falmouth, Cornwall, 8th October 1839: The Bucklands dined with us […] Mrs Buckland is a most amusing and animated woman, full of strong sense and keen perception. She spoke of the style in which they go on at home, the dust and rubbish held sacred to geology, which she once ventured to have cleared, but found it so disturbed the Doctor, that she determined never again to risk her matrimonial felicity in such a cause. She is much delighted at the idea of sitting in St Michael’s chair, that she may learn how managing feels.49 Everyone at the Foxes’ dinner-table that October day would have appreciated the final allusion. High in the tower of the church on St Michael’s Mount, the tidal island just off the Cornish coast near Penzance, was a ledge, once part of a medieval lighthouse. A subject for artists as much as poets – JMW Turner had sketched it in 1811– it was said of married couples that the first to sit on this dangerous perch, man or wife, would, from that time, be master in their house. But in truth, unlike Rebecca in Southey’s poem, Mary Buckland had no need of such a device. Within the conventions of the day, hers was very much a marriage of equals.

49 Caroline Fox, Memories of Old Friends, (London, 1883), 54-55.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 16.

St Michael’s Chair, a sketch by J M W Turner, 1811. Photo © Tate Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-ND 3.0 (unported) from ‘Ivy Bridge to Penzance Sketchbook’, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1811, Tate.

Mary was the daughter of Benjamin Morland, an Abingdon solicitor.50 Her father’s family were successful brewers (the Morland name is still found on beer-bottles in supermarkets today).51 Benjamin himself was involved in both canal and coalmining businesses and it may have been discussion of these concerns that stimulated his daughter’s early interest in geology. Her mother died while Mary was still an infant and the young girl spent much of her childhood at the Oxford home of her father’s friends, the Pegges. Sir Christopher Pegge was reader in anatomy and professor of physic at the University. He was evidently impressed by his young ward and encouraged her interests; on his death, in 1822, he bequeathed her his books and his collection of minerals and fossils, ‘as a mark of my esteem and regard’.52 Although William Buckland attended Pegge’s lectures on anatomy between 1805 and 1808, and it is possible that he would have encountered the young Mary in Oxford, a story recounted in Caroline Fox’s diary suggests a far more romantic introduction: travelling through Dorset by coach, William was allegedly reading a new book by the French naturalist George Cuvier (1769-1832) when he noticed that the lady opposite had the identical book among her possessions. ‘You must be Miss Morland,’ he exclaimed, ‘to whom I am about to deliver a letter of introduction.’53 And indeed, she was.

50 Hugh Torrens, ‘Buckland, Mary, (1797–1857)’, ODNB, (Oxford, 2004). 51 ‘Old Speckled Hen’ etc. – the Morland Brewery is now owned by Greene King. 52 Torrens, ‘Mary Buckland,’ ODNB. 53 Patrick Boylan, PhD dissertation, (Leicester, 1984), 41-2; Fox, Memories, 55.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 17. From the time of their meeting, however effected, Mary’s illustrations supplemented many of Buckland’s written works: one famous example being the lower jawbone that illustrated his 1824 paper to the Geological Society, Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield. This was the first ever description of that variety of ancient creature that would later come to be known as a dinosaur.

Jaw of Megalosaurus drawn by Mary Morland (Trans. GSL Ser.2 1.2, 1824) Mary and William married on 31st December 1825, soon after William was installed as a canon of Christ Church. This appointment increased his annual stipend from a bare £200 to £1000 and provided a substantial house in Christ Church’s famous Tom Quad.54 The duties could not have been onerous as the newly married couple were able to spend most of 1826 touring Europe, examining sites of geological interest in Italy and Sicily and meeting many European savants. In Paris, they spent a morning in the Jardin des Plantes, where Mary met Cuvier, to whom she had previously supplied drawings of fossil specimens. The famous naturalist, she confided to her Georges Cuvier diary, ‘is very taciturn, and so cautious that he never (Courtesy of Roderick Gordon & Diana Harman) utters an opinion in company’.55 He presented her with a printed portrait of himself. The long hours of travel during this extended honeymoon cannot have been easy for Mary; by March she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Frank, eventually born on 17th December. Indeed, pregnancy would be for her, as for many women at that period, a common condition. She bore nine children between 1825 and 1841, of whom five survived into adulthood. Life in the Buckland household was always interesting. Frank and the other children were encouraged to keep pets: as well as the usual guinea pigs and a pony they kept a monkey, an eagle and a bear, and a host of other exotic specimens. But, whether children or animals, Mary took them all in good part. Her son, Frank, wrote of her: Not only was she a pious, amiable, and excellent helpmate to my father; but being naturally endowed with great mental powers, habits of perseverance and order, tempered by excellent judgement, she materially assisted her husband in his literary labours, and often gave to them a polish which added not a little to their merits.56

* * *

54 Neville Haile, ‘Buckland, William (1784–1856)’, ODNB, (Oxford, 2004). 55 Elizabeth Gordon, The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, (London, 1894), 93. 56 Gordon, Life and Correspondence, 193.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 18. If William Conybeare’s presence in the vicinity of the landslip was not quite coincidental, that of William and Mary Buckland was more so. In October 1839, as part of the tour of the West Country that had taken them to the Foxes’ house at Falmouth and, one must suppose, to St. Michael’s Mount, the Buckland family stayed in Axminster with their friends, the Conybeares. While there, one of the Buckland girls contracted ‘a dangerous remittent fever’. Rather than risk the rigours of the coach journey back to Oxford, Mary took the girl to recuperate in Lyme Regis. (What happened to the other children – there were five at the time, ranging in age from 6 months to 12 years – is unclear.) William returned to his duties. On 18th December he chaired a meeting of the Geological Society in London, before leaving to join his wife and daughter in Lyme.57 Perhaps the family stayed in Lyme for Christmas, or maybe they were again guests of the Conybeares. Whether from Lyme or Axminster, on hearing of the landslip, Mary Buckland was quickly on the clifftop with her sketchbook, before the effects of wind or rain could spoil the impression of the jagged chalk-topped pinnacles. The Ten Plates included just two of Mary’s drawings. But hers were the most striking of the set; her simple elegance of line truly captured the strangeness of the scene. They were also almost certainly the first to be drawn, being dated 30th December, less than a week after the slip occurred.

Plate IV of Ten Plates etc. – View of Landslip – Mary Buckland, 30 December 1839 (LRM)

* * *

57 Ibid.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 19. The struggle for gender equality in the scientific world is by no means over.58 In 1840, it had not even begun. Mary Buckland was one of a very small number of women engaged in scientific pursuits, and one of a vanishingly small number to have her name on the title page of any sort of publication.59 At the time that Mary was growing up in Abingdon and Oxford, Jane Austen was busy creating a vision of Georgian society that remains the archetype today. But apart from the co-incidence of visits to Lyme Regis, there was little similarity between her life and that of Anne Elliot, or any other of Austen’s heroines.60 From an early age, Mary showed a great interest in palaeontology (though the word for this activity was not coined until she was 23).61 She pursued the subject with enthusiasm and intelligence, making the most of her more, so-called, feminine accomplishments in drawing and sketching to illustrate the objects of her fascination. She also developed an interest in marine zoophytes and the ‘animalculae’ to be found in freshwater; even on the day before her death in 1857 she was at her microscope, discussing specimens with James Bowerbank, a celebrated microscopist. She was, according to her son-in-law, George Bompas, ‘a woman of rare intellectual accomplishment’.62 The inclusion of her views of the landslip in the prestigious Ten Plates was no mere act of condescension.

Mary Buckland (Courtesy Roderick Gordon & Diana Harman)

58 See, e.g., “Nobel laureate Tim Hunt resigns after 'trouble with girls' comments”, Guardian, 11 June 2015. 59 Well known examples are: Jane Marcet: Conversations on Chemistry, Intended More Especially for the Female Sex, 1805, and Mary Somerville: On the Connection of the Physical Sciences in 1834. 60 Jane Austen, Persuasion, (London, 1985 [1818]), 116ff. 61 Martin Rudwick, Worlds before Adam, (Chicago, 2008), 48. 62 George Bompas, Life of Frank Buckland, (London, 1886), 2.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 20. 6. A Measured View: William Dawson (1790-1877) ‘Mr Dawson, a Civil Engineer and land Surveyor, of Exeter, has ascertained by trigonometrical measurement, that 20 acres of tillage land have subsided.’63 William Dawson was an enterprising man. Born in London, he set up practice in Exeter around 1830 after the death of his first wife, variously describing himself as a land surveyor, civil engineer, and even architect.64 His business prospered and by 1861 he was living in an impressive house in the Cathedral Close, his success clearly due to both his talent and his resourcefulness.65 In the early part of 1841, a year after the landslip, Dawson wrote to William Buckland.66

To: The Revd. Dr. Buckland, University, Oxford Exeter, 1841 My Dear Sir, I beg to thank you for your favour recd. yesterday enclosing the notices of the meetings of the Society.67 I think it unlikely I shall visit London soon but I shall be most happy to avail myself of your kindness should I do so. Most sincerely do I trust you will speedily (if you have not already) have occasion to so rejoice in the safety and comfort of Mrs Buckland and that the accession to your family may be an increase to its comforts.68 Will you have the kindness to present my respectful wishes to her. When I was last in Town I had a hint that the Duchess of Kent69 would be glad to have a memento of Devonshire and I accordingly had the remaining coloured copies leather bound and sent to Her Majesty, Prince Albert, The Queen Dowager70, & Her R.H. the Duchess of Kent, for all of which I have received very polite acknowledgements. Please allow me once more to trouble you for advice as to having any more printed. There are, I understand, only 25 copies left – I have none, having sold the last 2 the other day. I have been thinking that as the British Society71 meet in Devonshire this year I might perhaps have 100 more printed & have 50 of them coloured. What do you think? We already have 200 copies of the narrative, which are paid for, but it would be better to lose them than to incur an additional useless expense. I would plan to add 2 additional drawings and call it a 2nd edition. I have taken the liberty of enclosing a corrected Title page & list of subscribers - several others are desirous that their names should have appeared.

63 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 5. 64 Paul Garnsworthy, Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway, (Exeter, 2003), 6. 65 Paul Garnsworthy, personal communication. 66 The letter which follows is closely based on the text of three letters in OUMNH Bu P Letters Box 1 D.7 67 Presumed to be the Geological Society, of which Buckland was president between 1839 and 1841. 68 The Bucklands’ last child, Emily, was born on 3rd May 1841, surviving only until 20th December. 69 Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1786-1861), mother of Queen Victoria. The Duke and Duchess, and the young Victoria, were staying in Sidmouth in 1820 when the Duke died suddenly from pneumonia. 70 Queen Adelaide (1837-1849), wife of William IV. 71 The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), founded in 1831, was due to hold its Annual meeting in Plymouth in August 1841.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 21. Last week I was two days at the landslip measuring some of the fields. Time and the seasons have combined to make many alterations, particularly in the chalk cliffs forming the Southern Boundary of the Chasm which have in many places crumbled down, several of the Pinnacles and Columnar Masses also have fallen and others are splitting – but tho some of the earlier Beauties have suffered others are created and I never wander through the Chasm without an indescribable feeling of awe & at the same time a delight something like that experienced in listening to the strains of our Cathedral Music – I believe I could stay there for weeks. You remember the path we descended to the Beach from the western end of the Chasm where you pointed out to me the spring that had burst out – that I found had greatly increased, so much so indeed as to render the descent impassable from the boggy nature of the ground. A large mass had slipped, something in form like a horseshoe as here shown. It had quite destroyed the path descending to the Beach from Culverhole.

Sketch from letter, W. Dawson to W. Buckland, 28 April 1841 (Courtesy Oxford University Museum of Natural History)

The Beach is not very much altered from the time I had the pleasure of visiting it with Mr Conybeare and yourself. The western lake which was the largest has almost entirely disappeared but the smaller is very little changed – a good deal of water was oozing through the Fox mould at the eastern end near the orchard. I think I shall be able to put up such a model for the British Society as will please you, on a scale half as large again as my original Plan or 132 feet to an Inch which will shew all the detail and sufficiently mark the undulations of the land and the broken ground of the undercliff. I should much like you to see it before completing it, but should I not have the pleasure of meeting you earlier will you favour me with a visit as you go through to Plymouth.72 I have made up my mind for a week’s holiday there when I hope both to see and hear you. My Dear Sir, Yrs very respectfully, W. Dawson

72 For the Annual Meeting of the BAAS in August 1841.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 22. William Dawson was as moved as any man by the splendour of the landscape under the Bindon cliffs. His instinct as both artist and surveyor was to record what he saw. But, unlike the clerical gentlemen with whom he collaborated, he did not have a comfortable stipend with which to support his family (four children from his first marriage and a further two born to his second wife, Margaret, in Exeter). He lived by the fees he charged and by any further small sums his talents might bring him. In 1834, the London firm of Roake and Varty had published his ‘Map of England and Wales, on an Entirely New Plan’. This was described in the Quarterly Review as ‘among the most useful and ingenious of the many Modern Improvements for facilitating Elementary Instruction.’73 In Devon, he was employed to survey the routes for several new turnpike roads between Exeter and the south coast. Later, his professional expertise was recognised in the Palace of Westminster. Lyme Regis had a history of electoral irregularity and in the early nineteenth century ‘election contests had been very violent’.74 Despite the reforms of the 1830s, sharp practice was still suspected in the general election of 1841 and Dawson, who had carried out valuations in the locality, was called to give evidence to a Parliamentary select committee. He testified as to whether the value of property held by certain electors was sufficient to qualify them to vote under the reformed regulations.75 Yet later, in 1847-8, during the construction and trial phases of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s ill-starred ‘atmospheric railway’, Dawson produced an ambitious series of 25 sheets which included plans and sections of the whole length of the track between Exeter and Totnes, as well as watercolours depicting the views to be seen on either side. 76 Back in 1841, encouraged by Buckland, he had presented a copy of Ten Plates to what he called the ‘Society of Civil Engineers’.77 Perhaps it was this precedent that ensured that a complete set of his atmospheric railway prints can now be found at the London Headquarters of Institution of Civil Engineers.78 But if Dawson managed the business side of the Ten Plates venture, his contribution to the publication itself was also considerable. Not only did he provide the maps and the measurements of the disturbance, but five of the pictorial plates were engraved from his own paintings of scenes at the Bindon and neighbouring landslips. And he built the model. Sitting in a handsome mahogany case, this model is now in the Lyme Regis Museum. It is a three-dimensional relief map, just over four feet long and almost two feet wide. In the nineteenth century, it was fashionable to celebrate great events with such dioramas, carefully built to be in scale both horizontally and vertically. Two years earlier, Captain William Siborne had completed a 400 square-foot representation of the battlefield at Waterloo.79 Like Siborne’s work, Dawson’s model is very detailed, with plough furrows and even heaps of manure clearly evident. According to Richard Bull, a volunteer-curator at the museum, the model is extremely on the side with the main land mass, and probably constructed from plaster of Paris over a formwork of papier- mâché strengthened with wood and canvas strips.80

73 Quarterly Review, January 1834. 74 Roberts, History and Antiquities, x. 75 Report into the Lyme Regis Parliamentary Election Petition of 1841, (London, 1842), 133ff. 76 Garnsworthy, Atmospheric Railway, 6. 77 OUM Bu P Letters Box 1 D.7. Incomplete letter, 9 April 1841. Dawson’s misnaming is consistent, cf. Note 73 above. Buckland, who always promoted practical applications of scientific knowledge, was elected an Honorary Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1842. Gordon, Life and Correspondence, 275. 78 Garnsworthy, Atmospheric Railway, 6. 79 Siborne’s model is displayed at the National Army Museum in Chelsea. 80 Richard Bull, personal communication.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 23. The model may have been Dawson’s own idea, or it may have been made at Buckland’s instigation. Dawson’s letter makes it clear that he saw the great gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science due to take place in Plymouth in the August of 1841 as an opportunity to sell a few more copies of Ten Plates. But the BAAS was also an enterprise very dear to William Buckland. In 1832, in Oxford, he had presided at its second annual meeting, having mounted a vigorous campaign to ensure that the university would receive it with the welcome he believed it deserved.81 He would certainly have encouraged Dawson to exhibit the model at the Plymouth meeting. It was not the first time that a model had been considered. George Roberts reported in 1840 that ‘A Sculptor came from London to make a model of the Land-slip; but he desisted when he saw how extensive it was.’82 William Dawson was not so easily deterred. Although we do not know how the model was received at Plymouth (the official report of the meeting states simply that ‘Mr Dawson exhibited a model of the Great Landslip of Axmouth’), today it is a fascinating resource.83 At the scene, the reef and lagoon have both long disappeared; the original chalk pinnacles have weathered and crumbled, and thick woodland conceals the true extent of the great Chasm. Only by a careful examination of William Dawson’s model can the visitor catch a glimpse of the enormity of the events of that Christmas, nearly 200 years ago.

Model of landslip – W. Dawson, 1841. Printed label on model of landslip (Both photos Courtesy: Richard Bull, LRM – NB true scale appears to be nearer to 132 feet to 1 inch)

7. An Expert View: Professor William Buckland (1784-1856) The newspapers made much of William Buckland’s early presence at the Axmouth landslip. He was one of the country’s leading geologists: Oxford professor (in fact his position was the lesser endowment of a ‘readership’, but he was universally known as Professor Buckland), winner of the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley medal, and currently President of the Geological Society. His enthusiasm for science and its

81 Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, (Oxford, 1981), 389ff. 82 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, 10. 83 BAAS Meeting 1841, Notices and Abstracts, 64.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 24. applications was enormous. He was a popular lecturer and public speaker; today he might be termed a ‘celebrity scientist’. For him be on hand to investigate so unusual a phenomenon as the Christmas landslip was indeed fortunate, as Buckland was very much an experimentalist. He once imprisoned several toads in stone sarcophagi to see whether they really could, as folklore suggested, live trapped without food or water inside rocks. (The toads died.) Earlier, believing that the broken bones buried in the muddy deposits inside a Yorkshire cave had been gnawed by an ancient tribe of hyenas, he tested his hypothesis by finding a modern representative of the species to crunch the bones of an ox.84 (The fractures matched – his radical theory was widely accepted, and its publication established his reputation.) He was innately curious about everything, and a geological event such as the Axmouth landslip was particularly interesting, not least because Buckland himself had been born and brought up just five miles away from the site, in the little town of Axminster, where Conybeare was now vicar. William owed his early interest in natural history to his father, the Revd. Charles Buckland. Charles was very much a gentleman parson. He was not the vicar of Axminster but chose to live there in modest comfort, often assisting the vicar, the Revd. Charles Steer. Through the patronage of his friend Sir John Pole he enjoyed an income as rector of no fewer than three other parishes where he employed curates to do the day-to-day work.85 He was a keen amateur naturalist. and enjoyed walking the country lanes and searching for fossils in the quarries and along the beaches near his home, often accompanied by his eldest son. William was encouraged in his academic pursuits by his uncle, the Revd. John Buckland, who helped prepare him for entry to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, of which John himself was a fellow. In May 1801, William could write to his father: ‘I have just been elected the Senior Scholar for Devonshire, after a course of many days rigorous examination against eight competitors.’86 And so began a career that would lead to him, via readerships in mineralogy and geology, to his appointment as a canon of Christ Church in 1825, and, twenty years after that, to the Deanery at Westminster. William Buckland is the first of the Oxbridge academics chosen by Noel Annan for portrayal in his book, The Dons.87 In a chapter entitled ‘The Genesis of the Modern Don’, Buckland’s life is summarised; he is characterised as the archetypal university teacher of popular imagination. He was a gifted lecturer who often enlivened his delivery with vivid and sometimes alarming demonstrations, as testified by one of his undergraduate students: ‘He…rushed, skull in hand, …pointing the hyena full in my face – “What rules the world?” “Haven’t an idea,” I said. “The stomach, sir,” he cried (again mounting the rostrum), “rules the world. The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.”’88

84 This episode is recounted in ‘The Strange Case of the Hyenas’ Bones’, a pastiche Sherlock Holmes story in Roger Osborne, The Floating Egg, (London, 1998), 212-254. 85 Boylan, PhD dissertation, 32. 86 Gordon, Life and Correspondence, 6. 87 Noel Annan, The Dons, (London, 1999), 24-38. 88 Sir Henry Acland, quoted in Gordon, Life and Correspondence, 31.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 25. Such flamboyant pedagogy did not find universal favour; Charles Darwin thought his behaviour undignified buffoonery.89 Nevertheless, his annual course of lectures was popular with undergraduates, and it was not uncommon to find heads of colleges and even the occasional bishop in his lecture room in the Old Ashmolean Museum.90 By 1839, however, Buckland was becoming frustrated with university life. He was a practical man who looked to science for opportunities to improve the conditions of those around him. For him, the ‘book of nature’ was as much God’s word as that revealed in the Bible, and accordingly he argued that science should be more than a mere optional extra in a university education designed for the training of clergy. But Oxford was conservative; both his views and his science were treated with suspicion. In the 1820s his lectures had been both popular and fashionable, though even at that time there was little support for radical curriculum reform. And fashions change; by the 1830s the sermons of a man who had once taken careful notes during Buckland’s lectures were themselves drawing huge congregations at the university Revd. Dr William Buckland church of St Mary’s. The charismatic John Henry Newman (Public Domain) was leading his many followers towards a more spiritual, sacramental way of life, a way that found little space for science. Attendance at Buckland’s lectures fell and, unsurprisingly, he lost heart. By 1845 he was grateful for the opportunity to escape to the Deanery at Westminster. Buckland didn’t allow disenchantment with the university to curb his enthusiasm for work. He continued to maintain a large correspondence and was often engaged in speaking and lecturing around the country. In 1839, he had been elected, for a second term, as president of the Geological Society in London, and even his Christmas visit to Lyme was the result of an earlier visit to the West Country, when he had lectured at the Falmouth Polytechnic Society. While he undoubtedly took a great interest in the landslip and encouraged his wife and colleagues in the production of the Ten Plates, his own contribution to it was limited to providing the seal of his editorial authority. The title page credits the drawings to Dawson, Conybeare and Mary Buckland, the ‘geological memoir’ to Conybeare and only at the very bottom does it add the words: THE WHOLE REVISED BY PROFESSOR BUCKLAND He would have been content to entrust authorship to Conybeare, whose geological knowledge and understanding was unquestioned and who, indeed, had been his own mentor during his early days in the field. However, as Dawson’s letter shows, he did make a careful personal inspection of the landslip site, accompanying the surveyor and Conybeare and pointing out salient features as they progressed down to the beach. And there is, perhaps, just one more subtle indication of his presence at the scene. A careful examination of Mary Buckland’s panorama (Plate V) reveals two tiny figures looking out over the broken landscape. A small child is clutching the hand of a

89 Rupke, Great Chain, 7. The Old Ashmolean Museum in Broad Street is now the Museum of the History of Science. 90 Ibid.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 26. person in a high black hat carrying an umbrella. Has Mary included her husband and daughter in the view?91

Plate V of Ten Plates etc. – View from Dowlands – Mary Buckland, 30 December 1839. (LRM) In the year following the landslip, both Buckland and Conybeare lectured on the subject at various places around the country. As early as 2 March 1840, Buckland addressed Oxford’s Ashmolean Society, describing in detail his own findings at the site. He noted: that the upward movement of the reef from the bottom of the sea began and terminated simultaneously with the downward movement of the subsiding land; the weight of the latter pressing the semifluid portion of the subjacent fox- mould, must have produced throughout this fluid a general hydrostatic pressure tending to force [the rock forming the reef] upwards.92 According to the Royal Cornwall Gazette, both he and Conybeare were present when Dawson exhibited his model at the BAAS meeting in Plymouth, and together they ‘defended the theory that ascribed the convulsion to hydrostatic pressure’.93 Back in Oxford, Buckland had some large copies of his wife’s drawings made to illustrate his lectures; like all his visual aids, these were fitted with tiny brass eyelets to aid their suspension on wall or easel. But showman though he might have been, any sign of his own presence was omitted from the scene.

William Buckland's lecturing copy of Mary Buckland's Plate V (Courtesy Oxford University Museum of Natural History)

91 I am indebted to Jim Kennedy, Emeritus Director of the OUMNH, for pointing out this possibility at a lecture in July 2017. 92 Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Ashmolean Society, Vol. 1, 1840, 3-8 93 Cornwall Royal Gazette, 13 August 1841.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 27. 8. An Historian’s View: George Roberts (c1804-1860) ‘Certain horrifying statements and exaggerated, as well as incorrect accounts in the London and Provincial Papers, had caused our coast to be viewed with great suspicion and dread.’94

‘Persons who had relatives in the neighbourhood, were very anxious for their safety.’95

George Roberts, proprietor of the Classical Academy, a day and boarding school in Broad Street, Lyme Regis, was concerned for the reputation of his town. It had, after all, been his life’s study; since the age of eleven he had been engaged in ‘a virtuous search’ for information about his native place.96 His History and Antiquities of Lyme Regis & Charmouth was published in Lyme and London in 1834.97 In it Roberts wrote of the exploits of smugglers, the landing of the Duke of Monmouth (on Lyme beach in 1685), and the consequent heavy-handed justice of ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffries. He described the frequent violence surrounding the election of the town’s two MPs, and the discoveries of Mary Anning, the town’s renowned ‘fossilist’. Having traced the fluctuations in the town’s prosperity over the centuries, Roberts knew that its immediate future lay in its popularity as a resort for the rising middle classes. It was ‘a place of genteel resort, where good society is enjoyed in a fuller extent at a much cheaper rate than at any town of this description.’98 He realised that any upsetting rumours of earthquakes or volcanos must be hastily dealt with. By September 1840, his little pamphlet, An Account of the Mighty Landslip, was in its fifth edition. At the time of the first edition, in February, the only sound explanation of the event available to the public was a letter to the press, later acknowledged to have been written by William Conybeare. Roberts’ account had met with a success that ‘far surpassed anything anticipated’ and so it had been revised and re-issued.99 It was aimed at a market very different to that of the Ten Plates, which, as Roberts helpfully pointed out ‘sells at one guinea.’100 Like his history of Lyme, Robert’s pamphlet was comprehensive. It contained much of the information given in Ten Plates, including technical explanations, always carefully attributed, and the colourful stories of the Critchards and the coast guards. In addition, it provided useful facts for the visitor concerning the most appropriate routes to take and other details. Having taken in the view from the clifftop, ‘gentlemen may go on and descend…to the undercliff…[while] ladies must walk back to Dowlands farm’ to take a less precipitous path.101 Roberts commented too on the exploitation of the spectacle by the landowners – we have noted already his suggestion that the great August harvest fete may have honoured the god of money much more than the goddess of fertility. ‘There is no longer any commiseration felt for the loss of land. All dwell upon the great, good fortune, in having had such an object of interest brought for the manifest profit of the occupier.’102

94 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, iii. 95 Ibid., 18. 96 Roberts, History and Antiquities, xi. 97 Re-issued by the Lyme Regis Museum in a handsome limited edition, but now out of print again. 98 Roberts, History and Antiquities, 178. 99 Roberts, Account of Land-slip, iii. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 8. 102 Ibid., 10.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 28. Nevertheless, he saw and appreciated the potential of this ‘object of interest’ for the whole area. ‘Two Ashanti princes and many distinguished persons, have visited the spot…Persons coming from Torquay paid five shillings for the trip there and back.’ In 1848, and again in 1854, George Roberts was elected mayor of Lyme Regis. On the evidence presented in his account of the landslip he would have been an excellent advocate for the town.

9. A View from the Sea: Queen Victoria (1819-1901) Not all sightseers journeyed to the clifftops and paid their sixpences. Some came by sea. Steam power was just beginning to find commercial application in Britain’s coastal waters and the enterprising owners of paddle steamers from towns around the coast were quick to provide excursions offering a quite different view of the spectacle. As they sailed between Lyme and Axmouth, passengers might have been entertained by a ship’s band playing the Landslip Quadrille, a composition from the pen of the young composer and pianist Ricardo Linter (c1818-1886).103 The sheet music for this dance, now lost, locally published at the appreciable cost of four shillings, bore a splendid engraving of the scene at Bindon. Only the covers survive. Perhaps John Fowles had Signor Ricardo in mind when he wrote that ‘if a man was a pianist, he must be Italian’.104 Born plain Richard, in a small village just outside Exmouth, Linter was better noted for his title pages than for his music.105 The Spectator’s review of one of his later works was brief: “The gorgeous, illuminated titlepage of this song is worth its price; so that purchasers will have the words and music (be their value what it may) into the bargain.”106 Nevertheless, whatever the quality of his work, it is quite possible that someone played Linter’s celebratory quadrille on the piano in the drawing-room of the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert as she steamed past the landslip on 30 August 1843.

The title page of The Landslip Quadrille (LRM)

103 Peter Jackson, The Famous Axmouth Landslip of 1839 Between Lyme Regis and Seaton, (Axmouth, 1997), 16. 104 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, (St Albans, 1977 [1969]), 112. 105 www.linter.co.uk 106 The Spectator, Vol.19, 26 December 1846, 1243

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 29.

* * * Some brief extracts from the private journal of the Hon. Miss Matilda Paget:107

Thursday 24 August 1843 Today HM attended their Lordships’ House and Parliament was prorogued.108 We are all in a fearful state as we prepare for the journey to France aboard the new royal yacht.

Monday 28 August 1843 An early start. By the railway from Farnborough to Southampton, where great crowds greeted HM’s arrival. Strange event at quayside. The yacht having to stand off by some yards, HM must needs enter the barge – an unforeseen circumstance.109 There being no carpet on the landing stage, the Mayor and Aldermen of the town removed their robes of office and, like the noble Rayleigh, spread them before their Sovereign’s feet. HM, much gratified, was pleased to step carefully, avoiding the velvet collars. The Victoria and Albert is indeed a fine vessel. Her two mighty paddlewheels are driven by a steam engine. Not the slightest inconvenience from the smoke which the tall funnel throws high into the air. The apartments at the back are roomy enough and well appointed.110 A large dining room with a circular table and a fine drawing room with a pianoforte. The furnishings are plain mahogany. Lord Aldophus FitzClarence, the captain, seems a capable and pleasant fellow, whatever HM’s mother might think of him.111

Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert (Royal Collection Trust/© HM Queen Elizabeth II 2017)

Wednesday 30 August 1843 We sailed past Lyme Regis and the cliffs where the famous landslip happened. The landscape was indeed very broken and picturesque. We could plainly see the crowds waving from the clifftops as their Monarch sailed by.

Thursday 31 August 1843 In Plymouth, this morning, we heard news of a great disaster. It seems that as we passed the landslip yesterday, a Dutchman, racing towards the cliff for a view of HM,

107 These extracts from the journals of the Hon. Matilda Paget (1811-1871), a Maid of Honour to Queen Victoria between 1837-1855, are constructions based on contemporary sources. 108 Hansard, Vol 71, cc1005-110. 109 The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle, 1843. (London, c1844), 689. 110 ‘The Queens Second Visit to Scotland’, Illustrated London News, 14 September 1844, 169-172. 111 The Duchess of Kent is reputed to have left the room whenever a FitzClarence (illegitimate children of George IV) entered: K. D. Reynolds, ‘FitzClarence, Lord Adolphus (1802–1856)’, ODNB, (Oxford, 2004).

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 30. dismounted hurriedly from his horse and tumbled over to his death.112 HM was much moved.

Saturday, 2 September 1843 4 o’clock. Arrived in France at last. * * *

Despite the tragedy on the cliffs, Queen Victoria, whose thoughts were doubtless on her impending Channel crossing and diplomatic mission, does not appear to have been unduly impressed by the landslip. She noted in her journal merely that: ‘the coast was exceedingly pretty, – Axmouth, Seaton & Sidmouth, which looked very pretty, & all, situated in little Coves.’113 Perhaps though, as she sailed past, her thoughts turned to the hundred or more good women in the villages of Axmouth and Beer (two miles to the west), who just three years earlier, had worked from March to November to create the fine ‘Honiton’ lace veil she wore at her wedding, (and in which, by her own request, she would eventually be buried).114

10. A Twentieth-Century View: Muriel Agnes Arber (1913-2004) Ely, January 1960. The boy is puzzled. He stands before a solid wooden gate let into the high stone wall. He is already late and now he is lost – and it’s only his second day at the new school. At first, he’d been sure that this was the gate he’d gone through the previous morning on his way to the Parvuli classroom, but now he’s not so certain. He is reluctant to try the handle – suppose it’s somebody’s house. Yesterday the stern but friendly Mr Saunders had been there to show him the way, but today he’s alone. The street is deserted. He looks for clues, pointers that this is the right place. High on the black painted gate is a discreet brown Perspex sign, about 4 inches by 2; he spelled out the words THE CANONRY in neat sans-serif capitals. But it means nothing to him – he’s looking for the Parvuli (or at least he thinks that’s what it’s called) – though ‘Canonry’ did conjure images of big guns, like the one on the green in front of the cathedral tower. Is this what they stored here? If it was, then it couldn’t possibly be his classroom. It must be the wrong gate. He feels a lump in his throat and a pricking behind his eyes. But at two months past his ninth birthday it really wouldn’t do to cry. The workman is pushing a large bin on wheels and sweeping the pavement before him as he comes around the corner. When he gets near, the boy summons his courage and asks his innocently peculiar question. ‘Please sir, can you tell me where the Parvuli is?’115 The man stops and leans on his broom. ‘Well I don’t know about that, young man,’ he says, smiling and looking around. ‘But p’raps someone in here will be able to help?’

112 ‘Royal Marine Excursion’, Bury and Norwich Post, 6 September 1843. 113 Queen Victoria’s Journal, 30 August 1843. 114 www.francisfrith.com and www.devonlaceteachers.co.uk. 115 Dialogue not verbatim.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 31. Stretching forward, he grasps the twisted wrought-iron ring and, with a sharp shove, pushes open the heavy gate. Through the gothic archway the boy sees a small courtyard; on the far side is a familiar-looking door. Reassured, he sighs, thanks the workman and strides across the yard, confident that he will now find his way. Arriving at what he now knows to be the right door, he knocks. A deep but kindly voice from inside bids him enter. ‘Ah, Lincoln, welcome. Better late than never.’

And so began, on that January morning, my second day under the tutelage of Muriel Arber. Miss Arber, or ‘Ish’ as she was privately known amongst the boys under her care, had charge of the newly formed Parvuli (roughly translated as ‘little boys’) class at the King’s School, Ely. To us boys she was an enigma. She was, as all adults were, of indeterminate age. Her physical presence was majestic, almost stately. Beneath the customary black MA gown, her clothing was functional: the thick tweedy suits of winter replaced by frocks of a lighter material as the seasons changed. Whatever the weather, her skirts, hanging well below the knees, always gave way to the least sheer of stockings supplemented with beige ankle socks and highly polished brown brogues. Her shoes made a casual symmetry with the neatly parted dark brown hair which surmounted her large, round, and slightly austere face. But, for those that looked carefully, it was always possible to discern, behind her heavy plastic-framed spectacles, a mischievous twinkle about the eyes. Behind this awe-inspiring front was the quietest and kindest of teachers. I well remember her patience as she helped us decode the more difficult words of our class reader, Beasts and Saints, a book of stories translated from the Latin by author Helen Waddell. It was not a volume calculated to inspire the enthusiasm of a group of nine-year-old boys; but Ish did her best, explaining the stories’ more arcane references, apparently oblivious to the irony of the situation. Always keen to share her love of poetry, she introduced us to Blake’s Tyger, Masefield’s Sea Fever and other canonical works. Leading by example, she would recite to us from Lord Macaulay’s epic Horatius. I imagine most of my classmates will, like me, still remember the first few lines: Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the Nine Gods he swore, That the noble house of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more… As a girl, she told us, she had committed all seventy verses to memory – ‘always useful to pass the time when waiting for a bus’. Young, and very different as we were from our teacher, I like to think that we recognised that Miss Arber was an ally. We were fortunate to have her.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 32. Muriel Arber was the only female in the teachers’ common room at Ely, where she had taught since 1942. As such, she had perhaps been the obvious candidate to look after the little group of ‘pre-prep’ boys, the Parvuli. With her we learned reading and writing, and she was allowed to take history, geography and our so-called ‘divinity’ lessons; but despite what I now know were her impeccable academic credentials, the major disciplines of arithmetic, English grammar and, of course, Latin, were entrusted to ‘Sandy’: the austere Mr Saunders, head of the prep school. The following year, elevated to the First Form, I only encountered Ish as a geography teacher. She sallied forth from her base with the Parvuli like a galleon, gown billowing behind her and an assortment of large, canvas-backed maps on long wooden spars jutting out at various angles from under her arm. Her enthusiasm for the subject was prodigious: as was Part of KSE school photo, 1961. Muriel Arber: 2nd row, 2nd from right. her optimism. Gazing out across the streets of the (photo: P. Lincoln) fenland city from a first-floor classroom window, she would encourage us to look between the houses for a view of the ‘East Anglian Heights’, the 100m high ridge, 60 miles away in north-west Norfolk. This important geographical feature, she insisted, could be plainly seen on a clear day. I feel sure she was right.

* * * Lyme Regis, May 2017 I had come to visit the museum. I wanted to see for myself William Dawson’s model of the Great Landslip and was upset to discover that the museum was closed while major renovation and extension works took place. Thanks partly to a successful book by Tracy Chevalier, Mary Anning was at last receiving the recognition she deserved, and the museum was being enlarged to accommodate a new exhibition.116 A small information-centre-cum-gift-shop was the only part of the building accessible to the public. Ignoring the piles of Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (already on my bookshelf), I asked about the landslip. I was shown a glossy guide to the National Nature Reserve: Exploring the Undercliff. I bought a copy. ‘Oh,’ said the assistant, as she gave me my change, ‘you might be interested in this.’ She held out a small, undistinguished-looking pamphlet: Landslips Near Lyme Regis, 20 pages with a soft card cover held together with two rusting staples. On the back, the price of £2.95 had been crossed out and a new sticker affixed: £1.00. Then I noticed the author’s name: Muriel A. Arber. It was more than half a century since I had last seen Ish, and my memories of those early days at Ely had become dim, eclipsed by fifty years of work and family life. But suddenly they were clear again. I remembered that my old teacher had some sort of geological connection, though I had never known exactly what.

116 Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures, (London, 2009).

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 33.

* * *

Muriel Agnes Arber, MA, FGS, FRGS and sometime president of the Geologists’ Association, was the daughter of two Cambridge academics, both of whom inspired her own work. Her father, Newell, was the author of a classic text on the geology of the North Devon coast and her mother, Agnes Arber, was a celebrated botanist, the third woman ever to be elected to fellowship of the Royal Society.117 After her father’s early death in 1918, shortly before Muriel’s fifth birthday, she and her mother regularly spent holidays in Lyme Regis, a town Muriel quickly came to love. She describes arriving at the top of Silver Street and seeing, for the first time, the view: I let out a loud shout of rapture, but this was 1922 and I can still hear my mother saying, “Darling you really mustn’t make so much noise”. I suppressed my ecstasy, but I have been shouting about Lyme ever since. My mother did not know that at that moment I had found the key to the whole future of my life.118 Although Muriel lived in Cambridge throughout her life, Lyme Regis became almost a second home, and she is remembered with affection in the town. The novelist John Fowles, a long-time resident of Lyme, was a friend. He described her as ‘a tutelary spirit of the place’, and in her ninetieth year the local press proclaimed her to be ‘Lyme’s oldest tourist’.119 After taking a degree in geology, Muriel had done research at the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge until the Second World War when she trained to become a schoolteacher, working at Ely until, in 1962, she moved to become head of geography at March High School for Girls, where she remained until retirement.120 Throughout this time she continued to be a regular visitor to Lyme Regis, making a careful geological study of the Undercliff between Lyme and Axmouth. Her findings were published in a series of academic papers between 1940 and 1973, when, as President of the Geologists’ Association, she delivered the address that had later been reproduced as the pamphlet, Landslips Near Lyme Regis. Fowles, with whom she worked to ensure the success of the town’s museum, claimed that her work ‘allowed him to paint in the geology within his novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, largely set in Lyme Regis.121 In Landslips Near Lyme, Muriel Arber discusses the explanations suggested by Conybeare in Ten Plates in the light of later slippages along that section of coast and her own 33-year-long study of the area. For the most part her own research, and that of others, has confirmed the interpretation of the event suggested by Conybeare and supported by Buckland. Water was certainly the cause, though it is now considered more likely that the initial slippage was due to the slippery, and slightly tilted, surface formed at the top of the impervious clay layer rather than the liquefaction of the sand

117 E.A. Newell Arber, The Coast Scenery of North Devon (London, 1911). Kathryn Packer, ‘Arber , Agnes (1879–1960)’, ODNB, (Oxford, 2004). 118 Arber, Lyme Landscape, 6. 119 John Fowles, foreword to Lyme Landscape by M. Arber. Eric Robinson, “Muriel Agnes Arber, 1913- 2004, Obituary”, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 116, 2005, 63. Eric Robinson, “The influential Muriel Arber,” in The Role of Women in the History of Geology, edited by C.V. Burek, B. Higgs, (London, 2007), 292. 120 Karen Davies, “In Memoriam: Muriel Agnes Arber 1913-2004,” Lucy Cavendish College: Annual Report and Newsletter 2004, 68. 121 Robinson, “Muriel Arber”, 292.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 34. (fox mould) above it, despite Dawson’s evidence that ‘a good deal of water was [still] oozing through the Fox mould’ in 1841.122 Muriel Arber’s life spanned the twentieth century, but through the many academics she had known, as friends of her parents or as her own teachers, she formed a link back into the geological world of the century before – a link consolidated and focused by her long study of the significant events of Christmas 1839.

Epilogue – and a disclaimer Recent geological surveys have confirmed that the description by the Bucklands, Conybeare and Dawson is an outstanding example of observation and analysis, and that their interpretation of the mechanism, although incomplete, was superior to that of any subsequent account.123

The Heritage Centre at Axminster and the newly re-opened Museum at Lyme Regis both have exhibits on the Great Landslip. In the museum at Lyme visitors can again see William Dawson’s model and better appreciate the scale of the disturbance as it was in 1839. The site of the landslip itself is only accessible by foot. It lies along the South West Coast footpath, three and a half miles from Lyme going west or, more conveniently, just a couple of miles from the bridge across the river at Axmouth. It is a rewarding walk. Although, over time, the pinnacles in the great Chasm have crumbled and what is left of the jagged surface features are now largely hidden by vegetation, the visitor can still easily discern the more-or-less flat top of the separated part, now known as ‘Goat Island’. Since 1955 the area has been a National Nature Reserve and the gently sloping top of the ‘island’ has been maintained as meadowland, rich in plant and insect species. There is no sign of the lagoon or the great reef, all washed away by the sea within a year or so of their formation. The well-maintained footpath is subject to occasional closure or realignment as further, smaller, slippages continue to occur along this active stretch of coast.

* * *

In 1861, Charles Smithson, a scientifically-minded man, set off to explore an area of the Undercliff some three miles east of the Bindon landslip. His almost accidental meetings there with Sarah Woodruff , the eponymous French lieutenant’s woman of John Fowles’ novel, began a train of events with far-reaching consequences for both characters. The book is, of course, a work of fiction, but in it Fowles explores the possibilities of alternative histories, parallel narratives whose ‘truth’ or otherwise depends on the whim of the author – or, as Fowles offers two possible conclusions to the story, the whim of the reader. But history, you may say, is not like that. History must be based firmly on the facts – the task of the historian is to get to the truth. There should be no room for such authorial whim or whimsy.

122 R.W. Gallois, ‘The failure mechanism of the 1839 Bindon Landslide, Devon, UK: almost right first time,’ Geoscience in South-West England, Vol. 12, 2010, 196. 123 Gallois, ‘Failure mechanism’, 188.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 35. However complicated the geology might be, the broad facts relating to the Axmouth landslip are neither complex nor contested. The various accounts, reports and biographical notes in the preceding pages all refer to actual events and real people; the footnotes and references attest to the use of what historians call ‘primary evidence’. My intention throughout has been to achieve a kind of historical accuracy. However, a moment’s thought will show that even if the facts related are completely in accordance with the surviving evidence, this cannot ensure that the picture it presents gives a true sense of the event or its impact as experienced by any single witness. Even at the time and leaving aside questions of evidential reliability (in several cases contemporaneous accounts differed on points of detail), individual witnesses will have had their own personal, internal perspective on the occurrence. William Critchard’s view was very different from William Dawson’s, which in turn was quite different from William Buckland’s or William Conybeare’s. Such a multiplicity of viewpoints perhaps justifies the unashamedly self-indulgent nature of this project. Initiated by my own interest in William Buckland and encouraged by the discovery of a coincidental personal link via Muriel Arber, it was, I felt, ‘meant to be’. The ten Views almost suggested themselves, but my own interests and biases determined the way in which each was treated. In the process, I believe I felt something of the excitement that Mary Anning might have felt, setting out to find fossils on Lyme beach. Right up until the end, rockfalls of information have revealed new curiosities to be explored as more coincidences and connections became apparent – some important, some trivial: was it simply chance that so many of the witnesses should have been called William? Like a latter-day Sidmouthiensis, I hope that the ‘idle tourist’, and perhaps even ‘the philosopher and geologist’ might find something of interest within these Views; but in the end, I can claim no more than that they are an impressionistic collage – my own personal View of a Landslip.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ian Thomson, Richard Bull, Paul Garnsworthy, Roderick Gordon and Jim Kennedy, all innocent individuals whom I have pestered; also the ever-helpful staff and volunteers at the Heritage Centres at Axminster and Exeter and the Museums at Lyme and Oxford, who have all been generous with their help and expertise. I am particularly indebted to Roderick Gordon and Diana Harman and to the Librarian and Archivist of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History for permission to reproduce images from their collections.

Bibliography

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Websites & Webpages Details of specific webpages accessed are given below:

http://anglicanhistory.org/england/bampton , accessed 4 September 2017. http://www.axmouthcommunity.org/history/chancel/the-organ , accessed 4 September 2017. http://www.devonlaceteachers.co.uk/queen-victorias-wedding-lace.html accessed 4 September 2017. http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/combpyne , accessed 4 September 2017. https://www.francisfrith.com/uk/axmouth/the-real-family-of-axmouth-devon- uk_memory-156911 , accessed 4 September 2017.

Ten Views of a Landslip by Peter Lincoln © Peter Lincoln & LRM 2021 39. https://lady.co.uk/how-humble-turnip-changed-history accessed 30 April 2021. http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/christ_fagg.htm , accessed 9 July 2017. https://www.linter.co.uk/Index_of_People/Richard_-Ricardo-_Linter_1818- /richard_-ricardo-_linter_1818-1886.html accessed 4 September 2017.

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