John Woollcombe

Educated at Eton, admitted in 1799.

He was JP and Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Devon. He was also High Sheriff of the County in 1832.

Extract 'The Shearers and the Shorn' by E.W. Martin, Pub. Latimer Trend and Co. Plymouth, 1965

"THE SQUIRE'S PERSONALITY

The parish leader required a certain type of personality because of the job he was called on to do. He had to give orders like a military commander; and he showed a similar expectation as to the willingness of his cadres to obey. The hereditary link with manoral influence gave him assurance. As a child he chewed on the silver spoon of inherited grace. Standing in his park while the sun laced its traceries of light through the broad leaves of oak and beech on to his Georgian mansion, the grown man had the sense of being also a monarch. So far as the eye could see the land was his: looking from his bedroom window he glimpsed his own fields, his own cottages and his own subjects. So he came to accept the homage of lesser men as a natural right. He could say that without his intervention there be no one to dispense justice, distribute charity to the poor, set social standards do public work and organise local defence forces in time of war. All these things the squire did . He was never neglectful of the poor and when it seems that the distance between man and man was too great, the blame must rest on the barriers and unemotional rituals by which parish discipline and order were maintained.

It is possible to draw portraits of squires, as it were, from a great distance. But we can gather what they were really like these men who worked the minor miracle of subduing communities - from people who knew them or had known their descendants intimately. A typical Devon squire of the earlier period was John Morth Woollcombe of Ashbury House. Born at Ashbury in 1784, he succeeded to the estate at the age of 18 on the death of his father. Scores of men just like him lived lavishly in the seclusion of their country mansions.

John Morth Woollcombe was the squire at Ashbury for 64 years. He was fond of shooting, riding and hunting and kept two packs of hounds at The Kennels. He enjoyed good company, entertained, gave dinner parties with music, flute and violins; and had a large retinue of servants, coachmen, grooms, stablemen, kennelmen, huntsmen, gardeners and gamekeepers. There is an old portrait of him in his later years. He wore a tall hat, a high collar and muffler round his neck with buttoned strap, a frock coat buttoned from top to bottom and a long thick overcoat. His grey hair hung over his cars. His eyes were fixed, looked straight before him and shamed the devil. He had a broad nose, with defiant nostrils, a small mouth with thin, firm and tightened lips. He was tall in stature, well-built, upright - a soldier every inch of him. The man of character could be seen in his face and carriage and in every gesture. He was a man of authority, the lord of the manor, The Squire. The relation between the old squire and his retainers was feudal and patriarchal, mutual and reciprocal. The squire leased the farms and land, paid wages, bestowed favours, largesse, bounty, and in acknowledgement the tenants paid their fiefs or rent, the servants paid their services, and the village paid the respect and honour due. He was rugged, bluff, but large-hearted, kind, generous, lavish in hospitality. He kept open house. He brewed a hogshead of beer every fortnight. The donkeys that brought their loads to Ashbury always had their feed; the outside workers had their meat and vegetables from the kitchen every day; and when the Court or rent-day was held at Christmas he killed a bullock for the tenants and a bullock for the villagers. He was a lion to his household and roared if anyone dared to cross his path. He would not suffer himself to be contradicted. His word was law. He quarrelled with the local Hunt and shot every fox on the estate, nailing their pads to the stable door. The exchequer began to fail him toward the end, and he sold his farms to replenish his empty purse on a three-lives lease. The old squire long survived his generation. He drove out every day during his last years through the Ashbury estate in his four-wheeled coach or carriage and a pair of dark horses with a coachman on the box and the footman at the back. He died April 1866, aged 82.1

Ashbury House has now disappeared. Its modest grandeur is reduced to a heap of fallen rubble; and the author of that vignette is dead. A clergyman, an antiquary interested in genealogy, heraldry and folklore he was likely to magnify every virtue the squirearchy possessed. For all that there are facts to support his testimony. Many squires did earn respect: if masterful and opinionated, they were also charitable and as helpful as they knew how to be. Among these allies of convention, however, there were some who overstepped the mark of indifference. They bullied employees, threatened their tenants, played tricks on their gamekeepers and estate employees, punished poachers harshly and were quick to criticise immorality among folk who lived on the edge of temptation in their dark and overcrowded hovels.

Stories are still current in the neighbourhood about the behaviour of squires. Such folk-tales don't depict villainy. They seem to recall a breed of arrogant and eccentric men who treated the poor as comic figures. One squire is said to have dropped an ounce of shag tobacco into a boiler where a joint of beef was being cooked for a Friendly Society dinner. This dinner was the climax of the village Club Day. Scores of members, dressed in their Sunday suits, or what passed for such, sat down to a repast they had looked forward to, and paid for out of their sweated labour. So there was much for the squire to enjoy in the discomfiture of those who had no surfeit of pleasures. Another landowner ordered a worker to lop off some branches from a tree. Before doing this he was offered a jug of cider. The squire put into this a small quantity of Epsom Salts. The worker found his predicament a difficult one; and the squire was able to observe more than the rapid descent of a man from a tree.

It is dangerous for historians to rely on hindsight; dangerous even to imply from our present point in time that the best squires had no element of compassion. The squire's personality often contained much goodwill beneath its exterior reserve and aloofness. He was a human being even if he occasionally behaved like a demigod. Before and after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (and especially between 1875 and 1914 when depression hit Devon farming) the poor suffered hardships. The squirearchy and clergy could hardly be blamed for this. A corporate system required that the poor should laboriously contribute toward what the squire bought, built or used. The idea that the poor must meekly endure poverty and publicly experience the shame of it, was not a local product. The germ of such a philosophy was contained in the writings of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham. The Devon

I 'The Place Where the Devil Died of Cold'. History of Northlew and

Ashbury, Rev. W. R. Harvey (unpublished), c. 1920."

From 'Memoirs of the Rev. John Russell'

... Phillips

From Memoir of The Rev. John Russell, p204 - 209

?Phillipps, however, met one morning at Gribleford Bridge, only two miles from Hatherleigh, found four brace of foxes in the cover- a dog, vixen, and three brace of cubs-but made a mull of it, called off his hounds in disgust and went home, a distance of thirty miles at least to his kennel. After some time it was communicated to Russell that Phillipps would never draw covers again; so, as the country was a choice one, comprising the fine moorland district of Broadbury, the wildest in the West of England, Russell bethought him how he could best recover his footing and bring about the desirable end of securing it for his own.

A turn in his favour by the wheel of fortune soon gave him a suitable opportunity. Mr. J. Morth Woollcombe happening to join him one morning, ?they found,? in Russell?s words, ? a right real Dartmoor Hector, and away he went for his native moorland, straight as a bee-line; but never set foot on it, for we ran into him about a mile short of his haunts. Just before we killed him, he crossed some enclosures, and the hounds coming back to us, I held up my hands and said, ?Stand still, gentlemen, pray! the fox is in this field.? It was not two acres and it was plough.

??Nonsense!? cried Woollcombe; ? we should see him if he were.?

??He is here, I tell you, if I know my hounds.? And in a moment they seized him within a few yards of his horses feet.

?His delight was unbounded; he begged me as a particular favour to go home by way of Ashbury, invited the whole field into the hall, drew cork after cork of champagne, toasted the little Iddesleigh pack and their master, and promised similar hospitality whenever they killed a fox within his domain.

?He kept his word too up to a certain time, when for some reason I never could fathom, he sent his brother Robert over to Iddlesleigh to negotiate for the purchase of my whole pack. I was not at home; but when I returned to dinner Mrs. Russell said, ? Robert Woollcombe has been here all the morning, waiting to see you.?

??And did he say what he wanted?? I inquired.

??His brother is anxious to buy your hounds, and sent him over to treat for them; they think that as a clergyman, you ought not to keep them.?

?? They are very kind neighbours,? I said, ?and I fully appreciate their good feeling but at the same time I hope I do them no wrong if I altogether mistrust their motives.?

??Robert is coming again to-morrow,? continued Mrs. Russell, ?and is bent on seeing you.?

?Before the morrow arrived, however, being forewarned as to the object of his visit, I was fully prepared with my answer.

?The next day he accordingly came; and as he took me by the hand, I said, ?Well, Robert, and pray what?s your pleasure??

?? I came to buy your hounds, ? he responded, bluntly; ?what?s your price??

??Three hundred guineas,? I replied, ?for all but five couple, which I shall keep.?

?? A bargain,? he said; ?I?ll take them. But what are you going to do with the five couple??

??Keep them as a nucleus for another pack.?

??Oh, that will never do,? he said; ? we want the country; the hounds are no use without it.?

?? Then you shall have neither, Bob,? was my decisive reply.

?And so ended the negotiation. We then parted, and I went on hunting the country and killing the wild animal as heretofore.?

It was a real grief to Russell for many a day afterwards to discover, as he very soon did, that foxes in the Broadbury country became scarcer and scarcer yearly, and that at length Mr. Woollcombe went so far as to wage open war against the whole race by ordering his keepers and tenants to trap, shoot, and destroy every fox they found bred or travelling over his estate. And so rigorously was this mandate executed, that a paragraph appeared in the papers announcing the number of vixens and cubs he had destroyed, and calculating that he had rid the country of no less than two hundred and fifty, great, small, and forthcoming. Nay, large placards were printed at Okehampton and posted in the neighbourhood, setting forth the above gross statement, and justifying the slaughter as one of meritorious service to the whole community.

But although at the time it was denounced as a most unneighboulry proceeding on the part of Mr. Woollcombe, there are good grounds now for believing that he was, in truth, influenced by conscientious scruples only, rather than by any ill-will to Russell; for in speaking of him apart from his profession, he was wont to express his unbounded admiration of his manly power an pre-eminent ability in all that pertained to the science of woodcraft.

Great indeed was the indignation, especially of the hunting community, at this wholesale massacre of the foxes. One Jack White, a horse dealer, is said to have upbraided Mr. Woollcombe, who was a very tall man, to his very face.

Let me tell you, sir,? said Jack, ?that you?re six feet four of the very worst stuff as I ever sees wrapped up in one bundle. Gude morning, sir".

It was not without good reason, therefore, that Mr. Phillips, wither from a mistrust in the friendship of the cover-owners, or from a manly feeling that he would be doing Russell an ill-service by continuing to hunt that country, declined, after the day at Gribbleford Bridge, to bring his hounds again to that locality, and thenceforth devoted himself exclusively to the region round about Tetcott and Pencarrow1. One thing is certain, that in every transaction with respect to Russell and the Broadbury country, Mr. Phillipps?s conduct was always straightforward and altogether unimpeachable.

Early in the spring of 1831 the young baronet, Sir William Molesworth, then in his twenty-first year, having invited a large party of gentlemen to meet Phillipps and the Landue hounds at Pencarrow for a fortnight?s hunting, the house was filled to the rafters, Two stall were allotted to each guest, and hacks ad libitum found room in the stables of the neighbouring tenants. The few survivors of that meeting - and now, alas, they are very few - will never forget the 16 February in that fortnight, when a fox was found at Polbrock, near the riverside, every hound breaking away almost on his back, bringing him over the paling into Pencarrow Park, and by the Roman mounds away to Helland Wood; thence tearing on with a burning scent over the virgin soil of the vast rough enclosures, they carried a grad head, and, dashing five or six couple abreast over the big boundary fence, broke out on the moor and .....

1 Note by NW - JMW?s younger brother Thomas Woollcombe was a great friend of Sir William Molesworth.