By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
This notebook, a recent donation, is blank apart from handwritten notes – possibly sermon notes – on Genesis and Revelation, written at opposite ends of the book. The writer evidently intended to fill the notebook with notes on the other books of the Old and New Testaments. The handwriting is tiny; you need a magnifying glass to read it.
The notebook has two inserts, written in the same hand, which help to identify the owner of the book. The first is a folded note, dated 8 November 1844, addressed to ‘my little Mary’ from a ‘John Hawker’ of ‘Eldad Buildings’. A note on the back, written in pencil in a different hand, states that the note was written ‘from my dear father during my stay with the Tolchers at Ridgway’. We know from the content of the note that there were at least three girls, Florence, Fanny and Ellen, living in the Tolcher household while ‘little Mary’ was there.
There are several clues here: Hawker, Eldad, Tolcher and Mary. A John Glandville Hawker, son of Robert and Anna Hawker, was minister of Eldad Chapel in Plymouth. Born in 1773, he was curate of Stoke Damerel until 1830 when he left the Church of England in protest over Catholic emancipation, and set up his own church, Eldad Chapel, in Plymouth. He married Susannah Sadler in 1799 in Cheddar, Somerset, and had thirteen children, including Susannah, Anna, Robert, Edward, Thomas, Sarah, Mercy, Elizabeth and Samuel. In July 1832, now a widower, John Hawker married his second wife, Mary Pollard Tyeth, and had two children, Mary (presumably the ‘little Mary’ addressed in the folded note) and John. Evidence certainly points to John Glandville Hawker as the writer of our notebook; the Royal Cornwall Gazette announced the marriage of widower John Hawker and spinster Mary Tyeth on 21 July 1832 giving Hawker’s address as ‘Eldad Buildings’ – the same address given in the folded note. There can’t have been many John Hawkers living at Eldad Buildings.
Using Find My Past, Ellie Jones, our Archivist, ascertained that the Mr and Mrs Tolcher mentioned in the note were, in fact, Edward and Mary Tolcher and that one of their daughters was indeed called Florence, born in 1834. Florence would have been about ten years old when Mary Hawker went to stay with the family at Ridgway.
The other insert is a single leaf, written in the same tiny hand, giving an account of the death of the writer’s young son, Samuel. The account also mentions a female, Elizabeth, who looked after the ailing Samuel in the evenings (his mother cared for him in the mornings and afternoons). Samuel and Elizabeth must have been Hawker’s son and daughter by his first wife.
So, although there are many John Hawkers in Devon in this period, we can be fairly sure that only John Glandville Hawker lived at Eldad Buildings and had a daughter, Mary and a son, Samuel. He died in Plymouth on 30 October 1846 – just two years after writing this little folded note to his young daughter. Perhaps this explains why the notebook remains largely unfinished.