On the first of the month, just too late to go into last month's Journal, I received the following e-mail :

Hello there.

My wife Michaela and I were very interested to see our old house, Bessie's cottage (South Zeal) taking a prominent position on your web-site.

We lived there for about 3 years until about 2002, after doing a lot of work on the house.

We thought that some people may be interested in how we came to give the house that name- it was called "West Villa" prior to the name-change.  A local builder, Mark Wimberley, Ben Radford (Now at the Poltimore guest house) and I, opened up a wonderful fireplace, complete with cloam oven as part of the refurbishment to the house.

As Mark cleared out a load of rubble from the fireplace, he retrieved several items of interest from inside the old oven.  These included some broad beans in a paper bag, several religious books, two wonderful children's comics from about 1895, and best of all- a young girl's hand-written school exercise book, again from about 1895, when she would have been about 11 years old.

Having unsuccessfully tried to grow a 100 year old broad bean plant a la "Jack and the..", I set about researching the author of the exercise book, which described a day out to Exeter, including a visit to the Catholic Church at St Thomas, a collection of "sums", a poem dedicated to the dangers of alcohol, and a note of apology to a close friend with whom she had "Fallen out."

The author's name was Bessie Langmead.

A Jim Langmead appears in a photograph of the workers at Ramsley copper mine taken in 1905.  I often wonder if that is her Father.  A Langmead is buried in South Tawton Churchyard, and the date suggests that it could be "Jim".

Meg Wolton kindly looked at the 1901 census, and said that Bessie was described as a "seamstress".

We always felt very much at ease in Bessie's cottage and when we visit our friends at South Zeal, always admire the building and its part in the local history.

I hope this has been of some interest to you.  Please feel free to put extracts if you wish onto your website.

David Hawkins.

Thanks very much for your very interesting story. I will certainly put it on the site.

I have just published the September Journal issue so, rather than rush to tag it on to that, I will put it in The October one. That will give me some time to maybe get a couple of new photos of the house for illustration. I would also be very interested if you have any copies of pages from the exercise book or maybe the comics or anything else I could scan in to also illustrate the story.

Don't worry if you don't have copies, the story is very good on it's own. Thanks for sending it and thanks for looking at the site.

Hi Pete.

Thanks for getting back to me.  All the items discovered at "Bessie's" were left behind when we sold up.  We felt it only right that anything relating to the history of the house should stay.  The current owners, who are most amiable folk, will no doubt help you in the continuance of this lovely story!

Kind regards, Dave Hawkins. 

This morning, I happened to be on the 1901 census site and put in a search for Bessie. She came up as a Dressmaker aged 20 then so she must have been born in 1881 . I didn't go further because there is a minimum £5 charge to see the entry and I wasn't sure what else I might want to look up (there is a 7 day time limit to use money). If you are at all interested the address is :

http://www.1901census.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

pete