A Quicke History
These are the stories our family tells itself, that my father and others told me. I was prompted to write this piece following a lovely afternoon I spent with Izzy Fitzgerald from the Crediton Library Reminiscence Project. It felt worthwhile getting some of the stories out of my head and into the world. I tell some of them to the tours that come to visit the farm and cheesemaking.
The name Quicke belongs to a family of names: Quick, Wyke, Weeks, Wick, Zwicky that belongs to a Saxon tribe who lived in North Devon and North Somerset. Our family were one of the few families who retained land through the Norman Conquest. That was a great redistribution of land from the civilised Saxons to the invading warlike Normans in 1066. Goodness knows what we had to do to retain property through this cataclysmic barbarian invasion. To distinguish ourselves from all the other Quicks in Devon, at some point, we added the final ‘e’ to our name, now giving innocent delight to many.
Our family came to the farm in Newton St Cyres, first to Court Barton, when Henry VIII wanted the country to change its religion from Catholic to Protestant. He knew he’d have to put something in the balance against people’s fear of change and potentially eternal damnation. He dispersed the monastery lands, some 10% of all land, to influential landowners. An ancestor of mine acquired some of this land and his daughter Elizabeth Bidwell married an aspiring farmer from Sampford Courtenay, Richard Quicke, in 1537. An Australian came to our farm shop in the early 2000’s and told us he was our long lost cousin. It turned out the common ancestor was Richard and Elizabeth’s son Andrew Quicke, fourteen generations away for me and 17 generations away for him. Oddly enough he and his father had a little cartilage bobble on the back of his ear that my father and all of our generation have.
Fast forward to the 6th John Quicke (the name is a bit of a theme, my brother being the 11th John Quicke to head the family). In 1758, he married Jane Coster, the daughter of a wealthy ceramics merchant and mine owner Thomas Coster. She had been married to Robert Hoblyn, a wealthy tin miner from Cornwall. They had had no children and she brought her twin fortunes into the family. They were badly needed. John, using a husband’s rights over his wife’s property, promptly sold her library in a sale lasting 2 weeks in London to repair the cottages on the estate. I hope her satisfaction of seeing the inhabitants warm and dry made up for the sadness at losing her books.
This is where the money came from to build the original Newton House and to build the 3 large cuttings going through the village, cut into the red rock. Our family says this gave employment to a couple of hundred local people for 2 or three years after the Napoleonic Wars when there was considerable economic hardship in the country. It was said that the work was undertaken to give thanks for the safe return of the current John Quicke’s son and nephew safely back from the bloody battle of Waterloo, where the mortality rate of 25%, higher than the first day of the Somme. This finally curbed Napoleon’s imperial ambitions, as scary then as Hitler was in the last century. The works lifted the main road onto dry ground above the Creedy River marshes where our cows now graze.
These great works had the merit of making the road drivable by wheeled vehicles, where previously there had been none. It also gave the inhabitants of Newton House a great, and modern for the time, sweep of view across Hill Park which still has some fine parkland trees, and across the Creedy Valley up to Raddon Top. They’d have seen their fine new walled garden of fruit and vegetables, still there at Home Farm, and the secluded garden walk behind the wall alongside Station Road, now a jungle of brambles, without seeing travellers trudging along a mud track in front of the house.
We’ve just dug a 5 metre deep slurry lagoon on the same red soil and it becomes solid rock quite quickly, hard work for a large mechanised digger and tractors and trailers. It must have been brutal work with hand picks and wheelbarrows back in the early 19th century digging into rock and carrying it up to a mile away.
Jane’s money also brought Dutch drainage works onto Home Farm which still enables our cows to graze and produce milk from what would have been marshland. All the fields down there are called Marshes, a memory of what was once there.
The works also included the Head Weir on the river Creedy, which brought a mill leat to the farm. I remember our current Autumn Cow Manager, Matt Heal’s, great uncle, Arthur Heal, sawmilling with a long belt linked to the leat to saw tree trunks from the woods into planks of wood we used to build the farm buildings in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The saw benches are all still there until we work out what to do with the old mill. It’s one of the finest stone buildings on the farm, dating from the time that the country squires lived like princes and could afford to make their farm buildings beautiful. This was just as the Agricultural Revolution was starting. Farming behind high tariff barriers before the repeal of the Corn Laws fed the exploding populations that fuelled the Industrial Revolution.
Jane’s first mother-in-law was a Godolphin, a powerful political family. They were related to the Churchill family of Winston fame, particularly John Churchill who as head of the army led the revolt against King James II. He and his co-conspirators invited William and Mary over from Holland to replace him to protect the country from Catholicism. Oddly enough, in the church, there is one of the few charters to James II, a fine painted wooden declaration of loyalty. I wonder what the Quicke family thought of the fine paintwork as they were saying their prayers of loyalty to James’ sister and husband, the usurping monarchs. Kept their heads down and kept praying, in this peaceful and successful invasion by the Dutch in 1688 that would have passed close to Newton St Cyres as they landed at Brixham. Our Dutch cousins find it hilarious that it was so well organised the English don’t even remember it as an invasion and usurpation of the crowned monarch.
John Churchill is barely remembered for his disloyalty and better remembered for the triumph of beating the French at Blenheim, stopping their imperial ambitions across Europe.
My family had form: they jumped ship in the right direction at the right time during the Civil War when Crediton 3 miles in one direction was for Parliament and Exeter 4 miles in the other direction was for the King. Jumps in the wrong direction at the wrong time caused many families to have their land confiscated.
The well off people at the time of John and Jane in the late 1700’s were close knit; John’s great grandmother was a Godolphin, so they were distant cousins by marriage. My father’s middle name was Godolphin, to remember this illustrious connection. Jane brought a number of Godolphin family mementoes, I suspect to let her new family know she was someone of substance. John died at 54 and Jane spent an enjoyable second widowhood; there is a charming sketch of Jane with 3 friends, all shawls and lace caps playing cards in Bath.
Widowhood wasn’t all play. She brought tin miners from Cornwall to the farm, making Newton St Cyres and Upton Pyne for a brief decade the largest producer of manganese in the world. You can still see evidence of mine workings, miner’s cottages and miners’ gardens around the farm. Derek Cann, who was Farm Foreman when I was younger, told me that when he was young he was ploughing in Black Pit field behind Hayne Farm, and the horse fell down a mine shaft, taking enormous amounts of work to recover it. Manganese tailings are black hence the name of the field. Our family tradition is that the manganese was used to make the blue glass that was a tradition in Exeter.
Mining has a long tradition on the farm. The red soil is evidence of the river valley that wore away of the high mountains squashed up to form Dartmoor at the time 300–400 million years ago at the time of the single continent Pangaea. The boundary with the older clay land to the south of the farm marks a geological fault and minerals seep up from deep within the earth. There was a brief gold rush in the 1990’s when we had all sorts of strangers and stray geologists looking for gold on the land that came to nothing. One of them did teach me to pan for gold in a wok. Apparently, there are tiny flecks of gold in every ditch in the land. Don’t get excited: it took a dedicated friend who had 8 great uncles who went to the California Gold Rush decades of panning to make enough gold for a wedding ring. It’s also not legal to sell panned gold even on your own land as it all belongs to the Crown. Is that hump in the woods evidence of Iron Age iron smelting? Another of our fields is called Tin Pits, with spoil pits still there in a copse on the margin where the trees still don’t like to grow and my horse found spooky.
Jane had one surviving son and several daughters. She had a son who died young, while still in long dresses as was the custom in those days. He was very beloved. There is a touching memorial in Newton St Cyres Church to him and some sweet sketches of him looking really cute that we have. The daughters had substantial settlements of land given to them. Our family say Jane Coster insisted on this, going against the normal practice of all the land going to the eldest son. Primogeniture is what has kept the land in a significant enough chunk to be valued by successive generations, which is smart, and she probably thought there was plenty to go round, which is fair.
There are 4 hatchments in the church, painted wooden death notices that were hung outside people’s houses when they died, then brought into the church as memorials. They date from John and Jane’s time. It’s unusual to find four together. It feels like they were quite family-minded.
More family reminiscences next month, with more tales of the powerful women in the family.
Mary Quicke
