The old Ladywell, Pilton, Barnstaple
I am so pleased to be this year’s winner of the Di Yerbury Residency in Barnstaple, Devon in the UK. Having won the prize in the celebration of the 100th year of the Society of Women Writers NSW Centenary year feels very special and much appreciated.
Barnstaple is full of winding lanes steeped in history. At every corner, there is something new to learn about and discover. I arrived on September 6 and spent the first few days in my lovely apartment, settling in and finding my way around Barnstaple. Keen not to lose a day, I immediately began a writing routine, a daily journal, and a short Facebook blog, so friends and family can follow my journey. Each morning I plan a new place to discover and venture out for a lovely stroll. My daily walks reveal the town’s beauty and I always end my walk along the great River Taw. There is much tranquility to be found and thinking time to be had in these purposeful but quiet wanderings. I found little places like Pilton, across the river from Barnstaple, with its dark lanes and beautiful architecture quite enchanting and wondered if I had stepped back in time. Barnstaple, a thousand-year-old town with all its churches, almshouses and markets, is very inspiring but there is too much to mention here. The view from the apartment with its slate roofs and church steeple, is a wonderful and picturesque way to start each day. I especially love waking up to the English seagulls squawking and flying over, and then resting on the roof for a sunbath.
Barnstaple High Street-Devon Gold
View from the Apartment 
Taw River, Barnstaple
Barnstaple has excellent transport networks, so it has been easy to make connections to the Midlands where much of my research is based. My project centres on gentleman convict engraver, Joseph Lycett (1775-1828) a gifted Staffordshire artist or limner, whose talent for engraving and landscape painting was matched by a fatal compulsion for forgery. Arrested in 1810, he was finally transported to NSW in 1813 for fourteen years. He created hundreds of pictures of colonial Australia but, more importantly, produced the most enduring images of First Nations people in the world. Lycett reoffended in Sydney in 1815 and spent time in Newcastle for his sins. Eventually pardoned by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, he returned to England in 1822, only to bring himself to ruin again, with a third charge of forgery in 1827, and died by his own hand in the workhouse hospital in Birmingham in 1828.
Birmingham is an edgy and innovative place. It’s the land of ‘Yes Bab’ and the wonderful Brummie dialect. Its birth into a city was fuelled by the Industrial Revolution. Now a centre for the arts, the multicultural city, with its preserved Industrial Revolution era landmarks, has a vibrant feel. Its history is easily discovered by visiting its many cultural institutions, churches, and canals. I chose to stay near Birmingham New Street, in the centre and enjoyed its grungy inner-city atmosphere, which was convenient to many of the important places I needed to visit. Birmingham is the birthplace of the iconic musical genre, heavy metal, and its bands like Black Sabbath appear in galleries and street murals all over the centre. Still mourning the loss of music legend, Ozzie Osbourne, Birmingham’s many exhibitions about his life are to be found everywhere in the city.
Ozzy, the Mechanical Bull, Birmingham
Black Sabbath on Navigation Street, Birmingham
At the Midland’s Ancestors Reference Library in the Kingsley Norris Room at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, I was able to explore an extensive archive, which is housed inside the first circulating library of Birmingham founded in 1779. I was keen to find out about the Lycett family and to ascertain the site of Joseph Lycett’s grave. He was buried in St Mary’s Chapelry in Whittall Street, next to the General Hospital of Birmingham in 1828, but the actual place of his grave remains elusive. After hours of investigation, with the help of the wonderful archivists, we were able to confirm that, when the General Hospital expansion occurred in the 1920s, all the graves in the cemetery were exhumed to larger cemeteries in Birmingham. If the graves were marked, lists of reinterments were available. But as Joseph had attempted suicide and subsequently died before facing the Warwickshire Assizes on his third forgery charge in Bath Row, it was inevitable that, fifteen weeks later when he was buried in an unmarked grave, he was not reinterred. It was confirmed that his resting place was subsequently built over by progress. Much to my despair, Joseph now lies under the concrete of the city near St Martin in the Bullring.
Birmingham Midlands Institute
Stained Glass Windows, St Phillips
St Martin’s Church in the Bullring
St Martin’s Church and St Phillips Baroque Cathedral were associated with the Lycett’s and a visit to these cathedrals proved to be a wonderful source of information and inspiration. St Phillips is decorated with beautiful stained glass windows, and I spent an hour listening to the Choral Evensong in the late afternoon and was brought to tears.
Chamberlain Square, Birmingham
Floozie in the Jacuzzi
Victoria Square Birmingham
The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery with its exhibition, Birmingham; Its People and Its History, highlighted for me how Joseph lived and worked in the city. Armed with my archives card, I spent another whole day in Birmingham Library and Archives to look at trade directories, tenant and property indexes, newspapers, family history, maps of the old city, and other forger trials. The expansive library gave me the opportunity to research Bath Row and the history of engraving and printmaking. I ascended to the roof and viewed all of Birmingham and visited the wonderful Shakespeare Library founded by the civic preacher, George Dawson.
Birmingham Streets
Nell in the Birmingham Library
Birmingham Library
Known as the ‘city of a thousand trades’, Birmingham housed the ‘workshops of the world’. Its engineers and manufacturers made marine and stationary steam machines, guns, jewellery, pens and even glass eyes. In the early part of the 19th century, hordes of workers left market towns and farms in Britain and Europe to flock to the expanding metropolis. To accommodate the growing population, twenty thousand, two-roomed houses were cheaply built and arranged in back-to-back courts. Many were without windows and housed up to sixteen households without sanitation or water.
A shared laundry was deemed adequate and life in these places was all poverty and squalor. The ninety-minute National Trust tour of Court 15 took me to the last surviving corner of Back-to-Backs in Birmingham, comprising eleven houses on the corner of Inge and Hurst Street, where 60 people lived with only paper-thin walls between them. The site preserved each house in eras, ranging from the 1820s through to the 1960s. To experience the conditions people lived in firsthand during his time was invaluable and will assist me to make insights into the social history of early 19th century Birmingham.
Back-to-Back Houses Birmingham
Interior Back-to-Back Houses
Court 15, Back-to-Back Houses
On my final day, I took one of the only two public narrowboat tours of the Birmingham Canal. Joseph regularly frequented the canals for work and used them to travel back to his family in the Midlands from Birmingham. There are more canals in Birmingham than in Venice, so I’m told, and the Georgian factories and infrastructure on this grand transport network are still visible today. Once on board, the gentle chugging of the boat, navigating its way under bridges, turning sharp corners on the canal, was thrilling and historic. As I watched the tow path slide by, it made me feel like I was back in industrial Birmingham in 1822. With the lyrical sound of Brummie accents singing in my ears, combined with the smell of diesel and sweat, my senses were truly enlivened, giving me another unique experience into Georgian England and the life and times of Joseph Lycett.
Brindley Place, Birmingham
Canal Narrowboats on the Canal
Buildings on Birmingham Canal
Happy writing.
Nell Jones
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