Benevolent eccentric
 Last month saw the bicentenary of the birth of the remarkable and incredibly eccentric cleric Robert Stephen Hawker at Stoke Damerel, Plymouth.
He was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School, where at the age of 18
he published a book of poems entitled ‘Tendrils by Reuben’.
From there, in 1823, he attended Pembroke College, Oxford, where he
gained his arts degree in 1828. He married early in life and with his
wife moved to Morwenstowe in north Cornwall, where he was appointed
vicar in 1834.
Hawker was a prolific writer of poetry, his most famous example being
the “Song of the western men”, with its memories of Trelawney
and the “twenty thousand Cornish men will know the reason why”,
which was composed as early as 1826. He was dismissive of the established
custom of clerics dressing in black, and was to be seen wearing a claret-coloured
coat, blue fisherman’s jersey and long sea-boots, or a red-brown
cassock and a pink brimless hat. He often rose in the pulpit in red gloves.
He insisted on yellow stationery, which he had specially made for his
use. His handwriting was bold, his voice powerful. He was usually accompanied
to church services by a dog and nine or 10 cats. He forbade the lighting
of fires in the vicarage when jackdaws were nesting in the chimneys and
he objected vigorously to neighbouring farmers shooting rooks.
On many other matters Hawker was a progressive. He instituted what later
became widely accepted, a special harvest festival celebration. His sympathy
for his poor parishioners was exceptional for his time, and he did his
best for any shipwrecked mariners who came to grief under his cliffs.
He erected in his churchyard the white figurehead of the Caledonia, wrecked
in 1842 with a sole survivor, and buried beneath it the remains of the
drowned crewmen.
Despite his vigorous approach to what he saw as social evils, he was
much given to meditation and contemplation. With the flotsam of local
wrecks he made himself a hut on the edge of the cliffs, where he sat
and thought. It is there to this day, and to sit there and look out on
the treacherous reefs below is an inspiring experience that we can share
with Hawker, especially when the gales beat on the coast and the sea
rages.
In 1875, Hawker was taken to Plymouth by his second wife, Pauline, for
medical attention, but he deteriorated and was in severe pain, suffering
a paralytic stroke and dying before the end of the year. During his illness
he had recourse to opium for relief. On his deathbed he joined the Church
of Rome, for which he had always held deep sympathy.
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