S02E04
The life an times of the Priest Mermaid: Robert Stephen Hawker
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Robert Stephen Hawker (1803–1875)
Robert Stephen Hawker was born in the Charles Church vicarage at Plymouth in 1803 Grandson to the formidable Calvinistic preacher and writer Robert Hawker. He attended several preparatory schools but disliked them, and frequently ran away.
At nineteen Robert entered Pembroke College, Oxford to study for the Anglican priesthood where he discovered a love of poetry.
His first term was memorable; in November 1823 he married Charlotte l’ans, a Cornish gentlewoman of forty-one, but despite their age difference the union proved happy. The couple spent their honeymoon at Tintagel – a place that kindled his lifelong fascination with Arthurian legend and later inspired him to write ‘The Quest of the Sangraal’.
Ordination followed in 1831 and he began a curacy at North Tamerton near Bude, where he discovered he had a joint calling. Not only to be a priest but also a Mermaid.
In order to live out this life he fashioned a wig out of seaweed and naked apart from an oilskin wrapped around his legs, would row out to to the rock in the harbour where he would sit and sing brushing his seaweed hair with a comb.
Each evening the superstitious locals would gather on the cliffs edge to watch the mermaid perform. There are two stories as to why robert stopped his life as a mermaid. One is that the winter was coming and it became too cold, the other is that a sceptical farmer arrived one day with his gun, threatening to pepper the damsel with shot is she stayed warbling any longer. Whatever the reason, one night in late autumn to a particularly large audience the mermaid substituted her haunting lament for a rousing rendition of ‘god save the king’ finishing with great gusto she plopped into the water and swam directly home.
Shortly after this incident Robert was appointed vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall’s most northerly parish in 1835. When he arrived at Morwenstow there had not been a vicar in residence for over a century. Smugglers and wreckers were apparently numerous in the area. A contemporary report says that the Morwenstow wreckers “allowed a fainting brother to perish in the sea … without extending a hand of safety.”
His parishioners Robert became known as Parson Hawker had strongly-built figure, with long fair locks, blue eyes and an increasingly weather-beaten face.
Robert dressed oddly. Sober clerical garb wasn’t for him and it was said his only black clothes were his socks; he loved bright colours. Often he wore a long purple coat or a yellow poncho he’d fashioned from a horse-blanket, and underneath a fisherman’s blue jersey. Crimson gloves, brown or red trousers, and dark sea-boots added to his strange but cheerful appearance and he enjoyed hats, either broad-brimmed or a more flamboyant fez.
In addition to his outlandish fashion sence Hawker was regarded as a deeply compassionate person giving Christian burials to shipwrecked seamen washed up on the shores of the parish, and was often the first to reach the cliffs when there was a shipwreck. Formerly, the bodies of shipwrecked sailors were often either buried on the beach where they were found or left in the sea.
He built a little hut on the cliff at Morwenstow, using timbers washed up from the Caledonia and two other vessels wrecked the following year. He’d sit out on nice days composing his poetry, and during times of storm scour the grey waters for ships in distress. For many years he continued his gruesome duty of recovering corpses from the sea, and the harrowing task grew to weigh heavily with him; altogether, he rescued nearly fifty bodies. The driftwood hut is now the smallest property in the National Trust portfolio.
Early in 1863 Charlotte Hawker’s health, poor for some time, worsened; Robert nursed her constantly, sitting at her bedside reading to her. After her death in February he suffered a period of profound distress, and sought solace in poetry.
He however remained a polish Governess a year later in December 1864 making her Pauline Hawker who bore him three children. The marriage was happy, but it could not prevent him from sinking into despair and depression.
Robert Stephen Hawker also adored animals, and acquired several unusual pets. Robin the domesticated stag would sometimes pin vicarage callers to the ground, which perhaps stretches our view of the tameness of the deers domestication.
He talked to birds on the cliffs edge and in the church yard., always invited his nine cats to church and they followed him every sunday, eventually they made up the vast proportion of his congregation. However one day, he reacted with fury when he saw one catching a mouse and publicly excommunicated it in front of the other shocked animals for mousing on a sunday.
He made friends with a highly intelligent pig named GYP who would roam the vicarage and alert the occupants of any visitors.
Toward the end of his life Hawker wrote increasingly of witches, the evil eye, and the Devil’s emissaries he’d begun to believe he encountered, in a blend of growing persecution mania and mysticism perhaps fuelled by his opium addiction as well as his creative nature. He died penniless in 1875
He you want to read some of the his poetry I would recommend unofficial Cornish anthem ‘The song of the western man’
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