Small Talk at Wreyland, by Cecil Torr (1918, 1921, 1923)

One day in December 1916, Cecil Torr, a lifelong bachelor and amateur scholar, an expert in Roman and Greek history and author of books on Hannibal and ancient ships, began keeping notes on items of interest about the people and land around his family home, Wreyland Manor, on the edge of the village of Lustleigh in Dartmoor. “Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they should have written things down.”

The scope of his note-keeping quickly got out of hand. “I meant to keep to local matters,” he apologized, “but have gone much further than I meant.” And thank God for that. As the book’s original reviewer in the TLS wrote, “An analysis of the first few pages reveals: the value of local memory; … his parents, grandparents and kinsfolk; heaven; faith and works; infectious disease; weather-lore; singing birds; rooks; weather lore again; homely remedies for illness; open windows; the may-dew on the young barley.”

And thus what might have been a minor and justly forgotten bit of Dartmoor folklore became Small Talk at Wreyland, one of the great bedside companions of English literature. After getting the first volume together for printing in a private edition he planned to share with a few of his friends, Torr was contacted by S. C. Roberts, one of the editors at the Cambridge University Press, who’d been show the book by J. B. Peace, the firm’s chief printer, and asked if he was interested in having the book published. Torr agreed and when the book came out in the summer of 1918, it was soon being celebrated as offering a welcome relief from the constant drone of war news. “We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire,” wrote one reviewer.

Torr, his father, and his grandfather had all been university-educated, well-traveled, and omnivorous in their appetites for knowledge of all types. Torr often draws upon what seems to have been a substantial library as well as a great supply of family letters and diaries, so that his “small talk” embraces large as well as small topics. A few pages into the book, we learn about the ritual of scrubbing the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on Maundy Thursday:

The dignitaries of the church come down in procession, each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon the altar, and then begin to scrub. I was close by, and noticed how differently they all did it. Some evidently thought it symbolical, and merely waved their mops across the altar, hardly touching it. And others would scrub hard, and then put their heads down and look carefully through their spectacles to see what they had done, and then go on scrubbing again till they were satisfied that they had done their bit.

A page later, he shares a remark one of his “thoroughgoing Protestant” neighbors made upon being told of Cecil’s visit to Rome and seeing the Pope: “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper tiger to fight,” considering the Pope the Devil’s agent on earth.

Further on, he shares his mother’s recollection of one of the last duels held in the area: “It was a quarrel of two retired officers over facts which they could easily have verified. They had both got the facts wrong, and each was right in disbelieving what the other said; but neither of them would allow his veracity to be impugned, and they settled the matter in this fashion at five o’clock next morning.” The two men settled the argument with brutal finality: they both died.

He was particularly fond of the work of one of his great uncles, the Reverend William Davy, who spent most of his adult life writing an enormous twenty-six volume System of Divinity, then went on at the age of eighty to produce a three-volume set of “improved” extracts (you can find one volume online in the Internet Archive (link)). In a work of such length, one might expect an occasional detour to be found, such as the following diatribe on the evils of drinking tea: “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” No wonder England never managed to establish an empire.

And there is no end of the talk of the people of Lustleigh and the surrounding countryside, which Torr considered the most beautiful in England. Looking at her garden one summer afternoon, one neighbor remarked, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ‘an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.” Another assures him about the best way to forecast the weather: “If the signboard of the Punch Bowl creaked upon its hinges, and the smoke blew down at Treleaven’s corner, rain was sure to follow, let the quicksilver be high or low.”

Small Talk at Wreyland was not a best-seller by any means, but its reputation as a book of great variety, charm, and humor spread, and Torr was soon invited to put together another. Small Talk at Wreyland Second Series was published in 1921 and the Third Series volume in 1923. The later volumes are just as good as the first. In Series Three, for example, Torr offers a short disquisition on the subject of haloes:

Saints and angels had round haloes, but other people had to be content with square or oblong haloes while they were alive. I do not know why this was so, or what a halo really was whether it was a thing like a rainbow which always faces you, or whether it was a flat and rigid thing which you saw obliquely when the wearer turned aside: the Old Masters have depicted it both ways. For want of higher authority I draw my own conclusions from such things as Toto Maidalchini says: namely, that saint Cassian, being puzzled, scratched his head, and thereby put his halo all awry; or that saints Pancras and Sebastian went bathing in one of the rivers of Paradise, and then sat upon the river bank while their haloes were drying in the sun.

If there is a book heaven, I have a feeling Cecil Torr is sporting his own halo there.

A selection from the three books was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 1979, but aside from the usual print-on-demand suspects, you’ll have to make do with the electronic versions (Internet Library Series One (link), Series Two (link) and Series Three (link)) or one of the many used copies you can find for as little as one buck online (AddAll.com).