On This Day in Wembury — 2 December 1893

A fourteen-year-old sent to work on a Wembury farm

On 2 December 1893, the Cornish Times told the story of a 14-year-old Plymouth boy whose brief attempt at farm work brought him to Wembury.

The boy had recently left school after passing the Fifth Standard. According to the newspaper, he could read and write, but had little enthusiasm for settling into work and had already been spending much of his time wandering the streets and smoking.

The Rev. D. F. C. Poulter of the Boys’ Brigade intervened and tried to find him employment.

A farmer at Wembury agreed to take him on.

The arrangement did not go well.

After only a couple of days the boy began complaining of homesickness and asked to return to his mother. His employer agreed, lent him an overcoat for the journey and told him that he could come back the following day.

Two days later he did return to Wembury.

But once back on the farm, the newspaper said, he refused to work.

The farmer told him firmly that he had to do something. The boy’s answer was that he wanted “to go to sea.”

The episode ended with him asking a servant for a penny for the journey back to Plymouth. He then left the farm and resumed wandering around the streets.

On the following Thursday he appeared before the Stonehouse Guardians, who decided that he should be sent to the workhouse for three months.

The case says much about attitudes to childhood at the end of the nineteenth century.

At fourteen, a boy who had completed the required level of elementary schooling could be expected to enter employment almost immediately. Farm service was one possible route, particularly for boys thought likely to benefit from being removed from the temptations of town life.

The newspaper’s tone is revealing too. It presented the boy as a troublesome youngster who had been given opportunities and repeatedly rejected them. His desire to go to sea was treated less as an ambition than another sign that he would not settle.

Yet behind the rather stern Victorian judgement is a recognisable story: a 14-year-old taken from Plymouth and placed on a rural farm, quickly homesick, unwilling to remain and dreaming instead of a very different life.

For a few days in 1893, that attempt to straighten out a restless Plymouth boy brought him to Wembury.

Source: Cornish Times, Saturday 2 December 1893.
Supporting context: records of the Plymouth and Stonehouse Poor Law institutions and late-Victorian schooling and employment.

On this day in Wembury — 2 December 1989

The Western Evening Herald carried an advert seeking part-time bar and kitchen staff, along with a cleaner, for the Old Wheel pub in Wembury. The timing reflects a period of change, as 1989 marked the arrival of a new licensee, Mandy, whose tenure is recorded in local CAMRA pub guides. The recruitment drive suggests the new management was establishing a fresh team to take the pub forward. Known locally as the Old Wheel at that time, the pub stood at the centre of village life, and its continuity through changes of ownership underlined its role as a gathering place for Wembury residents.

(Source: Western Evening Herald, 2 December 1989 — staff advert; Plymouth CAMRA pub guide for licensee records.)