More eccentricity, vicar?- LUCINDA LAMBTON

The Rev Stephen Hawker designed his own Cornish vicarage, was friends with Tennyson – and liked dressing up as a mermaid

At first glance, the Old Vicarage at Morwenstow in Cornwall appears to be a pleasing but somewhat ordinary 19thcentury stone house.

Find out more and you will be entranced to learn that its five chimneys are models of church towers. Furthermore, they are the favourite church towers of the renowned prelate poet the Rev Stephen Hawker, who built and lived in the house from 1837 until his death in 1875.

A most magical figure, a most winning eccentric, this was no ordinary man of the cloth. Considered to be ‘a picturesque exception to the Tractarian tradition of formal churchmanship’, he kept company with the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Kingsley. Longfellow also greatly admired him, although Hawker was somewhat dismissive about the American poet and his fellow countrymen.

He complainted, ‘Certain it is that there is something naturally narrow and meagre in the American mind. There is not, it is said, one original book among their publications; not a single mastermind as an orator or a poet (Longfellow is tuneful but mediocre) or statesman or divine. They copy England with a second-rate power.’

Hawker won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford. Tennyson delighted in admitting that, as far as poetry went, ‘Hawker has beaten me on my own ground with his Quest for the Sangraal.’ He was also responsible for The Song of the Western Men, a patriotic song, considered to this day to be the Cornish national anthem.

He built a tiny hut nearby, on the cliff’s edge, rearing up over the sea. There he would plunge into talk with his distinguished pals. Today, it’s Britain’s smallest National Trust property.