Budleigh Past and Present

Professor Ivan Roots Back in 2009, the late and great Ivan Roots, Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, was kind enough to give a talk in Budleigh Salterton about Sir Walter Raleigh’s poetry.  The event was a prelude to a performance of ‘Even such is Time’, the cantata by local composer Nicholas Marshall which is based on one of Raleigh’s most famous poems. I wrote about Professor Roots’ talk at http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/onion-not-potato.html and remember his conclusion that Sir Walter was ‘not a great poet’. Although Raleigh’s later poems made ‘quite good, subtle points’, he conceded, much of the early stuff was extremely conventional, ‘addressed to imaginary women like hundreds of other courtly compositions of the age’. Professor Dodsworth’s edition of the poems, entitled  Sir Walter Ralegh : The Poems, with other Verse from the Court of E...

OK, I now know that the bloke in the hat with the droopy Mexican moustache and the baggy red pants is telling young Walter Raleigh and his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert that one day they'll cross the oceans and discover fabulous kingdoms and untold riches.  But when as a seven-year-old in my Gloucestershire village school I saw this copy of Sir John Everett Millais' 1870 painting - thousands must have been produced in the hope of inspiring kids to go out and rule the British Empire - I think I probably saw that outstretched arm as giving me a message of hope.  'One day you'll be free,' it told me. 'Over the wall, out of the building, away on that sky-blue sea, no more stupid times tables and dreary recorder practice. And uniforms? Forget it. Nobody wears them in Eldorado. Playground bullying is unheard of. Never again will you be thrown in the nettles. There are worlds out there that you can only dream about.'  It was also in Gloucestershire that I...