Having got over these preliminaries, he settled down to the finer conduct of his campaign. The first arrow was sped from the correspondence column of the Western Herald, and was editorially headed ‘Changes at Tittingham’:

Sir,

On a recent visit to Tittingham I noticed with regret that Opie Cottage, that little architectural gem of the Golden Age of our domestic culture—‘when Good King George the Third rul’d our land’—has disappeared from its former site in Cow Lane, and is in process of being supplanted by an excavation bearing every appearance of Public Baths. If the ratepayers’ money is to be spent on these gewgaws of Socialism, is it too much to ask that we should not be deprived of the relics of a happier England, in addition to paying for these so-called improvements?

I am, sir, etc.,

Devonian

159As Aubrey had intended, the imputation of Socialized baths paid for out of the rates drew a dignified correction from the secretary of the Memorial Committee. Devonian wrote again:

Sir,

I stand corrected. But though the Secretary of the Foale Memorial Committee has courteously elucidated that the large pit in Cow Lane is to be a Folk Museum, he does not explain why the provision of this no doubt desirable amenity should have entailed the demolition of one of the few houses in Tittingham on which the eye of a connoisseur could dwell with satisfaction.

These regrets for a house known to have been infested with rats and unconnected with the main drainage system were too much for Mr Moggs, the only Socialist member of the Tittingham Town Council. He wrote to the Western Herald with manly wrath and verbosity about the crying need to do away with all such dwellings of the so-called Georgian epoch, designed to be the smug abodes of toadying parasites, and to replace them by a proper housing scheme for the workers of Tittingham. To this Devonian replied that though he feared he and Mr Moggs could not exactly see eye to eye about Opie Cottage, he entirely agreed about the foolishness of building folk museums while the ‘folk’ of the present day were as ill-housed as ever they had been.

After this letter, the editor of the Western Herald inserted: ‘This correspondence is now closed.’160

He spoke for his own pages. From across the county border, the editor of the Cornubian had watched this shindy blow up. Thankful that no such acrimony had broken into his own quiet correspondence column, he accepted, nevertheless—for one likes to be in the movement—a short article about the Cornish artist John Opie, which, after some irrefutable twaddle about Opie’s birthplace and schooling, continued: ‘There is good reason to suppose that Opie spent some months, at any rate, in Tittingham, then a thriving and unspoiled specimen of the Devon market-town’—Aubrey had wavered for some time between this and ‘then a rotten borough’—‘a sojourn commemorated in the name of Opie Cottage, long borne by a small house at the foot of Cow Lane. But those who seek him there will seek in vain, for the house, with all its interesting associations and aroma of the past, has recently been destroyed. Eheu, fugaces!’