In John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazeteer of England and Wales, published between 1870 and 1872, Broad Clist (in the old spelling of the village name) ‘stands on the river Clist, [with] a station on the railway, a post office under Exeter and fairs on the first Monday of April and September’. The fair on 4 April 1870 took place, but three weeks later, on Wednesday 27 April, 63 of the 80 houses in the village were destroyed in less than an hour (our earlier post giving the date of the fire as 1871 was incorrect, and James Lawrie Monfries was still alive at this time, as we now know from his attendance at Martha Carnall’s wedding in May 1869). The Exeter Flying Post’s account describes ‘charred and blackened ruins which [the day before] were ... homes of peace, prosperity and happiness’.
The fire took hold around 1 o’clock in the afternoon, in the stables behind the Red Lion public house: a spark of burning soot from the pub chimney fell into the hay loft and set it on fire. The semicircle of thatched cottages around the pub in the village square were destroyed in ten minutes: as the press account says, ‘[they were] built to burn’. The fire then spread along the Exeter road, where the small traders and mechanics had their homes: a builder, the police sergeant, a carpenter, a ‘gentleman’s servant’ (perhaps at Killerton) and a shoemaker. A baker, saddler and stonemason were also burned out, and a boot/shoemaker, plumber/glazier and a second stonemason lost their homes on the Whimple road. Place Barton farm, in the centre of the village, with its cattle, pigs, poultry and stocks of barley ‘burned with a fury’. The four fire engines were hampered by a high wind, a lack of water and the intense heat, that melted the lead pipes through which it flowed. Seven cottages on the left-hand side of the square housed the village grocer and a second baker, the postmaster and the schoolmistress: they were owned by Henry Austin, the ‘relieving officer’ responsible for the workhouse and indigent in the village. He had ‘neglected to pay [his insurance] premium ... and ... now lost [his own home and] everything he possessed’.
The total cost of the damage to property was at least £10,000 (over £1 million today) and the loss fell personally on Sir Thomas Acland of Killerton, from whom most of the villagers rented their homes; the smallest tradesmen saw total losses of almost £2,000, and few of them were fully insured. Amazingly, no one was seriously injured, and the homeless found shelter with Lord Poltimore at West Clist, Colonel Acland at Killerton, the reverend Hart Davis in the Broadclyst rectory, the New Inn on the Whimple road, the sixteenth-century but stone-built and slate-roofed Prior’s Court and many other farmers’ cottages outside the village: ‘by nightfall there was not a single person who was unprovided with shelter’.
Among those offering a roof were a ‘Mr J. Chamberlain (builder)’, and here we come to the complicated relationship between our Chamberlain family and the fire. The ‘John Chamberlain, builder and family’ in the Exeter road, whose workshop and uninsured stock and tools worth over £200 were lost, is almost certainly Charlotte’s father, aged 74* but still apparently working as a craftsman, since a staircase worth £40 he had made for a new rectory in Bramford Speke was destroyed. His eldest son, born in 1826, was also John, but the Broadclyst Parish Register lists him as dying in May 1860, aged 34. His second son, James, born in 1828 and so 42 in 1870, seems to have prospered as both builder and farmer; in the 1881 census he was living at Kennicotts, a handsome now Grade II listed stone farmhouse which had a thatched roof and was near the Red Lion but seems to have survived unscathed; if he was not living there in 1870 he was clearly in a position to offer shelter to the dispossessed (in the 1881 Kelly’s Directory he is in both the ‘private resident’ and ‘commercial’ lists). We don’t know if the village butcher, Abraham Chamberlain, who had his ‘back premises burnt’ although his house was saved is a relation, nor the ‘Mrs Chamberlain, a widow’, who lived in the Exeter road.
* The 1841 census has John aged 45 and so born in 1796, but the 1851 census has him aged 60, so born in 1791; the 1871 census has him aged 84, which is almost certainly an error, but it also has him as ‘retired builder’ which may mean that quite apart from his age he and his business never recovered from the fire’s losses; also, he by then had Martha and Thomas Carnall living with him, and the infant John to help to raise.
Thanks are due to Kelly’s Directory, the Imperial Gazeteer and the Exeter Flying Post for its account, ‘Conflagration at Broadclyst’ of 4 May 1870, from which some details in this post are taken. Also Devon Heritage, for the Broadclyst Parish Register, burials 1857–1861 data.
and to Barbara !
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