OUR OLDEST (AND MOST INFAMOUS) OLD BOY
It was always easy to lose concentration and let your mind drift during those daily assemblies at the Grammar School and especially when the Headmaster was lecturing us on our behaviour and the “guttersnipes” who were letting the school down.
I would look around the old school hall and inevitably my eyes would light on the board listing the Headmasters and, particularly, Rev. Zachariah Mudge. What a wonderful name, how Biblical, almost Dickensian! Little did I think at that time that Rev. Zachariah Mudge would lead us to probably our oldest known pupil at the school.
I was reading recently about the eighteenth century academic, pamphleteer and iconoclast, John Shebbeare, who was put in the stocks and imprisoned for his verbal and written attacks on the Hanoverian Kings of England. And I found he had been born in BIdeford!
This spurred me to find out more about this interesting character, and I discovered that he had been educated by the self-same Rev. Zachariah Mudge. However, the historical records available inform us that he was educated at “the free school, Exeter”.
Now Shebbeare, sometimes spelt Shebear, was born in BIdeford in 1709 and died in 1788. Meanwhile Rev. Zachariah Mudge was Headmaster at BIdeford Grammar School from 1717 to 1732, when Shebbeare was between the ages of 8 and 23. And the Mudge family archive describes Shebbeare as one of his pupils. There is also no evidence of Mudge ever having taught at a free school in Exeter. So, it is far more likely that Mudge educated Shebbeare in his home town of BIdeford, and that he was indeed our first known Old Boy!
John Shebbeare was born in the “hundred” of BIdeford, where his family owned land that bears their name. His father was an attorney and corn-factor. Under Rev. Zachariah Mudge’s schooling he is said to have given “evidence of his future eminence in both misanthropy and literature.” Aged 16 he was “apprenticed to a surgeon and afterwards set up for himself.” Apparently he also married Susanna, a BIdeford girl, and they subsequently had three children.
However, Shebbeare soon got himself into trouble by lampooning his master and also members of the city corporation in Exeter. This necessitated a hasty removal to Bristol where he lived at 10 Guinea Street near the docks until 1751. While there he did research, in partnership with a chemist, into “Bristol Waters” and “the Causes of Diabetes”. (His Guinea Street home was featured in a fascinating recent BBC programme, “A House Through Time”)
In 1752 he travelled to Paris where he claimed to have obtained a medical degree, before returning to England and starting his new career, this time not as a doctor but as a political writer!
He soon became infamous for his scurrilous publications, and got into a great deal of trouble with the law. In 1758 he was tried for libel with the Attorney General himself prosecuting him. He was found guilty, fined £5 and given three years imprisonment in Kings Bench Prison as well as sentenced to a spell in the stocks at Charing Cross.
Shebbeare invited his supporters to attend this, presumably to prevent his adversaries from attacking him and he persuaded an accomplice to shelter him from the stones, rotten fruit and other missiles of the turbulent mob with an umbrella!!
The famous artist and cartoonist, William Hogarth, figures Shebbeare in “The Polling”, one of his “Humours of an Election” series. Shebbeare is portrayed with a prison shackle still on his ankle and one of his political pamphlets in pocket, trying to persuade a mad man to vote.
Diarist, Fanny Burney, describes him as “the rudest and most boring man I have ever met.” Certainly he was coarse in language, unpleasant and abusive. He refers in one of his diatribes to women and Scotsmen as “the two greatest evils on earth”, and of his own marriage, he declares,” I know but too well what it is to be married. I think I have been yoked one and forty years and I have wished my wife underground any time since.”
Shebbeare continued to the end of his days in similar fashion, racking up debt, promising commissions which were never met against advances, libelling and slandering friend and foe alike.
Certainly not the nicest BIdeford Grammar School Old Boy, but a very interesting one!
Footnote : I am grateful to Tyler Pollard of the North Devon Record Office and fellow Old Boy, John Bennett, for their assistance in compiling this piece. Ray Auvray, February 2020
