Tales from Watchet [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Of/f/'atchet is a small commercial port on the west coast of Somerset, ^^just opposite Cardiff on the Welsh coast. Most visitors would call it a village, but the three thousand people who live there call it a town. This is because until the end of the days of the sailing ships, Watchet was quite an important, busy town. Even in 1934, the people of Watchet owned 126 sailing ships, and Watchet sailors, like Yankee Jack, who died in 1933 at the good old age of ninety-three, travelled all over the world. My parents went to live in Watchet in 1987, and in 1988, when we went to stay with them, I was sure that the town must be worth writing about. Not long afterwards, I met two writers about Watchet. Ben Norman and Leslie Wedlake were born in Watchet and have seen many of its changes. Neither of them were professional historians or writers, but they write with a loiowledge and love for their little harbour town that no professional could copy. Mr. Wedlake, who was born in 1901, even tried to leave Watchet and go to make his fortune in London, but one year later he was back. London could not hold him. I could not write a history of the town in the short time I spent in Watchet, so I started to look for stories about the people there. I found more stories than I could put in a book this size; how the people of Watchet beat off the Vikings one thousand years ago; how the soldiers of William Cromwell attacked a Royalist ship on horseback when it became stuck on the rocks and made naval history; how in 1682 they found William Dashwood, the customs officer for Watchet, in the company of Watchet smugglers; how the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, visiting Watchet with William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, talked with the sailors and so wrote his most famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Have you ever been bored when people tell you about people and places you have never met or visited, or show you photographs that mean nothing to you? I have. On the other hand, a complete stranger can tell a good story about his great-great grandparents, or about an old man that he remembers from when he was a boy, or a ghost story. Out of all the tales I heard, these are the ones I chose to put in this book. They are all about Watchet, but because I, a stranger in the town, found them interesting, I hope you will find them interesting, too.