Sir,—I agree with the Dean that we ought to have some permanent war memorial of the brave men of the city and neighbourhood who have fallen in the great war, and though I could wish that side by side with this a fund should be raised for the scholarships to Secondary schools upon which the children of men who have died should have a first claim, and though I hope that other towns and villages might consider this stimulus to higher education a far-reaching and a helpful form of remembering the august dead, I cannot but wish that some such active body as the Citizens’ League could see their way to a house-to-house canvass for a fund to erect a really beautiful building which should serve the double purpose of enshrining the memory of the dead and being a great public benefit to the whole city.  Everybody to whom I speak admits the need of such a hall for public gatherings, for music, lectures, etc.  I understand that the Birmingham citizens have a scheme of this kind for a hall to be used chiefly for music.  The hall they contemplate is to seat 4,000 people; a hall to seat 2,000 would be ample for the needs of Carlisle.  At Birmingham, I gather the suggestion is to have an entrance hall, open at all times to the public, in which the names of the fallen would be inscribed, opening into a larger building which would be built entirely with a view to its beauty and acoustic properties.  Those who know the great use that is made of the fine organ in the Colston Hall at Bristol every Saturday might realise what an education to the whole city organ recitals for the people can be….  At some time or other there will surely be adequate municipal buildings in Carlisle.  Why should not this memorial hall be a nucleus of the scheme.  I cannot do much, but to prove my interest I shall be willing to contribute £100 towards such an effort.

(Carlisle Journal, 1 April 1919, p. 5)

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It is not to be wondered at, in this hurry of the nineteenth century, that we forget the days that are past, and how we became a people great in deed and thought and aspiration.  It is all the more important that we should place before the eyes of our children landmarks of history that cannot be mistaken, and show them that, for all the haste of our time, we are not unthankful, nor unmindful, of those who went before us and who, by the grace of God, have helped to set us on an hill and to order our going. (p. 691)

It is with intent to set up such a landmark of history in the domain of English thought and literature, that a committee has been formed to erect a beautiful monument in the Whitby Churchyard to the memory of Cædmon, the first maker of Christian poetry in England.  We believe in local associations to quicken and inspire, and it seemed that there was no place so surely connected with the beginnings of our scared poetry as the cliff of Streonshalh, still crowned with the remains of the Abbey that bears St. Hild’s name.  Hild, the Abbess, set up her school of learning on the Bright-Shining Bay Cliff in the year 658.  She passed to her rest in the year 680. (p. 691)

It is not too much to say that our vernacular literature was born here, between those two dates.  It is not too much to say, that we speak English as we speak it to-day largely because in those years, probably between 670 and 680, a poor herdman of the House was inspired to essay the singing of a song, and was, by the encouragement of the Abbess Hild, set to work to write a Bible paraphrase in verse. (p. 691)….

As to the place of Cædmon in the history of English song what shall be said but this?—That he was the fountain-head of the deep vein of serious poetry which has flowed on perpetually since his time, to the good and grace of the nation.  “Sweet and humble,” says Bede, “was his poetry; no trivial or vain song came from his lips.  The aim of his verse was to stir men to despise the world and to aspire to heaven.” (p. 692)….

I had long felt that it was a great pity that, whilst many visitors passed through Whitby in the holiday seasons, there was no visible sign of the fact of Cædmon’s life and work to arrest their attention.  The matter was brought before a meeting of the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society at Whitby, last October; the proposition was favourably received by them, and a local committee determined to carry the matter forward. (pp. 693-4)

Consultation with men eminent in the archaeological world, who were well versed in northern antiquities and the history of Northumbria …. had made it clear that the most fitting monument to Cædmon would be a cross of Anglian design, whose motive should be borrowed from the four great Anglian crosses that were extant in Cædmon’s time—the Ruthwell, the Bewcastle, the Bishop Acca of Hexham, and the Rothbury crosses …. There seemed to be an ideally perfect site for the monument on a vacant space of ground in the old churchyard of St. Mary’s at the top of the steps.  The ashes of the Christian poet may long ere this have been washed into the sea, for the cliff on which the church stands has had constant inroad made upon it, but it is quite as likely that his dust still lies in the consecrated ground in the midst of which the quaint old church stands.  The rector and the churchwardens gave their assent to the proposal to have the cross placed there, and it will be seen not only by all who pass up towards St. Hild’s Abbey, but far and wide over the harbour, and so to the western cliff. (p. 694)

The monument itself is no slavish copy as to detail or design, but a glance will show that it is of Anglian shape and Anglian in general treatment and scale, while at the same time it is evidently of nineteenth-century work.  It will stand up out of a solid base to the height of twenty-two feet. (p. 694)….

It was not a very easy matter to find the right kind of stone for this beautiful Christian monument….  The stone selected as best in every way for strength and power to resist decay was that of the Black Pasture Quarry above Chollerford.  This quarry had probably been worked in Roman times.  The Chollerford bridge-piers the Romans built are still seen unworn beneath the water at the ford. (p. 695)

(Sunday Magazine, 27 (September 1898), 691-6)

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Sir,—I will have the butchers against me and the farmers will not be well pleased, but men, and they are in the majority, who desire to win the war, to keep the price of meat reasonably low for poor folk, and at the end of the war wish their country to escape bankruptcy, will be with me in my appeal to this ancient city to try one meatless day each week.  I have calculated from such facts of our dead meat supply as are available, that if we all agreed to do this we should save in Carlisle the slaughter of 3,800 animals—oxen, sheep, calves and pigs in the year.  If all the cities of Great Britain followed suit we should not only prevent anything like a meat famine, but it would make the supply of imported carcasses, which, it is believed, amounts to one-quarter of the meat eaten, unnecessary.  It would have a good effect on the health of the whole population, for doctors are agreed that we all of us eat more meat than is wholesome for us.  But not the least good that would accrue is that we should, on that meatless day, turn our attention to a fish diet, and to the use of such vegetables as lentils and haricot beans as are now little used, while the good old days of “poddish” and “haver” bread might possibly return.  I know I shall be told that a man cannot do hard manual work without his bacon and beef-steak….  And if we go back only fifty years we shall find that the bulk of the workers of the land used meat quite sparingly, say once or twice a week.  I do not plead for any change in the meat diet of the mass of poor and rich alike, but we are at war—we may continue at war for longer than I like to prophesy—and I believe it a simple patriotic duty to go in for saving our stock of meat in this “right little, tight little island,” and know no better way than by having one meatless day in the week and urging all my friends and fellow-citizens to do the same.

(Carlisle Journal, 10 November 1916, p. 8)

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We had been talking about the sagacity of our Cumberland collies, “But there is no tale so touching, said my friend [Miss Frances Power Cobbe], “as the story of that Rizpah among dogs, who watched for three months her dead master ‘fade away’ in the ‘savage place’ by the Red Tarn, on Helvellyn.   I have been lately collecting from the Classics, from prose writers and poets in many lands, some pictures and incidents of dog-life.  The ‘Friend of Man’ has nowhere appeared so human in its tender kindness, so faithful and affectionate in its memory, as in this instance of terrible vigil. (p. 95)

“The unburied corpse with the lobe watcher on the mountain seemed more solemn to my imagination than the graves by which so many dogs have hungered till they died.  How one wishes that some record of that heroic little creature could be placed where passers by might see it and ponder.” (p. 95)

“The thing can easily be done,” I answered.  “We have but to get leave from the Lord of the Manor to erect a cairn upon Helvellyn overlooking Striding Edge, and build into it a simple slate-stone slab that shall record the fact, and shall serve to remind its readers, of the tragedy, and the pathetic incident which so touched the hearts of three poets in the memorable year 1805.  Memorable to Scott for that in the April of that year he gave his ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ to the world; memorable to Wordsworth because that he finished in mid-May of that year the poem that (p. 95) described the marvellous making of his own mind in ‘The Prelude.’” (p. 96)

So the thing was agreed upon, and the inscription to be engraved was written; and not without much writing in and writing out did it take final shape as follows:—

Beneath this spot were found in 1805 the remains of Charles Gough, killed by a fall from the rocks.  His dog was still guarding the skeleton. (p. 96)….

That devotion in the little watcher by the dead, has been long ago crowned with song, and when in memory of—

                That strength of feeling, great
            Beyond all human estimate!

we toiled up Helvellyn, through the heat of a long Midsummer day—June 18th, 1891—behind the sledge that, not without much difficulty, bore the record of “Fidelity” to the mountain top, we felt that the chains of love that bind man to the so-called brute creatures were stronger than had been thought of, and that the interchange of spirit between two worlds that seem so wide apart, was more possible than had been imagined. (p. 124)

There on the wind-combed mountain-top, above the dreadful precipice where Gough perished, the haulers of stone, the worker of mortar, the builder of the memorial cairn worked hard for a couple of days, and left behind them in what has been called “the Temple of the Winds and of the Sun,” a stone that may with its simple tale, touch the hearts of passers-by, for generations to come, and stand a monument to an heroic vigil, and to the Fidelity and Love, no death could quench, of the humble “Friend of Man.” (p. 124)

(Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Association for the Advancement of Literature and Science, 16 (1892), 95-124)

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