I often get asked if or how I am related to the Cornish poet Charles Causley and it is not uncommon for people to assume that I am his son or grandson or nephew! Charles in fact was an only child and he had no children so I am none of these reactions to the celebrated poet. I am a distant cousin of Charles’ and often people can look a bit disappointed when I tell them this and dismiss it by saying “oh, you’re not a close relative then”. I often feel saddened by this because I feel that I am close to Charles in many regards – not just creatively but also the fact that Causley is a very rare and geographically specific family name.
Estimates suggest that there are roughly about 1000 people worldwide who have this surname, not many have left Devon but those who have moved away all trace their Causley line back to a very specific little area of Devon. That is the Teign Valley, particularly the small town of Chudleigh and the villages of Trusham, Ashton and Doddiscombesleigh. All of my father’s Causleys side originated in Chudleigh and environs. They were tenant farmers at Farleigh Farm between Trusham and Chudleigh for several generations and just over the fields, Charles Causley’s Trusham family were living and working in Trusham. Their ancestral family cottage is famous in the area. It is called Mount Pleasant which is a very grand name for such a tiny cottage which started life most probably as single-roomed cow shed or byre or hovel. Extra rooms have been added over the years but it is still tiny building and how nearly ten Causleys lived in there at one point I have no idea!! Charles’ father Charlie senior was working as a groom and gardener down in Teignmouth just before the First World War and it was whilst he was living there that he met a lovely young Cornish maid who was also working in the town as a nanny and housemaid. They fell wildly in love and the rest is history.
Charles was born and raised his mother’s hometown of Launceston but he never lost touch with his fathers side of the family and he eventually inherited Mount Pleasant and owned the ancestral Causley cottage until the day he died. I am very pleased to say that a couple who were from the village now live in the cottage with their family which is exactly what Charles would have wanted. I am also related to the wife of the wonderful Devon singer; the late Dave Lowry. His wife Jill was originally a Causley before marrying Dave and my parents were close friends of her family when they lived in Pinhoe as teenagers. Jill’s mother was known as ‘Captain Causley’ because she was the leader of the village girl guide group. Even though there were two septette Causley families living in Pinhoe during the 20th century, they believed at the time that they were not related. Jill Causley’s family had originally come from Gittisham near Honiton and Ottery St Mary and she believed they were not connected to the Teign Valley Causleys.
During the lockdown years of the covid pandemic I became particularly interested in researching family ancestry and discovered that if you have a surname like Causley in your family then you are a member of a very niche clan with deep roots in rural Devon. After some hours of research on Ancestry dot com I was able to tie up all of our various Causley families and trace how all of them eventually led back to Chudleigh or Trusham and other Teign Valley villages. The Causley family were well known as master thatchers and took their trade to various parts of Devon. There is even a Causley Farm between the villages of Curscombe and Buckerell in East Devon. An etymologist has assured me the surname originates from the hamlet of Caseley in the parish of Lustleigh which isn’t far up the A382 just the other side of Bovey Tracey and snuggled into the North East corner of Dartmoor. The place name means a clearing (leigh or ley) where watercress grows which is rather lovely I think and is of course of Old English origin. Many English surnames take their names from where a family lived and Causley is no different. The same goes for the other variant spellings of the name such as Casley, Causley, Caseley and Causey. It has absolutely nothing to do with causeways or similar words as many dodgy websites still profess!
I have relatives who live in Australia and also some in Canada too. Many Devonians left the West Country to find work in Canada in the late 1800’s and early 20th century. This is another thing I have in common with Charles Causley: his father was born in Canada of Devonian parents who returned to Devon shortly after Charlie senior was born. My father’s mother who was a Tremlett (another ancient Devon surname) was also born in Canada to Devonian parents who left Crediton to find work across the Atlantic. My Grandma’a paternal grandfather (Philip Tremlett senior) was a well known shoemaker in Crediton who lived on Bowden Hill. There were two Tremlett families in the Crediton & Sandford area. The Sandford Tremlett’s were rather wealthy and their sons were decorated with honours during the wars but sadly our branch of the Tremlett family tree were on the other end of the social scale! My great grandparents Philip (junior) and his wife Susie Tremlett sailed from Liverpool to seek a new life in Canada and they were very fortunate because the ship they caught to sail across the Atlantic was apparently the ship right after the Titanic had left Liverpool Docks so thank goodness they didn’t catch the earlier sailing!!!
Life in Canada was harsh and after eighteen years the family decided to return to England. My Grandmother was a teenager at that time along with her two younger sisters. She said that coming to live in Crediton in the early 1930s was like returning to the Dark Ages because in Canada they had had electricity and fridges and indoor toilets and in Crediton they had none of those comforts as the Tremlett’s were very poor and from a large family with little to go around. Eventually my grandmother met my Causley Grandfather and ended up moving to Pinhoe and the rest was history on that side of the family! Funnily enough my mother was also from the Teign Valley and grew up in Doddiscombesleigh but she did not meet my father there. It wasn’t until my maternal grandparents cottage was condemned that they were moved to a new council house in Pinhoe near Exeter and it was there she met my father when they were teenagers. And that was how I came to be christened in the ancient Norman font of St Michael and All Angels church in Pinhoe. Mum and I still regularly return to Doddi to put flowers on the family graves and it was during a stroll around the churchyard one day that we discovered a Causley gravestone! We had no idea there was a solitary Causley buried in Doddiscombesleigh and my Mum said how strange it was to think that she had attended church and Sunday school for all of those years, not knowing she was walking past the grave of a man who bore the surname that would one day be hers! It’s funny how things come around.
It is a funny old thing how people talk about being “from” a particular place because when I look at my family tree, yes it is overwhelmingly Devonian but no-one seemed to stay put for very long. some lived in a particular village for several generations but many of them moved about from one village to another, following the work no doubt and some moved into the city of Exeter. In many ways I am very Exonian. I was born there and so were my parents and so were some of their ancestors too. And yet I’ve never lived in Exeter very long, not until I was in my 20s. We all grew up in villages around and about. I was raised just outside of Whimple and had a wonderful rural childhood there. And yet we were often made to feel like incomers by the locals even though we had only moved from Pinhoe which was the next stop on the Waterloo train line!
In more recent years my Mum reflected on all of our close neighbours who were mostly farmers and housewives and gardeners etc. The Kings were from Aylesbeare, so was Mrs Edwards. The Rowlands were from near Honiton, Mrs Flay was from Clyst Hydon, Miss Morgan was from Talaton and so it went on. It turns out that the vast majority, while thoroughly East Devonians, were all from other villages around just like we were! And most annoyingly, in recent years through my ancestry research I have uncovered that a lot of my maternal grandmothers, mother’s side of the family were from all of those villages and partially they were Lippetts from Whimple (many still buried in the churchyard) and Hardings from Ottery St Mary. Which interestingly ties us to the Lancashire folk musician, comedian and broadcaster Mike Harding who father was also from Ottery St Mary! What a small world it is hey! Another fascinating revelation for me which I uncovered through ancestry research is my family connection to villages in North East Dartmoor. I love that part of Dartmoor, ever since first visiting the Dartmoor Folk Festival in South Zeal I have felt an affinity for the area but again, I did not think we had any family connections to the area until relatively recently when I uncovered that my father’s paternal grandmother Eva Causley (nee Full) who was born in Pinhoe, her family were originally from a village below the South East of Dartmoor called Woodland and Eva’s maternal grandmother was called Ann Aggett and Ann had been born in South Tawton but moved to Woodland with her husband Henry Binmore. Ann Aggett’s parents were Ann Brimblecombe from Throwleigh and Richard Aggett from South Tawton. These two had been married in St Michael the Archangel church in Chagford in 1802 and their combined lineage is practically a history of North East Dartmoor in itself! Aggett and Brimblecombe are two very famous Dartmoor surnames and between them they had family from Gidleigh, Throwleigh, Murchington and South Tawton parishes.
I got back as far as my 7 x great grandfather Oliver Lidger Aggett who lived his entire life in Gidleigh and was buried in the churchyard there in 1777. Then back to the Causleys; my great, great grandmother Bathildas Causley (nee Shapley) was born in Ilsington, Dartmoor in 1855 where her family had lived for generations and confusingly was baptised in Ashburton Methodist Church (now Ashburton Arts Centre where I have played several times!) but as far as I knew we had no methodists in our family, her parents Samuel & Ann Shapley were both Anglican and on the 1861 census they are living in and running The Star Inn in Liverton which is not a very methodist thing to do at all! Growing up in East Devon, Dartmoor was always this wild, intriguing and romantic place and when we climbed up to Hollyball and Straightway Head we could see the hills of Dartmoor in the distance. It the home of Widecombe Fair and the Hound of the Baskervilles and it felt like such a distant land that I never imagined I had any family connection to the it. So I may not be able to say “my family are from such and such a village and we’ve lived there for generations” because that simple is not the case and all my ancestors kept moving around to find work but one thing I can say with complete certainty is that I am a Devonian and my Ancestry DNA results tell me that is am 83% Devon origin with a touch of Cornish on mums side ironically – not the Causley side at all!
One of my mum’s great grannies was a Warmington from Morwenstow. Warmington doesn’t sound like a particularly Cornish name but they had lived in that parish since the 1600s so they must have interbred with the locals quite a bit! And they must have known the famous Reverend Hawker very well. No doubt he christened and married several of my ancestors up there in North East Cornwall. Doubly ironically Reverend Hawker was a Devonian with a Devonshire father and a mother from Hampshire and he composed the Cornish national anthem; Trelawney. Perhaps one day a Cornish person might be likewise inspired to return the favour and compose a national anthem for Devon! Sadly I never got to meet Charles. I wrote him a letter where I was a teenager and was beginning to find my own voice musically and with a growing interest in poetry and literature and all things of a folky nature. I later learned that at the time I wrote to Charles his health was failing and he was living in a nursing home during the final years of his life. When he died on the 4th of November 2003, just a few days after my birthday, I was in my second year of a four-year degree course at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and couldn’t have been further away from home. Ironically my family live on the northern fringes of Dartmoor, not far from Okehampton and a quick 20 minute drive down the A30 to Charles’ hometown of Launceston. I’ve had a lot to do with that town since I first began setting Charles’ poems to music in the mid 2000s. It’s a shame that now I have learnt so much about our family ancestry, I am certain that Charles would have loved to have known what I have uncovered about the Causley family history and learnt of my Canadian connections.
Another strange twist of fate was that some of my Causley relatives ended up living in Launceston during Charles’ time. My grandfather’s brother Stan Causley was an engine driver and his work took him to live in Launceston before the Beeching cuts. Interestingly, just over the other border of Devon, another of my grandfather’s brothers; Arthur Causley was the last station master at Lyme Regis where his grandchildren now run Causley Taxi Cabs in the town! My Uncle Stan and his wife met with Charles on a coupe of occasions when they invited him into their home in St Stephens, Launceston and over my Aunt Clara’s kitchen table they enjoyed her famous congress tarts and tried to figure out how they may be related. Sadly they could not come to any conclusions.
How I wish I could go back in time and tell them that were were indeed related not all that far back, they shared a great, great, great grandfather in common. It is sad how it only takes a few generations for people to forget their family history and relatives and ancestors are completely forgotten. I feel I have so much in common with Charles now that I strongly believe we have a connection and that short five days I spent in his cottage, ‘Cyprus Well’ recording his poems and playing his piano, there were many spine-tingly moments, and not just me but all of the musicians involved said they felt it too. It all felt very right and meant to be and I must say, I’ve never recorded an album like it. They all are special in their own ways but that week was something quite unique! I felt he whispered to the tunes to me when I sat down at my piano on West Street in Exeter with his book of collected poems in front of me. The melodies came so easily, quicker than anything I had composed before or since. I don’t know what you believe but I believe he was with me every step of the way and even though we may no have met physically in this particular lifetime, I am quite convinced he has been guiding me all the way. I wonder if he ever visited Caseley or even saw a road sign pointing towards it and wondered if it had any connection to his surname?
When researching for the album Cyprus Well I spent some time in the Special Collections library of Exeter University who hold Charles’ personal manuscripts and diaries. I found his early workings for his poem ‘Trusham’ about his paternal, ancestral village. There was a verse that never got used for the final poem but it spoke of his journey home from Trusham across Dartmoor. Almost certainly he would have gone along the Teign Valley road, then driven past Dunsford, then to Doccombe and on to Moretonhampstead and from there to Whiddon Down and along the old A30 back to Launceston. Which means he would have definitely driven past where I now live, yards away from my door which is a comporting thought. He also used to visit Ted and Carol Hughes in North Tawton and would have used the very same road to get to their house too. I love the thought that the roads, lanes and landscape I am so familiar in my lifetime and the same roads and landmarks that he knew and that countless other Causley’s knew going back through the centuries.