THHE NORTH DEVON ACCENT

I was born in Derbyshire where I spent my first seventeen years on this mortal coil, so do not have a North Devon accent, but my wife is a North Devonian, so has a North Devon accent. I have an accent which is basically Derbyshire but it was not until I left Derbyshire, in order to do a brewing course at the at the Heriot-Watt college, Edinburgh that  realised that I had an accent. Except for one, the other English chaps on the course were either from the south or had public school accents. One chap in particular who had a London accent used to try and take the mickey by trying to imitate my accent and that of a chap called Jack who was from Bolton. Like a lot of southerners, he obviously could not even distinguish the difference between a Yorkshire and a Lancashire accent so it did not worry me too much, but it had obviously one day got to Jack,  as he unburdened himself to me. He said it is not as if he came from somewhere like Wigan where they do talk a bit funny, but there is nothing wrong with a Bolton accent. He told me quite seriously that they say "turkey" in Wigan not "turkey". When he said turkey the second time it sounded like when he said turkey the first time, except that it would not have been if I  was a fellow Lancastrian. At that time I could tell which town, almost, that a person in Derbyshire came from, so  could understand his sentiments.
        When I caught the train back to Derbyshire from Edinburgh at the end of term I used to get off at Chesterfield  and catch the bus to Matlock. Once I was walking through the middle of Chesterfield and I passed two youths who were in conversation. I have no idea what they were talking about but I just caught the words: " Happen, he's a mate of thine". "Lovely", I thought after ten weeks of "Och Aye, the noo" and eating 'sangwhiches'.
        After leaving Edinburgh, I went to the East Riding of Yorkshire where my two eldest children were born. My daughter was three when we left and just starting to say 'coat' with a Hull accent.  As with all accents they have their own words as well as a particular way of saying words we all use. Sometimes words have a different meaning, so in Hull, if you told someone that you would wait while 6 o'clock for them you would be telling them that you wold wait until 6 o'clock. Imagine the confusion when British Rail put up new signs at level crossings which said, "STOP WHILE RED LIGHT FLASHES". I left Hull when this was hot news in the local press. My new job took me and my family to Devizes in Wiltshire.
           I had no problem understanding the Wiltshire accent. If there was a problem it was with them understanding me. This was brought home to me when I went into someone's office where there was someone else on the phone. There was a lot of ,"Sorry but could you repeat that", "Could you speak a little slower" and "What was that again?". The chap on the phone covered the mouthpiece and explained that he was on the phone to someone in Clekheaton, in Yorkshire and he could not understand what the other chap was saying. I offered to translate and spoke to the chap in Yorkshire, who was a bit frustrated by this time. He was broad Yorkshire but we had a normal conversation  and got the business sorted quite quickly.
             This following anecdote does not concern the Wiltshire accent but since the story happened whilst I worked in Wiltshire I include it here. One day I had two chaps from Bristol visit the brewery and one Kept saying to the other, "Good ideal". I mentioned this to someone afterwards and he said that sometimes Bristolians stick an 'l' on words ending in an 'a' and told me the story about a chap in Bristol who was getting poor television reception, so called in an engineer. The engineer told the chap that he thought, "it was the areal" whereupon the customer replied, "no its not that, we had a new aerial a few months ago". Then someone told me about a Bristolian going to listen to Tinal Turner at the areal arenal but I think he made that up on the spot. 
            My eldest son who would qualify to play cricket for Yorkshire as he was born there has a very broad Wiltshire accent. One of the men who worked at the brewery had the christian name of Pearl and I used to love the Wiltshire way of saying Pearl - something like 'Purrul'. The Wiltshire accent like the Somerset and Dorset accent sounds very West Country to me. They are very 'oo ar' as my wife says.  As a Northerner I would not be allowed to say that, without speaking out of turn. It is a bit like using the "n word" to a black person when you are white. It is their word to use amongst themselves we are told, or is that an urban myth.
         My wife thinks that her accent is a bit "oo ar", but when I moved to North Devon my impression of the accent was that it was a bit clipped, not at all like theWiltshire accent or even my accent where we tend to draw out the words. It has been nicknamed the Derbyshire drawl. The "oo-ar" thing must be something in the North Devon collective vocabulary as I heard a TV presenter who I know is from North Devon say it, except that he said it with a BBC accent. Listeners in general would wonder what he was on about. He just tagged it onto something he said when he indicated that they were now going to visit somewhere in a rural area in the West Country.
         A lot of regional accents include an element of bad grammar. My mother always excused my accent by adding, "Well, at least you speak grammatically correct". This obviously influenced me, as I accept accents but not bad grammar. I was a little disappointed when I heard my son,  refer to "they bullocks". I sternly reproached him. Realising what I was referring to he said, "Sorry! Them bullocks". What can you do? I must point out that now he speaks (and writes) very well. We get there in the end.
          I soon got used to North Devon colloquialisms like " be um"? which means "are you"? or "is it"? and "where ze to"? which means "where are you"? or "where is it". I once saw on a toilet door in a pub "Ere tiz". There are of course many more colloquiqlisms. There must be some that I have adopted (called going native) and others that I have forgotten. I ran the post office at Swimbridge for many years so I had to understand the accent to know what people wanted. Many customers were pensioners so quite broad with their accents. I remember one chap in particular who used to add "ee" to all his verbs which apparently was quite common at one time. There always seemed to be a lot of "ees" when he spoke with the "be ums" and "ee" being used to mean "you" as well.
          North Devon must be one of the few parts of England where poems and pros are written in the local dialect. This has been done for centuries and people still give Devon Readings on special occasions like the entertainment after a harvest supper. I suppose at a superficial level the North Devon, like the Scottish  accent is not too difficult to understand but as they say  the more you know about something the more you realise what you do not know. I was very pleased to recognise the Edinburgh accent of Maggie Smith in the film"The prime of Miss Jean Brodie". I have now lived in North Devon for thirty years but I would never try to speak with a North Devon accent and at the same time I still find it difficult to follow a conversation between North Devonians. I am OK if I concentrate and do not lose the thread of the conversation but jumping in cold if this happens, is very difficult for me to do. The conversations I get involved in usually relate to agriculture or local people so this can easily happen.
         I have had to learn about the rural way of life as well as the accent and a lot of the words which I have learnt have been Devon agricultural words like tallet for hay loft, shippin for cowshed, dashel for thistle, arrish for stubble, hapse for fasten (as in gate),  haler for tarpaulin, hood for wood, like a henavoreday (literally a hen before day light) meaning startled or confused (as a hen would be if woken at night), browse for twigs, twobill (tubale) for mattock. There are some words which I particularly like but which are not agricultural words. There is dimmet and nightimes for evening and night. There is to terrify which means to tease and drive a person mazed or mad but a person could be mazed on their own account or just plain crazy. Backseyvore is a word I particularly like. It means back to front or "a*se about ti*" in what one could call North Devon vulgar slang or more simply "backwards".
          You will notice in the word "backseyvore" that fore is pronounced vore. This is part of the dialect, that fs are pronounced as vs. My wife had a sheep- dog and when you wanted him to go behind the sheep to collect them the command was fore, short for  forward. When I shouted "Fore" he looked at me as if to say, "What word is that"? If I shouted "Vore" he knew what to do. It reminds me of computers where you have to be very specific in your commands.
         I came across the word viddy in a pub car park where there was a sign which read 'Please Park viddy". Viddy means neat or tidy. I read that it came from the Old English word 'fiddes' and since in North Devon they pronounce 'fs' as 'vs' it became viddy.
        Another Devon word is suent which means even or regular. Your tractor may run suent. I particularly like the observation made by A C Coles: that a church dance should be viddy but never suent.       
       There are also sayings which are repeated in conversation like "dear lill' boy" as a term of endearment for a boy or "lill maid" for a girl .These are often said so quickly that it is easy to miss them or part of them. We have phrases like this up North like "mending the fire" meaning to put more coal on it, which once caused some confusion in Swimbridge even when said quite slowly.
       Just to be a little contoversial at the end I would say that I have seen lists of so called dialect words which are really word spelt as they are said in that particlar part of the country. For instance  first is pronounced 'fost' in Derbyshire but 'fust' in Devonshire. This does not mean that they are dialect words like 'backseyvore' in Devon, where in Derbyshire they would say 'bakkuds forruds' which is more a dialect way of saying 'backwards forewards' than actual words. It is a bit like the American song Let's call the whole thing off  where there are the words "You like tomato and I like tomahto". One is said the English way and the other the American way but they are both the red fruit we have in salad (rabbit food).

Memorial Mystery

Enter the Church of St James Swimbridge, walk down the central aisle towards the high altar, stand at the sanctuary steps and cast your eyes to the left. There you will see the memorial to John Nott "who was born into this world the 10th day of March1856". The memorial is in the form of an open book but one that does not tell us very much directly. On the first page, all that it tells about he man is that he was supposedly:
                                                 A humble minded Christian
                                                 And the friend of his poorer brethren.
But on page two of the memorial book it then states:
                                                 May our name as his
                                                 Be written
                                                 In the book of life
This tells us, a little more interestingly, what someone thought of the man. What is even more interesting is the unwitting testimony. Look closely at the words "as his" and you will see that someone has tried to erase them. The black inlay which forms the words, has largely been removed although enough remains to read them. Were there doubts that his name would be written in the book of life? I have always assumed that someone merely thought that it was all a little too presumptuous.
       Investigation into the life of John Nott sheds some light. In 1830 John Nott was at the centre of one of the most dramatic incidents in the history of Swimbridge Parish. Agrarian riots had spread across southern England and finally a poor harvest pushed up the price of bread, making it unaffordable to the poorer agricultural labourers. In Swimbridge, the poor decided that one of the ways that their financial plight could be relieved was by a reduction of their rents and tithes. John Nott
had the lease of the tithes, which were due to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter Cathedral and which he collected. A mob marched on Nott's home at Bydown House in order to seek relief and give John Nott a 'bloody shirt". What happened after that is a tale which will be told elsewhere, but all that needs to be noted here is that the poorer parishioners of that time despised him for his actions. Later in 1841 the courts gave the Overseer of the Poor a distress warrant for £24-6s-8d against his property for non-payment of poor rates. He had certainly gained a reputation with Rev. John Russell for being a little less than generous to the poor. This was perhaps further clouded by the bad relationship which had developed between Nott and Russell. Nott was very critical about the way Russell was conducting his ministry. It ended in a sensational court case in which Russell sued Nott for Libel and won.
      There is a feeling, which is a little stronger than a dislike of presumption, that could have accounted for the attempted alteration to the memorial inscription. John Russell was a man worthy of his position and after his victory over Nott in the libel case the North Devon Journal reported that: "The bells of Swimbridge were not rung, Rev. Russell having given peremptory prohibition of any demonstration which might offend the feelings of the defeated". It is doubtful that there were any instructions from Russell to erase the words from the memorial but there are always people who purport to know the mind of the incumbent and even presume to speak words or act on his or her behalf.