In October 1999 Mrs. Alice Richardson Sloane, of Iowa, USA on visiting Bradworthy, gave me a copy of her beautifully produced book entitled "The Ancestry and Descendants of John Lawrence Mason and his brother, Francis Henry Mason." She is a member of the family and a descendant of Grace Ashton of Bradworthy, who married William Mason in 1791. In her foreword Mrs. Sloane writes nostalgically of the old home in Iowa when the family were all together, but now many far scattered. And she expresses the hope that this book "will one day help a cousin to find their way back." Now it has happened. An article of mine relating to the Masons was found by a cousin on the internet. She sent out a request that came to me through friends on the internet for further information. She is Mrs. Betty Anderson of State Island, Plano, Texas, and I was pleased to be able to pass on the address of Mrs. Sloane and the publishers of the book.
I have in one of my small books referred to Bradworthy's military record in wars and campaigns, including America, 1812, Napoleonic, Crimea, Sudan, World Wars 1 and 2 and in more recent years the Falklands. Ivan Ham, already with twelve years service in the Army, and now in Germany, has previously been in the Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo. What vast changes there have been. Forty years ago from Klagenfurt in south-east Austria, I travelled in a local bus through a pass in the Karawanken Alps to Jesenice and on to Lake Bled. This was Slovenia in a Yugoslavia which was a Communist Federation of the Republics, it's President being Tosip Broz Tito. It was rainy weather and I remember seeing schoolchildren, well and warmly dressed, each carrying a small umbrella. A few years later, when in a boat on the Danube, I visited Belgrade. It was a peaceful country then. People were more independent and free then in other Communist countries. There were plenty of goods in the shops and private cars were parked. It was a happier land for thirty years under the rule of Marshall Tito than it has been since.
Ask people in Bradworthy if they have heard of Charles Garvice and most of them have not: Yet during the several years that he lived in Bradworthy he was a popular novelist with a big readership in Britain and America. I was reminded of him by coming across one of his books. It was fiction entitled "In Cupid's Chains." This was the kind of stuff he wrote - romantic fiction, usually based on upper class families, fiction of course. The book I have mentioned was published by Sands and Co. and is dated 1903. Garvice built Moorlands and also Little Silworthy in Putford. At the latter place he experimented with farming and wrote his only non-fiction book "A Farm in Creamland." It is quite interesting and amusing. Asked one day why he did not write something which would give him lasting fame, he is said to have replied that he was not writing for lasting fame, but for money. His novels certainly made him a rich man.