The novel Hocken and Hunken was published in 1912, first in the USA and then in the UK. After his year of frantic political activity in 1910, with its two general elections, followed by the industrial discontent of 1911, 1912 was a year of relative tranquillity, except for the 'Marconi Scandal' (April 1912 to June 1913) which involved three government ministers.
Q was still President of the South-East Cornwall Liberal Association, when in 1912 the first daily newspaper supporting the Labour Party, the Daily Citizen, was launched. Brittain gives Q's published response in his biography.
‘I do want to see a paper that will give Honest, liberal opinions without the taint of capital upon it – a paper that will give the opinions of a liberal mind on public affairs.
I don't care whether it is a Labour paper or one of any other political colour. I sympathize with Labour and am with them all the time.’ (pp. 52–53)
Q saw a ‘liberal mind’ as one independent of vested interests, the implication being that Liberal papers were tainted by capital. The 'Marconi Scandal' was a clear sign of taint.
In 1912, Q was 49 years old, a successful novelist and a central figure in Fowey life. He had one son, Bevil, who was at Oxford, where he excelled at rowing, and one daughter, Foy, at home. Although apparently settled he was in fact seeking an academic position. In the previous year there had been the suggestion of his filling the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford (Brittain, p. 56). Cambridge established a chair in English Literature at the same time but A.W. Verral was appointed. However, with Verral's death in June 1912, Q was approached, with the appointment coming in November. As Brittain notes: ‘Some extreme Conservatives, for their part, regarded his appointment as purely political.’ (p. 59). The inaugural lecture was delivered at the lecture theatre of the Arts' School on January 29, 1913.
With his interest in the Napoleonic Wars, as investigated elsewhere on the website, Q must have reflected upon 1912 as the centenary of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, an event which Jonathan Couch would have followed in newspapers such as the Sherborne Mercury. No doubt Q followed it in Tolstoy's War and Peace. As the novel did not appear in print until 1869, it is unlikely that Jonathan read the work. Tolstoy's life overlapped those of Jonathan and Q, having been born in August 1828 and dying in November 1910.
Tolstoy died exactly 98 years after Napoleon's fateful decision to abandon Moscow and 31 years before Hitler's attempt to capture the city. When Hitler's forces were driving inexorably eastwards from Poland in the autumn of 1941, Q was lecturing at Cambridge and writing: ‘Cambridge is livelier with a raid warning now and then, and protective planes overhead a good part of the time.’ (Brittain, p. 147). His aunt, Bertha Couch, the oldest child of Jonathan's third marriage and who must have heard of the Napoleonic Wars from her father, was living at Perranporth, near Truro.
As a writer, 1911–12 were two of his most prolific years. Yet Hocken and Hunken was the sole novel published in 1912. Only two more completed novels followed, Nicky-Nan Reservist in 1915 and Foe-Farrell in 1918. In contrast to these last two titles it was a work of harmony and tranquillity. It also shows Q at the height of his creative powers and is arguably his best constructed work. From 1912 Q's life would be dominated by the prospect of war, the aftermath of war or war itself. For those of us with parents and grandparents whose lives were dominated by and blighted by war, Hocken and Hunken holds a special charm.
In his biography Brittain calls Hocken and Hunken ‘pure comedy’ (p. 43), a view echoed by Rowse in A Portrait of Q (p. 109). If this is true, the novel is a development of Troy Town of 1888. In his preface to the Duchy Edition of Hocken and Hunken, which came out in 1929, Q draws the parallel between the two novels, claiming the later one to be artistically superior. In fact, Troy Town ‘seems unworthy to rank with the little comedy set out in the following pages’. In certain respects Hocken and Hunken seems closer to The Blue Pavilions of 1891, in that it deals with two retiring ships' captains and includes at least one morally insidious character.
Q's prefaces to the Duchy Editions need to be treated with caution, as has been seen before. To see Hocken and Hunken as a ‘little comedy’ scarcely does it justice. Like most Cornishmen, Q was sensitive to the humorous side of life. It is not surprising that he loved the Irish short stories of Somerville and Ross. South-west Ireland and Cornwall have much in common. As with so much Irish humour, captured in the Irish saying ‘happy-come-sad’, there is realism and often tragedy below the surface humour.
Hocken and Hunken draws on the writer's experiences and observations of the port in which he lived. The novel is set in 1896-7, when Q was a resident in Fowey and had been for some time. It is not, as with Troy Town and The Mayor of Troy, an imagined Fowey. The characters are almost certainly based on individuals he knew. The locations are accurate and identifiable. Even the botanical observations are correct, as fits the son of a trained botanist. The novel should be read against a list of Q's public offices between 1901 and 1912.
- Vice-chairman of Cornwall Education Committee
- County Alderman
- Chairman of the Commissioners of Fowey Harbour
- Chairman of the Sub-Commissioners of Pilotage for the Fowey District
- President of the Fowey Mercantile Association
- Magistrate
Q's mercantile activities were particularly important and demanding following the Liberal victory of 1906, in which Q played a part, as it resulted in government legislation relating to shipping. As President of the Fowey Mercantile Association and as Chairman of the Sub-Commissioners of Pilotage he was involved in compliance; as Chairman of the Commissioners of Fowey Harbour he was involved in enforcement.
In England, 1870–1914, Robert Ensor says:
‘While the main party measures of the government were thus in two successive years killed or sterilized, certain able ministers got through ambitious legislation, which did not directly raise party issues. The first was Lloyd George . . . His Merchant Shipping Act, 1906, (which) confined pilot's certificates to British subjects; and while prescribing better food and accommodation under the Red Ensign in order to retain British crews, it also contained clauses compelling foreign ships using British ports to conform to British standards.’ (pp. 3945).
Frank Owen in Tempestuous Journey goes into more detail:
‘A second and still more considerable achievement of the new President of the Board of Trade was the Merchant Shipping Act of 1906. This was a determined and successful effort to codify the shipping legislation of the past fifty years, the revolutionary era of the shift from sail to steam. It involved a mass of technicalities, and Lloyd George made history in Whitehall by the frank way in which he summoned to his conferences the best available exponent of every powerful interest concerned. They had to hammer out between them the question of the loadline of all ships using British ports; they had to give sanction to . . . reforms . . . and extend this Seamen's Charter to passengers.’ (p. 148).
As well as writing novels Q had to master the material for himself. Hocken and Hunken is centred in the period of transition from ‘sail to steam’ and demanded a knowledge of the ‘shipping legislation of the past fifty years.’ This knowledge was not available to novelists who landed upon a Cornish port for the sake of writing a romantic novel of romantic people for the urban escapist market.
He was also involved with a pressure group working for the establishment of a harbour of refuge on the north coast of Cornwall and the north-west coast of Devon. The body of his forebear John Quiller had been washed ashore near Newquay having been wrecked in this area. The novel of 1899, The Ship of Stars, had been written to draw attention to the problem. He makes a statement in the preface to the Duchy Edition of that novel that also needs to be understood in relation to Hocken and Hunken:
‘when I pleaded for it before an audience largely composed of South Wales shipowners, I was discouraged on the grounds that such a harbour, without an area of commercial profit behind it, would only tempt ships' captains to be careful of life at the expense of commercial delay. I have never since that evening, or at any time during the twenty-odd years' service as Chairman of a Harbour Commission felt any considerable sympathy for the whines of shipowners.’
Hocken and Hunken is like the waters around the Cornish coast: it may look tranquil and attractive on the surface but strong currents flow between reefs and shoals below. From the disregard by the Pure Gem of the Harbour Commissioners' bye-laws in Chapter I, to the loss of the Saltypool in Chapter XXIV, strong currents sweep below the surface of the novel. These were matters Q regularly had to deal with as Fowey was a busy industrial and fishing port. In Chapter XII, there is a wonderful description of Fowey harbour from Higher Parc on Rilla Farm. Floating on the tide beyond the loading-cranes are steamships and sailing vessels, a Swedish tramp and an Italian barque. The river descends into evening shadow as the sun disappears to the west.
The realism of Hocken and Hunken is found not only in the novel's involvement with the sea. Rilla Farm is a business of the time and a very prosperous one. Farmer Bosenna was a good farmer and his widow continues the work following his death. Q's knowledge of farming, which he gained lodging on the farm of his grandparents when studying at Newton Abbot Academy, is evident. Also evident is his knowledge of botany which he gained from his father. The details of the novel are accurate.
Hocken and Hunken presents us with a picture of the 1890s, when Britain was at the height of influence, which is totally authentic. When Q wrote the novel, although this was possibly not evident at the time, Britain was beginning a long decline, a process made speedier by involvement in two world wars. When Q died in 1944, the USA and the USSR were the dominant players on the world's stage. Today, the novel can be seen as a time-piece of some importance.
The novel concludes with the day of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Of this Rowse writes: ‘1897 was Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and for weeks ahead he threw himself into the preparations for the great day, 22 June . . . the local band under his windows early, while he didn't get to bed till three next morning.’ (p. 63)
Rowse concludes with a letter Q write to Sidney Colvin. ‘I worked the people up and we lined the streets with trees from end to end, put up arches and criss-crossed all between with lanterns and bunting till I had a mile of green bazaar. And we fed 1850 handsomely by the waterside— let alone 350 sailors, British and foreign, Swedes, Russians, Italians, infidels and hereticks; and marched and countermarched by hundreds in fancy dress under the lanterns, and then danced till the gunpowder ran out of the heels of our boots.’
In 1912, when he was writing Hocken and Hunken, the Jubilee must have seemed as part of a Golden Age. Few of Q's novels end on such a high note.