The literary and musical legacy of Lew Trenchard Manor

Lew Trenchard Manor is the setting for "The Hound of the Baskervilles"  
(Photo: Fiona Avis -- licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

DEVON, ENGLAND — Travel in its purest form can be life altering when you discover some obscure vignette of history involving an encounter with a well-known individual of the period. 

Such stories are even better when they revolve around a tale that links a family's ancestry to days gone by in a way that somehow magically binds the past with the present.

The Lew Trenchard Manor gardens
(Photo: Forbis)

In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy popularized a theory known as  "Six Degrees of Separation" which formulates the concept that all people are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other.

With that idea as a basic foundation, history quite literally leaps off the pages of a manuscript or a website to become a true "close encounter of some kind."

Trenchard Manor Outbuilding
(Photo: Forbis)

Recently a high classmate told me of a place that he and his wife, Sheryl, had visited in England which details just such a story.

The site is near Dartmoor on the edge of the Great Foggy Forest, and it is known as Lew Trenchard Manor.

Captain Edward Marshall was the great-great-grandfather of my former high school mate, Dick Forbis. Marshall married Lavinia Maitland Snow who was considerably younger than he, and the couple had two toddlers before the captain died.

Soon after, Lavinia remarried to Edward Baring-Gould of Lew Trenchard. Baring-Gould, who owned the manor house along with 3,000 acres of land, was a widower with two mostly grown children.

Sabine Baring- Gould 
inherited the estate
(Photo: Public Domain)

That union produced two more children, but when Baring-Gould died, Lavinia and her two youngest children were forced to move out to a dower house, since Baring-Gould's first born son, Sabine, inherited everything.

Because the family had spent much of his childhood traveling round Europe, most of Sabine's education was primarily taught by private tutors.

At that time, the first born usually became an officer of the Navy or a barrister, but Sabine felt a calling to the priesthood. Over his father's objections, Sabine took on the parish of St. Peter on the hill just above the Manor House. Here he wrote  hymns for the children and youth of his church.

It is two of those hymns which elevate this story from obscurity to eye-brow raising reality. You see Sabine Baring-Gould was the author of Now the Day is Over and Onward Christian Soldiers.

St Peter's Parish Church sits on a hill above the manor(Photo: Derek Harper --  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Sabine was also a prolific author, which he had to be to cover the expenses of his multitude of 12 children. He authored several novels using the unorthodox writing style of standing at his desk to compose. In addition, he published nearly 200 short stories in assorted magazines and periodicals.

Also fascinated with architecture, Sabine began buying parts of houses in disrepair while he continued to add on to Lew Trenchard throughout the years.

Ornate plaster interiors
(Photo: Forbis)

 Each room's ceiling is plaster with a different design, and the windows are also different throughout the house.

Sabine also added on to the rectangular house, which had already undergone several renovations over the years. In the end it was finally shaped like a capital "E," for Elizabeth, a popular style of the era which honored the greatest queen England had known.

The property also includes a grand ballroom, a huge upstairs hall and luxuriously appointed bedrooms.

Conan Doyle was a guest
(Photo: Public Domain)

Because Sabine was an author, he knew other authors of the day, including Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

On one occasion, during a visit to Lew Trenchard with a friend, Doyle mentioned that he had a myth of a monster he was going to write about. When he saw the Moors at the property, Doyle changed the setting of his story, which became the Hound of the Baskervilles. The house depicted in Sherlock Holmes' arguably most famous adventure is that of Lew Trenchard.

One of Sabine's grandsons, William Stuart Baring-Gould was a noted Sherlock Holmes scholar who wrote a fictional biography of the great detective in which, to make up for the lack of information about Holmes's early life, he based his account on the childhood of Sabine Baring-Gould.

The Manor as it appeared to inspire Sherlock Holmes' creator
(Photo: Public Domain)

Sabine himself is also a major character in Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes novel The Moor, a Sherlockian pastiche. In this novel it is revealed that Sabine Baring-Gould is actually the godfather of Sherlock Holmes.

The hound of basketville
(Photo: Forbis)

Beyond Sherlock however, there is yet another story. Sabine met his future wife, Grace Taylor, the daughter of a mill hand, when she was 14. They were married in 1868 and remained together for 48 years until her death in 1916.  The couple had 15 children, of which 12 survived to adulthood.

Oscar Wilde used the early part of the love story between Sabine and Grace as the basis for Pygmalion, which in the musical version became My Fair Lady.

Dick and Sheryl Forbis celebrate their family's legacy
(Photo: Forbis)

For Dick and Sheryl Forbis a visit to Lew Trenchard is a journey into their ancestral legacy. For anyone else, Lew Trenchard is an undiscovered treasure where literature, music and architecture literally immerse you into a glorious long ago, but never to be forgotten era.

Travel is truly just "one degree of separation" because in the end, it's all about discovery.

"It's elementary, my dear Watson."