Local History
thereby eliciting another series of obituary notices?’ the rector jokingly enquired.
Celebrities endorsing products is not new, and Sabine Baring-Gould was not above giving some selected
commercial patronage.
“..a crate or two of beers...”
During the early years of the twentieth century Edward Gilbert, proprietor of the Tavistock Brewery, advertised regularly in the Tavistock Gazette. His advert was noteworthy only for its mention of ‘an
unsolicited testimonial
from the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’ for the local brew. One wonders if the brewery dray occasionally dropped off a crate or two of beers at Lew Trenchard rectory.
clergyman was a familiar figure around Tavistock on Fridays when he came by train from Coryton Station to do his weekly shopping in the town. The late Bill Tucker, recalled on tape in 1998, that when a boy in the early 1920s he used to carry a parcel containing groceries for the elderly reverend gentleman from Palmer’s grocery shop (now part of Barclay’s Bank premises) to the railway station (site now Abbey Rise), and be
The highly respected
rewarded with three pence. On one occasion the old rector said to him ‘My boy, I hope you grow up to be a good man’.
“
..inspired Bernard Shaw(s).. Pygmalion”
One of the most interesting aspects of Sabine Baring-Gould’s life was his marriage to Grace Taylor, the attractive daughter of a mill worker, whom he met while working as a curate in West Yorkshire. This marriage between a young working-class girl, and an older member of the gentry,
crossed all the social barriers of the time. It has been suggested that it was this happy
marriage which inspired George Bernard Shaw, a friend of Sabine Baring- Gould, to write Pygmalion, the play upon which the film ‘My Fair Lady’ was later based.
Sabine Baring-Gould died aged 89 on the 2nd January 1924, having lived beyond his previously recorded ‘death’ by eighteen years. Grace Baring- Gould, his wife for 48 years and the mother of their fifteen children, pre-deceased him in April 1916. They are buried together in the graveyard at St Peter’s Church.
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