Frederick Charles Bawden, 1908-1972

Abstract

Love for the countryside and people of Devon was an extremely important aspect of Fred Bawden’s life. As he put it (1952a): ‘I come from Devonshire, where we are too modest to claim to grow the best crops of anything; we would be satisfied with the self-evident fact that we produce the best cream and cider, and, of course, the best men.’ Not much information is readily available on his ancestry. A member of the family, it is thought, designed and marketed a novel type of plough, but the family seems not otherwise to have been directly connected with farming. Fred’s paternal grandfather was a boot-maker, his maternal grandfather a stonemason. Fred’s parents, George Bawden and Ellen Balment, lived in North Tawton (Devon) when, on 18 August 1908, he was born; he had an elder brother and sister. George Bawden was Relieving Officer and Registrar of Births and Deaths in North Tawton, but three years later moved to Okehampton to be master of the Poor Law Institution—commonly called the Workhouse. It had a large garden in which George Bawden took a keen interest; he awakened a similar interest in Fred. Potatoes were an important crop in the Institution garden, and their health was an important topic of conversation in the locality. On the principle of ‘imprinting’, this may in part explain Fred’s lifelong attachment to the crop. He records that even as a boy he ‘began to appreciate the many problems involved in growing healthy plants’. Fred’s mother was matron of the Institution and the children were thus made aware of the problems of human old age, sickness and poverty at an age when most of us are shielded from these things; this probably contributed to his lifelong, unsentimental, concern for the welfare of the ‘underdog’, and to his critical approach to political institutions. Marjorie Elizabeth Cudmore was a school-fellow in Okehampton and, like Fred, studied botany at Cambridge. They married on 6 September 1934 and had two sons. The notes deposited with the Royal Society in 1949 were withdrawn a few years ago; on these family matters, the notes remaining are uninformative.