How Hawkers Restaurant was named

In 1999 when the Naylor family purchased The Camelot Hotel they decided to carry out a complete refurbishment including the creation of a new restaurant. A competition was held amongst the Bude craftsmen working on the job as to what the restaurant should be called. The winner was our plumber, Terry Bale, who is a Cornish patriot with a great knowledge of Cornish history who was born in a house at the end of the hotel car park.

His recommendation was the restaurant should be named after Parson Robert Hawker

Hawker was born in Plymouth in 1803 and as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, aged 19 he married his godmother, Charlotte, aged 41. She had money of her own and the marriage, along with a legacy, helped to finance his studies at university. He graduated in 1827 and won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry. He took Anglican orders in 1831, and became  in 1834 vicar of the church at Morwenstow, a scattered and isolated community some 5 miles from Bude. There he remained as Parson Hawker until he died in 1875.

The early years in Morwenstow

When Hawker arrived at Morwenstow there had not been a vicar in residence for over a century and he found his isolated church half in  ruins and the vicarage used for contraband storage. Using his wife’s money he repaired the church. He also built himself a remarkable vicarage, with chimneys modelled on the towers of the churches in his life: those where he had been curate, plus that of Magdalen College, Oxford. The vicarage’s kitchen chimney is a replica of Hawker’s mother’s tomb. The tiny hut he built out of driftwood, where he wrote his poetry, still stands on the cliff edge and is now renowned as the National Trust’s smallest property.

The compassionate Parson Hawker

Along the Bude west facing coast line, fierce winter gales drove many a sailing ship onto the rocks below the church. Prior to Hawker’s arrival the bodies and remains of shipwrecked sailors were buried on the beach where they were found or left to the sea. Hawker, however, insisted that  his parishioners help him carry the remains of drowned sailors up the steep cliffs and to bury them in designated ground at the entrance to the churchyard. It was a job that only the strong of nerve and stomach could handle. There still stands the figurehead of the ship ‘The Caledonia’ which foundered in September 1842. Nearby stands a granite cross marking the grave of 30 or more seafarers of the ‘Alonzo’, also wrecked in 1842.

The eccentric Parson Hawker

There are many stories of Hawker’s eccentricities and it is difficult to judge which are true and which are false. He is famed as being dressed in a claret coloured coat, blue fisherman’s jersey, long sea boots, a pink brim less hat and a poncho made from a yellow horse blanket, which he claimed was the ancient habit of St Padarn. The only black things he wore were his socks! Other eccentricities included dressing up as a mermaid and excommunicating one of his cats for mousing on Sundays. He talked to the birds, invited his nine cats into church and kept a huge pig as a pet.

Hawkers Restaurant

For more than forty years Parson Hawker admonished and ministered to his flock and waged war against the establishment  and the social injustices of the day. The stories about him abound and today he is revered as a great and colourful Cornish personality. Who better to give his name to our restaurant?