BBC researcher illuminates John Cannon’s Glastonbury

Helen Weinstein, a BBC producer and research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, provided fascinating insights in her talk on May 23 into the life of John Cannon, a familiar figure in the Glastonbury of the 1730s and 1740s.

John Cannon was born at West Lydford in 1684; his father was a small farmer. Given a very basic schooling in the church porch, he rapidly mastered reading and writing and developed a passion for books — eventually resulting in the production of his own memoirs, but often throughout his life either a means for self-improvement or the cause of financial hardship.

Family problems meant that at age 13 he was sent to work in the fields as a shepherd and ploughboy for £3 a year, but he continued to educate himself and when aged 21 in 1705 qualified as an excise officer, which brought him £50 per annum and 13 comfortable years, marriage, children and postings around southern England. Extravagant book purchases led to his getting into debt and his subsequent dismissal.

After a failed attempt to establish himself as a maltster in Bridgwater he returned to Lydford in 1723. He taught himself the skills of a scrivener [which the dictionary defines as scribe, copyist or drafter of documents; a notary], and in the early 1730s was appointed Charity School Master for St John’s parish at Glastonbury at £6 per annum, a post which he retained until shortly before his disappearance and presumed death in 1743.

As well as his teaching duties, Cannon provided legal and accountancy services for the town and district, earning perhaps another £50 a year by this means. His family continued to live at Lydford, while he lodged in the town. He had an office over the porch in St John’s and a schoolroom in the Market House, which stood opposite the present Town Hall.

While in Glastonbury he produced his elaborately handwritten memoir designed in emulation of volumes he had read. His memoir was itself a transcription and augmentation from three earlier versions, each of which had outgrown the volumes in which they were inscribed. The work contains his family history, descriptions, illustrations and historical sections on places where he had lived, as well as news items copied from newspapers and books, together with copies of his legal and business paperwork. Written in an elegant hand in homemade brown and green ink, it is a rare and astonishing survival, not just of his own life, but also in the rich detail it provides of the locality.

Glastonbury features prominently — Cannon recognised the historical importance of the Abbey ruins, and is dismayed at their steady destruction, often using gunpowder, to provide building materials. He resides at various hostelries and other premises in the town and provides details of its shops and personalities. Parish meetings he describes as lengthy and quarrelsome, and on one occasion mentions that the Overseer struck the Mayor with a candlestick.

John Cannon’s tragedy was that he did not get on with people — having risen from the level of his peers, he was useful to, but never joined, his social superiors. Economic depression in Glastonbury in the 1740s resulted in the loss of his teaching post. Soon afterwards, the memoir ends and he disappears from the written record. Somehow his work was preserved through the centuries that followed and is now available to an appreciative audience. The manuscript, owned by the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, is kept at the county archives in Taunton.

Helen Weinstein’s book on John Cannon is to be published next year and an ambitious website is in the works. Meanwhile her main work on Radio 4 is Documents (Thursday nights starting late summer) and, with Kate Adie, Women in War (this autumn).