2 AUGUST 1935, Page 6

I feel a certain melancholy interest in the drowning tragedy

at Morwenstow on Sunday because I myself went to Morwenstow to bathe the previous day, but thought better of it. The remote church and vicarage in a cleft of the coast are rich, of course, in memories of the eccentric rector, R. S. Hawker, with the fishermen's jersey and seaboots and cassock that formed his habitual dress. Hawker was at Morwenstow forty years, miles from even any country-town, miles further from a stage-coach route, and with railways in his early days non-existent south of the Trent. Townsmen today find it hard to imagine what such an existence means. Even for the present incumbent of Morwenstow and a ' hundred villages like it life must be something of a different texture from a Londoner's or a • Mancunian's —partly no doubt better; partly perhaps worse.