Charles G. Henderson (1900-1933) was one of Britain's amazing eccentrics, people who combined great intelligence with unusual interests. But for his early death from heart disease, he might well have become a much better known historian than he is at present.
Henderson was a native of Cornwell -- where I hiked with friends a year ago -- and from his earliest years he was fascinated by all things Cornish. As a boy of ten with a camera, he decided to photograph every church in the county -- a task which he completed within a year, then developing and printing the photos himself, and binding them in a book entitled Cornish Churches. Between the ages of 12 and 17, he described in handwritten detail, in some 1,500 pages, the antiquities, churches, and monuments in western Cornwall. Each of which he had personally visited and inspected.
Henderson was tireless, with an eye for detail. I've been reading Philip Marsden's Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place -- a book I'll discuss in a later post -- where the author describes his digging into Henderson's documents and writings, and being totally amazed by his precocious dedication.
Henderson's wide interests and attention to detail were recognized even at the time. Marsden discusses how Henderson, at nineteen, on a train to Oxford where he was a student, fell into a casual conversation with Sir Robert Edgcumbe, who commented how odd it was that Oxford's New College was actually ancient. Henderson agreed: "Like Newquay, in existence since at least 1480 or before." Sir Robert gave him a quick glance, and replied, "You must be Mr. Henderson."
What most appealed to me, I suppose, were not his amazing accomplishments as an adult, but his precocious play as a child. I described several months ago the kingdom of "Mamba" that my brother and I created on our bedroom floor, when I was thirteen. Henderson, at twelve, would have understood our enjoyment completely -- but he developed his own imaginary kingdom of the Spoffs that made Mamba look like the product of a kindergarten. (And he did it all without Dinky Toys!) As Marsden describes it -- and I can't resist a long quotation:
Over several notebooks, the invented country is set out in its entirety. Sections explain the government of the Spoffs under Ivan, the reforms of the Spoff King Charles II, the new capital of Spoffkinville, the invasion of Spoffkinland by the kingdom of Katmandu, diagrams of medieval battles, intricate accounts of princely power struggles, the troubled relationship between crown and parliament, a multi-branched royal family tree of the house of Livonia. In the first book is the geography of Spoffkinland -- detailing the southern federal regions of Bosh, Dona Peulia and the State of Mosk, each with its own provinces listed, the chief towns and products, and a map of population density, average rainfall, cathedral cities and principal exports. There is a grammar and lexicon of Spoff -- in red and white ink, explaining the conjugation of verbs, how to make plurals, rules of gender, relative pronouns, distributive and possessive adjectives -- pages and pages and pages.
A bound book was entitled, in gold letters, Spoffkin Graphic by C. G. Henderson, 1912. Under the headline "Is War Starting?" hand-written newspapers contained stories reported on the growing conflict between the Spoffs of Spoffkinland and their neighbors in Franconia and Polonia. The newspaper stories were accompanied by newspaper advertisements of the sort that we ourselves might have found in MAD Magazine:
"Why buy ink when you can buy an ink plant?"
Buy the ANTI-CAT boot filled with lead."
So many kids -- not enough, I grant you, but many -- start out with whimsical senses of humor, intelligence, and single-minded determination, only to eventually settle for a tedious life in the suburbs. Henderson was not such a disappointment. From his early days creating Spoffkinland, he dug deeper and deeper into the world of Cornwall -- in all its aspects: geographical, geological, historical, botanical, sociological -- and the documentary evidence, He single-handedly saved a vast number of historical documents that modern families were throwing away after World War I:
Charles Henderson gathered about sixteen thousand documents: wills, covenants, leases, letters, tithe-deeds, grants, charters and bonds, pass-books, assignments, jointure statements, letters of attorney, probate of wills, marriage settlements, inventories, releases and surrenders, sales and mortgages and estate maps.
All of which are now stored in the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro. These were documents Henderson gathered for what was intended to be his history of all the parishes of Cornwall. Little doubt that he would have succeeded through sheer persistence and enthusiasm if he had lived a few more years.
Cornwall is almost exactly the same size as the combined areas of Washington's Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties -- the area in which I grew up. For an American, especially from the West, it's hard to imagine that so much historical material could exist in such a small county, enough to fully justify the life's work of not only Henderson, but many other eccentric geniuses. Especially when, as Marsden makes clear, Cornwall was considered, until well into the twentieth century, an obscure corner of Britain, one that many well educated Englishmen of course knew about but had never visited.
But from such wild fields, unusual and beautiful flowers sometimes grow.
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