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The Renwick/Comery Road Trip

England and Scotland

August 1964

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The Renwick/Comery Road TripThe Journal of Robert W. Comery

Photographs by Ralph Renwick Jr.

Bob Comery and Ralph Renwick met in graduate school at Brown University in the late ’40s. They were both married; Bob to Dot, and Ralph to Mary Fay. As rarely happens, all four liked each other enormously and became lifelong friends.

Bob, my father, had two daughters. I was born in 1947 and Beth in 1952. The Renwicks had two sons: John (we knew him as Kim when we were young) was born in 1945 and Bill (called Billy as a child) in 1951. Although the Renwicks moved from Providence in 1952 when Ralph accepted a position at Michigan State, the families remained close. The Renwicks often returned to Rhode Island – usually in the summer when we were at Plum Beach – and my family made several trips to East Lansing.

In 1964, my father, a professor at Rhode Island College, took a sabbatical leave and we spent nearly three months in England from July to September. The Renwicks had planned a trip to England that summer as well.

It’s a testament to my parents’ affection for the Renwicks that they agreed to a 10-day road trip with the two families – in a minibus – through northern England and Scotland. As Bill said at my mother’s funeral in August 2011, “What were they thinking?”

In that minibus were two teenagers (I was 16 and John was 18), both going through difficult phases. I was horrified that people – even strangers – would see me “touring” with parents, and John was going through a period he can only describe as “rebellious.” In other words, we were a pain in the neck, as my father might put it. The two younger kids, Beth and Billy, were easier to like, but 12-year-olds on a road trip often aren’t that much fun either.

Unbelievably, the trip was a resounding success and one that we – the four children – recall with great fondness and gratitude. In his journal, my father describes the rising excitement in the car as we traveled into the spectacular scenery of the Lake District. Even John and I, cool and jaded as we were, had to acknowledge it was pretty impressive.

Ralph did most of the legwork for this trip. For months he researched hotels, planned itineraries, and corresponded by mail with hotel managers to arrange reservations. As my father noted after a fine picnic in Scotland, “It was all quite perfect.”

Cynthia Comery Ferguson

Bob Comery1918-1995

Ralph Renwick1920-1969

This publication was typed and designed by Cynthia C. Ferguson in December 2011. The photograph of Ralph Renwick (above) was taken aboard the Cunard Line’s Carmania en route to England. The cover photo was taken from a steam launch on Loch Katrine in Scotland.

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Friday, August 14

Yesterday we got up early, left Fleming’s, took a taxi to the Clifton-Ford on Welbeck Street to confirm our reservations for August 24, and went from there to the garage on Park Road to pick up the Bedford Minibus. The Renwicks were already there. After filling out various

forms, getting insurance, and lashing the bags onto the rack on top of the car, we took off.

Ralph seemed willing to do the driving, so I didn’t contest him for the privilege. I concentrated on the mapwork and giving Ralph directions out of London. Ralph was, naturally enough, uneasy about driving an unfamiliar kind of car on the left-hand side of the road, but the route out of London was fairly easy, and we made it to M1 without incident. The Minibus is quite comfortable, and there is plenty of room for all eight of us – it would take ten in a pinch.

We got to Coventry about noon, had lunch in a cheesy cafeteria, and went to the cathedral. More of the old cathedral is still standing than I had realized – the spire and parts of all four walls. The pillars in the nave are mere stumps and the whole thing is open to the sky. At the end opposite the nave, they’ve erected a new altar, with a cross made of two charred beams from the old cathedral, and they hold occasional services there.

The new cathedral is a spectacular piece of contemporary architecture. The walls are made of

thick sections of stone interspersed with shafts of stained glass that go from floor to ceiling. The baptistery window on the right-hand side is an enormous area of stained glass panels arranged so as to create a sunburst effect in the center. This is surrounded by deep greens, blues, purples, and reds. The whole thing is abstract, but there are suggestions of cruciform shapes scattered throughout. I still don’t like the huge tapestry of Christ above the altar in the Lady Chapel. The draping of the figure is all wrong – it seems to balloon around his knees and distracts attention from the face, hands, and feet.

“The Minibus is quite comfortable, and there is plenty of room for all eight of us.”

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Sunday, August 16

We arrived in Stone, a small provincial town not far south of Stoke-on-Trent, late Thursday afternoon. It’s a drab, quiet little town, but the Crown Hotel is very comfortable and even a bit plush. I walked around a little before dinner – very little

to see – the parish church up on a hill shabby and deteriorated, with broken and fallen tombstones and the grass about two feet high.

We had a good dinner, walked around town again, and went back to the hotel for a few beers in the lounge.

Friday morning we got an early start and made very good time on M6, a good turnpike that bypasses Liverpool and Manchester. We were in Kendal in time for lunch. Dot and Mary Fay had bought sandwiches and pastries in Stone, and Ralph and I went out and got a bottle of Chablis and cokes for the kids. We had a fine picnic in the park in Kendal. Not far away there was a hill with a ruined fort on the top.

After lunch we headed into the Lake District. The terrain got increasingly hilly, and we began to notice stonewalls, very much like those in New England but narrower and made of smaller stones. They are strung out in interesting patterns up and down and around the hillsides. The land is given over almost entirely to sheep-

grazing, and the hills and mountains are covered with grass and other low-growing vegetation to the tops – very few heavily wooded areas.

We drove first to Windermere and then on past Rydal Water and Grasmere. I was looking for Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, but I got more interested in the scenery and missed it – probably small loss. We stopped for a while in the middle of a high pass between two grass-covered mountains. Ralph and the kids went down the hillside to a brook, where Cynthia, Beth, and Billy went wading.

Everyone was becoming increasingly excited by spectacular scenery. Ralph, who I feel didn’t really like London, was his old enthusiastic self – this, it seemed, was the sort of thing he had come to England for.

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We drove down from the pass, past Helvellyn and Thirlmere, and arrived about four o’clock in Keswick, a compact little resort town at the northern end of Derwent Water. We’re staying at the Royal Oak Hotel in the center of town. The oldest part of the hotel goes back to the time of Elizabeth I, and among its former guests were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, De Quincey, Ruskin, and Tennyson. Ruskin spent his disastrous honeymoon here.

It’s a fairly big place and very comfortably furnished – there are heated towel racks in the bathrooms, very handy for drying clothes. The food is good, but the service is painfully slow – they wait until you’ve

finished one course before they take your order for the next. This morning there was a half-hour interval between my tomato juice and my poached egg. Some people consider this leisurely – I think it’s stupidly inefficient and a damned pain in the neck.

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Tuesday, August 17

We had two fine days at Keswick. It was cloudy most of the time, but we had little rain. The scenery around the lake is quite spectacular – it’s completely surrounded by some of the most rugged mountains in the Lake District, including Skiddaw just north of

the town. Most of them are covered with grass to the top and in certain lights look velvety. There are a number of islands in the lake, including a small private one with a beautiful house and sloping lawns.

We all did a good deal of rowing on the lake, and I took two rides around it on the motor launches. Cynthia went swimming one day but found it too cold to stay in for long. If it was too cold for her, I knew it would be far, far too cold for me, so I didn’t attempt it. Ralph did a little climbing on one of the smaller mountains and took Beth and Billy along with him on one trip.

Sunday morning Dot, Ralph, and I went to matins at St. Johns, a small Anglican church standing on a considerable rise above the lake. Much singing, including two psalms. The creed was chanted, but things were otherwise pretty low, including the priest’s vestments. Good sermon – especially for its brevity. I discovered that the Anglican Prayer Book contains an Order for Commination, a formal service for laying curses on evildoers – probably not used much any more.

After church, I took a walk around town and through the park and came upon two bowling greens with absolutely incredible grass – perfectly flat, clipped to within less than half an inch of the ground, as thick as the nap of a woolen rug, and bright green.

Saturday night, Ralph, Mary Fay, Dot and I sat around the lounge drinking, first coffee and then beer, until nearly midnight. We talked of a million things. Among other things, we decided that Ralph is a manic and I am a melancholic, a nicely balanced arrangement. We all said a lot of funny things – I don’t remember what they were, but they seemed hilarious at the time.

Bill Renwick

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Sunday night a bunch of Japanese tourists arrived. Ralph talked to them and discovered they were a group of actors and writers. They seemed highly incongruous in a place like Keswick, but they were having a great time.

YesterdaY was a big daY for ruined castles. In the morning we stopped at Brougham Castle just outside of Penrith and in the afternoon at Caerlaverock Castle on the coast south of Dumfries. They were somewhat similar – built in the twelfth century of red sandstone. Caerlaverock was the more interesting – it’s surrounded by a broad water-filled moat, and three of the round towers at the corners are still standing, as well as much of the interior living quarters. Much of the stone is covered with thick moss and, near the tops of the walls and towers, with grass and other vegetation. It was a cold, wet, bleak day, and as we stood in the courtyard looking up, a big white owl flew out of one of the turrets and swooped around the castle – very spooky.

We stayed overnight in a little provincial town called Thornhill in the Buccleuch and Queensbury Hotel. I discovered that Buccleuch is pronounced “Bukloo” – something I’ve been trying to find out for years. It was a most unimpressive place on the outside but very comfortable and pleasant inside – a fire in the

upstairs lounge, good food, and a nice little bar – everything just the way you’d want it in a small country hotel. We tried to go for a walk after dinner, but it started raining too hard. We went back to our shilling-in-the-slot electric heaters and fine, warm beds.

We left Thornhill fairly early this morning. I thought I’d give Ralph a rest and do the driving for the day. I was worried that I’d have a tendency to drift into the right (i.e., wrong) lane. It turned out that I had the opposite tendency – I kept banging into the curb on my left. Otherwise, I did pretty well.

We drove into Drumlanrig Castle shortly after leaving Thornhill but discovered that it’s occupied and

Top: Brougham Castle. Above: Drumlanrig Castle.

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not open to the public. We were all disappointed to find that it wasn’t a ruin.

We drove through Kilmarnock to Irvine and the seacoast. We drove along the coast and the Firth of Clyde almost into Glasgow, where we took a curious kind of ferry that winched itself across the river along a heavy chain. From there we drove north into the Highlands and arrived at the Covenanters’ Inn in Aberfoyle about four o’clock.

Aberfoyle is a small village, and the inn stands above it. You can see Ben Lomond from the inn. It’s an interesting old place that seems to have been added to many times – many different bars, lounges, and little sitting rooms all over the place.

For dinner we made the mistake of ordering filet mignon. It was slightly thicker but otherwise smaller than one of our minute steaks. It was, of course, well done (they simply don’t know how to do a rare steak, but, given the size of their steaks, it’s small wonder), and, ultimate abomination, it had a slice of pineapple on top. Only a positive hatred of steak could bring a person to do that – not even a dietician nor the Ladies’ Home Journal would sanction it.

After dinner Ralph and I went for a walk. The rain had let up, but there was a high wind and hairy clouds in the sky. The rivers are in flood.

Top: Aberfoyle. Above: Ben Lomond. Right: Aberfoyle.

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Sunday, August 23

Wednesday was a perfect day in Aberfoyle – bright, sunny, and chilly, like a good day in early October back home. In the morning we drove through the Trossachs a few miles to Loch Katrine, where we took a big steam launch (Ralph was fascinated by the

engine and took a couple of pictures of it) the length of the lake and back. It’s a long, narrow lake surrounded by steep, raggy mountains, something like a fjord and something like the Saguenay River. It was pretty cold on the lake, and Beth conned an English boy out of his sheepskin jacket for the return trip.

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Afterwards we drove back toward Aberfolye and stopped by a mountain stream for lunch. Ralph produced a bottle of Bristol Cream sherry for the occasion. It was all quite perfect.

In the afternoon we drove over to Inversnaid on the northern end of Loch Lomond – more fine scenery, including a waterfall. We got back to the inn in time for tea in front of the fire.

Above: A picnic near Loch Katrine. L-r in back: John (Kim), Bill, Cyn-thia, Beth, Mary Fay and Dot. In front, Bob. Ralph is behind the camera.

At left: Loch Lomond.

“It was all quite perfect.”

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Monday, August 24

We left Aberfoyle fairly early Thursday morning in spite of the fact that Cynthia had stayed up until about 4:30 the night before talking to some character in front of the fire in the lounge.1

We drove down the valley of the Forth to Stirling and up the hill to the castle. It was a bright day, and we had marvelous views all around – to the east you could see the almost classic geology of the alluvial plain and the meanders of the Forth. The castle, built of some kind of grey stone, is in an excellent state of preservation – some of the buildings are still used by military units. An early Stuart king (some James – I forget which) murdered an Earl of Douglas in one of the rooms.

From Stirling we crossed to the north side of the river and drove to the old village of Culross, where

we drove down a steep, narrow, cobble-stoned street and had lunch in a little park overlooking the river.

Later in the afternoon we crossed the river by ferry, from which we got a good view of the enormous Firth of Forth railway bridge. A highway bridge is in the process of construction.

1 Note from Cynthia: I have very little recollection of this “character” so I believe we really were just talking.

Top: The village of Culross. Above: A picnic in Culross. Right: The Firth of Forth railway bridge.

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In Edinburgh we went to the Bruntsfield Hotel, a quiet, dignified old brownstone place with ceilings at least fifteen feet high and windows from floor to ceiling. It was somewhat south of the center of the city, near a good residential district, and across from a park.

That night Dot and I, Ralph, Mary Fay, and Billy walked to the castle on its huge soot-blackened rock and watched a retreat on the esplanade to the east of the castle. There were a brass band and massed pipe bands – very exciting music. I’ve never been a bagpipe enthusiast, but I’ve decided that if you have enough pipes (that is, dozens) in the right sort of place, e.g., the arena at Earl’s Court on the esplanade at Edinburgh Castle, they can have a powerful effect.

fridaY morning we all split up. The Renwicks went off for the day, Dot, Cynthia, and Beth went shopping on Princes Street, and I went off by myself. I went first to the castle. It was another bright day – good views from the battlements. At the top of the rock, I went to the Chapel of St. Margaret (wife of Malcolm III, successor to Macbeth), a tiny, solid, Norman sort of chapel, twelfth century and the oldest of the castle buildings. Standing next to it is the National War Memorial, built in memory of the Scots who served in World War I. I glanced at a number of the regimental rolls of honor and discovered that the name Comrie is well

represented.

I walked down the hill to the Shakespeare exhibition in Waverley Market near Scott Monument, a statue of Scott canopied by an enormous Gothic tower, also soot-blackened – Edinburgh would be a beautiful city if it could get rid of soft coal and clean up the stone.

Many fine Elizabethan portraits, books, documents, etc. in the exhibition, with

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Elizabethan background music. Among other things, they had page 2 of the will – pages 1 and 3 are in the Public Record Office in London.

I had lunch with Dot and the girls. Then the girls went off to the castle2 and Dot and I to Holyrood Palace. We started going through it, but when I discovered you could only go through in guided groups, I ducked out and went to the ruined abbey church next to the palace, where Lord Darnley is buried along with a heap of royal Stuart bones. From there I wandered through the gardens – vast smooth lawns, trees, the graves of forgotten monks, and behind it all, a couple of steep cliff-faced hills. And on top of the palace, close to the royal ensign, stands a television antenna.

saturdaY morning we left edinburgh for durham. As soon as we were out of Scotland, we went through the Cheviot Hills, very wild, bleak country, almost treeless, largely unfenced grassland with great splotches of heather, very few villages or farmhouses. It was appropriately cloudy, and there was very little traffic, just sheep and rolling moorland to the horizon.

Toward noon, we stopped at a little village where there was supposed to be a section of Hadrian’s Wall. After a long walk through a meadow, we came upon the remains of a Roman bridge abutment on one side of the river and the foundations of a fort on the other side. The bridge abutment was made of closely fitted slabs of well cut stone. Apparently there are few sections of the wall itself left – at least we saw none.

We drove on to the little village of Corbridge for lunch. Apparently everyone in Northumberland had the same idea. We couldn’t get in anywhere. We finally bought some bread, ham, cheese, and cokes and made our own lunch on the banks of the Tyne.

About the middle of the afternoon we arrived at Durham and the Royal County Hotel, a place built in 1632. Cromwell stayed there when he came to ravage the cathedral. We walked through narrow streets up the hill to the cathedral where it stands amid lawns overlooking the town and the river that meanders

2 Another note from Cynthia: I don’t think Beth and I went to the castle. In fact, I clearly remember us running back to the hotel to watch one of the many British TV shows – Thank Your Lucky Stars, Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops – that featured all of the English bands that were just coming on the scene. 1964 was a magical time in Britain as a teenager.

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around the base of the hill.

It’s one of the oldest of the great cathedrals, almost entirely Norman in design, with massive columns at least twelve feet thick. Lots of stained glass, rather pale, mostly nineteenth-century, though a few fragments of the original glass remain in the south transept. Dot especially liked the cathedral for its open, uncluttered effect. You can stand at the front of the church and look up the nave, through the choir, and over the high altar to the rose window in the apse. Bede is buried in the cathedral, along with St. Cuthbert and other early English Christians.

That evening we went up to the cathedral again for the son et lumiére. There was very little son or lumiére, mostly just taped narrative and dramatization on the history of the cathedral. The acoustics made it almost impossible to understand (as the producers should have known), but it was pretty laborious stuff anyway. Billy went sound asleep, which made Dot giggle almost uncontrollably. We got out of the cathedral just in time.

sundaY was a beautiful daY as we drove south from durham to lincoln. We had lunch at a brand-new Howard Johnsony sort of place on the A1(M) motorway. After lunch Ralph thought we ought to take a little detour through Sherwood Forest, and, sure enough, there were a lot of trees there. Otherwise there was nothing to see but a few little mining towns complete with slag piles.

The approach to Lincoln was particularly striking – you can see the cathedral standing up against the sky about ten miles away. At about three o’clock we arrived at the Grand Hotel, which turned out, as we had guessed it would from its name, to be the cheesiest hotel of the trip. It was down by the railroad tracks, and the Renwicks had to go down two flights to the nearest john. Actually, it was a clean and reasonably comfortable place, and we were much better situated than the Renwicks, john-wise.

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Knowing we were about to go to the cathedral, Beth sneaked out and wandered around town on her own. We walked up to the cathedral, which proved quite a hike – it’s on top of a high, steep hill. From the outside, it’s the most impressive I’ve seen, with the possible exception of Salisbury. It’s very long, has two towers in front and an enormous central tower. It’s somewhat later than Durham and more purely Gothic – fairly slender columns, and very high broken arches. The main transept is huge and open, and there is a smaller transept to the east of it. I liked the stained glass better than Durham – there’s lots of deep blue and red. St. Hugh of Lincoln is buried there, though his shrine was largely destroyed during the iconoclastic fanaticism of the seventeenth century. Seeing the cathedrals has made me detest Cromwell more than ever, though, of course, much of the vandalism was perpetrated under Henry VIII and Edward VI.

After going through the cathedral, its chapter house, chapels, and cloisters thoroughly, I spent a good deal more time poking around the hilltop – it was bright and quiet, and there was a touch of fall in the air, and I just didn’t want to leave. I walked around the partly ruined castle and then along the street to the north of the cathedral, where I came upon the foundations of one of the old Roman gates of Lindum Colonia. Apparently, it was recently turned up by chance during some excavation work for a new building.

After dinner Dot and I went to the hotel bar, a very pleasant sort of pub with a couple of Irish barmaids (there seem to be a lot of Irish in Lincoln – at least, there are a good many Irish names on the honor rolls of the Lincoln regiment in the cathedral). There was a very jolly crowd of all ages, mostly drinking beer and not getting drunk nor making much noise but having a good time. We agreed that this kind of English pub is a great social institution – if only we had something like it back home.

mondaY morning we got an earlY start out of lincoln and made excellent time in spite of the rain. Ralph was doing the driving (which we had previously split with four days each), and I was doing the mapwork, which was easy most of the way but a little tricky coming into London. We reached the outskirts of the city by noon, and I could see that we could make it back in time for lunch, so we kept going. We were at the Bue Star Garage by one o’clock.

We parted happily with the Renwicks – the whole trip had worked out beautifully.

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When “getting there” really was half the fun

Bob, Dot, Cynthia and Beth Comery took the Queen

Mary to England in July 1964. Ralph, Mary Fay and

Bill Renwick took the Carmania, also a Cunard Line

boat, in August. John Renwick traveled by plane.

The Summer of 1964

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England and ScotlandSummer 1964