Well done to Gerald Hine Haycock for being such an excellent High Sheriff during a very difficult year and for sharing your trials and tribulations with us:
It’s hard to believe that just fifteen months ago, I was about to become the High Sheriff of Devon. After four years of planning, Judy and I were facing a frantic year, with probably more than two hundred and fifty events, taking us all over Devon. Judy had given up her job in a hospital and we envisaged driving thousands of miles around Devon, visiting all the agencies of Law and Order that are at the centre of the High Sheriff’s role. We planned to spend days with charities, attend civic ceremonies, and even attend royal visits, as a representative of an ancient office that in Devon stretches back in an unbroken line to Saxon times.
Declaration Day, when the High Sheriff takes over the post, would have been celebrated in Littlehempston Church in front of the Lord Lieutenant, the Chief Constable, mayors, politicians, military leaders and of course dozens of family and friends. Tom Benson had willingly agreed to be my Shrieval Chaplain, and proudly wore the High Sheriff badges on his preaching stole. But as the pandemic restrictions swept in, the event was reduced to my reading my pledge of loyalty to the Queen down a phone to a JP witness in Plymouth – and a muted celebration with just the two of us indulging in a bottle of fizz and some smoked salmon sandwiches.
Two other long-planned traditional events went by the board, were resurrected and once again cancelled. The High Sheriffs’ Legal Service at Exeter Cathedral and the procession of judges and lawyers through the closed streets of the City was set up three times, and then fell victim to the lockdown. Our garden party at home in Littlehempston for 450 representatives of organisations throughout Devon suffered three cancellations. The most common query I heard was: “Do you get another go next year?” Sadly, it turned out this wouldn’t have been possible as it would have needed a special decree from the Privy Council and a change in the law in Parliament.
So how did I fill the year after being “pricked” by the Queen, when she made a hole in a sheet of vellum alongside my name with a 16th century silver bodkin? It was extraordinarily varied from talking on Zoom with a hundred police cadets to attending a Passing Out Parade for new officers at Middlemoor police Headquarters. We visited prisons and in HMP Exeter I was put through a (simulated!) first night in custody experience. I had lunch with Princess Anne after attending the passing out parade at Dartmouth Naval College. I spent two days in the back of a police car on operations in Torbay and Plymouth. I sat alongside High Court Judges for two murder trials, and a third on Zoom from Bristol Crown Court. I joined the Coastwatch at Prawle Point and a barber who trained others to be alert for potential suicides in young male clients. And I was overwhelmed by the generosity of Devonians who contributed thousands of pounds to the High Sheriff Fund for charities linked to crime prevention.
So, on reflection it was a difficult but ultimately fascinating and genuinely rewarding year, that meant we had to constantly adapt to unpredictable changes. And when, on my final evening, the Bishop of Exeter and the Dean of Exeter Cathedral invited us to a specially arranged Choral Evensong, with only Judy and I as the entire congregation, I realised what an extraordinary honour it was to be chosen as the latest in eleven hundred years as Devon’s High Sheriff.
Many thanks to Jenny Galton Fenzi for sharing what’s going on beneath the railway bridge. We may never have noticed! Can you spot the mallards in the photo?