Totnes, still a picturesque and venerable Devon community by the River Dart, was the birthplace of several noteworthy, and also several less heralded individuals from Britain’s storied past. Two men befitting the former category, and honored by townspeople today, were Charles Babbage (1795–1871), and William John Wills (1834–1861). Babbage, a celebrated mathematician, has been justly extolled for his “Analytical Engine,” the forerunner of computer technology: Wills was a member of the ill-fated first expedition that crossed the Australian continent in 1860. But in addition to such memorialized men were those less illustrious but nonetheless significant personages born in this tenth-century Saxon settlement, whose overlooked careers call for exposition. Such is the case with one Robert Heath, a man who had his eighteenth-century roots in this once small hamlet. His life (1741–1800), while not that long, encompassed determinative spiritual and secular forces which, in turn, also affected Britons themselves during his career.

The Theological Magazine, a British religious publication, that appeared during the final years of the eighteenth, and first years of the nineteenth centuries, is the primary source offering biographical information concerning the career of Robert Heath. A somewhat limited memorial to him notes his birth in Totnes in the year 1741, but does not cite the month or day, or the names of his parents. Yet his family was not among the community’s more affluent residents, since the account notes “he received an education for trade, and about the age of fourteen was apprenticed to a white-smith [tinsmith]” in Totnes. There were a number of such tradesmen in the area, and Robert’s master was apparently not among the more adept of them. According to the biographical account, the artisan’s business soon collapsed, and “he was released from the bond term of his indenture.”

Later, the youth moved twenty-three miles westward to Plymouth where he worked briefly for a “Clock and Watchmaker.” Afterward, Robert bound himself out to a silversmith, but again, his master proved a poor entrepreneur, and he too failed before Heath’s indenture expired. But the young apprentice himself had absorbed the basics of the trade, and was able to establish a successful enterprise in this field at Plymouth Dock, also called Devonport, a separate community which then adjoined Plymouth at its western edge.