George Templer

Noted for his kindness, his hospitality and for his lavish lifestyle, his interests lay in poetry, amateur dramatics, field sports and cricket rather than business, which he mostly left to his lawyer and others.

[3] Templer was fond of entertaining at Stover House: his guests included Sarah Siddons and "Mr. Kemble", who were said to have praised his and his family and servants' performance of Shakespeare.

[2] In the later 1820s Templer ran into financial difficulties, considered today to be due mainly to his extravagant lifestyle[6] and his lack of business acumen, though he himself blamed his downfall on the dishonesty of a lawyer, about whom he wrote a bitter poem entitled "The Attorney",[7] the first verse of which runs:[8] Friends!

Still fancy's hand shall trace Thy pleasures past in all their former grace; And I will wear and cherish, though we part, The dear remembrance ever at my heart.

Not as the hare whom hounds and horn pursue In timid constancy I cling to you; But, like the bolder chase, resolved, I fly, That where I may not live I will not die.

At Sandford Orleigh he had a set of early-16th-century carved oak screens made into an ornamental overmantel: this was donated to Newton Abbot museum in 2008, after being removed from the house when it was converted into flats.

[18] The tramway was opened on 16 September 1820 with a great celebration at Haytor at which Templer gave a "short and energetic speech, which excited bursts of applause".

[1] Templer's business ventures were only able to support him for a short time: by the late 1820s he was in financial difficulties despite shipping 20,000 tons of clay and granite per annum down the canal.

[11] The difficulties with the granite business have been attributed to the strong competition that developed from other sources of granite, particularly in Cornwall, that did not need two transfers (tramway to canal barge, and barge to ship),[21] as well as Templer's lack of business acumen, which was described by L. T. C. Rolt in 1974 as him being "incapable of answering letters or taking important decisions and equally unable to select reliable men for positions of trust in his ventures".