by Tom Fort
*
It so happened that the Annual Parish Meeting was being held the evening I was in Bibury, so I went along. It took place in a side room at the village hall while Pilates or Zumba or something more strenuous went on in the main part. There were three members of the public – four if you include me – and six members of the parish council under the chairmanship of a local lady farmer, soft-voiced but firm, and adept at keeping things moving without letting anyone think that their contribution was not valued.
The items for discussion were no more exciting than at any of the thousands of parish meetings across the country (and I have been to a few in my time). Grass-cutting opposite the Catherine Wheel was going well. The parking of coaches remained a problem but the designation of two bays opposite the Trout Farm had helped. Someone from FWAG – the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group – was making progress with a report on flooding. The precept, the parish’s share of the council tax, was going up to £10,000 to pay for flood prevention measures.
The discussions became more animated for a while on the subject of a pair of plant boxes which had been installed by my cricketing friend Terry outside his house at the top of the approach to Bibury Court to make it impossible for coaches to get past. The councillors did not like the boxes. They were suburban, even – Heaven forfend! – a touch ‘Milton Keynes’. But there was nothing much to be done about them as the road was private and therefore beyond the long arm of the parish council or even the Highways Department.
Conscious of not having had any dinner and wishing urgently to repair the omission, I slipped away as the focus of discussion switched to the reluctance of the district council to provide drawings on paper to enable informed consideration of planning applications. Before leaving Bibury the next afternoon I went back to the Bat Field, cycling slowly along the track through the fringe of the wood above Bibury Court. It was a delicious May day. The beeches and oaks were in new leaf, and the ripening summer wheat waved across the fields. The cricket square glowed emerald green, its edges as sharp and straight as if cut with a knife against a ruler held against the longer, lusher grass of the outfield. The roller stood at the ready near the pavilion, and I knew that in the shed, securely padlocked, was Terry’s pride and joy, the Lloyds Paladin cylinder mower with which he sculpted the lines up and down the square.
I fell asleep on the springy turf in the shade of a big oak near the gate and woke up thinking about cricket.
7
SEA SHANTY
Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire
The closure of the Scarborough–Whitby railway line half a century ago is still mourned by rail enthusiasts; and quite understandably, as it must have been one of the great stretches on the whole national network. But all was not lost when Beeching’s axe fell. The line was acquired by Scarborough Borough Council, and although the track was removed, the cinder bed on which the sleepers had been laid was left. In time what had been a wonderful train ride became a wonderful cycle ride, the Cinder Track.
The attractions of the section immediately north of Scarborough are discreet, even low-key. The track cuts through green countryside and leafy woods. The sea is never far away but it remains out of sight, and there are no more than occasional glimpses of the clifftops. For long stretches the path is hemmed in by trees, the branches meeting overhead in a casual intimacy that would never have been tolerated when the locomotives were chuffing through. The cinders make an easy cycling surface, the inclines are gentle and the curves gradual. The cyclist is able – or this cyclist was able – to slide into a contemplative, contented state of mind, so that the miles slip by almost unnoticed.
Robin Hood’s Bay from the air
The one slightly taxing ascent is up to Ravenscar, where an imposing hotel is perched above dark, shaly cliffs, the one survivor from an impetuous and ill-fated plan in late Victorian times to transform this exposed clifftop hamlet into a swanky seaside resort. At Ravenscar the cycle path abruptly becomes grand, dramatic, even epic. Landscape and seascape come together as Robin Hood’s Bay shows itself: framed in the distance by the sharp outline of the headland known as Bay Ness, a crescent of steep-sloping brown cliffs with a chequerboard of green fields splashed with gorse and broom inland, a great sweep of water a mile-and-a-half across creased by white lines of slow, purposeful waves.
Seen at high tide under a blue sky on a summer’s day it all looks benign enough. But the ebbing tide reveals an extraordinary shoreline. Dark tongues of hard shale are exposed with channels between where softer rock has eroded. These tongues – known as scaurs or scars – curve away from the shore like the corrugations on a sea shell. Along the southern half of the bay they are at a fairly acute angle with the beach. Further north, around where the village of Robin Hood’s Bay spills down a cleft in the cliffs, the angles are wider, so that the scars thrust out into the sea. As the tide recedes further, the channels between the scars empty. Plateaus of bedrock, pitted with holes and tiny pools, stand up from the lower rock base. Massive boulders, seemingly distributed at random, rest on these platforms.
In calm weather the waves chase each other playfully across the fissured rockscape. But even then they come at varying angles and speeds, colliding as they break over the scars. In a storm on a low or ebbing tide the bay becomes a churning battleground of competing forces of water, surging this way and that in a roar of spray and foam. And if that storm is blowing from the east, thrusting big rollers from the open sea to smash across the scars, then to be out there in an open boat is to face the utmost peril.
Viewed from Ravenscar the village of Robin Hood’s Bay appears as a cheerful and incongruous red against the green of the woods and meadows clasping it from behind. In fact it is only the pantiled roofs that are red. The walls of the cottages and the few more substantial buildings are constructed from rough brown slabs of sandstone hewn from compacted deposits of the same rock that gives the cliffs and the shore their dark, stern hue.
Space was always the scarcest and most precious commodity in Baytown – or just Bay – as the village is known. There is the one road in and out (there was another 200 years ago but it was smashed away by the sea). It is called New Road, and it makes for an alarming and brake-squealing descent on a bike. On either side the cottages and crooked little houses are squeezed side by side, front to back and apparently almost on top of each other around a warren of tiny cobbled streets, passages, flights of steps and miniature squares – ‘perched like the nests of seagulls among the cliffs’, as a Victorian travel guide put it.
It is invariably referred to as a ‘fishing village’ or ‘former fishing village’ and a long time ago that, indeed, was its prime function. There were almost no gardens and every level bit of land that did not have a dwelling or a shed on it was filled with lobster pots, buoys, coils of rope and other fishing gear, or blocks for cutting and cleaning fish. Every post and fence supported netting or more rope, every shed was crammed with more equipment, and there were hurricane lamps on hooks for lighting the tables on which the nets were repaired and the lines with their weights and hundreds of hooks were carefully coiled so they could be taken to the boats in the darkness and loaded.
The bottom of New Road opens out to face the sea, with the Bay Hotel on one side and the old coastguard house on the other, and the slipway in front. Looking out you wonder how this could ever have been a fishing village. There are no protective seawalls, no harbour, no quayside with deep water beside, nowhere for boats to be safe from a storm and a rising sea. They were simply pulled up out of harm’s way at the end of each day’s fishing, and launched again the next, heaved down over the rock and shingle and thrust out into the waves. The designated channel was known in that terse Yorkshire way as The Landing. It was the task of the helmsman on an incoming boat to locate it, and woe betide any that failed. On either side the rocks waited, and in a storm in failing light the posts marking the way were hard to spot. Many were the boats smashed to pieces, and many the Robin Hood’s Bay fisherme
n drowned within hailing distance of the shore.
There had been boats and Bay men facing that peril back in Tudor times, but the heyday of Baytown came early in the nineteenth century when, for a short while, it rivalled Whitby and Scarborough in importance for landing fish. At the high point as many as forty-five boats and 130 fishermen were working the inshore waters out of Baytown. The boats were cobles, generally thirty to forty feet long. They had a high bow, a raised stern with undercut transom so they could be landed stern first, and a long tiller which operated a heavy rudder that acted as a centreboard to balance the craft. The cobles were rowed, although a sail was stored and raised when conditions were favourable. Pots were set for lobster, drift nets for salmon and baited hooks for cod, haddock and anything else that came along. When the boats came in at dusk the village turned out. The boys helped bring the boats in and unload the catch, and then the women and girls set about sorting it, cleaning and then barrelling the fish. There was a part for everyone; when a man got too old for pulling the coble oars he could still be useful putting out the crab and lobster pots.
Although fishing was the mainstay of the Bay economy, an important secondary prop was the alum works along the clifftop towards Ravenscar. Alum crystals were widely used in the dyeing and tanning industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its extraction from the shale deposits required heating in water, which required coal. Potash from kelp was used in another process, and ammonia from human urine in another – and all these materials were more easily delivered by sea to the foot of the cliffs than by land. At times as many as fifty men were employed at the alum works, and up to twelve boats on delivering materials and taking away the finished product.
So Baytown prospered, but as it did so, the fishing families thought to prosper more, which is the way economics works. That had to mean bigger boats, and that storm-blasted strip of shore in front of the village could not deal with bigger boats. Although mid-nineteenth-century Baytown was full of resident seafaring men, most were by then working on vessels registered and kept in Whitby to the north, where there was a secure harbour. Alan Storm, a descendant from one of the principal fishing dynasties, compiled an exhaustive study entitled Family and Marine Community: Robin Hood’s Bay c.1653–c.1867 charting the course of Baytown history. His researches revealed that most of the ships registered in the names of Baytown families were actually engaged in transporting cargo rather than fishing. The younger men from the village were sailors rather than fishermen, generally working far away as deckhands.
Jacob Storm, who was born in 1837, stated in his memoir of Bay life that around 1850 there were seventeen cobles fishing out of Baytown as well as two luggers and a yawl. The fishing was, he said, ‘prosecuted with vigour’. But the drain of men to merchant shipping meant that by the end of the century there was just one family still at it: one of the numerous branches of the Storm tree, this one comprising Thomas Smith Storm (known as ‘Argy’) and his sons Thomas, William, Oliver and Reuben (all of whom served at one time or other as coxswain of the Bay lifeboat). By then the opening of the Scarborough–Whitby railway line had introduced a new role for the village. Visitors from faraway Scarborough and even York discovered the village perched above the North Sea and pronounced it quaint and delightful. Baytown was becoming a holiday destination.
*
For my sixtieth birthday a few years back a dear friend, Padraic Fallon – now dead – gave me a book I had never heard of by a writer I had never heard of. On the inside cover he wrote: ‘To Tom Fort, a good man with words and a man of good heart’, which would be a nice way to be remembered. When I asked him about it, he just said that everyone in his family had read it and so should anyone who loved the sea and fishing.
The first sentence of Leo Walmsley’s Three Fevers reads: ‘It was treacherous weather, even for a Bramblewick December.’ That’s the way to start a story – you cannot help but read on, and I did. It did not take me long to reach the end, for it is a shortish novel (250 modest-sized pages).
It is the story of two fishing families and the north-east Yorkshire village where they live and fish. The Three Fevers of the title are the compulsions that overtake them successively: for catching cod, then lobster and finally salmon. The fevers are stoked by the rivalry between the Fosdycks – the resident Bramblewick family, going back to the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries – and the Lunns, who are incomers. The Fosdycks, ageing and traditionalist, fish the old way, slow and safe. The Lunns have an engine on their boat, and are risk-takers. The families fear and hate each other, but they are also trapped in a web of mutual dependence. Each needs the other to help manhandle its boat in and out, and when danger threatens, each must turn to the other as the only source of assistance.
More than that, they are bound together in their challenge to the sea. The action is narrated by an unnamed outsider who fishes with the Lunns. It revolves around the individual fishermen and their womenfolk, the business of fishing, the terrifying peril the sea can conjure at the drop of a lobster pot, and the way the two crews meet and face down that challenge. It is very simply told and all the more powerful for that. The descriptions of the storms and the rage of a sea that is their provider as well as their mortal enemy are heart-poundingly exciting. More than that I will not say – as my friend Padraic said to me, if you are interested in the sea and the story of those who lived from it, read it.
Having finished it I became curious about Leo Walmsley. It turned out that Bramblewick was Robin Hood’s Bay and that the story of Three Fevers came from the story of Baytown’s last two fishing families. The Fosdycks were the Storms, the Lunns were the Dukes, migrants from Flamborough. The narrator – not a popular man in the village – was Walmsley himself.
The Walmsleys were themselves incomers, from Shipley. Leo’s father, Ulric, was an artist who moved to Baytown with his wife Jeannie and their four children in 1894, when Leo – the youngest – was two. Ulric Walmsley spent the rest of his long life there, making a living and little more from selling his watercolours of the area, teaching and photography, and as a sign-writer. His wife was a devout Methodist, the effect of which was to turn her youngest child off religion for life. Leo also found the narrow, inward-looking life of the village unsympathetic; it is noticeable that in his autobiographical books he makes little mention of his parents and none at all of his siblings.
As a child he was an outsider, but he found an escape and consolation along the Bay shore and on its waters: fishing, hunting for fossils, examining and classifying the creatures of the pools and fringes. At the age of twenty he got a part-time job as curator of the marine laboratory recently established at Robin Hood’s Bay by the distinguished Professor of Zoology at Leeds University, Walter Garstang. Walmsley was paid five shillings a week and was left to determine his own working hours, which he combined with teaching at a local school. In 1913 he had an article about the geology of the Bay published in the Whitby Gazette. A year later he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps. He served with distinction as an observer during the East Africa Campaign and was awarded the Military Cross.
In 1928, having embarked with little success on the life of a writer, Walmsley returned to Baytown to live with his first wife, Elsie. By then the Storms and the Dukes were still fishing commercially, and no one else. The majority of the Bay folk evidently did not care for him or his bohemian ways or the manner of his talk. But he made friends with the Dukes and went fishing with them often enough to acquire the solid background material he needed to write Three Fevers. It was published in 1931, by which time Walmsley’s first marriage had broken down and he had moved to a creek near Fowey in Cornwall. It was enthusiastically reviewed – J. B. Priestley said ‘it is done with extraordinary assurance and conviction . . . and is grandly alive’ – and the sale of the rights to a film of it, called Turn of the Tide, enabled Walmsley to return to his home territory with his second wife. He built a house a couple of mil
es inland from Baytown and wrote three more Bramblewick tales, none of which repeated the success of Three Fevers.
After a period living in Wales, Walmsley’s second wife left him, taking their children with her. In 1945 he came back to Baytown again for a while, before retreating to Cornwall. He married a third time, had a daughter and died at Fowey in 1966. In all, this unusual and – reading between the lines – difficult man wrote twenty or so novels, guide books and memoirs. The last, Angler’s Moon, is an engaging medley of recollections, many of them from his Baytown days.
Walmsley classified the Bramblewick stories as ‘autobiographical novels’. Of Three Fevers he wrote: ‘All I had done by way of invention was to increase the rivalry between the two families to a feud – the old-timers against the foreigners.’ The entire narrative is concentrated on them – ‘The book had no plot,’ Walmsley said, ‘and the sea itself was the protagonist.’ Although the dwellings of the Lunns are carefully realised, there is no overall impression of the village itself or what anyone else was doing. In fact, by 1928, when Walmsley spent his fishing season there, most of the old cottages were already holiday homes. By 1935, when Turn of the Tide was filmed on location, the last Storms had retired from fishing and the Lunns had decamped to Whitby and bought a small trawler.
*
The sea is no longer the protagonist in the story of Baytown. Its role is limited to providing the setting, the beauty of which is undimmed, and a playground in fine weather for boaters, recreational anglers and the occasional brave swimmer. The gulleys between the scars and the rock pools are invaded and netted and picked over by holidaymakers on summer days, without a thought given to the appalling hazard these weed-draped spits of rock once presented.