by Tom Fort
Chesil Beach
In preparation for visiting Chesil Beach, I thought I would read Ian McEwan’s short novel On Chesil Beach. I hoped it might mention interesting aspects of the longest shingle beach in the United Kingdom, such as its geomorphological profile or the unusual composition and distribution of the pebbles, or the eel fishing in the Fleet, the shallow, brackish lagoon behind the beach, or the quality of the angling for pollack and ling from the steep-shelving outer bank.
I was disappointed. It turned out to be the story of a young man driven half-mad by sexual frustration, who marries a young woman half-mad with sexual repression and ruins both their lives by prematurely ejaculating onto her on their wedding night – which happens to take place in a hotel near Chesil Beach. I may have missed something – I must have missed something – but I have rarely come across a short book that seemed longer, and the description of his unruly emission ‘filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs and even a portion of her breasts in tepid, viscous fluid’ is enough to put you off your breakfast.
Fortunately other sources – among them Dr Ian West’s geological website – are more informative. For example, you may not have known that the Chesil is an unusual kind of tombolo, which means a ridge or spit connecting an island (Portland Bill) to the mainland. This particular tombolo is eighteen miles long, extending from Portland to West Bay (or possibly fifteen miles long, extending to Cogden Beach – there is dispute on the matter). It is forty-five feet high at its highest point. The pebbles are mainly chert and flint of local origin, pale in colour. But mixed in are some startling red and purple quartzite stones washed over from Budleigh Salterton in Devon, and a very few examples of jasper, a form of silica. The pebbles are pea-sized at the eastern end, swelling gradually to the proportions of cobbles as you go west, and are harder than steel.
The Fleet is the largest tidal lagoon in the country, 200 acres in extent, eight miles long, varying between 100 and 900 yards in width. It hosts a wealth of interesting aquatic flora, including the great beds of eel grass on which the famous swans of Abbotsbury feed. There are oysters there, and bass, and plenty of freshwater eels which the Environment Agency issues licences to trap. The beach itself is a major draw for sea anglers, although it is not a good place to fall in, as a powerful undertow is likely to seize you and drown you.
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A little less than halfway along the Chesil, set back from the Fleet, is the very small village of Langton Herring. It is one of the thirteen ‘doubly thankful’ villages in England and Wales, in that all those it sent to both world wars came back safely. Treves called it dismal but it seemed perfectly pleasant to me, and it has a pub called the Elm Tree with decent beer and some interesting history.
It’s a spy story of the old kind, the flavour of le Carré all over it. Two lowly clerks at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland – Harry Houghton, an alcoholic in a failed marriage spending beyond his means, and Ethel Gee, a spinster in her forties weighed down by the burden of caring for elderly relatives – began an affair. They were approached and charmed by a handsome flatterer who told them that his name was Alex Johnson, and that he was a US naval commander interested in seeing what the British were up to with their nuclear submarines.
In fact he was a KGB prize asset, born Konstantin or Konon Molodiy in Moscow, better known both in London and North America as Gordon Lonsdale. Houghton and Gee began passing him drawings and specifications; they often had a drink or two in the Elm Tree in Langton Herring before catching a train to Waterloo to hand the packages to their benefactor. He would take the packages to a seemingly innocuous pair of antiquarian book dealers, Helen and Peter Kroger, who lived in a bungalow in Ruislip, 45 Cranley Drive. Mr and Mrs Kroger were actually the American Communist spies Morris and Lona Cohen, whose real interest was not in leather-bound volumes but transmitting the deepest secrets of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme back to Moscow.
The so-called Portland Spy Ring was rounded up on 7 January 1961. Superintendent George Smith of Special Branch arrested Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale/Johnson/Molodiy near the Old Vic in London. Inside Ethel Gee’s shopping bag was a sheaf of documents setting out the lethal potential of Britain’s first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought. A co-ordinated search of the bungalow in Ruislip yielded a pile of the latest espionage gear including a radio transmitter, a microdot reader and cypher codes, as well as secret documents and false passports.
The trial at the Old Bailey was a sensation of sorts. Lonsdale said nothing. The Krogers also refused to testify. Ethel Gee maintained she had no idea the information was going to the Russians; she had acted out of love for Houghton, her first love. He gallantly attempted to minimise her part, saying he had been blackmailed. They got fifteen years, the Krogers twenty years and Lonsdale twenty-five. Within a few years the Russian had been exchanged for the British spy Greville Wynne; Molodiy died mysteriously some years later on what the Moscow authorities said was a ‘mushroom-picking expedition’. The Krogers also ended up in Moscow in a spy exchange deal.
But no one was interested in negotiating freedom for the couple who had canoodled in the pub in Langton Herring. After their release in 1970 an enterprising freelance journalist spotted Houghton at Poole railway station, chased him into a building nearby and cornered him in a cupboard. Asked if he was intending to marry Ethel Gee, Houghton replied that if he hadn’t been on parole he would have punched the reporter’s head off. But he did the decent thing, and together they ran a guesthouse in Bournemouth for a while before fading into total obscurity.
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A lane leads down from Langton Herring through fields to the edge of the Fleet. It was a glorious morning and the warmth had brought out a great cloud of hawthorn flies, which were hovering and darting between the hedges searching for mates. The Fleet was as flat as glass, the pale wall of stones on its far side perfectly reflected. Beyond the Chesil the blue sea was fretted with gentle waves.
There is a row of cottages originally intended for coastguards, now much smartened up into holiday lets and seaside hideaways. One was being renovated for an amiable former naval officer turned estate agent who had evidently done very nicely from specialising in seaside properties. He gave me a cup of coffee and told me that he had homes in Brighton and Antigua, but who could resist this? He waved languidly towards the Chesil and I had to agree. We watched a low, flat-bottomed punt-like boat creep across the surface of the Fleet. The two blokes in it were eel fishermen, on their way to lift their fyke nets. I wished quite acutely that I was with them, but they were in no hurry and for me time, as ever, was pressing.
Abbotsbury is famous for its swans. Personally I do not share the general fondness for swans. They have spoiled too many promising fishing moments with their hissing and slurping and pointless wing-flapping and tearing at weed with their horrible black bills and churning up the water and disturbing the fish. But I admit that they did look quite charming as they sailed across the Fleet in stately squadrons. If there must be swans, better here than on a precious stretch of trouty chalk-stream.
Chesil Beach and Abbotsbury Swannery
The swannery was established 700 years ago to provide food for Abbotsbury’s Benedictine Abbey. Charles Harper quotes a droll piece of doggerel about preparing swans for the table:
To a gravy of beef, good and strong, I opine
You’ll be right if you add half a pint of port wine;
Pour this through the swan – yes, quite through the belly
Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly.
Of the abbey nothing survives except a gatehouse, an archway and some stubs of pillars. The rest was plundered by Sir Giles Strangways, who supervised the abbey’s dissolution on behalf of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. As well as the abbey estates, Sir Giles took possession of the swannery and within living memory it was still the custom for a plump cygnet to be sent over to the family seat at Melbury Sampford for dinner when required.
St Cathe
rine’s Chapel
Abbotsbury is highly picturesque even without its abbey. There is a huge medieval barn with mighty buttresses and a fine arched gateway, a good fifteenth-and sixteenth-century parish church, an ancient chapel dedicated to St Catherine which is perched on top of a smooth green hill between the village and the Chesil, and a long, meandering main street fronted by old stone cottages, some thatched, some roofed in rough tiles. There is an excellent pub, the Ilchester Arms, useful shops (including Abbotsbury Fishing Tackle!) and a picture-postcard village cricket ground.
It all looks idyllic, but the man at my B & B was full of resentment against ‘the estate’, which still owns most of the village. As a result of a series of inopportune deaths, this has come down from the Strangways (later the Earls of Ilchester) to Mrs Charlotte Townshend, the richest woman in Dorset. My landlord was embroiled in a long-running dispute with those he referred to as her ‘clueless minions’, something to do with the blocking or unblocking of a watercourse through his garden, I couldn’t follow all the ins and outs. His grievances included the stealing of part of his view by the new property next door, the greed of ‘the estate’ in starting up various commercial offshoots in competition with village businesses, the ending of a long-standing concession allowing locals to help themselves to firewood and some others I don’t remember.
After supper, as the light faded, I pedalled down a bridle path to the Chesil. I left my bike propped up against a bush and crunched up the enormous rampart of stones. The sun was going down in an apricot sky behind the Golden Cap far to the west. The sea shimmered like a silken cloak streaked by gold. Little waves slapped against the pebbles, hissing in their retreat.
At intervals along the downward slope anglers had fixed their rods on tripods. Latecomers were lugging their gear in trolleys along the crest of the beach searching for a pitch. I watched one fisherman leap from his seat to seize his rod. The tip bent briefly, but there was little fight in the fish – a bass, a codling, I couldn’t tell in the light – and it was soon hauled across the stones to be unhooked.
Towards the western end of the Chesil is Cogden Beach, where an unusual event occurred in June 1757 and was recorded thus in the History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, compiled by the Rector of Wareham, the Reverend John Hutchins:
‘A mermaid was thrown up by the sea, thirteen feet long, the upper part of it had some resemblance to a human form, the lower was like that of a fish: the head was partly like that of a man and partly like that of a hog. Its fins resembled hands: it had forty-eight large teeth in each jaw not unlike those in the jawbone of a man.’
That is all – nothing about the circumstances or what happened to the mermaid subsequently, which is most frustrating. Frederick Treves scoffs at the account of ‘this romantic individual’ but elsewhere in his monumental History, Hutchins does not come over as an especially credulous chronicler. Although there do not seem to be any other contemporary references to the Cogden Beach mermaid, there have been sightings of other exotic sea creatures along the Dorset coast. Hollinshed’s Chronicles mentions that in November 1457, at Portland, ‘was seen a cocke coming out of the sea having a great crest upon its head and a red beard having legs half-a-yard long’. It crowed four times, turning and nodding its head, ‘then vanished away’.
A contemporary historian of Weymouth, Martin Ball, has alleged that civic leaders there deliberately covered up the story of the Cogden Beach mermaid because they feared it would deter potential visitors to the resort. In 1995 Mr Ball himself saw an enormous creature off Chesil Beach which he described in a magazine article as being twelve feet tall, ‘half fish and half giant sea horse’. He identified it as the Veasta, the Dorset word for sea monster, and speculated that its home was off Portland where ‘tides from the east and the west converge, drawing upon the forces of the sun and the moon to reflect raw energies to the ocean depths.’
The mermaid is a familiar figure in the sea lore of many nations. There is an extensive body of stories in many languages recording sightings and exploring the peculiar physiology of mermaids, particularly that of their vaginas, which are said to be constructed so as not to permit sexual intercourse with humans. Unfortunately it is the nature of such mysteries that they attract the attention of lunatics and cranks, making it difficult to disentangle hard fact from fantasy. Who knows what was washed up on Cogden Beach in the far-off summer of 1757? Reason suggests that it was not a mermaid, but since when has reason covered every eventuality? I cannot help thinking about the forty-eight teeth, on each jaw. Someone counted them.
These days Cogden Beach is overlooked by a caravan park, so if a mermaid were to show herself again, someone would surely capture the event on a mobile-phone camera. Caravan parks arouse conflicting views. The self-appointed guardians of the purity of the coastline and the countryside – generally members of the National Trust – tend to regard them with distaste. And it is true that rows of rectangular metal boxes each with a car beside it inevitably diminish the charm of a place when viewed from a distance.
On the other hand they are loved and cherished by those who own or rent them. I chatted for a while to a couple from Pershore in Worcestershire who were sitting on their verandah looking out over the sea. He had a camera on a tripod, lens pointing in the direction of the mermaid’s emergence. They came down whenever the weather was fine and had made good friends among the other caravanners. They felt the sea did them a power of good.
There is another much bigger and brasher caravan park to the west of Burton Bradstock. Freshwater Beach, as it calls itself, offers the full holiday experience: Jurassic Fun Park, cabaret nights, fun ’n’ frolic nights, 70s weekends, all sorts. Its rows of boxes spill right down to the beach and far back into the hinterland, thoroughly defacing the coastline between the little river Bride and the fairways of the Bridport and West Dorset golf course to the west. As I approached, I briefly mistook the glare of the sun off the roofs of the caravans for an interesting coastal lagoon. I would not want to stay in such a place myself, but there are many that do, and if we lose the odd stretch of coastline to give them pleasure, is that such a bad thing?
Treves called Burton Bradstock ‘exceedingly pretty’, which the old part certainly is. But he also noted its discovery by ‘the diligent holidaymaker’ to whose ranks have been added, much later, the legions of the retired. He would doubtless groan with dismay if he could see the accretions of dull modern housing all around it today.
On the beach I came upon an angler scaling a plump bass for supper. He was a refugee from Hertfordshire where, he said, he had burned himself out running a restaurant. ‘Now I go fishing and listen to the sea as I go to sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s very calming.’
The cliffs between Burton Bradstock and West Bay are a sheer, biscuit-coloured drop composed of layers of friable sandstone between shelves of much harder, cemented sandstone, to give the appearance of a cross-section of some complex work of bakery. They are also inclined to release chunks of rock without warning, so beach users are warned to keep well away from the foot.
The beach is familiar to lovers of vintage British television as the backdrop of the opening of the immortal The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, in which Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in the form of Leonard Rossiter, flings off his clothes and skips down the fine shingle beach into the sea to swim towards his presumed extinction. More recently it figured in the ITV police drama Broadchurch, bringing the glow of celebrity to the otherwise rather uninteresting resort of West Bay. For a time the question ‘Who killed Danny?’ was being asked across the land (it was the lady copper’s husband, as predicted by me halfway through), and the cliff from which he might have fallen/been pushed (he wasn’t) became a familiar landmark.
So great was the sensation created by this series that, according to local newspaper reports, the organiser of the longstanding Jane Austen tour of nearby Lyme Regis had decided to branch out into Who Killed Danny? tours of West Bay, concentrating on the cliff and beach, the
newsagent’s where Jack Marshall (chief suspect owing to dodgy past) endured angry insults (he eventually topped himself) and the private estate up the hill where all the passions brewed and stewed and boiled over.
The skyline to the west is commanded by the great headland known as the Golden Cap, at 620 feet the highest point anywhere along the Channel. The gold – and it is gold – is a layer of sandstone standing out above the dark, crumbly Jurassic clays below. It has always been a prized landmark for mariners, although the creeping encroachment of vegetation has made it less gold, and therefore less visible from afar, than it used to be. The Golden Cap was acquired in 1978 by the National Trust, which now controls a five-mile stretch of coastline and hinterland between Eype and Charmouth, broken only by the little resort of Seaton. The coastal path winds along the clifftops and into the vales. The land is divided between small farms according to ancient boundaries. The fields are small and irregular, the hedges and fences are well maintained and rules forbidding the use of chemical fertilisers and sprays are rigorously enforced. It is working countryside, accessible in a discreet way, and the manner in which it ends, with sheep and cattle munching at the land’s edge, is a source of wonder.
Seatown, Dorset
There is a track behind the Golden Cap that leads through what was once the village of Stanton St Gabriel until they moved the coast road inland to what is now the route of the A35, and the settlement mouldered into ruin. It passes the shell of the village church, clasped in bramble and wild rose. A little way further on I happened upon a stable where a tall, good-looking woman was tending a large, good-looking horse with affectionate murmurs while several dogs romped around.