Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  She told me in her soft Dorset voice that she had been brought up at Upcott Farm which stood where five fields and a copse met on the hillside nearby. It had been her father’s and now her brother was the tenant: 480 acres of grazing (though erosion nibbled away a little every year), no chemicals, just honest manure laboriously transported to improve the yield, and year-round toil to make a living from it. ‘But it’s in the blood, isn’t it?’ she said. She was working as a carer in Bridport but it was clear where her heart was. ‘I’ve lived all my life with the sound of the sea,’ she said.

  * * *

  Lyme Regis

  I really like Lyme Regis and have had very happy times there. I like the obvious things about it – the harbour and the Cobb, the museum, the crooked old cottages along the front, the beach of imported sand, the cheery Marine Parade, the narrow twisting streets and well-tended municipal gardens.

  I like it for having a proper secondhand bookshop, a cinema, a splendid bakery in the old mill where the breakfasts are a marvel. There are a couple of decent pubs and, of late, a classy fish restaurant up the hill. There are some proper shops, including an old-fashioned hardware store where I was able to get a set of Allen keys to adjust my handlebars; and a lot of shops of the kind you don’t mind looking through the window of even if you never actually buy anything. One thing Lyme Regis lacks is a butcher’s, which is odd, considering the kind of place it is.

  I like the fact that if you wander of an evening around to the end of the Cobb you are quite likely to come across the trawler New Seeker unloading her catch in fading light: polystyrene boxes of squid, ray, gurnard, black bream, the odd turbot and monkfish. This is real fishing, day in, day out, all weathers, the year round; a very far cry from the sedate routines of the town. There is an eccentric aquarium by the quay whose principal attraction is a tank of tame mullet trained to nibble fish food from your fingers.

  There is little for me to say about Lyme. It is so conscious of its rich history and heritage – fossils, Jane Austen, Monmouth’s rebellion, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, storms and shipwrecks, Mary Anning, civil war and so on – and markets them with such well-mannered assiduousness that there seem to be no obscure corners to be explored or dark deeds to be unearthed. Somehow it would be improper to say anything unkind about Lyme Regis, and I wouldn’t wish to.

  Instead I will address myself to the one burning question about Lyme: did Jane Austen swim naked there?

  The novelist’s visits in 1803 and 1804 have been documented to the point of tedium, as has her use of the location in crucial scenes in Persuasion. She certainly bathed in the sea there, as did her sisters. But what, if anything, was she wearing?

  The first thing to understand is that they bathed. They did not swim. Very few people could swim in those days. The purpose was therapeutic, not to take exercise. Bathers like the Austen sisters would immerse themselves in the water inside or close to their bathing machines. An illustration of one of the royal visits to Weymouth shows three princesses inside their machine, two in dresses at the side, the third in the water unashamedly nude.

  By the time the Austens came to Lyme for their holidays, sea bathing had become a favourite diversion at all resorts for people of all classes. Where bathing machines were not available or were too expensive, males and females went in where and how they pleased. At Liverpool in 1795 both sexes went naked. In Kent and Sussex girls and women generally wore flannel gowns, although some – generally those of the working class – were naked. An observer in Scarborough noted ‘charming maids in kindly clinging garments’. Men were always naked; it was generally believed that wearing anything lessened the benign effects of sea water.

  The indiscriminate mixing of naked men and maids in kindly clinging garments aroused unease. In 1800 the Observer reported that ‘the indecency of numerous naked men bathing in the sea close to the ladies’ bathing machines and under the windows of the principal houses at most of the watering places has long been complained of but in general has not been redressed.’ A guide to Worthing complained that the appearance of many bathers was ‘indecent and inconsistent with the rules of propriety and morality’. The great caricaturist Gillray’s depiction of a summer day at Margate showed naked men frolicking between the bathing machines while being watched from the esplanade by young women with telescopes.

  Little by little local authorities introduced regulations to enforce public decency. As swimming became more popular (as distinct from bathing), women covered themselves up. But the effectiveness of the covering was sometimes questionable. A correspondent for the Observer – which seems to have taken a particularly close interest in the matter – reported that at Margate ‘females lay on their backs waiting for the coming waves in the most degagée style . . . the waves carry their dresses up to their necks so that as far as decency is concerned they might as well be without dresses at all.’ The same newspaper – possibly the same outraged correspondent – groused about men gambolling around ‘in a complete state of nature’ and women disporting themselves ‘in questionable costumes’, the spectacle watched by crowds ‘of all ages and both sexes’.

  Such scenes were an affront to Victorian notions of propriety. Councils in seaside towns found themselves under pressure from the Church and other guardians of morality to segregate men and women and force them to cover their objectionable parts. In 1866 the local authority in Scarborough received two petitions, one from the clergy and the other from a group of residents, claiming that the indecent behaviour of bathers was keeping people away from the resort. The main problem was with naked men, but when the council proposed a bylaw requiring them to wear bathing costumes, the operators of the bathing machines objected that ‘first-class visitors’ who ‘have hitherto come here to bathe according to ancient useage’ would take their nakedness elsewhere. The eventual compromise was that men were required to cover up on the main beach between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m., but were allowed to go as nature intended at other times and on other beaches.

  The diarist and clergyman Francis Kilvert spoke for many dedicated followers of nudity when he wrote of the ‘delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air and running naked to the sea.’ He objected strongly to being required to wear drawers at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight in the 1870s. ‘If ladies don’t like to see men naked why don’t they keep away from the sight?’ he demanded. There is an arresting passage in his diary of 1874 in which he lingers over the appearance of a girl at Shanklin – ‘a supple, slender waist, the gentle dawn and tender swell of the bosom and budding breasts, the graceful rounding of the delicately beautiful limbs and above all the soft exquisite curves of the rosy dimpled bottom and broad white thighs.’ Phew!

  By then most councils had introduced broadly similar bylaws to outlaw such exhibitions. But as John Travis – a former hotelier turned academic – has shown in his research, many of them preferred to do little or nothing to enforce them. Brighton ordered bathers to be segregated and men to wear costumes but the Observer found ‘men in a state of nature and women with apologies of covering, exposed to the stares and remarks of the crowds’. In Margate ‘ladies outraged decorum’ by fixing opera glasses on the antics of nude men, while the council did nothing.

  Dr Travis reveals that the general covering up of the nude swimmer came about more through market forces than flaky public morality. As family seaside holidays grew in popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century, so did the pressure for mixed bathing. It is often stated that Bexhill in Sussex was the first resort to license mixed bathing, in 1902. In fact Paignton introduced it in 1896, Dawlish in 1897, Worthing and Bognor in 1899 and Torquay in 1900. The bathing machine, designed for concealment, was becoming redundant, and with families spread indiscriminately across the sand and shingle, no one wanted naked men around any more, for understandable reasons.

  Although the ‘fearless old fashion’, as Cosmopolitan magazine called it, survived on the margins, from roughly 1900 onwards costumes became the general rul
e. That remains the case, with allowance for minority topless display and the provision of some discreet nudist beaches (interestingly the one in Brighton, opened in 1980, is still the only one in a major resort). But the business of changing into swimming gear caused, and still causes, awkwardness.

  In 1927 the Labour MP for Southwark Central, Harry Day, asked the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, to consider legislation to ban undressing on beaches ‘for bathing purposes’ in view of the many complaints on the subject. Mr Day asked the Home Secretary if he was aware that in many cases ‘large groups of people undress on the beach without any covering at all.’ ‘In any case of that kind,’ Joynson-Hicks replied drolly, ‘I am quite sure the Honourable Member would not be present.’

  So did Jane Austen bathe naked at Lyme Regis? Maybe she did.

  15

  KEEPING THE RIFFRAFF OUT

  Although I am fond of Lyme, I am not sure I would want to live there and I definitely would not want to become infirm there. The cliffs to the west are dark and crumbly and the beaches too are dark, and when a stiff onshore breeze persists, the sea along the edge becomes ashy grey and murky and unappealing.

  So it can be dour at times, and is very steep at all times. I met an elderly man walking briskly at the western extremity of the town, where it peters out in a huddle of beach huts and mobile homes. He and his wife had migrated from inland Sussex. He had wanted to stay closer to London but she had her heart set on Lyme Regis. Now she had had a heart attack and couldn’t get around as she did before. ‘It’s too bloody steep,’ he said angrily. ‘We didn’t think of that. We’re going to have to move to Torquay.’

  The cliffs and clifftops west of Lyme are famously fossiliferous and notoriously unstable. Landslips are and have always been a hazard, the most celebrated of which brought natural disaster enthusiasts, fossil hunters and whiskered amateur geologists hurrying down in the winter of 1839–40. It had been an exceptionally wet and miserable summer and autumn, and in early December cracks appeared and widened along the cliff edge between Lyme and Seaton.

  Cliffs near Pinhay Bay, Devon

  On 23 December William Critchard noticed that the front door of his cottage was reluctant to open. The following night, Christmas Eve, the path to the cottage had sunk by a foot, and by the morning of Christmas Day it had risen seven feet. Something was evidently up, and Critchard set off to alert his employer at Bindon Farm, a mile or so inland.

  His wife and their neighbours set about gathering up their possessions and getting out. The ground shook and groaned, the sound likened to the tearing of cloth. A party out shooting rabbits narrowly avoided being swallowed up by one of the fissures appearing along the clifftop. In the course of that Christmas Day a section broke away and sank, creating a ravine half a mile long, up to 400 yards wide and between 130 and 200 feet deep. The outward thrust of the subsidence caused an upheaval of the sea bottom and the temporary appearance offshore of a considerable reef. Most of the cottages were wrecked and the unfortunate Critchard’s disappeared entirely.

  The undercliff settled over time. What had previously been fields of wheat became a wilderness, densely overgrown and fractured by deep gulleys. The path through it is not accessible to a man with a bike, so I missed it and instead took the very smart bridle path into the Rousdon estate and past a great pile bristling with high chimneys and sporting a timbered gable and arcade, a rectangular tower with pyramidal roof, a multitude of mullioned windows and much else. Rousdon was built in the 1870s at the behest of Sir Henry Peek, who made a great deal of money from biscuits (Peek Frean) and selling spices and groceries.

  He was a philanthropist of the old, semi-feudal kind. In addition to his mansion, Sir Henry commissioned a new church, a model estate farm, workers’ cottages, a blacksmith’s forge, slaughterhouse, barns, kennels, stables – a small, self-contained community able to feed and look after itself. It was a high-minded project, but such projects have a habit of becoming unstuck once the great wealth that made them possible runs out or the intense personal interest lapses with death or a change of circumstances.

  Like many other excessively large and draughty houses, Rousdon eventually became a school, Allhallows, which itself outlived its usefulness in time and closed. Now it has all been converted for twenty-first-century easy living: apartments and holiday lets and new houses built to imitate the old imitative style. It is a great place for DFLs – Down From Londons – two of whom I met pushing their buggies along the smoothly mown fringe of the estate road. The husband of one worked at home in their conversion, the other’s spouse was in London Monday to Friday – ‘so basically every weekend is a holiday which is cool. Yah, it works really well. It’s so lovely here.’

  Beyond and below Rousdon, the river Axe glides discreetly into the sea. There is a concrete bridge over it which was built in 1877, making it the oldest such construction in the country. These days it serves as a footbridge; next to it there is a modern boring bridge of the modern boring bridge type which takes the road traffic.

  At twenty-two miles long, the Axe is hardly a major river. Yet size is not everything, with rivers as with much else, and the Axe is rich in history and association – so rich, in fact, that when George Pulman came to write its story he ended up producing a book running to more than 900 pages. Pulman was born in Axminster, became a printer and bookseller, edited the Yeovil Times and founded Crewkerne’s first newspaper. He was a dedicated local journalist and historian, and a fly-fisherman of great distinction, a fine combination. In fishing history, Pulman is credited with being the first angler systematically to use a floating (dry) fly to catch trout instead of a sunken (wet) fly, which may not sound much to non-anglers but was a mighty revolution in its day. He wrote a little book full of wisdom and sound advice called The Vade Mecum of Fly-Fishing for Trout. But his great labour was his The Book of the Axe, which is not so much a guidebook as a love offering to the little river on which he spent so much of his time, and which gave him such delight.

  Pulman gives a very full account of the melancholy fate that overtook the once thriving port of Axmouth. In 1346 it was important enough to supply two ships and twenty-five men for the expedition to seize Calais, and it remained a major regional centre for shipping for a long time after that. But it was cursed by the inexorable eastward drift of shingle across the mouth of the river. The celebrated antiquarian William Stukeley recorded in 1724 that ‘it has been a great haven and excellent port of which they still keep up the memory’ but that the mouth was filled up with ‘coggles, gravel, sand, shells and such matter as is thrown up by the rowl of the ocean.’

  As at Rye and Winchelsea far to the east, laborious, extremely expensive and ultimately unavailing efforts were periodically made to clear the harbour. At one stage there was a very grand plan for a canal across to Bristol which would have saved ships coming around by Land’s End, but it came to nothing. The arrival of the railway finished the job of consigning Axmouth port to oblivion. Nowadays there is a basin below the concrete footbridge where small boats are tied up. Below it the river curves east then west around a spit of shingle, narrowing like the neck of a wine flask.

  I watched a silver-haired man in a baseball cap steer his boat out past the gravel bar. He went slowly and steadily, his engine a throaty chug, his fishing rod at an angle in the bow. It was a delicious morning, for fishing or anything else. I thought: that’s what I would do if I lived by the sea, get a boat and take it out on gentle days like this and catch some bass and mackerel. And what could be better than that?

  Another elderly bloke, in shorts and trainers, with a stick and a rucksack over his bony shoulders, was heading off purposefully along the beach towards Lyme Regis. His feet scrunched audibly on the clean-washed salty stones. He stopped, stared at the water for some time, carried on. He gave the impression of having all the time in the world to get to wherever he was going.

  Seaton Cliffs

  Seaton is set back behind its own stony beach across the mouth of the
Axe. The railway that killed off the port was the making of Seaton for a time. It became quite a classy resort, boasting fourteen hotels and a theatre, but its charms have, I fear, faded a good deal since that heyday. The seafront, which makes or breaks a resort, is too much taken up with mediocre blocks of holiday and residential flats. Seaton does, however, boast a turf labyrinth on the edge of town, although the reasons for it being there are not readily apparent to the casual visitor. Those entering are urged to ‘look deeply, bravely and sincerely at whatever circumstances are trying to teach you.’ I found that circumstances were trying to teach me to go to the nearby Seaton Hole café for a bacon bap and a slab of cold bread pudding.

  There was one other customer there, eating a healthy salad sandwich. She was somewhat glum about Seaton, which she had known for a long time. ‘It’s become a rather sad place,’ she said. ‘Nothing ever seems to happen here.’

  One thing that did happen was the collapse in summer 2012 of part of the clifftop carrying the old road to Beer, which has now been abandoned for good. Beer is a sweet little holiday place, much perkier than Seaton. It makes much of its history as a centre of smuggling, and of the adventures of a local lad, Jack Rattenbury, who spent half a lifetime dodging the excise men and wrote a book about his adventures which is invariably referred to as ‘colourful’.

  Beer Head

  But the main interest of Beer is geological and belongs to the headland to the south, Beer Head. Here the theme that has recurred at intervals from St Margaret’s Bay in Kent takes its final bow, for Beer Head is the last chalk cliff on the Channel. It is a fine one, surmounted by craggy pinnacles, dropping steeply into clear aquamarine water, its face pitted with holes and scarred by rockfalls. The sudden reappearance of the white chalk to the east and west of Beer is all the more striking because either side – at Seaton and Branscombe – a new theme has been introduced in the form of the deep terracotta of the Triassic Mercia Mudstone. Variations on this tone – sometimes as dark as uncooked liver, more often lighter but always strikingly maroon – dominate the coast as far as Torquay, giving rise to the label Red Devon.