by Tom Fort
Devon is often too lovely for its own good. At Branscombe three wooded vales come together in a straggling village of low, ancient stone dwellings with creepers and roses around their doors and little walled cottage gardens outside. A tiny stream twists through it and finds the sea through a gently shelving beach with a thatched café beside it. With the sea on one side, and green fields broken by woods to the other, Branscombe is perfect.
It is difficult not to dream of having a bolthole in such a place, and for those with a stack of spare cash it is not a great leap to obtaining one. So Branscombe, like so many sweet and lovely villages in south-west England, has become a settlement of second homes: full of life and noise and fun in the holiday season, quiet as night outside it. It has a school and two pubs, a post office and a forge with a real blacksmith, and even a little brewery producing fine ale, so the life has not been extinguished altogether. But its familiar blight is that its young people cannot afford to stay.
Branscombe’s dead rest in the graveyards either side of its exceptionally lovely church. An elderly couple were at work keeping the graves and the paths tidy. She was one of a tiny handful of Branscombe born and bred – there were four others left, she told me. She pointed out to me a pair of cottages set back from the lane, intended for living in, bought by someone from outside, converted, hardly used. ‘It’s a curse,’ her husband said bitterly. ‘There’s nowhere for the children to live.’
Branscombe made the national headlines once, in 2007, although it was an episode the village would probably prefer to forget. It began with the grounding offshore and breaking up of a container ship, the Napoli, and the arrival on Branscombe beach of forty or so of its giant metal boxes which the sea conveniently smashed open. A global treasure trove was revealed which included BMW motorbikes, casks of brandy, morphine, Nintendo and Xbox games, vast mountains of disposable nappies, quantities of anti-wrinkle cream and frozen Peking duck, pet food, a consignment of Bibles in the Xhosa language, seven cigarette cards featuring pigeons and a single Iraqi 50 dinar note.
The event set off a wild rebirth of the bad old practice of wreck plundering. Locals soon made off with the choicest items, but word spread and within a couple of days the roads leading to Branscombe were jammed with bargain hunters from all over Britain, and even some from abroad. The looting of the cargo of the Napoli became a national scandal. The impotence of the authorities, the use of mobile phones to spread the news, the reckless greed and oafishness of the looters, the chaotic and revolting nature of the spectacle shown on TV, all seemed to come together in a paradigm of society’s abdication of moral standards. The editorial columns hummed with expressions of outrage, ministers spluttered with indignation; inevitably, an official inquiry was set up (conclusion: leadership failure).
Then the story died. The salvage teams disposed of the Napoli and what was left of its load, and Branscombe was left battered and dazed. The trauma of those lawless days and nights is recalled by the presence next to the beach of the mighty anchor from the ship, which was presented to the village by her owners.
The road inland passes Weston and its donkey sanctuary, where the air is filled with the contented braying of its pampered inmates. I got back to the sea along a dip in the landscape leading to Southcombe Farm. The loveliness of the place was almost unreal; green fields overlaying red earth speckled by grazing beasts, hedges and copses in between, at the edge the red cliffs and the blue sea. I cycled down the track very happily, then hauled the bike up the appallingly steep slope of Salcombe Hill. At the top is a stone memorial to the man whose generosity of spirit ensured that this glorious spot has remained undefiled and free to anyone with sound legs and wind to enjoy.
The Cornishes were an old Devon family, widely dispersed. I knew the name of C. J. Cornish through an enchanting book, A Naturalist on the Thames, which is full of good stuff about chub and eel traps and the like. But I had never heard of his younger brother, Vaughan, a distinguished geographer specialising in wave forms who later developed a theory of what he called ‘aesthetic geography’, the power of natural scenery to promote spiritual wellbeing. Cornish campaigned energetically on behalf of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, focussing on the protection of the coast and clifftops.
He claimed for cliff scenery a superiority over the inland landscape that he likened to that of a sculpture over a bas-relief. He wanted to see an open strip five chains wide (110 yards) that would remain inaccessible to cars, free from seats, shelters, litter bins and noticeboards. And he put his fields where his mouth was. On inheriting Southcombe Farm, he made an agreement with the local council that it should be preserved as open space with public access in perpetuity. The South-West Coast Path now threads its way between the fields and the drop to the sea – not five chains wide, but wide enough. Vaughan Cornish deserves his stone.
Breathing heavily I heaved my bike over a gate at the top of Salcombe Hill. On the other side was a lady sitting on a bench facing east where the afternoon sun struck against the dark-red cliffs. She had walked up from Sidmouth with her golden retriever, which was slumped on the ground beside her. She had been a GP in Sidmouth for many years and had stayed there after retirement. She liked it and always had, but said it was not what it once was. Tesco were trying to get in, and Morrisons. ‘We’ve always been perfectly happy with Waitrose,’ she said.
Sidmouth
In 1933 Sidmouth Urban District Council rejected a proposal to build a holiday camp at Salcombe Regis on the grounds that holiday camps and Sidmouth did not go together. Until 1945 changing on the beach was banned at Sidmouth, as were icecream stalls, whelk stands and photographers. It had a new esplanade and the Connaught Pleasure Gardens, but none of the vulgar attractions – pavilions, piers, amusement arcades and the like – adopted by other seaside resorts. It had bowls, croquet, tennis and a putting green.
In 1952 the council decided to form a committee to promote the town, but voted against allowing hoteliers or retailers to be on it. Ten years later the committee came up with a slogan defining Sidmouth’s image of itself: Sidmouth Caters for the Discriminating. In pursuit of the mission ‘to preserve old-world graciousness’, a bylaw was passed in the 1970s prohibiting ‘wirelesses in public places’.
Sidmouth was the first proper Devon seaside resort. Throughout its long history it has prospered by attracting a flow of well-heeled patrons to its expensive and intensely respectable hotels. It has pursued a strategy of discreet exclusion of the lower orders, by the simple expedient of refusing to provide any of the amenities and amusements that the lower orders expect. As a result Sidmouth has always had a particular flavour, derided by its critics but savoured by its admirers. John Betjeman was one:
Mansions for admirals by the pebbly strand,
And cottages for maiden aunts inland,
That go with tea and strawberries and cream
Sweet sheltered gardens by the twisting stream,
Cobb, thatch and fuschia bells, a Devon dream.
Recently the town received an extraordinary gift. An investment banker, Keith Owen – a frequent visitor to Sidmouth despite being based in Canada – contacted the Sid Vale Association to tell them that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that he was leaving his £2 million estate to Sidmouth ‘to sustain its ambience and way of life’. ‘He was a nice chap, a very unassuming fellow and he really did love Sidmouth,’ the chairman of the town council said of Mr Owen in highly Sidmouthian terms. The first spending project was also highly characteristic: the planting at strategic points of 150,000 snowdrop, daffodil and crocus bulbs.
An early connoisseur of Sidmouth’s charms – he called it ‘a little marine paradise’ – was the Reverend Sydney Smith, who brought his family down from his parish in Somerset most summers between 1830 and his death in 1845. Smith was an oddity, a man celebrated not for his work – he was a dutiful clergyman, no more, and wrote nothing of lasting value – but for his jokes. Just about everyone who knew him considered him the
funniest man alive; his friends were often reduced to tears of laughter by his jests, and their servants to unseemly displays of hilarity. Of Macaulay, Sydney observed that ‘he has occasional flashes of silence which make his conversation perfectly delightful’, and of someone else that ‘he deserves to be preached to death by wild curates’, which I think is still funny.
His most notable intervention in public life followed the infamous rejection by the House of Lords in 1831 of the Reform Bill proposing a modest extension of the franchise. In a speech in Taunton, Smith drew an extended parallel between the behaviour of the Lords and that of a resident of Sidmouth, ‘the excellent Mrs Partington’, when confronted by the epic flood of 1824. Dame Partington, Sydney related, was to be seen at the door of her house ‘trundling her mop, squeezing out the water and vigorously punching away the Atlantic Ocean.’ His comic climax achieved immortality: ‘The Atlantic was roused. Mrs Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs Partington. She was excellent with a mop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest.’
The tempest in question was no joke for Sidmouth or any of the other ports and settlements battered by one of the most violent Channel storms ever recorded. The harbour at Lyme Regis was wrecked, Christchurch was flooded, Weymouth lost its esplanade and most of its pier, scores of houses on Portland were destroyed and the village of Fleet, well behind the Chesil Beach, was completely inundated. Hundreds of seamen were drowned as their ships were wrecked, and scores of people on land were drowned or killed by flying slates, or falling chimney stacks and trees.
In Sidmouth the sea invaded the town in the early hours of 23 November. Mrs Mogridge in York Terrace was awoken by the noise of boats banging against her front door. Mr Hall the draper reported sailors rowing across the market place to rescue distressed ladies. In the library the billiard table was smashed against the fireplace and the piano was washed into the sitting room. The landlord of the London Hotel watched a giant wave sweep into the chemist’s and retreat bearing bottles and pill boxes. At dawn Mr Yeates struggled to the beach and saw that the great local landmark, a forty-foot-high stack at the mouth of the harbour known as the Chet Rock, was no more.
The details were recorded by the town’s resident antiquarian, Peter Orlando Hutchinson, a magnificently quirky example of the species. Hutchinson came to Sidmouth with his family at the age of fifteen and remained there for the rest of his eighty-seven years. Unmarried (he lived with a cat and a pet raven), he habitually wore a kind of uniform of his own design and went around in a cart pulled by a donkey. He devoted himself to exhaustive investigation of every aspect of Sidmouth’s history, legends, geology, flora and fauna, recording his findings in thousands of pages of diaries, and in the five volumes of his History of Sidmouth, which was never published.
Hutchinson’s friend, the Reverend H. G. J. Clements, remembered him as ‘somewhat original and eccentric in all his proceedings . . . a typical antiquary in face and figure . . . his very handwriting was a copy from the antique, slowly and deliberately executed, his utterance and diction equally elaborate.’ Mr Clements speculated that Hutchinson might have derived his manner from Sidmouth itself ‘which has been (and I hope may continue to be) a very deliberate sort of a place’.
It certainly remains a very handsome and well-kempt resort, with fine terraces and crescents of elegant town houses, and a glorious cricket ground (though the secondhand bookshop I remembered from twenty-five years ago has gone). What passes for controversy in Sidmouth rages over such issues as the management of the beach huts, whether or not the Mayor should get a new mayoral chain and the discovery of a used condom outside the new Jurassic Coast Interpretation Centre. A council comment on this last scandal – ‘this is nothing new . . . we’ve had reports of people getting completely naked and using the open-fronted showers next door’ – hinted at a degree of depravity that would have set Betjeman’s admirals and maiden aunts all of a-quiver.
Sidmouth is at one end of the holiday spectrum. Ladram Bay Holiday Park, a few miles along the red cliffs, is at the other. Ladram Bay unspoiled must have been extraordinary. A geological quirk has thrown up stacks of sandstone just yards from the beach, which have been gnawed into horizontal corrugations by the wind and the sea over their 240 million years of existence. The blue of the water and the sky, the blood red of the flanking cliffs and the pillars of stone, the green of the fields made for a dramatic and beautiful visual composition – until the great host of caravans spilled down towards the sea and across the flanking slopes. It is irredeemably blighted, yet it gives great pleasure to countless holidaymakers who would never have a place at one of Sidmouth’s plush hotels.
* * *
Otter estuary, Budleigh Salterton
I approached Budleigh Salterton by means of a footpath along the river Otter from Otterton. The Otter was another Devon stream I had not encountered before. Alternating between gravelly riffles and slow, contemplative pools, it looked full of trouty potential. It flowed clear but dark, on account of the dark streambed. The far bank sloped steeply up, the red earth nourishing a thick band of alder, oak and the odd willow.
As it nears the sea, the river dissipates its energy in a marsh of lagoons and mudflats before gathering itself to end its journey at the eastern extremity of Budleigh Salterton’s shingle beach, beside a knob of rusty sandstone. The path swings away before the end, and curves along the edge of the saltmarsh and around Budleigh Salterton’s charming cricket ground. Practice was in progress: boys were being drilled in their forward defensives and slip catching. It was clear evidence of something that I otherwise might have doubted – namely that there were children in Budleigh Salterton, and people of child-bearing age.
What a curious place it is, starting with the abnormal size, smoothness and roundness of the quartzite stones that make up its beach. It is a seaside town, very appealingly situated, but in no sense a seaside resort, because there is almost nowhere to stay. As recently as the 1960s there were as many as thirteen hotels on or near the seafront. Now there is not a single one. Following the closure of the railway in 1967 they were all either demolished to make way for flats, or themselves were converted into flats, nursing homes or residential homes.
I became anxious about my bed. The one B & B was full, and I became more anxious. Eventually I did locate a hotel, a considerable distance inland; and very welcoming they were, Brian and Lorraine, and the breakfast the next morning was everything I had hoped. But before breakfast came dinner, and they had no restaurant. Where to eat? My question had the edge of desperation.
They suggested the Salterton Arms and gave me directions. I found the place, which seemed extraordinarily busy for a Tuesday evening, drained a much-needed pint and asked for the menu. No food on ukelele night, the barmaid said. I looked around more attentively. They all had ukeleles. Some were strumming them purposefully and a collective outburst of ukelele was clearly imminent.
The barmaid sent me across the road to the chippie. It was ten minutes past eight. A schedule of opening hours on the door revealed that it closed at eight. I went back to the Salterton, had another pint and sought more advice. The only hope was the other pub, the Feathers. I arrived panting. The barman looked at his watch in answer to my question. Seven minutes till last orders, he said. Home-made faggots with onion gravy and mash, plus more beer, repaired my morale. I felt as if I had been plucked to safety from dangerous seas.
When I came out of the Feathers the light was fading and the town had pretty much shut down. I was startled to find someone having a barbecue on the beach, infringing heaven knows how many Budleigh Salterton bylaws. On the wall nearby was a plaque recording that Millais painted his Boyhood of Raleigh there; across the road was the octagonal house where he stayed. That largely exhausts the town’s cultural heritage, unless you count various mocking barbs at its expense – as in Coward’s Blithe Spirit: ‘No one but a monumental bore would have thought of having a
honeymoon in Budleigh Salterton. I wanted glamour and music and romance. What I got was potted plants, three hours every day on a damp golf course and a three piece orchestra playing Merrie England.’
Budleigh Salterton is a place to live long and die respectably. The town is slightingly referred to (as are Eastbourne and Bournemouth and Florida and doubtless other locations too) as God’s Waiting Room, and these days God is waiting longer and longer. My landlord Brian told me that if anyone was recorded by the local paper as having died under the age of eighty-five, it was assumed to be a misprint.
It is not easy to conceive of strong passions being aroused in Budleigh Salterton, but if they are, the likeliest setting is surely the clubhouse of the Budleigh Salterton Croquet Club, or somewhere on the ten velvet-smooth croquet lawns outside. Croquet may be a joke elsewhere, but in Budleigh Salterton it is a serious business. The club is celebrated across the croquet-playing world for the splendour of its facilities and the richness of its history, and they come from all over the world to play there.
It is not a gentle game. A notice beside the lawns hints at the hazards: Danger. Beware. Injuries Can Be Caused By Fast Moving Croquet Balls. As for passions, the club’s history – available for inspection on its website – is understandably reticent. There is a good deal about the comings and goings of various groundsmen, some of it suggestive of dramatic possibilities: ‘Creasey went and Hutchins replaced him. Hutchins was not satisfactory and Till came . . . Till was discharged for unsatisfactory service, to be replaced by Lawrence.’ This sentence, I think, defies analysis: ‘Dolfuss was murdered by the Nazis in 1934 and Hitler came to power in Germany but there was no foreboding in Budleigh Salterton.’