Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  In 1953, Coronation year, Miss Sutton was appointed canasta hostess and the club acquired a new flagpole, but the committee decided against taking part in the town procession. Three years later there were tributes to Lord Clinton, who had died after forty-six years as President; and ‘Mrs Lanning resigned after many disagreements with Mrs French.’

  Who knows what dramatic scenes informed these simple sentences, what furies took wing, what feuds boiled and festered, what injuries and slights were suffered, what pride came before what fall, what revenge was taken?

  16

  GULLS AND GROCKLES

  Exmouth and the Exe estuary

  Exmouth has a slightly forlorn air about it, as if it had come off second-best in a fight or an argument and still felt aggrieved about it. The town centre is well away from the waterfront and is distinctly shabby. The docks were once the heart of the town, handling biggish ships on behalf of Exeter and supporting a fishing fleet to harvest the herring and mackerel. Now it just has a marina hemmed in by brightly coloured, gormlessly derivative boxes of ‘luxury apartments’.

  The seafront has a long beach of reddish sand, a sea wall, a road, a line of serviceable nineteenth-century houses and a standard range of visitor attractions. I’m afraid that as a resort Exmouth lacks class, and always has. Our old friend Charles Harper – now onto The South Devon Coast – found it overrun on Sundays with excursionists from Exeter – ‘tradesmen’s assistants, clad in the impossible clothes pictured on provincial advertisement hoardings, laughing horse laughs, singing London’s last season’s comic songs, wearing flashy jewellery, smoking bad cigars . . .’

  But Exmouth’s consolation is the glory of its situation on the estuary of the Exe. An estuary is a mysterious and subtle place, belonging neither to sea nor river but taking from both to create its own shifting, dynamic water world. At full water the six miles or so of the Exe estuary from Exmouth to Topsham is a great, brimming lake held between slopes to the east and west. Then, as if a stopper had been eased out, the water rushes out through the gap between Exmouth and Dawlish Warren, straining buoys against chains and boats against ropes, setting ridges of wavelets dancing and dashing across the sandbanks.

  The colour and texture of the whole sheet of water changes as the mudflats and sandbanks loom beneath then break the surface. The navigation channel follows the western shore, twisting like a dark snake around quaintly named hazards: Great and Little Bull Hill, Shaggles Sand, Cockle Sand, Greenland, West Mud. With the paling of the water’s face come the changes in light. A gust of a breeze roughens the surface, the sun goes behind a cloud, a bank of fog rolls up from somewhere and clears. The wind quickens and the cloud gathers, the whole scene becomes grey. Come evening, the sky clears in the west as the sun goes down and everything is burnished in gold. Then the moon rises and brightens, spreading silver.

  And so on: a thousand modulations a day, like a book of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues transposed for light and water.

  There is a fine chronicler of Exmouth and its estuary who calls himself Wayland Wordsmith. I have no idea who he is – except that he is a poet, a historian, an antiquary of the old kind, a sailor, a fisherman, an explorer, a lingerer over sunsets and dawns, a fierce enemy of the enemies of his town, a philosopher and a gifted writer of a terrific blog. From it I gather that he is around my age, early sixties; that he used to do some netting for salmon when there were still enough salmon seeking the Exe to make it worthwhile; that he has a boat and a family; that he spends a good deal of his time hunting out arcane stories and nuggets of information from piles of old newspapers and books.

  I confess that I have borrowed freely from him, and without shame, because I am pretty confident he won’t mind. I’d like to meet him and tell him what a debt I owe him.

  Exmouth has no Grand Hotel but it does have the Imperial, which looks across its own lawns and the esplanade to the sea. One of Wayland Wordsmith’s titbits concerns an interview conducted in February 1918 by a correspondent from the local paper with ‘the wealthy and somewhat eccentric Australian inventor Thomas Mills’, who was then occupying a suite at the hotel.

  Thomas Mills was in Exmouth to do his bit for the war effort. Like many other patriots, he had been appalled by the dreadful toll of merchant shipping taken by the German U-boats. It occurred to him that if the German subs could be detected at sea before they attacked, they could be neutralised. His brainwave was to train seagulls to find them. To that end he had constructed a dummy submarine with an imitation periscope from which food congenial to seagulls was expelled at intervals. His plan was to get the association between periscope and nourishment lodged in their avian brains, rather in the way that their descendants have become accustomed to feeding on municipal rubbish dumps, and then to send them to locate the real things.

  The Admiralty gave Mr Mills some encouragement, but not much. One senior officer asked him – quite reasonably – how the seagulls would be able to tell the difference between German subs and British subs. Mills replied that if our subs were confined to port, it would follow that any still at sea must be hostile.

  The trials he organised in Exmouth were, in the view of Mr Mills, successful enough for the seagulls to be deployed for real. But his view was not widely shared. By then the adoption of the convoy system, in which merchant ships sailed together guarded by warships, had significantly reduced the depredations of the U-boats; and in any event the signing of the Armistice in November 1918 rendered the whole exercise somewhat redundant. Mr Mills was and remained extremely bitter about the way he was treated by the Admiralty and vented his spleen in a book to which he gave the arresting title The Fateful Seagull, which I’m afraid I have not read.

  *

  According to Wayland Wordsmith, the most famous son of the estuary (born in Starcross) was Captain George Peacock, not exactly a household name. He does, however, warrant an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography detailing his extensive surveying work in the 1830s and 1840s in South and Central America. The DNB is a little snooty about this, recording that ‘he seems to have persuaded himself’ that he was the first to survey the route of the Panama Canal, even though ‘the routes he recommended were known to the Spaniards from the earliest times.’

  In time the Captain retired to Starcross and had built for his amusement an unusual pleasure boat called the Swan of the Exe that became a familiar sight on the estuary. Described by the Illustrated London News as ‘the very similitude of a gigantic white swan’ she was only 17-and-a-half feet long but so broad in the beam that the saloon could fit a table for ten. Her sails were folded to look like the bird’s wings, and additional power came from the two webbed feet operated by lever. The saloon was originally fitted with a hatch for bathing, but Captain Peacock scrapped it after one of his guests got stuck in it and nearly drowned.

  The Swan of the Exe was launched from Exmouth in 1860 in front of a large and excited crowd, while the town’s brass band played ‘Rule Britannia’. She proved to be surprisingly durable and was still being sailed by Captain Peacock’s grandson in the 1920s. By then she was accompanied by a tender, the Cygnet, which may still be admired in the museum at Topsham, her parent having finally perished in a fire.

  *

  In the interwar years Dawlish Warren, the thumb of sand squeezing the southern side of the estuary opposite Exmouth, played host at its sea end to an impromptu community of shacks and chalets brought by boat and installed wherever a reasonably firm foundation could be found in the dunes. One belonged to the family of Raymond Cattell, who became an extremely distinguished psychologist in post-war America. Before leaving England for good in 1937, Cattell wrote an intermittently diverting book called Under Sail Through Red Devon recounting his adventures with various boats and companions along the south Devon coast. He recalled carefree times at Dawlish Warren where ‘peculiar people have built themselves habitations in which they live in precious freedom and isolation.’ They were, he said, philosophers rather than artists – ‘
they live in strange, parti-coloured wooden bungalows which hide themselves between high banks of sand . . . others ride like ships on the rolling dunes . . . two, raised on stilts, permit the waters of the estuary to flow beneath . . . at night they send their twinkling lights over the water like small Venetian castles.’

  Some of the chalets, Cattell recorded, were strong and protected enough to survive several winters. Others were blasted to smithereens by the storms and scattered on the waters. After the war the originals were joined by cheerfully painted beach huts, which were generally taken away by boat at the end of the season and reappeared like migrating birds the following spring.

  Such free-and-easy behaviour was, needless to say, anathema to officialdom. In the 1980s the council decreed that henceforth only huts of an approved uniform design would be permitted. The old ones that were not claimed and removed by their owners were burned on the beach. At around the same time the old custom of pootling over from Exmouth in fine weather to camp on the dunes was outlawed.

  In the spirit of modern times, part of the Warren was declared a nature reserve, these days policed by wardens on quad bikes. The rest is shared by a golf course and a large amusement park. Meanwhile the hinterland beside the coast road has been annexed by a cluster of campsites, caravan parks and chalet settlements, which during the season release a flood of humanity across the Warren and neighbouring attractions. ‘Balancing visitor use with the needs of rare and important wildlife’ is part of the nature reserve’s mission statement; which means, in effect, the wildlife keeping out of the way.

  I headed for Dawlish along the sea wall by the Red Rock Café. It was almost high tide and the sea was licking at the fringe of terracotta sand at the base of the wall. Further on it struck against the wall itself, a heavy hollow thump like distant artillery fire.

  Dawlish

  With its black swans and neat gardens and fudge shops and polite cafés Dawlish is pleasant enough on a sunny day. It’s a place for an outing rather than an extended stay; to wander around The Lawn and listen to the tinkling of the stream, paddle along the dark-pink beach when the tide is out, have an ice cream and a clotted-cream tea.

  It once had hotels and pretensions to be a resort of special elegance. Some bright spark coined the slogan ‘Dawlish is Dawlicious’, but the coming of Brunel’s famous railway put a stop to that. It cheated the town of its seafront and became a kind of psychic prison fence between it and its sea. The building of it displayed the contempt of those Victorian entrepreneurs and their engineers for the interests of local people and the preservation of landscape at its most gross. The railway company simply bought up the land it wanted, booted the locals out, flattened what it needed to lay track and kept the rest.

  Brunel’s belief in his own vision and disdain for those who refused to share it was boundless. He was repeatedly urged to build the line inland; he told the shareholders that running it along the shore between Dawlish Warren and Teignmouth would be cheaper and more efficient, and he dismissed any suggestion that the storm-driven seas beating at his embankment would cause trouble. Brunel created an undeniably wondrous rail experience. But the price to be paid for the little man’s hubris was brought home in spectacular style by the complete collapse of the track under the impact of the storms in early 2014, which closed the line for weeks, inflicting untold damage on the economy of the whole south-west and landing Network Rail with a bill for many millions.

  West from Dawlish the railway line takes to a series of tunnels to penetrate the cliffs, and there is no sea wall or path of any kind until it emerges beyond the pair of red stone stacks known as the Clerk and the Parson. I had a sweaty climb out of Dawlish on the A379 then a steep descent of Smugglers’ Lane (what other name could there be?) to rejoin the wall.

  I had cycled along it improperly but quite safely between Dawlish Warren and Dawlish and intended to do the same to Teignmouth. But I was intimidated by Network Rail crews in electric-orange jackets so I got off. I asked one of the Network Rail men why they were so down on cycling. ‘It’s a bylaw,’ he replied. I refrained from pointing out that this was not a reason. ‘Well, it would be down to us if you went over,’ he said. ‘Think of the bloody paperwork.’

  It was good luck for Teignmouth that it escaped the Brunel blight. The line cuts away from the sea at the eastern edge of town and proceeds discreetly via a deep cutting through the railway station and up the side of the Teign estuary towards Newton Abbot. Its bad luck was, and is, the main road. As a result of a particularly brutal 1970s ‘improvement scheme’, this cleaves its way around the back of the old town to get to the Shaldon Bridge over the estuary. Scores of houses and shops and pubs were swept away to make room for this monstrosity, which has done nothing to relieve traffic congestion and acts as a car-clogged barrier between the residential district to the north and the docks, harbour and retail heart of Teignmouth, not to mention its seafront.

  Nevertheless the town has managed to hang on to a good deal of the charm and vivacity that have beguiled visitors for 200 years and more. I wanted to share this with my family, so at the end of August 2013 we came down for a night and the best part of two days. The blissful weather that had spread a smile around our seaside resorts for much of that summer was holding on. We stayed in an astonishingly inexpensive hotel off the Dawlish Road, in a spacious suite looking out over the blue sea. There was a gate at the bottom of the hotel’s grounds which took us out near the sparkling Lido, whose reprieve from closure a few years back displayed a grasp of priorities rarely encountered among local authorities.

  We swam in the Lido and we swam in the sea. The girls splashed around in a cheap inflatable boat until it burst. I hired a deckchair and read and daydreamed and watched other families helping themselves to the sweet and innocent fun that the seaside, at its best, dispenses so liberally. We wasted a heap of coins in the arcade on the pier – which they call the Grand Pier but is anything but – and joined everyone else wandering around The Den, the big grass oblong that separates the seafront from Teignmouth’s most gracious residences.

  For lunch we ate prawn and crab sandwiches, sitting on a wall at the quayside looking up the estuary. The view was framed by Shaldon Bridge ahead, and by the town and Shaldon village either side, with rising ground beyond. A multitude of sailing boats bobbed at their moorings or lay slumped on their sides on the mud, stranded by the retreating tide. Two girls were diving and swimming between their boat and a pontoon. A boy threw a stick for the family dog until his dad said he was wearing the poor creature out. In the port proper, a freighter was unloading, a reminder that Teignmouth’s long history as a minor but significant port was not yet over.

  Later we wandered through the narrow streets behind the quayside, bought buttered Brazils and sherbet lemons and cola cubes at the sweet shop, peered through windows at knickknacks and tattooists at work. We went across to Shaldon on the ferry in the evening. Anglers were lined up along the spit at the mouth of the estuary casting into the running tide in the hope of a bass.

  We left the next afternoon after scones and strawberry jam and clotted cream in the café near the Lido, scoffed amid a cloud of wasps. I thought again – not an original thought by any means – that when the breeze is in the south and the skies are clear enough for the sun to show, there are few things in life better than a day at the seaside in Teignmouth or a place with the same spirit about it.

  Fanny Burney liked Teignmouth too. In 1791 she spent three months there with her sister, Maria Rishton. Maria was distinctly free and easy in her ways, wearing nothing fancier than ‘a common linen gown’ and swimming in the sea every day. Fanny thought Teignmouth ‘situated the most beautifully of any town I ever saw’. She took up bathing herself, attended an ass race on The Den featuring sixteen ‘of the long-eared tribe’ and watched a rowing race between two teams of females, one from the town and one from Shaldon, which was distinguished by ‘the barbarous dress’ of the Shaldonians, who wore no shoes or stockings and were ‘naked to the
knee’.

  The Devon heritage people are not that interested in Fanny, who is not sufficiently A-list, but they are obsessed by Keats, who spent several months in Teignmouth over the extremely wet spring of 1818. There are Keats plaques, a Keats trail and even some indifferent lines of his about local beauty spots on an outside wall of the New Quay Inn. Much is made of the fact that he finished off his one epic poem, Endymion, while he was there; rather less of his opinion of Devon, ‘a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy slipshod county.’ I’m with Wayland Wordsmith, who complained vigorously about the ‘unreasonable monopoly’ exercised by Keats on Teignmouth in particular, and by dead poets generally.

  There are at least two genuine local notabilities deserving attention as well. One is that most dashing frigate captain of Nelson’s day, Sir Edward Pellew, whose fine mansion, Bitton House, is now the headquarters of the local council. Admittedly Pellew was – for obvious reasons – very rarely there, but the heritage squad might consider replacing the endless photographs of departed aldermanic worthies on the walls of the house with some decent naval memorabilia to complement the pair of cannon on the terrace outside.

  Teignmouth’s most distinguished native son was known in England as the King of Harpists and in Vienna – where they adored him – as Der Paganini der Harfe, because the brilliance of his playing reminded them of the diabolically virtuosic Italian violinist. I freely admit that I had never heard of Elias Parish-Alvars until I picked up a monograph about him from the Teignmouth Museum (he was born plain Parish, and added the Alvars to make himself more exotic). But for a while he was a celebrity – Mendelssohn was his friend, Liszt admired him and Berlioz was quite bowled over: