by Tom Fort
The Wigwam was finished in 1878 but by then Singer’s widow had moved back to France. Eventually it came into the hands of her son Paris, the third in the last batch of Isaac Singer’s offspring. Paris had studied architecture and felt he could do better than a mere château with a comical name. He shared Louis XIV’s taste and commissioned a French father-and-son team of architects and garden designers, Henri and Achille Duchêne, to transform The Wigwam and its grounds into a Devonian version of Versailles, to be renamed Oldway Mansion.
As a result three of the four walls of the original house disappeared behind façades of stone slabs bristling with pillars, porticoes, loggias, niches, statues, marble embellishments and other pseudo-classical clutter. The interior was remodelled to contain a hall of mirrors, a ballroom, a study lined with Corinthian oak columns and figures from classical allegory, and a gigantic double staircase of white marble with bronze balustrades leading to Jacques-Louis David’s absurdly over-the-top depiction of Napoleon placing the imperial crown on Josephine’s head with Pope Pius VII looking impotently on. Outside, the Duchênes laid out an epic composition of parterres, lawns, gravel walks, formal beds, terraces, an orangery, grotto, hippodrome, rock garden, bowling green, tennis courts – all thickly populated with statues of Pan, Bacchus and a supporting mythological cast.
Needless to say, this display of boundless wealth and ambition brought its owner no happiness. Separated from his wife (and the mother of his four children), Paris Singer embarked upon a troubled affair with the dancer Isadora Duncan. After the birth of their first child she came to his palace in Paignton for the summer. He mostly stayed on his own in his room, tormented by digestive difficulties, while she watched the rain. ‘I had not reckoned with the rain,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘In an English summer it rains all day long. The English people do not seem to mind at all. They rise and have an early breakfast of eggs and bacon and ham and kidneys and porridge. Then they don mackintoshes and go forth into the humid country until lunchtime when they eat many courses ending with Devonshire cream.’
No family ever lived in this most unfamilial place. It was used as a hospital during the 1914–18 war, and later became a country club. In 1946 it was bought by the local authority from the Singer family and was converted into council offices. The council finally moved out in 2013, leaving the place looking sadly neglected: the roof lead hanging in sheets, the plasterwork stained, the parapets cracked, weeds bursting through the paving on the terraces. It is now awaiting conversion into a ‘luxury spa hotel’ with indoor bowling and apartments – its only possible salvation, although some might think demolition a kindlier fate.
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There were plenty of fishing boats in Brixham Harbour: big beam trawlers, smaller inshore trawlers, day boats, stubby little crabbers. The smell of fish was insistent, mixed with fumes of diesel, tar, anti-fouling paint. Heaps of netting and stacks of crab and lobster pots shared the quayside with coils of rope, rusted chains and winches, bits of old engines, fuel cans, paint cans, cans that had once held putty.
The port and the fishing constitute the beating heart of Brixham, but there have been plenty of times when the pulse beat very faint and the town wondered about its survival. It was Brixham men who showed the other British ports how to use the beam trawl – a big bag of netting attached to a rigid beam which was dragged along the seabed. In the 1830s a Brixham skipper, James Stubbs, who was fishing out of Hull, dropped his gear into the Silver Pit, a deep hole near the Dogger Bank, and took four thousand sole in a single trawl. In a classic illustration of the destructive potential of new technology, the Silver Pit was soon being fished night and day; the price of sole fell to five shillings a truckload and within three years the location was fished out.
Brixham boats and skippers led the expansion into the fabulous cod grounds off Iceland. By 1850 more than 200 boats were registered there and the extension of the railway across south-west England opened up yet more outlets. But the outbreak of war in 1914 was a catastrophe for the port in more ways than one. Its finest and fittest fishermen were called up for naval duties, and many of the boats which were able to find a crew were sunk by German U-boats. By 1918 the number of vessels had halved, and many of the fishermen who did come back were forced to seek work in new ports such as Milford and Fleetwood.
By 1939 only six boats were still registered in Brixham. The 1939–45 war gave a boost to fish stocks, and afterwards the combination of new diesel-engine technology and bigger trawlers brought Brixham’s fishing industry back to life. The fleet swelled and in 1971 a new quay was opened to deal with the catches. By 1991 more than a thousand people worked in fishing; ten years later Brixham had established itself as the premier fishing port in England and Wales.
On the harbour wall – streaked in gull shit and, more often than not, with a gull perched on its head – is a statue of the man responsible for Brixham’s one moment of real historical importance. He was a Dutchman, small, thin, severe-looking, with a hawk’s nose and piercing eyes; reserved in manner to the point of moroseness, with no inclination for social life or amusement apart from hunting, driven by a powerful sense of duty and equally powerful Calvinist convictions. Just the man, in fact, to drag England out of the mess in which James II was doing his utmost to land it.
The story of the arrival in Brixham in 1688 of the invasion force led by William of Orange became embellished with exaggeration and invention so rapidly that later historians were hard-pressed to disentangle what happened from what the locals had made up. It was said that William’s boat was greeted by a local fisherman called Youldon and that the Duke was actually carried ashore by ‘a little man’ called Peter Varwell, and that on putting his foot upon the first step of the pier William asked ‘Welcome or not?’ Whereupon the people huzzahed and cried ‘Welcome!’ Thereafter – the story went – the Duke was addressed by Youldon thus: ‘As it please your Majesty King William / You’re welcome to Brixham Quay / To eat buckthorn and drink bohea / Along wi’ we.’
Alas, ’tis all nonsense – apart from all the other improbabilities, bohea, a species of strong dark China tea, was a rare luxury even in London and could not possibly have been the brew of choice for common Devonians. Nor, as was also related, did local orchard keepers have apples rolled down the narrow streets to cheer up William’s weary men, nor did Peter Varwell ever travel to London to claim a reward of £100 from the new King and use the money to build a fine mansion (another version has him being cozened by sharpers in London, repulsed from court as an impostor and returning home ‘never to hold up his head again’).
However, it is possible – just possible – that the man who would be William III did say as he stood on English soil: ‘Mine goot people be not alarmed, I am only here for your goot, for all your goots.’ His English was not fluent and the sentiment was in character, so I like to think he did.
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A little way up the hill from the harbour is the fishermen’s church, All Saints, where they were paying respects to Brixham’s scaly heritage at the annual Festival of the Sea. The interior was hung with nets and ropes, buoys and anchors, pennants and chains. There were models of fish, paintings of fish, fish made of sugar, photographs of old boats and old salts and harbour scenes. There were also fish, real fish fresh that morning: whiting, sole, cod, gurnard and several heads of monkfish split wide in cavernous grins.
The display was being orchestrated by John Lovell, a longtime Brixham trawler skipper. He sees it as his mission to show something of the town’s history and the part of fishing in it to Brixham’s incomers. ‘When I was a lad,’ Lovell says, ‘the port and the boats, that was Brixham. After school every lad and lass came to the quay to watch the boats come in and unload the catch. Some of the kids these days never eat fish, except fish fingers.’ So they have fish in church and Lovell coaxes them up to touch the skin and feel the teeth. ‘It’s important they understand what fish means to this place,’ he says.
It was just my good luck he happened to
be there. I had come to All Saints to hear the carillon, which at noon each day plays one of the great English hymns, ‘Praise My Soul The King of Heaven’ – the one that goes on, ‘To his feet thy tribute bring / Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven / Who like me His praise should sing? / Alleluia! Alleluia! / Praise the everlasting King’. Noon struck and lo and behold, what a disappointment! Instead of the familiar march tune ‘Lauda Anima’ that has lifted the roof off a thousand churches (composed in 1869 by the long-serving organist of St Paul’s London, John Gross), I was treated to an insipid and inferior substitute. It was a sad anticlimax.
Those stirring words were written by Henry Francis Lyte, minister at All Saints for twenty-three years until his death in 1847. By all accounts Lyte was an exceptionally high-minded minister, a gentleman, a poet, a man of science, a fierce enemy of slavery, passionate in his religion and in his devotion to his rough parishioners who came to church in thick jerseys, red woollen caps, blue trousers and white braces. But he was also a poignant figure, progressively undone by the ravages of TB and by the religious currents of his time which flowed as strongly as the currents off Berry Head.
In the course of his ministry his once large and loyal congregation thinned to a mere handful. Some were offended by his introduction of High Church ritual, others were seduced by the fiery evangelism of emerging non-conformist groups, particularly the Plymouth Brethren. Many of the deserters were young men from respectable local families whom Lyte had picked and then trained to go out into the countryside to spread the word among rural labourers and their families. The final disaster was the defection of the choir, whose members also taught in the once-thriving Sunday school. None ever set foot in All Saints again, and according to his family and friends, their desertion caused Lyte immense grief.
In September 1847, after preaching a last sermon at All Saints, Henry Lyte left Brixham for Italy, where his doctors had advised him to spend the winter. He got as far as Nice where he died in November. It is often stated confidently by those who do not know what they are talking about that Lyte wrote his immortal hymn ‘Abide With Me’ in a fever of inspiration on the afternoon of that Sunday when he preached his last sermon. The story goes that he was sitting in the study of his house at Berry Head looking out across the waters of Tor Bay when the words came to him. In fact Lyte’s biographer, B. G. Skinner – himself a vicar of All Saints – presents convincing evidence that the hymn had reached its final form earlier that summer, although elements may well date from much earlier.
What is sure is that it speaks with the voice of a man who knows death is near and is not ashamed to address his God in the most intimate terms, almost as a friend who will not and cannot let him down as others have. It is a hymn of ending, of passing, suffused with the sadness of looking at things for the last time, suffused also with the confidence of redemption.
Lyte himself wrote a tune to accompany it, but it was not until it was joined – long after his death – with William Monk’s great and ineffably sad tune ‘Eventide’ that it acquired its classic status. It remains one of very few hymns – ‘Jerusalem’ is another – to have escaped far beyond the confines of the church. It is sung at the FA Cup final and the Rugby League Challenge Cup final and is played on India’s Republic Day by the combined bands of the Indian armed forces.
Henry Lyte’s house at Berry Head is now a handsome and smart hotel, where there is a plaque recording the spurious version of the hymn’s composition. Berry Head itself is composed largely of Devonian limestone, hard, grey, rich in fossils. It marks the end of Red Devon whose last appearance is a low outcrop of Permian breccia between Paignton and Brixham known as Roundham Head. It also concludes the adventure recorded in Dr Ian West’s great geological website. I wish he and his helpers had gone further, but all good things must come to an end, and this is a very good thing indeed.
18
COOTS AND CRABS
It is a very different coastline that reveals itself south-west of Berry Head. Even on a fairly benign summer’s day there seemed to my landsman’s eye a suggestion of a threat about Start Bay, the great crescent of sea stretching away to the dark finger of Start Point. The blue water was roughened by the breeze into white crests. There were no boats out and the empty sea looked wide and unfriendly.
It calls itself a bay but it offers precious little in the way of protection in stormy weather. When the wind is from the east or south-east it is horribly exposed, and its bed is littered with the wrecks of vessels driven in and either smashed on rocks or battered to pieces on the shore.
There is one gentle refuge at the north end of the bay, where the high ground steps back to make room for a quarter moon of smooth shingle beach. It is known as Blackpool Sands, just as the shingle at Slapton is known as Slapton Sands. I’m sure there’s a perfectly sound reason why Devon chooses to refer to pebbly beaches as sands but I don’t know what it is, and I would like them to know that it is rather confusing.
A beast of a hill leads up from Blackpool Sands to Strete, a village perched on top of a cliff with a handsome pub, the King’s Arms, distinguished by some very pretty decorative ironwork along its first-floor balcony. A plaque across the road records the sad fate of three little thatched buildings – one of them a reading room run by the Women’s Institute – which were destroyed by a stray shell during artillery practice in 1944.
It is a reminder that this whole area between Blackpool Sands and Torcross and extending several miles inland played a vital role in the great turning point of the 1939–45 war – vital, painful and largely unsung. In November 1943 Devon County Council was informed that thirty thousand acres of land and foreshore were being requisitioned for military use. The three thousand inhabitants of eight villages and the surrounding farms were given five weeks to leave their homes. A few months later the peace of the countryside was shattered by the thunder of gunfire, and the waters of Start Bay and the shingly shore at Slapton seethed with boats and men and weaponry preparing for the invasion of Europe.
Slapton Sands was the nearest equivalent we had to Utah Beach in Normandy, where the right flank of the Allied invasion force would make landing. Eisenhower, concerned about the lack of battle experience of many of his men, ordered a series of training exercises that would simulate real conflict as closely as possible – including the use of live shells and ammunition. Inevitably there were accidents, such as the unintended bombardment of Strete, and incidents of American soldiers killed by friendly fire. On the whole, though, the rehearsals for D-Day proceeded smoothly enough, until the night of 28 April 1944.
Exercise Tiger had been organised to mimic a full-scale beach landing. The combat assault by the US 4th Infantry Division took place in daylight and passed off without problems. Several hours later, in darkness, a follow-up force of engineers and back-up personnel was to be put ashore with trucks, amphibious vehicles, jeeps and the like, all transported in the flat-bottomed tank-landing ships knows as LSTs under the protection of Royal Navy gunboats. Eight of the LSTs were in Lyme Bay, well to the north of Slapton, when they were attacked by German torpedo boats. Three were hit – one sank almost at once, one burst into flames and the other was crippled. Hundreds of American soldiers and sailors were trapped below deck. A total of 749 of them were killed in the explosions, burned to death or were drowned.
Among those on board were ten officers of particular concern to the command. They all had what was known as BIGOT security clearance, which meant they had detailed knowledge of the invasion plans, including target locations. Had any of them been taken alive and interrogated, the entire Overlord operation could have been compromised. An information blackout was imposed on everyone involved, including the doctors and nurses who treated the injured. In the event the bodies of all ten BIGOT officers were recovered. The secrecy order was not formally rescinded, although an announcement of the deaths and brief details of the disaster were published in an American military newspaper.
Ten years later US General Alfred Guenth
er unveiled a monument on Slapton Sands to acknowledge the sacrifice of local people in evacuating the district so that the exercises could take place. Although he referred briefly to what had happened during Exercise Tiger, the whiff of mystery and cover-up still hung around the incident, and in time inquisitive nostrils began to twitch. A retired policeman, Ken Small, publicly wondered why there was no comparable memorial to the Americans who had died, and he arranged for a Sherman tank sunk offshore to be salvaged and placed on a plinth at Torcross.
Newspapers in America and Britain picked up rumours that had been circulating for some time: that many of the supposed victims of German torpedoes had in fact been killed by American friendly fire; that a mass grave had been dug on someone’s farm to take bodies, and that other bodies had been walled up in tunnels in the Castletown dockyard near Portland; that Eisenhower himself had witnessed the disaster and ordered a cover-up to conceal his own responsibility. It’s worth recording that no convincing evidence to support any of these claims has ever been produced. In all probability Exercise Tiger was just a bloody mess, as happens in war.