by Tom Fort
Pedalling through Downderry, where there is nothing much to look at, I pondered the marine tendency in naming villas and bungalows by the sea. I passed The Nook, The Lookout, Gun Deck, Ahoy The Sloop, Four Winds, West Wind, Sea Breezes, Sea View, Sea Drift, Smugglers’ Cottage. I wondered how many Smugglers’ Cottages there were along the Channel coast. It must run into hundreds. Another tendency is to bestow Cornish names on new dwellings – Gwel an Mor (Sea View), Chi an Mor (House by the Sea), An Dyji (The Small Cottage), Pol Dhu (Black Pool) and so on – as if in an attempt somehow to compensate for the erasing of Cornish particularity elsewhere.
There is a devil of a hill out of Downderry. At the top the lane passes the Monkey Sanctuary. Why there should be a sanctuary for monkeys in Cornwall – a county at the end of a country where there are no native monkeys – was a question I felt too worn out to tackle. There is a sharp descent into Millendreath, a holiday village which fell on hard times and is now being spruced up no end, and another ascent. Finally you look down on Looe; or two Looes, East and West.
I liked them both considerably, even though the only room I could find for the night was in a questionable guest house near the bridge. The two Looes – it is debatable whether they are two portions of the same town, or separate entities – are squeezed either side of a long, slender harbour reached from the sea by a tight neck of water. Inland, beyond the bridge connecting the two sides, the harbour broadens. At high tide the expanse of water appears impressive, but the ebb reveals most of it to consist of quaking banks of grey oozing mud with feeble trickles between.
Looe East and West
East Looe has a little sandy beach beside the entrance to the harbour. When I arrived in the evening this was strewn with litter and looking distinctly tacky, but by morning the rubbish had been cleared and the sand swept. It and the blue sea looked tempting, but not sufficiently so for me to join the two ladies forging purposefully through the wavelets on their morning swim, suspending their powerful breaststroke every now and then to chat.
The old town was thronged with holidaymakers, who were heavily outnumbered by gulls. These birds are a menace, detested by the locals even more than the second-homers. My landlady, a tough but affable migrant from Glasgow, told me with relish that that morning she had kicked an infant gull off the gangplank leading to her boat and watched it drown. There are notices up all over the place denouncing them as a prime public enemies and urging people not to feed them. Some people, the incurably stupid, still do so, however; not that it would make any difference if they didn’t, since the gulls are such accomplished raiders and swoopers on chips and sandwiches and half-eaten pizzas. The authorities have the eggs pricked when and where it is possible to get at them, but the gull is an irrepressibly fertile and resourceful creature, and short of arming the populace with orders to slaughter them or an outbreak of plague, it seems nothing can restrain them.
It is tourism that keeps Looe ticking economically, but the commercial fishing that has sustained and defined it throughout most of its history survives, and in its reduced form thrives. The skippers with the resolve to endure the black times of plunging fish stocks, combined with the imposition of quotas and stultifying amounts of paperwork have emerged, if not into a sunlit upland, at least into a viable present and future. Thirty years ago there were thirty to forty boats working out of Looe. Now there are fewer than ten, but that handful are doing all right, thanks to the growing market for fresh fish and the sustained price.
In search of more information on the subject, I called in at the office of the harbour-master, thinking he might know a thing or two. He wasn’t there but his helpful secretary said the fellow I really needed to talk to was the historian of Looe’s fishing industry, Paul Greenwood. As it happened I had already filleted his Once Aboard a Cornish Lugger and wasn’t at all sure I had the time or the need for a personal encounter. ‘Look, there he is,’ the harbour-master’s secretary exclaimed, pointing through the glass door at a distinctly sea-doggish individual with a rough, dark beard and a face as weather-beaten as a holystoned deck. ‘Paul, Paul,’ she cried, waving her arms, ‘there’s a chap here wants to talk to you.’
So off we went to have a coffee at the sea’s edge, and I was soon glad that I had, as he was excellent company and thoroughly agreeable with it. I knew from his book that he had packed in the fishing. I asked him why. ‘I was tired of it and I wanted to make some money,’ he said baldly. ‘So I got into property. Buying old cottages, doing ’em up, flogging them for holiday homes. A lot more money in that than fishing, I can tell you.’
He read the look on my face cannily. ‘I know, second homes, very non-PC. Let me tell you about those old fishermen’s cottages. They are poky, dark, damp, tiny and totally uncivilised. You wouldn’t want to live in one; neither did they. They’re all right for a week or so, very quaint and jolly, but try living there. If people like me hadn’t got interested they would all have been demolished and replaced by flats, so don’t go all sentimental about it.’
Looking back at the fishing that had lured him to sea at the age of sixteen, Greenwood was clear-sighted and unsentimental, not bitter. But angry, still angry, about what had happened in the 1980s when the Scottish purse-seiners came and pretty much killed off the old way of life. Greenwood had begun in the old luggers, fishing pilchards and herring. Towards the end of the 1960s Cornish mackerel fishing began to take off; throughout the 70s more and more Cornish boats caught more and more mackerel. But because the boats were small and the method – feathers or lures on hand-lines – was selective, the fishery remained entirely sustainable.
Then the Scottish boats arrived. They were large trawlers fitted with gear capable of putting out nets a mile long to encircle whole shoals of fish from the surface to the seabed. These engines of mass destruction, paid for with lavish government grants, had already cleaned out the North Sea of herring. They headed south, drawn by reports of the huge shoals of mackerel out from Plymouth and Falmouth.
One Scottish purse-seiner could catch more mackerel in one night than the entire Cornish fleet in a week. The Scottish boats were soon followed by big trawlers from Hull and Grimsby. The landings of mackerel soared, the price crashed. No one could possibly eat the enormous quantities available, so most were converted into fishmeal. The Cornish hand-liners could not compete. Fishermen gave up and the smaller ports fell silent, while out at sea the destruction of the stock continued until there was no stock left.
‘The thing about fishing in the old days,’ Greenwood said, ‘was that we were just as greedy to catch fish, but because of the limitations of the boats and the gear, there were always parts of the sea that never got fished. They were sanctuaries. Then they got found and fished out.’
I bought copies of both his books and he gave me a crunching handshake in return. The books give a superbly real and vivid picture of the fishing life, the rigours and rewards, the comradeship, the boredom and discomfort, the thrill. His prose is as lean and hard-muscled as the flanks of a big mackerel, as bracing as a faceful of spray thrown by a stiff southwesterly breeze. Above all, Greenwood makes it possible for a landlubber like me to understand something of the power and fascination of the sea, and what it is that makes fishermen what they are: a different breed.
*
Looe is also the headquarters of that fine institution, the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain. I have never fished for sharks but plenty do, and Looe is the top spot for them. The main target species is blue sharks, which are not that big or ferocious. Occasionally they get a porbeagle or a thresher, which run bigger, and very occasionally indeed a mako, which can exceed 500 pounds. Sharks of all kinds are much less abundant than they used to be, including the blues, but the day before my visit there had been eight boats out and seven fish had been landed and released. The club secretary told me you had to get one at least seven feet long to become a member. I asked her if she liked sharks. ‘Don’t like fish full stop,’ she said. ‘It’s a job.’
The
Shark Angling Club of Great Britain was founded by Brigadier J. A. L. Caunter, a pillar of Looe society and an enthusiastic big-game angler. According to Paul Greenwood, the Brigadier was actually after the elusive tunny in the 1940s when he started catching blue sharks. Word got around, and the local skippers began making useful money taking anglers out to the marks. In 1953, 350 sharks were recorded by Looe boats; by 1957 it was more than 4000. The secret was in the deployment of the rubby-dubby, a mesh bag packed with pilchard heads and guts which was trailed over the side to bring the sharks in. The smell of it, Greenwood says, took the breath away, and the shaking of the bag would induce a collective groan of nausea from the anglers.
The sport and the club were very much Brigadier Caunter’s pet, and each year he would make a speech at the annual dinner. At one of these events he chose to comment on the success of a new conservation scheme to fix a tag on the dorsal fin of the fish and release it, instead of killing them all. Did he really – as Paul Greenwood relates – congratulate the skippers on shagging the tarts instead of tagging the sharks? Maybe he did.
About a third of a mile out of Looe is St George’s Island, more commonly known as Looe Island. In 1788 it was reported to be inhabited by a family called Finn – apparently some of the same Finns previously resident on the Great Mewstone off Wembury Point. But there seems to have been another family there as well, the Hoopers, two of whom – a brother called Amram and a sister called Jochabed – were great smugglers.
They were evidently a resourceful lot, these Finns and Hoopers, whatever the nature of the relationships between them. The nineteenth-century historian of Looe, Thomas Bond, recorded that before their arrival the island swarmed with rabbits and rats, but that these were ‘now much reduced by the inhabitants catching and eating them . . . a rat smothered in onions must no doubt be a delicate dish.’ I’m inclined to think that it must have been this connection between rats and onions that inspired Wilkie Collins to include in his Rambles Beyond Railways an extremely fanciful account of the extermination of the rats of Looe Island in a great communal rat hunt: ‘They were caught by every conceivable artifice and once taken were instantly and ferociously smothered in onions, then decently laid out on clean china dishes and straightway eaten with vindictive relish.’
The island was bought in the 1960s by two adventurous middle-aged spinster sisters from Surrey, Babs and Attie Atkins. They lived there alone for the rest of their lives – Attie Atkins died in 1997 and her sister ten years later. They are buried in the corner of what was once a field of daffodils near their cottage. No one lives there any more; the island is looked after by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and is open for two-hour tours between Easter and the end of September.
22
SKULL OF DOOM
Between Looe and Polperro is the hamlet of Talland, overlooking Talland Bay. The church there is unusual in having its bell tower standing apart from the main building, and unique in being dedicated to Saint Tallanus, supposedly a Cornish hermit who most probably never existed.
One of the tombstones records the death in 1746, in his ninety-third year, of the long-serving vicar, the Reverend Richard Dodge. According to the Looe historian, Thomas Bond, Parson Dodge was ‘a very singular man . . . he had the reputation of being deeply skilled in the black art and could raise ghosts or send them into the Red Sea at the nod of his head . . . he was a worthy man and much respected, but had his eccentricities.’
A later vicar, the Reverend Nicholas Kendall, hired a curate to tend to Talland while he remained at his other living in Lostwithiel. This curate, who called himself Thomas Whitmore, disappeared suddenly taking an armful of church silver with him. He reappeared subsequently in the Forest of Dean and obtained another curacy, this time under the name Thomas White. He was arrested after absconding with £30 that he had borrowed from a church warden and tried for forgery at Gloucester Assizes under his real name, Robert Peacock. Despite being described as a model prisoner happy to give religious instruction to his fellow inmates, he went to the gallows. The news of his crimes caused alarm in Talland, where seven couples who had been married by him came forward to take their vows again, and eight babies were rebaptised.
All this and much else I gleaned from a brilliant little exhibition in the church. What no one can do, sadly, is to bring back what was its most extraordinary treasure: a series of medieval wall frescoes depicting, among other things, Christ on the Cross, the devil and a gallery of monsters, imps and dwarfs, a Roman centurion, and a four-masted sailing boat about to collide with a prison. When Talland Church was restored in the mid-1850s, the view was taken by some pious philistine or other that the paintings were primitive and unseemly and they were destroyed.
Polperro is a dream of a fishing village realised: a huddle of absurdly sweet old cottages and crooked houses squeezed into a cleft in the coastline beside a blissfully sheltered harbour. Its streets were intended for horses and donkeys, and for many years visitors in the summer have had to leave their cars on the outskirts. A favourite diversion for the inhabitants is the sight of a Tesco delivery van jammed on a corner between leaning walls or a hire car being reversed uphill around improbable angles accompanied by the smell of burning clutch.
My reason for lingering there was to make inquiries of, and pay my respects to, a brace of very different men who had one passion in common, a passion shared by me. One was no more than a fleeting visitor to the village. The other spent most of his long life there, and was most reluctant to travel more than a few miles away. One was a wanderer of the world, a spinner of tall tales, a fantasist, a boaster, something of a scoundrel. The other was a man of science and unimpeachable good character, a pillar of the community, unfailingly scrupulous in thought, word and deed.
Polperro
I first became aware of the name of F. A. Mitchell-Hedges – Mitch to his friends – at least forty-five years ago, when my brothers and I got hold of a book with the irresistible title Battles with Giant Fish. A glance at the chapter headings was enough to set the pulse racing: Four hour battle with a mighty tarpon – The horrors of the deep are encountered – Face to face with death – Terrific fight between shark and saw-fish – Battle with a veritable leviathan of the deep – and so on. We were utterly gripped by these thrilling accounts of adventure and epic struggles in the waters of Central America. One of our favourites climaxed in the capture of a seventeen-foot hammerhead shark which causes Mitch’s boatman to leap back yelling, ‘Lord, boss! It’s the devil, cut the line, boss, cut the line!’
His methods were not very sporting, involving either lowering into the sea a giant chunk of meat with a huge hook in it at the end of a thick rope and allowing whatever monster swallowed it to tow his steam yacht around until it was sufficiently exhausted to be shot; or impaling the monster on a harpoon, with the same outcome. Each episode was illustrated by photographs of the corpses of the leviathans with Mitchell-Hedges, invariably in shorts with a pipe in hand or clenched in firm jaw. We were much intrigued by the appearance in quite a number of the photographs of a companion identified as Lady Richmond Brown, her face shaded by a hat, her body wrapped up against the tropical sun.
Mitch’s domestic circumstances were certainly unorthodox. Born in 1885, he married a woman called Lillian Clarke – known as Dolly – when he was twenty-one, and remained married to her until his death in 1959. He took up with Lady Richmond Brown after the 1914–18 war, in which he did not fight, went on several expeditions with her to Central America and was cited when she was divorced by her husband Sir Melville Richmond Brown in 1930. Subsequent entanglements included an apparently bigamous marriage with a chorus girl.
At some point Mitchell-Hedges acquired the artefact that made him famous, the so-called Skull of Doom. This object, fashioned by high-speed cutting instruments from a block of quartz crystal, is probably twentieth century in origin, and certainly no earlier than mid-nineteenth century. This did not inhibit him from claiming that he had found it while excavating the lost Mayan ci
ty of Lubaantun in British Honduras (now Belize) in the late 1920s, that it had been fashioned by generations of Mayan craftsmen using sand to rub down the crystal and that it was at least 3000 years old. He hinted that its sacred function was to be used by the high priest to will death on enemies and unbelievers.
After Mitch’s death, the skull was inherited by his adopted daughter Anna, who shared his oblique relationship with factual reality. She insisted that she herself had found the skull, either beneath a collapsed wall at Lubaantun or in a cave in a pyramid into which her father had lowered her on a rope. She would tell anyone prepared to listen that the skull was imbued with the power to heal, deflect witchcraft and ward off the evil eye.
In fact Mitch bought the crystal skull at an auction at Sotheby’s in London in 1943 for £400 (about £16,000 today), it having previously been in the possession of an antiques dealer, Sydney Burney. Mitchell-Hedges later stated that it was he who had originally sold it to Burney, which may or may not have been true. One story is that he originally obtained it from a fisherman in Belize in exchange for two sacks of flour, although how the fisherman got hold of it is not related.
All of which brings us by an admittedly wandering route to Polperro. Throughout all his escapades, Mitch stayed in touch with his wife Dolly. In 1948 she was living in Polperro at a guesthouse called The Watchers, overlooking the harbour. According to Ray Howgego, author of the definitive Encyclopedia of Exploration and of a website devoted to Mitchell-Hedges’ colourful life, the guesthouse was run at the time by the current owners’ grandparents.
This, I thought, was a golden opportunity for some firsthand research. The lady who answered my ring at the doorbell looked at me suspiciously as I embarked upon a rambling explanation of my business. Then she interrupted me: ‘So it’s Mitchell-Hedges, is it? Amazing how many people want to know about him.’ I was dumbfounded. I had always thought that, apart from my brothers and I, no one had ever heard of him. ‘I must have had a hundred inquiries about him,’ she said rather crossly. ‘I was even phoned up when I was on holiday in Scotland.’