by Tom Fort
Feeling somewhat crushed, I asked her if it was true – as related by Mr Howgego – that Mitch had shown her grandfather the Skull of Doom. She said he had told her that Mitch produced it at a dinner also attended by the well-known Polperro painter Fred Cook and his wife, and had rolled it along the table. I then asked her if she remembered Mrs Mitchell-Hedges, which was probably a mistake considering that she was about my own age or a bit younger. ‘What is this, Twenty Questions?’ she demanded. ‘Look, I’m not interested, okay?’ Then she shut the door in my face.
So much for first-hand research, I thought. I went off instead on the trail of Dr Jonathan Couch, supreme ichthyologist and Polperro’s greatest son.
Couch was born in Polperro in 1789 and died there in 1870. He was educated at Bodmin Grammar School, became a scholar in Latin and Greek and decided to pursue a medical career. He completed his studies at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London, and then returned to Polperro. There he remained, marrying three times in all – the last when he was seventy to a woman of twenty-two – and having a total of eleven children.
He was, first and foremost, Polperro’s doctor. Habitually dressed in a stovepipe hat, a white neckerchief doubled over, a long black coat over dark-grey trousers and a pair of shoes with silver buckles, he ministered tirelessly to the sick and needy, regardless of class or income. His patients included the local bigwigs, the Trelawnys, old Zephaniah Job who was the financial brains behind the local smuggling syndicate and just about every family in Polperro. Couch was a man of profound learning, able to mix easily with scientists, antiquaries and ladies and gentlemen of culture, but equally at home in the dark, pilchard-infused cottages of the fishermen.
In 1837 there was an outbreak of smallpox locally. Couch vaccinated virtually the entire village, using an ivory point dipped into a pustule on someone already deliberately infected with the milder cowpox. Not a single death from smallpox was recorded and after that Dr Couch could do no wrong in the eyes of Polperro.
Hard though he worked, he had energy and time to spare. This was the golden age of Victorian discovery; all over the land doctors and clergymen and gentlemen of leisure were immersing themselves in archaeology, geology, meteorology, ancient and natural history. Couch began by examining, drawing and describing the creatures most readily available to him: molluscs, crustacea, fish, zoophytes, bats, midges and much else. He became a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, although he managed to attend only one meeting in his life, and produced a stream of scientific papers for various journals which, over time, covered just about every subject under the Cornish sun. Shooting stars, fossils, bird migration, abnormalities in unborn babies, the behaviour of cuttlefish, common spiders, rooks, jellyfish, whales, hedgehogs – nothing was too great or insignificant to escape his searching eye.
But Couch’s great labour of love and learning – and the reason why his name should be revered by fish-lovers – was his epic History of the Fishes of the British Islands. This was published in its final form in four volumes between 1862 and 1865, and brought together the fruits of sixty years of inquiry. The 252 coloured plates were of his own watercolour paintings, which whenever possible he executed while the subject was still alive. It is true that some of his classifications are shaky – for instance he includes four separate species of freshwater eel whereas, in fact, there is only one, Anguilla anguilla – but by the standards of the time it was a monumental work of scholarship which brought the Polperro doctor international renown.
I rather doubt that Jonathan Couch would have had much time for F. A. Mitchell-Hedges. He would have found Mitch’s braggadocio ill-mannered and his casual attitude to the truth offensive. Perhaps if they could have gone fishing together it might have been different, but I have found no evidence of Couch having the least interest in catching fish for fun. His grandson, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – ‘Q’ – put it neatly: ‘He was a patient man of science who spent his life observing the habits of fish, without attempting to teach the Almighty how to improve them.’
* * *
Once up and out of Polperro I had a glorious ride along the lane in the general direction of Fowey. It was a prime summer’s day with no more than a wafting breeze from the south-west in my face. I could not see the sea; in fact I could not see very much at all in terms of vista, for these Cornish lanes – like Devon and Somerset lanes – are generally sunk deep between their hedges. The Cornish hedges are not really hedges as we Home Counties types understand the word. They are more walls of stone and slate and earth, surmounted by a tangle of bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel or whatever else manages to retain a roothold.
Their glory is the wealth of flora carpeting their steep lower sides. Foxgloves, red campion, native bluebells, violets, speedwell, pale-purple vetch and pale-yellow toadflax, primroses, yarrow, dog’s mercury, nipplewort and lesser stitchwort – the names are as seductive as the flowers – grow in the gayest abandon among the bracken and ferns and various grasses. I cruised along at a gentle pace under the cornflower sky, ravished by scent and colour, pausing every now and then where a gate opened the prospect onto fields of grazing and ripening summer wheat woven into a patchwork by more distant hedges with stone farmhouses and cottages scattered thinly about.
I passed places with pleasing names – Raphael, Windsor, Lansallos, Trevarder and Triggabrowne. Eventually the lane brought me back within sight of the sea: an irresistible crescent of sand and rock fringing a bay of glittering blue water. I tethered the bike and scrambled down a steep path. On a flat rock raised above the beach to the right an entirely naked man was doing curious exercises. Below him a girl in half a bikini was stretched out on the sand reading a book. I changed and strode bravely into the water. It was damn cold but not disablingly so, exhilarating beyond belief. I would have liked to have stayed and read my own book but the road to Fowey was summoning me.
I spent that night in a pub near the quayside in Fowey called the King of Prussia, where I had a decent dinner and a few pints of decent St Austell ale. There was time before arriving and dining to explore the peninsula between Fowey – which is not really on the Channel by my strict definition – and St Austell Bay. I followed an old track called the Saints Way, and wished I hadn’t as there were many gates and a luxuriance of brambles and nettles that left my poor forearms and legs bloodied and lacerated. It was a hot, annoying slog which ended near a little church, a so-called Chapel of Ease put there by the Rashleighs, owners for many centuries of the famous house of Menabilly.
The name, of course, is indelibly associated with the writer Daphne du Maurier, who lived there, and her novel Rebecca, which she set there. Having no particular interest in either novelist or novel, I sped past the gates down to the beach at Polridmouth where the subject of the story drowned. It is an exquisite spot: a sheltered sandy cove clasped by rocky headlands, separated by a causeway from the lower of the Menabilly lakes, which has a glorious stone house beside it. Just visible on the flat top of Gribben Head is the slender outline of Gribben tower, placed there in 1832 to guide ships towards Fowey.
Rootling around in a local studies section of one library or another, I had come across a Cornish anthology which included a potent passage about the bay. It was taken from a privately printed and anonymous memoir simply entitled Michael, which I think must have been written sometime in the 1930s by Pamela Jekyll, the wife of Sir Reginald McKenna, who served during the 1914–18 war both as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and later as chairman of the Midland Bank. They had two sons, the elder of whom died in 1931, and the memoir recalls family holidays at Menabilly:
‘Michael loved to go up to the Gribben alone and would spend hours there, stretched at full length on the fragrant turf, gazing down the cliff-side where gulls and jackdaws kept up a flying commentary . . . One day, when he came back to the rest of us down in the cove below, he confided to me very secretly that it was on the Gribben when he was there alone that he saw visions.’
That last
sentence still haunts me.
* * *
I gave the Saints Way a miss the next morning and took the main road to Par. It brought me to the entrance of an enormous caravan park which is above Par’s main attraction, its even more enormous sandy beach. The morning was grey, the water also grey, the tide three-quarters in. I talked for a while to three women who were walking their dogs. ‘I bring her here every day,’ the eldest of the women said. ‘She loves it. I love it. I have salt in my veins, I have to be near the sea.’
Why Par, I asked? ‘Simple. Couldn’t afford anywhere else. It’s all right, nothing special but friendly enough.’ One of the others had migrated from Seaford in Sussex to be near her daughter. ‘I wouldn’t go back to Sussex,’ she said firmly. ‘Everyone’s in such a hurry there.’ What, in Sussex? She read my look. ‘It’s true. Down here people take their time over things.’
To the south-east, towards the Gribben and the fields behind, the view is a delight. But scenically Par Sands is blighted by the presence, bang on the western shore, of its china clay works. This complex comprises a harbour, a network of private roads, batteries of warehouses, storage facilities, ancillary buildings, waste tanks and steel towers, miles of piping, conveyor belts and chutes, all gathered around a cluster of gigantic concrete and steel chambers for drying the clay.
This was all fine when hundreds of local people worked there. But since 2006 the whole site has been progressively decommissioned by its owners, the French company Imerys. The harbour was shut and its business switched to Fowey, and production of clay was slashed with the loss of most of the jobs. There is a grand plan – naturally – to transform it all into a marina, biomass energy plant and ‘eco-town’ of 500 houses, but the company behind the project says it has been forced by the state of the property market to scale back its ambitions. Meanwhile the china clay works continues to moulder and rust away, left to the multitudes of gulls roosting in the tops of the drying chambers and the advancing walls of brambles and buddleia and ivy consuming it from the margins.
The footpath took me around the perimeter of this industrial graveyard and between the cliff edge and the greens and fairways of a golf course until I came to a spectacle even more dispiriting than the china clay complex. This is Carlyon Bay, once – and not that long ago – a prime destination for funlovers throughout south-west England, now looking more like part of Sarajevo at the end of the Bosnian civil war.
It began as the New Cornish Riviera Lido, and over time added bars, restaurants, a ballroom, sauna, solarium, amusement arcade, mini golf, boating and a premier arena for live music known as the Coliseum. By the 1990s, though, the Lido had long gone and the Coliseum was on the skids. The buildings were getting tatty, tastes were changing, competition from elsewhere was hotting up. In 2003 it was closed.
By then Carlyon Bay was owned by a property company which had plans – big plans, bold plans, money-making plans – to turn it into a complex of 500 beach-side apartments with bars, restaurants and leisure facilities. It secured planning permission and stuck up a hideous wall of sheet metal to protect the site from the sea. Apartments were advertised at up to £800,000 each, but mysteriously none were built. In fact nothing much happened, apart from the partial demolition of the complex, leaving the Coliseum to rot into a roofless ruin surrounded by a wasteland of rubble and rubbish, and the rapid rusting of the metal defence wall.
I have no idea who is most to blame for this scandal. Local people blame the developers, the developers blame the locals for being difficult, both blame Cornwall County Council for being either too complaisant or obstructive. Meanwhile the savagery of the winter storms of 2013–14 has underlined the need for improved sea defences, which will be hugely costly. The developers say that they need more time to lay their hands on the necessary cash to proceed, and that they ‘hope’ to start building in 2016 – twenty-five years after the scheme was first approved. No one is holding their breath.
Poor St Austell! What has it done to deserve two such disasters on its doorstep? But at least no one has yet devised a way to ruin the jewel gleaming on its southern flank, the perfectly preserved Georgian seaport of Charlestown.
My first reaction on seeing the square-riggers moored on the clear blue water of its superbly picturesque harbour, with the rows of whitewashed cottages and stone storehouses wrapped around, must have been extremely common. I’ve seen this before, I thought, and I had, several times over. In my case it was the TV series The Onedin Line: Peter Gilmore as James Onedin, ruler-straight sideburns and jaw as square as one of his own sheets of canvas; Captain Baines with even more luxuriant whiskers; long-suffering plain Anne and totally seductive Elizabeth; the sweeping theme tune borrowed from Khachaturian’s Spartacus; and the ships, those glorious ships with their billowing clouds of sail.
That was 1971, but long before that the location had been used in the original Hitchcock Rebecca with Olivier and Joan Fontaine. It was used again in the 1997 remake, and in scores of other films and TV dramas with a seafaring strand. For the past twenty years or so this has been Charlestown’s chief business, feeding the appetite for make-believe, yet it was built for hard-headed commercial reasons, to handle exports of copper and of Cornwall’s newest industrial product, china clay.
The man behind the project was Charles Rashleigh, one of the Rashleighs of Menabilly, a lawyer, land agent and banker with an entrepreneurial bent. He commissioned the great engineer of the time, John Smeaton, to design the harbour, which was built from granite in the 1790s. To run the harbour, Rashleigh appointed his trusted man of business, Joseph Dingle, whom he had rescued from the St Austell workhouse at the age of twelve. The closeness of their relationship, given their disparate social backgrounds, caused comment. Charlestown Harbour prospered for a while, but Dingle was a wrong ’un and systematically helped himself to rents and port dues to the tune of £25,000. In the end Rashleigh took legal action against him, and a marathon succession of court proceedings worthy of Jarndyce and Jarndyce ended with Dingle being declared bankrupt and Rashleigh financially disabled.
Copper smelted on site continued to be a mainstay of the Charlestown Harbour until the 1870s, when the reserves of ore began to run out. By then more than 30,000 tons of china clay, dried in kilns close by, was being shipped out each year. There was also a ship-building yard, and a range of ancillary businesses, including salting pilchards, a brickworks, net and rope making and the assembly of casks and barrels. But through the twentieth century business dropped off, with most of the china clay exports being switched to Fowey and Par, and by the early 1990s Charlestown was hardly used at all.
It was then that Robin Davies, the boss of a company called Square Sail, specialising in film and TV work, stumbled upon it and bought it as a base for his operations. Since then the little harbour and Mr Davies’ tall ships have featured in scores of seafaring films and TV dramas, and the locals have become used to pulling on antique costume to appear as extras. But now the future of the perfect little harbour is surrounded by uncertainty. It and Square Sail were put up for sale by Mr Davies some time ago. Two out of the three tall ships were disposed of – one, according to local reports, to the inevitable ‘Russian oligarch’, with the idea of sailing to Brazil for the 2016 Rio Olympics.
23
THE TRAIL OF THE SEA MONSTER
The dark granite snout of Black Head closes off St Austell Bay in the west. There is a memorial on the path to the historian and supreme Cornish egotist A. L. Rowse, with the inscription: ‘This was the land of my content.’ Rowse was born in poverty in a china clay village near St Austell and lived for forty years at Trenarren House, inland from Black Head, where he spent his time among his books, kept the lower orders at bay and proclaimed his contempt for the second-and third-raters of the academic world.
In A Cornish Childhood, Rowse recalled Sunday school outings to the beach at Pentewan, taking the little train that serviced the harbour there. The track cut through the edge of Kings Wood beside the St Austell River,
so closed in that ‘the honeysuckle reached into the truck and tickled your neck.’ At the beach they paddled – ‘hardly anyone bathed in those days,’ Rowse recalled – and played games and quarrelled. Then there was tea – ‘an enormous, round, golden saffron bun, corrugated with currants and flavoured with lemon-peel.’
The railway has long gone, but to compensate there is a fine cycle track to Pentewan. The village is clustered around the edge of what Rowse remembered as the harbour. But after his time, and long before mine, the harbour was cut off from the sea by a sandbar which extended across its mouth from the long beach to the west. Behind the beach, covering the grassy bowl where Rowse and his little friends played, is a whopping great holiday park. These days Pentewan’s chief function is to service the needs of the holidaymakers. As with many of these coastal settlements, its past seems somehow richer and more colourful than its present.
It owed its development as a port to Christopher Hawkins, a member of an old Cornish family with extensive estates around St Erth, further to the west. By all accounts Hawkins was an exceptionally greedy and tight-fisted individual. He was a great collector of rotten boroughs – at one time controlling six, each returning two MPs to Westminster – and had no scruple about destroying the homes of those who dared oppose his candidates and bribing the rest. His reputation was summed up by an anonymous notice pinned to the gates of his mansion at Trewithen, near Truro:
A large house and no cheer,
A large park and no deer,
A large cellar and no beer,