Wayland Wordsmith

STARCROSS PLOUGHGIRLS, 1794

2012-02-11T18:11:00.001Z

William George Maton MD was physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte, the consort of George III. He was also the doctor summoned to Sidmouth when the Duke of Kent was dying in 1820. But in 1794 he was a twenty year old medical student travelling along the western bank of the Estuary making notes for a book, published in 1797, entitled: 'Observations relative to the Natural History, Picturesque Scenery and Antiquities of the Western Counties of England.'

One of his observations was as follows: "The lands about Star-cross were two years ago covered with furze, and in a state perfectly wild, but are now cultivated; they produce surprisingly well, though they are exposed to the sea. We here see women employed at the plough, which they guide with as much dexterity as the most robust men, and we were informed that the practice is not uncommon in Devon."

It has been suggested that this most unusual practice, women at the plough, can best be explained by their menfolk being much engaged in fishing. This would imply that in the eighteenth century there were still fisher farmers here as there had been in mediaeval times. While the men of the Exe fished the Estuary and the Bay, the women ploughed the fields.

AN OLD PAINTING

2012-02-06T12:20:00.005Z

It would be nice to believe that this old, naive oil painting was of the Estuary, viz. the estuary of the Exe. If it is not an altogether imaginary scene existing solely in the mind of its creator then where is it? It was bought in Exeter a quarter of a century ago and there are no further clues to its provenance. One feels that one is looking up river to commons and moorland rather than out to sea, perhaps looking across to the Clyst. That would put it on the western bank of the river and perhaps, if on the Exe, Powderham is the only likely spot. But could Powderham ever have looked like this, and if so, when?

The 'creel' or fisherman's basket is very convincing. ('Creel' is a jolly word but too Norman to be an estuary word. There is no doubt a splendid Anglo Saxon word for it lurking somewhere.) Convincing too is the boy in the punt poking with a paddle and the man in the lugger who it seems has anchored off on two, what we would now call 'fishermen's,' anchors.

The Exe or not, this painting gives the feel of what the shores of the Estuary would have been like before the railways came and straightened things out for us.

WITHIES

2012-02-01T14:39:00.007Z

In the little Hamlyn "Sailing Handbook" under the heading "Other channel markings" is the following:: "Minor channels in creeks, rivers and so on are usually marked with sticks or branches of trees, called withies, stuck into shallow water on either side."

There are still a few such sticks to be found on the Estuary mostly in the channels leading across Greenbank into the Clyst and "withies" is or was the local fishermen's name for them.

"Withy" is the country name in Devon and elsewhere for the willow tree and therefrom for the wands of the willow.   Withycombe Raleigh, a neighbouring parish to Lympstone, was presumably once a valley of the willows. 'Withy' is an  Anglo Saxon word with Old Norse cognates, closely related to the modern German word for a willow, 'die Weide'.   Is Widecombe In the Moor perhaps another Willowdale?

Once, for many hundreds of years, perhaps back to prehistoric times, before the coming of buoys and the International Buoyage System, the channels of the estuary would have been marked only by such withies.   They stand to their places on the banks remarkably well. Wind and tide seem to find it difficult to shift them. They are, however, hard to find by day and impossible by night.

The few surviving examples of such sticks on the Exe seem not to be from the willow but they are 'withies' none the less.  "A good man steers between the withies."  should be a proverb.   "He sailed between the withies." - a fitting epitaph for one who always managed to steer clear of trouble.

THE SHINING HOURS

2012-01-29T12:04:00.008Z

How many shining hours
have we drifted here
with no more aim than flotsam
while all around us river creatures pulse
and quiver to meet their needs inherent:
feeding, fighting, mating,
procreating?

Is this to be most human,
so to be idle,
least like a beast,
not to be busy,
thus to lie low
and let sun, wind and tide
deal gently with us

but not to forget,
how we are favoured
who are free to think and float
over calm waters,
while around and about,
the storms are brewing
and the birds and the beasts are still hungry?

THE DARLING ROCK

2012-01-28T19:53:00.002Z

The Darling Rock at Lympstone was once quite a stack and is still a landmark of the Estuary although time and tide have worn it to a stump no longer visible at springs. Local myth records it as once havng been big enough for sheep safely to graze upon it and no doubt once it was but certainly not in living memory. John Swete painted it in watercolour when he visited the Estuary no later than 1799 and the Darling Rock is clearly shown to be a needle remarkably much the same shape and size as when it was photographed well over a hundred years later, which is to say not big enough for even one remarkably agile mountain goat to graze upon it.

If it is true, as it is recorded, that, in 1792 the Rector of Lympstone burned Tom Paine's Rights of Man at the Darling Rock and if, as is written in that most excellent book, For Love of Williamina, "The loyal parishioners of Lympstone watched the ashes float away on the ebb tide in the direction of Revolutionary France." they must have been not so much standing on the rock as all around it.

The name, Darling Rock, appears to be ancient and consistent. It appears on William Chapple's map of the Estuary of 1743 but it could well have been so (Deorling!) called by an Anglo Saxon. The local account that it gained its name because women stood upon it waiting for their loved ones to come home and calling out 'O my darling!' to the waves and water seems to me not to carry conviction.

THE ESCAPE OF KING HAROLD'S MOTHER

2012-01-21T19:58:00.004Z

Gytha Thorkelsdottir, the mother of King Harold II, he who died at the battle of Hastings, spent many years in Exeter and was perhaps the foundress and certainly a patron of Saint Olave's church in Fore Street. When, in 1068, William of Normandy came to Devon and besieged Exeter and the city held out against him for eighteen days, Gytha was living there but she escaped, "perhaps down the Exe" says Derek Gore in his 'concise history' of the Vikings in Devon. Gytha is said to have been accompanied by other women who had lost their loved ones at Hastings. She herself had lost three sons there and a fourth, Tostig, who was on the 'wrong' side at Stamford Bridge. Gytha is then said to have taken refuge with her widows on Flatholm Island in the Bristol Channel and later to have found safety in Scandinavia..

It is a pity about that 'perhaps' in 'perhaps down the Exe' but it can't be helped. It was a long time ago! But I am allowing myself an image of this longboat full of widows and the old, proud mother of dead and living jarls being pulled down the channels of the Exe and so out to sea, the women frightened and desperate but at the same time excited and just a bit exalted to be giving the great Conqueror the slip.

THE SONG OF THE OLD FISHERMAN

2012-01-12T00:32:00.007Z

Over Haldon hills and the Western hills
Burn the winter skies
And the breeze falls off and the birds are still
As the old sun dies.
And the breeze falls off and the birds are still
As the old sun dies.

And I think once more of the cheerful days
When my world was new
And up jump the ghosts of fine men I’ve known,
Fine women too.
And up jump the ghosts of fine men I’ve known,
Fine women too.

Those who seined with me, those who trawled with me,
Those who worked the tide,
Those who romped with me, those who quaffed with me
Drift to my side.
Those who romped with me, those who quaffed with me
Drift to my side.

Old friends of mine, are there fish to take
Where now you float?
And is there work for a ready man
In someone's boat?
And is there work for a ready man
In someone's boat?

Over Haldon hills and the Western hills
Burn the winter skies
And the breeze falls off and the birds are still
As the old sun dies.
And the breeze falls off and the birds are still
As the old sun dies.

,

THE EXMOUTH REGATTA OF 1888

2012-01-06T11:04:00.000Z

From 'The Evening Post with which is incorporated Trewman's Exeter Flying Post', 18th August 1888.

"EXMOUTH REGATTA

"The Exmouth Regatta, which is an annual event looked forward to by the inhabitants with great interest, and by whom the day is kept as a general holiday, took place on Thursday. The weather was beautifully fine, and in every way suited to both rowing and sailing matches. The various events were watched with great interest from the sea wall, which was lined with spectators. Besides the racing there were various amusements provided on the beach in the way of shooting galleries, swinging boats &c. and which during the afternoon were kept busy at work. The number of entries for the different events were, if anything, above those of former years and the Regatta was in every way a success.

"The programme numbered thirteen events and in addition there were several swimming matches and other amusements such as walking the greasy pole &c. and athletic sports on land. The starting point was from the Committee boat stationed about three hundred yards from the shore, and the course for the large boats was from Bull Hill buoy to Fairway buoy a distance of about three miles while for the smaller boats the course was from Bull Hill to Double Ledge buoy, a distance of about two miles."

A STORMY NIGHT

2012-01-04T23:59:00.005Z

Listen, how wind and rain fight up the channels,
Old enemies raiding on a winter's night.
They crash upriver like berserkers.

We are none the less anxious who have forgotten how to cower.
Our walls are strong but here's still a suggestion,
A mere hint, of fears our long dead forebears knew.

Under duvets, we do not sleep but listen
For the crashes and the screams
As these old enemies pillage and murder someone else, not us.

THE FAIRWAY BUOY OF 1910.

2012-01-03T11:51:00.003Z

At the start of the year 1910, the Fairway Buoy leading ships into the River Exe had neither bell nor light. In thick or foggy weather or at night it was very difficult picking up the channel buoys. The responsible, irresponsible rather, public body was the Exeter City Council, the Navigation Committee of which had for years delayed a decision to provide a better buoy. They did not want the expense. It is likely that their parsimony was the direct cause of the loss of many seamens' lives and of a good many ships.

In January 1910, a public spirited Exmothian, Dr Martin, collected the signatures of a hundred and fifty of the captains, mates and seamen of vessels trading in and out of the river and of the fishermen of Exmouth, Lympstone, Torquay, Topsham and Budleigh Salterton to petition Trinity House to change the Fairway Buoy into 'a lighted buoy with a bell attached, or into a lighted buoy or into a bell buoy'.

In February, Trinity House promised to supply to Exmouth a bell buoy. The Exeter City Council which collected the harbour dues of Exmouth readily enough made neither comment nor contribution.

In March, a bell buoy painted with black and white stripes and surmounted with a Saint Andrew's cross was placed in the Exe Fairway.

The Exeter Navigation Committee was shameless in its indignation. 'Why no light?' asked one counsellor, while another, a Mr Rose, at a Council Meeting of 12th March announced that the new bell buoy was a great inconvenience. Three of his friends had been disturbed in the night by the terrible booming of the bell. It was one of the most dismal of sounds.

Did Mr Rose blush? The record makes no mention of it.

THE MIDNIGHT LOVERS

2011-12-28T22:38:00.003Z

It was a bitter winter’s night,
the goddess rose up beaming,
a twinkle frost creaked underfoot,
the silver stars were gleaming.
The flood slipped in like beaten light
while all but they were sleeping;
the tide was mirror to the night
it came so calmly creeping.

Chill to the water's edge they came;
she trembled at his shoulder
but when they kissed they burst aflame,
their whole world was asmoulder;
their eyes were furnaces of love
that blazed with youth and yearning;
the very stars looked pale above
the brightness of their burning.

Orion from his post peeped round
and could not mind his duty.
The lady from her chair looked down
and sighed for fatal beauty.
The great bear grinned to gaze upon
a kiss that warmed for ever.
Even the sacred moon smiled on
these lovers in their fever.

.

SLANDER IN TOPSHAM, 1888.

2011-12-26T18:54:00.025Z

In the year 1888 there lived at Topsham a villainous reprobate who spread falsehoods blackening the name of a young woman called Harriet Louisa Finch Pearce. Harriet was the daughter of a market gardener who lived on the High Street. She was thirty three and engaged to be married to a Topsham baker called Louis Ware.

The scandal was so foul that poor Harriet could find no better solution than to drown herself in the Estuary. She told her brother that rather than see her name in the paper she would 'make a hole in the water' but he could not believe that she was serious in her intention.

On the morning of June 18th she rose up early and this time told her brother she was off to Devonport because she could not bear to stay in Topsham to hear the awful scandal which had been circulated about her. Her journey that day should have been by way of the ferry across the Exe, there to catch the early train to Plymouth but events proved that Harriet had been planning a longer and a sadder journey.

A passing stranger found some of her clothes and jewellery on the public footpath opposite the stable yard of the Retreat. Later a fisherman called Edward Hall found her corpse below the summer house and brought her home.

'Touchstone' who in those days wrote up the local news for 'Trewman's Exeter Flying Post' reported as follows:

"The spirit of the poor young girl at Topsham who has gone down to her death will surely haunt those who started against her the foul slander which was the cause of her broken heart and unhinged reason. She was, as Shakespeare says:
'slandered to death by villains,...
boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops!'
I need scarcely say that I would not stand in the shoes nor feel the remorse of the individual who aspersed the good name and fame of Miss Pearce for all the gold that could be gathered together within the limits of the little town on the Exe."

Touchstone's 'only regret' was:

"that the name of the creeping snake in human form who first assailed her character should be kept from the eyes and ears of the outside public."

I don't think there are many young women in Topsham these days who would 'make a hole in the water' if they were libelled. More 'suing' than 'suicidal' perhaps. Nor these days are there many local reporters quoting from Shakespeare, more's the pity.

But shed a tear with me for unhappy Harriet Pearce!

THE ROSY BOSOM'D HOURS

2011-12-20T22:03:00.004Z

The Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, wrote a poem called 'The Rosy Bosom’d Hours' in which he describes an August rail journey to Dawlish and the rosy bosomed hours that he and his second wife spent there. Below is the poem in full.

The Rosy bosom'd Hours.

A florin to the willing Guard
Secured, for half the way,
(He lock'd us in, ah, lucky-starr'd,)
A curtain'd, front coupé.
The sparkling sun of August shone;
The wind was in the West;
Your gown and all that you had on
Was what became you best;
And we were in that seldom mood
When soul with soul agrees,
Mingling, like flood with equal flood,
In agitated ease.
Far round, each blade of harvest bare
Its little load of bread;
Each furlong of that journey fair
With separate sweetness sped.
The calm of use was coming o'er
The wonder of our wealth,
And now, maybe, 'twas not much more
Than Eden's common health.
We paced the sunny platform, while
The train at Havant changed:
What made the people kindly smile,
Or stare with looks estranged?
Too radiant for a wife you seem'd,
Serener than a bride;
Me happiest born of men I deem'd,
And show'd perchance my pride.
I loved that girl, so gaunt and tall,
Who whispered loud, ‘Sweet Thing!’
Scanning your figure, slight yet all
Round as your own gold ring.
At Salisbury you stray'd alone
Within the shafted glooms,
Whilst I was by the Verger shown
The brasses and the tombs.
At tea we talk'd of matters deep,
Of joy that never dies;
We laugh'd, till love was mix'd with sleep
Within your great sweet eyes.
The next day, sweet with luck no less
And sense of sweetness past,
The full tide of our happiness
Rose higher than the last.
At Dawlish, 'mid the pools of brine,
You stept from rock to rock,
One hand quick tightening upon mine,
One holding up your frock.
On starfish and on weeds alone
You seem'd intent to be:
Flash'd those great gleams of hope unknown
From you, or from the sea?
Ne'er came before, ah, when again
Shall come two days like these:
Such quick delight within the brain,
Within the heart such peace?
I thought, indeed, by magic chance,
A third from Heaven to win,
But as, at dusk, we reach'd Penzance,
A drizzling rain set in.

He was, I think, travelling soon after 1865 with his second wife from the estate that he had purchased in East Grinstead. His rail journey involved changes at Havant, Salisbury and so to Dawlish for a couple of days where the happy couple stepped hand in hand over the same rock pools John and Tom Keats had known some forty or fifty years earlier. Then the Patmores made the mistake of pressing on to Penzance where, as so often, it was raining.

THE SOLSTICE AND THE ESTUARY

2011-12-13T21:40:00.013Z

There is a sign outside the Methodist Chapel in Sidmouth at the moment that reads “Jesus is what Christmas is all about!” and the same maxim is big on the internet. The argument of this too true statement is as circular as a holly wreath and therefore signifies nothing. If you call Christmas, Christmas, then it clearly has everything to do with Jesus Christ but if you call the Winter Solstice, the Winter Solstice, then there have been many hundreds of gods claiming this space and competing with the Christians’ 'Nativity' and, I dare say, there are still a few competing gods about.

As every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows, the magic of the winter solstice is that the sun stops its apparent run along the horizon, bobs up and down in the same place for three days and then starts moving back the way it came. After this magic time when the sun ‘stands still’, the days, which were getting uncomfortably shorter, start once again to lengthen and everyone breathes a sigh of relief and congratulates the priests and wisemen who have predicted the happy outcome.

Few places allow a better view of the march of the sun than the East bank of the Exe Estuary. The Western hills provide a stage where this oldest of dramas is played out year after year. For thousands of pre Christian years the many different pagan races who lived on the high ground towards Woodbury would have kept a close eye on the setting sun as, day by day, he sank dramatically behind the Haldon Hills ever further to the South, across the wide Estuary. They would have followed his slow apparent journey from his midsummer position on the high moors behind the Turf Lock Hotel (which pub of course they all knew well!) to the seacoast at Dawlish, and they probably prayed to the gods of the age to encourage the sun to fight, fight against the dying of the light which, in the end he always did and, which,as yet, he has never failed to do.

And then, at last, ‘Phew,!’ just in time for Christmas, the sun stops slipping away into the ocean, and, ‘Wowee!, what an excuse for a party!

Midsummer Sunset.

STEPHANIE JUPP

2011-12-07T10:35:00.003Z

FARAWAY RIVER

Not for us the Sailing Club,
the racing and the craning in,
we lived up the village
far away from the river;

but there were occasional signs;
the fisherman who sold his fish
at the back door, the ships' sirens
on New Year's Eve;

and when I was in bed
the hollow sound of trains
floated across the river
as I faded into sleep;

the hollow sound of trains
across the river
as I faded into sleep...

Stephanie Jupp

BOILED FISH AND THE MISSION TO SEAMEN, 1898.

2011-12-01T18:46:00.005Z

"To the Editor of the EXMOUTH JOURNAL

SIR,- We have all, I am sure, heard with pleasure of the proposed 'Sailor's Rest', which seems in a way to become one of the Institutions of the place. We all sympathise with sailors and fishermen, and nearly every one in the community is, I imagine, willing to help, according to their power, in this effort for their comfort and well-being.

But, while we help them, does it not seem a little too bad that of all the nice fresh fish these men bring ashore so small a portion, if any, is available for the people of Exmouth - and that it must be sent off to different parts of the kingdom and come back to us from London and elsewhere, not improved by the journey? Sailors and fishermen, as a rule, like fair play, and if the good people of Exmouth do their best to provide a Sailors' and Fishermen's Shelter, ought we not to have the chance of buying such fish as is brought in daily by the fishermen?

Fresh fish is a palatable and wholesome food and a plentiful and cheap supply would be a great boon to all classes in Exmouth.

Yours truly,

HOUSEKEEPER
Exmouth, January 3rd 1898."

"Housekeeper" wrote this trenchant but patronising letter almost one hundred and fourteen years ago but it has been revealed to me, by way of extra sensory perception, that she, yes definitely 'she' , was in fact a mean old biddy, an Exmouth landlady, who contributed not so much as a mite to the Flying Angel charity that set up the Exmouth Seaman's Mission in Victoria Road and who did not give a shrimp's whisker for the comfort and wellbeing of seafarers. She was rather one who dreamed nightly of serving, cheap, cheap, cheap, boiled fish every 'teatime' to her suffering Victorian holiday guests. If I'm wrong in this , may her shade forgive me!

It is no doubt true that the fishermen sold their catch regularly to the London buyers but I don't believe that there was not, in 1898, a local supply of fresh fish available to those Exmothians who were prepared to pay the market price for it.

LYMPSTONE, A NIGHTPIECE, 1922(?)

2011-11-25T15:01:00.005Z

From the novel, 'Redcliff' by Eden Phillpotts.

"Dusk was down and the tide just upon the turn.  The still waters of the estuary, subdued to a dim silver, flickered wan and wide in the last of the light and extended to the vague outlines of the distant shore, where earth again arose- an amorphous, undulating ridge of darkness between the water and the fading sky. A railway train flung a feather of steam to break the gloom afar off and a gaggle of geese flew aloft, heard but not seen. The shore did not reflect this peace, however, for the boats were sailing with the tide and not a few fishermen stood upon the little breakwater with their dingheys waiting below. The fishing fleet rode at anchor a quarter of a mile from land. They were set blackly on the still waters, and a boat or two from the haven had already started for them. Women and landsmen stood about among the departing fishers. Little groups talked, moved, mingled; lanterns twinkled and one by one the shore boats carried their crews to sea."

What a glorious ampleness of alliteration is here! : 'dusk/down', tide/turn', 'subued/silver', 'wan/wide' 'last/light'. I have loved this passage for many years despite the fact that here, as so often, Phillpotts shows himself to be a somewhat careless prose writer.   I admit to being a pedant but 'fleet' is singular and can't carry a plural verb and 'however' serves better at the beginning of a sentence than half way through and geese surely are only a 'gaggle' when they are earthbound; when they fly they are a 'skein'.   Perhaps this carelessness, he wrote at such speed, is one reason why Eden Phillpotts, despite his amazing productivity never received the critical acclaim he desired.   The picture, however, that he paints is very convincing. The old man, he was sixty when he came to live in Lympstone, to write 'Redcliff' and to flirt with the young cousin who became his second wife, must surely have stood, notebook in hand, in Lympstone cove and watched the fleet putting out to sea. His use of the word 'dingheys' is odd.   The word is of Hindi and/or Bengali origin and is given by Eric Partridge as 'dingi'. It means a small boat. My Lloyd's 'Encyclopaedic Dictionary ' of 1895 gives 'dinghy', dinghi,' 'dinghee', and 'dingey' but not Eden's, he was born in India, 'dinghey'.  Lloyd's gives as a first definition: "A row-boat of the Hoogly, which probably gave the name to the little jolly-boat of the merchant service."   But who the Hoogly?

Those Estuary fishermen would have called their 'dingheys' 'punts'. 'Punt' is a very proper name for such a boat. It relates closely to ancient words meaning bridge or ferryboat.   A punt is a boat of passage which takes one from here to there and back again.

But, oh my friends, those 'twinkling lanterns'!

BUDLEIGH PEBBLES

2011-11-11T21:16:00.004Z

In a bright and jolly book, 'Seaside Resorts', recently published by the 'Oldie' and written by that journal's 'Unwrecked England columnist', Candida Lycett Green, is this perfectly smooth paragraph about Budleigh pebbles.

"There is a clarity and neatness about Budleigh beach. But everything about Budleigh is neat - even its perfectly smooth, soft-to-the-touch pebbles, which can be traced back 440 million years. In shades of mauvish and pinkish grey, some of them are as big as goose eggs. They are composed of a hard quartzite brought here from Brittany by one of the giant rivers flowing into the Triassic desert."

Some years ago a Budleigh man was brought before the local magistrates for stealing a couple of these elegant pebbles from the beach. This court case seemed to me at the time to be more than a little dogberryish. Four hundred and forty million years, however, is quite an age! The next time I steal a Budleigh pebble for my garden I shall treat it with all the respect due to its years as well as to its essential smoothness.

A NEW SONG OF CALM AFTER STORM

2011-11-01T13:17:00.012Z

.

As I walk out on Saturday,
on Saturday and late,
the clouds are monstrous birds of prey,
the wind is holy hate.
The gale that roars in from the sea
grows darker with the night.
A savage tide is fighting free
from Topsham to the Bight.

When I walk out on Sunday though
all other is the story.
The clouds are doves with breasts of snow.
The sun climbs high in glory.
The breeze is dreaming and the tide
drinks from the morning's light.
The Exe sleeps gentle as a bride
from Topsham to the Bight.

(Valparaiso)

JENNY MOON (2)

2011-10-14T23:12:00.002+01:00

THE WATCHER

For the moment I am a watcher.
From the quayside I watch the sun rise and travel the day,
watch its flare set into the hills beyond the flood and the ebb,
the swing of boats and the arrows of geese that fly into dusk.

On a new morning five swans drift by the quay.
Colours are cut in crystal. A woman wanders,
city clothed and somewhere in her dream.
At the church bell, she stirs and is away.
A dog bounds into the morning, scattering the swans,
but somehow the woman stays with me.
I roll her dream on my tongue, seeking its flavour.

In November, storm winds lash the quay,
drive the tide high in pitch black night.
Figures emerge from the streets, hoods over wet faces.
There are quick voices, torches. She moves among them easily,
feeling ropes, shifting sandbags into doorways.
She calls to me and her laughter is woven
into the wind, softening the night.

On a fine Sunday, I am among the cracking sails,
Thrilled by the breeze and cooled by frisking spray.
On the quay, five summer children dangle hooks.
There is bait and buckets, mud on brown skin.
She is there, reaching for a crab that scuttles to freedom,
A man is with her and I see the look between them. I turn away.
I can only remind myself that I watch and wait.

Over months they walk this quay, sometimes in love,
Sometimes apart. Come winter and she is always alone.
There is a day when snow follows a purple dawn.
Some snow is fallen; some feathers an icy breeze over black water.
She is there, buried in fleece, looking towards the hills.
Suddenly she is the song and all that is warm in this winter
And I walk out in her footprints, carrying my dream to her.

Lympstone

(More Jenny Moon)

JACK RATTENBURY IN EXMOUTH

2011-10-08T21:05:00.006+01:00

In February 1821 the mate of the revenue cutter 'Scourge' , at anchor in Lyme Bay, managed to lure the notorious and seasoned smuggler 'Jack Rattenbury', then 42 years of age, aboard his vessel by telling him that there was a spyglass of his on board the cutter which Jack might like to collect by rowing out.

Jack Rattenbury should have known better but he rowed out to the cutter to collect his spyglass. He took with him his two little boys, one five, the other nine years of age. Once aboard he found not only the mate of the 'Scourge' but also the captain of the 'Lyme Packet', who was a fellow smuggler turned informant, and a deputation officer waiting there to arrest him.

Jack Rattenbury later wrote:

"It is impossible for me to describe my feelings on finding myself trepanned in such a manner and when the deputation officer desired me to go below I positively declared that I would not; and when one of the men asked me what I was going to do with the boys... being goaded to madness by the question, I replied in a rage, 'Throw them overboard if you like, and drown them, for you might as well do so as to take their father from them in such a clandestine manner.'"

But the officers did not drown the young Rattenburys. They set the boys ashore and half an hour later the 'Scourge' made sail for Exmouth with Jack aboard. At Exmouth a coach was waiting to carry him under guard to Exeter and so to prison.

RUMBLINGS AND GRUMBLINGS, 1910.

2011-10-02T10:38:00.008+01:00

(image courtesy of http://www.richardrochester.co.uk/)

From the Exmouth Journal January 15th 1910:

"The herring fishermen of Exmouth have met with very little success this season, poor catches having been the order throughout, while many men have been working their boats at a loss. This is most serious because the majority of local fishermen depend to a very great extent on the proceeds of the herring fishery to tide them over the lean period of the year.

"It is suggested that the heavy gun practice which is indulged in by warships in the neighbourhood is responsible for the absence of the fish and there appears to be something in the idea. The vibration caused by the firing of a heavy capital gun can be felt for miles on the water and would naturally affect herrings coming into the bay to spawn and, while it would drive the majority away, the spawn of those which remained would, in all probability be broken up by the vibration."

Across the century one hears the rumblings of war and of the great guns and the grumblings at the bar of the Volunteer.

A SEA SERPENT

2011-09-23T22:37:00.001+01:00

On my evening walk tonight I was lucky enough to see the Estuary's only living monster, Marmaduke, our 69 foot sea serpent, swimming down river with the falling tide, his coils clearly visible above the surface of the Exe. Luckily I had my camera with me. Otherwise I dare say nobody would believe me.

JENNY MOON

2011-09-19T13:42:00.000+01:00

.

THE SOUND OF THE TIDE

I am wrapped in you and your jacket
and the sound of the tide running out.
A flow along the harbour wall
pulls at buoys, sweeps the eroding rock.
There is the slapping stay,
A squabble of ducks, the suck
of mud on hull. Far is the city
and its cathedral tower, far off its roar
as dusk settles across a big sky.

Wrapped in you and your jacket,
we are somewhere between
our first meeting and what might be;
somewhere in the order of things.
Reflections shatter and remake.
In the wispy breeze the image of a boat,
mirrored exactly, can break at a whim.
We watch the swans pair, glide
and preen, group. They may part,

- but for now we weave our way
Between life’s events, the turn
of tides, the incessant roll of hours
measured out by the harbour bell
Now, to the north, the night
takes its ease over the hills,
while up and down the estuary
the port lights begin to mark
the channel through the dark waters

Lympstone.

DAME PARTINGTON

2011-09-15T11:52:00.000+01:00

This weekend the Sydney Smith Association will hold their AGM in Sidmouth, choosing this 'little marine paradise' as Sydney called it because the great man brought his family to holiday here year after year from about 1830 to about 1845. This seems a good excuse to quote from his pro Reform Bill speech at Taunton in 1831 in which he remembered the great floods of 1824 that brought that stalwalt Sidmothian, Mrs Partington, to the nation's attention. He said:

"I do not mean to be disrespectful but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm of Sidmouth and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion.

"In the winter of 1824, there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea water and vigorously punching away the Atlantic Ocean. 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 slop or a puddle , but she should not have meddled with a tempest."

PORPOISES

2011-08-26T12:54:00.000+01:00

In the spring of 1910 the salmon fishing on the Estuary was slack with only two or three fish per tide being taken at Topsham but the fishermen were further frustrated by 'porpoises' making an appearance in the river and chasing the salmon, scaring them upriver. Moreover many of the salmon taken in the seines had savage bites on them. It would seem they were being porpoisely blemished.

'Porpoise' is a jolly word, being a contraction of the Latin porcus pisces, a pig fish.

There is, I learn, not a lot of difference between porpoises and dolphins. Sailors and fishermen tended not to discriminate between the species. It would seem they were all porpoises to most people. I wonder, therefore, if these reported porpoises of a century ago were in fact bottlenose dolphins like the ones who still draw an audience by leaping about and playing with the salmon off the Scottish coasts. If so it must have been fun watching them chasing the salmon up the Exe. I also wonder how far upriver they came and until how recently they were to be seen in the Estuary. More questions than answers I fear! Nowadays they do not seem to visit us.

Still, much though they are fun to watch, I don't suppose the poor, struggling Exe salmon fishermen were greatly amused by them.

A LINE ENGRAVING , 1803?

2011-08-21T22:20:00.000+01:00

In one respect Exmouth cannot be faulted. It has the finest charity shops in the South West. There is no end to the treasures to be unearthed in the Exeter Road and elsewhere. A charity shopper in Exmouth is a prince of Serendip.

Last Friday I bought the original copper line engraving here illustrated for six pounds only. It is one of the illustrations to "The Beauties of England & Wales", a series of books published between 1801 and 1815 and the print is entitled "Powderham Castle. &c. Devonshire". It was engraved by W. Angus from a drawing by W M Craig.

Mr Craig,the artist, is sitting on a sand dune at Dawlish Warren and the windmill in the middle ground is on the Point at Exmouth. This is a rare glimpse of this windmill which did not survive the middle of the nineteenth century. It is high water and calm and the Warren is busy. Then as now it is a grand place to beach boats and to attend to them. The mariner in the foreground sitting on a barrel is holding a bumkin or bumpkin. 'Bumkin' is a lovely word from the Dutch boomken , a little boom. He has been working no doubt but like most boatmen he has time to listen to a tale, today from the knock kneed mariner in the tarred hat. To the left is a fishing party setting out. If my eyes don't deceive me the standing figure in the boat is handling a net.

The western bank of the Exe looks as deserted as any African riverbank. Haldon is bald, a wild tract of common rather than a forest. That lone building at the end of the Point must surely be a boatyard. This corner of Exmouth would appear to boast only four boats where now are a hundred and these few boats are not moored but pulled up on the beach. There are no boats shown to be moored on the Estuary but we cannot see the Bight where the big ships ride. Powderham Castle and its new Belvedere are not for me the most interesting things in this picture. I prefer the &c. But the magnificent castle walls are gleaming in the sun.

PENS AND QUILLS

2011-08-18T11:24:00.001+01:00

I have thought that the Cornish family name Quiller, as in the great Quiller-Couch, might have something to do with the large strong feathers of swans and geese, a 'quiller' being either a supplier of quill pens or, perhaps, a writer of glorious mediaeval gothic. It would, however, seem more likely that the name has to do with operating weaving machines, with spools and bobbins. A 'quill' says the OED is first and foremost 'a hollow stem or stalk, as that of a reed' and by extension other hollow things. The word 'pen' of course means since ancient times a feather and only by transference does it mean a writing tool.

In the first weeks of July the Estuary tideline was punctuated by swans' feathers. The swans must have been scattering plumage like our post riot politicians have been scattering platitude.

My little granddaughters wanted some pens from which to make quills, or perhaps they wanted some quills from which to make pens. A good neighbour found a dozen fine swans' feathers for their experiments between Lympstone and Nutwell, the best of them a good eighteen inches long.

One wonders how the mediaeval scribes and illuminators went about finding the ultimate writing tool. There would have been flocks of geese no doubt honking around the monastery at Exeter but the image I am nursing is of a couple of twelfth century, holy hoodies wandering along the banks of the Exe on a day in July and keeping their eyes open for the whopping great writing instrument that will shock the vestiments off their brethren.

(In the photo are, left to right: Lily Rochester, Ines McDonald, Charlotte Rochester.)

A BOAT SONG

2011-08-12T18:58:00.000+01:00

(Taken freely from the Norwegian of Arnulf Ǿverland)

The blades dip. The blades ride high.
The shining drops that fall are silent tears.
Around my sleepy boat the ripples sigh.
The shining drops that fall are silent tears.

My boat drifts. She drifts and dreams.
All things are drowsy on this lazy tide.
Nothing I see or hear is what it seems.
All things are drowsy on this lazy tide.

My boat glides. She skims along.
We’re bound for golden joys and heart’s desire.
The sea sings softly, sings a sleepy song.
We’re bound for golden joys and heart’s desire.

MAJOR MORRISON BELL

2011-08-10T20:29:00.000+01:00

The name Morrison Bell is remembered here if only because of the 'Morrison Bell Cup' which is competed for by the Devon and Exeter Football League. In 1910 Major Morrison Bell was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Honiton. He was a character straight out of John Buchan, the younger son of a Northumbrian baronet, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, then commissioned into the Scots Guards, resigning his commission to become a Member of Parliament but returning to the Army at the age of 44 to fight in the First War. He was buried in rubble by a shell that killed three of his fellow officers but was dug out by the Germans and taken prisoner. After the war he returned to be the Member for Honiton until 1931 and, in 1923,was created the first and only Baronet, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir (Arthur) Clive Morrison Bell, of Harpford.

Anyway, "the Major" loved the Estuary and in June 1910, only a few months after he entered Parliament, he had a seventeen foot Canadian canoe delivered to Exmouth. He kept it in Mr W. T. Holman's boathouse at the Dock. The Exmouth Journal for June 25th 1910 has the following:

"Our popular representative, Major A. C. Morrison Bell is an expert canoeist, and recently purchased a Canadian canoe, which he has had brought to Exmouth, and in which he has made several excursions on the Exe. During one of his trips it came on to blow, the voyageur being compelled to retreat. A unique experience, illustrative of the general popularity and esteem in which the Major is held, befell him as he was commencing one of these trips.

"At the back of the houses at the Point, a number of children were paddling, and had their attention arrested by the queer-looking boat, and the strange manner of its propulsion. Suddenly one of them recognised the occupant and called for 'Three cheers for Major Morrison Bell.' which were heartily accorded, the Major waving back a smiling acknowledgment....

"Major Morrison Bell intends making another trip up the river in a week or so and will, if possible, do the double journey to Exeter and back in one day."

They don't make Members of Parliament like that any more!

LEARNING TO SWIM, 1930

2011-07-17T13:56:00.000+01:00

In 1930 the Exmouth Swimming Club were still using the Dock as a place to teach people to swim.

Pressure was growing for the town to have a swimming bath but many voices were raised against it. The reluctance to spend money on a pool was partly due to the perception that there was something perverse about a town that boasted two miles of golden beach needing anywhere other to swim than in the sea. But,as teachers of swimming were keen to point out, the beach is seldom a good place to teach or to learn. The sea with its wayward ways and wild waves invited none but the boldest to learn to swim there and the remarkable number of local people who drowned in the Bay and the Estuary was of concern to many.

The Dock as a swimming pool was also less than satisfactory. The Exmouth Journal of March 16th 1930 has the following:

"The amount of rubbish thoughtlessly thrown into the Club's corner of the Dock, though it has caused damage to the feet of swimmers, is really a minor nuisance. The chief trouble is that a sheet of enclosed water used by shipping must at all times be more or less polluted."

It seems amazing that a facility which nowadays we all take for granted was so slow coming to this seaside town.

THESE DEAD THINGS

2011-07-10T16:22:00.000+01:00

How all these dead things come and go
across this Estuary, its shining length and breadth!
Dead creatures, the wholes or parts of them,
that come in with the flood, that go out with the ebb
without asking anyone's leave.

(No last trump for them, then?
No! No more than for you or me, kiddo!)

Spineless, jellied things and twisted skeletal things,
flesh and bone and shell and feather,
remains of bird, beast, fish of the sea,
hanging about, but not for ever.

Where they float they are tugged by crabs and fishes,
where stranded, rent and plundered,
pecked by hungry rook and crow,
nibbled by the progeny of those happy rats
who ate the leather flaps
of Brunel's Atmospheric Railway,
sniffed by night by that dogfox we know
and devoured from within by tiny, salty bugs:

dead things crawling with life!

And even that proud and noble buzzard
resting on her splayed wings,
black on the wind, above Sowden's cliff,
does not distain these dead things.

THE VENERY GAME.

2011-07-09T12:16:00.000+01:00

I like the entry on 'venery' in Fowler's Modern English Usage: "The existence of homonyms, one synonomous with hunting, the other with sexual indulgence, make it necessary to provide against ambiguity in using either." Well, here, let us be clear, we mean the former and not the latter. The 'venery game' is the game of finding the right collective for beasts, primarily those which lend themselves to being hunted. If T H White is to be believed, which mostly he isn't, learning the correct venery terms constituted about fifty per cent of a mediaeval education.

Anyway, last Friday there were nineteen swans swimming together on the western side of the Estuary near the stone steps upriver from Starcross. This is the time of year when swans group and there have been much larger groupings in past years. Nevertheless nineteen is a goodly number. They were in grand procession which is how they mostly appear to be.

Swans have always been a challenge to players of the venery game. In the air it is, of course, a 'skein' of swans but there is no consensus when it comes to swans on the water. There are many suggestions on the internet as elsewhere but I am happiest with my own contribution to the game, "a pomp of swans".
'Pomp' is a fine word. Its roots would have it mean first and foremost a grand procession. What could be closer to the vision in which I was delighting upriver of Starcross last Friday? "A pomp of swans" : that's what it was and don't forget that it was I who coined this particular collective! Or are we being pompous again?

THE FLOATING CAFE

2011-07-02T20:55:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, Friday, I went off with 'Poppy' on the ebb tide at half past nine in the morning and came home with the flow of the tide at half past seven. It was a long day of glorious sunshine with light winds, first from the north and then from the south. For me it was a wonderfully aimless day of just messing about in the boat, than which, as every schoolboy knows, 'there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing.'

At lunchtime, however, I discovered that I had failed to pack the flask of coffee which I had carefully prepared so I went to see what the new 'River Exe Café' had to offer by way of libation. I had been keeping an eye on this amazing building rising from the Exe without knowing what it was about. It floats just off Starcross like the Ark, as though some latter day Noah was taking global warming very seriously.

The construction is somehow very pleasing. Everything is of timber. A deck about 80' by 60' has been laid on two canal barges and a sizeable hut has been built on it. A strip of landing stage is attached. It is such a fantastic project, so brilliantly conceived and executed that it deserves every success.

I was made fast alongside by a helpful hand and went aboard beneath a flutter of brave bunting. It was lucky for me that only last weekend the Café had received its licence to serve alcohol and I was able to enjoy a pint of cold Yellowhammer beer, brewed by O'Hanlon's in Whimple, with my lunch. It will be a great place for a party. I shall be going there again and taking friends and so, I hope, will many another.

THE WRECK OF THE SCHOONER 'VIGA'

2011-06-24T15:32:00.000+01:00

I was tidying my attic when I found, I don't know how it came there, a copy of Pulman's Weekly dated Tuesday, October 15, 1907. It contained the following report under the title: "Russian Steamer(sic) wrecked near Exmouth":

"A Russian three-masted fore and aft schooner, name unknown, from the Baltic, with timber for Messrs Sharpe, Exmouth, went ashore on Thursday afternoon one and a half miles from Exmouth. She rolled badly, and the sea washing over her, the crew sought safety in the rigging.

The lifeboat was unable to rescue them owing to the blinding surf and sea but eventually the Teignmouth lifeboat, which put off, rode up on the windward side of the schooner and, to the great relief of anxious watchers on the shore, rescued the seamen from a perilous position. As soon as the ship had been abandoned the masts were washed away. The vessel is breaking up."

Despite the headline, the ship, "Viga", was no steamer. It must have been truly desperate for the seamen high in the shrouds looking down at their crippled ship and an angry sea. Messrs Sharpe of Exmouth, to whom they were carrying a cargo, were still selling timber from their vast dockside timber sheds twenty or thirty years ago when I was building my kitchen. B&Q is just not the same somehow. Later in the same newspaper is reported:

"LOOTING A WRECK- The Russian schooner, Viga, which went aground at Exmouth on Thursday, drove further in shore during Friday night and split in half. In the evening the crew boarded the vessel and discovered that she had been looted, two watches, a telescope, silver articles and some clothing being stolen."

Some lightfingered Exmothians got lucky. That Russian telescope will be turning up on the Antiques Roadshow one of these days, you mark my words.

RUTH MANNING-SANDERS

2011-06-07T11:55:00.000+01:00

In the nineteen forties when that classiest of all publishers, Batsford, wanted to add 'The West of England' to the 'British Heritage' series they commissioned the established writer of fairy stories and verses for children,Ruth Manning-Sanders, to write the book. It was an inspired choice.

Ruth Manning-Sanders faced a huge task and necessarily relied on the writings of others to complete it. Nevertheless she is spot on in her comments on Exmouth and she bears witness that when it comes to the little town taking advantage of its natural glories, the place was as unhappy sixty years ago as it is today.She wrote:

"Exmouth, like Teignmouth, was a Georgian retreat for naval and army officers, but of this period only a few houses, on the Beacon facing the sea, now remain. Away from the sea-front Exmouth is a most depressing network of street after street of execrable buildings. In its busy and somewhat spiderish precoccupation with enlarging its holiday trade, the town has lost whatever native character it once possessed, and so is bound to be depressing, whether in season or out of season, whether its lodging houses are full or empty."

It was true then. It is true now.

When it comes to the Estuary Ruth Manning-Sanders took from that same vein which many a writer has mined before and since:

"From Topsham the estuary extends in a straight wide reach to Exmouth. If you look out from the windows of an ex-G.W.R. train, as it travels up or down the western bank, you may well regard this reach as flat, mud-coloured and uninteresting; but see it from the water-front at Exmouth, and you think very differently. Indeed quite the best thing about Exmouth is the view looking westward, up the grey-blue estuary, backed by the long, wooded heights of Great Haldon; especially at sundown when the waters burn, and the hills fuse their detail into a blue and shaggy silhouette, and day fades in glory behind Haldon's darkening ridge."

The italics are mine.

A FORGOTTEN ROMANCE

2011-05-28T17:06:00.000+01:00

When in, probably, 1933 that remarkable young man Raymond B Cattell came paddling down the Exe in his two seater, German, sailing canoe, Sandpiper, he and his bold companion, Hugh Crowther, spent the night at Lympstone.

"Lympstone, like many fishing villages, is in its material possessions a slum, but in this picturesque setting and with the sturdy independence of its inhabitants, to say nothing of their fine and handsome appearance, it might be a dwelling of kings."

The two young men walked by 'the ruined sea wall' where they met 'a tall dark girl, whose handsome face was as attractive as the lithe freedom of her carriage.' The boys passed themselves off as 'yachtsmen' and the tall dark girl and and Hugh took an instant fancy the one to the other. Raymond left them to flirt with each other while he 'sat on a tiny red cliff, watching the water ebbing from the estuary and dreaming of the magical nights he had spent with his lost girlfriend Monica on Dawlish Warren the previous summer.'

The next morning the two young men knocked on the door of the 'very tall, handsome and dignified fisherman' who had undertaken to look after their canoe.

"Lo, there appeared at the door the tall dark girl of the night before! She had a duster in her hand and a scarlet handkerchief about her dark hair, which accentuated her gypsy appearance...Her face wreathed itself in delicious smiles. "So you've come for the 'yacht' that father's keeping for you?" she laughed. We assented, blushing as red as her handkerchief. "You'd better get it before he comes," she said to Hugh. "He may be keeping something else for you because of my getting in late last night."

It would seem that the father was subsequently pacified and was paid a shilling for the mooring he had provided. The fisherman's daughter sent the boys off with one kiss for Raymond and two for Hugh and with a warning for both of them:

""The swell's grumbling on the bar a lot this morning, you oughtn't to go out" she added, her face suddenly grave and judicial. We listened with all our ears, but to us the still morning air told nothing of what was happening three miles away at the sea's edge. We had no senses to detect the ominous drone which meant so much to the professional sixth sense of the fisherman's daughter."

Long, long ago these innocents parted.

A RING OUSEL

2011-05-24T21:07:00.000+01:00

I was watching a ring ousel this afternoon on the shingle at Sowden End. It might have been a blackbird for all the fun it was, but it wasn't. It was a ring ousel and the female of the species. She was coming and going and feeding on the sandhoppers in the seaweed there. I was familiar with ring ousels in my youth when I lived and worked in the Lake District but had never seen one here on the Estuary before. It was a 'what's a bird like you doing in a joint like this?' experience.

The ring ousels have white gorgettes, which is what officer cadets have. Generals have red ones. The connection is that the 'tabs' of the military are the skeuomorphic suspenders of the crescent shaped throat armour that is properly the 'gorgette'. Anyway the whitish patch on the ring ousel's throat is the very same shape as this last worn chunk of plate armour. I suppose one might define a ring ousel as a blackbird that has winged its way through the Regular Commissions Board.

SHOOTING SEAGULLS

2011-05-20T11:32:00.000+01:00

From The Exmouth Journal, Saturday February 8th, 1930:

"FAIR PLAY FOR GULLS

To The Editor of The Exmouth Journal.

Sir,

In your paper you always seem to encourage kindness to dumb creatures, so I send you the following.

Kindly residents at the bungalows throw food to the birds and a week ago two sportsmen (!) with their guns were seen to hide behind a boat on the sand in order to get shots at the birds as they hungrily fluttered in crowds on the beach.

I wonder if all the youths who are continually shooting at birds round the Point have paid for their gun licences.

Yours truly,

A TEMPORARY RESIDENT

The Point, Exmouth, February 3rd."

I think this letter well defines the unbridgeable gulf between those of us who love and those who hate seagulls. Myself, as readers of this blog might know, I tend to side with the former. As for those Exmouth 'youths', they will be at least in their nineties by now but they know who they are, I hope they are still thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

MUD FOR MARTINS

2011-05-18T20:56:00.000+01:00

It was a grey morning last Monday. There was a cold breeze and I was standing once again at the end of the boat shelter wall at Lympstone and leaning on the rail. It was low water. The mud banks stretched away for a mile in front of me, a depressing sight to see. There was a dearth of birdlife.

Then I found myself watching a lone house martin. She, I had the impression she was a she, was the first martin I am conscious of seeing this spring although the birds must have been hereabouts for a few weeks. She was coming and going and landing twenty yards in front of me, collecting mud for nest building.

I had never thought of it before but estuarial mud must be a blessed convenience for house martins especially when, as now, there has been very little rain.

I imagined a conversation between two martlettes:

“The trouble these days, my dear, the mud just isn’t as wet as it used to be.”

“That's so, ma'am, everybody says so. My Martin thinks 'tis all this global warming. It makes things so difficult for first time home builders like us.”

“Well, my dear, if you’ll take my advice, don’t you even bother to go mud hunting inland. There’s plenty of wet mud out there on the Estuary, enough for everybody and for ever. 'Tis a bit salty mind, but…”

LUCKY JACK PHILLIPS

2011-05-15T20:29:00.000+01:00

When the Exmouth lifeboat, the Maria Noble, was called out on Christmas Day 1957 and Lifeboatman William Carder was washed overboard and drowned, the second coxwain, Jack Phillips, was also washed overboard into those raging seas. He lived to tell the tale to the coroner.

"There was nothing I could do. I caught hold of a rope of some sort but I could not hold on, and it would not have done me any good if I had. I was conscious all the time I was in the water and I was washed up on the beach. I felt the ground under my feet and tried to to get up but another wave took me back. I told myself, 'I'm not going to be had this time' so I crawled the rest of it."

The coroner said "You were both swept overboard. You were lucky and Mr Carder was unlucky; that is really what it comes to."

Jack Phillips had crawled onto the beach near Orcombe Point. He was then able to stagger homewards in the howling gale and through blinding rain. Coastguard Tutton and members of the lifesaving team from Budleigh Salterton were already on the beach and saw the staggering figure of Jack Phillips by the light of their torches. Mr Tutton told the coroner, "We were very surprised to see him I can assure you." They supported him for a while and then handed him over to other members of the search party and went on to find poor William Carder who had not been lucky.

AN INVITATION TO SAIL BY NIGHT

2011-05-01T21:33:00.000+01:00

Take my word for it, there is too much light,
up poles, down holes, from bulbs and tubes it pours
and too much noise; the world shouts ev'ry night,
clanging, jangling, piercing my limp ears.

So to be lighted is to lose one's sight,
to miss the comet with his fiery train,
to miss the countless stars that grace the night,
to miss the sacred moon, her wax and wane.

And we are deafened 'til we hear the singing
of these dark waters where the salmon leap
and sea birds pass like ghosts silently winging
over the shallows where the shadows creep.

Come, why should we be blind? We'll sail beneath
stars in their glory, there we'll see the bright
road to eternity; shall we be deaf?
Hush!, you shall hear the silence of the night.

Light Pollution?

ANTHONY FARRAR-HOCKLEY

2011-04-30T15:53:00.000+01:00

Last night, at a party to celebrate the wedding of Will and Kate, I heard for the first time the story that Anthony Farrar-Hockley, the charismatic general and hero of the battle of the Imjin River which took place sixty years ago this month, had lived for a while in Lympstone and had joined the sea scout troop here. The Lympstone scouts were a plucky bunch who went summer camping from aboard their whaler and the story I heard was how the fourteen year old Anthony Farrar-Hockley turned up for one of these expeditions carrying his golf clubs and his typewriter and needed to be persuaded that these were inappropriate items to stow aboard.

He was going to Exeter School and when he was fifteen, at the outbreak of war, he ran away and lied about his age to sign up as a Gloster. His trespass was discovered and he was returned to (I suppose) Lympstone, Exeter School and the scouts. In 1942 he enlisted again.

I met General Farrar-Hockley in the Army of the Rhine and, in so far as a junior officer can converse with a general, had conversation with him. I dined at the same table. I wish I had known then of his Lympstone scouting and his boyhood connection to the Estuary.

It's a thought worth recording, however, that TFH cut some at least of his teeth arms teeth on the waters of the Exe.

COCKLES & Co.

2011-04-27T21:00:00.000+01:00

The unprecedented fine weather we have enjoyed this April has meant that Poppy and I have been moved to spend more time floating up and down the Estuary than in any April before.

At midday on Maundy Thursday we slipped off down river with the tide and did not come back to our mooring until eight o'clock in the evening. I watched the turn of the racing tide from the safety of the sandhills of Dawlish Warren where the sun shone and the skylarks were pouring their full hearts from heaven,or near it!

On the way home I landed on the Cockle Sand which still lives up to its name although the cockles are`far fewer and much smaller than heretofore. It took me twenty minutes to find two handfuls of cockles for my Good Friday tea.

I observed once again the curious way in which the cockles, who had opened up a millimetre or two to observe the great and glorious world beyond their shells, snap tight the moment they are picked from the sand and how sometimes they spit as though disgusted with their fate, as though making their comment on the capture that dooms them to being boiled alive.

There is a notice where I tie up my dinghy on the Green at Lympstone telling the world that all shellfish taken from the Estuary must be boiled for at least three minutes. This seems a small precaution to take considering the history of poisoning attributed to the Exe shellfish. I boiled mine for six minutes just to make doubly sure. I did not want this to be my Last Supper! The boiling perhaps makes them taste a tad more wersh but pepper and salt and a drop of white wine and a little fresh thyme soon puts enough joy into them.

THE BRIDGE INN

2011-04-19T22:06:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I did something that I have been wanting to do for some years. I sailed again to ‘The Bridge Inn’ on the River Clyst. We used to sail there at the least once a year but it is a couple of decades since I last sailed that way. My father and I liked to motor there in his punt, tie up at the bridge, drink our pints and motor home again.

‘The Bridge’ claims to be Topsham’s oldest pub, a claim made because, as I believe, there is some record of a hostelry being there at the time the cathedral was being built in Exeter and of masons being entertained and accommodated there.

But there is also the contention that in the eighteenth century it was the home of Mr Meekin the salt boiler, so perhaps its record as a pub has not been unbroken. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

To sail to ‘The Bridge’ from Lympstone you need a high tide. Yesterday the evening high water was 4.24m. The wind was from the south east, the perfect wind to sail to the mouth of the Clyst. The sail had to be dropped to pass under the railway bridge but when made again I was able to sail most of the way along the little tributary. No one can hope to sail all the way up the Clyst to the bridge because the river is too serpentine but the rising tide spins you along.

It is a delightful sail past Tremlett’s old shipyard where so many amazing hullaballoo boats were built. Thereabouts I found again my black swans, cob and pen, swimming happily together in that imperfect symmetry that seems to be part of their annual courtship. Despite the fact that I was sailing through RSPB lands there was not much other wildlife to be seen.

It seems odd to tie up near the busy A376 but there is a convenient corner to leave a boat and an iron picket to tie to, (or tether to, as we say in Lympstone.) Nor is is difficult to hop over the wall.

‘The Bridge’ is a most satisfying pub. I have been drinking there off and on for 47 years and wonderfully nothing has changed. Predicatably, by the time I had drunk my pint of Branoc at the fireside in the snug and in the company of a couple who had lost their home in Christchurch NZ in the recent earthquake, the breeze had dropped. There was, however, plenty of water and it was an easy starlit row home falling with the tide down the Clyst, along the reed beds, past Exton, past the Marine Camp, along the wall past Nutwell Court and so to Lympstone, there to see the biggest full moon I have ever seen rising gloriously from the commons.

GHOSTING

2011-04-17T22:35:00.000+01:00

Ghosting they call this
when there is just breeze enough to fill the sail
and not a puff more

and the boats move silently
like spirits over the water, like phantoms drifting
between the far banks.

Alongside, unseen, who knows?, perhaps are ghosts
of some who drowned here by ill chance, others who drowned
to end their hurt.

For now might be just the time for them
and tide, this brimming evening lull
and the half light

when there is just breeze enough
to fill the sail and not a puff more.

Ghosting they call this.

INSIDE A PILOT CUTTER

2011-04-16T21:47:00.000+01:00

Arthur Ransome readers will know that the Sea Bear in Great Northern? was once a Norwegian pilot cutter. As far as I know Arthur Ransome never visited this Estuary but his account below perhaps describes something of the lives of pilots in the age of sail, here on the Exe as elsewhere.

"The cabin had been little changed since the days when the Sea Bear had been a working pilot cutter. There were still the six berths of the pilots, built as it were in the walls of the ship, above the long settees. Going to bed...was like getting into a rabbit hutch. But, once you were in, you could shut yourself off from everybody else by pulling a curtain across. Many a tired pilot must have slept in one of those bunks while the other pilots, only a yard or two away, were playing cards with each other under the cabin lamp. Further aft were two more bunks, one on each side, close to the companion ladder, handy for going on deck. They had been used in old days by the men whose business it was to take the cutter to sea to meet the big ships coming in, put pilots aboard them and pick up other pilots from the big ships outward bound."

Once upon a time Exmouth and Topsham were busy ports and the ships were lining up at sea waiting to sail up the Exe's tricky channels. In those days the pilot cutters must have been busy, sailing to and fro, from ship to ship, day and night, according to the tides.

TWO PASSAGES FROM SIDNEY HEATH: 1910

2011-04-09T20:56:00.000+01:00

.

STARCROSS COCKLE RAKERS

"This (low water) is the hour when the cockle-rakers of Starcross sally forth armed with rakes and baskets, intent on the same purpose as that which animates their feathered companions. Strange looking figures these cockle-rakers are as they move slowly about the mud flats on the lookout for cockles, winkles, and other shellfish of a similar kind."

(like mussels perhaps?)

THE ESTUARY DESCRIBED

"The wide estuary of the river Exe, that forms a natural and well-defined boundary between the eastern and the western portions of South Devon, is, at high tide, a fine expanse of water; but when the tide is out little is visible but a stretch of mud whose slimy surface is enlivened here and there by patches of green and crimson seaweeds and by the numerous sea-fowl taking advantage of the absence of water to seek for whatever dainties may have been left stranded by the outflowing tide."

(Nothing new here! 'Dainties' exposed, yes, but for the most part not 'stranded')

Sidney Heath was an artist as well as an author. Perhaps he was better with the pencil than the pen. His water colour illustrations are very charming. His book is full of inaccuracies and evidence of slight ignorances and he didn't spend much time on research. He happily tells his readers that the Elizabethan/Jacobean adventurer Captain Richard Whidbourne, or Whitbourne, was born "either here (Exmouth) or in the adjoining parish of Withycombe." In fact Whidbourne was born and baptised in Bishopsteignton. Not that it matters. He married (?) and lived in Exmouth and styled himself ' Captain Sir Richard Whidbourne of Exmouth.'

More Shellfish gatherers.

A SAIL UPRIVER

2011-04-04T16:13:00.000+01:00

My first sail of the new season was, as tradition demands, on April 1st, the day I launched 'Poppy'. She was glad to escape from the gravel patch in front of my house. This first sail was an uneventful spin barring the inevitable (for me) wrinkles which needed to be unwrinkled.

My second sail was last night. I planned to take one of my sons in law for a quiet float up river to the Turf Hotel, there to drink a beer, as in my beautiful verses, and so to drift happy home. I 'phoned the Turf to make sure they were open and was told, from the mouth of the landlord himself, that they would be serving beer until ten, no food though!

We set off with a lively breeze blowing on our nose. With some difficulty we inched up towards Turf as best we could but our thirst made us impatient with sail so we took to the oars and rowed turn and turn about to the Turf against the wind.

It was an unsatisfactory landing. The moment we landed, the breeze which would have taken us trimly home died the death. Moreover the landing stage had disappeared and the path was littered with engineering plant over which I nearly broke my ancient neck. The promontory was deserted. The pub had closed. This was at half past eight!

We rowed home as sober as Mormons and by now the tide had started to ebb so we had an easy enough time of it. We made 'Poppy' fast to her mooring and paddled to Lympstone's Green.

As we went ashore lights flashed and a voice from the dark informed us that the coastguard had been called out to search for us. Why? you might well ask. Because an imaginative neighbour had thought we MIGHT have got into trouble. Why should he have thought that? Because it WAS DARK. I shall not describe the ensuing nonsense of having to dismiss zealous inshore lifeboatmen and coastguards.

You might think that, what with contrary winds, equivocating landlords, over imaginative neighbours and lack of beer, this expedition is to be classed as a failure but that would be to take too narrow a view . It was a wonderful spring tide. Our outward voyage was under one of those glorious Exe sunsets, not of the obvious blood dripping kind but of the subtler golden kind. For a while, for some reason unknown, the sky above us was full of swirling arabesques of shrieking gulls. Then the curlew flew South high overhead and a lone heron flapped from Topsham to Powderham. Our return was under the most brilliant starlight. We sailed beneath Charles's Wain, surely the loveliest name of the many for that constellation, and Orion stood to his post nobly in the West. Apart from the rumble of traffic over the motorway bridge at Topsham the Estuary was silent. Such evenings are rare and to be treasured.

DEATH IN THE FOG

2011-04-03T11:56:00.000+01:00

The afternoon of Saturday the seventh of January, 1956, was foggy. Henry Rowland, a forty two year old Council lorry driver who liked to go duck shooting of a weekend, said goodbye to his wife, left his home in Moorfield Road, Exmouth, and pedalled off with his twelve bore shotgun to the wasteground near the mudflats. There he left his bicycle and wandered towards Lympstone along the shingle. What happened next is conjecture but it would seem that he shot a duck on Mudbank opposite the George V Recreation Grounds and walked out onto the foggy Estuary to retrieve it. The mud trapped him and the tide rose. He cried out for help. For many minutes his shouting was heard through the gloom. A witness described hearing 'pitiful cries for help'. Then there was silence.

His wife had expected Henry Rowland back in time to say goodnight to the babies but he did not come. For a long week search parties were out on the Estuary looking for the missing man. On the Sunday, his body was found by his brother, Arthur, out on Mudbank about half a mile from the brickworks. His Wellington boots were missing.

It must have been a horrific death, trapped by mud on the foggy Estuary and with the icy tide creeping in. He was, no doubt, unable to break free because of his filled boots and his heavy, wet, winter clothing. He was shouting for his life but no one ventured out onto those foggy banks.

"God send us all good ending."

More horrific death!

MUD UNEARTHED

2011-04-01T11:35:00.000+01:00

Every blue moon a discovery is made that revolutionizes the way in which we think about the fishermen who worked the Estuary in the nineteenth century and perhaps in earlier centuries. Such a discovery has been unearthed in a hitherto disregarded slim volume brought to light by today's, indeed this morning's, J S BLOG. Our not so rude forefathers seem to have developed a highly sophisticated vocabulary to describe the Estuary mud upon which and from which they earned their living. As Risdon put it:

"The mudde of Ex is of such precious stuffe
An hundred names for it were not enuff."

WOOLCOMB'S ISLAND

2011-03-27T21:57:00.000+01:00

In the August of 1883 J B Davidson MA FSA gave a paper to a meeting of the Devonshire Association at Exmouth on the History of Exmouth. Among other good things he knew the story of the stair cross. In the thirteenth century, according to Mr Davidson, ...

"...amongst the other privileges conferred upon Sherborne Abbey by these grants was the right of ferry from Exmouth to the opposite shore of the mouth of the river. The starting-place of this ferry was at a place called Pratteshide, which is spoken of by Dr. Oliver as an ancient name of Exmouth. At any rate it was a place of resort for the purposes of the ferry, and of some commercial importance. The actual point of departure must have shifted from time to time with the changes brought about by waves and storms. On the other side of the river the ferry terminated at a place formerly called Woolcomb's Island, where there was a flight of stone stairs ; and near this ferry-house was set up by the bishop of Sherborne a stone cross, whence was derived the name Stair, now Starcross."

Presumably Woolcomb's Island was properly an island connected to the main by bridge or ford. Another source, Sidney Heath's book "The South Devon and Dorset Coast" published by T Fisher Unwin in 1910 has the following|

"On November 26, 1703, in the same storm that wrecked Winstanley's Lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock, the houses on Woolcomb's Island, as the district was then called, were washed away by the overflowing waters of the Exe. In order to guard against a similar disaster in the future, the Courtenays of Powderham Castle built a strong embankment all along the shore from Powderham Point to Eastdon, a short distance below Starcross, and some years later this embankment was completed by the construction of a wall to keep out the tides, but provided with sluices for the outlet of the water of the little River Kenn. Up to this time the Kenn was navigable as far as Powderham Castle, and a contemporary painting shows the castle with the river at high tide.

"Where Exe meets curled Kenne, with kind embrace,
Betwixt their arms they clip fair Powderham's place."
-RISDON."

Well, there's a lot to be commented on here had I not already written my quota. But I must say before I go that "Pratteshide" seems to me a very apt name for the Exmouth of today, especially at the weekends.

THE WATER TIN QUART

2011-03-20T10:23:00.000Z

There was, in the early eighteenth century, a craft plying the Estuary called the ‘Water Tin Quart’. This is according to a thin book about Topsham by D.M. Bradbeer called ‘The Story of the Manor and Port of Topsham’ and published by Town and Country Press in 1968. Mr Broadbeer doesn’t reveal his source but he must have found one.

The business of the ‘Water Tin Quart’ was no less curious than its name. It sailed up and down the Estuary from Topsham to Exmouth Bar where it laded a cargo of sea water which it carried back to a salthouse in Topsham. (Meekin's salt manufactory at Riversmeet which gets a mention under 'Saltworking' in the Topsham-Exton Cycle Walkway Environmental Statement.) At the saltworks the sea water was transferred into a huge cauldron. There it was boiled until salt granulated.

The name ‘Water Tin Quart’ must have been a Georgian joke. Perhaps there was something about the lines of the vessel that reminded its owner, the salt boiler John Meacham, more often known as John Meekin, of a tin quart measure. She must have made the trip more or less every navigable tide to keep the business going. She would have been a familiar sight on the river.

Salt, of course, was much in demand in the eighteenth century on the Estuary because of the cod fishing off the Newfoundland coast. The ships that carried the fishermen across the Atlantic could not set off without a hold full of salt. The enterprising Mr Meekin, according to D.M. Bradbeer, went on to bring in rock salt by sea from Liverpool, to take his business to what is now the Bridge Inn, and to make a small fortune.

WILLIAM CARDER

2011-03-11T19:17:00.000Z

On Saturday 29th December 1957 was buried William John Carder, 53, lifeboatman and landlord of the Volunteer Inn in Exmouth. He was a volunteer and his father had been a volunteer before him and he had been called out in the evening of Christmas Day 1956 to be one of the crew of the Maria Noble. She launched to go to the aid of the Dutch motor vessel, Minerva. The lifeboatmen would hardly have enjoyed their Christmas puddings when they received the call. Between them they would have had a drink or two. It was a wicked wind blowing from the southeast. “It was,” said Coxwain ‘Dido’ Bradford later, “the biggest gale I have ever known in my life.” Before the Maria Noble reached the channel buoy, William Carder had been washed overboard. The lifeboat could not turn. His body was recovered from Orcombe the same day.

Another gale was howling and raging and the rain was lashing down when, four days later, William Carder’s funeral cortège left Chapel Street bound for the old church at Littleham. Silent crowds gathered in the raindrenched streets to watch the procession go by. Men took off their hats. The police sergeant on point duty solemnly saluted the dead man. At Littleham, William Carder’s coffin was carried into church by blue jerseyed, red capped lifeboatmen. The church was packed with lifeboat crewmen, launchers, rocket men, fishermen, sailors, boat builders, dockers, shipowners and their agents and representatives of all the people of Exmouth and of the Estuary. Naturally William’s fellow publicans were there too and no doubt a few sinners.

The parson did his best, as parsons do, and Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” was read and the salty congregation sang the old hymns “O God, our Help in Ages Past” and:

“Eternal Father! strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.

“Here in Exmouth,” said the parson of William, “We shall remember him for all time to come.”

Well, there is a plaque to his memory on the wall of the new lifeboathouse but, although little more than half a century has passed, not only is he mostly forgotten but the Exmouth in which he lived has mostly been forgotten too.

THE REDSHANK

2011-03-06T11:12:00.000Z

There are some birds that are easily recognised from their names. The wheatear is one because of his white arse and the redshank is another because of his bright orange legs. Well , there are no whitearses on the Estuary at the moment but there is an abundance of orangelegs. I have just been watching many of them, not in a flock you understand but spread out along the mudbanks. They stride about pecking at sandhoppers and seaweed hardly slackening their pace. They turn out in large numbers for the month of March.

Shank for leg has an ancient Middle English ring to it. In the Thirteenth Century it was standard English. Edward I had the nickname Longshanks and the word has persisted to describe the 'leg' of an anchor, a fish hook, a wine glass and so on.

The "noisy, restless, redshank" is the master of silly walks. He makes John Cleese look as though he needs some practice. His flight is pretty crazy too, "swift and erratic," says Mr T A Coward. He makes a lot of noise which the birders consistently write as tewk. In some localities, not here I think, he is said to answer to the echoic name of Tewk or Tewkie but Redshank is such a good name he hardly needs another.

A MIDNIGHT WALK

2011-02-12T21:18:00.000Z

Last Wednesday I went for a midnight walk along the shingle beaches of the Estuary. It had been a beastly day, cold, cloudy, damp, but the night was warm and pleasant. Everywhere there was cloud except over the Estuary. Even out at sea it was cloudy but over the Estuary there was a circle of clear sky. Above Exeter was low cloud and the lights of the city were reflected by the cloud bank which glowed golden. In the circle of light over the river the stars shone brightly. Orion dominated. There was a moon, at its first quarter. There was a planet, Jupiter?, to the South. Orion was not lying up and down the Estuary as in my scurrilous verses. He was lying aslant, across the water, his head towards the East.

This clear sky over the Estuary is such a regular phenomenon there must be some reason for it. Day and night it occurs and sometimes the pattern of cloud and clear seems to mirror the geography of the coastline. For this reason the Estuary is often a grand place from which to gaze at stars. For another reason too! There is a lot written these days about light pollution. There is too much light and we do not see the stars. The Estuary, however, a mile wide and many miles long bestows a dark sky to all who care to look. The stars shine brighter . The moon and the planets shine brighter. One is never nearer the night sky than when one is in a small boat, without lights, in the middle of the Estuary.

SALMON HAULS

2011-02-05T22:38:00.000Z

The Topsham names for the Exe salmon hauls, “salmoning holes”, are well documented by Sara Vernon in ‘Talking about Topsham.’ On page 99 there is even a chart of the Estuary mapping some of them. Bill Pym tells Sara Vernon:

“ These are the names of the salmoning holes, starting from Church Causee on the right hand side: West Mud, under the Drifters; The Bightway; Black Oar Mud; Ting Tong; The Cupboard just above the Turf; Jan’s Cove; Range Banks; Out Over the Neck; the Drain of the Neck; Scot’s Pool; Pool Mud; Canal Hard and down to the Warren.

Then if you start the other side, from Shapter Street and the Goat Walk, the first one is Withies Mud, then Black Oar Hard; The Reach; The Spit; The Nob; then Eastern Side; the Sands; the Hookers and down to Bull Hill.”

There’s poetry for you!

In ‘Devon Life’ for January 1979, some ten years before Sara Vernon’s book was first published, Marc Millon wrote about his day out with a salmon crew. The skipper is called Pym:

“Undaunted, the long net is regathered into the boat, and Pym heads further downstream, through the main channel to one of the many bends in the river where the salmon range – bends which have strange names centuries old – Black Ore , Ting Tong, the Spit, the Stile, In through the Mud, Out through the Drain, the Clock, and many others.”

Strange names indeed, but centuries old? That’s a guess. Some of them might yield to research. Scot and Jan and Withie would appear to be men's names. I doubt if the names of the hauls were ever written down before 1979 but would like to be proved wrong.

To me “Ting Tong” is the strangest name of all. There is of course the hamlet up on the commons near Budleigh Salterton. The name would seem to be ancient and to do with parliaments, but then it would have to be Danish, wouldn’t it?, and that seems unlikely..

When I was young and foolish I used to say that I hoped one day to live in one of the big houses at Ting Tong and rename it ‘Far Ting’.

I think I prefer Ore to Oar, but am not sure why. 'Black Haw' would make more sense, the Old English 'haw' being a fence, hedge or enclosure.

A YELLOW DAWN

2011-02-02T21:42:00.000Z

From 'The Exmouth Journal', Saturday, August 6th 1938:

On Thursday last:

"Slight murmurs of a distant thunder in the early hours gave warning of the apprehending storm, and at 4.30 a.m. when the peals became louder and aroused numbers of the townspeople, the sky was of a curious lemon hue, with flickers of lightning playing over the whole area, from the horizon to the zenith.....

.....With the tide rising in the estuary, there came a succession of rainstorms of growing intensity, the climax coming right on top of the tide just after 1 p.m. when for nearly an hour rain simply lashed down and filled the whole of the sewers of the town to overflowing. Roof gutters were unable to cope with the rush of water, which cascaded into the streets like miniature Niagaras.

Chapel Street and the Parade for the third time became impassable, water flowed into the houses in Stables Buildings almost to the height of the dining tables, and residents and summer visitors had to make their escape to the upper rooms, where they endured as best they could the abominable stench from the sewage."

STEPHANIE JUPP

2011-01-30T17:33:00.000Z

.

LYMPSTONE, SEPTEMBER 1960

On Station Hill I stare astonished -
deep water lies below; the brook
angry at the clogged up sluice gates
has roared and tumbled through houses and shops -

the estuary has kept out of it, being neapish
and near low tide; a man hands me
into a boat and rows me along
the street at window level; a schoolgirl

Cleopatra in her barge; but unlike
the Nile Queen, I have to step out
and trudge homewards, navy hatted
and black stockinged up and up

the village, wondering if an asp
would be preferable to Science prep.

Stephanie Jupp

More:

FLOODS

2011-01-23T16:08:00.000Z

Upon the broad estuary of the Exe lies Redcliff” - so writes Eden Phillpotts as the first line of his novel set in Lympstone in the 1920s, “ and the fishermen’s quarters thrust so near its brink that at spring tides, under push of an equinoctial gale, the highways are invaded and ducks swim in the little streets.”

Flooding has always come to the Estuary’s towns and villages at a time of spring tides and the Estuary seems to be making a visit and takes the blame for it. In fact there are never floods without heavy rainfall and our floods tend to come to us at the same time that there is also extensive flooding inland At least when the floods come to the banks of the Estuary there are boats to float in the streets and spare people from getting their feet wet.

We have not had bad flooding for many years. Much engineering work has been done. Time was the Council used to send sandbags so that householders could block their doors against the tide. Before that every house had its floodboards. These were caulked with clay and were surprisingly effective. The fittings for them can still be seen at many cottage doors.

On Thursday 4th August 1938, 1.97 inches of rain fell on the Estuary. The tides were at their highest and there was extensive flooding. Dead sheep and tree trunks floated ashore along the Exe and in Exmouth, Lympstone and elsewhere boats were busy in the streets.

“There was a comic side to the flooding on the Parade, “ thus the ‘Exmouth Journal , “and it was caused by the Council’s traffic sign, “To the Sea,” which was on a veritable island in the middle of the flood.”

The floods of 1960 caused equal chaos. At Exmouth barefooted barmen served drinks at the London Inn while women at the hairdressers' suddenly found themselves sitting in rising, stinking water. There is a photo in the Journal that shows three shopkeepers trying to sweep away the invading waters with brooms and brushes. The spirit of the famous Dame Partington of Sidmouth lives on in these parts!

GOING OUT OVER

2011-01-16T17:09:00.000Z

Followers of this blog will have noticed that of late I have been reading ancient copies of 'Devon Life'. By and large coverage of the Estuary is disappointing. The 'Devon Life' fisherman generally is one who seems to have an unhealthy interest in flies. But now and again there is a gem of an article for lovers of these waters. One such, in August 1979, is another splendid article by Cyril G Tuckfield entitled "Over the Bar" It starts like this:

"When I was growing up in a small Devonshire fishing village in the early 20’s it was the ambition of every boy to be taken out over the bar. The bar in this case was the sand bank which crosses the mouth of the River Exe at about the latitude of Orcombe and is, I suppose the physical boundary between the estuary of the Exe and the English Channel, or more specifically Lyme Bay. But to us boys it had a much deeper significance.

To go over the bar was in itself an adventure but it was also a landmark in growing up. From our earliest days we had heard the fishermen speak of going “out over”; one didn’t know exactly what it meant but it sounded exciting and adventurous. Part of its attraction for us stemmed from the fact that it took place at night. Certainly it was the ambition of every Lympstone boy in those days to go.”

See also:

BATHING IN BUDLEIGH

2011-01-10T21:26:00.000Z

In the July./August 1969 edition of ‘Devon Life’ a Mr Roland Richardson wrote about Budleigh Salterton. His article is entitled ‘Eighty Years On’. He remembers seeing the bathing machines on the beach in his early years which would have been well before the turn of the century.

“The beach has altered little, indeed if at all, except for the manner in which those enjoying themselves there have changed. In my youth people coming down to bathe disappeared as soon as they reached the beach, fully dressed, into the shelter of the curious hutments on wheels, painted in blue and white stripes. I never remember seeing these “bathing machines”, as they were known, actually driven down to the water, which no doubt had originally been the procedure, but after the disappearance of the bather, carrying the appropriate roll of towels, he or she would presently emerge, heavily clad in dark navy apparel, to bob up and down in the waves a few times before climbing back again into the shelter of the machine to redress. There indeed is a change from the beach of today with its throng of near naked sunbathers, the more venturesome swimmers boldly striking out for the diving raft moored at a convenient distance from the shore.

How astonished, and not a little shocked, my mother would have been, sitting on the pebbles dressed in her “neat blouse” with stiff collar and cuffs, her long serge skirt well down to her ankles and on her head a hard wide-brimmed “boater”, as she kept an eye on me while I paddled, and saw that I did not venture far enough for the water to wet my rolled up serge knickers.”

In the same article Mr Richardson quotes a ‘West country poet describing the red cliffs of East Devon as being like “anchovy sauce spread upon toast.’ Who was this poet? Does anybody out there know?

More on bathing machines.

THE SMUGGLERS' WAY

2011-01-03T21:50:00.000Z

We know that smuggled goods that had been landed in Babbacombe Bay regularly came overland from Combe Cellars on the Teign to Lympstone on the Exe. This was a distance of some ten miles, across two rivers and over hilly country. The journey was made at night.

Looking at the map the route they took seems pretty clear. The goods would have been rowed across the Teign to Luxton’s Step and there strapped to ponies that the smugglers led through Bishopsteignton and up across the side of Little Haldon to join the ancient Dort Way that leads by way of Greenaway Lane and so by deep and narrow paths to Kenton. It is hard to see how Kenton could have been circumvented and no doubt there was a good measure of:”Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by.” in that place.

Then somehow the goods were brought to the shores of the Estuary on or near the Powderham estate and there they were loaded into boats and rowed across the tide to Lympstone where, tradition has it, they were offloaded either at Sowden End or Parsonage Stile depending on which route seemed the safer. The smugglers signalled to each other across the river , so it is said, by lanterns shone, on the Eastern side, from the tops of the cliffs. From Lympstone, 'that notorious haunt of smugglers' the goods were carried, with ever more confidence, up-country.

It must have been exciting work, travelling through the night with smuggled goods , over hills and through dark woods, but it would seem these midnight folk carried on their trade largely undisturbed by the Excisemen.

FIVE WINTER SCENES: LYMPSTONE: 1977

2010-12-27T20:54:00.001Z

These verses were first published in Devon Life in October 1977. They were also runners up, we was robbed, for the Gladys Hunkin Poetry Prize of the University of Exeter. They are reprinted here by permission of the author. For the record, the Mr Bell of the fifth scene was Mr John Clapp of this pish who lived opposite The Green and who died some thirty years ago.

With noises borrowed from the old men's throats,

the raucous rooks about the chimney pots

are croaking out the old year, in the new.

Though January looks both ways, the old

look only back. The black rooks have foretold

this new year's cipher on the headstones too.

At the twilight calm when the smoke soars lazily,

out of the winter haze drift evening swans,

ghosts on the polished edge of the filling tide,

five white souls and two grey little ones.

Five hard working, chapel going fellows

and two, alas, who had their peccadillos.

Across the water, field and winter tree

sketched with a bamboo pen.

Like the shadow of Azrael's wing, the pewter sea

draws back and leaves old men

creaking for one tide more

in their long sea boots.

At low tide the banks wrinkle and fold like an old skin

and under the long abandoned limekiln

old anchors, links of chain,

rusted and forgotten,

rest in the mud.

Here too the old men

who stand and gaze with dimming eyes,

dreaming of wild green years and wild green seas.

As sure of resurrection as a Wesleyan

the winter sun goes down in fierce glory.

Old Mr. Bell has set aside his Bible

and tottered out to watch the setting sun.

The glowing banks are golden backed Leviathans.

And Mr. Bell, who fears the Lord's good name,

reminds the Lord his prophet has predicted

a rising sun with healing in its wings

and Mr Bell shall frisk like any calf.

A DESCRIPTION OF DAWLISH WARREN 1895

2010-12-02T16:47:00.000Z

From: The Coasts of Devon and Lundy Island, John Lloyd Warden Page. (Horace Cox 1895)

"It is a long, desolate piece of waste, this warren, and I recommend no one who is a stranger to attempt to cross it after dark. For at high water parts of are covered by the sea, which leaves as it retires pools and slimy streams that are unpleasant if not absolutely dangerous to encounter. Most of it is covered with grass or rushes. Except as a rifle range, it is apparently of little use. At one time an attempt was made to lay down oyster beds at the broad end near the 'Bight', the name given to that part of the estuary that lies, a calm sheet of water along the inner slope. But I do not think the projectors of this enterprise ever made much of it, and I fancy the most valuable product of the Warren nowadays is the rabbit."

There are splendid verses about Dartmoor by John Lloyd Warden Page at the touch of a button and a likeness of him with glorious mustachios.

VICTORIAN BIRDS

2010-11-28T19:54:00.000Z

In the British Library the other day, waiting for my books to turn up, I reached for a Devonshire volume of the Victorian County Studies published in 1906 and found therein a wonderful account of the birds of Victorian South Devon. (Yes, I know the volume was published in Edwardian times.) Most fascinating of all is the attention given there to the local names for birds.

For example the Herring Gull is said to have been known on the Exe as the Ladram Gull because it nests or nested on the stacks in Ladram Cove.

The Fulmar was called in South Devon the Mollymew or the Mollymauk and the Great Shearwater was called the Hackbolt .

The local name for the Great Northern Diver was, interestingly I thought, the Loon which, as every schoolboy knows, is how it is called in Canada and New England . Presumably the North American name was the gift of Westcountrymen.

The Great Skua was for some reason known locally as Tom Harry.

The Knot, on the Exe had the name Silver Plover and the Cormorant, so says the good book, was once known here as the Topsham Pilot.

One day I mean to go back and make a complete list.

What is sad is that the list makes it clear that the Victorians' attitude to birds was to hunt them and kill them. Killing was the only way they knew to make scientific observations of the birds. A typical reading is this about the Fulmar: "One killed with an oar on the Exe had a calcereous concretion in the vent. Very interesting but what a shame! And how on earth does anyone get close enough to a Fulmar to kill it with an oar?

There are some comprehensive lists of the old North Devon names for birds here.

A FAMILY CALLED REEVES

2010-11-23T12:33:00.000Z

In the year 1909 a Mr Joseph Reeves held a position of responsiblity at the New Avonmouth Dock. He and his family lived comfortably at Avon Villa, Avonmouth. That year he planned to take his family to Exmouth for a fortnight's holiday and one of his workmen suggested to him he should get in touch with a brother of his who lived there and who was Charles Carnell, one of the Exmouth pilots. Charles, said the brother, would be pleased to take the family sailing in his boat, the 'Bona' if they so wished.

The family came to Exmouth and lodged in Bicton Place. There were four children but the oldest, a boy of ten, stayed in Avonmouth with his aunt, Miss Reeves. He could not go on holiday because he had to finish his school term. He must have been disappointed to see his family leave for the golden beaches.

Throughout the first week the children played happily on the beach. There was Harold, aged 6, and Bryan, a 'sturdy little chap' aged 4, and 3 year old Gwenneth who had long golden hair and who, said Mrs Green, their landlady, 'was like a little angel. '

On the Tuesday of the second week Mr Carnell sailed the family in the 'Bona' up the Estuary to the Turf Hotel . The trip pleased them all , except for young Bryan. On the Wednesday they set sail for Teignmouth. Little Bryan wanted to stay at home with Mrs Green but his mother persuaded him to sail with them.

On the return journey the boat capsized. The family was trapped beneath the sail and all were drowned. Charles Carnell and a friend of his, a solicitor's clerk, Henry Norton, were also drowned.

The little boy who had been left behind in Avonmouth had lost his father,his mother, his two brothers and his pretty sister.

A WINTER SONG

2010-11-21T20:38:00.000Z

It's goodbye to our summer suns.

Farewell, the skies of blue.

The balmy nights have left us.

The birds are far and few.

The boats have left their moorings.

The fish are God knows where.

A sigh of loss sings in the breeze.

There's sorrow in the air.

But beauty has not left us.

I trust she never will.

Along the fiery banks of Exe

her glories glimmer still.

There's beauty in our blackest cloud

and in our coldest light,

in all the winter waves that chase

from Topsham to the Bight.

A SCOURGE OF TYPHOID

2010-11-19T22:24:00.000Z

A Sheffield History site refers to a "curious theory expressed by experts when in February 1912 Sheffield, Derby and Leicester were afflicted by a scourge of typhoid." These experts concluded that the typhoid fever was caused by the mussels that were being eaten by the hundred in the happy homes of these towns. The mussels in question came from the estuaries of the Teign and the Exe.

It is an alarming thought that mussel fanciers, men women and children, were retching and suffering and no doubt dying because they had eaten mussels gathered on the Exe.

By 17th February the matter had come to the attention of the General Purposes Committee of Devon County Council and Lympstone had been pinpointed as the main offender. Under the heading: EXE SHELLFISH CONDEMNED, the Exeter Flying Post reported that:

"As a result of complaints from Derby of typhoid supposed to be due to mussels collected at Lympstone, Dr Adkins has reported... that the mussels and the river water contain large quantities of the micro organisms found in sewage."

It seems odd though that there was no typhoid in Lympstone at a time where every second family had mussels for tea and often for breakfast as well. I wonder if the supposed connection between mussels and typhoid was ever proved. The typhoid in distant Derby was to have dire consequences for the fisherfolk of this village.

THE VALUE OF SEAGULLS

2010-11-16T21:50:00.000Z

On 23rd February 1918 the ever investigative Exmouth Journal sent its 'representive' to the Imperial Hotel to interview the wealthy and somewhat eccentric Australian inventor, Thomas Mills, then resident in Exmouth. He spoke about his plans to 'train' seagulls to detect submarines. "I have been at work," said Mr Mills, "for the last few months, with my invention at Exmouth."

What Mr Mills was doing was trailing a 'dummy' submarine behind his own boat all around Exmouth Bay. His cunning apparatus was so devised that it rose from the depths and showed its dummy periscope to the seagulls while at the same time distributing food to them.

In time, it was Mr Mill's belief, the birds would associate periscopes with free and easy food and any German submarine breaking the surface would be immediately identified by the flock of gulls that would descend on it.

All that was necessary to beat the submarine threat was to have a thousand or so of these dummies being towed around the coasts of Britain and very soon the seagulls would be doing their bit in the Great War for Civilization.

Mr Mills spent some time observing the coming and going of ships in the Docks here. From his observations he concluded: "... seagulls can be trained in the same way as a sportsman would train a dog or any other animal or in the same way that a St Bernard might be trained to find people lost in the snow."

Somehow the BBC recently made Mr Mill's acquaintance and somebody called Neil Oliver who is famous, spent a few licence fees replicating the experiment in Scotland. I don't know if the Exe got a mention on TV but here is where it all happened first. (or maybe second. See Comment below!)

BLACK SWANS

2010-09-30T11:58:00.000+01:00

All philosophers eventually go mad but, you can believe your Uncle Wayland when he tells you that not all swans are white. I was standing on Odhams Quay looking on the River Clyst yesterday and watching the black swans. And if they are not swans then I'm a cuckoo. A three year old child could have told you that they were swans!

The black swans have been off and on the Estuary for many years. I first saw them, three of them, maybe ten years ago, swimming by the steps at Powderham where the River Kenn enters the Channel. They are said to escape from Dawlish Brook where, since Edwardian times, they have been kept pinioned to be wondered at by the visitors. These four swans yesterday on the Clyst looked happier and healthier for having got away. I am told cob and pen had hatched three cygnets of which two survive. The third was probably scrobbled up by a fox.

There is an Exmouth Quay Residents' account of doomed black swans coming to the Estuary in January 2008. It tells of the Dawlish harbourmaster swanning about the Exe trying to get his birds back. I hope these Clyst swans will be left in peace. They looked to me as though they had come to stay. They were not lacking in confidence. In fact the pen was humming the old black swansong as she glided along among the reedbeds:

"I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,

as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon."

LIMEKILNS

2010-09-23T13:37:00.000+01:00

There are a number of limekilns fronting the Estuary. They produced lime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily for local farmers. They are where they are for two reasons. First, such kilns needed to be built into the side of a hill or into a cliff because of the nature of the limeburning process. A very high temperature was required to heat the limestone. The soft red sandstone cliffs of the banks of the Exe were ideal for the purpose. Secondly the limestone had somehow to be delivered to the limekiln and this could best be done by sea. For centuries heavy ‘stone boats’ plied back and forth between Torbay and the Exe carrying suitable stone for burning.

These stone boats needed to be substantial vessels. One built for Lord Rolle in 1802 and called ‘the Bicton’ was of 74 tons. She was ‘a square sterned sloop’ over fifty feet long and carrying a square sail in addition to main, fore and jibs.

The best remaining lime kilns on the Exe are at Lympstone where there are two fine examples of such building. These were supplied with limestone by a stone boat that needed to lie off shore. The stone had then to be transferred to lighters and so brought ashore and offloaded again. Even by the best tides it must have been an arduous task. By 'dead' tides the stone was left beyond the tideline in piles and needed to be fetched in by cart.

The limekilns with their gracious barrelled arches have now a rather romantic look about them but in their time time they were the worst kind of polluting industrial intrusion. The noise of the furnaces was thundering. The gases were foulsmelling and poisonous. The warmth, however, of the area around limekilns attracted the homeless. It seemed a good place to sleep on a cold night. All too many vagabonds were found dead, poisoned by the carbon dioxide that spewed out of the top of the kilns.

The Lympstone kilns and those at Countess Weir and Topsham were for many years owned by the Topsham shipbuilder, Daniel Bishop Davy and his family. I don’t imagine he or his kin or his kilns were very popular with the neighbours.

More from Segal Books.

A SONG FOR THE ESTUARY

2010-09-20T11:35:00.000+01:00

Sometimes we pull up and sometimes we pull down.
Sometimes we pull over from this to that side,
but as often as not we don't pull much at all.
We just dip with the paddles and ride with the tide.

Upriver is handsome. Downriver’s the sea.
The sea's quite a swell. Well, we know about that;
'tis best to defer to the oceans, my dear,
magnificent, infinite. Take off your hat!

But here, where the two of them meet it is rare,
for here the tide rises and here the tide falls
and here screaks the sea pie while tides tap away
and the sandpiper pipes and the sad curlew calls.

Upriver’s a rushing. Downriver’s a lop
but here on the lake it is sometimes so calm
your soul can glide off like a white winter swan
and paddle back home with a beakful of balm.

And the grey herons stalk and the white herons squawk
and the cormorants hang out their dark wings to dry
and the bright gulls line up as they wait for the ebb
and the wild geese come honking, low down in the sky.

Upriver’s a green and a beautiful land.
Downriver’s the bay and the wide open sea.
There's nought to be said against either, my dear,
But here where they meet is the rare place to be.

Sometimes we pull up and sometimes we pull down.
Sometimes we pull over from this to that side.
But as often as not we don't pull much at all.
We just dip with the paddles and ride on the tide.

Another?

STARCROSS

2010-09-17T15:38:00.000+01:00

I have heard it said , I don’t know on what authority, that the name Starcross is a corruption of Stair Cross and that it is an ancient name dating from a time when passengers landing there climbed an actual stair to an actual cross where, on their knees, they devoutly gave thanks for a safe crossing, presumably from Exmouth.

This is not as fanciful as at first it might appear. The ferries from Exmouth were a salient fact of mediaeval life on the Estuary and for many years up until 1267 they were in the possession of the Abbot and monks of Sherborne who may well have demanded a little piety, as well as a little money, from the people who were carried across to Starcross.

I have lately dipped into a book called ‘The South Devon Coast’ by the ‘Historian of British Highways’ Charles G Harper. He too had heard the ‘Stair Cross’ story, though not the ‘giving thanks’ bit. Unlike many travel writers he does not hesitate to disparage where he thinks disparagement is due. I find that healthy. I like his irony and his style. His writing is refreshingly unaffected for the times. His book was published by Chapman and Hall in 1907. Here is a sample:

“Starcross itself has been described as ‘a melancholy attempt at a watering-place’, probably by some person who regards Exmouth as a cheerful and successful effort in that direction; but ‘there is no accounting for tastes’ as the old woman said when she kissed her cow. As sheer matter of fact, Starcross never attempted anything in that way, but just like Topsy – ‘grew’ and so became what it is; a large village of one long, single-sided street, looking once uninterruptedly upon the`shore and the water, but since the railway came, commanding first-class views of expresses, locals and goods-trains; and more or less identified by strangers with a singular Italianate tall red tower, sole relic of the atmospheric system with which the then South Devon Railway was opened in 1846. This survival of one of the old engine-houses completes a conspicuously beautiful view along the Exe, raised thereby to the likeness of an Italian lake. The one other remarkable feature of Starcross is the curious little steamship, modelled like a swan, that for fifty of more years past has been moored off Starcross jetty: to the huge amazement of travellers coming this way for the first time.”

Well, ‘The Swan of the Exe’ was never a steamship but it stands to reason that it must have been something amazing to look out for from the trains for all those little boys and girls bound for West Country holidays. In those days children gazed out at the world. Nowadays the little monsters are encouraged to gaze into electronic toys on their laps, missing so much and so much.

And what fun to have the Estuary compared to an Italian lake as well as to the Bosporous.

THE EXMOUTH TRITON

2010-09-15T16:22:00.000+01:00

We are invited to believe, by the Leeds Mercury of 1st August 1738, ( Mine is the secondary source: Volume 36 of the Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries,) that a Mr Robert Heath caught ‘a strange fish’ supposed by many to be a Triton, just over Exmouth bar on 6th May 1737. It conformed to the following description:

It had “a Body much resembling that of a Man with a Genital Member of considerable Size, together with jointed Legs and Feet extending from his Belly 12 or 13 Inches with Fins at his Thighs, and larger ones, like Wings, in the Form of which those of Angles (sic) are often painted, at his Shoulders, with a broad Head of a very uncommon Form, a Mouth six inches wide, Smellers or Kind of Whiskers, at his Nostrils, and two Spout Holes behind his Eyes through which he ejected Water, when taken, 30 or 40 Feet high.”

‘Smeller’ as a synonym for ‘whisker’ is a fun word. According to the Shorter Oxford it is a name for, especially, the whiskers of a cat. Assuming Robert Heath was not just hornswoggling, what kind of fish or mammal did he catch?

The Exmouth Mermaid

The Exeter Mermaid.

The Mermaid's Wedding, (Verses)

The Sleeping Mermaids

ELIZA JANE PINE'S VERSES

2010-09-12T17:23:00.000+01:00

Ah me! I’ll sit me down and write
A mournful tale: One luckless night
My brothers how they went away,
And left us to lament their stay.

Have you not heard the dreadful sound,
That eight dear souls that night were drowned;
Over the ferry just across,
Without wind or sail were lost?

Four of whom my brothers were,
Ah me how sad, oh, how severe!
None were there to see their grief,
None to give them swift relief!

How then were the youths adrowned?
None to hear a single sound;
How was it done? Ah, where was I,
Not to see, or hear their cry?

Oh, Robert was it hard to sink?
Thou’rt gone! Thou’rt gone! I’m left to think.
My James and Francis, did you see
The danger, and still could not flee?

Ah John, did you look round on them,
And see the flowers plucked from the stem?
Ah no! Ah no! Thou did’st not so,
Thou too art gone! Thou, too, did’st go!

Ah me! had one been left to tell
The tender sorrow, how they fell;
The more I think, it seems more hard,
Angels! were you not on your guard?

In the garden oft that night I went,
At last I weary went to bed;
I thought not of that sad event,
I never dreamed that they were dead.

The youths are flown,- the youths are flown,-
To dwell beneath another sky;
Their life, alas! on earth is done,
And we are left below to sigh!

Eliza Jane Pine, Exmouth, January 1837

ELIZA JANE PINE

2010-09-09T14:43:00.000+01:00

Eliza Jane Pine was the daughter of a mariner of Exmouth. In 1837 she was nineteen years old and she had four brothers, John and James and Bob and Frank. One day, it was the 24th January, her two older brothers, John and James, were invited to take tea with the Captain of the brig Hinde which had just arrived home and was lying in the Bight. In the evening at about seven o clock, Eliza’s two younger brothers, Bob who was twelve and Frank who was only ten, rowed out in calm waters to fetch their big brothers home. Meanwhile, on board the Hinde, John and James Pine had met with a Mr Pring of Exmouth and his two daughters. Mr Pring was on board with his girls to welcome home his son who was one of the ship’s crew. When Bob and Frank reached the Hinde the Pines offered to ferry the Prings, father, son and two girls, home to Exmouth.

There were thus eight people in too small a boat and although the waters were smooth and there was no wind the boat was swamped and all eight were drowned.

Eliza Jane had lost four brothers at a stroke but soon after the event, like a well-conducted person, she sat down and wrote some verses about it which were printed in the Western Times.

Later in her life, in 1863, Eliza Jane was to suffer further bereavement through drowning when her husband William Hall, captain of the sail steamer Ruby, drowned at Bluff Harbour, New Zealand, but she probably did not suffer too much because by then William was a bigamist who had set up home in Australia with his new woman.

Next week, the Fates willing, I shall publish Eliza Jane’s 1837 verses.

My source for this melancholy tale is the Reverend William Webb.

FISHING FROM LYMPSTONE, 1922

2010-09-06T13:49:00.000+01:00

In the second chapter of ‘Redcliff’ young Joe Parable, wanting to find out about the life of the village to which he has come, pops into ‘The Cat and Canary’ for a quick pint. A local fisherman, James Blaker, tells him about his work.

“As for fishing,” he said, “there’s all sorts and some be good fun – like seining for salmon in the estuary – and some be infernal hard work, like going to sea in bad weather. We fish with hooks and lines, with drift nets and with trawls according to what we’re after. Drift nets be for herring and sprat only and trawl nets for the bottom. We catch dabs and plaice and ray and brill and soles in them – ground fish. Mackerel, which we’re after now, we catch with hook and line on a bobbin pale. Then, when we’re after salmon in the tidal waters, our net is a heavier mesh and stronger than herring net. That’s the fishing I like, though it’s harder work than just sailing with your lines running astern.”

‘Redcliff’ is Eden Phillpotts' name for Lympstone and the above is an example of his writing at its most journalistic. In the year 1922 he literally did wander around the village with a notebook and pencil and put people into his books.

But what was a 'bobbin pale'?

VERSES BY STEPHEN REYNOLDS (2)

2010-09-05T14:34:00.000+01:00

THE FISHER FATHER AND CHILD (The Child)

And the boy –

Like delicate dawn to the sunset was the child to his father –
A sturdy slight figure, as straight as the mast,
A grey and more gently coloured figure, glancing round with the father’s self-same gestures softened and with childish trustful sea-blue eyes;
Pattering with naked feet on the stern-sheets, and hauling the fish with a wary cat-like motion….

O splendid and beautiful pair!
O man of the sea! O child growing up to the sea,’tis the likeness of your souls,
And I know that as I love you, I am loving also the sea –
O splendid and beautiful portions of the sea!

From: 'A Poor Man's House'' Stephen Reynolds, 1908

Part 1 (The Father)

VERSES BY STEPHEN REYNOLDS (1)

2010-08-31T19:43:00.000+01:00

THE FISHER FATHER AND CHILD (The Father)

As I pulled the boat across a loppy sea –
The bumping and splashing boat,
With the sail flapping round my head,
And the pile of mackerel amidships ever growing larger and lovelier in the light –
And the sun rose behind the cliffs to eastward, and the sky became lemon-yellow
(A graciously coloured veil twixt the earth and all mystery beyond),
And the wavelets sparkled and darted like ten thousand fishes at play in the ambient dawn, –
It seemed that the sky and the sea and the earth gathered themselves together,
And became one vast kind eye, looking into the stern of the boat,
At the father and boy.

Navy blue guernsey, and trousers stained by the sea, scarce hiding the ribbed muscles;
Tan-red face, the fresh blood showing through;
Blue eyes all of a flash with fishing and the joy of hauling ’em in; now on the luff of the sail (out of habit. There being hardly a sail-full of air), now to wind’ard, and again smiling on the child;
Big pendulous russet hands, white in the palms from salt water, and splashed with scales –
Hands that seem implements rather, appearing strangely no part of the man, but something, like the child, that has grown away from him and has taken a life of its own –
Strong for a sixteen foot sweep, delicate to handle the silken snood of a line –
A man that the winds and spray have blown on, gnarled and bent to the sea’s own liking,
The Father!

From ‘A Poor Man’s House’ Stephen Reynolds, 1908.
Next Monday: Part 2. (The Child)

THE PARSON AND THE CLERK

2010-08-27T21:24:00.000+01:00

The stacks between Teignmouth and Dawlish are called Parson and Clerk. Some blogs ago we looked at the so called legend of the Parson and the Clerk which I do not love. The ‘legend’ is of the ‘how did the stacks get their name?’ variety. In short a parson and a clerk lose their way and find a house in the mist and drop in on the devil and a few dead friends. There they wine and dine but when they leave the party they drop over the cliff and are never seen again except, so to speak, stoned for eternity. And so the stacks got their name.

Yes, I know it’s only a story but the silliness of it still niggles me! Let me state the obvious that these splendid stacks were named from their appearance and not from the landward but from the open sea. The wit , the humour and bright inventiveness of the name lie with the mariners of yore. It’s a great name for a great image and it dates from a tithepaying age before state registrars when few could escape the church and the clergy. From the sea when the stacks line up one sees quite clearly how the parson is sermonising the waves from his high pulpit and below him the clerk is sat at his desk where he should be, ready to make the responses. And perhaps there is space between them for some pious parishoner to read the lesson. Generations of fishermen and other seafarers, church, chapel and freethinkers, immediately recognised that double or triple decker pulpit from their own Devon churches and they recognised its occupants and saluted them in passing. 'Hello Passon, my dear! Hello Clerk! ' And if some touched their hats no doubt others shook their fists or thumbed their noses.

STEPHEN REYNOLDS

2010-08-25T15:07:00.000+01:00

A serious young ‘gentleman’ by the name of Stephen Reynolds who aspired to be a writer of books came to live and work as a fisherman in Sidmouth in the very early years of the twentieth century. He took lodgings in the house of a fishing family called Woolley. Reynolds was a graduate of Manchester University and was only twenty two or so when he started this adventure. In 1908 was published his successful book, A Poor Man’s House, in which he wrote about the Woolleys and their hard lives.

Thankfully in this book he confirms and preserves many of the words that were part of the everyday language of the fishing community here in the Estuary as well as along these coasts at that time. ‘Wrinkling’ for ‘periwinkle gathering’ we have discoursed upon before. “Taking out frights” for the taking to sea of pleasure parties,’frights’ being a corruption of ‘freights’, is new to me. Below is Stephen Reynold’s description of the Woolley’s mackerel lines:

“…the upper part consists of 2 – 3 fathoms of stoutish conger line, to take the friction over the gunwale,and 5 – 6 fathoms of finer line, to the end of which a conical ‘sugarloaf’ lead is attached by a clove hitch, the short end being laid up around the standing part for an inch or so and then finished off with the strong neat difficue (corruption of difficult?) knot. A swivel, or better still simply an eyelet cut from an old boot, runs free just above the lead, between the clove hitch and the difficue knot. To the eyelet is attached the ‘sid’ – i.e. two or three fathoms of fine snooding; - to the sid a length of gut on which half an inch of clay pipe stem is threaded, and to the gut a rather large hook, The bait is a ‘lask’, or long three-cornered strip of skin cut from the tail of a mackerel…”

Now ‘snoods’ are the shorter lines attached at regular intervals to a long line and ‘snooding’ is the appropriate thickness of line for snoods. ‘Sid’ and ‘lask’ are, I suspect, forgotten words. They both seem to defy etymology but every word must be supposed to have one, just as every man must be supposed to have a mother.

THIS POMP OF SWANS

2010-08-21T14:23:00.001+01:00

By last night’s ebb the swans sailed past in line.
How many? Ten? A dozen? Maybe more.
Their liquid world moved them, but I in mine
was fixed. I watched from the too solid shore.

The rain clouds which had leadened the long day
still lowered, but an amber from the West
brightened the moorings where their passage lay,
gilded the waters where these swans progressed.

No doubt it wondered as it slipped along,
this pomp of swans advancing through the night,
that other beasts live in a world so wrong
whereas the swan lives in a world so right.

Another Swan

And another

JOSIAH NISBET'S YACHT

2010-08-18T11:14:00.000+01:00

The image is of a gallant, young, Josiah Nisbet more or less saving Horatio Nelson's life at Santa Cruz.

Yesterday my eye was caught by a memorandum concerning a yacht called the ‘blank’ and listed as No 13 and for the year 1818, in the Memoranda Book of the famous Topsham shipbuilder Daniel Bishop Davy, as published by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society’s Shipbuilding on the Exe, 1988, with an introduction by Clive N Ponsford. Mr Davy had written:

“A yacht built at Topsham called the [blank] for Captn Nesbitt R.N. of Exmouth, composed by myself. She was a foot to(o) narrow and a foot to(o) low to have any accommodations. She was a very good model but very sharp. She had an alteration from the drawing which was a quarter deck aft 18 inches higher then [than] the other part of the deck & 8 feet long from the fore part of the stern post.”

Then are listed the measurements which would seem to indicate that she was a thirtyfooter with a ten foot beam and a mast height of thirty foot and with six foot depth in the hold.

The connection that sprang to my mind, and I like to think no one else has spotted it, is that this is the yacht of Josiah Nisbet, Nelson’s stepson, who is buried at Littleham and who regularly sailed to France out of Exmouth in his own boat, sometimes, ‘accommodations’ or not, taking his wife, Fanny, with him. Irregular spellings, of course, were commonplace in the Age of Orthographic Chaos.

So, at Topsham in 1818 was built a yacht for Lady Nelson’s son. Is this a significant footnote to history? Well, maybe not. But I am still feeling pleased with myself and, if they don’t know already, I shall let the armies of Nelson scholars know about it.

VICTORIAN WATER EXCURSIONS

2010-08-17T12:56:00.000+01:00

“The observant stranger will soon discover that the whole country around Exmouth on both sides of the Exe is full of objects of interest, and intersected with innumerable lanes and paths which will conduct him through scenes of ever-varying beauty. The sheltered waters of the Passage-way and the Estuary afford very good boating, and delightful excursions by water may be had in fine weather to such places as TURF, TOPSHAM and LYMPSTONE. But the favourite water-excursions are to Dawlish, Teignmouth, and POWDERHAM CASTLE. Cards to view the Castle and grounds can easily be obtained by application to the Steward at Starcross. Pic-nic parties are not allowed to bivouac in the Park, but they are permitted to refresh themselves on the green sward in front of the boat house, and no better place for the purpose could be selected. The good people of the Cottage are ready to spread the board and lay out all the necessary paraphernalia of the tea-table. Powderham Church. a little beyond the landing-place , should not be forgotten.”

This is from William Webb’s Memorials, published in 1872. I like the term ‘Passage-way’ used here to mean the long Channel between Exmouth beach and the Pole Sand.

The railway which had opened in 1846 clearly had made no difference to the Victorian visitors’ water excursions to Powderham. Presumably there was then a crossing over the railway line. Nowadays arriving by boat to visit the Castle is not possible. Perhaps the idea should be revived. For the price of a bridge and a turnstile it could be. In any case the Estuary is everywhere scandalously short of welcoming landing places but that is a fit subject for some other day’s blog.

THE DEATH OF A WILDFOWLER

2010-08-14T11:44:00.000+01:00

This is the story of the horrific death of Mr John Radford of Exmouth who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a brewer of beer and a maltster. When he was not brewing and malting his passion was to visit the Bight and to shoot wild fowl from his duck punt. His gun was mounted to his punt by a swivel. It was a veritable ‘goose cannon’ which generally carried three quarters of a pound of shot and one ounce of powder. It would have looked much like a length of drain pipe. He no doubt discharged it so as to blast ducks and geese sitting on the water which is not very sportsmanlike but very effective. The explosion would have been deafening and the punt would have shot backwards in the water like the proverbial bat.

One day, it was Saturday 13th October 1837, both Mr Radford and his gun were ashore at Exmouth. He wanted to withdraw the wad and the charge from his giant muzzleloader. To do this he used an iron rod with a worm at each end. Such a rod was the traditional tool for the job, a ‘worm’ being a screw or spiral, so called because that was the way earthworms were supposed to move through the ground. This gun, however, was too big for one person both to hold it steady and to poke about down the barrel so he placed it across a block of wood and asked the boy who was with him to lean on the gun and hold it firm.

While Mr Radford was wrenching away, trying to worm the charge out of the barrel, the gun slipped and fell and went off and three quarters of a pound of shot together with the iron rod with its two worms lodged in his body. He cried out, “Christ have mercy!”, reeled once or twice and fell flat on his face, dead. When his body was raised it was found that his bowels were splattered all over the pavement and his chest was riddled with shot. The boy who was with him must have had quite a shock. The ducks and geese might not have known it but they were fearfully avenged.

Mr Radford left a wife and five young children. Mrs Radford was just about to produce their sixth.

The details of this gory story are taken from that splendid book, Memorials of Exmouth, compiled by the Reverend William Webb, B.A. Curate of Littleham-cum-Exmouth and published at Exmouth in 1872 by T.Freeman, Baring Place. I am grateful to that indefatigable researcher Ray Girvan for drawing my attention to Mr Webb’s wonderful compilation.

WILDFOWLING

2010-08-11T16:17:00.000+01:00

Here in Lympstone in my time there was only ever one duck punt. It was maybe fourteen foot long, heavily constructed and was painted warship grey. It lay low on a mooring off the Green, squat and sinister, the more so because it was fitted to carry a heavy swivel gun. It was owned by a man whom I can only remember as someone I disliked. He is most likely dead by now. The cause of this dislike is forgotten but it was probably as much due to my prejudices, I have grown sweeter since then, as to any fault of his. It was not, however, that I was against the idea of wildfowling, which in those days was not frowned upon. Indeed the thought of lying in wait to ambush the winter geese flying into the Estuary, at dawn perhaps, fascinated me. I itched to kill my goose but never got around to it. These days of course one thinks more correctly.

The geese have started flying low over my house again. I see or hear them every now and again. They fly by the tide and not by the clock. There seem to be more of them every year. It is as though they could smell the protection that the Estuary affords. I love their crazy flight and the wild noise they make.

This menacing gun punt was regularly put to use but I never heard tell of any quantity of ducks or geese coming home. Traditionally the place to shoot wildfowl was on the Bight but to judge by the number of empty shotgun cartridges, red and green, that one found on the shingle beaches there was quite a procession of hunters trooping up and down the banks between Lympstone and Exmouth.

There are said still to be thirty acres of marshland on the Exe, I don’t know where, where the Devon Wildfowlers Association enjoy their over controlled sport. I somehow doubt that they venture out in grey punts mounted with kingsize swivel guns.

THE GREEN CRAB

2010-08-08T13:28:00.000+01:00

If you tie a fish head
to a length of string,
dangle it from a wall
into the tide
you can catch the green crab.

The green crab is good for little.
Nobody wants him
to eat,
for bait,
as the family pet.

But you can watch him
scuttle about for a while,
shuffle home to his muddy depths.
That’s about it
with the green crab.

Beyond, however, any doubt
catching the green crab is something for you.
Go to it!
Get feckless!
Let’s face it, lately there has been
altogether too much purpose in your life.

Remember!
All you need is a fish head
and a length of string.
Perhaps take some child with you
By way of pretext.

A TURRABUL RIDE BEE RAYL

2010-08-05T15:18:00.000+01:00

In 1865 Henry Baird, under the pen name Nathan Hogg, published a second book of poems in the Devon dialect. Henry Baird was born in Starcross in 1829 and for much of his life he worked in Exeter as a lawyer’s clerk. He often travelled the line between Starcross and Exeter. In one of the poems published in ‘Poetical Letters tu es brither Jan, 1865’ Nathan Hogg’ in a poem called ‘A Turrabul ride bee Rayl’ thus records seeing Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan of the Exe’ sailing up the Estuary beside the railway:

Wul, then ess luk’d owt pin tha zay,
(Zich thing wiz niver yer’d,)
Vur bigger thin a rick a hay
Thare zwim’d a wackin burd,
And ez ess raud, ha turn’d es bayk,
Thort I “now hang on varm,
Vur ef he com’th and vind’th thur wayk,
He’ll ait thur like a warm.

No, you don’t need a translation! You do? Well okay then:

Well, then we looked out upon the sea/ (Such a thing was never heard,)/ For bigger than a rick of hay/ A very large bird was swimming there./And as we rode, he turned his beak. / I thought, “Now, hang on firmly,/ For should he come and find you weak/ He’ll eat you as though you were a worm.

The funnest thing about Henry Baird aka Nathan Hogg is that through the dialect poems that he started writing as a teenager he attracted the friendship of His Highness Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a man sixteen years his senior who was passionate in his study of English dialects. The Prince came to Exeter to spend time with Henry Baird and ‘Nathan Hogg’ wrote a poem about it. The ‘Poetical Letters’ is dedicated to Prince Louis.

STEPHANIE JUPP

2010-08-02T16:40:00.000+01:00

.

Sowden End

No, World's end,
a place to run away to,
where the dark lane's elbow
nudges away the tide
and a thin moon shivers eerily
over the fleeing water;

yet an hour ago
sunset viewers came
over the village's left shoulder
to the waiting seats
as high tide trickled up the slipway
and blushing cliffs blushed deeper.

More!

THE MYSTERIOUS FLYING MAN

2010-07-29T18:53:00.000+01:00

Sometime the snippets I find in old books and newspapers leave me wonderstruck and greedy for further information. This, of May 28th 1845, from Woolmer’s Gazette is a good example.

“A singular attempt was made at Exmouth which may prove a step to the long-coveted art of flying. At day-break, a man singularly clad was observed to leave the beach, near the sea wall, and, by a series of motions with his apparel, almost similar to those of a bird attempting to fly, he crossed the water and landed safely on the Warren The time occupied was about ten minutes. On his landing, he was observed to make some alterations to his dress, and he then proceeded across the Warren, so that no more was seen of him."

Now what is to be made of this curiously worded report? Was it a bird? Was it a plane?

SPEED

2010-07-27T16:57:00.000+01:00

The fourth of the Exeter City Council’s Exe Estuary Navigation Byelaws, and the first published in my tide table, seeks to restrict the speed of vessels in the Estuary to ten knots an hour ‘through the water’. There are certain exceptions where the byelaw does not apply and boats are permitted to travel at eleven knots or more but these exceptions are minimal. For most of the Estuary most of the time, ten knots is supposed to be the maximum speed permitted. I suppose some lawyer is paid good money to write byelaws. I doubt if byelaws come cheap.

Ten knots is a reasonable speed to drive a boat. It equates to eleven and a half statute miles per hour. There is, however, hardly a speedboat roaring up and down the channels of a weekend that keeps to this limit and the Exeter City Council which made this byelaw does little or nothing to enforce it. Some offenders not only speed, they seek to break the world water speed record and more than once I have found myself wishing such aspirants the same sad fate as the late lamented Donald Campbell.

I suppose it is difficult to measure the speed at which a boat is travelling. I don’t know if anything that equates to the policeman’s roadside speed camera could or should be fitted on the banks of the Exe. In any case even as I write our coalition government is promising to get rid of speed cameras on the roads. I also suppose that not too many people care who speeds on the Estuary. I care because the Estuary is my escape from a world which I find moves too quickly, a world which I find too noisy. It is the peace and freedom and openess of the waters that I think we should treasure most, first and foremost the peace.

But I find myself in something of a quandary here. I dislike unnecessary regulation. The older I get the more I lean towards anarchy. Where a society has to police, to make rules, to put up notices, it seems to me it is admitting some lesser or greater failure of alternative communication, of culture and of education. At the same time I hate the noise and the apparent mindlessness of the speedboats and ribs and scooters and the trawlers of waterskiers that screech across the Estuary at high speed making waves and frightening the fish. I just wish they would not.

Edward Fitzgerald, who gave the English speaking world the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, kept a fine boat on the Deben and in one of his letters famously wrote: ‘I get to the water where no friends are buried nor Pathways stopt up.’ For my part I get to the water where there are neither lawnmowers nor chainsaws nor drills nor sanders nor strimmers nor discos, except when Powderham Castle offends, nor ghettoblasters nor mobile telephoners nor fast cars nor motorbikes nor televisions nor supermarkets nor garden centres nor wheel clamps. Most of the time I find on the river the peace and quiet I seek but every season there are more, faster and noisier boats.

It would all be a lot better if everyone kept to the ten knot speed limit. Perhaps it really is time the City Council showed its teeth and took the worst offenders to court and punished them adequately, let us say to be hung by the neck until dead and then for their rotting corpses to swing in chains from gibbets for a summer or two. A good place would be the Exmouth Quay Development Marina where they could dangle high above the assorted ‘Private, Keep Out, Go Away!’ signs

Just to discourage the others.

THIS JONAH

2010-07-25T15:48:00.000+01:00

The man who was a Jonah
I remember him well,
how like a crab he would scuttle sideways
so as not to see his neighbours.

He had put his jinx,
this Jonah,
on whatever boat he had been in
before the village got wise,
before it smelled a rat.

The calamities were rehearsed
that this Jonah had inflicted:
one boat touching bottom where none should have been;
another, against an ill wind from an unlikely quarter,
making no way;
a third, snagging nets where moots never were known

and hardly a boat ever,
with this Jonah,
had taken fish worth taking:

sick salmon, stunted bass,
horse mackerel, green crabs,
catches, if any,
slight like the sharings.

Bad luck clung to this Jonah like his own crumped shadow
and who would want to cumber a good boat with bad luck?

And all of this, all of thirty years before ever I knew him,
thirty years of crabwise scuttling

not that anyone had forgotten.

THE BOW HITCH

2010-07-23T12:48:00.000+01:00

In a small open boat the sheet should never be made fast, says G Christopher Davies in Boat Sailing for Amateurs, and it is a good plan not to have any cleats handy as the temptation to belay it is almost irresistable…. This seems to me to be pretty sound advice and one of the first rules of safe sailing.

The boatsman of a hundred years ago had a clever way to belay his main sheet safely, or so he thought, and thereby save himself the tedium of hanging on to a straining sail. This was to make the sheet fast with a bow hitch. (pronounced bō not bow) His boat had a small hole or thimble bored through the main thwart down through which he could pass a loop of the sheet. Then he took a bight of the free line through the eye that appeared below the thwart and allowed the sheet to pull tight against this second loop. He could now hold the slack of the sheet in his hand. When he wanted, perhaps in an emergency, he could always give the sheet a sharp pull and the hitch under the thwart would fall away, much like a highwayman’s hitch, and the sail was free to shake. This was how the Exmouth pilot, Charles Carnell belayed the main sheet when he took a party of seven for a pleasure trip from Exmouth to Teignmouth on a blustery day in June 1909.

His boat was the fifteen foot pilot boat Bona, with lugsails fore and aft. She was said to be a safe vessel. On the return trip the Bona met with squally weather off the Parson and Clerk rocks. Pilot Carnell tugged at his bow hitch but somehow it had jammed in the hole and would not give. The boat heeled and took in water and keeled over and Carnell and six passengers, three of them little children, drowned. One man Frederick Hunt, an Exmouth carpenter, was rescued from the sea.

When, days later, the Bona was raised and brought ashore the main sheet was found still to be made fast, jammed tight below the thwart by the treacherous bow hitch.

THE PARSON AND THE CLERK ROCK

2010-07-20T20:39:00.000+01:00

This is from the Exmouth Journal of 19th June 2009 with the somewhat bizarre original punctuation. (All those commas!!!) This is,however, the best telling that I have found of this rather silly ‘legend’ and now that it is over a hundred years old I suppose it must be considered a genuine antique. It is, at the least, much better told here than in the late Llywelyn Maddock’s ‘West Country Folk Tales.’

“A curious legend attaches to the Parson and Clerk Rock,. It runs as follows:-

The Rector of Dunchideock was a parson of the old type; he loved wine, he loved good living, and he loved the Chase. He had ambition, too, and thought that the Bishopric of Exeter was not out of his reach. In both his serious and lighter purposes his clerk was always present, and shared all his carouses, as well as his clerical duties. Dunchideock lies at the foot of Haldon, the hills separating the Exe from the Teign, and here runs the road between Holcolmbe and Dawlish. On a dark night it was difficult to keep the track, but the parson and clerk knew every foot of the road between Exeter and the Warren. The Bishop of Exeter was dying in Dawlish and three days in every week the horses were saddled at Dunchideock, and the parson, with his faithful clerk, galloped over the heath to Dawlish.

One afternoon the news reached them that the Bishop had suddenly become worse, and was on the point of death. “Hurrah!” roared the parson, and he and his clerk set off to be, as they said, “in at the death,” and “I’ll be Bishop of Exeter.” The horses were brought and the parson and clerk rode off. “Confound it”, said the former, “it will be dark in half an hour.” As he spoke thick, dark clouds rose up over the moor. The mist rose from the Exe, and hid the valley. The clouds spread murky blackness, and a moan came from the moor. Again they cursed the darkness, and drops of rain fell. The parson beat his horse; the clerk did likewise. The wind howled and the darkness increased. In vain they endeavoured to find their way; the lightning flashed, the thunder re-echoed, and the air was black as pitch. “May Satan take us to Dawlish,” cried both the riders, “for we shall never get there by ourselves.” A furious roar of thunder followed this expression, followed by the galloping of a horse. The parson and clerk reined in their horses – they were plucky fellows – and waited for the rider, who came up close to them, but so black were both that they could hardly be distinguished from the blackness of the night. The parson roared out his trouble, and asked the way to Dawlish.

The black stranger told him to follow the sound of his horse, and trotted off. The parson and clerk followed close behind. On they rode unril they could hear the sea dashing against the cliffs, and judged they were near. Suddenly their guide stopped before a large house, and invited them to enter. When they had done so they found a brilliantly-lighted saloon, and a splendid supper laid out, and a large queer-looking party assembled. Thanking their host they sat down, without noticing the grins and leers of the other guests. Black-jacks began to circulate freely. The parson sang songs with decidedly profane choruses. The night wore away in revelry, when one of the party said that the old Bishop was dead. Up jumped the parson and clerk, with many curses, and called for their horses. They went out. The waves were dashing furiously against the cliff, and the very ground shook with the violence of the wind and sea. They mounted their horses, and the supper party gave a diabolical shout of laughter.

The parson struck his horse, but it would not move. The horses of clerk and parson stood motionless. At last they gave one fearful plunge. The house disappeared; the guests dashed away with yells of mirth; there was a dreadful shock, and neither parson nor clerk were again seen alive. The good people of Dawlish, coming out next morning early to see what damage had been done by the storm, saw that the sea had dashed down part of their red cliff, which had broken in two as it fell; on the larger portion the dead body of the parson was found, on the smaller that of the clerk.”

NIGHT TIDE

2010-07-11T14:58:00.000+01:00

This night tide was to be,
we had been warned,
the highest for forty years.

All alarm, however, was unwarranted.
There was neither wind nor wave, only the pulse of tide,
the heartbeat of an ancient world.

Brimming slowly, calmly, inch by inch,
the flood came to our sandbagged doors.
The dark waters were coming to call
but would not cross our thresholds.

From the famous sandstone cliffs
the weathered trees bending low
marvelled at so much water and so calm.

While all along the tide’s cutting edge
the cottages, the forsaken limekilns,
even the admiral’s high clock tower
reflected on the splendour of the night.

Towards midnight
the whole village came out to see
the dazzle of diamonds,
emeralds, rubies rocked by this jet black, polished tide
and the pale swans, like parish ghosts
yearning for hearth and home,
that drifted high up our lanes and slipways
to peck at stars and planets.

Children, fetched from bed for this grand occasion,
splashed along the drowned sea wall in rubber boots
to envy a wild few, whose parents knew no better,
dipping like midnight mermaids in the flood.

Boats rode high on their cables
rising up from the depths of their shelter
to loom gondola black and proud
and fond fathers took their families for a float
poking an oar where oar was never poked before.

Our cup was full to the brim
with not one drop spilled
and when the gracious moon,
she who worked all this magic,
rode by and smiled down on lucky Lympstone
we older ones, remembering the goddess,
spoke in temple whispers
while the great tide fell back.

So then only goodnight, goodnight!
When shall we see such a tide again?
Shuffle and squelch home all,
and so to bed.

THE DEATH OF A FISHERMAN

2010-07-09T15:05:00.000+01:00

There was no moon on the Tuesday night of 5th October 1926 and the four Squire brothers of Lympstone were seineing at Dawlish Warren. They were two crews in two boats. Francis (Frank) Squire and his brother William were in one boat and William’s son Reginald was with them. At eleven o’ clock these three decided to shoot the net at ‘the Gutter’ which is to say at the very Point of the Warren.

Frank was the shoreman and William and his son were in the boat, one of them rowing and the other paying out the net. The net was halfway out when they heard Frank shouting from the shore that there was too much tide and he could not hold. William and Reginald started to boat the net and to return to land. They could not see Frank but they heard him shout, “Quick, quick!” and then silence. “

Are you all right Frank?” William shouted back into the darkness, but there came no reply.

They left off boating the net and rowed for the shore as quickly as they could and within minutes they had landed on the sand but Frank Squire had disappeared. When they pulled in the shore line they found one of Frank's seaboots tangled there.

The next morning practically every fisherman in Lympstone turned out to look for the body but it was a Topsham boat that first saw Frank where the tide had left him. He was on the sandbank called Bull Hill lying with one boot on and one boot off. He was rowed home to his widow. He was just forty four years old.

Fifty years later, my skipper, Dick Squire, would say to the shoreman, by way of cautioning him to keep his feet out of the line: “Remember Uncle Frank!”

MR MUNBY IN LYMPSTONE

2010-07-08T11:01:00.000+01:00

Arthur Munby who lived from 1828 to 1910 was a man of many parts: diarist, civil servant, barrister, poet, artist and photographer. Some people thought he was also Jack the Ripper but he wasn't. He is now remembered chiefly for his diaries, his sketches, his photographs and his clandestine marriage to Hannah Cullwork, a working class woman who was also for many years his servant.

He was obsessed with working class women and he sketched and photographed them wherever he found them but on 19th August 1861 he was in Lympstone, sitting on the shingle and making sketches of the women who, at low tide, collected mussels on the Estuary. There are two of his Lympstone sketches among his papers at Trinity College Cambridge. The sketches are in black ink and the first of them is a full length figure of a woman holding her basket over her right arm and her rake in her left hand. She is wearing a muffler around her head and neck and a longsleeved jersey , patched trousers and boots. She could be one of the Lympstone mussel gatherers Eden Phillpotts describes sixty years later.

The second sketch shows a woman stooping forward. Her bare feet are in the mud and her hands are on the ground collecting mussels. She wears a bonnet and shawl and her skirt is tucked up above the knee.

Munby was thirty three when he came to the Estuary. He was looking to find working women, the rougher, dirtier and more ragged the better. The Estuary shellfish gatherers working in the Lympstone mud would not have disappointed him.

THE OPPOSITE BANK

2010-07-03T15:39:00.000+01:00

No one these days
at least I have not seen it,
so much as shakes his fist across the river.

Well, perhaps when Powderham Castle, night and day,
gigs or raves or rocks, whatever the verb might be,
and vulgar discord fills the wide basin of the Exe.

But nothing as of yore
when an amplitude of hatred flew
back and forth across the tides,
sometimes borne by cannonballs.

For banks are such opposites that they will confront
and wide rivers make deep divisions.

Celts defied Romans across these channels,
Britons hated Saxons,
Roundheads cursed Cavaliers roundly.

Even today perhaps, a legacy of ancient loathings,
sometimes arising like a miasma,
poisons the thinking of peaceable men
so that they, for no good reason, mumble to themselves,
squinting westwards across our broad and beautiful waters,
something like:

‘fucking Teignbridge fucking District Council!’

THE SKIRMISH AT POWDERHAM CHURCH

2010-07-01T12:43:00.000+01:00

In the cold winter of the year 1645, ‘loyal’ Exeter was still a royalist stronghold holding out against a now confident parliamentarian army. General Fairfax, the parliamentarians’ supreme commander, had his headquarters in Ottery and Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell had turned up with his forces. The Estuary demanded their attention because supplies and reinforcements were reaching besieged Exeter up river by ship and boat.

The parliamentarians controlled the length of the eastern bank and there must have been armed men everywhere. There were garrisons at Topsham, Nutwell and at the Fort in Exmouth. Troops stared across to the western bank of the Exe which was in royalist hands and fired at suspect shipping passing up to Exeter. Then came the parliamentarian attack across the river on Powderham Castle. With both Powderham and Nutwell in their hands, the parliamentarians hoped to prevent help reaching Exeter up river. Professor Hoskins takes up the story:

“Under cover of darkness – it was nine o’clock on Sunday night, December 14 – Captain Dean with two hundred foot and dragoons , moved across the river from Nutwell in boats and reached the Powderham side. But they found the house more strongly defended than they had imagined and they did not, in fact, attack it.

Not wishing to return without doing anything, they occupied the church, not far from the Castle. The next morning they brought provisions across the river from Nutwell into the church and began to fortify it. The royalists up at Exeter feared that the river would be blocked by these manoeuvres. On Monday night they sent down a party of five hundred soldiers to join the two hundred in the Castle. Together they attacked Fairfax’s men who were barricaded inside the church, throwing in many hand-grenades. For three hours the siege of Powderham church went on until the royalists withdrew, leaving the snow stained with their blood. However, it was bitterly cold in the church. There was no means of warming it, and the parliamentary forces were glad to be withdrawn in a day or two from this unpleasant situation.”

For more on Exeter in the Civil War link to Exeter Memories.