A LINE ENGRAVING , 1803?

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.

A DESCRIPTION OF DAWLISH WARREN 1895

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.

SCOUTS ON DAWLISH WARREN

Scouting for Boys was first published in six fortnightly parts between January and March 1908. In no time at all there were Scout troops at Dawlish, Newton Abbot, Ashburton and Exmouth. In those days they were referred to as the Baden-Powell Scouts and as well as Scoutmasters there were Quartermasters. The Dawlish Troop was called ‘the Haldon Troop’ and the Newton Abbot troop was called ‘the Haytor Troop’. All these scouts planned a Field Day together on Dawlish Warren in the first week of June 1909.

The business of the day was to play a Wide Game called ‘Flag Raiding’. This game is described by Baden-Powell in Scouting for Boys. It requires some scouts to hide and defend their flags while other scouts creep about and try to capture them. The rules are quite complex.

The Warren must have been the best place in the world. Where better for little lads to wriggle around than in and out of those glorious sand hills between the river and the sea? In the event the Ashburton troop were not able to turn up but the others must have had fun galore creeping about, finding ‘enemy’ positions, attacking, writing reports, sketching and mapmaking, snatching flags.

The dark thought though is that these same little lads, crawling about in the sunshine, had a Great War looming over them like a giant’s boot.

JOHN THE FERRYMAN

John Carder was an Exmouth ferryman. As ‘John the Ferryman’ he became something of a local character, loved and remembered by visitors. Shortly before he died he was portrayed, standing in his little rowing boat, in a wonderful Murduck postcard. He had a bushy white beard and he mostly wore his famous, very jolly, bowler hat. He rowed passengers to and from the Outer Warren. In 1913 he fell into Exmouth dock after a happy night on the cider and drowned. The morning light showed only his bowler hat floating over his watery grave.

In the days when Exmouth welcomed careful drovers, there was a beast market where now is Market Street. Exmouth men would get up early and walk out sometimes as far as Exeter to drive sheep and cattle and other beasts back to market. For centuries, however, some of the beasts also came across the Estuary from Dawlish carried by ferry from the Outer Warren to the Point.

John Carder had started work as a ferry crewman in 1861. Up until his death he was still ferrying. He was rowing holidaymakers and the numerous Warren bungalowdwellers back and forth across the race. But in his early years he had worked on a ferry that must have been a sizeable vessel. In the Exmouth Journal of August 29th 1908, he is reported as telling how on market days in Exmouth the ferryboat would regularly carry over sheep and horses from Dawlish and would bring even carriages across. There must once have been a considerable traffic between Dawlish and Exmouth with sheep being herded and horses being ridden and carriages being driven over the sandy dunes and levels.

A DAY OUT

This innocent little gem is from E R Delderfield's book "Exmouth Yesterdays" published in Exmouth in 1952. It is a story of the first years of the twentieth century.

There was the occasion when five or six Exmouth youths decided to spend a day at the Dawlish Races. The wealthy among them had a shilling each. At the docks they spent twopence each to be rowed over to the Warren. They walked to Dawlish and at the Races spent a whole sixpence on a luscious dinner. A bun and a bottle of ginger beer for twopence satisfied them for tea and what a wonderful day they had! The outing concluded with the walk back to the Warren where they adopted the usual method of calling the boatman over by lighting a fire on the beach. Their last two pennies were spent on the return journey across the strip of water.

As a story I find this somewhat inconclusive and less than satisfying. It would have been more fun if they had drunk too much ginger beer and fallen out of the boat and been attacked by a disoriented shark or something but that's all we get. I like, however, the bit about lighting the fire on the beach to attract the ferryman. And that's another thing that is forbidden these days, lighting fires on Dawlish Warren. It says so on all those dismal notice boards.

SALT

Ursula Brighouse in her fascinating history of Woodbury, "A View from the Beacon" makes much of the mystery of how Woodbury Salterton came by its name. All the clues, and they are listed, seem to point to Woodbury Salterton being named after "salt-workers or salt-sellers engaged in some sort of storing and distributing business connected to the salt trade." and yet, "it is hard to see, looking at the map, how Woodbury Salterton could have been on a direct route leading from any of the known saltpans to an inland market."

But what if salt was being produced in quantity on the Exe estuary? Surely then Woodbury Salterton would be a likely place to store salt for onward distribution.

In Charles Vancouver's "General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon" which was published in 1808, he writes the following:

"In the parish of Dawlish there is a large proportion of coarse, though improvable land. A large range of sand-hills extend south-westerly from the mouth of the river Axe:" (This a typographical error for Exe)" these are chiefly appropriated as a warren; some of their lower parts have been enclosed with a view to improvement, but the rank driving sand of which the surface is composed, defeated the undertaking. Among these sand-hills are some lagoons or lakes of salt water, where the making of salt has lately been renewed with the prospect of answering very well."

So there was at least one saltern on the Exe at Dawlish Warren. This is the only reference I have seen to it but there must be more about this nineteenth century initiative. Vancouver writes here of a renewal and salterns can be very ancient and it is not unthinkable that salt was being made on the Warren and/or elsewhere on the Estuary before ever Woodbury Salterton got its name.

THE DAY THE SKY TURNED GREEN ON DAWLISH WARREN

The day the sky turned green on Dawlish Warren
the trippers came in droves to Exmouth front
and some rejoiced to see a sight so foreign
and some dismissed it as a silly stunt.

The day the sky turned green there was no reason.
The sun was shining and there was no cloud.
It was a dog-day of the summer season.
It made a deep impression on the crowd.

The locals lowered and blamed the District Council,
the pious prayed and took it for a sign
and still the sun shone down on saint and scoundrel,
a golden grape upon an em’rald vine,

and swam its course as guileless as a goldfish,
gliding through the clearest, greenest seas,
until the day grew old, the air grew coldish
with the upspringing of the evening breeze.

The green drained from the sky and on the morrow
the heavens once again were welkin blue
and some expressed surprise and some their sorrow
and some went off to Paignton and the zoo.

And we were young and life and love were jolly
amid the sand dunes where we were not seen.
None but the summer sun remarked our folly
on Dawlish Warren when the sky was green.

PHILLPOTTS ON THE WARREN

“I have seen dawn upon the Exe,” writes Eden Phillpotts, “ and can remember how a great mist rolled down the river to meet the morning. In billows it came under a breeze from shore, hid all the heron-haunted flats and marshes, heather-ridges and sleepy dunes; then the risen sun touched it, and it waned gloriously in a rosy glow against the increasing blue of the sky; while from its depths stole Exe to the sea; and I saw red cliffs and marble beaches and fishers with bright sails setting forth into an ocean of light.”

This would have been the eighteen seventies. To have seen the dawn from the Warren, it argues that the boy Eden spent the night there. Did young adventurers camp there in Victorian days? A lot of families camped there a hundred years later in the nineteen seventies. We did, my wife and I and two infant children, on a wild night of thunder and lightning and were woken by the sea birds to our own desert island and a day of fine weather. Now, alas, there are ‘notices’ on the beach prohibiting all sorts of things, camping amongst them.

In his soap operatic novel “Redcliff”, Phillpotts sends two pairs of lovers to the Warren, not at the same time!, to experience the bliss of young love enhanced by the beauties of Nature.

“He took off his coat and spread it for her to sit on. Then he flung himself on the sand, smoked and looked at the evening light creeping down the estuary and burning on the flats till they shone like red gold. Mary heard the whispers of the dune, where breezes stirred its ragged, grassy crown; she listened to the ripple of the waves also and the cry of the marsh birds. The boats were returning to Redcliff on the tide, their little sails aglow.”

Eden Phillpotts was one of those men who had been ‘in love’ with some girl or other since his schooldays and I strongly suspect the Warren might have been the scene of one of the old womanizer’s first dalliances.

Be that as it may, tomorrow I shall post a love song entitled ‘The day the sky turned green on Dawlish Warren

SAND DUNES

Eden Phillpotts in his essay on Sand Dunes in his 1903 book ‘My Devon Year’ writes of his childhood visits to Dawlish Warren:

“Then these sand-hills were a procession of lion-coloured monsters, wandering in awful company by the waters; and the scanty grasses served for bristling hair upon them; and I imagined these gigantic and sinister things as leaping into the narrow channel where Exe flows to the sea, and crossing over it that they might devour a little town upon the other side. Yet me they hurt not, and I would lie upon their hot breasts fearlessly, roll in thesoft sand, speculate on the purple of the sea-holly, prick my fingers with it, tumble and bask, and gazing upwards, build my secure kingdom, fortress, home in the pinnacles of a summer cloud.”

And again:

“These rolling dunes are a home of many good things: for flowers that are beautiful dwell among them, and flowers that are cheerful under stress of circumstances, and flowers that are merely rare. Hare’s-foot trefoil, whose pink blooms are hidden in a pearly mist, make a sort of manna scattered by the way; soldanella spreads little arrow-shaped leaves under the grey-green wheat-grass and opens her trumpets there; sea-rocket creeps to the very feet of the sea-horses that paw the beach at high tides, and the great gulls look into its mauve eyes as they strut on yellow feet in the harvest of the last wave.”

And so on. And so on. I find it all sounding just a little alarming. Those hotbreasted monsters are about to gobble up poor little Exmouth while the sea rocket keeps a mauve eye on the yellow legged gulls (not herring-gulls then!) and the sea horses. But he was a great observer of detail was Eden Phillpotts. He would have liked to have been remembered as “a man who used to notice such things.” The quotation is from the poem ‘Afterwards’ by the writer said to be Phillpott’s ‘god’, Thomas Hardy. But compared to Hardy old Phillpotts is hardly remembered at all.

Next: A little more of Phillpotts on the Exe.

ON DAWLISH WARREN

In 1862 Eden Phillpotts was born in India. His father died when he was four and he and his mother and his brothers returned to England and it seems that they lived for some years at Dawlish with his grandfather and his mother’s sisters.

Anyway, one of his most precious memories was that as a boy he ran and rolled in the sand dunes on Dawlish Warren. He later wrote verses about it. Let me quote a stanza or two:

Oh naked-footed boy with the wild hair
And hopeful eyes, is it so long ago
Among these windy dunes you made your lair
Beside the immutable sea’s unwearied ebb and flow?

Above you sings the horrent bent; the sun
Finds you and burns your budding limbs to brown;
You race the waves and wade and leap and run
Then in the sweet, hot sand contented cuddle down.

You dream great dreams while all the upper air
Is musical with mews and round about
Upon the flats among the sea-ways there
The dim sea lavender spreads her purple fingers out.

I can report that the mews were still musical, at least in the spirit of our contemporary composers, and the horrent bent was still singing when I visited the Warren this summer: probably singing the same old song!

In a chapter of his book ‘My Devon Year’ of 1903 Phillpotts records a return visit to his beloved Dawlish Warren from which, in a day or two, I shall quote .

Tomorrow: Misjudging the tide.