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.

LEARNING TO SWIM, 1930

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.

RUTH MANNING-SANDERS

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.

THE CUSTOMS OFFICER'S BOY

It was the dark evening of Thursday 27th November 1872 and Mr Matthew, the chief officer of Customs for the port of Exmouth was working at the dock. Helping him to measure a stack of timber were his two sons, George and Joseph. At half past five Mr Matthew told his son, Joseph, to scoot off home and tell mother that he and George would be home shortly looking for their tea.

Joseph needed to take the narrow path that ran by the dock edge. There were no lights and there was no fence and by now all was black as pitch. Young Joseph felt his way forward but somehow he slipped and fell into the dock. His head struck timber and, although he was a strong swimmer, he sank and drowned.

A half hour later Mr Matthew and George arrived home unaware of Joseph’s fate. When they did not find him at home they immediately suspected what had happened and went back to the dock and spent the night searching for the lost boy but to no avail. Before dawn others joined the search. The dock was dragged and the body was found in thirteen foot of water at the dock gates. There were two dreadful bruises to the face.

On many occasions previously Mr Matthew had pointed out the danger of the dock having no lighting and no fencing. Only after Joseph’s death were steps taken to make the docks safer.

BATHING MACHINES

Of the many curiosities of the Victorian age the bathing machine must rank as one of the most curious. At Exmouth in 1872 there were many of them and they were set down in the sea at shallow depths so that ladies and gentlemen might enter them to landward, change in them, and leave them paddling to seaward.

As upholders of public modesty these local machines seem to have been unsatisfactory. There was of course a strict segregation of the sexes. The ladies’ machines were distant from the gentlemen’s but in some people’s estimation they were still far too close for comfort. One anonymous Exmothian wrote to the local paper calling the beach “ a scene of disgusting exposure and gross indecency.” He, or possibly she, wrote, ‘It seems to me that the men’s machines ought to be further away from those set apart for ladies, and that boatmen should not be allowed to pass close in front of machines where ladies are bathing.” For me this last comment conjures up a pretty, Gilbertian image of a summer’s day and a flotilla of rowing boats crewed by wicked, mustachioed young men intent on causing flutter after flutter among the bathing belles of the age.

Another correspondent wrote, “The bathing machines are only just put down to the water’s edge, and the gentlemen wear for the most part no bathing dress of any description. The result is an unblushing exposure which is disgraceful . The indecency of the thing before numbers of little girls playing right in front on the sand is shocking; and it is a virtual prohibition of all modest women walking that way…”

The amazing fact is that it was only social convention and constraint that made anyone queue for these ridiculous machines in the first place. People were free, then as now, to change on the beach and to swim anywhere they wished and many freely did so. It was the fear of appearing not ladylike or gentlemanly that drove the respectable classes into these dark, poky boxes on wheels.

The disreputable and the poor just stripped off and swam.

HEAVY HAULS OF HERRING

It was a cold January day in 1909 and it should have been an unlucky day for two reasons. It was the thirteenth day of the month and it was a Sunday. Nevertheless the small herring fleet, with boats from Exmouth, Lympstone and Budleigh Salterton, came home with seventy five thousand herring. Some boats had made such hauls of herring that they could not ship them. Many nets were torn by the sheer weight of the fish. The following Tuesday one Lympstone boat alone shipped thirty thousand fish. A Budleigh boat caught twenty five thousand. “It reminds us of old times in Exmouth” said one of the fishermen.

Crowds of spectators gathered at Exmouth dock to see the mountains of silver fish that had been lifted from the boats. They were sold by the thousand to buyers who packed them into barrels on the spot and sent them by the waggonload to the railway station, thence to London where the commission agents were waiting for them. The fishermen acted as their own auctioneers and took turns at the selling. The earnings were good. The boatowners took their cut of a third and the crew members took their shares of two thirds. There was general rejoicing.

A hundred years on and there is not so much as the smell of a herring in these waters.

D DAY AND THE ESTUARY

In 1941, Percy Bradford, who was a Trinity House pilot joined the Exmouth Police War Reserve. One of his wartime duties was to organise moorings for the many barges that, in 1944, came to be based in the Estuary in preparation for the D Day landings. These were strung out like a giant’s footprints between Exmouth Bight and Powderham Castle. The United States Navy and G.I.s of the Ivy Division were ashore in Exmouth. General Eisenhower came to visit and to encourage. There was fun to be had in the mild spring weather of 1944 but every man and maid knew that the happy days were numbered.

On the fifth day of June, the day before D Day, Percy was ordered to report to H.M.S. Tennyson. Tennyson was one of His Majesty’s ships ashore. It was the Imperial Hotel in Exmouth by another name. Percy was given sealed orders to take out to the anchored tugs and their barges now ready and waiting beyond Exmouth Bar. He went out in the pilot vessel and delivered the orders to the senior master. The master read his orders and signalled to the other tugs. Within two minutes every vessel was sounding its whistle. Then, in choppy seas, the little fleet moved away, bound for Normandy and the beaches.

For more on World War Two and the Estuary see the articles by Ian Dowell for Key News.

AN EDWARDIAN BOATING PARTY

From the Exmouth Journal, July 1908.

“…A party of Exonians who were on a visit to Exmouth, last Saturday, had a novel, if not disagreeable, experience of “navigating” on their own account. They hired a boat, just as others did, and went out for a short trip on the “briny.” But shortly afterwards, when somewhere between the Exmouth beach and the Warren, they found their own united strength more feeble than that of Old Neptune, and eventually were cast upon a sandbank! The boat by this time was also accommodating the water and of help their (sic) was none to be had.

Two of the passengers sacrificed comfort for the sake of their companions by jumping out, and , up to their waists in water, they succeeded in safely towing the craft away, a landing then being effected. They, however, suffered the disadvantages of wet nether garments, which, rumour says, they dried in the sun, and patiently awaited the consummation of renewed comfort…”

What I like about this story is its pomposity, its intrinsic silliness, its total insignificance and its studied unfunniness. It seems such a strange survival, such a serendipitous find. Thanks to the Exmouth journalist and against all the odds after a hundred and two years we know all we need to know about what happened to some visitors from Exeter on that Saturday in July.

They hired a boat,went aground on a sandbank and two of them had to dry out their trousers. Good, isn’t it!?

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.

CAPTAIN PEACOCK'S SWAN

The Illustrated London News of October 13, 1860 described her as ‘an elegant yacht , the very similitude of a gigantic white swan which may now often be seen sunning its wings on the shining waters of the estuary of the river whence it derives its appellation.’

Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan of the Exe’was the strangest vessel that ever sailed these waters. This fantastic 'pleasure yacht' was designed by Captain Peacock of Starcross and built by Dixons of Exmouth. She was launched in September 1860 and every inch of her lived up to her glorious name.

See now where the famous inventor, Captain Peacock, peruses Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’ and takes the measurements of the mute swan that he finds there and scales them up fourfold.

This gives Captain Peacock a yacht only seventeen feet six inches in length but so broad in the beam that he has room for a table in the saloon large enough for ten persons to dine in comfort. While his guests sit at table they can dangle fishing lines through small oval apertures in the table which open to the water beneath. When a fish is caught it can instantly be cooked in a ‘multum in parvo cooking apparatus’. The smoke from this stove is drawn up the neck of the swan and is breathed out through the swan’s nostrils.

Imagine! It is a sunny afternoon on the Estuary. Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan’ is bearing down on us. Her vicious head rides sixteen feet above the dancing wavelets. Her wicked, beady, black eyes are looking straight at us. She is now so near that we can read, worked in letters of gold upon a silken azure banner, pendent from a brass rod which the bird carries in her bill, the proud name: ‘Swan of the Exe.’ Someone at the dinner table must have got lucky for as the great bird looms towards us she is breathing smoke.

Quick! Out of the way before the bugger pecks us!

ARRIVING AT EXMOUTH

The poet, Patricia Beer, (1919 - 1999) imagines her mother's first coming to Exmouth from Torquay. Patricia's mother, Harriet Jeffery, came to work in Exmouth as a young school teacher in the early years of the First War. There she married Andrew Beer, grandson of Andrew Alexander Beer. master of the Exmouth brig Magyar who died when his vessel was cut in half by a steamer off Hartlepool. The excerpt is from Patricia Beer's autobiography of childhood,'Mrs Beer's House' (Macmillan 1968)

I sometimes try to enter into my mother’s feelings as she approached Exmouth for the first time. She must have come across the estuary on the Starcross ferry, which was the recognised route from Torquay, as it saved going up to Exeter and down again on the Exmouth line…It is impossible for me to recreate her impression of coming into exile or to think of Exmouth as a hated, hostile town; I feel too differently. But I admit that the estuary could look cheerless on its worst days, and this may have been one of them. Wet sand is a very depressing sight, and the ferry-boat would have got a long, uninterrupted view of Dawlish Warren, which stretched half-way across the mouth of the river as well as the two-mile line of beach from Exmouth Harbour to Orcombe Point.

The estuary was hardly ever blue. It varied from silver at its brightest to pewter at its dullest, and always tarnished with currents, which seized the ferry-boat with some violence as it left the shelter of Dawlish Warren at the last stage of the crossing.

As the boat entered the harbour, swinging awkwardly in the current and hardly ever head-on, the passengers , I suppose, would have been as conscious of the residents’ shoes as they waited on the jetty above as the residents were of the passengers’ hats. My mother may have looked into the inner harbour, where the boats tended to huddle up in corners like sheep and where a few swans and a great many rotten apples were usually swilling about. She would have been too far away and perhaps in no mood to enjoy the smell of cut wood from the saw-mill just beyond. The boards and planks of the landing-stage and the steps were slimy and green, with every corner worn off. It may have been raining and she certainly suffered from seasickness. Perhaps it was one of those terrible first impressions from which people never wholly recover.

TRAWLING INSIDE THE LINE

On October 12th 1922 the evening was breezy and Samuel Squire, fisherman of Lympstone, had been trawling out at sea and had not had much luck. He had caught only enough fish to cover the bottom of his basket. Ten minutes before he passed the line which the Devon Sea Fisheries Committee had fixed as the limit for fishing with trawl or trammel he put out his trawl again. It was his last hope.

This was the kind of dusky, blowy October evening when Exmouth front looks deserted. No doubt Sam was keeping his eye out for anyone who might be watching. He did not see Fishery Officer Pym, who was employed by the Devon Sea Fisheries Committee and who was probably lying low and squinting at him through a pair of binoculars.

The bye-law had been passed in 1904 but the Committee knew their law was being flouted. They wanted to make an example of some poor fisherman to encourage the others to observe the limit and Sam was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he was still trawling well over the line Fishery Officer Pym was rowed out by boatman Thomas Thomson towards Sam's little trawler. At the last minute Sam saw him coming and the trawl was hauled in but by this time it was too late! The boat was by now between the Clock Tower and the pier.

The next month Sam was up before the Exmouth Magistrates' Bench. Richard Turner, fisherman of Topsham, was there too, charged with the same offence. Richard had been fishing in the channel earlier that same day and he too had fallen victim to Fishery Officer Pym. Both fishermen were found guilty of trawling inside the line and heavily fined.

A DAY BY THE EXE

These verses by 'NN' of Lympstone were first published in the Exmouth Journal 0f 5th September 1925.

One fine day we resting lay
At noontide by the Exe,
A paradise which Nature
In lovely garb bedecks.

The bullfinch red sang overhead.
The sky of blue serene
With honeysuckle bright was hid,
A glorious scented scene.

Bathers in sunlit waters lazed.
A cool breeze murmured by.
The seagulls with their snowy breasts
Were wheeling in the sky.

Within our view the rich red cliffs
Of such tremendous height.
When the golden sun is sinking
'Tis such a wondrous sight.

The brilliance of the sunset sky
merges to glowing red.
The Lympstone fishing fleet sails out
Seeking for daily bread.

O but 'twas a glorious sight
For any eye to see,
The variegated boats and sails
All dancing on the sea.

So if you want to come and stay
Where hearts are blithe and free
You couldn't choose a better place
Than Exmouth by the sea.

Who was this NN? A young Norton perhaps. He or she, my bet is on she, did well. 'The seagulls with their snowy breasts' could be Yeats. Let's hope that the Lympstone fishing fleet came home with some bread.

THE CLEVER GULLS AT ORCOMBE POINT

I have long been acquainted with the story of Pliny, truth or legend, that the Greek playwright, Aeschylus, was killed, two and a half millennia ago, by an eagle who mistook his big bald head for the kind of rock upon which , if one happens to be such an eagle, one can drop tortoises from a great height. Lammergeiers, which look a lot like eagles, are reported to be dropping tortoises onto rocks every day of the week and thereby they smash the shells and get at the flesh.


So I was not in the least surprised a couple of years ago to see that the clever gulls at Orcombe Point had learned the same game. They were dropping mussels and other shellfish onto the road from a great height and immediately zooming down to bag the flesh. It is a sight worth seeing. Stan Davies remarked on this phenomenon in his 1987 book, Wildlife of the Exe Estuary .

There are quite a few gulls around here and they sometimes use the road and footpath to drop crabs and razor shells in order to break them open. Surprisingly, even turnstones have discovered the behaviour of the gulls and can be found on the footpath of Queen's Drive pecking morsels from the shells

I have never noticed the turnstones but the gulls are always at it. I too am beginning to bald in an interesting sort of way. When I walk that way I put on my hat.

SOME BAD VERSES

Throughout the 1920s, Albert Ash Allen and "R I P" wrote consistently bad verses for the readers of the Exmouth Journal. I am allowed to say this. I have written plenty of bad verses myself. These though by "R I P" , squeezed in between advertisements for Miller's Motor Coach Tours and Grey Flannels for Town or Country in the newspaper of 23rd April 1927, in all their innocence, almost work. From the evidence of his verses "R.I.P." sounds like he might have come from Salcombe, (Does anybody know?) But one Devon estuary is as good as another I suppose.

Up to a point, I sort of know how the old chap felt. I never do seem to see anyone I recognise in Exmouth these days.

VISIONS OF THE PAST

One spot alone in all the earth .
comes back to me where'er I roam,
my little town, my place of birth,
that bears for me the name of home.

For often will the fancy stray
amid the scenes of long ago,
the same old rocks are there today,
I see them like a passing show.

There stands the Bolt, whose grim old head
though aged yet is still unbent,
whose rocks were there when sea o'erspread
the chalky downs and cliffs of Kent.

I see the Bar, now gleaming white
where relics of the drowned lie
whose voice lone widows hear at night
nor ever hear without a sigh.

And there the harbour where the tide
lays bare the flats where shrimpers go
and likely spots where cockles hide
or wily prawns dart to and fro.

Then up the creeks at harbour head
where now the tidal waters flow,
each one an ancient river bed,
but who can say how long ago?

I see the schooners as of yore,
swing slowly with the ebb and flow
and I can hear the sailors roar
their chanty when to sea they go.

There too, the boys, young sailor men,
companions in adventures bold;
the years are shed 'twixt now and then,
and I forget that I am old.

But now that I am home again
no well known voices do I hear,
for friends of old I look in vain
and I am but a stranger here.

And some within God's Acre lie,
for some the legend,"Lost at sea,"
and yet, for me, they cannot die
while they come back to memory.

R.I.P.

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.

VIEWING THE ESTUARY

I think my favourite view of the Estuary is from Sowden End in Lympstone parish where the road dips to the beach. To sit on one of the benches above the wall there and to look out at waters not too fussed by boats, moored or moving, is a great joy.

Thomson and Clark in their 1934 book The Devon Landscape suggest a few places from which to view the Estuary.

"Every tide and passing cloud seems to bring some fresh beauty to this fine estuary, whether viewed from the heights by the Belvedere on the Haldon ridge or from the riverside at Topsham, Lympstone or Starcross. We have already written of the commanding view of the river from Woodbury Common, but another, hardly less satisfying, is that from the Beacon at Exmouth looking westward across the silvery-blue waters of a full tide to the hilly background of Great Haldon."

Which last reminds me of the story, I found it in Burton, The South Devon Coast, that Frederick Temple, when he was Bishop of Exeter, stood on the steps of Exmouth vicarage and observed drily, "Exmouth is a good place to look - from."

EXMOUTH CARGOES

The Estuary port of Exmouth was busy in the year 1814. Below are listed just some of the cargoes reported in the Exeter Flying Post that were unladen in the spring of that year.

From Newport,coals; from Liverpool,salt; from London and Bristol,groceries ; from Teignmouth, slate and pipe clay; from Neath, culm; from Plymouth old junk; from Guernsey,cork and passengers; from Milford, stone; from Stockholm, deals and pitch tar; from Oporto, wine; from Lisbon, bale goods; from Portsmouth, potatoes; from Bridport, timber; from Portland, household furniture. And more, much more!

Culm, as well as being the river on which Culompton stands, is a second rate coal. Junk is old rope, the hemp to be reworked, not smoked! Each of these many cargoes argues a business enterprise. And imagine, O glory, the tarry crews ashore!: the proud captains and the happygolucky sailors, Scots and Welshmen, Spaniards and Swedes. Not too many Frenchmen and Americans because we were still at war with them. Most of the ships that came to Exmouth sailed in convoy under the protection of the Royal Navy's gun brigs and therefore arrived in port at much the same time. The harbour must have been a lively, busy place with tall ships jostling for a place to land their cargoes.

Meanwhile at Topsham on 27th April 1814, Mr Pridham informed the nobility, gentry and others that his TEPID and COLD sea baths were ready for their Accommodation, and that he had the addition of a Pump, for such as required Warm or Cold bathing.

Now what was all that about? Rolling about in Topsham mud? Ugh!

PHILLPOTTS AND PHILISTINES

I had meant to leave Eden Phillpotts and Dawlish Warren well alone for the time being. We have had more than enough of both of them. But then I discovered that there is a new (Copyright 2008) book, “From an Obtuse Angle, the Life and Work of Eden Phillpotts.” written by David Needham and available from Lulu Publishing, http://www.lulu.com/ . It is by far the best account of Phillpott’s life and work available. David Needham lived in Devon until 1972 when he moved to Tasmania. By coincidence he quotes the same passage that I quoted in my blog of 8th October but I am going to let him quote it again because of the wonderful comment that he subscribes to it: “Many years later Phillpotts would recall these halcyon childhood days in one of his essays in My Devon Year (Methuen 1904 ) after he had revisited Dawlish Warren following an absence of over thirty years. Like many children his imagination was vivid: “these  sand hills were a procession of lion-coloured monsters, wandering in awful company by the waters 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”. The monsters that finally devoured the little town of Exmouth were not, however, the monsters of Phillpotts’ imagination but developers and contemporary town planners.” (my italics) Which brings us neatly to the subject of Exmouth philistinism. There cannot be another place in the kingdom that is surrounded by so much natural beauty and yet has so little integrity or charm. To consider Exmouth’s relationship with the Estuary alone is to review a history of disasters. What a wonder the land between the railway and the beaches of the Estuary might be. Where now there are dismal carparks, coachparks, boatparks and general squalour there could have been tree lined avenues and promenades where lovers could walk; there could have been waterside inns where one could watch the sun go down in a blaze of glory over Haldon and a foaming pint; there could have been cafés and restaurants with glorious estuary views. There could have been boat shelters and quays and quiet places where small boat owners might tie up and come ashore. As for that monstrous development of today's tackiness and tomorrow’s slums where once were the docks, with the myriad signs of ‘bugger off this is private!” , "park and be clamped! & co. … but enough! ....I must consider my blood pressure. Next: 'Lammies'