SACRED LOBSTER POTS, TORQUAY, 1843.

I try not to stray too much from the poor people of Victorian Exeter but today I have gone as far as Torquay to remember once again the obscenely grasping Henry Phillpotts, the bishop who milked the Anglican Church for the every penny it was worth and who died disgracefully wealthy.  The Western News of February 25th, 1843 notes with sarcasm how the Bishop of Exeter commutes from London to his new palace in Torquay without thinking to stop in this city where he was much hated and the column continues, in a report, ostensibly about the seizure  of spirits, to lambast him.

"If our dear prelate did but know how heartily we rejoice over his flights from those sad scenes - how proud we feel when we see his carriage driving past our humble threshold, whirling him along to the soft scenes of this beloved region - we think it would gladden his heart.

"Our right reverend and respected prelate not only loves these charming scenes, but he loves the finny tribe that float in the briny waves beneath.  He has established a fishery at Anstey's Cove.  Cod, turbot, soles, maids and dories, all grace his table, and come to the aid of his generous spirit - to be scattered as presents from the episcopal fishery.

"Along shore in the sunken recesses, at the foot of the rocks, lie lobster pots and crab pots, save when the Brixham fellows come sneaking along to sneak them up.  Parson Lyte, the Brixham parson, it was that taught our dear diocesan how to shoot a net and lower a lobster pot - why the Brixham people disturb the episcopal fisheries we cannot for the life of us imagine.  But it so happens that he is too often disturbed, as we have before said.

"But a new source of annoyance is now pursued.  The 'free traders' finding that the Bishop's sanctity had thrown the Coast Guard off their guard, have actually been sinking their kegs near the sacred lobster pots.

"Last week, soon after the Bishop returned from London, where he had had such a bad run of spirits himself, 153 tubs of contraband spirits were seized in Babbicombe Bay ! ! by the officers on that station, and are now safely deposited in Dartmouth Custom House." 

The Bishop's Walk leads down from the Palace Hotel ( Bishopstowe) to Anstey's Cove.  The BBC (being very bbc!) made me laugh out loud:  "Here the bishop would go on his regular constitutional and have moments of contemplation.  Some 150 years later the coast path is still there for us all to enjoy - thanks to to the bishop's hard work."  I suspect the thing Henry of Exeter mostly contemplated at Bishopstowe was how to keep the hoi polloi from sight of his house and land and the most hard work he did was his proverbially self-serving. 

 It was a great joke of the time that the fisherfolk of Brixham were emptying the bishops' lobster pots. 

I don't think Henry Francis Lyte, Brixham's poetical parson, had much to do with Phillpott's interest in his fishery project but he, Lyle, had a deserved reputation as a fishermen's friend.   I don't think either of them ever hauled up a lobster pot.

Incidentally, at this time Lyle must have been just about to publish his chart-topping  Abide with me and then to go off, on full stipend, to spend four years touring the continent while half his congregation deserted the Church for the Plymouth Brethren.  Yes, he was ill at times, but privileged. He died and was buried at Nice. 

The smuggling recorded here shows how busy the 'free traders' still were in 1843.

What kind of fish is a 'maid'?  I guess a maid must be a mullet but I can't find evidence.

Just one month after this report the Bishopstowe fishery, the store house where the bishop kept his nets , tackle, pots &c. were all washed away by a great storm and the one fishing boat was damaged and no doubt the city of Exeter was alive with Schadenfreude.

BOILED FISH AND THE MISSION TO SEAMEN, 1898.

"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(?)

 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'!

RUMBLINGS AND GRUMBLINGS, 1910.

(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.

PORPOISES

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.

GOING OUT OVER

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:

FISHING FROM LYMPSTONE, 1922

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'?

STEPHEN REYNOLDS

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.

THE DEATH OF A FISHERMAN

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!”

CATCHING A BASS

It would seem that we are to have a summer worthy of the name. Last Tuesday, all of a sunny afternoon, I sailed Poppy up and down the tide just for the fun of it.

When we set out there was a steady breeze blowing from the sea and the tide was flooding fast so I sailed her closehauled and took on both wind and tide and we made what progress she and I could. 'Us against them'.

Now, to tell the truth, my lovely Scaffie, with her one loosefooted lugsail, is not the best in the world at sailing against the wind and some might think we made sad progress. But why should we care? There is a pure joy in going nowhere elegantly and Robert Louis Stevenson was right when he wrote, ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive and the true success is to labour.’

Poppy was labouring right enough and it was with difficulty that we crept down river until we were clear beyond Powderham castle. It was a hard won advance but what glorious wide sweeps we made across the whole width of the shining river and how sweetly the sun shone on us both! Next though we allowed ourselves the luxury of gliding with the wind on our beam and with the tide in our favour until we were way up river under the Royal Marine Camp. By now the tide was considering turning and the wind had shifted slightly in our favour and it was already time to think about tacking home.

I had trolled a handline over the side in no great hope of catching my fish. There is always too much seaweed floating about the Exe these days. Every time I pulled up the line to clear it of weed I told myself that I was wasting my time because of the weed and because I was sailing far too speedily. The lure, I told myself, must be positively skidding along and too near the surface for any fish to take but a superfish. Nevertheless I persevered. There was nothing to be lost beyond a fishhook and two inches of electric cable.

Then I caught my sea bass. It fought nobly. They always do. But soon it was aboard, all silver scales and spines and shining in the sun. I rejoiced. I only hope to catch two or three sizeable bass in a summer and here was the first.

I cooked the superbass à la Vendangeuse according to a 1970's Jane Grigson recipe that required half a pint of white wine in the cooking and the rest of the bottle in the drinking. It had been a triumphant day.

I'M GLAD I'M NOT THE BARNACLE

"Barnacles have the largest penis to body size ratio of the animal kingdom." Wikipedia.


The barnacle’s a simple fish.
He finds a rock and sticks around.
Once he’s at home his only wish
Is not to leave the spot he’s found.

He does not crave a roomy place.
He does not seem to mind a throng.
A thousand brothers share his space.
A thousand sisters string along.

He eats all day and grows and grows.
He waves his pretty legs about.
He gathers plankton with his toes
and never thinks to venture out.

His sex life is amazing and
he has no need to rise and roam.
He sends his quite enormous gland
out hunting while he stays at home.

I’m glad I’m not the barnacle.
Though home’s a sweet and pleasant place,
I’d miss the fun of eating out,
the joy of mating face to face.

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.

SALMON FISHING IN NINETEEN TWENTY TWO

In 1922 the salmon season began on the first of March. There were two boats fishing from Exmouth, fifteen from Topsham and six from Lympstone. Between them these boats took five hundred salmon in the first week of the season.

The largest single catch was made by a Lympstone boat. There were thirty nine fish leaping in the bunt of the net. The next best catch was made by a Topsham boat, a poor second with sixteen salmon. The record catch, remembered from the April of a few years before, was of fifty six fish in one haul. I would like to have seen that!

The Exmouth Journal reported: “…It is a great advantage that the fish this seaon are being taken and marketed, thus assisting the exchequers of many a poor household, making possible the payment of tradesmen’s bills long overdue … For some months past the salmon fishermen of the Exe have had an exceedingly lean time, and the present abundance of fish is a veritable godsend to them.”

How precarious they must have been in those workhouse days, the 'exchequers' of the Estuary's fishing families!

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

A reader with a famous name, Mr. R. L. Stevenson, of 8 Morton Crescent, Exmouth addressed the letter below to the Editor of The Exmouth Journal. It was published 27th March 1965.


Sir,

As far as I can see, the only way to become a successful Deep Sea Fisherman is to be blindfolded, gagged and have my hands tied behind my back (quite a handicap when fishing) because the advice I have received to date from the professionals is as follows: -

When setting out I must NOT –

Use a green painted boat.
Go on a Friday the 13th.
See a Minister of Religion or a cross-eyed woman.
Wish another fisherman ‘good luck’.

Also when in the boat I must NOT –

Mention a coney by its proper name (this is fatal).
Whistle.
Comb my hair.
Stick point of knife in boat timbers.
Use an umbrella.

Perhaps some of your nautical readers could tell me a few more things I MUST NOT DO in order to catch fish as I am most anxious to learn.

DRIFT NETTING BY NIGHT

It is the top of a calm night tide on the Estuary. Two people are necessary and sufficient. One plies the oars gently to pull the boat across the tide. The other lets the drift net slip out over the stern. A moonlit night is favoured. The spring tide of the full moon promises a depth of water under the net and a good light. When the length of the net is a shadowy line stretching across the glinting waters, the oarsman keeps it so by lazily dipping his oars and pulling across. Only once in a while does he need to pull hard. The night is suffused with light and peace. If any words are spoken they are spoken quietly. The Estuary is a temple.

The net drifts with the tide and the boat drifts with the tide. The netsman, with his fingers on the line, can feel the subtle tugging when a fish tangles in the mesh. But when a salmon comes his way he can cry with Osric, ‘A hit, a very palpable hit’. The drift lasts for so long as there is no fear of moots or moorings. Then the net is hauled aboard and cleared. The leaping, moonlit fish are disentangled. They delight the eye. The tide is falling now and the boat has just about taken herself home.

Nothing more can be done tonight. The village is dark and deserted. A bed would be a fine thing.

But first, of course, there is just time to return that magnificent salmon to the river.

DRIFTING

When we went drifting down the night,
while our tide filled to its brim,
the net ran out, the line set tight
when we went drifting down the night,
working by the moon’s green light.
The long oars creaked, the boat rode trim
when we went drifting down the night
while our tide filled to its brim.

Now we go drifting down the years,
tide by tide and moon by moon,
we run our hopes out and our fears
now we go drifting down the years.
Pleasure, pain and joy and tears,
all will be as nothing soon,
now we go drifting down the years
tide by tide and moon by moon.

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.

CLOTS

I first read about clotting for eels more than twenty years ago in young Doctor Bellamy’s book published in 1843. For details about him and his book see my blog for 25th November 2009. Since then I have asked around but nobody seems to know much about clots and clotting. So I was very pleased to read Emily, née Howard, Irish’s brief eel-statement in Talking about Topsham: We’d catch eels with a clat of worms and drop them into a tin bath through a hole in a cut-open sack. They’d slither through the hole and they couldn’t get out again. And another memory is there for I remember eels being handled with sackcloth. Emily was born in 1889 and the six Howard children lived at Lock Cottage, across the Exe from Topsham. Emily would have been clotting or clatting for eels at about the turn of the century. John Bellamy gives a full and fulsome description about how to make a clot. You take, I’m working from memory now, a quantity of nice fat earthworms and with a needle you thread them end to end, right down the middle, using a length of rough worsted. When you have sufficient you roll them into a ball and attach this, the clot, to a line. Then you let it lie where eels abound and the eels snag their teeth in the worsted and so are hauled in to their doom. Is there, I wonder, a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Earthworms?

WHITEBAIT

The edition I have of the very well devised Methuen ‘Little Guide to Devon’ is the tenth, rewritten in 1949 and, 1n 1959, reprinted with corrections. The original text, 1907, was supplied by that reverend old romancer, Sabine Baring Gould.

Of the Estuary the Little Guide says:

The estuary of the Exe below Topsham is very beautiful at high water, but when the tide is out presents a wide tract of mud. To the W. is Haldon. On both sides is rich woodland with stately mansions set in parks. Conspicuous among these is Powderham Castle, the seat of the Earls of Devon, and Nutwell Court. On the E. side is the village of Lympstone, famous for its oysters and whitebait, and at the mouth, on the same side, is Exmouth, a favourite watering place. The entrance to the river is obstructed by a sand-bar called the Warren.

Whitebait, in this country, are the young of the herring. Lympstone is now famous for neither oysters nor whitebait but, in the days of the great shoals of herring in Exmouth Bay, armies of whitebait used regularly to come rushing up the Estuary with the tide. The bass followed the whitebait and devoured them from below and a snowstorm of screaming tern came from the sea and devoured them from above.

In the sixties a neighbour of ours, an old Lympstone widower called John Clapp, creaked many a day to the slipway called the Green just when the cockle beds were tapping and gazed expectantly down river. What he was looking for was this cloud of tern. The tern, however, mostly disappointed him. They have put in ever fewer appearances over the years and today they seem never to have cause to muster in such great number. On the rare occasions that Mister Clapp, it was thus that I knew him, did see the tern he would wade out to his punt and motor off to troll beneath them and , as likely as not, come home with a basketful of bass. I only once took advantage of this phenomenon. Whether the birds were taking whitebait I doubt perhaps the sand eels were massing and on the move. In any case it was a rare delight to go fishing in among the piping, plunging birds.

WINKLEWRINKLES

Sacks of winkles have been taken from the Estuary for ever. There is still some winkling going on out there. In the nineteen seventies, Doctor Cyril G Tuckfield, local historian, wrote an article for 'Devon Life' entitled 'Inshore Fishing at Lympstone' and he mentioned the humble periwinkle. He wrote:

"Associated with mussel culture was the periwinkle (locally "wrinkle") industry. Westcote in 1630 wrote, "The wrinkle or sea-snail is common at Lympstone" so clearly the shell-fish industry is of some antiquity, as also is the local name."

Thomas Westcote Gent. was the author of 'A View of Devonshire in 1630'. He was a Devon man but not from East Devon which suggests that 'wrinkle' was not just local to this estuary. Curiously the two words would seem to be of quite separate derivation. Of course 'wrinkle' could be no more than a corruption of 'winkle' but I do not believe that. Four hundred year old, dialect words are not likely to have been born of and perpetuated by ignorance. 'Winkle' has to do with winches and 'wrinkle' to do with wrenches and etymologically the twain seem never to have met although both have a twisty history to them that makes one think of the winklewrinkle's shell. Interestingly, both words are, or were, used by fishermen on the Eastern seabord of the United States which implies that 'wrinkle' has its own history and its own legitimacy.

Where the peri comes from seems to be a mystery although I read that there are Old English forms 'winewincian' and 'pinewincian'. In some parts of England, but not here, there is a dialect form 'pennywinkle'.

But 'wrinkles' seems to be what, until recently, the people of the Estuary called them. I have never heard anyone speak of a 'periwrinkle'!