GEMS OF THE RIVER

Sunlight on the flood
and a sharp breeze chops ripples
into emeralds,
diamonds, sapphires, rubies;
but not for plump princesses.

Midnight and the flood
and the flashing buoys tumble
jewels brighter yet
deep into our dark channels
where no thief can come to them.

Gems of the river,
the more precious not to have
served time round the necks
of ritzy women or in
some sound and safe deposit.

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!

THE BABY IN THE MUD

On a March day in 1909 the water-bailiff in the employ of the Exe Board of Conservators, Thomas Robert Luxon, was walking along the banks of the Exe between Turf and Powderham when he saw a dead baby in the mud about five feet from the bank. Mr Luxon fetched Police Constable Acland from Starcross who picked the child out of the Estuary. She was a little girl.

The tiny muddied corpse was carried to the doctor at Starcross, Mr John Hyde Iles, surgeon. John Iles was thirty three years old and at the beginning of his long working life in Starcross which was to last for another forty years. He was no stranger to death. After Cambridge, he had served as a volunteer in the war against the Boers and he had come to Starcross having been for some years the house surgeon at the Victoria Hospital for Children, Chelsea.

There needed to be an inquest even for so slight a person as this dead baby. It was held at the Church House, Powderham. John Iles told the Coroner and the jury that the body had probably been in the water for a couple of days. There was a mark on the left chin, caused by a fish bite. He had concluded that the child had been prematurely born and there was no evidence that she had ever had a separate existence. The baby had been stillborn.

No one had any idea whose child this might be and there seems to have been very little curiosity. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence.

I find it strangely moving, this inconsequential tale of the baby in the mud and the fish that bit the infant chin.

THE INVITATION

The morning sun looks over a green field,
Over a ragged hedgerow then a yellow field,
A hedgerow, then a brown field with a barn,
A hedgerow, then a golden field and a wood high on the hill.

At each field’s southern margin, stunted trees
Scribble the invitation in black line
With here and there the red cliff’s underlining.
For this is where the land ends.
Beyond this limit the deep blue sea
Beckons to a calm horizon under a better sky.

For those who would read it
These margins still spell out their weasel promises,
Promises that have drawn so many sanguine souls
Across big seas in small boats.

The many who ventured forth to fight foreign wars,
The many who ended their days captive in distant ports,
The many who sailed to settle empty lands,
Some to fortune, more to fever,
A few to swing in chains.

This sea has drowned enough of them
Whose bones still wander and wash with the pull of the moon.

Me, I’ll have none of it. I’ll look away
To the wheatfield, gold in the sun,
And the woods high on the hill.

A GLORIOUS DAY

Not only did the rhymster Vicar of Salcombe Regis, Philip Avant, (See, if you so wish, this blog for 6th May,) witness the coming of the French Fleet in 1690 but he was also joyful witness to William of Orange’s arrival in Torbay on 5th November 1688 and his triumphant progress to Exeter.

The ships, Philip Avant tells us, left Torbay as soon as they had disembarked the troops and then, with the cannon still on board, they came up the Exe. There were three hundred of them. Their skeely skippers sailed them in convoy around Exmouth Point and into the channels of the Exe and what a sight that must have been, three hundred transports, sailing up with the tide, gliding before an onshore breeze. “Three hundred Sail here safe arriv’d, and brought/ That Comfort which poor England long had sought.”

That November day must surely rate as one of the Estuary’s most glorious.

“When Orange with his Host, Batavians and
Other brave Hero’s gain’d Torbaia’s Strand,
The Fleet weighs Anchor thence, to Topsham bends
Her Course and soon obtains what she intends.
The Wind her Favours, through the mouth of Ex
She safely enters in despight of Styx:
Topsham receives the Cannon at her key;
And thence to Exon doth them soon convey,
The Prince mean while, welcome on land proceeds,
Whilst Dev’n o’erjoy’d admires his pious deeds.”

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.

WHAT LOVE IS NOT.

Love is not the Beaufort Scale.
It sizes up no Calm or Storm.
It neither bids you press on Sail
Nor tells you when to stay at Home.

It does not list the Times of Tides;
It calculates no Ebbs and Flows;
Unlike the Admiralty Charts
It promulgates no Highs and Lows.

And Love is not that Longshoreman
Who tells you how to sail your Boat
And how, despite the Gusts, you can
Make good your Course and stay afloat.