Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  Such concentration on the life lived would suggest an ego to match. But to judge from the last in the series, The Green, Green Grass – written in Bournemouth and a lot of it about his life there – Croft-Cooke was actually rather modest. Like Nevil Shute’s No Highway, its distinction is in its ordinariness. He writes like the regular at the bar in the Three Horseshoes, pint of bitter to hand, in cardigan and old corduroys, holding forth gently, but not insistently or disputatiously, about the little things that make up daily life.

  In The Green, Green Grass Croft-Cooke explains that he has come to live in Bournemouth after many years abroad because his parents, his brother and a favourite nephew all spent their honeymoons at the Royal Bath Hotel (Croft-Cooke himself was a homosexual who did six months in Wormwood Scrubs in 1953 after being convicted on highly dubious evidence of illicit sex with two Navy cooks). He is not worried by the sky-high rates of income tax – this is 1973 – ‘since I do not earn enough to make it payable’. He likes his cheerful flat and the view it gives him of the tennis courts where ‘tanned and handsome young men stripped to the waist disport themselves’. He finds the town endlessly diverting – ‘discreetly plutocratic in its residents, Midlands in its holidaymakers, swinging and cosmopolitan in its youth.’

  As a result of a stroke, Croft-Cooke is confined indoors and discovers the joys of television. He relishes Morecambe and Wise and Joyce Grenfell, enjoys The Goodies (who ‘so cleverly exploit the unexpected’), adores It Ain’t Half Hot Mum for its ‘nostalgic reality, truth of detail and verisimilitude . . . I find it sublimely funny.’ He considers breakfast cereals, wondering if the Force Flakes and Grape Nuts of his youth were any better than the Weetabix and Corn Flakes of today. He muses on the pleasures of bloaters and kedgeree and pickled pork, and is delighted by the antics of grey squirrels outside the window. Of his writing he says: ‘Looking back . . . I recognise that there is far too much of it, but I am not sure that if I had written less I would have written better.’

  The Green, Green Grass was published in 1977, two years before Rupert Croft-Cooke’s death. I have no idea how many copies it sold, but I do not think it can have been many. There is no blue plaque at Amira Court to recall his time there. The tenant when I knocked on the door turned out to be a Zimbabwean. He showed a polite interest in the story of the flat’s previous occupant, but I did not get the impression that he would be hastening to the library to seek out Croft-Cooke’s work. I doubt if I will either, although a handful are available in ebook form from Bloomsbury, which suggests that someone somewhere is interested.

  The last of my trio of Bournemouth literary lights is a poet – not Shelley nor Brooke nor Verlaine, but a less familiar name. Here are some characteristic lines about Cumberland Clark’s home town:

  The climate mild the best is styled

  For those who’re seeking health.

  The tonic air they meet with there

  Is better far than wealth.

  So, if you’re feeling rather down

  Just take a trip to Bournemouth town.

  Clark was born in 1862 and in his youth travelled the world, earning his living as a Congregational minister, farming sheep and cattle, and even mining for gold. He wrote a host of books about Shakespeare and Dickens, as well as a series of tracts exposing the wickedness of communism. But his particular talent was for a rhyme, the more banal the better. Among his many volumes of verse was his Bournemouth Song Book which contained such gems as ‘Bournemouth’s Milk Supply’ and ‘The Soil and Water Supply’. Clark’s one big hit was a song called ‘The Ogo-Pogo’, with music by a popular tunesmith of the day, Mark Strong. It begins thus:

  One fine day in Hindustan,

  I met a funny little man.

  With googly eyes and lantern jaws,

  A new silk hat and some old plus fours.

  The abundant flow of his muse was abruptly halted by a German incendiary bomb that landed on his flat in St Stephen’s Road in 1941. By chance one of his final offerings contained these lines:

  Let the bombs bounce round above us

  And the shells come whizzing by

  Down in our air-raid shelter

  We’ll be cosy, you and I.

  * * *

  Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in the 1930s that Bournemouth ‘is for men and women who like their pleasures to be as steady as their bank accounts . . . people move along the promenade with more dignity than hilarity . . . there are no slums or proletariat in Bournemouth.’ Muggeridge quoted from a pompous town guide: ‘In catering for patrons who desire recreation and restored mental and physical energy, its exemption from the ravages of the lower class of tripper is assured.’

  This was the Bournemouth brand from the start. From the mid-1840s onwards, the slopes and heights and dells of what had previously been deserted heathland were gradually covered in Gardenesque developments of villas, and houses and cottages of Elizabethan, Gothic and mock rustic design with spacious gardens shut off by luxuriant hedges. They were occupied by a representative sample of the well-to-do and the made-good: bankers, industrialists, Army officers, clergymen, doctors, merchants, whose common characteristic was that their days of toil or service to their country were over.

  Some rented for the summer or winter seasons; many – attracted by the real or imagined salubrity of the climate and the company, not too close, of those of the same class – settled permanently. In the seasons the smart hotels and seafront mansions were taken by a more elevated class of patron; earls and countesses were common, princes and princesses not unknown.

  Bournemouth’s reputation for elegance and intense respectability proved remarkably enduring; indeed elements of it persist today as a kind of popular myth, long after the town was forced to embrace new and often uncomfortable realities. In 1946 Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the great high priest of post-war urban redevelopment, presented his plan for the future of Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole. Among other things, it envisaged the complete rebuilding of Bournemouth town centre, the provision of a network of new through roads, an imposing new civic centre on East Cliff and the replacement of many of the clusters of villas by blocks of flats.

  Although some of Abercrombie’s proposals were followed through, most were not. Instead, the council – bewildered by changing circumstances and incapable of drawing up its own strategy – left the task of expanding the town and changing its face to speculators and developers. High-rise blocks of flats sprouted to fracture the skyline, and many of the spacious older houses previously let to genteel persons on fixed incomes were converted into flats or demolished to make way for more blocks.

  The era of unrestrained building gave way, in the 1970s, to the era of the grand scheme with its intoxicating visions of conference facilities and gleaming luxury hotels and sports centres and shopping centres and multi-storey car parks and soaring palaces of high-rent flats. One followed another, different in detail and location, but all sharing the characteristics of inflated ambition and disdain for the existing townscape. The International Centre did manage to get built, but one by one the other ventures fell by the wayside. Slowly the council learned the painful lesson that sometimes it might be better to hold on to what you had rather than cash it in in return for a sheaf of fancy drawings.

  However, the expensive farce of the IMAX cinema suggests that there is still learning to be done. The council pushed through the demolition of the Winter Gardens in 2006, without having anything to put in its place, and the site is still a car park. A £50 million proposal to cover the gardens next to the Pavilion with a nine-screen cinema, multiple restaurants and flats went belly-up early in 2014 when the funding failed to materialise. The best one can find to say about Bournemouth is that the worst may be over.

  Bournemouth Pier

  But winter does Bournemouth no favours. Like other seaside resorts – but perhaps more so than some – it needs to be seen in summer sunshine. It is redeemed by blue sky and blue sea and the full exposure of its magnificent golden beach. I retur
ned on my bike on such a day, at the start of what was to prove the generally fine summer of 2013. It was too early to be in the sea, but – considering it was a working day – half the town seemed to be on the beach, or strolling along the promenade or spread out in the municipal gardens. A large proportion were young – students, perhaps, or benefit scroungers or bar staff kept in work by Bournemouth’s £12-million-a-year alcohol economy. But young and old and middle-aged, everyone seemed content, everyone hoping the sun would keep shining.

  Not everyone. I talked to a lady of a certain age who was taking the air on a bench beside the West Cliff zigzag path. Bournemouth, she said, had gone irretrievably downhill in the thirty-five years she had lived there. Too many foreigners, too many old people, too many rubbishy shops. It was 4.10 in the afternoon and she said she was looking forward to her first drink of the day. ‘Bournemouth is boring,’ she grumbled. I happened to mention to her that I had been in Barton-on-Sea earlier. She looked at me incredulously. ‘Christ, Barton’s worse than Bournemouth.’

  Sandbanks

  But neither Bournemouth nor Barton can, in my view, compare with Sandbanks as a place to be avoided if possible. Those who wish to sell real estate there have set it up as some kind of paradise on earth. It is not. It is horrible.

  I leant my bicycle against the window of one of the estate agents and went in. They looked at me briefly – one glance was enough to know that I did not have the £2 million needed for the average Sandbanks property. Everything they had, however trashy, was stunning, unique, iconic or luxury. Some required all these adjectives to do them justice.

  Twenty years ago the Sandbanks style was just big and brash. But more recently it has been refined into something very white and angular and curvy, with a pastel roof, a great deal of tinted glass, a great deal of shiny tubular steel and invariably with a pair of huge, remote-controlled gates. Many of the newest and most ridiculously costly properties in Sandbanks and nearby Branksome are the work of a company called Seven Developments, owned by a local businessman. For those with strong stomachs or revolutionary inclinations, I recommend having a peek at some of the company’s prize offerings on its website: the Moonraker (‘even the garage doors have curvature’), the Bowie (‘sleek, ageless’), the Utopia (‘epitomises luxury lifestyle’), the Gladiator (‘a modern architectural masterpiece’).

  On the ferry mercifully removing me across the mouth of Poole Harbour to Studland, I confided my impressions of Sandbanks to a fellow cyclist. ‘We used to live there,’ he said. ‘It was nice once.’ He and his wife had moved to Swanage. Wise people.

  12

  SAVAGE COAST

  Exchanging Sandbanks for the Isle of Purbeck is like getting away from the moneychangers in the temple and reaching the hills of Canaan. Beyond the mouth of Poole Harbour the landgrabbers and speculators and developers who have conspired over the years to cover the coastline west of Hengistbury Head with bricks, mortar and concrete have been held back by the virtuous hand of the National Trust. The road west from the ferry landing cuts through a landscape of heathland, past shallow, reed-fringed acid ponds, thickets of gorse and gatherings of ragged, stunted pines. There is hardly a dwelling to be seen.

  To the east, out of sight, is Studland Bay, a long curve of gritty sand backed by low dunes spotted with clumps of marram grass. It takes an hour or so of leisurely cycling to reach Studland itself, although you would hardly know you were there, as the village has no beginning, middle or end. The church is as randomly situated as the rest of it but is worth searching out. On a triangle of grass near the door is a memorial to Sergeant William Lawrence of the 40th Regiment of Foot, whose long career took him to South America, where he fought the Spanish, to Spain itself for the Peninsular War and to Waterloo.

  After Napoleon’s final defeat, Sergeant Lawrence went to Paris with the army of occupation where he fell for a French girl whose father had a stall outside the barracks gates. He married her and brought her back to England and finally to Studland, where they took over the New Inn and renamed it the Wellington Arms. In old age he dictated his memories of his fighting days. They are simply told, as much concerned with comradeship and the humble detail of camp life as the blood and thunder of battle, and they give a vivid notion of what it was like for an ordinary soldier under Wellington’s generalship.

  The Wellington Arms stood across the lane from what is now the Bankes Arms, a fine old creeper-clad stone-built hostelry with an enormous choice of beers, hearty food and a bed for me. I warmed to Studland.

  Old Harry’s Rocks

  At seven o’clock the next morning I was sitting as close as I dared to Old Harry’s Rock and Old Harry’s Wife – she being the smaller of the two famous columns of chalk that rear up from the clear sea south of Studland.

  The sea and the sky, both devoid of colour, met and mingled beyond the great expanse of Christchurch Bay. It was flat calm, the surface of the sea minutely disturbed here and there by soft breaths of breeze. A fishing boat chugged out of Poole Harbour, spreading its wake in enormous Vs. In the far distance was the Isle of Wight, although I wasn’t sure if I was looking at it or an island of cloud resting on the horizon. Through the binoculars other islands of vapour took shape and dissolved. The diffuseness of the light made it impossible to make out anything of the great Bournemouth conurbation stretched along the distant coastline.

  Peering over the edge, I watched tiny waves spend their feeble force against the foot of the cliffs. They made a gentle whispering, just audible when the gulls shut up for a moment.

  I thought about the enormous part played in the life of the nation by the National Trust. Now that the Church of England has rather fallen from favour, the National Trust has replaced it in public esteem and in the hierarchy of great institutions – below the monarchy, probably above the judiciary and certainly above the civil service. A certain kind of person who used to go to church regular as clockwork but doesn’t any more has become a National Trust volunteer. He or she is entirely white, entirely middle-class, buys organic, cycles where possible, walks a lot, watches BBC Four and listens to Radio 4, helps out willingly with the grandchildren and reads Arthur Ransome and Wind in the Willlows to them, is unfailingly polite to visitors however tiresome they may be, but can be firm with people who drop litter or park their 4x4s across the pavement.

  The National Trust is a force for good and its people are the backbone of Britain. We are very fortunate to have it, and them. It has done precious work in keeping our most beautiful buildings and countryside out of the clutches of the sharks and barbarians who would despoil everything if they had the chance. It is almost impossible to find anything unkind to say about this most virtuous body.

  Yet sometimes, I am ashamed to say, the urge comes over me. On the whole the Trust governs with a light touch, but there are still plenty of rules. Don’t cycle on the footpaths, don’t let your dog off the lead, put litter in bins, don’t pick wildflowers or fungi, don’t light a fire on the beach, don’t use a lasso, don’t carve your initials on a rock or tree, don’t rollerskate, don’t sleep overnight in the car park, don’t camp, don’t touch furniture, don’t swear. And so on.

  The Trust has its scoutmaster side, the one that urges everyone to get up and get outside whatever the weather and join together in defeating the forces of couch-potatoism and the evil seductive lure of computer games and iPads. This voice is heard with grating heartiness in such initiatives as their 50 Things To Do Before You Are Eleven-and-three-quarters: collect frogspawn, hold a scary beast, catch a crab, climb a tree, etc. I am afraid that with some people of depraved character, it is a function of the book of rules and the list of healthy outdoor activities that they incite a yearning to behave badly.

  As I sat alone by Old Harry’s Rock, I wondered what I could do that would most offend the righteousness of the National Trust. I could light a barbecue. I could play pop music on a portable radio very loudly. I could roar along the footpaths on a motorbike. My favourite thought was to acqui
re a hotdog van and bring it to this peaceful spot and dispense disgusting tubes of mechanically recovered pork in powdery rolls to the accompaniment of poorly amplified tunes by One Direction.

  Naturally I did nothing of the kind, just headed for Swanage.

  Swanage

  Swanage is a modest seaside resort, both in size and character, but full of eccentricity. Its growth and transformation towards the end of the nineteenth century was bemoaned by some of those who had known it of old. Among them was a remarkable and appealing Dorset man, Frederick Treves, best known today as the surgeon who treated and befriended the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick. Treves made his medical reputation through his pioneering treatment of appendicitis, a condition which at the time – the turn of the nineteenth century – was more often than not fatal. In 1902 he was called in to examine the infected appendix of the new King, Edward VII. The coronation was due; Treves said it must be postponed. When Edward argued, the surgeon told him that if he didn’t have an operation with a period for recovery there would be a funeral instead of a coronation. The King submitted, the appendix was drained and Treves was made a baronet for his deft work with the knife.

  Frederick Treves’ contribution to the incomparable Highways and Byways series of guidebooks published by Macmillan between 1899 and 1939 is one of the best. It is stuffed with curious tales and recondite information, and imbued with the vigour and energy that its author displayed as he tramped, cycled, swam and sailed in and around his beloved home county. Treves was a lifelong friend of Thomas Hardy, and when he died suddenly in 1923 of an infected gallbladder, it was the ancient Hardy who arranged the funeral in Dorchester, chose the hymns and wrote a brief epitaph.