Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  ‘I met the prodigious English harpist Parish-Alvars . . . the man is a Liszt of the harp. You cannot conceive all the delicate and powerful effects that he manages to produce from an instrument in many respects so limited. His fantasy on Moses, his Variations on the Naiads’ Chorus from Oberon and a score of similar pieces delighted me more than I can say.’

  Parish-Alvars wore himself out playing and touring, and died in Vienna in 1849, the same year as Mendelssohn. As a boy he had been much encouraged by a prominent Teignmouth figure, Sir Warwick Tonkin, who – when he heard of his death – wrote some memorial verses for the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette:

  O’er Mendelssohn the cypress tree

  Was scarcely planted near,

  Ere weeping willows bend, we see,

  To shadow Alvars’ bier . . .

  * * *

  The ride from Shaldon to Torquay is not one I would care to repeat. Not only is it atrociously steep, but there is no realistic alternative to following the main and extremely busy A379. Cyclists moving at less than 3 m.p.h. are not popular with motorists. Impatience is palpable, hostility often open.

  The road passes through a succession of places with names ending in ‘combe’ – all once separate villages but now forming together the northern limb or tentacle of the Torbay urban spread. The last is Babbacombe, below which the land drops down to the sea at a beach called, not Babbacombe, but Oddicombe. Early in 2013 a large section of the cliff slid into the sea, staining it blood red for weeks and bringing down with it part of a large house which – perhaps imprudently – had been bought at an auction by a retired London police officer without looking at it.

  The unstable rock at Oddicombe is not the mudstone of Sidmouth but Permian breccia – interestingly different for geologists, but for the rest of us very similar in its redness and its habit of falling on incautious heads. At Oddicombe it is flanked to north and south by outcrops of grey Devonian limestone, foretastes of major changes to come.

  It was here that a remarkable, self-taught Victorian naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, and his young son poked and pried and delved into the rock pools exposed at low tide. Their relationship, which must have seemed then so natural and instinctive, would much later provide the material for a haunting and unforgettable exercise in rearranging the past, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.

  The son’s version of the story tells how Henry Gosse, a rigid and fervent member of the fundamentalist Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, tried to shape his only child into another warrior for Christ; of the rupture between them, and of the agony of mind caused by the conflict between the father’s creationist beliefs and the evidence of the world’s great age he found staring him in the face from the pools.

  The most extraordinary thing about Father and Son – demonstrated by Ann Thwaite in her biographies of the Gosses – is the way in which the son so carefully distorted the portrait of the father and the nature of the bond between them. Edmund Gosse called it ‘a genuine slice of life’ and insisted that it was scrupulously true. Henry James was nearer the mark when he said of Gosse that he had a ‘genius for inaccuracy’. The mystery is whether or not he was aware in his heart that he had manipulated a whole series of incidents and encounters to support a version of his father that those who knew him found unrecognisable; and if he was aware, why did he do it?

  Curiously, Henry Gosse had a much greater influence on his age than Edmund on his. The son was an industrious professional writer, his many volumes of poetry, literary criticism and biography mildly admired in his time and subsequently wholly forgotten – apart from Father and Son. The father wrote a series of bestsellers about the wonders to be found where the land meets the sea – most notably A Year at the Shore – which set off a Victorian craze for rock-pooling. Gosse came bitterly to regret his part in the invasion of the shore by ‘crinoline and collecting jar’. ‘You may search all the likely and promising rocks within reach of Torquay,’ he wrote, ‘which a few years ago were like gardens . . . and come home with an empty jar and an aching heart, all now being swept as clean as the palm of your hand.’

  This excessively sensitive and remarkable man died in August 1888, not long after a final drive along the Torbay coast with his son. He had always prayed fervently that his destiny would be to witness the Second Coming and be chosen as one of the ‘favoured saints who shall never taste of death’. Edmund Gosse claimed much later that in his final hours his father had turned on his God, rebuking him bitterly for the deception. Is he to be believed?

  Torquay is the most westerly of the major Channel resorts and historically the one with the highest opinion of itself. Its growth in the nineteenth century owed much to the natural advantages of its position and the allegedly exceptional balminess of its climate. Its promoters invoked a parallel with the South of France and suggested that Torquay had somehow managed to import its unique microclimate from the Mediterranean and reposition it on a bay along the rugged, storm-tossed coast of Devon.

  Investors fell for the lure of the English Riviera. Military men, retired naval commanders, doctors and solicitors, respectable merchants and provincial bankers all scurried west to snap up sites on one or other of Torquay’s five or six or seven hills (opinion is divided on the exact number). They built spaciously and elegantly, chose their neighbours with care, brought with them the values and standards of moneyed, middle-class Victorian England.

  An early expression of Torquay’s idea of itself is Hesketh Crescent, a bow-shaped row of exuberant early Victorian town houses looking out to sea from the north side of Tor Bay. Charles Harper claimed that early on summer mornings the retired generals and colonels of Hesketh Crescent set forth for their morning dip ‘clad in gorgeous dressing-gowns, shuffling in bath slippers to the sea, the bright sun making heliographs of their bald and shining pates.’ But even Hesketh Crescent, Harper bemoaned, was subject to changing tastes. ‘To Let’ boards had appeared; the generals and colonels were too close together for comfort. Detachment was the rage – ‘a multitude of discreet villas, each enclosed in its grounds behind inclosing walls and shrubberies.’

  Torquay’s retirees continued to maintain a tight control over its development. To be ‘select’ was the guiding principle. Exmouth, Paignton, Ilfracombe on the north coast, were all welcome to pull in the hordes of eager trippers. Torquay, like Sidmouth and Budleigh Salterton, did its best to keep them out. In the years between the two world wars, Torquay Council invested consistently in appropriate amenities. It built a pier, a magnificent Pavilion and a bandstand, installed pleasure gardens and shaded walks fitted with many benches, provided a boating lake and bowling greens and tennis courts as well as anchorages for yachts and pontoons for cruises by motor boat.

  The 1932 official guide stated Torquay’s philosophy plainly: ‘Those whose idea of a holiday is compounded of big wheels, paper caps, donkeys, tin whistles and generally a remorseless harliquinade turn their backs on the town . . . the residue, the thoroughly normal, healthily educated people who are the backbone of the nation, love Torquay.’ Sunday trippers were banned, but seductive posters illustrating Torquay’s sundrenched charms shone down from the portals of Paddington Station. The Times approved: ‘Torquay is certainly the English equivalent of Cannes . . . there is no other resort which, apart from a certain prim austerity in the administration of the licensing laws, comes nearer in character and amenities to the most progressive of Mediterranean towns.’

  The 1939–45 war changed everything. But it took Torquay some time to wake up to new realities. In 1949 Alderman Edward Ely addressed the council thus: ‘We have to make up our minds if we are to continue as a snobbish seaside resort, which I and many other people prefer. If Blackpool sells tripe, that is no reason why we should.’ The council voted for business as usual and reaffirmed its ban on Sunday games. But this was post-war England, a very different place, and business could not be as usual.

  The fate of the wonderful Pavilion illustrates the point. When it opened in 1912 this stat
ely pleasure house embodied and symbolised Torquay’s pride in itself. Faced in gleaming enamelled tiles, its central dome supported a full-sized figure of Britannia, with statues of Mercury above the two smaller domes. Outside, it had a promenade deck, octagonal bandstands, floral swags, urns topped with pineapples, carved scrolls, ferns and cherubs, an amazing wealth of decorative ironwork. Inside, there were sumptuous lounges, a café, an auditorium panelled in oak and embellished with mouldings. The Torquay Municipal Orchestra played mornings and afternoons, the concerts often broadcast by the BBC.

  The Pavilion was always a heavy drain on the council’s budget, but one it was prepared to carry to maintain the dignity and prestige of a premier seaside resort. But after 1945 costs rose as income fell, and the tone was inexorably lowered. The orchestra was disbanded, a body blow to civic pride. They tried variety, bingo, roller-skating, ice-skating. The final live entertainment, in 1976, was the Eric Sykes Show with Hattie Jacques and Deryck Guyler – a far cry from the opening night of the 1926 season, The Farmer’s Wife, starring the young Laurence Olivier.

  Two schemes for demolishing the Pavilion and developing the site were proposed in the 1960s, but campaigners shamed the council into rejecting them. It reopened after a refit in 1987 as a complex of small shops and survived in this form until 2012, when the traders were evicted in preparation for another grand hotel/shopping/car park redevelopment vision. The Pavilion, by now looking very sad and shabby, was shut. And that is how it remains, sadder and shabbier still, now dwarfed by yet another Big Wheel.

  In the 1980s the council was persuaded that the town’s flagging economy could be revived by the provision of a venue for conferences and year-round events on the lines of the one in Bournemouth. The demolition of the elegant old Rosetor Hotel on Chestnut Avenue provided a prime location for what was to become the English Riviera Centre. The firm responsible for Bournemouth’s BIC, Module 2, was hired; the predictable result was a hideous grey slab with six stunted turrets topped in green. Now renamed the Riviera International Centre, it welcomes visitors in eleven languages. It remains a dispiriting sight in all of them, its ugliness the more striking because of its close proximity to the glorious medieval Torre Abbey, while continuing to cost the council an arm and a leg to keep it from falling down altogether.

  By then the responsible local authority was Torbay Council, which had swallowed up the old Torquay Council as well as those of Paignton and Brixham. The change reflected the dilution of Torquay’s once impregnable exclusivity. In the 1960s it became for a time a favoured destination for disaffected youth seeking sunshine, loud music and freedom from the stifling confines of home. Their clothes, hair, unwashed feet and apparently casual morals were repugnant to Torquay, and the town’s Trades Council passed a motion imploring the police to get rid of ‘these so-called Beatniks’.

  According to Torquay’s inquisitive historian, Kevin Dixon (see www.peoplesrepublicofsouthdevon.co.uk for a full selection of his work) this invasion was blamed on a 1964 film set in Torquay, The System, in which a group of hormonally vibrant young men, led by a startlingly youthful Oliver Reed, hunt for complaisant girls among the summer influx. Incidentally, the film is also credited with popularising ‘grockle’ as a derogatory term for tourists. Kevin Dixon records that a swimming-pool attendant in Torquay referred to an elderly female swimmer as The Grockle because she reminded him of a dragon so named in a cartoon in the Dandy comic. It caught on among locals as a label for all visitors, and was picked up by the film’s scriptwriter.

  Whatever the Trades Council and the residue of the retired generals and colonels might think, Torquay had to go downmarket. The question was – and remains – how to manage that descent. Tourism is the town’s lifeblood. Keeping it flowing is a struggle, with casualties on the way. One has been the residential hotel of the type immortalised in John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. A more recent example was the Grosvenor, whose progress onto the rocks under the hand of its bouffant-haired owner, Mark Jenkins, was charted in squirmingly embarrassing detail by a Channel 4 series, The Hotel. Plenty of Torquay’s hotels have sunk; others remain just afloat in a condition that challenges belief. But some cruise along because they successfully manage the balance between quality and quantity – between the discriminating visitor and the necessary coach party – to the satisfaction of both.

  Torquay is blessed by natural advantages: its hills, the sweep of its bays, its sand, its blue sea, the way it is cradled between its headlands and the rising land behind. Speculators and developers, aided by successive generations of councillors and officials, have committed many crimes against the town, but not enough of them to despoil it.

  One of the particular pleasures of Torquay is to arrive at its elegant railway station and walk across the road to the wedge of green that is the home of its rugby, cricket and bowls clubs. How delightful it is to have these sports at the heart of the place instead of banished to some faraway windswept tract of reclaimed wasteland. I walked from the bowls club’s cheerful black-and-white clubhouse through the gardens in front of Torre Abbey, registering the presence of the Riviera Centre with a shudder, and onto the beach. It was a soft, mild day in late February, balmy enough to sustain Torquay’s climatic pretensions. I met a chap doing early maintenance on the wooden platform on which the family beach hut would sit for the summer. Torquay born and bred, he told me the town was on the slide; and to illustrate his argument pointed out to me the roof of the Grosvenor Hotel where Mr Jenkins had just finished making a considerable ass of himself for the TV cameras.

  The tide was almost in and I strolled along the sea wall, admiring the recently repaired Royal Terrace Gardens soaring above the pier and the Princess Theatre and the marina. Beyond the harbour the road climbed past the Imperial Hotel, which was in need of a lick of paint and struck me as rather less imperial than the Grand was grand. I picked up the coastal path which twists and turns up a steepening slope among choice villas glimpsed behind hedges and walls – some banal in design, some outlandish, some rather sweet. Eventually I came out at Babbacombe, stopped in my tracks by the appearance of the Palace Hotel, itself appropriately characterised by Pevsner as ‘an unprepossessing monster’ but redeemed somewhat by its very splendid grounds.

  It was a good long walk, but the best of it was the promenade along the seafront between the pier and the Grand. It is a curious word, promenade, meaning both the activity and where it takes place. The pleasure of it is at the heart of the pleasure of the seaside town: the stroll from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular and back again, in no kind of hurry, with no particular purpose in mind except to pull the sea air deep into the lungs, feel the rhythm of the sea and match it to the rhythm of your heartbeat and the tread of your feet, and to notice and delight in the incidentals.

  17

  MINE GOOT PEOPLE

  I was looking for Oldway Mansion, which is the marvel of Paignton, when I bumped into an elderly woman and her daughter walking companionably along a leafy avenue away from the seafront. She gave me directions, and I asked her how she liked Paignton. She said she had been evacuated to Torquay from London in 1939, and had come back thirty years later with her husband to live there. ‘Then we moved to Paignton. Torquay used to look down on Paignton, now it’s the other way round.’ She said she walked down to the seafront most days, had a cup of tea, watched the world go by. ‘I really like Paignton,’ she said. ‘I always have.’

  Paignton’s holiday trade is of the cheap-as-chips variety and that is the flavour of its seafront: cheerful, noisy, dare one say it, a touch tacky. Under the June sunshine the red beach shone with oiled flesh. The smell of batter spread from the several chippies. The pier reverberated to the clash of dodgems and the clang of slot machines. The multiple attractions of the Green – the broad open space between the sea and the handsome white-and-cream villas along Esplanade Road – seethed with families unashamedly drawn to Paignton by the cheapness of the abundant self-catering accommodation. It declared itself conscious
ly to be the polar opposite of Torquay, and proud of it.

  Yet away from the seafront they have a good deal in common. Paignton’s town centre was laid out in the 1870s and 1880s in expansive style by George Bridgman, a local architect of taste and vision. Many of the handsome terraces of town houses and the villas and public buildings from that era survive and convey an atmosphere of genteel and comfortable living far removed from the raucous fun required by the holidaymakers.

  In 1870 George Bridgman was introduced to a large American with a luxuriant white beard and wealth to match. Isaac Merritt Singer, the sewing-machine magnate, had arrived in south Devon by a circuitous route. He had left America for Paris a few years before to escape from a remarkably complicated and scandalous domestic situation involving the fathering of at least a dozen children through various marriages, bigamous and otherwise, and amorous entanglements. In Paris he lived contentedly enough with Isabelle Boyer, the last of his wives, who provided him with six more children, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1872 persuaded them that England would be safer. He visited Torbay and liked what he saw. Land was available in Paignton and he set about buying up as much of it as he could lay hands on.

  Singer took a shine to young George Bridgman, and commissioned him to design a residence on a rather grander scale than Paignton was used to. It was to be a mansion in French Renaissance style, which Singer insisted should be called The Wigwam to remind him of home. In addition he needed somewhere to exercise his horses by day and entertain by night, so Bridgman supervised the construction of a round red-brick pavilion with a low conical roof, called the Rotunda.

  The horses were exercised and the invitations were issued. But the snobs of Torbay were not impressed by Singer’s Rotunda or his horses or his money or – least of all – by his reputation, and turned their backs on him. The traders and merchant classes were less choosy; on New Year’s Day 1874 all the children of Paignton were invited to inspect Singer’s 26-foot Christmas tree and receive presents from the man himself. Meanwhile work on The Wigwam proceeded, but before it was finished, Isaac Singer dropped dead from heart failure. The funeral was the kind of spectacle he relished. Eighty carriages formed the procession to the white marble Singer mausoleum in Torquay’s cemetery, stretching back three–quarters of a mile through the streets and watched by tens of thousands. His body was dressed in black coat, trousers and slippers, white shirt, waistcoat and gloves. It was placed in a cedarwood coffin inside a lead coffin inside an oak coffin.