Many British seaside towns are currently fighting a
reputation for being run down, having many residents suffering financial
hardship, having an influx of homeless people with all their problems, and also
for open drug use. This is, of course, a generalisation, as there are many
“bijou resorts” with many (un)occupied second homes and even the major resorts have
marinas filled with craft owned by wealthy residents or by visitors who own
apartments where they spend a few weeks, or week-ends, each year.
The influx of visitors to UK resorts has always been at its
height during summer and in the 1950s and 1960s tourists poured in by train,
coach and, latterly, by private car. “No Vacancy” signs were everywhere: on
large and small hotels and also on guest houses, often converted from large Victorian
properties built for a quite different type of visitor. I was brought up in
Torbay and, as a year-round resident, was aware of the huge differences in the
numbers of people in Paignton and Torquay in the summer months compared to the
population in winter, when so many businesses that catered for holidaymakers
shut down. All this was obvious, but I was not as curious as I should have been
about the origins of the handsome villas and large houses that had been
converted to accommodate visitors (and are now more widely used as holiday apartments).
The young rarely are curious about history: it is something which comes with
age and a sense of time passing.
Torquay was especially lucky in having a building boom in
the mid-Nineteenth Century, with villas in an Italianate style being common,
mirroring the Riviera feeling that the location of the town provided. Some of
the villas were permanent residences and some were for shorter-term stays for those
who wanted to own property in this fashionable resort. Then there were hotels
that catered for First Class passengers and for members of the burgeoning
middle classes who were attracted by the climate, beautiful setting and social
cachet of the town. It was a time when visitors enjoyed a gentle walk, or a
carriage ride, through the beautiful countryside and many also joined in the
passion for Marine Natural History that was at its height at this time.
We get an idea of just how important a visit to the shore
could be from the writings of Philip Henry Gosse, who lived in St Marychurch in
Torquay, venturing round the coast and out to sea [1]. He was one of the great
popularisers of Natural History and part of the fascination for visitors to the
shores of Torbay was down to him [2]. In his book Land and Sea [3], Henry Gosse describes the local coastal scenery
and the book is illustrated by woodcuts in a highly Romantic style that must
have encouraged readers to visit Torbay (some are shown below).
Another woodcut from the book (see below) shows a man and
woman on the shore, dressed appropriately for collecting and making observations
[4]. This is what Henry Gosse writes about the effects of collectors,
especially of sea anemones, that would be added to their parlour aquaria, a
popular form of “entertainment” at the time:
Ah! gentle reader, I’ll whisper a
secret in your ear; but don’t tell that I said so for ‘tis high treason against
the ladies. Since the opening of sea-science to the million, such has been the
invasion of the shore by crinoline and collecting jars, that you may search all
the likely and promising rocks within reach of Torquay, which a few years ago
were like gardens with full-blossomed anemones and antheas, and come home with
an empty jar and an aching heart, all now being swept as clean as the palm of
your hand! Yet let me do the fair students and their officious beaux justice:
the work is not altogether done by such hands as theirs; but there is a host of
professional collectors, small tradesmen whom you must search-up in back
alleys, and whose houses you will easily recognize by the sea-weedy odour, even
before you see the array of pans and dishes in front of the door all crowded
with full-blown specimens. These collect for the trade, and are indefatigable.
Only think of the effect produced on the marine population by three or four men
in a town, one of whom will take ten dozen anemones in a single tide!
A reflection then of the popularity of the pursuit of
collecting marine animals. It is not something that we recognise today,
although families still venture on the shore to examine rock pools.
Later in Land and Sea,
Gosse describes travelling to parts of Torbay that were less popular for collectors
[3]:
Therefore it was that we ran some
miles away from home, and pursued a pleasant road, partly through green lanes,
rank with the glossy young leaves of the arum, and the arching fronds of the
hart’s-tongue fern, scarcely embrowned by the late arctic winter; and partly
sweeping along the shore-line and over the cliffs that make the base of this
beautiful bay; till, Paignton being some distance behind us, we turned off to
the left down a little lane, and drew up at the margin of the broad flat beach
called the Goodrington Sands.
Far away is the edge of the sea,
for the tide is wonderfully low, though we have yet a full hour and a half
before it will be at its lowest point, and an immense breadth of soft, wet sand
lies exposed. We pause for a moment to gaze on the boundary to the right. It is
Berry Head, a noble headland that projects like a long wall far out into the sea,
and presents its bluff termination, crowned with fortifications, to the impact
of the waves that drive in with impotent fury from the wide Atlantic.
Berry Head is mentioned in the label to the woodcut of
collectors shown above and, in Land and
Sea, Gosse goes on to describe his methods of collecting, although contemporary
Natural Historians would frown at his use of chisels and hammers to remove
specimens together with the rocks to which they are attached.
Above are two contemporary images of Goodrington Sands and I
wonder how many visitors today are aware of the activities of the passionate
collectors of the mid-Nineteenth Century? The rocks in the lower picture were
one of the collecting sites used by Henry Gosse and it is good to see young
children in the picture following his example, but presumably without chisels and hammers.
If only they knew about their enthusiastic predecessors.
[1] Edmund Gosse (1896) The
Naturalist of the Sea-shore: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse. London,
William Heinemann.
[2] Charles Kingsley (1855) Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore. London, Macmillan and Co.
[3] Philip Henry Gosse (1865) Land and Sea. London, James Nisbet & Co.
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