Another local railway legend, of some interest, relates to a forlorn platform that no living person ever saw put to any manner of use. It stood some distance to the north side of the existing station for Uphill and Bleadon, and was popularly supposed to be a station erected by the Company in accordance with the letter (certainly not with the spirit) of an agreement entered into between the Company and a local landowner through whose land the railway had been made, at an extravagant cost, in consequence of the high price this freeholder had put upon his holding. He, it appears, finally insisted upon having a station built for his own personal convenience, and the Company agreed. But nothing had been said about trains stopping there, and so no tickets were ever issued to or from this freak building, and no trains ever halted at it.
Nowadays with its twenty-five thousand inhabitants, Weston welcomes, instead of repelling, the visitor. Nay, more: it has arrived at that stage of existence to which most other seaside towns have come, and lives for and on visitors, and when the summer season is over ceases to be its characteristic self; always remembering that in winter its climate is mild and inviting to invalids.
It has long been the fashion in many quarters to depreciate Weston-super-Mare, and to style it “Weston-super-Mud.” Mud there is in plenty, far out in this shallow bay, and it is exposed for a great distance at the ebb, but it never intermingles with the fine broad yellow sands that form a paradise for children along the entire two miles’ sweep of the bay, from Anchor Head to Uphill, and make a fine track for the donkey rides that are so great a feature of the children’s holidays here. The scenery surrounding Weston is delightful and singularly romantic. Boldly placed in mid-Channel are those twin, but strongly dissimilar islets, the Steep Holm and Flat Holm, the last-named provided with a prominent white lighthouse, and both in these latter days the site of massive forts presenting an embattled front to any possible hostile voyage up the Severn Sea. These islets are outlying fragments of the Mendip range of hills, which ends south of the town in the quarried hills of Bleadon and Uphill, and in the almost islanded gigantic bulk of Brean Down. Overhanging the town on the north is that other outlier of the Mendips, Worle Hill. In every direction, therefore, we find hills peaking up with a suddenness and an outline almost volcanic in appearance. The air, too, of Weston is brisk and enjoyable; and if there be indeed nothing of interest in the town itself, modern creation as it is, the same criticism is applicable to many another seaside resort. The stranger, therefore, who has for many years been familiar with severe and undiscriminating criticisms of Weston finds it, when at last fate brings him hither, a very much more likeable place than he had dared hope.
It must, however, be said that Weston is not select. It is popular, in the sense that Yarmouth, Blackpool, and Southport (to name none others) are popular. It caters of necessity for the crowd, for the crowd is at its very threshold. Half an hour’s railway journey from Bristol, and a mere ten miles’ steamer voyage from Cardiff and other populous Welsh ports, would render useless any attempts that might be made to keep Weston as a preserve for the comparatively few rich, leisured, and cultured persons who might give its Parade a better tone, but certainly would not do the shopkeeping class much good. And to do the people and the local authorities of Weston the merest justice, they make no such attempts, foredoomed to failure as they would be. I do not know what the motto of Weston-super-Mare may be, nor even indeed if it has one. If not already furnished in this respect, it might well be “Let ’em all come.” And they do already come in very considerable numbers. But this, it should be said, is not to pretend that Weston is either so large, or so besieged with immense crowds of visitors, as Blackpool and the other popular resorts already mentioned. Still the streets, the long curving Parade, and the sands are in July, August, and September as densely crowded as any lover of humanity in masses could reasonably desire, and the place is as fully furnished with strictly unintellectual amusements as the average lower middle-class holiday-maker could hope for, outside Blackpool and Yarmouth. Here is a pier, the “Grand Pier” it is called, thrusting forth a long arm from the centre of the Parade into the shallow waters of the bay, with a huge concert pavilion midway, and a further lengthy arm going on and on until it rivals Southend pier itself, with a total length of 6,600 feet, or something like a mile and a quarter; the intention being to enable the excursion steamers to touch at the pier-head. An electric railway runs the length of this prodigious affair, which entirely eclipses the old Birnbeck Pier under Anchor Head: really a pier-like bridge connecting the rocky isle of Birnbeck with the mainland. From the isle itself three pier-arms project in different directions, and to these the excursion steamers from Bristol, Cardiff and other ports have hitherto come. Such dreams of delight await the incoming visitors on this siren isle that many day-excursionists to Weston proceed no farther. The place abounds with every kind of amusement, except the intellectual variety: water-chutes, switchback railways, try-your-weight and try-your-strength machines, and battalions of other penny-in-the-slot mechanisms; and, above all, a damned something that may be espied from the shore, like a huge giant’s-stride pole with baskets whizzing in dizzy fashion around it; the said baskets being filled with people who have paid a penny each for the privilege of being given a sensation which must be a colourable imitation of sea-sickness. The channel called the Stepway, which separates Birnbeck from Anchor Head at high tide, is readily crossed at low water; but the place has its hidden dangers, in a very swift current that sweeps suddenly through when the tide again begins to flow; as may be seen by personal observation, and in the evidence offered by a tablet in Clevedon church, which records the deaths in 1819 by drowning of Abraham and Charles Elton, two sons of Sir Abraham Elton, who at the ages of thirteen and fourteen were thus cut off: “In crossing from Bearnbeck Isle, at Weston-super-Mare, the younger became involved in the tide, when the elder plunged to his rescue. The flood was stronger than their strength, though not their love, and as ‘they were lovely and pleasant in their lives,’ so ‘in their death they were not divided.’”
Midway between Birnbeck and the Grand Pier is a projecting rock, once an island called Knightstone, now connected with the shore and made the site of the Knightstone Pavilion and Baths.
Add to these varied delights the presence of hundreds of itinerant vendors on Parade and sands, and barrows innumerable in the busy streets; and throw in a very plentiful supply of teashops, restaurants, and dining-rooms in the centre of the town, whose proprietors or their agents stand on the pavement and shout for custom, and you will have a very fair notion of what Weston is like. To these items, however, must be added Grove Park, with its mansion, the old manor-house of the Smyth-Pigotts, and, the Clarence Park, and one other. Finally, conceive that indispensable feature of a modern watering-place, an electric tramway, and there you have Weston-super-Mare.
Everything is very new, and probably the one ancient object is the chancel of the parish church, which seems to have escaped rebuilding, but is not, at any rate, of much interest. In the church is the following curious epitaph:
Of two brothers born together,
Cruel death was so unkind
As to bring the eldest hither,