To this place, for health and quiet, on account of their embarrassed finances, and for the sake of their infant daughter, the Princess Victoria, then only a few months old, the Duke and Duchess of Kent came in the autumn of 1819, and took up their residence at the pretty cottage in Woolacombe Glen, still standing at the western extremity of the town. Here, quite unexpectedly, for he was a robust man, and but fifty-three years of age, the Duke died, January 23rd, 1820, from inflammation of the lungs, the result of a chill. Croker wrote of the event: “You will be surprised at the Duke of Kent’s death. He was the strongest of the strong. Never before ill in all his life, and now to die of a cold when half the kingdom have colds with impunity. It was very bad luck indeed. It reminds me of Æsop’s fable of the oak and the reed.”
Sidmouth continued to grow in favour for years afterwards, and only began to experience neglect when the opening of the railways to the West discovered other beautiful spots in Devonshire. Next to the Royal association already recounted, Sidmouth most prides itself on the fact that in 1831 the Grand Duchess Helene of Russia for three months resided at Fortfield Terrace. Without recourse to a book of reference I do not quite know who exactly was this Grand Duchess, and am not so impressed as I doubtless ought to be. Nor do I think any one else is impressed; but the local historian will never forget the circumstance, and indeed it is devoutly kept in remembrance by the black effigy of a double-headed eagle on the frontage of the terrace.
The railway that took away the prosperity of Sidmouth is now instrumental in keeping it prosperously select, for it is something of a business to arrive in Sidmouth by train, and a great deterrent to trippers to have to change at Sidmouth Junction and, journeying by a branch line, to be deposited on the platform of Sidmouth station, one mile from the town.
Sidmouth is in these days recovering something of its own. Not perhaps precisely in the same way, for the days of early nineteenth-century aristocratic fashion can never again be repeated on this earth. But a new vogue has come to it, and it is as exclusive in its new way as it was in the old; if not, indeed, more exclusive. More exclusive, more moneyed, not at all well-born, jewelled up to the eyes, and only wanting the final touch of being ringed through the nose. Oddly enough, it is a world quite apart from the little town; hidden from it, for the most part, in the hotels of the place. Most gorgeous and expensive hotels, standing in extensive grounds of their own, and all linked together in a business amalgamation, with the object of keeping up prices and shutting out competition.
It is not easy to see for what purpose the patrons of these places come to Sidmouth, unless to come down to breakfast dressed as though one were going to a ball, and dressing thrice a day and sitting in the grounds all day long be objects sufficient. From this point of view, Sidmouth town is a kind of dependence to the hotels, an accidental, little known, unessential hem or fringe, where one cannot wear ball-dresses and tiaras without exciting unpleasant criticism.
Bullion without birth, money without manners are in process of revolutionising some aspects of Sidmouth, and it is quite in accord with the general trend of things that the newest, the largest, the reddest, and the most insistent of the hotels should have shoved a great hulking shoulder up against the pretty, rambling, white-faced cottage in Woolacombe Glen, where some earliest infant months of Queen Victoria were passed, and that it should have exploited the association by calling itself the “Victoria.”
There is no river mouth at all at Sidmouth, and the Sid, which so plentifully christens places on its banks, has not water enough to force its way to sea, as a river should. Instead, it abjectly crawls through the pebbles of the beach, as though wishful of escaping observation; but when storms heap up sand and shingle and the Sid is denied even this humble outlet, then it becomes an urgent matter to hire labour for the speedy digging out a passage, lest the low-lying town should be flooded.
WOOLACOMBE GLEN.