The entrance to the awful sanctities of Hesketh Crescent is passed on the ascent from Meadfoot into Torquay; but the Crescent is not what it was, and boards, actually proclaiming houses to let, disfigure the proprieties of its threshold. As a matter of fact, the taste—or rather, the fashion—which obtained when Hesketh Crescent was built has wholly changed, and residents by the seaside are no longer content to live in a continuous row of houses. It is an unavoidable condition in great towns, but most undesirable for a place like Torquay, whose ideal is detachment, and whose chief feature, in the residential districts, away from the business centre, is the multitude of discreet villas, each enclosed in its grounds, behind masonry walls and shrubberies. If these villas were situated near the Regent’s Park district of London, the discretion of encompassing walls and screening shrubberies would be referred to motives not here to be discussed, but Torquay being what it is, these features are but marks of the strictly proper seclusion that is an essential feature of its existence; an emotionless existence punctuated by the visits of gibbering curates and the meetings of Dorcas Societies.
Nothing is more remarkable in the later history of Torquay than the number of “literary landmarks” and associations it has gathered to itself; more particularly associations connected with the spinster lady authors of improving stories. Torquay, of course, is not merely the place for invalid visitors in the winter, but a place of residence for many delicate persons to whom its genial warmth is the very breath of life. It would seem that when contemplative persons of a certain fragility seek a permanent home, they come to Torquay and write stories like Christy’s Old Organ and Jessica’s First Prayer. At any rate, the remarkable little shilling book, Literary Landmarks of Torquay, by Mr. W. J. Roberts, discovers an amazing number of literary associations, with Charles Kingsley, P. H. Gosse, W. E. Norris, and Eden Phillpotts at their head, and a regiment of ladies bringing up the rear.
The seven hills—or more—on which Torquay is built are dotted plentifully with the largest and finest of these quiet villas, and the hollows in between are cut up into winding roads, where the stranger may speedily lose his bearings. If you consult a plan of Torquay, it will be perceived that the roads of its residential districts are like so many vermiculations, returning upon one another and intertwining almost with the intricacy of whorls in a Celtic design. It must have been far easier to find one’s way about the site of Torquay a century ago than now, and in many respects it was surely a more desirable place. From existing records one may form a very exact picture of it, say in 1815, when the long-dreaded “Boney,” for many years a figure of terror to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, was brought captive on the Bellerophon into Tor Bay, to be revealed to the gaping hundreds who put off in boats to see him, as merely a little fat man, clean-shaven, melancholy, and obviously unwell, mildly pacing the quarter-deck, and saying unexpectedly complimentary things about the scenery and the climate.
Its inhabitants then numbered about fifteen hundred, chiefly fishermen and the wives and families of naval officers, who, anchoring from time to time in the safe and roomy anchorage of Tor Bay, had first “discovered” the place. It was then still little more than that Quay at the foot of the hills (or “Tors”) it had been when William of Orange landed at Brixham, in 1688; and the fine old residence of Tor Abbey, seat then as now of the Carys, was the only considerable place in the neighbourhood. The hill-tops were yet in a state of nature, except the crest of Chapel Hill, where the little chapel of St. Michael formed a notable landmark for sailors. This was, according to legend, the offering of some ancient mariner, and displayed a beacon-light at night, to guide shipping safely into the bay. The ancient chapel, one of the smallest in England, measuring only thirty-six feet in length, remains to this day, two hundred and seventy feet above the sea, at the modern suburb of Torre, and is part of the borough meteorological station.
THE ANCIENT CHAPEL OF ST. MICHAEL, TORRE.
The Carys had so long been seated by the shores of Tor Bay, in the halls of the discredited and dispossessed monks, that they had lost all sense of the trend of affairs, and were utterly unimaginative; and accordingly when in 1786 Sir Robert Palk, retiring wondrously enriched from the governorship of Madras, and with an £80,000 legacy into the bargain, purchased Tormoham Manor, they made no attempt to outbid him. To the changed times and to the Palk family Torquay owes its growth. Tor Bay had in all those bygone centuries been a lovely solitude, for in the warlike ages, when fire and sword swept even sheltered spots like Dartmouth, snugly hidden behind a difficult entrance, an open strand was too dangerous a place to settle upon; but Sir Robert Palk early perceived changed conditions and made his account with them, and in due time his son, Sir Lawrence Palk, succeeded him and built the first harbour. The inevitable consequence of the Palk activities and of the changed condition of affairs was that the town of Torquay sprang into vigorous existence, and the further and equally obvious consequence of the Palks becoming great as ground-landlords was that in the fulness of time they were raised from baronets to be barons; Sir Lawrence Hesketh Palk, fifth baronet, being in 1880, in his thirty-fourth year, raised to the peerage as Baron Haldon. I can quite distinctly hear gnashings of teeth and imprecations at lost opportunities from the direction of Tor Abbey, echoing down the alleys of the years.
Torquay was built when the Italian villa fashion prevailed in the land. It was a favourable spot for such an experiment. Look back upon those terraced and rock-girt hills from this kindly distance of the harbour, and the Italianate character of the scenery, in its brilliant colouring and bold and picturesque outline, is obvious, and from this remove quite a number of those villas deceptively resemble in outline the marble palazzos of Florence, of Venice or Bologna. But close at hand they are no more Italian than an Italian warehouse, which we all know to be a parabolic description of an oil and colour shop.
And now Torquay has acquired a Mayor and Corporation, with town arms and a crest and the advertising motto, Salus et Felicitas, and ought to be happy as well as healthful, as per motto: even though that motto does, when spoken, suggest “sailors and solicitors.” But no! Torquay has since learned that these luxuries are expensive; in the facts that while, when the town was incorporated, in 1892, there were then but twenty-one officials, whose salaries amounted to £2,413, there are now thirty-nine, who draw £5,495.