The South Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The little terminus, so high above the town, smells like a fish-shop, for Brixham is pre-eminently in Devon the place of fish, and great trainloads go forth every day. You look astonishingly down upon roof-tops from this place.

MILES COVERDALE’S TOWER, PAIGNTON.

Down there is Brixham, perched with seeming precariousness along the steeply sloping sides of the hills overlooking the pool that forms its crowded harbour. To those who have never seen the fisher towns of Cornwall it is an amazing place: those who know the Cornish coast realise that this is the first of the true West Country fishing harbours, and it seems to them to have strayed over into Devon by mistake. To speak by the card, the “Brixham” of modern speech is strictly “Brixham Quay,” and Higher Brixham, away up-along, on the high table-land, is the real original Brixham; but Brixham Quay long since supplanted the original place in importance. It is by far the largest and busiest fishing-port in Devon, and as different from Torquay in character as chalk proverbially is from cheese, marching-boots from patent-leathers, salt from sugar, or any other picturesque and striking antithesis you can think of. In Torquay you commonly hear Brixham spoken of as a “dirty, stinking hole” and by similar terms, the reverse of endearing, but while we may not deny it to be that, it is that and something more. It is natural, and characteristic of the real old seafaring and fishing life of this coast, and Torquay, however delightful, is not. Torquay and all “seaside resorts” are excrescences, and utterly uncharacteristic of the real indigenous life. No artist would choose to paint or sketch Torquay and its delightful but pictorially impossible villas, and smart but artistically desolating visitors; but Brixham is an artistic paradise. It is dirty but natural, smelly but picturesque at every turn. An excellent opportunity offers here, had we the leisure, for a philosophic disquisition on the delightfully picturesque qualities of dirt and untidiness, and the negation, artistically, of order and sanitation. Because of its wallowing in fish-offal and its generally rough-and-ready ways, Brixham is no place for the visitor, as generally understood; but artists rejoice in it and its ways.

It must by no means be understood that the houses of Brixham are picturesque. They are nothing of the kind, being simply gaunt, stark unlovely structures of cob, or stone, or lath and plaster, as the case may be, generally stuccoed and slate-roofed; with a resultant effect of greyness. But they are arrayed in such amazing tiers of terraces, one above the other, and are huddled so nearly together, and hang so closely over the harbour that the general effect is highly picturesque.

Brixham changes little, and appears to be very much as P. H. Gosse, visiting it in 1853, found it; “close, mean and dirty,” with “refinements of filth” which he had never seen paralleled. One feels quite sorry for that distinguished naturalist; but on the shore, at low water, under the stones, he found Trochus ziziphinus numerously, which seems to have been some consolation. One feels irresistibly tempted to suggest that, had he stayed at Brixham the night, he might also have found pulex irritans, at the least of it, which would not have been so satisfactory.

It was to this fishy place that William, Prince of Orange, came on November 5th, 1688, intent upon saving the liberties of England from extinction at the hands of his bigoted father-in-law, James the Second. The “Protestant Deliverer” came invited and welcomed by the majority of Englishmen, for the country was so shiftless that it could not make out to save itself; and, because of the mutual jealousies that would have forbidden the success of any rising headed by one of our own, must needs call in the cold, silent Dutchman, whom none loved. One’s sympathies are distinctly with the debonnair Duke of Monmouth, whose rebellion had ended so disastrously, three years earlier.

The Hollander preparations for this invasion were great, and spread over a considerable period of time; and there was, moreover, no secret made of them. The flotilla gathered together for the enterprise consisted of fifty men-o’-war, and over five hundred transports, carrying an army of fourteen thousand men. It was thus not very much the inferior in strength to that of the great Armada itself. It waited long in the harbour of Helvoetsluys, attendant upon the wind, which had been blowing steadily in an unfavourable direction. At last, October 16th, it changed from west to east, and the hour seemed to have come. The prince took leave of the States-General, which wept copiously over him; while he remained, as was his wont, grave and phlegmatic, only recommending the princess to their care, should anything happen to him.

The great fleet sailed on the 19th, but the next day the wind changed to north, and then worked round with violent gales from the west, so that, in distress, they were obliged to put back to port. No vessels were lost, and only one man was drowned, but five hundred horses died.