SIDMOUTH
Coming into Sidmouth, you see at once that you are arrived in a Superior
Place, and, before you are perceived, make haste to brush the dust off
your boots, put your headgear straight, and, in general making yourself
look as respectable as may be possible to a rambler in the byways, step
forth with a jaunty air; just as the postboys in the old days, driving
my lord home, although their horses might be exhausted, always “kept a
gallop for the avenue.”
Sidmouth was the first of Devonshire seaside resorts, and had arrived
at that condition long before Thackeray wrote of it as “Baymouth,” in
_Pendennis_. Do you remember how “Pen flung stones into the sea, but it
still kept coming on”? It seems hardly worth while to have said as much,
but having been said, let it be put on record that it has lost none of
its ancient courage in the meanwhile, and in spite of every intimidation,
will still “come on” if you follow Pen’s example; unless, indeed, you
choose the ebb, when, strange to say, it will retreat. It is believed
that this odd phenomenon has been observed elsewhere.
Before Torquay, Teignmouth, Exmouth, and other places had begun to
develop, Sidmouth was a place of fashion, and the signs of that early
favour are still abundantly evident in the town, which is largely a
place of those prim-frontaged, white-faced houses we associate with the
early years of the nineteenth century. It belongs, in fact, to the next
period following that of Lyme Regis, and has just reached the point of
being very quaint and old-world and interesting, as we and ours will have
become in the course of another century. The stucco of Sidmouth is not
as the plaster of Torquay, any more than that of Park Lane is like the
plaster of Notting Hill. It is of the more suave, kid-glove texture we
associate with Park Lane, is white-painted, and is only a distant cousin
of the later plaster of Notting Hill and Torquay, which is grey, and
painted in wholly immoral shades of drab and dun, green, pink, and red;
in anything, indeed, but the virginal white of Sidmouth.
And now, in this town which ought to be jealously preserved as a precious
specimen of what the watering place of close upon a century ago was like,
the restless evidences of our own time are becoming plentiful; older
houses giving way to new, of the pretentious character so well suited to
the age, and in red brick and terra-cotta; the inevitable architectural
reach-me-downs that have obtained ever since Bedford Park set the vogue.
Why, confound the purblind, batlike stupidity of it! red brick is not
wanted at Sidmouth, where the cliffs are the very reddest of all Devon.
We need not give the old builders of white-faced Sidmouth any credit for
artistic perceptions, for they could not choose but build in the fashion
of their age, and everywhere alike, after our own use and wont; but,
by chance, they did exactly the right thing here, and in midst of this
richest red of the cliffs, this emerald green of the exquisite foliage,
this yellow of the beach, deep blue of the sea, and cerulean blue
above, planted their terraces and isolated squares of cool, contrasting
whiteness. It was a white period, if you come to consider it, a time
of book-muslin and simplicity, both natural and affected, and although
Sidmouth was fashionable it was not flamboyant.
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.
[Illustration: WOOLACOMBE GLEN.]
The sea-front of Sidmouth is, indeed, yet an unsolved problem. Many
centuries ago, there seems to have been a harbour where the beach and
the walk of the Esplanade now stand, the constant easterly drift of
shingle being kept well out to sea by a cliff projecting from the Western
end of the town, where its last remains, the Chit Rock, stood until 1824.
But that protecting headland was gradually worn away and by sure degrees
the river mouth was choked with shingle. It is much the same story
as that which belongs to the Axe and to other rivers and obliterated
harbours of South Devon.
Many projects have from time to time been set afoot to remedy this state
of affairs, but without success. A plan to excavate the river mouth
and form a harbour was mooted in 1811, and another in 1825. Again, in
1836, an attempt was made to construct a harbour pier on the site of the
Chit Rock, but was soon abandoned. Even the more modest attempt made in
1876, to build a pier on either side of the river mouth—or rather, where
the river mouth should be—failed; and it seems as though what was long
ago written of Sidmouth will long continue to be true of it: “In times
past a port of some account, now choaked with chisel and sands by the
vicissitudes of the tides.”
At present, Sidmouth beach is open and exposed, like that of Seaton, but
even when Turner made his drawing for the projected work on the “Harbours
of England,” although there was certainly nothing even remotely like a
harbour here, the Chit Rock remained, to afford some slight protection.
But the Chit Rock itself has disappeared. It vanished in that terrible
November storm of 1824, of whose traces there seems to be no end on the
southern coasts. With the rock went a number of cottages, and with the
cottages almost went the inhabitants, among them the real original Dame
Partington, who was rash enough to attempt to mop up the waves.
[Illustration: “THE OLD CHANCEL.”]
Mrs. Partington might never have attained immortality, had it not been
for Sydney Smith, who in 1831 compared the House of Lords, rejecting the
Reform Bill, with her. Reform, he said, _would_ come. The Lords were like
Dame Partington at Sidmouth, who attempted to keep out the Atlantic with
a mop, and failed. “She was excellent at a slop or puddle, but should
never have meddled with a tempest.”
The old parish church was rebuilt, except the tower, in 1859. It was a
rather wanton work, and to some minds the purely secular use made of a
portion of its stones may be shocking. Those of the most sacred part
of the building, the chancel, were sold and used in the erection of a
singular-looking villa close at hand, named from this circumstance, “The
Old Chancel.”
There can be few more charming nooks than that of Woolacombe Glen,
where the cottage of Princess Victoria’s early infancy still stands; a
white-fronted, long, low, rambling building set in midst of the most cool
and delightful lawns and overhung by trees. But, charming though it be,
the Glen is not what it was at that time, for the broad road leading down
to the Esplanade is a modern innovation constructed on the site of other
lawns, through which a little stream flowed to the sea. Alas! for that
clear-running Woolabrook. It has been compelled into an underground pipe.
And—a last little irritating pin-prick—the “Woolacombe” in the name of
the glen is now shorn of the peculiarly Devonian connecting and softening
_a_ between the syllables, and has become merely “Woolcombe.” How horrid
the deed, and how excruciating the thought that, if the same amputating
process were extended throughout the county, we should exchange
Babbacombe for “Babbcombe,” Lannacombe for “Lanncombe,” Ellacombe for
“Ellcombe,” and the less lovely like of them!
High Peak, the tremendous hill and cliff that shuts in Sidmouth on the
west, is well named. The road up to the top of it is a mile of exhausting
gradients, with fortunately a little grassy ledge on the way, whence you
look down on to a distant beach and along the pebbly coast to Ladram Bay
and Otterton Point. Ladram Bay is reached either by cliff-top or along
that tiring beach; or, greatly to be recommended above all other courses,
by boat from Sidmouth, one of whose boatmen, with the pachydermatous
hands that would scarce feel any effect from rowing fifty miles, will
take you there if you give him a chance.
[Illustration: LADRAM BAY.]
Ladram Bay was undoubtedly made expressly for picnics. There cannot be
the least question of it. Geologists write profound things about the
raised beach and the pebbles—Triassic, Silurian, or what not jargon—that
compose it, but Nature most certainly in prophetic mood designed beach,
natural arch, and caves for lunch and laughter, and as a romantic
background for flirtations.