BRIXHAM—THE FISHERY—ROUND THE COAST TO DARTMOUTH
The statue of Dutch William makes the background of Brixham Harbour
picturesque, and the fishing-fleet and the houses climbing up, tier above
tier, confer a nobility upon the statue: they re-act upon one another, in
short, in a most admirably pictorial way. There are over three hundred
vessels in the trawling fleet of Brixham, and all are sailing-boats.
The largest, known technically as “dandies,” are of fifty tons burthen,
and cost about £1,000. The intermediate, and most numerous class are
“bumble-bees,” and the smallest are merely “hookers,” “hukers,” in the
Devon inflection, of twenty-five tons. The cost of a “bumble-bee” is
£450. It carries a crew of three men, who work according to the custom
of the Brixham fishery, on rarely changing lines. Brixham, unlike the
great fishing port of Grimsby, where steam-trawling and highly costly
vessels owned by corporations are the rule, conducts its industry on
more individual and joint-stock lines. Here we find the captain and the
owner usually one and the same person, working with his two men on the
partnership principle. He is, of course, by virtue of his ownership a
capitalist in his way, and for the purpose of getting a return for his
venture, as well as for his labour, the shares of the boat are divided
into five parts, of which he takes three; one for self, one for the boat,
and one for the nets and general gear, leaving one each for the crew, who
contribute only their labour. The takings are divided every week, and,
like the fortunes of war, they vary extravagantly.
If you conceive a bag forty to fifty feet in length, you will have
some approximate notion of the size of a trawl-net. The mouth of it is
stretched wide apart by a pole like a builder’s scaffold-pole, heavily
shod at each end with iron, for the purpose of weighing down the mouth
of the net as it is drawn, or “trawled,” along the bottom of the sea.
Sailing out of harbour, the trawl-net is “shot” the length of some
seventy fathoms, necessary to reach the bottom of the fishing-grounds in
Torbay, and thus, going with the wind for six to eight hours, the smacks
drag their exaggerated bags along the bed of ocean, scooping up whatever
lies in the way. It may thus justly be supposed that the bed of Torbay is
a pretty well-swept floor.
It is a comparatively easy thing to shoot a trawl-net, but a long and
laborious job for two men, straining at the winch, to wind it aboard
again, with its load of fish, often very largely useless. So soon as
the hauling up of the nets begins, myriads of sea-gulls, springing
apparently from nowhere in particular, appear, with the instantaneous
promptitude of a crowd in a quiet street of London when an accident has
happened. Screaming and circling about, dipping instantaneously into the
water, and rising up quickly, they often make daring snatches at the
fish aboard. Surely there is nothing so sharp-eyed on earth, in air, or
water, as a sea-gull, and nothing so greedy and insatiable. The sea-gull
is the scavenger of the fisher towns and villages, and is not nice in his
tastes. Nothing comes amiss to his hungry maw, from fresh fish down to
stale, ancient enough to be a very monument of offence and a something
beyond the worst experiences of a sanitary inspector; and the dead
kittens and rats of the seaside communities form welcome side-dishes.
The gulls’ turn, however, comes when the sorting of the nets begins.
When the useless dog-fish are flung overboard they struggle and guzzle
their fill: for, unfortunately for the fisherfolk, the dog-fish are
never lacking, although the saleable fish may be often sadly to seek.
But now dog-fish are often marketed as “flake.” The catch is generally
a miscellaneous one of turbot, bream, plaice, whiting, hake, haddock,
gurnet, sole, and brill, with a few lobsters, crabs, and eels, and when
the undesirables among the fish, and the stones and the seaweed, are
sorted out, frequently resolves itself into a dozen or so pair of soles,
and a few baskets and “trunks” of other fish. The aristocracy of the
catch are, of course, the turbot and the soles, but when a bad day’s
trawling and a day of poor market prices come together, the day’s labour
for three men may not bring the skipper more than twelve shillings and
his two men four shillings apiece.
[Illustration: BRIXHAM HARBOUR.]
The fish is sold by auction in the long-roofed but open-sided shed that
runs the whole length of the harbour, and the auctioneers settle weekly
with the skippers, after deducting their commission, the market-dues, and
the earnings of the lumpers, as the fish-porters who carry the catches
from the smack to the market are called. Rougher, more rugged, ragged,
or more quaintly dressed and bearded men than those of the Brixham
trawling fleet, and those others who attend the auctions, it would be
difficult to find; but many among them are of the famous “Brixham lords.”
A “Brixham lord” is the product at a considerable distance of time, of
the vicissitudes of the old lords of the manor of Brixham. That manor,
passing from the Novants and the Valletorts, and coming eventually to the
Bonviles, was at length divided into quarters, of which one quarter came
to the Gilberts, from whom it was purchased by what in these financial
days we should term a “syndicate” of twelve fishermen. In the course of
many generations and the natural subdivision of property, those original
twelve shares of that quarter have been so apportioned that the “lords”
of Brixham, owning infinitesimal portions of the manor, are a very large
crowd indeed. Some of them, too, are “ladies.” The saying of Brixham is
therefore easily credible, that there are more lords of the manor in it
than in any other town in England.
A pathetic literary interest belongs to Brixham, for it was here that
the Rev. Henry Francis Lyte was vicar for twenty-five years. He died at
Naples, whither he had gone to seek health, in his fifty-fourth year.
One last evening, before he left Brixham for ever, as he knew it must
be, he prayed that he might be allowed to write something by which the
memory of him might be kept green to all time, and, returning from the
fisher-town as sun was setting, to Berry Head House, conceived and wrote
that best-known of hymns, “Abide with Me.” In the widespread favour it
immediately obtained, and in the vogue it must ever retain while hymns
last, his prayer was answered. It is a beautiful hymn, but a thing of
tears, depression, and hopelessness, that leaves you a great deal worse,
and a great deal more self-pitying, than before indulging in it. As well
might one suggest sitting in a draught as the remedy for a cold, as hope
to revive the spirits on “Abide with Me.” It is beautiful, but for my
part, I want something more uplifting and robustious, and would rather go
forth and do battle with blue-devils and kick stumbling-blocks out of the
way, and keep a stout heart to the ultimate breath, on some swashbuckling
Hew-Agag-in-Pieces-before-the-Lord psalmody, than dissolve in tears on
the minor key of “Abide with Me.”
Berry Head is a kind of natural barrier, or unsurmountable wall, to the
Brixham people. You will readily understand why it should be so, if you
seek to walk round to Kingswear by the coast. It is so, not so much by
reason of the steepness and ruggedness of the way, for the road out of
Brixham, up-along to the railway-station and so on to Churston Ferrers,
is equally heart-breaking, but there are all manner of occasions for
going in _that_ direction; while few have any business, or pleasure
either, over Berry Head, or along that lonely and rugged coast, save
some poor fool of an exploring tourist who, encountering rain on these
shelterless coastguard walks, is fain to think, like the Melancholy
Jaques in Arden, that when he was at home, he was in a better place.
Hence the peculiar appositeness of the Brixham synonym for death, “going
round the Head,” as it were into the Unknown. “Bless ’ee! ’er’s bin gone
round the Head these dree months” was the reply to an inquiry after one
recently dead.
Primed with all this knowledge, it is scarcely with uplifted heart that
the explorer scales these minatory heights. On the way to the Head
the road looks down upon the incomplete breakwater, begun in 1843 and
abandoned when 1,300 feet of it had been built and £21,000 expended.
Across the bay lies Torquay, glorious in the sunshine; behind us is the
end of the world, as it seems—the gorsy plateau of the Head, with a
forlorn refreshment house among the ruins of five forts erected during
the Napoleonic scare, themselves built amid the walls and earthworks of
the Romans, constructed some 1850 years ago. Here is the Ash Hole, a
cavern where the soldiers of the early nineteenth century flung the bones
and broken pottery and domestic refuse of their barracks on the top of a
similar deposit made by the Roman soldiery of the first century of our
era. And beneath the potsherds of the Romans is stalagmite, and beneath
_that_ again the bones of animals extinct aeons before Rome began. Ugh!
From hence it is an easy walk to the sheer edge of this great mass of
pink limestone, which drops perpendicularly down into deep water. Round
the point, the cliffs grow darker and more jagged, with the Cod Rock and
Mewstone out in the sea and Durl Head, splashed pink and black, marked by
a deserted iron mine.
Durl Head looks across to Mudstone Sands, not really muddy, and Sharkham
Point. Inland, in between them, is Windmill Hill, with its celebrated
cave, sharing the prehistoric honours of Kent’s Cavern. No visitor to
Brixham who arrives by steamboat is likely to be left in ignorance of
“Philp’s Cave,” for handbills extolling the glories of it are plentifully
distributed at such times.
Philp was a dyer who in 1857 determined to leave his dyeing and go in
for quarrying, and to this end purchased a plot of land here of the
Commissioners for the enclosure of Waste Lands. He soon got to work,
and in the following January the cave “discovered” itself by engulfing a
quarrying tool that Philp in person was using. He explored the place and
found it to be a tunnel running fifty feet into the hill, with a further
gallery at the end, in another direction. Stalagmite made a continuous
covering on the floor, and from it projected bones which scientific men
who soon flocked to the spot proclaimed to be those of reindeer and
cave-bears. Among them were the flint implements of prehistoric man, who
seems never to have returned for them, for his bones are not among the
remains. Perhaps one of the hyænas of Kent’s Cavern cut him off, untimely.
I think the ten miles (for it is not an inch less) round from Mudstone
Bay to Kingswear is the loneliest, and the most scrambly and tiring,
coast climb in South Devon. Rocks succeed sands, and sands follow rocks;
headlands alternating with bays, and ups with downs. Now you face west,
now south, then something betwixt and between; and if you don’t quite box
the compass, you do so very nearly. Every coombe, every headland, has a
name, but they are all of a likeness: Sharkham Point, Southdown Head, Man
Sands, Crab Rock Point, Long Sands, Scabbacombe Sands, Down Head, Ivy
Cove, Pudcombe Cove, Kelly’s Cove, and Froward Point. Not a soul will you
see, not a house, save the coastguards and their station and cottages at
Man Sands. And this is overcrowded England!
Off Froward Point, black and splintered and well-named, is yet another
Mewstone, with a companion, the Cat Stone; and the Black Rock some
distance out. From here we turn gradually round and come by Mill Bay,
under the tall white day-mark on the hill-top, to Kingswear Castle.
[Illustration: DARTMOUTH CASTLE AND THE CHURCH OF ST. PETROX, FROM
KINGSWEAR.]