TORQUAY
As a health resort--The Palk family--Myths concerning the
family--Its real history--The Cary family--Landing at Brixham
of William of Orange--Kent's Cavern--Order of deposits
therein--Churches in the neighbourhood--Haccombe--The Teign-head
combes--Wolborough--The Three Wells--Aller pottery--Its
story--Red mud.
This pleasant winter residence is now stretched from Paignton on
one side to Marychurch on the other, with different climates in its
several parts. Torquay is backed by a high ridge against the east,
and consequently is sheltered from cutting winds from that quarter.
S. Marychurch is on the top of the cliffs, and catches every wind.
Paignton looks across the bay due east, and is therefore exposed to
the most bracing of all winds. In Frying Pan Row, Torquay, one may
be grilled the same day that at Paignton one may have one's nose and
fingers turned blue.
A century ago Torquay was a little fishing village, numbering but a
few poor cottages.
Torquay has benefited largely from the Palk family, but then the
Palks also have benefited largely by Torquay.
A cloud of dust has been stirred up to disguise the humble, but
respectable, origin of the family; and even Foster in his _Peerage_
(1882), who is always accurate when he had facts placed before
him, commences with "Sir Robert Palk, descended from Henry Palk,
of Ambrook, Devon (Henry VII., 1493-4)." But Ambrook, which is
in Staverton, never did belong to the Palks; it was the property
first of the Shapcotes, and then of the Nayles. Sir Bernard Burke,
in addition to the Ambrook myth, states that Walter, seventh in
descent, married Miss Abraham, and had Robert, Walter (who was
member for Ashburton), and Grace. The late Sir Bernard Burke was
not remarkable for accuracy, and here he has floundered into a
succession of blunders. The descent from Henry Palk, of Ambrook, is
apocryphal; and Walter Palk never was member for Ashburton, or for
anywhere else. Another false assertion made has been that the family
are descended from a Rev. Thomas Palk, of Staverton, a "celebrated"
Nonconformist divine, who died in 1693. Wills proved in the Court of
the Dean and Chapter of Exeter disprove this.
The real facts are these.
Walter Palk, of Ashburton, married Grace Ryder, and by her means
came in for a petty farm called Lower Headborough, close to
Ashburton. He died in 1707, when his personal estate was valued at
£160 10_s._ 5½_d._ His son Walter married Frances, daughter of
Robert Abraham, a farmer in Woodland, and his pack-horses carried
serge from Ashburton over Haldon to Exeter. This is probably the
origin of the story commonly told that the first Palk was a carrier
between Exeter and Ashburton. He had two sons: Walter, whose son,
the Rev. Jonathan Palk, vicar of Ilsington, described his father as
a "little farmer with a large family." The second son, Robert, born
in 1717, was sent as a sizar to Oxford, by the assistance of his
uncle Abraham. He was ordained deacon, and became a poor curate in
Cornwall. On Christmastide he walked to Ashburton to see his father,
and as he was returning on his way home, he stood on Dart Bridge,
looking down on the river, when a gentleman riding by recognised
him, drew up, and said, "Is that you, Palk?" He had been a
fellow-student at Oxford. Palk had a sad story to tell of privation
and vexation. The other suggested to him to seek his fortune under
John Company in India, and volunteered an introduction. He went out,
acting as chaplain to the _Stirling Castle_, and during the time
he was in India, attracted the attention of General Lawrence, who
in 1752 obtained for him an appointment as paymaster to the army,
of which he had then assumed the command. But already by clever
speculation Mr. Palk had done well; the new position enabled him to
vastly enlarge his profits.
He next embarked in trade, and this also proved remunerative. He
came back to England for the first time in 1759. Subsequently a
difficulty arose in India. The Company were debating it at the old
East India House in Leadenhall Street. What capable man could they
find to do the difficult work before them? At last one of them
exclaimed, "Gentlemen, you forget that we have Mr. Palk at home."
"The very man!" He was sent out as Governor of Madras in 1763. In
1775 General Lawrence died, and left £80,000 to his old _protégé_.
The acquisition of the property about Torquay, at the time when it
was a place of no consideration, was a shrewd stroke of business.
Mr. Palk was created a baronet, and elected to represent Devon in
Parliament. Subsequently, when the Rev. John Horne Tooke, a Jacobin,
as it was the fashion to call Radicals of that day, was returned to
Parliament, the House settled that it would not allow of clerical
members being admitted, and this would have excluded Sir Robert Palk
as well as Horne Tooke, but that Palk was only in deacon's orders.
Sir Robert did much for Torquay. Sir Lawrence continued to promote
the material welfare of the place in every way available.
He constructed the outer harbour and new pier, which were completed
in 1870, at an outlay of £70,000. Further attractions were afforded
to visitors by the provision of recreation grounds and public walks.
He also gave sites for new churches, and the modern town of Torquay
has risen into a place full of beauty and attraction.
"Robert Palk's touch seemed to turn everything into gold. He
realised it for himself, for his children, for his relatives,
for his friends, and for his surroundings. He was an ancestor to
look back upon, a forefather of whom any family might reasonably
be proud."[36]
[36] WORTHY, _Devonshire Parishes_, 1889, vol. ii., p. 335. Mr.
Worthy has worked out the Palk pedigree from extant wills and
registers.
The other family attached to Torquay to which it must look is that
of Cary, as ancient and noble as that of Palk is modern and humble.
The nest of the family is Cary, on the river of the same name in S.
Giles-in-the-Heath, Devon, but on the borders of Cornwall. It can be
traced back like those of most men to an Adam--but an Adam Cary in
1240.
Torbay is noted as the place where Dutch William arrived in 1688.
He landed at Brixham on November 4th, and, as the tide was out, he
called for someone to carry him ashore, whereupon a little man named
Varwell volunteered.
The local story is that the good folk of Brixham presented their
illustrious visitor with the following address:--
"An' please your Majesty, King William,
You're welcome to Brixham Quay,
To eat buckhorn and drink Bohea
Along wi' we,
An' please your Majesty, King William."
But the story is of course apocryphal, as the prince was not a king,
and tea was at a fabulous price.
The subsequent history of the "little man" who carried the king
ashore is rather singular. Having a short ambling pony, he rode
bare-headed before the prince to Newton and afterwards to Exeter,
and so pleased him with his zeal that the prince bade him come to
court, when he should be seated on the throne, and that then he
would reward Varwell. The prince also gave him a line under his
hand, which was to serve as a passport to the royal presence. In
due time accordingly the little man took his course to London,
promising his townsmen that he would come back among them a lord at
least. When, however, he arrived there, some sharpers, who learned
his errand at the tavern where he put up, made Varwell gloriously
drunk, and kept him in this condition for several successive
weeks. During this time one of the party, having obtained the
passport, went to court, with the "little man's" tale in his mouth,
and received a handsome present from the king. Our adventurer,
recovering himself afterwards, went to the palace without his card
of admission and was repulsed as an impostor, and returned to
Brixham never to hold up his head again.
It is fair to say that the Varwell family entirely repudiate the
latter part of the tale, and say that the "little man" did see the
king and got a hundred pounds out of him.
The troops with the prince were obliged to encamp in the open air,
but William got a lodging in one of the cottages.
Whitter, who was one of the attendants on the Dutch adventurer, has
left a graphic account of the landing and subsequent march:--
"It was a cold, frosty night, and the stars twinkl'd
exceedingly; besides, the ground was very wet after so much rain
and ill weather; the soldiers were to stand to their arms the
whole night; and therefore sundry soldiers went to fetch some
old hedges and cut down green wood to burn therewith and make
some fire. Those who had provision in their gnap-sacks did broil
it at the fire, and others went into the villages thereabouts to
buy some fresh provisions for their officers, but, alas! there
was little to be gotten. There was a little ale-house among the
fishermen's houses, which was so extremely thronged that a man
could not thrust in his head, nor get bread or ale for money.
It was a happy time for the landlord, who strutted about as if
indeed he had been a lord himself."
The little ale-house is probably that now entitled the "Buller
Arms." It was there William is said to have slept, and to have left
behind him a ring that remained in the possession of the taverner's
family till it came to one Mary Churchward, who died about 1860. It
was stolen from her one night by a thief who entered her room whilst
she slept, and it was never recovered.
On the morrow William and his Dutchmen with a few Scots and English
marched to Paignton, and many people, mostly Nonconformists,
welcomed him.
A gentleman, very advanced in age, in 1880 says:--
"There are few now left who can say as I can, that they have
heard their fathers and their wives' fathers talking together
of the men who saw the landing of William the Third at Torbay.
I have heard Captain Clements say he, as a boy, heard as many
as seven or eight old men each giving the particulars of what
he saw; then one said a shipload of horses hawled to the Quay,
and the horses walked out all harnessed, and the quickness with
which each man knew his horse and mounted it surprised them.
Another old man said, 'I helped to get on shore the horses
that were thrown overboard, and swam on shore, guided by only
a single rope running from the ship to the shore.' My father
remembered one Gaffer Will Webber, of Staverton, who lived to a
great age, say that he went from Staverton as a boy with his
father, who took a cartload of apples from Staverton to the
highroad from Brixham to Exeter, that the soldiers might help
themselves to them, and to wish them 'God-speed.'
"I merely mention this to show how easily tradition can be
handed down, requiring only three or four individuals for two
centuries."[37]
[37] WINDEATT (T. W.), "The Landing of the Prince of Orange," in
_Transactions of the Devonshire Association_, 1880.
What was done by the country folk was to roll apples down the slopes
from the orchards to the troops as they passed.
The prince spent the second night at Paignton in a house near the
"Crown and Anchor Inn," where his room is still shown.
Next day he with his troops marched to Newton, and he took up his
quarters in Ford House, belonging to Sir William Courtenay, who
prudently decamped so as not to compromise himself. A room there
is called the Orange Room, and is now always papered and hung with
that colour. At Newton the prince's proclamation was read on the
steps of the old market cross, not by the Rev. John Reynell, rector
of Wolborough, as is stated on a stone erected on the spot, but by
a chaplain, no doubt the fussy and pushing Burnet. Reynell had also
made himself scarce. From Newton the prince marched to Exeter.
One can tell pretty well what were the political leanings of squires
and parsons at the period of the Jacobite troubles, for where there
was zeal for the House of Stuart, there Scotch pines were planted;
where, however, the Dutchman was in favour, there lime trees were
set in avenues.
In Torquay Museum is an interesting collection of relics from
Kent's Cavern. This is a cave in the limestone rocks that was first
explored in 1824, when Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, near Exeter, visited
it with the double object, as he stated, "of discovering organic
remains, and of ascertaining the existence of a temple of Mithras,"
and he declared himself happy to say that he was "successful in both
objects." An amusing example this of the egregious nonsense that was
regarded as antiquarianism at the beginning of this century. He was
followed by Mr. (afterwards Sir) W. C. Trevelyan, who was the first
to have obtained any results of scientific value.
The Rev. J. MacEnery, a Roman Catholic priest, whose name must be
for ever associated with the Cavern, visited it in the summer of
1825. The visit was a memorable one, for, devoting himself to what
he conjectured to be a favourable spot, he found several teeth and
bones; and he thus sums up his feelings on the occasion:--
"They were the first fossil teeth I had ever seen, and as I laid my
hands on them, relics of extinct races and witnesses of an order of
things which passed away with them, I shrank back involuntarily.
Though not insensible to the excitement attending new discoveries, I
am not ashamed to own that in the presence of these remains I felt
more of awe than joy."
He communicated his discovery to Dr. Buckland, and from time to time
dug into the deposits. At that and a long subsequent period the
proper method of studying deposits of this kind was not understood,
and the several layers were not distinguished. Trenches were cut
that went through beds separated in age by many centuries, perhaps
thousands of years, and no distinction was made between what lay
near the surface and what was found in the lowermost strata. A
proper examination began in March, 1866, and was continued without
intermission through the summer of 1880 under the able direction of
Mr. W. Pengelly, at a cost of nearly two thousand pounds.
Kent's Cavern gives evidence of a double occupation by man at a
remote distance of time the one from the other. The upper beds are
of cave-earth. Below that is the breccia, and in the upper alone
are traces of the hyena found. In the lowest strata of crystalline
breccia are rude flint and chert implements of the same type as that
found elsewhere in the river-drift. In association with these were
the remains of the cave-bear, and a tool was found manufactured out
of an already fossilised tooth of this animal. The chert and flint
employed were from the gravels that lie between Newton Abbot and
Torquay.
Above the breccia is the cave-earth, in which flint implements are
by far more numerous, and are of a higher form, some being carefully
chipped all round. The earlier tool was fashioned by heavy blows
dealt against the core of flint, detaching large flakes. But the
tools of the second period are neatly trimmed. The flakes were
detached, very often by pressure and a jerk, and then the edges
were delicately worked with a small tool. A bone needle was also met
with, and bone awls, and two harpoons of reindeer antler, the one
barbed on one side and the other on both.
Rude, coarse pottery has also been found, but only quite near the
surface, and this belongs to a later period.
There are other caves in the same formation, at Anstis and at
Brixham, that have rendered good results when explored.
The two deposits are separated from each other by a sheet of
crystalline stalagmite, in some places nearly twelve feet thick,
formed after the breccia was deposited, and before the cave-earth
was introduced. After the stalagmite had been formed, it was broken
up by some unknown natural agency, and much of it, along with some
of the breccia, was carried out by water from the cave, before the
deposition of the cave-earth began.
"From these observations it is evident that the Riverdrift
men inhabited the caves of Devonshire, Derbyshire, and
Nottinghamshire in an early stage of the history of caverns,
and that after an interval, to be measured in Kent's Hole by
the above-mentioned physical changes, the Cave-men (those of
the Second Period) found shelter in the same places. The former
also followed the chase in the valley of the Elwy and the vale
of Clwydd in North Wales, and the latter found ample food in
the numerous reindeer, horses, and bisons then wandering over
the plains extending from the Mendip Hills to the Quantocks,
and the low, fertile tract now covered by the estuary of the
Severn and the Irish Sea. When all these facts are taken into
consideration, it is difficult to escape Mr. Pengelly's
conclusion that the two sets of implements represent two
distinct social states, of which the ruder is by far the most
ancient."[38]
[38] BOYD DAWKINS, _Early Man in Britain_, 1880, p. 197.
We have, in the caves of France, evidence of the successive layers
of civilisation, one superposed on the other, down to the reindeer
hunter, who ate horses, represented by the cave-earth man of Kent's
Hole; and in this latter we have this same man superposed on the
traces of the still earlier man of the river-drift. To make all
plainer, I will add here a summary of the deposits.
{ Modern, Roman, etc. }
{ Iron Age, Celtic, bronze ornaments. } Fauna, as
Neolithic { Bronze weapons, Ivernian, flint } at present.
{ tools. }
{ Flint and pottery. }
{ Flint and bone tools, cave-men. } Hyena,
Palaeolithic { Rudest flint tools, river-drift } cave-bear,
{ men. } reindeer,
} mammoth.
There are remains of a cliff castle at Long Quarry Point; from its
name one may conjecture that a church stood in Celtic times on
Kilmarie. Almost certainly this was a cliff castle, but the traces
have disappeared.
The old church of Tor Mohun is dedicated to S. Petrock, as is shown
by a Bartlett will in Somerset House, in 1517. Tor Abbey has been
crowded into a narrow space by encroaching buildings. Cockington
House and church deserve a visit, as forming a charming group.
Paignton Church contains a very fine but mutilated tomb with rich
canopy and screenwork, showing that there must have been in the
fifteenth century a native school of good figure sculptors. Marldon
Church is also interesting, and in that parish is the curious
Compton Castle, of which history has little to say. Haccombe, the
seat of the Carews, has a church crowded with fine monumental
effigies. The mansion is about the most hideous that could be
conceived. It is said that a Carew pulled down his fine Elizabethan
mansion and went to Italy, leaving instructions to an architect to
build him a handsome house in the Georgian style.
When he returned and saw what had been erected: "Well," said he, "I
believe that now I may take to myself the credit of possessing the
very ugliest house in the county." The situation is of exquisite
beauty. How lovely must have been the scene with a grave old
Elizabethan manor-house, mottled with white and yellow lichen,
embowered in trees, above which rose the hills, the evening sun
glittering in its many mullioned windows, while the rooks wheeled
and cawed about it.
The little combes that dip into the estuary of the Teign, rich
with vegetation growing rank out of the red soil, are very
lovely. Stoke-in-Teignhead not only has a good screen, but it
is a parish that has never had a squire, but has been occupied
from the sixteenth century by substantial yeomen, who have
maintained themselves there against encroaching men of many acres.
Combe-in-Teignhead has a very fine screen and equally good old
benches.
Wolborough has a good church occupying a site that was once a camp,
and contains an excellent screen, well restored and glittering with
gold and colour. East Ogwell has also a screen, and the old manor
mill is a picturesque object for the pencil. Denbury is a strong
camp.
Torbrian, situated in a lovely spot, has fine screenwork
and monuments of the Petres. The three Wells, Coffinswell,
Kingskerswell, and Abbotskerswell, lie together. At Kingskerswell
are some old monumental effigies of the Prowse family. At
Abbotskerswell are a screen, and a large statue of the Blessed
Virgin in a niche of the window splay. This latter had been
plastered over into one great bulk; when the plaster was removed
the statue was revealed. The very fine Jacobean altar-rails were
removed at the "restoration," to make place for something utterly
uninteresting. Here there is an early and interesting church-house.
The church-house was the building in which the parishioners from a
distance spent a rainy time between morning service and vespers. The
house was divided by a floor into two storeys, that above for women,
that below for the men. Here were also held the church ales, that
is to say, the ale brewed by the wardens and sold to defray church
expenses. The ale was also supplied on Sundays by the clerk to those
who tarried for evensong, and so, little by little, most of these
old church-houses degenerated into taverns.
Abbotskerswell is the seat of the Aller pottery art manufacture,
started by the late Mr. John Phillips, with the object of providing
the village young men with remunerative work at their own homes.
But about this presently. The story of the inception of the work is
interesting.
Coffinswell still possesses its holy well, that is called the "Lady
Well," used by young girls for fortune-telling.
At some little distance from this spring lies a nameless grave in
unconsecrated ground, where is buried a lady banished holy ground
for her sins. Every New Year's morn, after the stroke of midnight,
she rises and takes "one cock's stride" towards the churchyard,
which, when she reaches, she will find rest, and her hope is to be
found therein--at the crack of doom.
The three well-parishes lie about the stream of the Aller (W.
_allwy_, to pour forth, to stream), that flows into the Teign below
Newton Abbot. But it was not always so. At some remote period,
when the great Dartmoor peaks "stood up and took the morning,"
far higher than they do now, the mountain torrents that swept the
detritus of quartz from Hey Tor and Rippon Tor not only filled the
lake of Bovey with pure white china clay, till they had converted
a basin into a plain, but they also poured between red sandstone
and limestone cliffs into the sea at Torbay. Then came a convulsion
of nature; these latter formations rose as a wall across the
bed of the torrent, and the spill of the granite upland passed
down the Teign valley. Then the little Aller was formed of the
drainage of the combes of the upraised barrier, and, blushing at
its insignificance, it stole through the ancient bottom, cutting
its modest way through the beds of quartz clay left by the former
occupant of the valley, and, of course, flowing in a direction
precisely the reverse of the former flood. The deposits of the
earlier stream remain in all the laps of the hills and folds of the
valley. They consist of quartz clay, somewhat coloured by admixture
of the later rocks that have been fretted by lateral streams.
The first to discover these beds were the gipsies. They were our
early potters. These wandering people were wont to camp wherever
there was clay, and wood suitable for baking the clay. They set
their rude wheels to work, and erected their equally primitive
kilns, and spent one half the year in making pots, and the other
half in vending them from place to place. When the wood supply was
exhausted, then the Bohemians set up their potteries on another spot
that commended itself to them, to be again deserted when the wood
supplies failed once more.
The reason why the potteries at Burslem and elsewhere in
Staffordshire have become permanent is, that there the coal is
ready at hand, and that there the native population has taken the
trade out of the desultory hands of the gipsies, and has worked at
it persistently, instead of intermittently. The old stations, the
rude kilns, the heaps of broken and imperfectly baked crocks of the
ancient potters, are often come upon in the woods of Aller vale, and
among the heather and gorse brakes of Bovey Heathfield.
The Aller vale opens into the Teign, as already said, below Newton
Abbot, and extends about four miles south to the village of
Kingskerswell, that stands on the crest of the red rocky barrier
which diverted the course of the flood from Dartmoor. A branch of
the valley to the west terminates at a distance of two miles at the
picturesque village of Abbotskerswell, and another branch to the
east leads up to the village of Coffinswell. The deepest deposit of
clay is at the point where the three parishes converge.
Just nineteen years ago the idea of an art school was mooted in the
district. It was enthusiastically taken up by the village doctor at
Kingskerswell, in association with an institute for the labourers
and young men of the parish, and after a little difficulty he
succeeded in getting hold of some premises for the purpose. This
earnest-hearted and energetic man, Dr. Symons, did not live to see
more than the initiation of his scheme. By many the idea of an art
school among village bumpkins was viewed with mistrust, even with
disfavour. It was argued, and with truth, that art schools had been
started in country towns, and had failed to reach a class below the
middle order. Sons and daughters of artisans and labourers would
have none of it. Such had been the experience in Newton, such in
Torquay. If the intelligent artisan of the town turned his back
on the art school, was it likely that Hodge would favour it? When
people have satisfied their minds that a certain venture is doomed
to failure, they are very careful not to lend their names to it,
nor to put out their finger-tips to help it in any way. It was so in
this case.
The managers of the Board School, when asked to lend the room for
the purpose, refused it. The promoters, failing in every other
direction, turned to a poor widow left with two sons, struggling
hard to keep soul and body together in a modest "cob" (clay-walled)
cottage with thatched roof. She was asked the loan of her kitchen,
a room measuring 21 feet by 18 feet, lighted by two small latticed
windows, with low open-boarded and raftered ceiling of unhewn
timber. Glad to earn a few pence, she consented, and the art classes
were started on a career of unexpected success.
The school of art began with a few pupils. A Sunday-school teacher
persuaded his class to go to the art school, and perhaps to humour
him, rather than with any anticipation of profit, the boys accepted
the invitation. The widow's kitchen was whitewashed and clean. On
the hearth a log fire blazed. A few simple pictures hung on the
walls, and a scarlet geranium glowed in a pot in the window. A
couple of trestles supported a plank for a table, and a pair of
forms served to seat the pupils. The ploughboy, with his stiff
fingers, was set to draw straight lines, and wonderful were his
productions. The lines danced, trembled, wriggled, halted, then
rushed off the page. They were crackers in their gyrations at first,
and then rockets. By degrees the lines became less random, more
subdued and purposeful, and finally a crow of delight proclaimed to
the whole class that the curly-headed ploughboy had succeeded in
producing a musical bar of five fairly parallel lines. Then, with
both hands plunged into his pockets, young Hodge leaned back and
went off into a roar of laughter. It had dawned on his mind that he
could draw a line with a pencil on paper as true as he could with
a ploughshare in a field. He had come to the school for a lark,
and had found that the self-satisfaction acquired by the discovery
of his powers was a lark better than he had expected. The question
presented itself from the outset--How was the art school to be
maintained? The fires must be kept in full glow, the lamps must be
supplied with oil, the widow must be paid to clean her floor after
the boys had brought over it the red mud from the lanes. As so much
mistrust as to the advantage and prospect of success of the classes
was entertained, it was from the first resolved by the promoters not
to solicit subscriptions. The whole thing was to be self-supporting.
This was represented to the pupils, and they readily accepted the
situation. They undertook to organise and keep going through the
winter a series of fortnightly entertainments; they would invite
some outsiders, but for the most part they would do their best
themselves to entertain. The evenings would be made lively with
recitations, readings, and songs. Doubtful whether such performance
would deserve a fixed charge for admission, the young fellows on
putting their heads together determined to make none, but to hold a
cap at the door when the "pleasant evening" was over, and let those
who had been entertained show their appreciation as they chose.
These fortnightly cottage entertainments became a recognised
institution and a source of profit, besides serving as a means of
interesting and occupying the pupils. A thing that begins in a small
way on right principles, a thing that "hath the seed in itself," is
bound to succeed.
Adjoining the widow's cottage was another untenanted, like it
consisting of a single apartment on the ground floor. It became
necessary to rent this, knock a door through the wall, and combine
the cottages. The second room was turned into a workshop, with a
carpenter's bench and a chest of tools.
Out of the first art school in the one well-parish grew two others,
one in each of the other well-parishes. Coffinswell has but a
population of a hundred souls, nevertheless its art school has been
frequented by as many as twelve pupils. Sixty is the highest number
reached by the three together, which are now combined to maintain an
efficient art instructor.
It fell out that a stoneware pottery in the Aller vale was burnt
down in 1881, and when reconstructed the proprietor, who had
cordially promoted the art classes, resolved on converting what
had been a factory of drain and ridge tiles into a terra-cotta
manufactory, in which some of the more promising pupils might
find employ, and in which the knowledge and dexterity acquired in
the class might be turned to practical uses. A single experienced
potter was engaged, a gipsy, to start the affair, as there was no
local tradition as to the manufacture of crocks upon which to go.
The classes were from the outset for boys and girls together, and
though recently there has been a change in this arrangement, the
young women coming in the afternoon, and the young men in the
evening, this alteration has been made owing to increase of numbers,
not in consequence of any rudeness or impropriety, for such there
had not been in the ten years of the career of the school. In this
case the experience has been precisely the same as that of the mixed
schools and colleges of the United States.
There is one thing that a visitor to Torquay is certain to carry
away with him if he has made excursions on foot about it--some of
its red soil. The roads, in spite of the County Council, are bad,
for the material of which they are made is soft. But what a soil
it is for flowers and for fruit! Anything and everything will grow
there and run wild. Stick a twig into the earth, and it is bound to
grow. As for roses and violets, they run riot there. And, taken on
the whole, the visitor who has been to Torquay is almost sure to
carry away with him something beside the red mud, something quite as
adhesive--pleasant memories of the place and its balmy air.