Kevin Dixon: Snobbery that meant Torquay refused to bow to pier pressure

One of the shortest jokes ever written was in Fawlty Towers way back in 1979: “Pretentious? Moi?”
 
As with other facets of Torquay’s character, brilliantly picked up by John Cleese and Connie Booth, that one-liner embodied something about the resort’s self-importance.
 
Our pretensions go back a long way, affections that were often remarked upon by visitors. In 1897 Annie Cann recorded in her diary,
 
“We walked along the promenade to the town. We found it very clean, very white, very fashionable, and very hot. White walks, white dresses, blazing sun, no breeze, and no shade. Everyone wore gloves and carried a parasol… It is a place of ease, luxury, riches, convenience and prettiness – it cannot be called beautiful – for it is too artificial and unromantic to stir a pulse.”
 
By the time of Annie’s visit, Torquay was claiming to be the richest town in England, the recreation epicentre of the largest empire in history, a place where its rulers and decision-makers chose for their vacations and retirement.
 
Torquay was created to be an idealised miniature version of the imperial dream; an illusion constructed on certainties of power and privilege. But to fulfil that role the resort became a mirage, an impersonation of other places. It transformed itself chameleon-like to satisfy its target clientele and to manufacture their desires.
 
In the beginning, Torquay was selected to replicate places denied to our Channel-hopping Grand Tour aristocracy by Napoleon’s imperial ambitions. For the following 200 years, the resort was designed and promoted to replicate the Rivieras of Italy and France.
 
During the early nineteenth century, we catered for the needs of the sick and dying. ‘The Guide to the Watering Places of South Devon’ (1817) identified that the town “was built to accommodate invalids”; while Octavian Blewitt’s ‘Panorama of Torquay’ (1832) confirmed that “houses were erected for the accommodation of the invalids”. Rich invalids, obviously.
 
Specifically, we welcomed those searching for the relief and management of Consumption, a general term for tuberculosis. This ‘romantic disease’ was associated with such visiting celebrities as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charles Kingsley.
 
Gradually the population increased. From 838 in 1801 to 5,982 in 1841. By that date, the illness industry was well entrenched with Dr Granville writing, “The Frying Pan along the Strand is filled with respirator-bearing people who look like muzzled ghosts, and ugly enough to frighten the younger people to death”.
 
But we didn’t know that TB was infectious, incurable, and fatal, and so Torquay became “the southwest asylum for diseased lungs”.
 
In another reinvention for the paying visitor, God’s antechamber mutated overnight when the railway station opened in 1848. The arrival of trains to our isolated and peripheral part of the coast immediately exposed the town to wider public attention.
 
By 1851 the population was almost 12,000 and the heights around the old harbour had been transformed. In 1868 novelist and poet Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name of George Eliot, called in and observed:
 
“I don’t know whether you have ever seen Torquay. It is pretty, but like all other easily accessible sea-places, it is sadly spoiled by wealth and fashion, which leaves no secluded walks, and tattoos all the hills with ugly patterns of roads and villa gardens. This place is becoming a little London, or London suburb. Everywhere houses and streets are being built, and Babbicombe will soon be joined to Torquay.”
 
The railways opened a new experience. But when lower middle- and working-class tourists began to arrive in ever greater numbers, they brought their morality, less sophisticated manners, and a liking for alcohol with them. This was a culture shock as many of these new sightseers were not the kind of folk that the town judged appropriate.
 
Victorian Britain’s 48 seaside resorts then began to reorder themselves. Torquay, along with a select few others such as Eastbourne, Bexhill and Frinton, wanted to preserve the image of being a premier resort. We emphatically did not want to respond to popular preferences and emulate the likes of Southend, Margate, or Brighton.
 
Concerned at the direction of travel, steps were therefore taken to protect our identity. Having seen the future of tourism, we knew who we wanted and who we didn’t want.
 
To attract a select clientele, the nation was ceaselessly scoured for the best ways to satisfy the appetites of the sophisticated leisure seeker; theatregoing, bathing, yachting, and promenading.
 
At the same time, efforts were made to repel and divert the working-class tourist to the more affordable Paignton, where it was implied that looser standards of behaviour would be allowed.
 
Making this clear, that great symbol of the working-class Victorian resort, the pier, was shunned by Torquay. Teignmouth and Paignton could have their piers, rowdy visitors, their noisy children, penny arcades, Punch and Judy shows, acrobats, music hall smut, and ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines. Torquay would much prefer the mature, refined, and, above all, prosperous.
 
In 1883 A poll was undertaken which rejected the proposal to construct a full-scale pier by 3,194 to 1,296. Confusingly, Princess ‘Pier’ isn’t actually a pier, but a harbour wall; a true pier has water running beneath it. A later public meeting even turned down the modest offer of a covered bandstand. Torquay was not to have anything that may have attracted unsuitable visitors.
 
While the tourism industry gave a distinctiveness, at the same time it fostered a social and political settlement that acted to discourage other forms of economic activity. Torquay’s working class was consequently atypical in that it was largely concentrated in the service and servile industries, low-paid and difficult to organise. A majority of those in service were female which saw a gender disparity; by 1881 there were 19,293 females to 13,665 males in Torquay.
 
Torquay saw itself in consequence as a resort above and apart, more a concept than a real place. it consequently evolved a self-image that became readily recognised and often critiqued by visitors.
 
Rudyard Kipling was one who recognised that conceit. “Torquay is such a place as I do desire to upset it by dancing through it with nothing on but my spectacles. Villas, clipped hedges and shaven lawns, fat old ladies with respirators and obese landaus (a kind of carriage).”
 
While surface change was necessary to cater for new expectations, one constant remained. This was the imperative to maintain the town’s select position at the summit of the holiday hierarchy. But this came with the anxiety that Torquay could become ‘Brightonised’ into just another seaside resort. In 1923 The Western Times warned that “Torquay is not Brighton, neither is it Blackpool. It stands upon a different plane to these watering places. A higher one”.
 
Nothing about this mission was subtle. In 1932 ‘The English Riviera Official Guide’ described the kind of visitor the town didn’t want. It condemned, “Vulgarians whose idea of a holiday is composed of Big Wheels, paper caps, donkeys and minstrels, tin whistles, and generally a remorseless harlequinade…”
 
The Guide went on to describe the ideal tourist. “Thoroughly normal, healthy and educated people who are the backbone of the nation, love Torquay as few other towns are loved, and it is they who throng its pleasant ways the whole year round”.
 
Going back further, in 1861 Charles Dickens described Torquay as a “humbug”. He saw the resort as a “place I consider to be an imposter, a delusion and a snare”.
 
Was he correct then? And if he came back now, would he come to a very similar conclusion?
 
Let’s leave the last word to Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) from the BBC’s ‘Keeping Up Appearances’. “If there's one thing I can't stand, it's snobbery and one-upmanship. People trying to pretend they're superior. Makes it so much harder for those of us who really are.”