Most visitors have a great time in Torquay… some don’t
The English Riviera website assures tourists that “the warmest of welcomes awaits on the English Riviera, South Devon’s Beautiful Bay.” Yet, some past visitors haven’t enjoyed their visit as much as they should have done.
Indeed, the locals can sometimes be a bit unfriendly.
In 1750 the brig St. Peter was wrecked “about a mile west of Torre Abbey. Immediately, the country people came down to plunder the wreck and even robbed the captain of his watch.”
A year later a French vessel was wrecked under Waldon Cliff, causing a confrontation between the locals of Torre and the Torwood estate. Waldon Hill was Cary ground, but the Torwood men came along from the harbour and did “much pillaging and wanton damage”. The Cary steward recruited half a dozen men from the neighbouring Cockington estate and prevented the Torwood folk from carrying on their thievery. We don’t know what happened to the French sailors while the locals were pillaging their ship.
The origins of Torquay as a resort were in catering to the sick and dying, specifically in the relief of consumption, now known as tuberculosis. This left other visitors surrounded by illness.
In 1840 Dr Granville found Torquay to be “the southwest asylum for diseased lungs… 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”.
The hotels were “filled with spitting pots and echoing to the sounds of cavernous coughs, while outside the only sound to be heard was the frequent tolling of the funeral bell”.
Torquay grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, especially when the railways arrived in 1848. Author Mary Anne Evan, better known by her pen name George Eliot, visited in 1868 and wasn’t that impressed:
“I don’t know whether you have ever seen Torquay… 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… Everywhere houses and streets are being built, and Babbicombe will soon be joined to Torquay… We should not come again for in a few years all the hills will be parts of a London suburb.”
But, as with many who find the town getting under their skin, she later mellowed, “…we became deeply in love with Torquay in the daily heightening of spring beauties, and the glory of perpetual blue skies.”
The Bay’s scenery similarly impressed Charles Dickens in 1869, though he disliked Torquay’s affectation of superiority. It was “humbug… a place I consider to be an imposter, a delusion and a snare”.
When Canadian Isabella Cowen visited in 1892 she found it rained a lot: “Torquay weather outdoes anything else I have encountered in the way of fickleness. The explanations and apologies for the state of the atmosphere are getting to be a very monotonous theme of conversation.”
Isabella also noticed the high population of sick and disabled:
“Torquay has a seeming monopoly of invalids. Some days I found the pleasure of our walks along Rock Walk and the sands perfectly destroyed by the number of infirm old people and still more lamentable, deathly looking young people who haunt that particular place of pleasure.”
We also had a fondness for alcohol:
“Intemperance is too common a vice here and too fruitful of the misery both here and elsewhere to be made light of… As long as an Englishman can keep upon his feet he is considered quite respectable.”
In March 1893, children’s author Beatrix Potter called in to find her accommodation deeply unsatisfactory:
“I didn’t much want to go. I did not take to what I had seen of Torquay… I sniffed my bedroom on arrival, and for a few hours felt a certain grim satisfaction where my forebodings were maintained, but it is possible to have too much Natural History in a bed. I did not undress after the first night, but I was obliged to lie on it because there were only two chairs and one of them was broken.”
Anstey’s Cove was “curiously pretty but rather too much of a show place”, while St. Marychurch was “a most dreary suburb”. Then came the turn of Kent’s Cavern: “I can imagine no more unlikely or unromantic situation for a cavern. It is in a suburb of Torquay, halfway up a tangled bluff, with villas and gardens overhanging the top of a muddy orchard with some filthily dirty cows in the ravine below.”
In 1896 the author Rudyard Kipling came to stay and quickly took a dislike to Torquay’s conservatism: “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.”
Above: Rudyard Kipling, haunted in Maidencombe
Continuing the theme of the resort being somewhat pretentious, 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 carries 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.”
Yet, it was his rented home in Maidencombe’s Rock House that really disturbed Rudyard. He experienced “a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart” whenever he entered. Even thirty years later when he revisited Rock House, it was “quite unchanged, the same brooding spirit of deep, deep Despondency within the open, lit rooms”.
It does indeed seem that even invisible locals can be hostile to outsiders.
In 1920, the writer Beverley Nichols and Lord Saint Audries, explored ‘Castel a Mare’ in Middle Warberry Rd. The intrepid ghost hunters were violently assaulted by unseen spirits.
Perhaps some locals can be a bit judgemental.
Arnold Ridley was an actor, writer, and a Torquay schoolmaster but is probably best known as Private Charles Godfrey in the 1970s TV series Dad’s Army.
Ironically, Arnold played the only conscientious objector in the Home Guard platoon of Walmington-on-Sea. Yet, he fought on the frontline during the Great War. He went ‘over the top’ at the Battle of the Somme, and was wounded three times and suffered from shellshock, blackouts and terrible nightmares for the rest of his life.
In Torquay in 1917 Arnold was handed a white feather by a tall young woman wearing a fox fur. This was the symbol of cowardice given to young men who weren’t in uniform. She didn’t realise that he had served with courage and been stood down from duty.
He took it without comment. When he was asked why, he answered: “I wasn’t wearing my soldier’s discharge badge. I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I was a wounded soldier and I used to carry it in my pocket.”
Other residents can be unforgiving.
Author and poet William Pryor is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He was also a heroin addict, and in 1972 moved to Torquay and opened Cosmic Books in Market Street. His autobiography records how in 1973 he was “busted by local drugs squad as customer of local pushers of ‘Chinese’ (heroin)”. He turned Queen’s evidence against his suppliers and was subsequently assaulted by their friends, “knocking four teeth from his head”.
Above: Poet William Pryor, assaulted in Ellacombe
Finally, we have a youthful Mick Jagger damning with faint praise. For five days in August 1964, the Rolling Stones used the Grand Hotel as a touring base. Mick told the local paper that Torquay was “a great town. But I shouldn’t think there’s much to do in the winter”.
Above: Mick Jagger “a great town. But I shouldn’t think there’s much to do in the winter”
On the other hand, most visitors do have a great time in the Bay…
