A Book of the West. Volume I Devon

CHAPTER XVI.

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 10s. 5½d. 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 - 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 - 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 - 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.

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.