A little town where the spirit of Old England still lives and flourishes
Villages and little towns are rather like people: they either have charm or they don't, and it's not always easy to explain why. When I am staying at my house in the Quantocks, I always go over to Watchet, an ancient little harbour-town on the point where the Bristol Channel becomes the Atlantic Ocean. It has a splendid gallery which specialises in Victorian paintings. I have bought many treasures there, including a terrifying 1880s vision of Loch Carusk in Skye, so scary it makes people's hair stand on end. Watchet also has the best small museum in England, entrance free, created entirely by the locals, and much loved by children for it has gruesome weapons. a model railway and a pirate ship. But the real reason I go is that Watchet is entirely true to itself; a hard-working place that has struggled to keep its head above the waters — sometimes literally, for the storms on this coast are cataclysmic — for well over LOCO years, and looks it: weather-beaten, bony, sinewy, no frills or ye-oldes, with no rich men's houses or follies — just solid workingclass history stretching back until it dissolves into the mists of early Anglo-Saxon times.
The enemy came from the sea. So the town's church. St Decuman's, named after the missionary who first brought it Christianity, was solidly built on the hill above, out of reach of all but the fiercest pirates. King Alfred made Watchet one of his 30 fortified towns, and the Vikings were beaten off in 918, though on two later occasions, 988 and 997, they got inside the walls and laid it waste. These marauders were particularly keen on the town, for it had a mint, which made beautiful silver coins from the time of Ethelred the Unready to the chaos of King Stephen's reign 200 years later.
Indeed Watchet did everything. It fished and cured its catch and sold it inland. It enlarged its natural harbour by piling up walls of enormous boulders, later reinforced by thick timbers beaten into the ground, forming what was called a 'cobb', like the one in Persuasion. The vital harbour wall has to take a continuous battering, building up, every few years, to a venomous assault by the entire resources of the Atlantic. Then it has to be rebuilt, with infinite labour and at daunting expense; a process that still goes on. I have been there at storm-time and done a watercolour of the giant waves crashing against the wall. Last week, on a normal windy day, I took two of my grandchildren along it to see the little red lighthouse that guards the entrance to the harbour, and the
force of the wind nearly blew all three of us into the water. On such days, the coast of south Wales disappears in the mist; the sea, a mass of foam, churned mud and sand, becomes deep chocolate brown; the crest of the waves advance with personal menace, the wind slicing off the tops and slapping you in the face with chilly scoopfuls of malicious brine. Children like this, of course, but are glad to get out of the futy before long and sit in the warm Corner Café, overlooking the port. where huge platefuls of chips, eggs, etc., are served by a tall, comely, smiling blonde.
Watchet or Watchatte certainly had such a wall in the 16th century, and the authorities noted that `small botes have and used to come yn with salte, wyne, etc.' Boats of up to 100 tonnes were built by local shipwrights, and one of them crossed the Atlantic to early Virginia. Watchet engaged in smuggling (though never wrecking, like some west of England places), and sometimes the local collector of customs was in league with them, arguing that the trade was easier to contain when in the hands of 'respectable' people like the men of Watchet who did not murder customs officers rather than when left to the ruthless professionals. But after an inquiry in 1662, the surveyor general of customs reported to Charles II that Watchet, having been a poor and poky place, had 'grown rich' at the crown's expense. Not for long, however, for Watchet has always had to grub a hard living as best it could. It had a bit of agriculture, worked on the old mediaeval strip system; some strips still existed in living memory. So it exported food, in its own ships, and hides, and timber from the woods, which once came down to the water's edge. There was a saw-mill, and many other mills, and in time there evolved a busy trade making paper. The ships that took these goods to Bristol, south Wales and London came back loaded with coal and luxuries such as tobacco and fine cloth (the rough stuff was made locally). At one time in the 18th century, not only small boats but also brigs and brigantines, ketches and trawlers, schooners and three-masted vessels — as many as 128— were operating from Watchet. An amazing system of railways, one with a gradient of one-in-four, was constructed to bring iron ore from the top of the Brendon Hills to the harbour, there to be conveyed to Swansea and the great furnaces of Port Talbot, visible on fine days.
The seamen and shipwrights of Watchet could turn their hands to anything. They built ships and demolished them for scrap. In 1920
the flagship and pride of the old Pacific fleet, HMS Fox, was brought in for scrap, the largest vessel (more than 6,000 tonnes) ever to enter the harbour, and for two years was reduced to saleable quantities of iron, steel, copper and brass. Though half the harbour has now been converted into a yacht marina, nearly all the old trades continue and the import-export business flourishes. Trade unions? Never 'card of 'ern. Other trades were lime-burning, clothmaking and fulling, manufacturing boxes and blankets, ropes and sails, burning seaweed for bottle-blowing, mining alabaster and gypsum (used in making plaster of Paris), and many curious trades connected with timber and paper-pulp. Foundries operated in the town to make machine parts and keep the railway and the shipyard in good running order.
I have gleaned much of this knowledge from an admirable little history of the place. Old Watchet, written by A.L. Wedlake. He was a typical Watchet man in that he worked in paper-making, marine insurance, helped to break up HMS Fox, engaged in farming, ran a nursery business and a flower shop, took photographs and helped to found the delightful local museum.
Watchet was the port where 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' began and ended, and Coleridge was there often, studying the local types. I have seen there no old salt with a 'glittering eye', I'm glad to say. But descendants of the Wedding Guest, 'one of three', who was forced to listen to the grisly tale, are still around: kindly, sympathetic people who look as though they are out in all weathers and who pride themselves on an honest day's work. There is a certain spirit in Watchet, a spirit I now miss in other places and which, for want of a better term. I call the spirit of Old England. Watchet people keep up with the times, are enterprising and inventive. But they are also modest, quiet, soft-spoken and unobtrusive. They remind me of the grown-ups I remember when I was a child, before the war. They are content to be part of the human background of their country. They have no desire to appear on the telly. They seem to live in a different century from the weird population of modem Britain about whom I read with increasing bewilderment in the newspapers. They go about their business without pushing or showing off. They are happy to inhabit a sensible little town which makes no effort to rise above its status as a good place to live, nothing more. Would there were more of such people, and more such places, in today's England.
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