Brixham
Brixham is a coastal town and civil parish in the borough of Torbay in the county of Devon, in the south-west of England. As of the 2021 census, Brixham had a population of 16,825. It is one of the main three centres of the borough, along with Paignton and Torquay.
It is believed that the name Brixham originates from the personal name of an early resident, Brioc, followed by the Old English suffix, ham meaning home. The town, which is predominantly hilly, is built around a natural harbour, which in addition to leisure craft, provides anchorage for what is now one of England's largest remaining commercial fishing fleets. A conspicuous local tourist attraction is the permanently moored replica of Sir Francis Drake's ship Golden Hind.
Historically, Brixham was made up of two separate communities connected by a marshy lane. In Fishtown, in the immediate vicinity of the harbour, the residents made a living mainly from fishing and related trades, as the name suggests. Cowtown, inland in the vicinity of what is now St Mary's Square, made its living from agriculture. Cowtown is on the road out of town to the south-west in the direction of Kingswear. St Mary's Square is overlooked by a sizeable church standing on the site of a Saxon original.
On 5 November 1688, the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange landed in Brixham with 40,000 soldiers, sailors, and volunteers, before marching on London, where he was crowned King William III as part of the Glorious Revolution.
History
The first evidence of settlement dates from the Saxon period, it being possible that settlers arrived by sea from Hampshire in the 6th century or overland in about the year 800.Brixham was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Briseham with a population of 39.
Brixham was part of the former Haytor Hundred. In 1334, the town's value was assessed as being one pound, twelve shillings and eightpence. William de Whithurst, a distinguished Crown official and judge in Ireland, became parish priest of Brixham in 1350. By 1524 Brixham's value had risen to £24 and sixteen shillings. In 1536 the town was recorded as being a borough, but the status was later lost. The presence of a market is recorded from 1822.
The oldest and largest of Brixham's two Anglican churches is St. Mary's, approximately inland from the sea in the area of the town once known as Cowtown. The present church, dating from approximately 1360, is the third to occupy the site, the first and second having been a Saxon building of wooden construction and a Norman one of stone respectively.
File:Joseph Mallord William Turner - The Prince of Orange, William III, Embarked from Holland, and Landed at Torbay, November 4th, 1688, after a Stormy Passage - N00369 - National Gallery.jpg|thumb|The Prince of Orange Landing at Torbay by Turner, 1832
On 5 November 1688, the Dutch prince, William of Orange landed in Brixham, with 40,000 soldiers, sailors and volunteers, prior to marching on London to be crowned King William III as part of the Glorious Revolution. There is a statue and commemorative plaque marking the event close to the Golden Hind replica in the Inner Harbour, while a road at the other end of the harbour, which leads up a steep hill to where the Dutch made their camp, is still called Overgang, Dutch for passage or crossing.
Built in around 1736, Brixham boasts what is believed to be the world's only coffin-shaped house, the story going that its unusual design results from an argument between a father and his prospective son-in-law. Upon being asked for his daughter's hand in marriage, the father answered that, "I would rather see my daughter in a coffin than married to you." Not to be so easily discouraged, the prospective husband promised that the father's wishes would be met and built the coffin-shaped house, his action so impressing the bride's father that the latter gave his blessings to the marriage.
Built in 1815, the tower of All Saints' Church is a prominent landmark overlooking the centre of Brixham. Vicar of this church from 1824 to his death in 1847, though much absent because of ill health, was the Rev. Francis Lyte, who is well known for the writing, in the last weeks of his life, of the famous hymn Abide With Me at his home, Berry Head House, on the north-eastern edge of the town.
Most of the small picturesque terraced cottages built during the nineteenth century and earlier, along the narrow streets overlooking Brixham Harbour were occupied by fishermen and their families and others involved in related trades such as boatbuilding and sailmaking, while housing further away from the harbour in Cowtown and Higher Brixham tends to date from between the 1930s and the 1970s.
Opened in 1863, the British Seaman's Boys' Home was established in Brixham by William Gibbs of Tyntesfield for the bringing up and education of orphaned sons of deceased British seamen. It was closed in 1988 and the building it once occupied, Grenville House in Berry Head Road, is now an outdoor education centre.
On the night of 10/11 January 1866, Brixham was subjected to a storm of unusual severity, which, after the wind had veered to the east around midnight, a direction from which Torbay is not well sheltered, sank at least eleven local trawlers and a visiting French boat. Four Brixham fishermen were drowned. Much greater damage was done to the large number of vessels, at least 62 in number, some by the standards of the time quite large ships, en route to other ports which had sought shelter in Torbay from the storm. Forty of these ships were driven from their anchors and for the most part wrecked along of the local coastline. It is not known how many of their crew members and passengers were killed; the committee set up to help the victims of the disaster estimated that at least 70 had died, while other sources, in particular contemporary newspaper accounts, made claims of more than 150 fatalities. A memorial marking a mass grave in St Mary's Churchyard memorializes 25 unidentified victims and four named ones. The estimated financial cost of vessel and cargo losses ranges between £150,000 and £200,000.
A direct result of this disaster was that, thanks to money raised by the citizens of Exeter, Brixham acquired its first Royal National Lifeboat Institution lifeboat, and has maintained a lifeboat station ever since. To date Brixham lifeboat crews have been awarded 26 awards for bravery.
Brixham was joined to the railway network in February 1868 by the short Torbay and Brixham Railway which carried both passengers and goods, but the line, rendered progressively less and less commercially viable by the expansion of the road transport network in the course of the twentieth century, finally fell victim in 1963 to the Beeching cuts and the course of the old line, though still recognisable in places, has largely been built over, as has the site of Brixham railway station.
Due to Brixham's increasing popularity as a tourist destination following the Second World War, a number of holiday camps were built, for example Pontin's Wall Park and Dolphin camps, the latter being one of the company's biggest. It closed in 1991 after its main entertainment complex was destroyed by fire and the site has now been redeveloped with residential housing.
On the morning of 3 September 1973, a Jodel D. 117 G-AVEI light aircraft crashed due to engine failure on a residential bungalow in Higher Ranscombe Road, Brixham, killing its twenty-five year old pilot and his two small children. His wife, though very seriously injured, survived.
Maritime
There has probably been fishing in Brixham in one form or another from the settlement's very beginnings in the Saxon period. When this developed into a recognisable industry no one any longer knows, but by 1406 it had grown sufficiently large to warrant regulation by the Bailiff of the Water of the Dart, an officer of the Duchy of Cornwall, a legacy of this being that up until 1902 Brixham fishing boats were registered at Dartmouth rather than their actual home port.Due to being sheltered from the prevailing south-westerly winds, over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Brixham became Torbay's largest town and main fishing port, hake being the principal fish landed. Trawl fishing was first recorded in south Devon in the 1760s with high value deep water species such as turbot, sole and plaice being landed. As a result of the development of the turnpike road system during the rest of the eighteenth century, the transportation of fish to markets in Exeter, Bath and even London became economically viable, this trend being substantially enhanced in the nineteenth century with the coming of the railways, although Brixham itself, not getting its own railway station until 1868, was relatively late to fully benefit from this process. During the 1820s over 120 tons on average of turbot and sole was being landed per week by a Brixham fleet of about ninety trawlers exploiting fish stocks as far west as the Irish and Welsh coasts and eastwards along the Channel as far as Hastings and Dover. Migration of Brixham fishing families up the North Sea coast led to the establishment of new fleets in Grimsby and Hull.
In time these ports would grow significantly larger than Brixham, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the town still boasted the largest fishing fleet in England, with more than 250 boats keeping well over 1,000 fishermen in employment. Catches consisted of flounder, gurnard, herring, mullet, plaice, sole, turbot and whiting, the best quality fish being sent to Exeter, Bath, Bristol and London. From 1868, once Brixham had finally been connected directly to the rail network, fish landed in the port could be delivered to London's Billingsgate Fish Market in eight hours as opposed to three days by road.
In parallel with this expansion, over the course of the century, a major boat and shipbuilding industry grew up in the town, numerous boatyards lining the shore and catering both for the local demand for new boats and that from ports further afield. For much of the century, these yards also turned their hand to building ocean-going schooners for the fiercely competitive fruit trade with the Azores.
Other maritime trades such as sail, rope and net-making were needed as well and became a conspicuous feature of the Brixham townscape, forming an important part of the local economy in their own right.
In 1900, Brixham even had its own ice factory, a much needed addition to the town, given the large quantities of ice required to keep catches fresh and the somewhat precarious method of supply available previously, from 1869 onwards it having been imported from Stavanger in Norway, carried aboard fast sailing ships capable of making the passage in just four days. Despite their speed, in the summer months half the cargo would typically be lost to melting in transit.
However, reluctant and unable on financial grounds to replace sailing trawlers with faster and more powerful steam-powered ones, from the 1890 onwards and into the early twentieth century, Brixham's fishing industry went into decline, in particular being unable to compete with North Sea ports such as Lowestoft and Grimsby in the lucrative Dogger Bank fishing grounds. This decline was further compounded by the outbreak of World War One in 1914 and the resultant loss of fishing boats to U-boat attack and trawler crews being called upon for military service. The inter-war years proved no better. In 1928 only 2160 tons of fish were landed at Brixham, compared to 94,000 at Hull, and by the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 the Brixham fishing fleet had dwindled to only six boats.
The arrival during World War Two of refugee fishermen from Belgium helped to revitalise the fishing industry and brought with it a much needed knowledge of diesel engines.
A definite upturn in the industry's fortunes was seen in 1960 following the adoption of larger trawlers from the Netherlands and by 1966 the fishing fleet had grown to 45 boats. In 1969 the fleet had grown to 70 boats with £247,000 worth of fish being landed at Brixham and over the next two decades £4.6 million was invested in infrastructure projects such as building a new fish market and ice plant. In 1991 more than 800 people were employed directly or indirectly within the industry. In 2000 Brixham became England's premier fishing port, landing a total of £18.4 million worth of fish. In 2021 £43.6 million worth of fish was landed.
The modern boats are diesel-driven, but a few of the famous old sailing trawlers have been preserved. Owned by not for profit organisations and registered as historic vessels on the National Historic Ships register it is possible to sail on these big wooden built, red sailed boats. They depend on income from guests to keep them sailing, such as Pilgrim of Brixham and Vigilance of Brixham.
Hundreds of ships have been wrecked on the rocks around the town. Brixham men have always known the dangers but even they were taken by surprise by a terrible storm that blew up on the night of 10 January 1866. The fishing boats only had sails then and could not get back into harbour because gale-force winds and the high waves were against them. To make things worse, the beacon on the breakwater was swept away, and in the black darkness they could not determine their position. According to local legend, their wives brought everything they could carry, including furniture and bedding, to make a big bonfire on the quayside to guide their men home. Fifty vessels were wrecked and more than one hundred people died in the storm; when dawn broke, the wreckage stretched for nearly up the coast.
Hearing of this tragedy, the citizens of Exeter gave money to set up what became the Royal National Lifeboat Institution's Brixham Lifeboat in 1866. Now known as Torbay Lifeboat Station, it operates a all-weather lifeboat and a inshore lifeboat. The crews have a history of bravery, with 52 awards for gallantry. The boathouse can be visited and memorials to the brave deeds seen; on special occasions, visitors can go on board the boat. Two maroons are the signal for the lifeboat to be launched.
Smuggling was more profitable than fishing, but if the men were caught, they were hanged. There are many legends about the local gangs and how they evaded the Revenue men. One humorous poem describes how a notorious local character, Bob Elliott, could not run away because he had gout and hid in a coffin. Another villain was caught in possession but evaded capture by pretending to be the Devil, rising out of the morning mists. On another occasion when there was a cholera epidemic, some Brixham smugglers drove their cargo up from the beach in a hearse, accompanied by a bevy of supposed mourners following the cortege drawn by horses with muffled hooves.
The town's outer harbour is protected by a long breakwater, useful for sea angling. In winter, this is a site for purple sandpiper birds.
To the east of Brixham, and sheltering its harbour, lies the coastal headland of Berry Head with a lighthouse, Iron Age fort and national nature reserve.