Night-time Torquay is another Torquay.
Late at night, despite the remnants of Harbourside revelries, it can be unaccountably alien. Modern Torquay hardly knows pure darkness or silence any more, yet when the light fades, ordinary sounds acquire sinister meanings and our roads echo with emptiness.
The night creatures emerge, our town’s bestiary. Gulls flying the Fleet Street canyon pillage Kentucky scraps, rats rustle in plastic bins, foxes slope away, and the occasional badger can be seen even at Castle Circus.
Some Torquay folk are more visible at night. These are our nocturnal workforce, the taxi drivers, delivery workers, cleaners, and take away staff. A good few are recently-arrived migrants performing the least popular forms of labour, and it’s at night that Torquay most closely resembles the ethnic mix of our cities.
The other wakeful denizens of the dark are those without a home to go to. The homeless search for shelter in the lanes and churchyards of Castle Circus and Torre, subdued or enraged by alcohol and narcotics, a pursuit of desperate numbness that hasn’t changed much since the nineteenth century. History surely moves at a far slower place for the vagrant and, though we may try to understand their alienation, alas we can still find them alien.
We’ve forgotten that our town centre and suburbs are built upon real earth, a prehistoric landscape. Under the depopulated roads and pavements are those mythical seven hills, the fast-flowing Fleet lies submerged beneath Primark, and Abbey Meadows caps reclaimed marshland.
At night everything seems made from the same monochromatic substance and there’s something surreal about those limestone cliffs and the liminal blackness at the edge of the palm-lined promenade. Perhaps the darkness reminds us of that primordial Bay.
After midnight it’s difficult to resist the feeling that people walking alone are up to no good. We unfairly label them as the mad, the bad, the lost and the lonely; those running out of time or with time to waste. It’s a mutual suspicion, of course, and in those small hours it’s worth reminding ourselves that the silhouettes of other wanderers can feel just as threatened by our presence as we are of theirs.
This isn’t new.
For hundreds of years anti-social activity took place after the coming of darkness. Victorian and Edwardian Church leaders saw work as a duty to God, and at dusk the laborious and contented were expected to sink to rest. Meanwhile, those out after dark without a legitimate purpose were suspected of being immoral.
Male nightwalkers were identified with disorderly drinking, criminality, or the mania and insomnia caused by the opium once easily available on Torquay’s streets. In a patriarchal society, lone women in the night were, in contrast, assumed to be prostitutes and regarded as the most corrupt and disreputable. Many middle-class men were openly contemptuous of ‘streetwalkers’, even if they used their services. Being uneducated, they left no memoirs and are among the forgotten women of our town.
As Torquay flourished, migrants filled the poorly constructed buildings of Pimlico and Swan Street. These alleys had almost no illumination, were disease-ridden and known for the stench of animal and human waste. Gin and opium offered speedy but temporary relief from the anxieties of poverty, hunger, and abuse.
Inevitably, in 1849 cholera came to town and so we buried the open sewer that was the River Fleet. But not before the disease claimed the lives of 66 people in six weeks. Many of the dead were quickly buried at ‘Cholera Corner’ in Torre’s St. Saviour’s churchyard, the graves unmarked as the victim’s families lacked the funds for memorial stones.
In the early years of Torquay, lanterns and candlelight were the sole sources of illumination. But on 8 October 1834 the darkness was banished by forty gas lamps installed in our main thoroughfares. This was modernity and it transformed the town. The richer classes could then act as both spectators and performers as they paraded Fleet Street and the Harbourside, a revolution that inspired a local poet of the time to write:
“Come quick, Jemima, bring your shawl,
Come, come and take my hand,
And let us see the brilliant gas,
Just lighted on the Strand.”
Yet illumination was the privilege of the upper and middle classes, while the poor inhabited a parallel social world. Street lighting certainly gentrified the commercial centre of the resort, and allowed for ostentatious acts of consumption, though it relegated other areas. The intense pools of light emphasised the darkness beyond and the dangers it concealed:
“Oh! And may it prosper, may it show,
The ruffian as he lurks,
And may the new light drive away,
The Devil and his works.”
There was always this mirror to the Enlightenment and Establishment, and to a Torquay that wanted to portray itself as modern, educated and sophisticated. Despite the triumph of the rational and scientific, where medicine and education provided explanations and cures, the night remained a time when the bindings of logic loosened, and a repressed and secretive community could surface.
It was here in the interstices where some locals continued to believe in the power of witches. When a harbourside house was being renovated, for example, a mummified cat was found behind the fireplace, the animal placed there to protect the inhabitants from evil spirits. As late as 1875 local magistrates could still receive an application by a poor elderly Chelston woman who believed that her husband had perished through witchcraft.
Furthermore, Satan, the great enemy of humanity, continued to lurk in the imagination. In February 1855 panic ensued when the Devil’s supposed cloven footprints were found in overnight snow in Barton. Legend even had it that he lived locally in the caves beneath Daddyhole Plain, Daddy being the old English for Devil. In the early hours he would emerge to claim his victims.
And, of course, the night is the domain of the supernatural, both ancient and modern. We were never short of paranormal visitations in our town; more Torquay people claim to have seen a ghost than anywhere else in the country.
Indeed, the richest town in England had always been fascinated by the occult. From our very beginnings we set up secret societies to explore hidden knowledge. Though now primarily philanthropic organisations, Torquay’s Freemasons (founded in the resort in 1810), the Oddfellows (1856), and the Foresters (1858) all claimed to have their roots in pagan antiquity and used rituals that concerned the established Church.
This other side to the daylight of the rational was darkly reflected by an outpouring of literature exploring the uncanny, with many of the great writers on the macabre and mysterious having associations with our town.
Yet there was always enough real horror in Torquay without the need for make-believe. Secrets could be hidden after dark: Charlotte Winsor’s serial murder of babies in her lonely cottage at Lawe’s Bridge in 1865; the starvation which triggered riots; the exploitation of thousands in domestic service.
Those who fell way from society altogether were often taken away at night. They used to send the mentally ill and ‘idiots’ to be deliberately degraded in Newton Abbot’s workhouse. Out of the sight of the tourists, out of mind.
Now much of this is forgotten, lost to our collective memory, best not dwelled upon.
Even our legacy of the killing field of Gallows Gate where the ground is enriched by the remains of the brutalised bodies of those convicted of trifling crimes against property. For centuries locals would avoid the place after dark. Now past recall, except by those of us with a grisly interest in such things,
Even the darkest night comes to an end. So must all dreams and nightmares vanish with the first streaks of dawn over the Bay. But what we should always bear in mind is that Torquay’s night is far more than just a darker form of our day.
‘Torquay: A Social History’ by local author Kevin Dixon is available for £10 from Artizan Gallery, Fleet Street, Torquay. or:
https://www.art-hub.co.uk/product-page/torquay-a-social-history-by-kevin-dixon
