women of Beer rushed in with an artful story of shipwreck, attracting the soldiers’ attention. Rattenbury, seizing the opportunity, dashed among them, half-naked, and escaped to the beach, where he hastily took boat and went off to his own vessel, and safety.
In 1806 he, his crew, and his cargo of spirit-tubs were captured by the Duke of York cutter, when returning from Alderney. He was fined £100, and with his companions was sentenced to the alternative of imprisonment or service on board a man-o’-war. They chose the sea, and were accordingly shipped aboard the brig Kate, in the Downs; but soon, while the officers were all more or less drunk, he found an opportunity of escaping, and was presently home again.
The smuggling exploits of this master of the art were endless. Perhaps the most amusing—to the reader, at any rate—is that incident at Seaton Hole, where, one dark night, going up the cliff with a keg on his back, one of a cargo he had just landed, he was so unfortunate as to stumble over a donkey, which began to bray so horribly that, what with his trumpeting and the noise of the smuggler’s fall, a Revenue officer, sleeping at the post of duty, was aroused, and seized forty kegs, nearly the whole of that run.
After serving three terms of imprisonment for smuggling, and for being unable to pay a fine of £4,500, Rattenbury’s many adventures came to an end in 1833. His later years were devoted to fishing and piloting, and between whiles, to composing his reminiscences. In those pages you read this rather pitiful little note: “The smuggler gratefully acknowledges the kindness of the Right Honourable Lord Rolle, who now allows him one shilling per week for life.” What lavish generosity!
That was a picturesque village in which this Old Master and prime exponent of smuggling lived. The one street led steeply down to the sea, with a clear rivulet purling along the gutter, with quaint pumps at intervals and bordered by cob cottages. The peasant women sat at the doors making the pillow-lace of Devonshire, and the children, for lack of better toys, played the great game of “shop” with the fish-offal in the kennel.
BEER.
But the old Beer of this picture has vanished, and a new and smart village has arisen in its stead, with just two or three of these characteristic survivals, to make us the more bitterly regret that which we have lost. The place that was so inspiring for the artist has become an impossibility for him, except, at the cost of veracity, he dodges the Philistine surroundings of those surviving “bits.” One little circumstance shall show you how artificial this sometime unconventional and simple village has become. When it was the haunt of painters, there was none who loved Beer so much as, or visited it more constantly than, Hamilton Macallum, who died here, aged fifty-five, in 1896. He had endeared himself to the people, and they and some of his brother artists combined to set up the bronze tablet to his memory that stands in the tiny pleasure-ground or public garden in the village street. And here is the sorry humour of it, that shows the damnable artificiality of the times, which has spoiled so much of Old England. The “public garden” is kept locked through the winter and the spring, lest the children go in and spoil it; and only thrown open when the brief visitors’ season begins. There could be no more bitter indictment.
There was once a humble little church in this same street of Beer. A very humble church, but in keeping with the place. And now? Why a large and highly ornate building, infinitely pretentious and big enough for a cathedral, has arisen on the site of it. It is, however, still in keeping with Beer, for as deep calls unto deep, so across this narrow street pretentiousness bids “how d’ye do” to pretence.
There are polished marble pillars in this new church of Beer, where there should be rough-axed masonry, and a suburban high finish in place of a rustic rudeness; and the sole relics of what had once been are the two memorial tablets, themselves sufficiently rural. One is to “John, the fifth sonn of William Starr of Bere, Gent., and Dorothy his wife, which died in the plauge was here Bvried 1646.” John Starr was one of a family which, about a century earlier, had become owners of a moiety of the manor. The house he built in Beer street bears on one chimney the initials “J. S.” and on another a star, in punning allusion to his name.
The other memorial in the church is to “Edward Good, late an Industrious fisherman, who left to the Vicar and Churchwardens for the time being and their successors for ever TWENTY POUNDS in TRUST for the Poor of this Parish. The interest to be Distributed at Christmas in the proportion of two thirds at Beer and one at Seaton. He died November 7, 1804, in sixty-seventh year of his Age.”
Of the four industries of Beer—stone-quarrying smuggling, fishing, and lace-making—the shy business of smuggling has alone disappeared. Those who do not carry their explorations beyond the village street will see nothing of the stone-getting, for the quarries lie away off the road between Beer and Branscombe, where, in a cliff-like scar in the hillside they are still busily being worked.
It must be close upon two thousand years since building-stone was first won from this hillside, for the quarries originated in Roman times. Since then they have been more or less continually worked, and although the ancient caves formed by the old quarrymen in their industry have long been abandoned for the open working, they exist, dark and damp, and not altogether safe for a stranger, running hundreds of yards in labyrinthine passages into the earth. It is of Beer stone that the vaulting and the arches of the nave in Exeter Cathedral were built, 600 years ago; it was used, even earlier in the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster; in Winchester Cathedral, and many other places; and to-day is as well appreciated as ever, huge eight and ten-ton blocks being a feature in the trucks on the railway sidings down at Seaton. It greatly resembles Bath stone in its fine texture, but is of a more creamy colour and, while softer and more easily worked when newly quarried, dries harder.
In ancient times the stone was shipped from the little cove of Beer, which was thus no inconsiderable place. To improve it, in the words of Leland: “Ther was begon a fair pere for socour of shippelettes, but ther cam such a tempest a three years sins as never in mynd of man had before bene seene in that shore”; and so the pier was washed away, and the fragments of it are all that is to be seen in the unsheltered cove at this day.
The fishermen of Beer are a swarthy race, descended, according to tradition, from the crew of a shipwrecked Spanish vessel, who found the place almost depopulated by that plague of which John Starr was a victim. They and their trawlers, which you see laboriously hauled up on the beach, are in the jurisdiction of the port of Exeter.
Here, in the semicircular cove, the summer sea laps softly among the white pebbles, as innocently as though it had never drowned a poor fisherman; and the white of the chalk cliffs, the equal whiteness of the sea-floor and the clearness of the water itself give deep glimpses down to where the seaweed unfurls its banners from rock and cranny, where the crabs are seen walking about, hesitatingly, like octogenarians, and jelly-fish float midway, lumps of transparency, like marine ghosts. The sea is green here: a light translucent ghostly green, very beautiful and at the same time, back of one’s consciousness—if you examine your feelings—a little mysterious and repellent, suggesting not merely crabs and jelly-fish, but inimical unknown things and infinite perils of the deep, sly, malignant, patiently biding their time. The green sea has not the bluff heartiness of the joyous blue.
The little cove, enclosed as it is by steep cliffs, looks for all the world like a little scene in a little theatre. You almost expect a chorus of fishermen to enter and hold forth musically on the delights of seine-fishing, but they only suggest to the contemplative stranger that it is “a fine day for a row,” and ask, in their rich Devonian tones, if you want a “bwoat.”
The white cliffs of Beer are crannied with honeycombings and fissures, banded with black flints, and here and there patterned with ochreous pockets of earth, where the wild flowers grow as though Dame Nature had been making the workaday place gay with bedding-out plants for the delight
