To Brixham

Would you believe, we've been down in Devon for around 18 years, and had never been to Brixham?

We finally went on Monday. It could scarcely be easier from Topsham: a straight-through train along the coast to Paignton, and out the door of the station to the bus station, from which a 12 bus goes to Brixham. The Brixham terminus is at the harbour end of Lower Brixham ("Fish Town" - as opposed to the historically separate Upper Brixham, nicknamed "Cow Town"). I don't terribly like overcast autumn/winter days, and out-of-season coastal towns can feel very run-down - but it was a very pleasant afternoon. From the slightly shabby view over the car park ...

... a short walk takes you to the quay, with its replica of the Golden Hind.

From there you can potter left to look at the fishing quay ...

... or go right to the other side of the harbour, where the dockside path or higher roads take you to Prince William Marina, the half-mile breakwater, and ultimately to Berry Head. We saved the last for another day (it's not far, but at 3.30pm the dusk was already starting to set in).  but did get to the end of the breakwater.

Lower Brixham is built up the limestone sides of an inlet, and the vista that opens up as you walk along the Berry Head road is a delight, almost Mediterranean in style, with intriguing glimpses up the steep flights of steps between the pastel-coloured houses.

From the breakwater - though it wasn't the best day for it - you have a panoramic view right across Torbay, to Torquay and beyond.

We must definitely visit on a brighter day.

- Ray

Nooks and crannies - an ill-fated housing boom

click to enlarge

This is the cover of a pleasant booklet, Isle of Wight: Forty-one camera studies of the nooks & crannies, bays & chines of the garden isle, produced by the Photochrom Company of London and Tunbridge Wells. It's undated, but circa 1910. The cover has a cut-out revealing the first image, a location that's one of my obsessions, Blackgang Chine, a now-destroyed coastal ravine near the southern tip of the Island.

click to enlarge

The image, taken from the headland called Blackgang Bluff, looks across the chine to various clifftop villas in the near distance, part of the mid-Victorian development of Blackgang, and off into the distance over the 'Back of the Wight'. The row of houses at the right is called Cliff Terrace, which is presumably the "terrace of lodging-houses" described in Edmund Venables' 1867 A guide to the Undercliff of the Isle of Wight, Shanklin and Blackgang (page 67). There were further villas at Lowcliff, hidden by the cliffs at the right of the photo - compare the view I posted a while back:

Low-resolution image reproduced in accordance with dissemination statement: McInnes, R. 2008. Art as a tool in support of the understanding of coastal change. The Crown Estate, 106 pages, ISBN: 978-1-906410-08-7 First published 2008. Click to enlarge

click to enlarge

All of the cliffscape in the foreground has been destroyed by coastal erosion over the 20th century. Cliff Terrace itself has been truncated, and is one of the few remnants of a fairly ill-fated Victorian development boom.

Apart from finding the picture interesting, I returned to the topic because I hadn't fully realised the extent of the speculative developments and land dealings going on in the Isle of Wight in the 1830s-40s. I already mentioned the land turnover at Bonchurch in that period, associated with the breakup of the manorial estate - see Brannon on Bonchurch and ... in the Isle of Wight #1. Similar moves happened with the breakup of the "Buddle estate" near Niton; an advertisement in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle for September 11, 1847 offers the individual sale of a portfolio of plots "with an extensive frontage to the Coast, affording a grand sea view, and admirably adated for the erection of Marine Villas".

The Newport agent managing the sale, Mr Francis Pittis (later Sir Francis Pittis, mayor of Newport), must have done extremely well out of such deals, because the same issue shows him handling the sale of recently-built properties at or near Blackgang: the "Italian style" South View House (previously mentioned here); the "Gothic villa residence" Lowcliff Lodge (the large house at bottom right of the colour image above) and Lowcliff Cottage at its drive entrance. Around the same time (Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian, October 16, 1847) he handled the sale of the estate of James Barlow Hoy, whose 38 lots included pasture land and houses in the area of Blackgang and Chale; and in the Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian of May 19, 1849 he has further ads for the recently-built Southlands (with "15 acres of pasture land, part of which is composed in terrace walks, pleasure grounds, and gardens, and includes the most valuable and desirable building sites") as well as the Blackgang Hotel itself (now part of the offices of the Blackgang Chine amusement park), Blackgang Farm, and various nearby properties.

The whole development, looking in hindsight, seems wildly shortsighted. Even then, the land was known to be unstable, with a particular major slip in 1799 taking out 100 acres and Pitlands Farm at Blackgang. Only a few years before the boom, the author Robert Mudie, in his The Isle of Wight: its past and present condition, and future prospects (c. 1840) commented extensively on the 1799 slip, and the high probability of future ones - see page 100 onward - saying that

the fate of this [farm] however ought to give some warning to those who are erecting villas between the land-slip and the chine; for, though these may be founded immediately on the rock, and that rock may have the appearance of stability. appearances in such a place are not to be depended upon; and it is very possible that the leveling of a flat area for a villa and its patch of lawn, may tend to admit the water in the vertical fissures and cutters of the rock, and thus hasten some such catastrophe as that to which we are alluding.

Mudie was right, but it all took longer than he feared. As it happened, none of the affluent buyers ever fell off a cliff while in occupancy; the larger villas outlived the era of the gentleman mansion owner, and generally succumbed quietly to property blight and dereliction / demolition long before the cliff reached them. Southview, for instance, suffered minor damage from the 1978 landslip, and was destroyed by fire (how it started appears unknown) shortly after. There don't seem to be any easily findable records of what happened to Southlands or Lowcliff. But one notable villa from this era, Five Rocks, is still extant, and houses the goblin-haunted "Rumpus Mansion", one of the theme park features.

The Carisbrooke Castle HistoricImages site has some very impressive views of Blackgang in the early 1900s (you can see higher resolution if you select an image, right-click, and view it in Windows Photo Viewer; from the terms of use, this seems to be OK as long as you don't use them for anything). This one in particular - #1766 - also shows Cliff Terrace and Lowecliffe, with other buildings in positively scary locations at the foot of the chine.

Update, 1 Nov 2014
I've found a deal more about Lowcliffe and Southlands: see Lowcliffe and Southlands: from cradle to grave.

- Ray

Blurb.com: impressed

Should any readers be thinking of self-publishing, I want to share a recommendation for Blurb. I decided a while back to self-publish A Wren-like Note, in strong part because I wanted it to happen quickly, and had recommendations for Blurb - for combination of affordability and high quality - from reliable colleagues and friends (such as Felix Grant).

They have a few options for creating books, including PDF upload; a couple of high-power Adobe applications mostly suited to top-quality photo books; and Blurb BookSmart, a dedicated DTP program designed to interface with Blurb's system. I went for BookSmart. You register to download it, create your book, then upload the book direct from the program.

BookSmart - edit mode

BookSmart is pretty self-explanatory. It walks you through creating the basic template for the book (name, size and format, hardback/paperback) and importing files - in my case, the chapters of A Wren-like Note in Word format. Then it launches a WYSIWYG word processor with completely standard controls: the usual menus (file, edit, fonts, etc) with various additions customised for creating book, such as inserting different classes of page. When you add a page (text, text and picture, picture, chapter heading, table of contents, etc), a side menu offers various presets for content location on the page; these can be customised once in place. If you have images, there's an image library that handles importing them into BookSmart (this is necessary for the final upload). The ordinary edit mode shows box borders in grey, but you can switch to a preview mode that shows what the book will look like.

BookSmart - preview mode

I found BookSmart very easy to use, and mostly trouble-free. When you're adding text 'live', it gives a lot of temporary warnings about text overflowing the page, and this can cascade forward through the book to give a list of hundreds of such errors. Mostly, however, these self-correct. It crashed on a few occasions, but gracefully - it auto-saves frequently, and restarting the program takes you smoothly back to the pre-crash state. You can also manually save, and doing this frequently is always good practice with such work.

BookSmart - image organiser launched

Once you're happy with the result, you just click on 'order book', and BookSmart uploads it to the Blurb site (it may take around 15 minutes, depending on how graphics-heavy the work is). Blurb processes it, and advises you shortly that it's ready. Online, there's an again self-explanatory setup for creating a sales page, deciding profit margin, and setting your options for receiving payments (in most cases, PayPal is the most convenient, so I directed it to my account). All Blurb asks up-front is that you buy one copy of the book straight away, or it'll be deleted from the system.

My proof copy took a week (ordered 16th November, arrived 22nd November); the quoted ETA was 3rd December, but I assume this is a Mr Scott worst-case estimate to cover them legally, Once it's in transit, you can follow the FedEx delivery trail online, and so know what day it'll arrive, which is a nice touch.

I'm absolutely delighted with the book quality, in terms of cover, paper and binding, and print (including photos), and all my dealings with Blurb have been an extremely good experience. Blurb is also completely transparent about costs; there may well be other self-publishing companies that are a little less expensive, but quality and a complete lack of hassle are aspects very worth paying for.

Note that you won't get into any kind of personal interaction with Blurb; any help you might want is conducted through their forum page, and that doesn't go beyond nuts-and-bolts of using the software and the system.

This is actually a significant point. Self-publishing does need a large toolkit of skills beyond writing the stuff: for instance, a modicum of aesthetics about layout, readiness to learn how to use various software, ability to manipulate photos and other graphics (if you're doing your own artwork), organising ISBNs (both the number and creating the barcode), and so on. That's not to mention your responsibilities - and I've found these horribly good at keeping me awake at night - for areas such as copyright and photo permissions.

What you upload is what you get. Blurb won't talk you through the creative process, do your ISBN, or spot any proofreading or legal problems for you. But if you have those skills, and are 100% confident about exactly what you want printed, Blurb will do their side of the job quickly and outstandingly well.

- Ray

Mysterious superwhatevers #4

Yahoo! advertising has showcased another rich crop of biological oddities, this time drawn from a mix of plant and animal kingdoms. I say "oddities", but they're not - eggs and seeds are commonplace biologically - but they're certainly odd when used irrelevantly in advertising something completely different. The ads all have the slogan "Eat THIS, Never Diet Again" and lead to the blurb for the latest fad weight-loss nostrums: "Garcinia Cambogia" (which has mysteriously changed its name almost overnight from the same advertiser's "Garcinia Gambogia") and "Green Coffee Bean".

This first one appears to be the eggs of some species of Apple Snail, probably the invasive Pomacea canaliculata. I haven't been able to identify the source image, but there are plenty of images of its distinctive pink eggs online.

This, as I described at Mysterious superfruit #2, is a Finger Lime (Citrus australasica), the fruit of a thorny shrub native to Australia; it has lately acquired a reputation as a gourmet "lime caviar".

Google Images didn't find this one (I wonder if the advertisers are getting sneaky and trying to avoid identifiable images). But I'm pretty sure it's Alaska Salmon roe - see the image at Alaska Fish Radio.

This one: I don't know. It might be more roe.

I couldn't identify this one ... but (24th November update) Emily at Ephemeral Curios has a likely identification that it's a salp (or, I think, two of them). See the comments section below.

These are slug eggs: image cropped from a Dutch Flickr photo by "Jolle" (eitjes van 'n naaktslak).

More fish eggs: these are eggs of Arctic grayling, an image from a series by the brilliant photographer Paul Vecsei showing the developing embryos. See Inside the egg at the blog Way Upstream.

One I recognise: these are the edible fruit of the longan (Dimocarpus longan), a tree of the soapberry (Sapindus) family, closely related to the lychee. They're rather nice - while very similar to the lychee, they have a pleasant aromatic muskiness - and our local greengrocer occasionally has them in.

These I recognised too. They're wasabi peas,  a hot (spice-hot, not temperature-hot) snack made by dusting dried cooked peas with a seasoning powder containing the very pungent brassica, wasabi (aka Japanese horseradish). The image seems to come from this Romanian online food magazine.

More salmon roe, I think

A third I recognise: a raw cocoa pod (the fruit of Theobroma cacao). The image tracks to a stock photo from Visuals Unlimited.

No luck, but it looks like some kind of fish eggs on seaweed.

Most likely slug or snail eggs again ...









... and finally, more slug or snail eggs, the image cropped from this Flickr photo - teeny tiny eggs - by "Luckybon".






Whatever the dubious merits of the advertised products, these guys certainly provide interesting biological quizzes ...

- Ray

Dean Maitland locations

Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note:

While I managed to source most of the Maxwell Gray books as e-texts on the Internet, I did want a print copy of The Silence of Dean Maitland, and was pleased to find the 1897 Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner illustrated edition with line drawings by Frederick Hamilton Jackson (1848-1923). The book itself is undated, but it's listed in The Publisher, Volume 12, Issue 65, 1897. Jackson clearly took the trouble to go to the relevant locations, in the Isle of Wight and Winchester, since the scene pictures are mostly very identifiable.

 

This is Alma looking over a gate as she climbs the hill from Chalkburne (Carisbrooke) towards Malbourne (Calbourne). The view is of the western end of St Mary's church, Carisbrooke, somewhere on the steep ascent up the present B3401 called Alvington Shute, though trees and building obscure this view nowadays.

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The village of "Malbourne" - in fact Calbourne. This is more or less the view from the Sun Inn, on the present B3401, looking down Lynch Lane (the Isle of Wight Family History site has a couple of similar views - see particularly the first image at Photo Gallery : Isle of Wight - Calbourne). The British Listed Buildings Entry - Church of All Saints, Calbourne, #392986 - doesn't say why and when the church lost the stubby spire that formerly topped its tower.

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This is St Mary's church, Carisbrooke, viewed from the northern rampart of Carisbrooke Castle:

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Alma with her baby; Carisbrooke church, with its small turret, is visible on the horizon.

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This shows the wrongly-convicted Everard escaping from Portsmouth. The arch behind him is the Unicorn Gate, Portsmouth, then the entrance to the dockyard (there's a nice early 20th century photo here at Rootsweb, (detail below) ...

... and a British Listed Buildings record #476642). Due to general redevelopment, it now sits isolated on a roundabout on a ring road within the HM Naval Base.

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This shows Winkle Street (aka Barrington Row) Calbourne, from the NW end. The Isle of Wight Family History Society site has a similar photo: see Photo Gallery : Isle of Wight - Calbourne, second row down, middle image.

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This - "Belminster" in Dean Maitland - is the Bishop's House, Winchester Cathedral.

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This is where Everard talks to Dean Maitland's blind son, also called Everard; it's supposed to be in one of the doors of Winchester Cathedral, but I can't find any such view; and no building is so close to the cathedral (even on contemporary maps). Any ideas?

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This is the scene where Maitland, realising his guilty secrets have finally come back to bite him, says goodbye to his family. The view is of Winchester Cathedral from the east, from a location around what's now Abbey Gardens.

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This is the much-photographed Cheyney Court, Winchester Cathedral Close.

- Ray

A Wren-like Note: launch imminent

An update: A Wren-like Note, my biography of Maxwell Gray, is now finished and uploaded to the publisher, and I'm expecting a proof copy at the beginning of December. All being well, the book will go live then.

Just so you know what the deal is: this is a very geeky biography of a little-known author whose biographical details are sparse. Her own stated opinion was "There is so little to tell about me ... so little that can be told", so this is not a book packed solid with non-stop life story. Whole swathes of her life, especially in her younger days, are a virtually closed book. Nevertheless, her works are intensely autobiographical in their recycling of what she knew, and places she had visited. To me, they abound with fascinating regional, cultural and geographical detail: Isle of Wight locations and dialect, the dangerous technicalities of driving a heavy-horse wagon, the Indian Rebellion, the sighting of Donati's comet, the culture of Menton (a French winter resort) in the Edwardian era, and much more, often with crystal-clear authorial asides. A Wren-like Note is a book with the mindset of JSBlog: to digress into anything about Maxwell Gray - life, works, and contemporary reviews - that seems pertinent and interesting.

Meanwhile, A Wren-like Note (www.maxwellgray.co.uk) is the support site for the book. But it's turning out to be a little bit more: a website and weblog to celebrate Maxwell Gray, and provide a central focus for finding her works online.

- Ray

Mysterious superwhatevers #3

Emily at the excellent Ephemeral Curios, which largely focuses on biological curios, just commented in response to Mysterious superfruit #2 with another good example of advertising using weird biological images completely unrelated to the product advertised:

Possibly even weirder are these ads for a "weird food" that "kills blood pressure." It's a Glaucus nudibranch! I think they're actually toxic.

Actually, these advertisers don't seem to be very picky about what marine organism they use. A quick Google image search for "weird food" "blood pressure" finds these.

Glaucus atlanticus

"Glaucus atlanticus (commonly known as the sea swallow, blue angel, blue glaucus, blue dragon, blue sea slug and blue ocean slug) is a species of small-sized blue sea slug, a pelagic aeolid nudibranch, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Glaucidae." - Wikipedia

Google images of it: "Glaucus atlanticus".  It's an absolutely amazing little creature.

Squid

This one is just some species of squid.

Nine-tentacled octopus

This one you're unlikely to find; it's a well-circulated image of a mutant nine-tentacled octopus that "was spotted at the Marusan Seafood Shop in Marugame, Japan (Kagawa prefecture) on October 26, one day after it was caught in the Seto Inland Sea. Masa Koita, the 60-year-old shop manager, noticed the abnormal Common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) after he had boiled it in preparation for market."

This one is just calamari salad (Insalata di calamari) from the Angela's Italian Organic Oregano website.

This one is amiyaki surume: a Japanese seasons and dried squid snack. The image appears to have been ripped off from the Snack Attack blog.

This one is a California sea hare (Aplysia californica). The image comes from the Gray Whales of San Ignacio Lagoon weblog (text by Tom O’Brien, photos by Karen Capp).

Go figure...

Edit: Dan Schwab of Keytoons explains at Weird Food (for yout heart!). There is a partial pertinence, in that the ads are for a new supplement in vogue, partially based on calamari oil; that at least explains the squid.

- Ray

"The Baby was an anachronism"

Mirrored from A Wren-Like Note, as potentially of geeky interest:

A while back I mentioned the versatile and prolific Scottish writer Andrew Lang - see Andrew Lang: a sampler - and in particular his 1890 Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (Internet Archive ID oldfriendsessay00langgoog) which imagines correspondence between various literary characters.

In the light of the current MG project, I re-read "From Mr. Paul Rondelet to the Very Rev Dean Maitland" (see pages 121-125). Dean Maitland we know from The Silence of Dean Maitland: the cleric who gets a young woman pregnant and accidentally kills her father in a fight, his guilt only revealed a couple of decades later. Paul Rondelet is a major character in a distinctly forgotten novel, the social satire The Monks of Thelema (Walter Besant and James Rice, Chatto & Windus,1878, Internet Archive monksthelemaano00ricegoog). Lang has Rondelet - an aesthete turned hack journalist, and apparently based on Walter Pater - escape his responsibilities by doing a runner to a Pacific island, and his letter advises the disgraced Maitland to do the same.

The bit that intrigued me was this footnoted sentence:

[Rondelet writes to Maitland] "And, in your time, no doubt you have loved?" 1

1 Alas, not wisely! But any careful reader of "The Silence of Dean Maitland" will see that the Baby was an anachronism. —Ed. 

Lang is presumably referring to some problem with the chronology of the conception and birth of Alma Lee's baby by Cyril Maitland, and I thought I'd check this out. It wasn't wildly difficult, but nevertheless takes close reading; Maxwell Gray is an author prone to subliminal chronologies that take some piecing together from details chapters apart.

The novel starts with Alma Lee hitching a wagon ride to Malbourne on an autumn day. We know it's autumn by the cold weather and the clematis being in seed:

the high tangled hedges, draped with great curtains of traveller's joy, now a mass of the silvery seed-feathers which the country children call "old man's beard"

On this day, Cyril Maitland first meets Alma Lee in Malbourne - they're mutually attracted (in his case, despite his engagement to another woman) - and offers to escort her home from his sister's regular Bible class. Then:

Rather more than a year after Alma Lee's evening ride in the waggon

Maitland (after some months away) returns to Malbourne, where the general gossip is that Alma Lee is now pregnant. It's a few days before the New Year, and another character thinks:

" I shall long remember sixty-two," he thought ; "it has been a good year ..."

We're then told the chronology of Maitland's temporary break-up with his fiancée Marion in that year.

Cyril wrote back to release her from an engagement which he said he perceived had become distasteful to her ... This was in March. At Whitsuntide, Everard spent some time at Malbourne, whence Cyril went to Belminster for ordination at Trinity ... and got himself placed on a mission staff in the East of London, where he led a semi-monastic life in a house with his fellow-curates ...

On New Year's Day (referred  to as that of "sixty-three"), Alma gives birth to a son.

So this connects up to place Alma's first meeting with Maitland as autumn 1861; Maitland's split with his fiancée as March 1862; his leaving Malbourne as Whitsun 1862 (Google finds this to be June 8th); and the birth as January 1st 1863. Thus, given a normal 40ish weeks pregnancy, this timeline easily accommodates Alma's son being conceived in early April 1862. Unless I've missed something, the baby doesn't seem to be an anachronism; I'll probably never know what precisely Lang meant.

- Ray