Washed Ashore Exhibition August-October 2018

Andrew · March 19, 2021 at 5:11 pm

I’m close on 72 and spent my Easter, summer and autumn childhood holidays in a caravan at West Bay. Both my parents originated from the area although we were brought up in Hampton Wick, West London, near where my parental grandfather had been a teacher in Hounslow. Between the wars my father (born 1914) used to cycle down to West Bay on a Friday to see his future wife, and cycle back on a Sunday and that’s 140 miles each way which says something for devotion! My grandmother and several aunts and cousins of mine on my mother’s side lived in North Allington where I still have at least one aunt and a couple of distant cousins still alive. My mother was a (head?) teacher at Symondsbury School and then at Exeter. My father served in Burma, including the Arakan Box, which was the worst place in the world. He contracted hepatitus , jaundice and had an ear drum blown out but became a successful surveyor after the war. On holiday he always wore his army khaki shorts which came down below the knee. It was always a matter for laughter for us young kids, although fashions have gone back to long shorts so not so funny today. He also wore a swimming costume that continued in a strap over the left shoulder. Again something not so unusual in the 1950’s but lost to time.

Oh, and our enjoyment in playing in the sea was from inflated black lorry inner tubes, dotted everywhere with orange puncture repair patches.

I have bored you enough but I have so many stories of West Bay that will soon be lost to time. But what raised my interest was your article on the German Heinkel III that crashed off Black Rock/Table Rock in 1940. My father (I think) said he went to the funeral of the German pilot/crew member who was buried at Eype cemetery with full military honours with his wife in attendance. I believe I remember reading about it in the Bridport News.

Just one hundred yards or so past where the triangular pattern of rocks that led out to Table Rock with Black Rock further out (and just past that awful modern concrete breakwater that with its underwash has ruined all the prawn, crab and lobster fishing we kids had there) used to sit one of the two engines of the Heinkel, exposed at low tide. I’m sure it is still there. It was nothing much more than aluminium cylinder sleeves, full up with gravel and small pebbles.

Now I have a question or two to ask. Who remembers the 20ft vertical white wooden pole with triangular climbing steps set in a depression in the grassy ground when one walked from West Bay to Eype? It was a few hundred yards inland from the cliff and I was always told it was used by WWII watchers. It must be long gone by now.

And another. Tom Summers ran one-hour, two-shilling, mackerel fishing trips from the steps alongside the sluice gates. He was a rough but cheerful chap, burnt brown by constant exposure to the elements, and was always speckled with white silvery scales, which (as a child) I thought he had placed there, but they were just fish scales. I’ve known the name of his boat for years but now I have forgotten and would dearly like to be reminded of it. Tom Summers lived in one of those single storey huts (surrounded by stinking nets and lobster pots) which I walked past with painful bare feet, carrying my prawning nets from the campsite to the rocks at low tide.

And what of the strange white-and-blue cabin cruiser, that sat moored for years just beyond the steps of the sluices. All us youngsters called it Bluebird and looked up to it as something special, although my modern standards it was nothing more than our limited aspirations of the day.

I will now sign off and not bother you any more

Andy