The first half of the 20th century was the most turbulent and challenging that Britain has ever known. How did we get from the structured world of Victorian Britain – Oscar Wilde, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ – to the anarchic world of 1950s rock and roll – Bill Haley and the Comets, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in barely one generation? The SWCP corridor contains plenty of clues, often in the most unexpected places and I hope you will enjoy discovering them on your forays to the coast.
Zenith of Empire
Between 1870 and 1914 the British Empire more than doubled from roughly 4.5 million square miles to 11 million, largely driven by expansion in Africa. The people of the SW were entirely familiar with this Empire. Cornish miners were in high demand as the tough, skilled professionals who had the know-how to develop the new mineral wealth of South Africa. Administrators retired, after a professional lifetime spent in the colonies, to Torquay with its balmy climate and palm trees. Torquay museum has unexpected legacies of this time. A fascinating room devoted to Fiji for example, the legacy of two Colonial Officials with a deep interest in Fijian culture.
The museum has displays covering a range of British explorers and adventurers connected with Torquay from Colonel Fawcett in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil – the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lost World’, to Shackleton in the Antarctic. The great explorer and his crew dined in style on the harbour-side in Torquay the night before they set sail for their first mission to the Antarctic. Leonard Greenstreet, the First Officer on board the Endurance, was one of the men rescued from Elephant Island after the Endurance was crushed by the sea-ice. Commander Greenstreet lived in Brixham and gave local slide-show presentations, which must have been every bit as thrilling as the ‘movies’ in the hugely popular film theatres. This was the first Empire to run on ‘data’. Brunel’s Great Eastern – the world’s largest ship – had laid the first effective trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1866, going on to weave a web of cables to connect the Empire. The quiet, peaceful, Cornish beach of Porthcurno on the Coast Path was the British hub of all these cables, becoming in the inter-war years the largest submarine telegraph cable station in the World. The Telegraph Museum in Porthcurno is well worth a Path detour to marvel at the first ‘internet’.
The First World War, 1914-1918
Britain reluctantly declared war on Germany in August 1914 because Germany had violated the neutrality of Belgium. The 1839 Treaty of London, signed by all the major European powers, guaranteed Belgium’s independence. In the lead-up to war, Britain had other pre-occupations not least the prospect of civil war in Ireland and the increasingly violent struggle for women’s suffrage. Britain’s defence investment to this point was spent on the world’s largest navy and a relatively small army. The West Country had benefitted, with massive industrial investments in Devonport, the immense artificial harbour at Portland, built to counter the 19th century French naval base at Cherbourg, and the magnificent Edwardian naval college at Dartmouth. Preoccupation with the resurgent naval power of France had driven the Government to invest heavily in 14 artillery forts to protect Plymouth and its dockyard in the 1860s, but the shock defeat of France by Prussia in 1870 completely upended all strategic calculations. Faced with the ominous build-up of German naval power, the navy had to about face, shifting resources from the Western Approaches to the North Sea. However new technologies, driven by war, introduced new threats. By 1917, Mullion in Cornwall, hosted Britains busiest airship base, guarding the Western Approaches from German U-Boats. Today, there is little to see on the cliffs at Mullion, here and there are giant concrete blocks used to anchor windbreaks and the crumbling foundations of huts and hangers. These days six massive wind turbines stand out as markers for what was once a bustling 320-acre naval air station.
Art Deco – The Seaside Architecture of Recovery
The awful trauma of World War 1 precipitated immense change in social attitudes. We can capture this change in the advertising of the time. From the Royal Vinola perfume ‘ad’ of 1912 with the elegant lady’s sweeping floor-length dress to the glamour of the 1920s in the most celebrated fashion magazine of the day ‘Art, Taste, and Beauty’. All in the space of a decade. Art Deco and Modernist styles fused to create a new domestic, sun-facing, coastal maritime architecture, for those who could afford it. Burgh Island, now a hotel, is a celebrated example. As is the National Trust’s marvellous Coleton Fishacre with art deco-inspired interiors, created for the D’Oyly Carte family. Aside from the rich, the new style and new inclusive social attitudes, created a craze for the ‘Lido’.
Two of the best SW examples have been restored in recent decades, the wonderful 1934 Penzance ‘Jubilee Pool’ Lido – now heated by geothermal energy, and Plymouth’s 1935 Tinside Lido. The future of the iconic 1936 Bowleaze Cove Lido and Club (aka the Riviera Hotel, Weymouth) is presently more uncertain. There was also a new progressive attitude to education, best exemplified by the 1920s transformation of the medieval Dartington estate, with a profusion of modernist buildings for arts, education, and social renewal, and a splendid, tranquil, modern, garden design. All still well worth a detour from the Path. Dartington, thanks to the generosity of the Elmhirst family, hosted a rising tide of eminent exiles from 1930s Germany, as an increasingly dictatorial regime took exception to dissent. Back on the coast the Air Ministry quietly, and secretly, prepared for increasingly ominous times.
World War 2 – 1939-1945
Marconi’s ground-breaking radio work is commemorated with the Museum at Poldhu on the Lizard. Later 1930s experiments had proved that his radio waves could detect aircraft. In the SW, over 20 Royal Air Force radar stations were erected. A monument to the pioneering Worth Matravers Dorset radar experimental establishment has been set up near the SE end of the Path at St Aldhelms Head. Substantial remains of 3 ‘Chain Home’ radar bunkers can still be seen near Prawle Point in South Devon.
At Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, English Heritage has restored a striking example of the gun batteries which encircled the coast. Elsewhere on the Path, the walker will still come across surviving fragments of the comprehensive fortifications which guarded against invasion. By 1945, Britain was victorious, but exhausted, and broke, and faced with a monumental task of clearing the barbed wire and mines from practically every West Country beach. Isolated pillboxes and crumbling bunkers still survive, which offer a testament to the fear and uncertainty of those times.
Recovery
Once again war provided the catalyst for social change. William Beveridge’s report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired, or widowed. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service, instituted in 1948.
The election of a reforming Labour Government under Clement Attlee provided the raw energy for the changes which were so necessary. Attlee presided over the recovery of a shattered economy, achieving near full employment, learning from the economic failures of the post-WW1 period which had seen appalling social hardships. The terrible destruction of the west country’s chief city, Plymouth, led to a massive 15-year post-war rebuilding campaign which was full of hope and promise. Making Plymouth the most complete post-war planned city in Britain.
A political consensus emerged which lasted until the 1970s. Broadly both parties sought to rebuild at home and decolonise abroad. Taking key steps in the formation of a new European security architecture in face of emerging ‘Cold War’ threats which were to keep defence investment in the West Country cripplingly high. Historians label the period 1951-1964, the ‘Affluent Society’. Britain would take decades to rebuild its shattered economy. But prosperity in the second half of the 20th century was to find the SW struggling to retain its crown as Britain’s favourite holiday destination with the advent of cheap flights to the sun, sea, and sand of the Mediterranean. In the last part of our story, we will arrive at the present, reflect on the cumulative heritage of the Path, and speculate a little on its possible future.
Written by Bob Mark
Chair, South West Coast Path Association
This article is the eighth in a series exploring the history around the landscape of the South West Coast Path. Read the other articles in the series:
History Around the SW Coast Path – Part I – Prehistory – The Age of Megaliths, Bronze and Iron
History around the SW Coast Path – Part II – Medieval
History Around the Coast Path – Part III – Late Medieval and Renaissance
History Around the Coast Path – Part IV – Civil War, Revolution and Invasion
History Around the Coast Path – Part VI – Elegance and Innovation in Georgian England
Discover a selection of Heritage Walks on our website and explore the past as you travel.
The South West Coast Path 