Hallsands The Lost Village 1st March 2009 | TheTFF Torquay United Fans Forum

merse
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Hallsands The Lost Village 1st March 2009 Mar 3, 2009 4:16:42 GMT

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Post by merse on Mar 3, 2009 4:16:42 GMT

Mar 2, 2009 21:34:24 GMT Dave said:

The next time I was there was when we played the O's when Caldwell scored two goals, but on the road to the ground in the East End all I saw and noticed was dirty littered streets.

I guess first or early impressions are very important and opinion forming.

My first visit to London wouldn't have been until the mid sixties and I STILL hold vivid images in my mind of the dereliction and poverty I saw on the streets down the Old Kent Road, the poorly dressed children, the bomb sites (forty years after the Blitz) and amazingly, horse drawn totters plying their trade.

My first impressions of Bournemouth - formed in the late fifties/early sixties from holidays that my gran took me on where of those yellow trolley buses and the smell of pine and air of cleanliness everywhere.

Subsequently, Plymouth to me was how I first saw it in 1956 when my father took me on the train from NA to Plymouth Navy Days and the widespread scenes of re-construction set against acres of bomb damage, my first ever experience of a moving escalator (in Spooners Dept Store) and those massive, massive warships on the Hamoaze.

Leeds was the long drive into town down the Huddersfield Road with seemingly every side street off it festooned with washing lines strung across with their contents billowing in the breeze.

The point I'm making is that times move on, things change and sights alter. Preconceptions rob one of the open mindedness to enjoy new experiences and even make renewances when returning to old haunts.

I was born in Newton Abbot, my partner in Paris; yet we both live equidistant from those places in our shared home in London. I think it would be fair to say that Paris, even though it is situated in a foreign country; has far more in common with London than Newton Abbot....................certainly my partner thinks so!

It seems like your work journey to London was a bit of a nightmare Dave, and a lot of those parking wardens are like automatons - particularly in certain boroughs; so I'll give you a little tip here..................if you drive up this way again and want to know the way ask a black cab driver (that's a driver of a black cab, not...................

) They and only they really know their way about this vast place and the Knowledge they are required to attain before getting their licence is legendary. They are expected to know and demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the whereabouts of every school, museum, major hotel, place of interest and police station within the M25 to say nothing of the many "runs" they are required to store in their heads beginning on day one with "Manor House to Gibson Square" and carrying on for seemingly ever and ever on repeated visits to the infamous Cab licensing offices in Penton Street for "appearances" before the examiners.....................many of them still retaining the age old traditions of sarcasm, officiousness and intransigence.

There's no need to hold any different environment in contempt or even fear, as it is just that - a different environment; and whilst I do concede that the edginess of a city (any big city) will put a certain amount of fear and mistrust into a country boy there really is no need to assume we all live in pollution and overcrowding up here...................and I hope my ramblings of Clerkenwell yesterday went some way towards demonstrating that fact.

I never cease to overwhelmed by the shear beauty and majesty of the wide open spaces of my home county and am very proud to be a Devonian, but I have lived in London for longer than anywhere else in my adult life now and am also proud to call myself a Londoner..................a typical Londoner as I wasn't born here; and you see to me that is the very difference in the two places. In London one is accepted as a Londoner almost as soon as one arrives whereas in Devon one can live there for two or three decades and still be "that bloke from London" or wherever.

Does that make sense?

Deleted
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Hallsands The Lost Village 1st March 2009 Mar 3, 2009 22:43:01 GMT

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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2009 22:43:01 GMT

Two great posts from Jon and Merse - one reminding us how things change; the other showing us how life (and football) goes on pretty much in the same old ways. Both are equally valid - and worth pondering - in any language.

Football, stating the obvious, is a human activity which is the product of people and the age in which they live. In some ways Jon's 1912 report reflects how the "day out" really took off with the railways from the 1830s and 1840s onwards so that the excursion quickly became a feature of many people's lives. There's some wonderful stories of how country people went on trips to London - leaving their home villages for the first time ever - to visit the Great Exhibition in 1851. Football became professionalised partly as a result of increased leisure time and better access to transport. Trains, charabancs, trips to away matches were all in place before the slaughter in the trenches by which time, of course, the game was sufficiently popular to be used as a recruiting tool.

As for change in our lifetimes, I was contemplating its nature two or three weeks ago during my first visit to Wigan in donkeys years. There I was, sat in a pub - at ten in the morning on the Sunday after we played at Southport - drinking my latte, munching a muffin, watching Sky, sending texts and wondering why on earth we hadn't played Wigan Athletic for a while....

And here's one prompted by the musings about London. Back in the sixties we were visiting relatives in London and popped down to the paper shop on the corner of Gunnersbury Avenue and Gunnersbury Lane. My parents - emigre Londoners - were gobsmacked by the fact that it was run by - whisper it - Indians. What was the old place coming to?

And like Merse, our other trips away were to Bournemouth - or BoMo as I believe it's known these days. Once young people were desperate to leave the place, now they flock there to university. But they don't have the pleasure of riding these....

And, from that 1984 Chesterfield v Torquay programme another reminder of the past:

Last Edit: Mar 4, 2009 0:21:14 GMT by Deleted

Dave
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Hallsands The Lost Village 1st March 2009 Mar 23, 2009 16:41:47 GMT

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Post by Dave on Mar 23, 2009 16:41:47 GMT

There was one great story to come out of the Hallsands disaster and that was the one about the Trout sisters.

The Trout family home is on the far left (1894).

They would not leave Hallsands and ended up building what later came to be known as the Trout Hotel, it is on the top of the cliff at Hallsands. When we were there a few weeks ago, it was a building site and I had said to Carol I thought it been left unfinished, It just looked like the builder had run out of money and had stopped work. It seems I was wrong, everything will become clear by reading the articles below.

The hotel as it once was

On 8 September 1917, Ella was out in a boat crab fishing with her 10 year old cousin, William Trout, when they saw the SS Newholm was struck by a naval mine one mile south of Start Point. They along with William Stone, another fisherman in the vicinity, rowed to the scene and helped rescue nine men. Ella and William Trout rescued one sailor, but with the tide and the wind against them, they were unable to row back to shore. They, in turn, were towed back to safety by William Stone. In recognition of her bravery, she received the Order of the British Empire.

The sisters, with compensation for the destruction of their cottage at Hallsands and their own earnings, built Trout's Hotel on the cliff above the deserted village. The hotel was run successfully until 1959.

Todays story copyright of the HE