NAVAL OCCASIONS

Evening Star, Issue 18048, 16 August 1922, Page 3

NAVAL OCCASIONS

THE KINO AT TORBAY. SHIRE OF THE SEA KINGS. [From Odr London Correspondent.] July 6. Torbay is a fit and proper place for such naval occasions as the present. A large proportion of cur naval personnel still comes from Devon, the shire of the sea kings, and, apart Jrom being about our best anchorage, Torbay has figured in big sea history. Within tiro crescent of deep blue water formed by the jutting headlands of Daddy Hole Plain and' Deny Head, the former on the Torquay side, and -the latter on the Bvixham side, there is a safe mooring for -the world’s fleets in smooth water, except when, a gale blows from tho south-east. During tho war several Hun submarines poked their periscopes almvo Torbay waters, and tho JSrixham Ashing trawlers had a. rough time with them., but the last sea fight there was in the Napoleonic Wars., An oldsailor, whose life covered the period from 1801 to 1895, once described to me how all Brixham rushed off one Sunday morning to Berry Head, where two French frigates were hammering one English frigate within gunshot of- ihe head, while the admiral in charge of a hopelessly windbound fleet of three-decker line of battleships inside Torbay bit his thumbs and) ordered all the fleet's boats out to tow an eighty-gunner round Berry Head to tho rescue.

Tho crowd on Berry Head watched the efforts of the admiral to get his battleship out on one side, and a hammer-and-tongs sea fight between the frigates on (.ho other. There was a great roaring of guns, and tho battle smoko swept across the Berry. My old seaman got out there, toddling along with his mother holding his hand and "praying to God as the cannon thundered, in time to see the English frigate, pretty badly shot about, slowly lumbering under a few ragged sails, round the head into Torbay, followed in even worse array by the two Frenchmen as prizes under our ensign. Later that same eyewitness was rowed out from Brixham round tho Bellerophon, and saw Napoleon, standing cross-armed on the stern gallery, gazing towards Franco and his vanished greatness, on the eve of St. .HelenaLong years before the name Napoleon was heard in the world Drake and other seamen of the Elizabethan ago sank their anchors in tho Torbay gravel and brought their prizes of the Holy Armada there. A great old barn still stands gallantly within a few yards of Torquay station, where the captured Dons were imprisoned.