Sunday Times Where Was I? Holiday Competition

Near as I can figure it, through the possibly flawed perceptual filters of my own reality tunnel, the most likely answers this week, seem to me to be:


Q1. Teignmouth


Q2. Babbacombe

внимание друзья! for question 2, some sources claim that Emma Keyse was murdered at Babbacombe Bay but the district just seems to be marked as Babbacombe on some of the maps I checked.

The initial clues seem to place us in the town of Dawlish, in the county of Devon. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is said in some references to have built an atmospheric railway (c 1846) from Exeter to Newton Abbot, which passed through Dawlish. The project is believed to have failed because rats ate the leather seals which kept the air in the pipes which propelled the trains.

An artist who was associated with rodents and painted a large canvas featuring Waterloo Station (c 1967) , was Terence Tenison Cuneo (he liked to paint a small mouse in some of his pictures) but I could not find any references that claim he went to school in Dawlish. Cuneo did produce a painting of a train called the 'Monmouth Castle'  (the work was called 'Castle on the Coast'), emerging from a tunnel in the Dawlish area and he said this image reminded him of his schooldays, as when the train emerged from the tunnel on his way back to Cornwall, he knew his holiday proper, had begun.The 'gingerbread nuts being smallish' reference, seems to originate with John Keats, who produced a work called Dawlish Fair

"Over the hill and over the dale, And over the bourne to Dawlish, Where ginger-bread wives have a scanty sale, And gingerbread nuts are smallish"

The clues given suggest that the second town is Teignmouth, as a poet called Charles Causley (born c 1917), wrote a poem called 'Keats at Teignmouth - Spring 1818', which contains a verse about a 'gaudy river' :

          "By the wild sea-wall I wandered 
           Blinded by the salting sun, 
        While the sulky Channel thundered 
           Like an old Trafalgar gun. 

        And I watched the gaudy river 
           Under trees 0f lemon-green, 
        Coiling like a scarlet bugle 
           Through the valley of the Teign. 

        When spring fired her fusilladoes 
            Salt-spray, sea-spray on the sill, 
        When the budding scarf of April 
            Ravelled on the Devon hill. 

        Then I saw the crystal poet 
            Leaning on the old sea-rail; 
        In his breast lay death, the lover, 

            In his head, the nightingale."

Some sources claim that Teignmouth pier is 625ft long and was opened c 1867, with an octagonal domed lighthouse being built there, c 1845.

Travelling seven miles or so south west from Teignmouth via the upstream route, would bring us to the outskirts of the resort of Torquay and it was here at Babbacombe school, that some sources claim a theatre builder called Frank Matcham (born 1844) was educated. According to some references, Babbacombe was also the site of the murder of Emma Keyse (c 1884). The man accused of this homicide was one John Henry George Lee aka 'The Man They Could Not Hang'. The authorities tried to hang Mr Lee three times at Exeter prison but the trapdoor on the scaffold failed at each attempt and the home secretary commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.

The funicular railway at Babbacombe, which takes holidaymakers 720 feet up and down the cliff to the beach, is said to have opened c 1926.