The British have always had a close relationship with the sea (as islanders must), but it has never been a straightforward one. The sea may have shaped Britain geographically, but it has not defined it politically. Britain has never been a single ‘island nation’; indeed, it was not governed by a single parliament until 1707. When James Thomson wrote his famous lines, ‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves’, it was more a hopeful exhortation than a statement of fact. In 1740, when ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed in the gardens of Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire, the British Empire and the Royal Navy, on which it depended, were both still relatively modest. As British seamen know better than anyone, no one can ‘rule the waves’ for long – not least because no one can ever really master the weather. Indeed, the second outdoor performance of ‘Rule Britannia’ had to be called off, when it started raining.
Yet despite all this, the sea still has a central place in our hearts. When we travel abroad today, it is usually above the waves in an aeroplane or beneath them in a train, but childhood memories of seaside holidays – whether in Cornwall or on the Costas – remain strong. However far we may live from the sea, we still feel its attraction. The founders of the National Trust were no exception. It is not surprising, therefore, that their first acquisition, in 1895, should have been a piece of coastline: Dinas Oleu in Gwynedd, which looks down over Cardigan Bay and out to the Irish Sea beyond. Ever since then, and particularly since the foundation of the Neptune Coastline Campaign in 1965, the National Trust has worked ceaselessly to acquire and conserve beautiful and significant stretches of the British coastline. It now owns over 740 miles of British and Northern Irish coast, including such different places as the White Cliffs of Dover in Kent, the Seven Sisters in East Sussex, the Golden Cap estate in Dorset, the Gower and Llyn peninsulas in Wales, Giant’s Causeway in Co. Antrim, Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire and Orford Ness in Suffolk.
Like Coleridge’s wedding guest in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ , we are easily seduced by stories of the sea, and of its heroes and villains. The National Trust is as much about people as it is about places. So there are few of its properties, however far inland, that do not have some connection with the sea and seamen. At Buckland Abbey in Devon you will find Drake’s Drum, celebrated in Sir Henry Newbolt’s famous poem (see here): when England is threatened, the drum is supposed to beat of its own accord. To Victorian romantics like Newbolt, Francis Drake and the other Elizabethan adventurers such as Richard Grenville, Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert were unalloyed heroes. Today, we may take a more sober view of their often piratical activities, but the drama of the Spanish Armada’s defeat in 1588 still has the power to stir. One Englishman who certainly became a pirate was Sir Francis Verney. After five years spent harassing ships in the eastern Mediterranean he died in wretched circumstances in a Sicilian hospital in 1615. Somehow his splendid purple Turkish robe and slippers found their way back to his home at Claydon in Buckinghamshire. Later in the seventeenth century Admiral George Delaval battled the Barbary pirates of north Africa, accumulating a fortune that he used to save the family estate at Seaton Delaval and to commission a great baroque house from Sir John Vanbrugh. The frieze on the entrance front is decorated with nautical symbols that acknowledge the source of his wealth. The prize money that George Anson earned from capturing a Spanish treasure galleon in 1743 helped to pay for the building of his brother’s new house at Shugborough in Staffordshire. Anson went on to lay the foundations of the navy with which Nelson defeated Napoleon. Nelson’s flag-captain, ‘Kiss Me’ Hardy, is commemorated by an obelisk overlooking Weymouth Bay in Dorset.
The British reserve a special place in their affections for circumnavigators such as Drake and Anson. When Francis Chichester achieved this feat single-handed in 1967, he was knighted by the Queen with Drake’s sword at Greenwich. A model of the second Sir Francis’s boat, Gipsy Moth IV, is displayed in the collection of ship models at Arlington Court in Devon.
The National Trust not only honours the past, but also considers the future of the places in its care. The global problems of rising sea-levels, pollution and coastal erosion demand global solutions, and the National Trust is working with the international community to find them.
Oliver Garnett, The National Trust 2011