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Dawlish is a town and civil parish now in the Teignbridge District on the south coast of Devon in England, 12 miles (19 km) from the county town of Exeter. During the 18th century, it grew from a small fishing port to become a well-known seaside resort. The town was made an urban district in 1894. At the same time it was split into two civil parishes: East Dawlish, equivalent to the urban district, and West Dawlish, which surrounded East Dawlish and was more rural. West Dawlish became part of Newton Abbot Rural District.
The area covered by Dawlish today was part of the ancient division of Devon called Exminster Hundred. The urban district was absorbed into the Teignbridge District as was West Dawlish in 1974. The population at the 2011 census was 13,161.
History
For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Dawlish. Describes the early fishing village and the growth of tourism in a seaside town.
Brunel's railway
In 1830, Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed a railway which operated on a pneumatic principle, using a 15-inch iron tube. One of the pumping stations was in this town. The line ran right along the seafront, but Brunel ensured that the line was carried across the mouth of the stream on a small granite viaduct, leaving access to the beach.[1]
The atmospheric railway opened on 30 May 1846 and ran between Exeter St Davids and Newton Abbot. The first passenger train ran in September 1847, but the project was besieged with problems mainly with the leather sealing valve, which after 12 months of use needed replacing at a cost of £25,000. South Devon Railway directors abandoned the project in favour of conventional trains.
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In February 2014 the small granite viaduct across a stream was washed away by a storm leaving the railway tracks suspended in mid-air. The line through Dawlish is the main line between London and Cornwall and trains had to be diverted over other lines further inland until the repair could be made. The repair was completed by May of that year and the scenic mainline route just above the beach at Dawlish is now usable again. The re-opening ceremony was typical of anything that might have been put on in the 19th century. (Source: viewer of BBC Television News) [Further discussion in Wikipedia under Transportation. Wikipedia also has a photograph of the Dawlish seafront showing the railway track.]
A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Dawlish from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72:
- "DAWLISH, a town and a parish in Newton-Abbot [registration] district, Devon. The town stands at the mouth of a rivulet of its own name, on the coast, and on the South Devon railway, 3 miles NNE of Teignmouth. It was known, at Domesday, as Doelis or Doules; it remained, till about 1790, a small fishing village, ½ a mile up the rivulet; and it is now a handsome, picturesque, and fashionable watering-place, extending down to the beach, and presenting three sides of a quadraugular area to the sea. It partly occupies a fine valley, flanked by heights; and partly rejoices in a grand cove, about 1½ mile wide, overhung by tunnelled precipices, and terminated on one side by the Langstone Cliffs, on the other by the fantastic rocks called the Parson and Clerk.
- "It is a seat of petty sessions and a coast-guard station; and has a head post office, a railway station with telegraph, three hotels, two churches, three dissenting chapels, public baths, assembly rooms, billiard and reading rooms, circulating libraries, a literary society, and a pleasure fair on Easter-Monday. The railway station is ornamental; and the railway viaduct across the rivulet has an Egyptian character. The parish church, at the upper end of the town, was rebuilt in 1825, at a cost of nearly £6,000; and St. Mark's, in Brunswick Place, was built in 1850. The erection of a promenade pier was proposed in 1866. Population of the town, 3,505. Houses: 680.
- "The parish includes also the hamlets of Cockwood, Middlewood, and Westwood. Acres: 5,512; of which 495 are water. Real property: £20,127; of which £324 are in gas-works. Population: 4,014. Houses: 795. The property is subdivided. The manor belonged at Domesday to the see of Exeter; and belongs now to the Dean and Chapter. The railway here traverses alternately five short tunnels and four spaces over-hung by lofty cliffs; and was momentarily overwhelmed, at one point, in 1853 by the fall of a mass of about 4,000 tons, which carried a piece of it into the sea. The living is a vicarage, united with the [perpetual] curacy of St. Marks, in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £256. Patrons: the Dean and Chapter of Exeter."
Research Tips
(revised Jul 2021)
- Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
- GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.
- Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.
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- There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.
- Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.
- This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
- Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.
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- Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.
- There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
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