HM Coastguard Station, Beer, Devon

 

I came across this coastguard station when I went looking for the remains of a radar post in 2009. I didn't find what I was looking for but I did take some photos of this while I was there. 

At the time I couldn't find any information about it, so I recently thought about adding it to the next Odds & Ends series. I had a quick look to see if any other info had turned up and found quite a lot, so it now deserves an article of its own. :)

I didn't realise at the time that the whole row of buildings was all part of the station and this particular style was in the traditional English domestic style. Designed by the architect P M Andrews, and used during the late 1940s and 1950s, this one was built sometime between 1950 & 1959.

As these two photos above and below show, the central building is the office, vehicle garage and equipment store. Along with that, the other buildings contained living accommodation and a watch room. The accommodation buildings have since been sold off for private dwellings, although the central building at least remains part of the coastguard.

In Britain the HM Coastguard is a civil organisation, not a military one as in some other countries, and its main services consist of Search and Rescue, Maritime Security, Vessel Traffic Management, Counter Pollution and Salvage, Receiver of Wreck, Civil Emergency and Disaster Response plus International Work.

One of our emergency services, along with Police, Fire & Ambulance, the Coastguard is often called out for boats in difficulty on the sea, people cut off by tides and cliff rescue. A recent operation was due to cliff falls near Sidmouth when a series of massive landslides initiated a search for anyone hurt or stranded.

To learn more about the service and history of the Coastguard, you can view their website here.

Each station also had its own flagpole. These photos show the hard standing for the pole on the edge of the forecourt, no longer used, although there is one on the central building. I haven't got many photos so I'm adding both of these! ;)

And the next photo is of the view across the cliff and out to sea. One of the buildings served as a look out, which would give an even higher, and better view of the sea from here. Because of the difficulty in getting a boat down to the beach and launched from here a boat might not have been kept here. The store would, however, be used for equipment. An essential vehicle (or vehicles) would be the coastguard landrover(s).

A couple of other examples of Rescue, Counter Pollution and Salvage include the wrecked MSC Napoli after severe storms in January 2007, which lost containers along the East Devon coast (notably Branscombe) and spilled oil onto the sea in Lyme Bay. Rescue included winching the men onto a helicopter, organising boats to contain the ship and oil spill within a huge boom preparatory for clean up operations as well as the Receiver of Wreck. 

The other was shortly after I'd moved to Seaton in 1977 (a couple of miles along the coast from Beer). My former partner and myself were walking along Seaton beach when we found some cannisters washed up on the shoreline. My partner opened one and it was full of white powder so he phoned the coastguard, who turned up to take them away. We never heard anything else but at least if it was dangerous it wasn't left for children to find or to pollute the beach with.  

And I think that's about it. There's such a wealth of information that it was difficult to know what to include and leave out. One of its earliest incarnations is that of catching smugglers along the eastern, southern and south-west coasts, but that's a big subject so I've left that out for now.

Again, I'm sorry my posts are very sparse this year. I have another two partway completed but time has been lacking recently. However, I will try to do better and hopefully get some more out before the end of this year.

Cheers. :)