Surfing in Bude

“that peculiar lonliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about…….”

Yet More on Surfing in Cornwall

 Bude sits on the north coast of Cornwall with the air of a place that has only recently been told it's in Cornwall and is still thinking it over. It has a canal that goes nowhere much, a sea pool built in the 1930s so that Edwardian bathers could enjoy the Atlantic without the inconvenience of being killed by it, and a beach, Summerleaze, that on a grey Tuesday in September looks less like a surfing destination than the setting for a quietly tragic BBC drama about a retired schoolteacher/detective/vet. And yet this is one of the places where British surfing began, which tells you a lot about the British, mainly that they will do almost anything in cold water provided nobody makes a fuss about it.

For a long time surfing in Bude meant bellyboarding, which involved lying face down on a plank of plywood roughly the size and shape of an ironing board and allowing a wave to fling you towards the shore at a speed that felt thrilling but was in fact slightly slower than a brisk walk. People did this for decades, wearing woollen swimsuits that absorbed about eleven gallons of seawater and gave the wearer the approximate buoyancy of a leather sofa. Then, in 1953, a group of locals formed the Bude Surf Life Saving Club, generally reckoned to be the first of its kind in Britain, on the not unreasonable grounds that if people were going to keep throwing themselves into the Atlantic, someone ought to be on hand to fish them out.

The real change came in the early 1960s, when the local council did something that no English council has done before or since, which is to have a genuinely good idea. It hired Australian lifeguards. These were tanned, cheerful, alarmingly healthy young men who had never seen a Cornish drizzle and who arrived carrying proper Malibu boards, long, sleek and glossy, and then, before a crowd of astonished holidaymakers in cagoules, stood up on them. It is hard to overstate the effect of this. It was as if a spaceship had landed at Crooklets and the aliens had turned out to be very good at volleyball. Within a few years the town had surf clubs, surf shops and a generation of pale Cornish teenagers standing hopefully on boards in the kind of water that could stop a watch. Bude has been at it ever since, and the only concession it has made to the passage of time is the wetsuit, a garment that has done more for British happiness than the National Health Service, though you'd never get anyone in Bude to admit it……