This is a new start for these cycle journals in a couple of ways. First, after following the young Lawrence’s 1907 trip through Normandy, I will switch to 1906, when he cycled around central and eastern Brittany, on a trip that lasted almost the whole month of August. There will be some mentions of 1907 (he returned to Brittany after his excursion to the Loire, carrying his father’s camera and taking photographs of some castles and churches that he had seen in 1906).
The other reason is that there is a change of pace in my own ride, as I will be following a route designed by travel company Headwater, a self-guided cycling tour called ‘The Backroads of Brittany’. See more below.
In 1906 the young Lawrence arrived in St Malo from Southampton after what he describes as ‘an excellent crossing’, though it seems to have been rather a difficult journey – it took almost 24 hours, the sea was rough, entry into St Malo was delayed because of the rough seas, and nearly everyone on board appears to have been sick… apart from Lawrence himself and a Mr Kerry (a family friend who had been asked to accompany the nearly 18 year old Lawrence to make sure he was all right).
Clearly Lawrence wasn’t the only cyclist on the crossing. In his first letter from France, he wrote:
“The Customs people were chalking all the baggage as fast as it appeared; they do not seem to have opened any: there was a fearful crush; I should think there were 120 bicycles.”
At Customs he also came across Mr Chaignon, the friend of his parents (their next door neighbour when the family lived in Dinard between 1891 and 1894). Lawrence would stay with them several times during the month, just as they had looked after his older brother Bob on a similar trip the previous year.
I take the morning to have a look around St Malo and then catch the ferry across to Dinard. The town is heaving. It was ever thus, in July. Dinard developed as a tourist town with the fashion for sea-bathing in the mid-1800s, as trains enabled people to leave the metropolitan centres for a stay at the seaside. The town sits partially on the Rance estuary, across from the walled town of St Malo, but the centrepiece is the Plage de L’Ecluse, a huge and very fine beach. It is backed by enormous, grandiose buildings that were once hotels and casinos – this was the other secret to the town’s development (six casinos were built between 1866 and 1928). It was a very fashionable resort.
In the 1800s the town had a long association with the English (and some Americans), who built villas here and brought the habit of sea-bathing from horse-drawn bath-houses. There were English newspapers and an English church. An avenue is named after Edward VII and streets carry the names of George V and Winston Churchill, another visitor. The front was certainly developed when Lawrence visited in 1906:
“They say that Dinard has changed greatly. The Hotel des Terrasses has been burnt down and rebuilt; a large hotel The Royal has been made just beyond the old Casino, and the Third Casino is being built. The Vicomté has many houses on it.”
The Lawrence family’s decision to live here for three years might seem a little strange, but of course their circumstances were unusual, if not scandalous (Read more about their family story.) I decide not to look for Chalet Vallon, their family home, this time. That’s for my return in a week.
I walk the Promenade du Clair de Lune, a snaking walkway that hugs the shoreline opposite St Malo. On one side bald rock tumbles into the estuary where lines of sailing boats sit at moorings; above, there are retaining walls and gardens: hardy sub-tropical plants grow vigorously, spiky deep green explosions proffering delicate blooms.
Not much more than a single stretch of boutiques and restaurants in Dinard has any pretensions to Dinard’s former glamour. However, you get a sense of it by looking at the private villas on the headlands, and on the Vicomté, just inland. They are utterly vast: and fanciful as only a seaside town could conceive. There are mini-chateaux, turreted stone edifices festooned with finials, even mock-medieval fantasies, complete with crenellations. (The town has around 400 listed buildings.)
The young Lawrence wrote quite a few letters during his August trip in 1906, sixteen in all. This was his first big adventure abroad and he was probably under instruction to write, but was diligent enough to do so. He certainly reveals his self-confidence: he is often opinionated (with sound reason when it comes to his medieval architectural knowledge), while at other times he appears simply precocious. Interestingly, perhaps because he is so young, he is slightly more artless than he would later become, giving more away; and there are already glimpses of his later habits of dissimulation and he is happy to lard the pudding when it comes to his prowess as a cyclist. Read more about his letters.
He can be chatty about the people he meets and is not abashed at being quite rude:
“..the Fletchers are here; I saw Mr Fletcher behaving in a rather loud manner on the beach…”
This is also the moment of his first famous spat with his mother. At one point, when she must have written to him saying that she wants to hear more about him – to her the most important person in Dinard - and how he is getting on, he is simply defiant, replying:
“Here goes another letter full of nothing! Since the last was written, very little has been done by the most important person in Dinard. I have visited the old church in St Lunaire and it is most interesting. The architecture is wonderfully plain (Norman) about 1000 AD. There is absolutely no sign of “Long and Short” work…”
And he carries on about the church for two paragraphs before relenting and becoming more chatty about the people he has seen. On his return to Dinard a couple of weeks later he returns to the issue in a letter to his father:
“Dear Father, I think it time I dedicated a letter to you, although it does not make the least difference in style, since all my letters are equally bare of personal information. The buildings I try to describe will last longer than we will, so it is only fitting that they should have the greater space. On Friday we went to look over the Tour Solidor. The plan as you will remember is two circles, joined by connecting walls…”
I join the ferry back to St Malo in the afternoon. As a boy (between the ages of three and six), the young Lawrence would make this crossing regularly to take gymnastics lessons, at the recommendation of his father. And I take a look at The Tour Solidor myself. Later I meet Headwater’s representative, the redoubtable Steve, who sets me right for the tour, to start the following morning. And for dinner I find a worker’s restaurant with its “Menu €11”: three courses, steak included.
For all the lack of personal information, the young Lawrence can be pretty damning when he wants to. Part way through the month, he decides:
“I don't like Dinard; it has a misplaced ambition to become a watering place like Bournemouth which it will never perform.”
Headwater - Backroads of Brittany
For reasons of disclosure, I should mention that part of this section of the trip was sponsored: I was commissioned by the Telegraph to write a travel article about a company called Headwater who offer organised hiking and cycling holidays. Their Backroads of Brittany trip (from Dinard to Dinan, Lamaballe and back along the coast, via Sables d’Or, to Dinard) closely resembled some of the route cycled by the young TE Lawrence in 1906, so I was able to combine the two. Read the Telegraph article here.
Headwater do not run the Backroads of Brittany tour any more. Instead they have a tour called St Malo to Mont St Michel which covers some of the same ground.
