The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
An iconic symbol of the British seaside
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THE DECKCHAIR
One of the consistent themes which has emerged when researching this series is that so many classic objects associated with travel and holidays were invented centuries – often millennia – before the modern age. Take the deckchair. I assumed it would live up to its name and stem from the early days of passenger steamships. But no. It seems that folding chairs were used in Bronze Age Europe as well as in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Of course, that does depend on stretching the definition a little. Two or three thousand years ago, there wasn’t much demand for the type of chair which allows you to lie back and enjoy the sunshine. These were portable chairs, often used as temporary thrones or by high-status individuals or priests rather than for holiday relaxation.
The first portable chairs built for the leisured classes were indeed made for use on ocean liners. Passengers were travelling on steamships in ever greater numbers and there was no such thing as outdoor furniture for use on deck, so it had to be invented and made in a style that was easy to stow away in rough weather. By the 1860s the slightly clunky style of fold-up wooden chair with a long support for the legs was being widely used on passenger ships. We know them now as “steamer chairs” but originally they were called deckchairs.
The British inventor John Thomas Moore was perhaps the first to cash in on their commercial – and medical – potential. He set up a factory in Macclesfield in 1887 and developed two types. The Waverley, “the best ship or lawn tennis chair” was the classic wooden steamer style. The Hygienic had rockers and so, said Moore, was “valuable for those with sluggish and constipated bowels. Its action is perfect massage without the toilsome labour”. Moore was doing well enough by 1912 to supply the Titanic with 600 Waverleys. About 50 were thrown to passengers to use as life-rafts when she sank, but only one fully intact example is known to have survived. This was sold at auction in 2001 for £35,000, making it likely to be the most expensive deckchair in the world.
The first fold-flat deckchair – based on a frame with a central hinge, a back strut and a canvas strip which acts as the seat – seems to have been produced by Edward Atkins of Bethnal Green, east London, in 1884. That design was originally made in green canvas but was soon jollied up with coloured stripes and became ubiquitous on piers, beaches and – in England – around the boundaries of cricket pitches.
Remarkably, given how uncomfortable they are to sit in and how easy it is to trap your fingers in the mechanism, the
design has hardly changed. They are still rented out in London’s Royal Parks and, as mentioned in Telegraph Magazine’s ‘the last of the deckchair men’ feature, were reintroduced in Blackpool this summer after a 10-year absence.
In Bournemouth, though, they have proved controversial. In August, councillors banned them from the beach for fear they might be dangerous. This was after several violent incidents around the coast, including a mass brawl in Southend last June when bare-chested combatants used them as weapons.
But before we are tempted to tut that things are not like they were in our day, we might remember the famous Battle of the Beach Chairs on Brighton seafront in 1964 when the Mods hurled them down from the promenade onto the Rockers below. There is nothing new under the sun-lounger.