‘Gentle madness’ of the British at the seaside
Exhibition The Great British Seaside National Maritime Museum
Sometimes you know you are going to love an exhibition from the very first artwork. In 1967, the British photographer Tony Ray-jones (1941-72) took a brilliant black-and-white picture on the beach at Blackpool. In the foreground, an old man relaxes in a deckchair. I say “relaxes”, but he doesn’t look like he’s having fun. Stony-faced, arms resolutely crossed, he wears a tie and heavy black suit, as well as a fancy watch more appropriate for the boardroom than the seaside.
Lacking sunglasses, he covers his eyes with a twisted handkerchief, so he can snooze. And, in a majestically bizarre, entirely pointless flourish, he props his yesteryear spectacles on top of this impromptu mask.
The effect of the picture – the first in The Great British Seaside, the National Maritime Museum’s spellbinding and at times side-splitting photography exhibition documenting how we spend leisure time at our fraying coastline – is both comical and surreal.
Somehow, though, it avoids cruelty or mockery, by poking fun not at the absurdity of this individual, but at the ridiculous way we all behave when we visit the seaside. To borrow the eloquent words of Ray-jones himself, who spent two years in the mid-sixties travelling the country in a camper van to document the English at leisure, this photograph encapsulates “the sadness and the humour in a gentle madness that prevails in a people”.
“Gentle madness”: it’s a lovely formulation to describe the eccentric institution that is the British seaside holiday. Unreliable weather, oppressive hordes of loudmouthed people, rickety beach huts, aggressive seagulls, tawdry entertainments, sand in shoes and sandwiches, as well as between toes, and, generally, a persistent, nagging undercurrent of melancholy and dereliction, of something past its best. What’s not to like?
Ray-jones – the first of four photographers in this beautifully designed exhibition, which boasts its own deckchairs and seaside-town benches – was constantly alert to such ironies and silliness. Here is a grinning lady, wearing a toy policeman’s hat. There are three old biddies, sheltering by a windbreaker, but doggedly refusing to budge. In a surreal moment, a man with a pencil behind his ear manoeuvres a stuffed black bear on a trolley: the off-kilter pageant of the British seaside in high summer was rarely so well expressed.
Meanwhile, a man holding binoculars gazes – with disgust, or maybe envy? – at a lolling young couple enjoy a prolonged smooch.
Superficially, the fashions and food may have changed since he took the picture in the Sixties – these days there are fewer flat caps, string vests and braces, and far more flesh on display, while picnics are less likely to include tins of corned beef – but the underlying truth of Ray-jones’s human comedies remains timeless. “Don’t take boring pictures” was his mantra, and Ray-jones, who died aged just 30, of a rare form of leukaemia, never did.
David Hurn (b.1934), the self-taught Welsh photographer who comes next, also works in black-and-white. Like Ray-jones, he cannot resist the ludicrous or strange – witness his shot of an entertainer dressed as Neptune inspecting a sandcastle – but he is more attuned to the changes afoot in British society at the time. In 1967, for instance, he photographed a black family on the pebble beach at Bognor Regis, sitting apart from the white day-trippers in the background. And 30 years later, at Rhyl in Denbighshire, four ageing women from the Indian subcontinent, all wearing white, laugh and lounge on a seafront parapet.
A superb panoramic photograph, taken by Hurn on Aberavon beach, Port Talbot, in 1971, records a large group of beachgoers sitting in a ring of deckchairs and almost entirely encircled by windbreakers, like a protective town wall. In the distance is a lone figure carrying a surfboard. It pits the huddled safety of community against nonconformity and adventure. It also evokes the rise of individualism challenging the old order.
With the work of the celebrated photographer Martin Parr (b.1952), the third of the show’s four artists, saturated, glaring colour unforgettably
There’s a harsh, Hogarthian sizzle to Parr’s picturemaking – that isn’t present in the work of the others
enters the fray. Part of the interest of Parr’s work is that its tone is elusive: at times, he seems less charitable than the others towards the human follies he sees unfolding on the British beach, and more inclined to satire.
His large-scale photograph of a woman outside a beach hut at Paignton, Devon reading The Sun bearing the front-page headline “I Want to Hang Them” made me laugh out loud, because the disjunction between the apparent gentleness of the scene and the red-top’s spiteful ferocity is so unexpected. But the image is troubling, too: is Parr suggesting that she personifies British small-mindedness? No doubt he’d say he wasn’t – but suspicion lingers that Parr is occasionally infuriated by the spectacle of the British seaside: “I love it and hate it at the same time,” he says.
Indeed, an unsettling sense of menace is detectable throughout his work, and not only in that
Sun headline: a sunbather in New Brighton, Merseyside appears in danger of being crushed beneath a digger; children watch the bish-bash-bosh of a Punch and Judy show; a couple of sharp-beaked seagulls peck violently at a tray of chips, while a Union Jack flutters in the background.
This last image is a wonderfully concise and evocative portrait of Britishness. There is a harsh, Hogarthian sizzle to Parr’s picture-making – evoking the stink of sweat, the salt of chips, the slap of sun cream – that isn’t present in the work of the other photographers. Parr captures human appetites and the craziness of the British seaside, and this arguably makes his work the most compelling.
Last up is Simon Roberts (b.1974), the youngest of the four. If Parr works amid the melee of the beach, snapping people up close, Roberts takes the opposite tack, creating considered panoramas, often from a raised vantage point (“familiar from landscape painting”, he says), in which teeming holidaymakers and their goings-on provide details animating the overall scene.
Several of his large pictures are beautiful, and unexpected: consider, for instance, the bleached-out, epic vista of Saunton Sands in Devon, taken in 2008, suffused with a sort of milkywhite miasma, broken only by the tiny dark silhouettes of people venturing into the sea. In Roberts’s work, we find a panoptic vision of national identity, focusing explicitly on the group rather than the individual, and emphasising – again – the timelessness of this peculiar British pastime.
Much is made of the decline of the British seaside, but, on the evidence of this exhibition, we will always reserve a special fondness for holidaying at home, despite the allure of the Med. This may sound loopy and excessively nostalgic, but that’s the British way – afflicted by “gentle madness”.