Oh we do like to be beside the seaside...
Seaside pictures have been in vogue for as long as there have been cameras. David Behrens looks at some of the earliest.
From top, a boat pulls on to the beach at the picturesque resort of Sandsend, near Whitby, in 1911; Alfred Hind Robinson’s view of Robin Hood’s Bay circa 1900; children wearing coats and berets for a visit to a chilly Whitby beach in June 1930; visitors to the ruins of Whitby Abbey in August 1931; a family walking on the beach at Sandsend, near Whitby, in 1913. PICTURES: GETTY IMAGES.
HIS WORK is less well known than that of his contemporary, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, but the seaside souvenir left us by Alfred Hind Robinson is a no less precious record of the Yorkshire coast in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
This remarkable set of pictures captures some of the earliest views of the holiday playgrounds the railways and the horseless carriage had brought within reach of everyone.
A quarter-century separates Robinson’s pictures of Robin Hood’s Bay – where the ladies and gentlemen of 1900 dressed even for a stroll on the beach – and the miniature golf course at Whitby in the inter-war years. Both are remarkably candid snapshots of an everyday way of life that has long passed.
Born in Leeds but resident for most of his life at West Ayton near Scarborough, Robinson was a pioneer of panoramic photography, using a system of carbon printing. He took more than 2,000 pictures in the first two decades of the last century but was never commissioned – though he did sell several prints to the London Midland and Scottish Railway for display to the first class passengers.
The seaside was his speciality, but he also appeared fond of golf links, castles, abbeys and cathedrals.
He is not responsible for all the shots in our selection but his style appears to have been widely copied. In the 1913 picture on the right, for instance, a photographer has stopped an open-topped charabanc on its way to Lealholm and Glaisdale in the North York Moors, a few miles inland from Whitby. There appear to be two drivers, both in peaked caps, and a wicker picnic basket is strapped to the back.
On another picture, three children wear coats and berets for protection from the chill of the 1930 English summer, as they stand on Whitby beach with their buckets and spades.