THE VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN SEASIDE
This summer, many of us will be heading to the coast for holidays nearer home – just like the Victorians and Edwardians. Anna Maria Barry takes a trip back in time and explores the seaside excursions of the 1800s
Dr Anna Maria Barry takes a trip back in time and explores the seaside excursions of our ancestors in the 1800s & early 1900s
In the 19th century, the British seaside experienced an explosion in popularity. From Blackpool to Brighton, Brits flocked to coastal resorts. The rapid expansion of the rail network had made the seaside more accessible, which was convenient as people had more leisure time to fill, particularly after the introduction of bank holidays for workers in 1871.
Where to stay?
New hotels sprung up along the coast to cater for the influx of tourists, and sometimes these establishments were very opulent indeed. One of the fanciest was The Metropole Hotel in Brighton, which opened in 1890. Historian Judy Middleton explains that it boasted an Italian garden, a Turkish bath, a Renaissance-style library and an Arabian-themed drawing room. The latter was furnished with opulent rugs and lamps, while the hotel’s own perfumer created an exotic scent to waft around the room. The Metropole was opened with a grand ceremony: 1,500 guests travelled down from London on a special train and there was a parade involving lions and tigers. Guests who stayed at the hotel included princes, ambassadors and even a maharajah!
While hotels like this were clearly for wealthier visitors, a wide range of accommodation was available for those with more modest budgets – from hotels to boarding houses. Some visitors, particularly from the working classes, sometimes only visited the seaside for a day. Saltburn, for instance, attracted day trippers from Durham while many Londoners visited Southend or resorts along the Kentish coast. A journalist in 1862 described this summer exodus from the metropolis:
No sooner did the sun shine out with promise of continuance than hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands flocked into the South Eastern and Victoria Stations en route to London-super-mare, which is a name just now equally applicable to several sea-side resorts.
Bathing beauties
While the Victorians loved splashing in the sea as much as we do, modesty was a concern – particularly for women. They came up with an ingenious solution. Bathing machines were boxes on wheels, in which a
woman could get changed into her swimming costume. She was then rolled out into the water, where she could step into the sea with her modesty intact, away from the gaze of any onlookers.
Queen Victoria had her own luxurious bathing machine, complete with personal ‘dipper’ – someone who helped her in and out of the sea. In her journal she wrote about her first encounter with this contraption:
Drove to the beach with my maids and went in the bathing machine, where I undressed and bathed in the sea (for the 1st time in my life)… I thought it delightful till I put my head under water, when I thought I should be stifled.
The Queen soon got used to bathing. At Osborne House, her holiday hideaway on the Isle of Wight, she loved visiting her private beach – often arriving on a donkey. Here she would collect shells and seaweed with her children, paint the view and bathe twice a day.
Fun on the beach
There was much to excite younger visitors at the seaside. Though Punch and Judy puppet shows had been popular in Britain since the 18th century, they found new audiences at Victorian coastal resorts where they cemented their reputation as enduring icons of seaside culture. Those who ran these shows were often itinerant performers who travelled from town to town following the crowds. This was seasonal work, and performers would often take other jobs in the winter months, coming to the coast in the summer.
Donkey rides were a key attraction, too. They became popular from the 1880s and inspired much mirth in newspapers and magazines. A cartoon in the comic Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, for example, shows a large lady mounting a donkey after its owner reassures her that it ‘has been ridden by all the crowned ‘eds of Europe’. The distinguished donkey then bolts, chucking the woman into the sea where she has to be fished out by a coastguard!
Just like today, children were fond of building sandcastles and sometimes this was a competitive activity – in 1898 the Mayor of Weymouth found time to judge his local competition. The adults joined in the fun too. In 1862 a correspondent wrote:
Pleasant it is even to do intensely stupid things – to be upon the beach and pitch pebbles into the sea for half-an-hour, and then help to dig a moat round a sand-castle […] almost feeling as much interest in it as your little son or daughter. […] Pleasant it is to have nothing whatever to do during the whole day, accustomed as you are to hard work.
Bathing, riding and digging works up an appetite, but luckily there were many exciting things for visitors to eat at the seaside. Many of the foods we associate with the coast today – from fish ‘n’ chips and candy floss to ice cream and sticks of rock – could all be found on the Victorian seafront. Cockles and whelks were also available, pickled or fried – a 19th-century fast food!
Seaside entertainment
The crowds that flocked to the coast found a dazzling array of entertainment on offer. Larger resorts, like Blackpool and Southend, boasted large theatres where punters might catch anything from acrobats and puppet shows to comedians, opera singers or music hall acts. Indeed, the seaside was a popular subject for music hall songs, performed by artists like famous singer Marie Lloyd. One such song, ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, remains popular to this day. The well-known lyrics include the lines:
Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside! Oh, I do like to be beside the sea! Oh, I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom,
Where the brass bands play, tiddlyom-pom-pom!
This song was written in 1907 and first performed by music hall artist Mark Sheridan.
Even if there was no dedicated theatre at a resort, troupes of musicians and performers would play on the seafront and on bandstands. Here you might find anything from a brass band to a troupe of ‘Pierrots’ – pantomime characters that were precursors of the modern clown.
One of the popular fixtures of seaside entertainment at this time was the minstrel troupe. Blackface minstrel shows were a tradition imported from America. Performers painted their faces with burnt cork and performed songs, skits and sketches which purported to depict black plantation slaves. Though such acts were deeply racist and would rightly be unacceptable to a modern audience, minstrels were a popular form of family entertainment in Victorian Britain. Some troupes set up makeshift stages on the sand, collecting money in a bottle which was passed around the audience. Others had more formal
arrangements with theatres, selling tickets to their performances. Troupes could also make additional money by selling souvenir prints or song-sheets, which allowed audiences to re-create their acts back at home.
Today, you can sometimes still find fortune tellers in residence at seaside fun fairs. This is another tradition we can trace back to the Victorian period. In the 1880s, palmistry became wildly popular and many ‘palmists’ – often women – offered readings to holiday makers. In 1895 a palm-reader who went by the name ‘Satanella’ was plying her trade in Eastbourne. A local newspaper sent a reporter along to see if she was any good, explaining that:
In a few minutes he heard more truth about himself than he had ever heard before, and was somewhat startled and dumbfounded […] With scarcely a glance at your face she can gaze on your hands and tell you about yourself, your disposition, your parents, your health and so forth […] It is certainly an interesting experience.
Over & under the sea
Piers were another popular attraction. Initially, they were designed for wellheeled travellers, allowing them to alight boats and step onto land in a civilised fashion. Before long, however, they evolved into destinations in their
own right. More than 100 piers were built in Britain between 1814 and 1905, with some of the best-known including Aberystwyth’s Royal Pier and Blackpool’s North Pier. While at first piers had a more genteel feel, charging visitors for a stroll out to sea, they soon evolved to incorporate tea rooms, food kiosks, concert spaces and fun fairs. By this point, they had become a popular attraction for tourists of all classes.
Visitors to Hastings pier could jump on a steamer that would take them across the Channel for a day trip to Boulogne, the coastal city Charles Dickens dubbed ‘our French watering place’. In 1894 a journalist reported on the phenomenon of day trips to France, musing that:
It used to be thought a wonderful thing, 50 or 60 years ago to be able to go to London and back in the same day […] But the introduction of railways and the application of steam power to ships have made travelling quite another thing, and a journey can be accomplished in a day now, and comfortably too, that might have taken a week in the “good old times”.
Such trips to France were now so speedy that even those who lived some distance from the coast could make a return journey in a single day. The reporter goes on to describe how a group of day trippers left Oxfordshire on a train at 6am, arriving in Boulogne in time for lunch. There, they enjoyed four hours of sightseeing. Describing the attractions of the town, the journalist (not too insightfully!) noted: ‘Boulogne is a typical continental town. Everything is foreign.’ The exhausted travellers were safely back in Oxfordshire just after midnight.
Some travelled not over the sea, but under it. In the 1870s there was a craze for aquariums, with several opening at larger coastal resorts like Blackpool and Scarborough. Here, visitors could marvel at the colourful world beneath the waves. At the Yarmouth Aquarium, opened in 1877, visitors could see octopus, turtles and even alligators lurking amidst ferns and cascading waterfalls. They were then invited to dine on the terrace, enjoying a fine sea view. If they happened to be there at seven o’clock in the evening, they could also catch ‘Herr Dorla’s celebrated string band’. The aquarium craze inspired new music, too. In 1880 the popular music hall star George Leybourne performed a song called ‘Lounging in the Aq’ with the words:
Lounging in the Aq, lounging in the Aq,
That against all other modes of killing time I’ll back.
Fun that’s never slack, eyes brown, blue and black,
Make me feel in Paradise while lounging in the Aq!
Innovation on the coast
Victorian technology played its part in shaping the seaside, too. Electricity fuelled the lights that lit up seafronts, while fairground rides like carousels were powered by steam. In Devon, the engineer George Croydon Marks came up with an ingenious solution to a problem that had been facing tourists – the steep cliff that separated the pretty seaside towns of Lynton and Lynmouth. He designed a waterpowered funicular railway which opened on Easter Monday in 1890. ‘The opening ceremony’, said a report, ‘was characterised by spectacular effects’. Locals paraded through the streets, the twin towns tried to out-do each other with decorations and ‘many and loud were the hurrahs of the excited populace.’ The railway is still in use today.
Another Victorian feat of seaside engineering is the Blackpool Tower. Inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, it was for a time the tallest man-made structure in the whole of the British Empire. When it opened in 1894, visitors queued for a ride to the top. Downstairs, they could visit a circus complete with lions, tigers and polar bears. The Tower is, of course, still a major attraction in Blackpool and its circus is still in business too – it has not missed a season since the venue opened 127 years ago.
So – when you visit the seaside this summer, look around and you will see plenty that we owe to the Victorians and Edwardians too.
About the author
Dr Anna Maria Barry is a writer, historian and curator. She specialises in Victorian and Edwardian culture.