Walvin's Beside the Seaside

James Walvin, Beside the Seaside: A Social History of the Popular Seaside Holiday. London: Allen Lane.

Living as they do on a small island whose centre is a bare hundred miles from the coast, the Britons' yearly lemming-like rush to the seaside is a curious phenomenon. Yet it is worth a second glance. First, because items of popular culture like rock and the pier and salacious postcards are significant in the complex history of tourism itself. And second, there is the sheer size of the phenomenon. One almost unbelievable statistic is that into Blackpool alone, a smallish town off-season, floods yearly the equivalent of half the entire Australian population. The subject is a ripe one for the social historian, and in fact most of the ground was covered in J.A.R. Pimlott's The Englishman's Holiday.

As its subtitle suggests, Walvin's book covers a more limited range than its predecessor - though it is written in the same rather bland style. Walvin's theme is essentially the mass holiday; the growth of that institution which he calls 'the annual treat of the urban working class'. Those who want a history of the Grand Tour, or who wish to learn about that strange last gasp of Romanticism whereby Victorian agnostics found spiritual regeneration in high peaks and gleaming snowfields and came to regard (as Huxley put it) 'a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of church-going' - why, then, they will have to read Pimlott.

The lively story Walvin has to tell covers two centuries, near enough, and one can distinguish two threads running through it. One thread is the familiar tale of the amelioration of the conditions of life and labour last century. In the Litany we pray for divine aid for women in childbed and for folk travelling, and this conjunction makes more sense when, in 1801, the London-Brighton coach took twelve jolting, dangerous hours. But fifty years later there existed a railway network. Add to it cut-throat competition between the private lines; add such entrepreneurial geniuses as Thomas Cook (he invented the 'package deal') and then mass paid holidays, and the huge expansion of the resorts was inevitable.

Beside the Seaside goes at length into how the major resorts, mostly starting from nothing, so rapidly acquired an individual character. It often appeals to geography. Take Bournemouth, for instance. Relatively far from London, and so immune to the plague of day trippers; without a rail link until 1870: obviously predestined, Walvin argues, to be the home of the elderly and infirm gentility. But readers of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles will remember how the fallen heroine repairs to 'Sanbourne' with her rascally seducer. Hardy's thinly disguised Bournemouth of the Nineties - 'a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place' - sounds more like Monte Carlo than a geriatrics' heaven. So is Walvin reading history backwards?

The other thread to the story, and the one handled more interestingly, is part of the history of medical treatment. The first resorts were mineral water spas on the ancient model of Bath: being on the coast was an incidental factory. A little later the drinking of seawater began to be recommended by influential quacks, at the heroic dosage of a quart of brine chased by another quart of gin and beer, mixed. This was said to cure anything from epilepsy to the problems of ladies who came with the desire to be 'gott with child'.

Such tippling merged at last with sea bathing itself. The Prince of Wales came to Brighton to dally with Mrs Fitzherbert; but the 'Prince of Whales', as he was unkindly dubbed, came also to be forcibly dipped for his health.