From rebels, radicals and protest – smugglers, Thomas Paine and Captain Swing – to a paradise of seaside resorts, to an idealised rural idyll which inspires artist and writers, to Britains front line in war. The history of modern Kent and Sussex is one of extraordiary variety.
Transcript
It’s the night of April 21st 1747, and William Sturt of the Wealden village of Goudhurst was waiting in a village hall. Although he was with his mates, he was nervous, and was carefully, quietly, watching the dark street outside. He and the men around him all held muskets, primed and ready. At last they saw a gang of men appear, a vast mass of them – all of them openly bearing arms. These were smugglers of the Hawkhurst gang, and they walked down the main street of the little village, unaware of the watchers – but bold as brass. Sturt looked at his fellow volunteers and held up his hand. They had decided to act. No one liked government taxes, no one objected to a bit of smuggling on the side or picking up the odd case of contraband brandy; but the Hawkhurst gang advancing down the street, bold as you like, they had gone too far. They ruled the Weald with fear and terror. A customs officer had been thrown down a well and stoned to death, a farm labourer found brutally whipped and beaten until dead. It was time for honest people to make a stand, and Sturt had formed his village militia and warned the Hawkhurst Gang to stay out of Goudhurst. Thomas Kingsmill had laughed at him. And now Kingsmill and 150 armed members of his gang were here to show the Weald who really ruled, with a demonstration of violence and terror. But The militia were not afraid. Sturt gave the order – and opened fire.
Hello Members all, and welcome to the third and final episode in my trilogy of shedcasts about Kent and Sussex – a Dream of England, from the Restoration to the Second World War. So was the story of the Goudhurst militia fighting back against the notorious smuggling gang, an 18th century English mafia. Sturt won the battle of Goudhurst – Kingsmill’s brother was killed in the shootout and the gang forced to run away. 2 years later Thomas himself was finally caught, convicted and executed on the Tyburn Tree – and his body hung in gibbets in the little village of Goudhurst which had faced him down.
I decided to start this episode with this story because it illustrates one side of what I might call the long 18th century – 1660 to 1815. This is a period where the modern world is created, the era of scientific advancement, agricultural and industrial transformation, wealth and prosperity, when English society is the envy of the world – even to the French for crying aloud, yes, Voltaire, Montesquieu and all that.
It is also time of deep social dislocation and fracturing, when English society is divided into the haves and haves not, where labouring classes live in fear of the Bloody Code, and the gamekeeper and property is king. The old idea of a society of mutual obligation is strained like never before. It’s an age of contrasts.
All of that is very clear in Kent and Sussex with the Smuggling craze. It’s not new in the 18th century, in fact it’s a tradition, but previously it was on a much smaller scale, and focussed on the Owlers, who smuggled wool without paying duty. But in the 18th century, heavy duties on the new luxury goods like tea meant there were fortunes to be made. The so-called Centipede Boats’ rowed across the channel carrying contraband; gangs like the Hawkhurst lot wore their guns openly in hang outs like the Mermaid Inn at Rye. They ruled society with fear – kidnapping informers and anyone who resisted them and shipping them to France to be sold as galley slaves./ They even raided bonded Customs warehouses and stole goods from the government own hands. After all, if you could be hung for stealing a sheep, you might as well go big, and have a bunch of mates around you with a big fist to keep you out of the teeth of the Beak.
Right, well I left you last week with an almost cliffhanger, a complete mystery – who was it that stepped ashore at Dover in 1660? Well – shock and horror, it was Charles II of course, who followed Watling street, spending nights at Canterbury and Rochester before arriving in London. In popular memory we think of Charles bringing the Merrie Monarch vibe, everything light and ease once more…this is nothing but royal propaganda. It’s certainly not all Charles fault, but the restoration brings the oppression of the non conformism that was so strong in the South East. The Quakers in particular; William Penn worshipped in Warminghurst, and Horsham; but the gaols in the south east alone hosted over 200 Quakers between 1665 and 1690. And Going to an 18th century goal was frequently a terminal experience.
The Restoration also brought back the Stuart aristocracy; one example was John Ashburnham, who had given Charles I such idiotic advice and guidance when he jumped ship at Carisbroke; he is restored to all his estates, and from Ashburnham Place would command vast swathes of the Weald. Petworth house derives from this time, to be redesigned later in the neo Palladian style by the earls of Egrement. Uppark House was extended by the Earls of Tankerville in the 1690s. From houses such as these, a small group of noble and gentry families would dominate and very hierarchical Sussex society during the 18th century.
Over the same period, the trend we talked about last time of land being reclaimed for agriculture from parks is completely reversed by the returning aristocracy – there’s evidence of over 200 pleasure parks in Kent, and over double that in Sussex. You can still see examples at places like Knole, Chevening, Petworth and many others. It was not just the old nobility taking part in this though – it’s also a continuation of the trend which started in the late middle ages – an increasing stream of rich professionals escaping the hectic life of London. So many of the parks cluster around the new turnpike roads from London, as people realise that with better roads, the weald isn’t so far away. You wait until we get to the 19th century – all Londoners will reach the same conclusion in spades.
The 18th century nouveau riches of the City came to create their piece of the perfect England away from the big smoke. A perfect England in the Weald and the Downs, based on the principles of curving ‘lines of beauty’ beloved of designers like Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. They had far more impact on the landscape than the agricultural changes of the period, so much so that Horace Walpole predicted that the Brownian landscape would obliterate everything that had preceded it. In 1825 William Cobbett talked with despair of ‘the artificial landscape’.
At the same time, the commercialisation of agriculture that had started in the 17th century took off. Specialisation intensified – market gardening in north Kent, grain on the West Sussex coast, and the hop as an industrial crop – I should note in that regard that Harvey’s Brewery was founded in Lewes in 1790, and that is a good local pint to this day. Larger estates and farms allowed economies of scale without increasing the use of labour, and land that had been held in common was enclosed and privatized. Marginalised land was made productive where possible – salt marshes being reclaimed all along the coast, such as at Romney Marsh.
All sorts of new style farms were helped by new crops such as vetch, tare and clover which improved soils. Water meadows were extended in the river valleys of the Weald. New strains of livestock are developed; we are in the period of all those fantastic paintings of over sized prize beast being tended by a bloke in a smock, some of them frankly looking a bit weird. The beasts I mean not the blokes, you know the thing, vast square piggies with a titchy tiny head at the end. One of the most famous animals produced by breeding programmes was the Southdown sheep, developed by John Ellman of Glyde near Lewes, ubiquitous on the Downs, bred for meat, but also wool.
One of the problems that had held back development was the quality of roads; and Wealden clay was the problem. Unmetalled roads turned into a quagmire in wet weather, and the Weald was almost cut off in the dead of winter. And so we come to the super famous period of turnpike roads, a system designed to encourage private investment for better roads. The first turnpike laws were introduced into Kent in 1709 – a turnpike designed to improve access to the spa at Tunbridge Wells for the elites, rather than anything more practical obviously; I am told that Tunbridge Wells has the distinction of being the first town in England to develop purely as a resort from scratch. We like to help by giving you handy pub quiz questions here at the History of England, folks.
Meanwhile, the first Sussex turnpike was a long time later, in 1749 and chose the London Brighton road – still the most important of them all crossing the Weald, now the M23. Along that route, and increasingly others, charged an increasing number of stage coach services. Poor old William Cobbett again would soon complain of the
Dark, dirty faced half whiskered tax-eaters
Who commuted to Brighton well before the railways came in the 1840s. Because it was becoming possible to get to Brighton, spend 2 or 3 hours there, and return the same day.
Those who travel on turnpike roads know nothing of England
He carried on. Just you wait, William, just you wait when the Victorians come.
There’s not much of a canal revolution in Kent and Sussex, though there’s a little bit, and work to improve navigation along main rivers like the Medway. It’s possible to over estimate the impact these things had – transport was still hard, and only 22% of roads were turnpiked; but the south east and Weald were slowly being opened up.
One of the most attractive features of Georgian England is the vibrancy of the towns, especially when you consider the struggles of most high streets these days. Though not every town develops; while Horsham expands and its markets are crammed and retail shops opening up, Petworth goes backwards. Celia Fiennes is one of England’s first tourists, and her diaries are a treasure trove as she travels around; and she describes Sandwich as ‘a sad old town’; Daniel Defoe talks of the decay of the medieval; Cinque ports as the sea moved away- Rye, Winchelsea and Dover. But these are not typical; many others are booming.
I might pick two different examples. Lewes had always been one of the two most important towns in Sussex, and it was continuing to flourish. It had seasonal cattle and sheep fairs; there was a race meeting in August, and a wool fair. Manufacturing was not something for vast separate developments like now, but was on a more human scale in and around the town centre – Lewes had 5 breweries, there were tanyards, brick kilns, a small iron foundry and paper mill. It is one of those places where the river had been improved – the River Ouse; and there was a new port on the coast Newhaven – which would, fair dos, eventually kill Lewes as a port. But look – every silver lining has its cloud. When you walk through Lewes these days, you will see Georgian facades everywhere, like so many English towns because this is the heyday of the regional town – many of those lovely regular facades it must be said, were just stuck on the old medieval brick. The Georgians really are a bunch of old shysters, it’s all show with them.
The county goal is in Lewes, there are popular community events around such as the muster of the local militia, and look, nothing says party like the Quarter sessions of the County court with assize judges in from London – I kid you not, everyone headed for town for the gossip, civic duty and the theatre of the law. The winter months are a time for gentry to gather in towns; in Canterbury in the 1790s one person comments that all the London folk turn up
Where there are assemblies, plays and other entertainments during the whole time of race week
The other example is in North Kent, where there is a general shift towards greater industrial urban development and a good example of that is Chatham. It’s not a planned development, it’s all higgledy pighgledy, and one of the drivers are the massive naval dockyards there. The Chatham dockyards were established by Elizabeth I in 1568, and despite something of a humiliating set back during the 1667 Dutch raid, by the 18th century it was enormous, covering 400 acres, feeding the world’s biggest and most advanced navy, and it was at the cutting edge of technology. England’s favourite ship was built there – and no, I don’t mean the Mary Rose, nor even Boaty mcBoat Face, I mean the HMS Victory, of course.
There is one other reason for successful towns in the south East, and we owe it, to some extent to Lewes, again – to Dr Richard Russell, and his publication in 1750 of the page turning
A Dissertation concerning the use of sea water in the Diseases of the Glands
He set up a clinic at Brighthelmstone, or Brighton to thee and me, and people started coming to the seaside for medicinal purposes. In the 1780s, a fat and often drunk lecher also started coming – I speak of George, the Prince of Wales. He had an unpleasant swelling of the glands in his neck. Too much detail? Anyway, he’d build his ‘funhouse’ to get away from Mum and dad, the really quite extraordinary Brighton Pavilion. He built it in three stages from 1787, and it is a hoot. And where royalty go, others follow, sadly. So, from 2000 people in a silting up fishing port in 1760, Brighton grew to 25,00 people 60 years later by 1821 with 11,000 visitors each year.
Brighton was part of a trend; Prinny had tried other places too; he’d rejected Dover because they’d made the mistake of welcoming his wife Caroline, and he didn’t do Mrs Wales; so he went to Ramsgate instead, before hitting on Brighton. Margate in Kent was possibly earlier to offer sea bathing from the 1730; by 1769 it had a Master of Ceremonies, and purpose-built assembly halls for dancing and cards, circulating libraries and bath houses – and Bath machines of course. Obviously there’s no showing off your physical prowess with Speedos, thongs and factor 2 tanning oil yet, but instead a bathing machine. You put your name down on a slate, and when your name reaches the top, enter a shed on wheels from the coast side, which was then wheeled out, and you come out the other side into the sea, unseen by human eye. Although, actually blokes could bath nude until 1860.
And talking of Masters of Ceremony, Tunbridge Wells had gone gangbusters, a proper spa town with all the facilities, and it demonstrated its cache by attracting Richard ‘Beau’ Nash to the job in 1735, to add to Bath where he ruled on all matters of taste, decorum and entertainment. Spa towns like Tunbridge, Buxton, Bath and others were great social mixers, where the newly prosperous middle classes rubbed shoulders with the great families, ate and played together. As the gap between those two narrowed, the gap between them, and the labouring classes they once championed, widened.
Which means I am, of course, going to butt you a but, it’s got to be done – especially since I started the episode where I did. Amongst rising prosperity associated with improvement, rationalisation and consolidation, there were losers as well as winners. Areas like the Weald, which relied on alternative husbandry supplemented by rural crafts, with poor soil, where the opportunities for rationalisation and economies of scale were therefore scarce, did not do well in a world of large scale specialisation. The Weald had seen the highest population growth in Tudor times to supply the iron, glass and rural clothing industries, and now they died or shrivelled, out competed by counties close to coal and water power. Defoe wrote that the trade in cloth was
Now quite decayed and scare ten clothiers left in all the county
And in once mighty Cranbrook half the inhabitants were too dirt poor to pay even the lowest Hearth tax.
So the population in the Weald was higher than medieval times, but the trade that had supported it was now stripped away. Land that had been held in common was enclosed and privatized, and led to constant battles as smallholders and labourers fought for the rights they once relied on – and usually lost. The living-in of labourers and servants falls, especially after the Napoleonic wars, and servants are now less and less an integrated part of the household – and more distant workers to be kept apart from the grand family that employed them. Even in areas where agriculture was successful, working practices did not help landless labourers; big arable farmers, for example, would only maintain a small permanent workforce, and employ seasonally – and then lay labourers off once the harvest was gathered in. Tramping was ubiquitous as workers had to walk big distances for seasonal work, or move from region to region, looking for work at hiring fairs. By 1801 Sussex had the highest poor law rates of anywhere in the country, and agricultural wages were low.
And so we come full circle; rural labourers needing a supplementary income, and smuggling and social crime became a common way to do that, and the Weald was an ideal landscape for it. Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie became an adopted Wealden family from 1897, and in 1902 they bought the 17th century house Bateman’s which they adored./ A bit like a latter day Walter Scott, Kipling saw romance in the old stories of smuggling
Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark
Brandy for the Parson
‘baccy for the clerk
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy
And watch the wall my darling, while the gentlemen go by
But Kipling was talking from a safe distance from the pressing need and the violence. Poaching and smuggling was another way to make ends meet and keep body and soul together, and had another purpose too – a way to express resistance and defiance to the legal savagery of the Black Acts, property laws which allowed transportation or death for minor poaching offences or petty theft.
On the coast, another of the social crimes was called wrecking, a term which covers all sorts, from pilfering to the most extreme form of actually luring of ships onto rocks. In 1740 when a Dutch ship came ashore at Goodwin sands, everyone in Deal and Ramsgate knew what to do – a crowd of so called ‘hovellers’ rushed onto the sands, and formed chains to take as much as they could ashore from the ship, and not in a good ‘just being good citizens saving it for their owners’ way. The Hawkhurst gang got involved in a wreck near Selsey Bill, the coastal promontory at the western edge of Sussex, and formed a cordon to beat off customs officers with clubs while they cleared the site and spirited it all away – no pun intended.
Meanwhile smuggling was probably quietly sanctioned by the Cinque portsmen; they held the right of justice, and preferred to turn a blind eye to all but the most egregious offences – after all, these people were local, in need, and probably supported by the parish poor law any way. So a bit of pilfering lowered poor law bills. You get a similar response from local militias sometimes; in 1794 for example, a time of terrible harvests and rising prices, the local militias refused to enforce orders against grain riots or poaching. And juries were notorious in fixing the prices of items stolen, below the level where the law required transportation or death, even to the point of absurdity.
All of which seems to link with a recurrent theme of radicalism in the South East, from the Peasants revolt, to Jack Cade to the Protestant martyrs, to the English Revolution, in social crimes, and ironically in the Lewes customs service, because of course Lewes was the home of a Customs Officer called Thomas Paine. There’s no evidence he took bribes or outwardly supported the folks he was supposed to be banging up; but he certainly developed his passion for a cause. He wrote furiously of the poor pay of customs officers and the corruption that lead to – for which he lost his job as it happens. He spent loads of time at the White Hart inn in a tradesmen’s debating society, and acquired the reputation of a man who refused to accept defeat in debate.
By Paine’s side we can put William Cobbet from nearby Farnham, and John Bright from Midhurst in Kent; both of them would earn a reputation for a sort of Tory Radicalism; defending the old customs and traditions of ordinary people against the march of progress that left some of them behind.
National politics put a halt to most of that kind of sympathy for a while at the end of the 18th century in Kent in particular with the Napoleonic wars – and the threat of yet another French invasion. I mean seriously – again? Had Boney managed it, one line of defence was the local militia, the East or West Kent Yeomanry – who, would you believe, wore oak leaves as a memory of Billy the Conq and the dodgy invicta claim. History is a myth agreed on and all that. You can still see the evidence of the Napoleonic wars all along the coast with Martello Towers, basically gun platforms to prevent an amphibious landing.
One thing the Napoleonic war did bring was higher employment to supply the war effort, and all the spending fuelled a war economy. But after the party came the hangover; after 1815 into the 1820s the economy crashed, unemployment rose to dizzying heights. And by 1830 the theme of protest and radicalism raised its head again. By the 1830s mechanisation was beginning to reach agriculture in a serious way, and combined with recession, the result was trouble, riot and protest, with the myth of Captain Swing and the call of ‘Bread or Blood’.
One of the problems in the south East was that even if you had a job, wages were really low; because not only was agriculture in the duldrums, but there was no competition for your labour to drive wages up; outside North Kent there was little industry providing alternative employment and competing for people; agricultural wages in the industrial north of England were far higher than in the south. So although the Swing riots of 1830 happened across the country, they were very fierce in Kent and Sussex, with major riots, arson and machine breaking in Canterbury and the Sussex weald, all the way to Chichester. Before the riots ran out of energy, in Lewes 52 men and women were tried for taking part, and in west Sussex the Duke of Richmond raised a sort of volunteer militia to respond to the first signs of trouble.
It was the return of prosperity that helped resolve the Swing riots really, though support for the radical political Chartism movement would be strong here, and later for agricultural unionisation. But 1840 to 1870 was a golden age for High farming at least, and this despite Robert Peel’s repeal of the corn law, which farmers as one had predicted would cause disaster. The Weald was different though to the general story again; farms remained small, 70 to 100 acres was typical, with therefore less potential to reap the benefits of specialisation and economies of scale.
The difference in the rural economy between Weald and Downs, and coastal areas has stayed with us right from the start, and as consolidation and industrialisation continued outside the Weald, you can see the impact in the form of parish communities and how they worked socially and economically. There’s a fascinating concept developed in the 19th century, about how communities worked, by describing Parishes as Closed or Open. Closed parishes were where a lot of land was owned by one or two principal landowners. As a result they dominated society – they controlled the institutions, owned the available stock of housing and could charge what they liked, provided all the employment, if you cut up rough you’d find yourself out of a job and a home. So, society in a closed parish was conservative and hierarchical. In Open parishes, ownership of land was much more diverse, no one or few families dominating. People living there had much more freedom from social control, able to swap employers, start local businesses, organise strikes and protests. The weald absolutely stands out as an area of almost all Open parishes, Whereas the vast majority of other south East regions, Downlands and coast, were often closed controlled by just a few landlords. The Weald had been different from the start, and until the later 20th Century would remain so.
In their agricultural struggles of the 19th century, Wealden farmers showed an increasing reliance on and confidence in hops as a sort of saviour. The reality was their confidence was often misplaced. Because in practice, Wealden hops were a bit of a lottery; they were lower quality than elsewhere such as Germany, and so if times were good, all was fine. But if they failed or there was an oversupply even, where higher quality hops fell in price and were preferred – farmers would be hit hard. Kipling reflected this strangely misplaced local confidence in hops when assessing the value of his farm if he sold:
If I grub out the hops no one will take the farm, and if I don’t I might as well keep a small Monte Carlo, for hops are a demoralising gamble.
On the other hand, so extensive were hop fields in the later 19th century that the hop picking season became an institution. It was very labour intensive, and so Londoners, Irish, and Gypsies flocked to Kent each year to get the harvest in, for the Fuggles or the Goldings hops, and get them into the Oast houses to dry while they were fresh. Not until mechanisation of the 1950s did the seasonal hop picking tradition begin to end, and global competition and changing tastes has reduced the industry now to a fraction of its former importance – though it’s still there., you can still see the tall poles of hop farms around.
A severe agricultural depression followed the good days from the 1870s onwards, but by that time, Kent and Sussex had changed. It had become a more diverse economy, with much better transport links that gave greater opportunities. That is not to say there was no popular response to the Depression; the ‘Revolt of the Field’ was an agricultural unionisation movement of the time. But by then the balance of population was being transformed. Population in total doubled between 1831 and 1900 – from 700,000 to 1.5m. But that growth was all in the towns and suburbs, especially the Medway towns, Rochester, Maidstone, Chatham, Gillingham; and the seaside resorts of course. Not in the countryside. In 1831, the rural population was 45% of Kent’s total, and 58% of Sussex’s total population. In 1931, a hundred years later, those proportions had fallen to 28% and 31%. Agricultural change was easier to absorb and impacted by a smaller number of people directly.
Now then, here’s a pub quiz question for you. Where and when was the world’s first railway season ticket? Any guesses? No?
Well, it’s 1834, and it’s for the Crab and Winkle line, the C&W – Canterbury to Whitstable on the North East Kent coast. And before you think of steam trains puffing along, it used stationary steam engines and cable haulage for most of its length.
Now the answer is a bit surprising, because Kent and Sussex were not classic candidates for railway investment. There were no massive centres of population, there was no huge concentration of heavy industry demanding quick access, unlike the midlands and the north. There was the huge population of London of course, a population that was increasingly looking to get out and down to the coast, but the topography didn’t help; you had to cross those darned Surrey hills, North Downs, and the Weald – I mean it was something of an Engineering bore. But despite that, in the 1830s there was a great competition to build the first rail link to the coast – there were 6 proposals all squabbling in parliament, and it was the technically tricky but most direct route that was chosen, from London to Brighton, won by John Rennie over the protests about all the damage it would all do to the countryside. From that point on, more railway schemes would be proposed, and branch lines be added.
Crash, Crack
Brighton and back
All the way for a shilling
So the motivation for rail was not industry, but for London’s sake; to allow people to escape what was becoming something of a monster. Ole Sam Johnson famously said something about if you were tired of London you were tired of life, a phrase so frequently quoted that I seriously wish he’d said nothing of the sort. But Victorian London was a very different proposition to the nice contained and manageable Georgian version, and it would get increasingly worse as it turned into Dicken’s London. So people wanted to get the dickens out.
This then is the story of the South East in the 19th and 20th century – the rise of the need for Londoners to escape into an idyllic world outside, and it would fire population growth from commuters seeking a better England than where they worked. And it would super charge the growth of the tourist industry. It’s not that there was no population growth from industry – there was industrial north Kent, concrete, brick, arms and explosives, even coal for a short while – but the vast growth in population came along the coast.
The railways did not create the tourism that fuelled the growth; as we have heard, it had started before that with the turnpikes, in Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, Ramsgate, Margate and so on; but railways lit a fire under it. There were some other factors as the 19th century rolled on which are critical too. One is the appearance of a radical new idea – hey, maybe everyone deserves a reasonable life, not just the elite, maybe everyone could do with a break. From the 1850s and 1860s, the state starts to legislation on factory working conditions and working hours and even, later on, gasp, paid holidays.
The other factor is the growth of a middle class with spare money to spend; might spend it by going to live in an idealised version of the England from Surrey southwards; more prosaically they could hop on the Brighton Belle and spend the day on the coast by rail. I mean the Brighton Belle didn’t appear until the 1930s, but you know what I mean. Express services soon meant you could take the 8.45 from London, be in Brighton for 6 or 7 hours having a hoot, and be back home by 6.30 ready for work the following day.
The railways came just in time to save Brighton. It was beginning to fall out of fashion and lose its aristocratic allure, as it grew to 47,000 people, it was no longer exclusive, the sanitary arrangements didn’t catch up and it was difficult to get around a bigger place. But now there was a new market to serve – the day tripper. It’s not just about Brighton though; the South East coast is littered with resorts of all different types, appealing to different clientele, and it’s not just the railways either; many more working class people would hop on a paddle steamer and nip down to somewhere like Gravesend, for the pleasure gardens, theatres, the palace pier and then hop back.
It would take for ever to describe them all; thought I have to say, knowing just a tadge more about Brighton and Hove these days, for family reasons, they make for fascinating social history, and a riot of architectures and styles – a riot I tell you. One constant factor is of the rich and famous constantly trying to get away from hoi polloi as tourism relentless grows into the 20th century. One mayor of Brighton will describe it as a shabby garment with golden tassels as the smarter set build houses out on the edges of the loud, messy and unruly centre. And they want to show off their style and innovation, to demonstrate just how well they were in tune with the cultural fashions of the day. Walking around Hove in particular is a hoot of architectural fun. Anyway I don’t have space to describe all the different resorts, but there are a couple of points to make.
First is that each town develops their own flavour and clientele; Folkestone starts off for the smart set, but begins to develop around cross channel ferries as does Dover. Charles Dickens, a Rochester man of course, he preferred Broadstairs. The Duke of Devonshire promotes and invested in Eastbourne for the Upper classes, banning vulgar stuff like music halls that might attract the wrong sort. Invalided smart folks liked Worthing, day trippers liked Gravesend, Margate and Herne Bay and accessible by the cheap paddle steamer. And increasingly they come to Brighton of course, and as Brighton became inundated with hoi polloi, next door Hove becomes a refugee for the rich, refined genteel, well behaved and purse lipped, as in the poem
It’s OK to be tight on
The seafront at Brighton
But I say, by Jove
Watch out if it’s Hove
The other point to make is that by and large these places did not start off originally as a resort. Although there are influential individuals and investors at various points, all the towns develop around an ancient, original core; so the railways don’t create these towns – but they are transformed by the mass tourism it brings, and across all social classes too. There are no massive entrepreneurs who come along with a great idea, and lay out a new resort, there are a series of incremental developments. Some of them are truly organic in a way that causes some horror; such as the uncontrolled, unregulated and planned individual plots that spread like a rash above Peacehaven in the 20th century, each one a family’s small corner of paradise.
The story of Kent and Sussex, then, and indeed Surrey of the late 19th century, is how it became both London’s playground; and a dream of England, and idealised version of the real England, divorced from the origins of its hard, rural past. The tourism of the classic English sea side resort is just one aspect to the world Londoners found and created as they escaped the increasing chaos and pressure of London – there was recreation to suit many tastes. Walking in the remote countryside of the Weald was one; in 1844 a walking guide advised a trip to Balcombe in West Sussex to enjoy
One of the most fashionable notions of a thoroughly English countrified lane
The poet and novelist George Meredith, organised rambles for his friends in the 1860s; walking for recreation acquired a powerful supporter in the Sabbatarian movement in the 1870s – spend the Lord’s day with healthy exercise in the country. All of these were essentially a phenomenon for urban people, an escape to an imagined simple life. By the late 1920s hordes of hardy youths would come with their Sunday church organisations to the country. Or if you wanted to, as the famous Mark Twain gag goes, you could ruin your good walk with a game of golf, the options became legion. James I and VI brought golf with him from Scotland, and in 1608 Royal Blackheath Golf club became the earliest club in England – and for another great pub quiz question, in 1894 Royal St George’s Golf Club held the first Open Championship outside Scotland. Popularity of the game soared after the introduction of the rubber ball in 1908, invented I believe by American Coburn Haskell.
And this seems the best place to talk about Cricket since we are sort of talking about sport, though it’s not really relevant to the ‘escape to the country’ theme, but I couldn’t find anywhere else to put it. It is thought by many that Cricket was invented in the Weald, possibly way back in Anglo Saxon times. The first record of an adult game is 1611 when two men were prosecuted in Sussex for playing cricket on a Sunday – classic – and in 1640 there’s a court case which refers to a cricket match there. So if you take nothing else away from this pryle of episodes, let it be formally recorded that Kent and Sussex bequeath to mankind its greatest sporting achievement. Oh – and in 1822, John Willes of Sutton Valence was the first person to bowl overarm in a match. Before that it was just underarm. The idea actually came from his sister Christina Willes, because she had to find a way to get her arm, round her skirts. It was banned until 1835.
Anyway, enough, back to the escape to the country theme, and another recreational craze – Cycling which took off in the country after Harry Lawson invented the safety bicycle in 1894; Harry would then set up the Daimler motor company., just by the way.
In the 1930s, Union lobbying and the Two Weeks Holiday Movement produced legislation on holidays and working hours, and for the first time everyone had the chance for a long holiday. By that time weekending had a long tradition; as far back as Daniel Defoe, who mentions in 1738 the City Tradesmen that built
Gentlemen’s mere summerhouses or citizens voluntary houses wither they retire from the hurry in business, and forgetting money, to draw their breath in a clean air
By the early 20th century weekending and renting a country cottage was not just the preserve of the rich, but the middle classes too, and the most extreme version of this was the extraordinary habit of getting away to live a bohemian weekend in a make shift bit of shanty town – bungaloafing I have heard it called. Messy, makeshift settlements without any facilities appeared on waste and undeveloped land along the coast, horrifying the locals. Bungalow Town at Shoreham in Sussex was its most extreme form. It began in the 1870s, and seems to have been started by ‘thesps’, music hall stars, silent movie actors, well off types in search of the Bohemian Simple life, ‘roughing it’ without the servants. Some old railway carriages were hauled there by horses and cobbled together to make the ideal bungalow.
This was part of a stream of artistic types who came in search of an Elysian England, a dream of England. It has been a search that rose in greater and greater strength as the ugliness of industrialisation grew greater and greater. We might blame William Gilpin, and his idea of the picturesque, or the 18th century idealised landscapes in paintings of ancient Greek and Roman ruins; but maybe people like William Cobett are more to blame. Radical Tories like Cobbett and Cobden railed against the wrong kind of change, enclosure, the change of rural life, and they did so by extolling, visualising and describing an imagined rural idyll of the past.
Landscape artists joined in, a trend that would continue all the way through to Tizah Garwood and Eric Ravillious in the 1930s. Writers came next – it became an absolute requirement that the muse just could not visit unless you were in the country. Early refugees included George Elliot, and Bollinger Bolshevicks Beatrice and Sidney Webb who formed a little colony society of Fabians at Crockham Hill on the Kentish North Downs. Ford Madox Ford built houses overlooking the glory of the Weald, and they were joined by the likes of D H Lawrence and H E Bates, and large houses gradually became an integral part of the landscape.
Because people were not only coming to visit, they were coming to live, having made their pile, to retire to the country, or come to live and commute. The Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris inspired Phillip Webb to build his masterpiece of Standen House in 1894. This became the absolute template of a wave of suburban villas which spread over Surrey and the Weald – an example might be Soames in the Forsthye saga if you know that. There grew up a sort of pseudo gentry, looking the part in their country houses – but without the older, deeper community connection and commitment, without the sense of mutual obligation with the local community.
The local historian Peter Brandon jokes that by the inter war years, there was not a country lane which didn’t resound with the click of typewriters. Most memorable I suppose are the Bloomsbury group. Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson at Sissinghurst, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Ducan Grant, Maynard and Lydia Keynes amongst others at Charleston Farmhouse underneath the Chalk Downs. You should go, Charleston is rather remarkable; and while you are down there go and see Berwick Church, with its frescoes which really are vibrant, fresh and beautiful. Not possible to do in a 45 seat coach though.
There are quite a few very well known books and characters that were born in this idealised world. You might recognise the Darling Buds of May by H E Bates – Pop and Ma Larkin live in Kent. There are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, in Howling, Sussex, created by Stella Gibbons, The landscapes of Rupert Bear are inspired by the countryside, and of course 100 Acre Wood, the home of Winnie the Pooh and gang, set in Ashdown Forest in the Weald.
Hillaire Belloc gives a nice example – he loved it down there, and like other arty types revelled in a vision that didn’t necessarily conform in all respects to the daily life of rural labourers
I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald
They watch the Stars from silent folds
They stiffly plough the field
By them and the God of South Country
My poor soul shall be healed
As a child that sprung from the loins of Loughborough, a couple of lines in that poem really hurt:
When I am living in the Midlands
That are sodden and unkind
Well, the cheek of it. I bet he didn’t walk the glorious parklands of Braggie Park or among the ancient trees of Swiggy woods. Sodden and unkind, pah and pshaw Belloc. Still, Kipling was every bit as blown away, with poems like Puck’s Song, finishing with
You be glad you are Sussex born
Well I never did. I defy you to come up with a more complete transformation of a regional story. The Weald, and the Downs to a lesser extent, had been a byword for wildness, poverty, rugged individualism and danger for centuries. Now it had been comprehensively gentrified. A vast, open air painter’s studio and writer’s muse. It has become a sort of new romantic movement; even after the industrialised farming from the 1950s, one local historian writes that the Weald and Downs in particular seem implausible as a working landscape
You feel that sheep and cattle have been stationed in the field…merely to give scale to the prospect
I think we are very nearly finished; and bit randomly I must say, but I should say just a little bit about the two world wars. Firstly, because the First World War was transformational for society. Of course it was massively traumatic with agricultural chaos of the plough up campaign, followed by a return of the marginal land put under the plough to something like wilderness in places. There was the ‘homes for heroes’ building, but also legislation that began to
chip away at the wall of privilege and deference which had surrounded the gentry
I speak of the inheritance and land taxes of the 1920s, mercifully breaking up many larger estates, and the spread of democracy to a local government open to all.
Kent in particular returned to one of the defining characteristics of its existence – the influence of the continent. There was traffic both ways; in 1914, 60,000 Belgian refugees arrived, and there were 50,000 Canadian soldiers stationed at Shorecliff Camp, which was said to have become a suburb of Toronto. Between 1914 and 1918 it’s been estimated that 10 million troops passed through Folkestone harbour, the main embarkation point, and the tunnels under Dover castle hosts Military hospitals, and the same tunnels would be where Operation Dynamo was managed in 1940, to rescue over 300,000 troops from the beaches of Dunkirk.
Obviously there’s much more I could say about that, but I feel I have run out, and reached the end. I hope you have enjoyed it then; one of the glories of England, as I am sure it is for every country to be fair, is regional differences, and the environment and history that so often drives them. Although the modern world increasingly irons out much of the traditional differences and strength of local tradition, it is still there. In the days of my youth as a Midlander the south was always something of a mystery, as I said at the start, somewhere a bit foreign, and we always looked north. Recently I have discovered the glories of southern England too, there is something in that idea that its landscape is absolutely one of the quintessential models of the English countryside – alongside Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Shropshire etc etc of course. And there is so much that survives, despite the density of the population, and so much history there; Olivia Lang wrote about her journey along the river Ouse that
It feels as though the past is very near
And I think that’s very true.
