England's Beaches
Mew a family man (and woman) returning exhausted from the annual battle of the beaches must wonder how the English came to develop the seaside habit. Mr. Marsden suplies the answer in this diverting I and charmingly illustrated book. t all seems to have started with Dr. Wittie of Scarborough who, seeing a chance of getting ahead of his professional rivals in the inland spas of Bath and Tunbridge Wells, extolled the curative properties of Scarborough sea-water for internal and external use. That was in 166o. In less than a century Scar- borough " Spaw," already equipped with assembly rooms, piazza, circulating library and theatre, had become the model for the sea- side bathing resort. But the emphasis was still on cure rather than pleasure by the sea. Eyen Brighton was launched on its career of exotic revelry by its founder, Dr_Russell, with a Latin thesis on the use of sea-water in glandular disease. Before the end of the eighteenth century the migration to the seaside for pleasure as well as for health had become a feature of English social life, and Mr. Marsden might have quoted Cowper's admonition to the modern belles who
" In coaches, chaises, caravans and hoys Fly to the coast for daily, nightly joys And all, impatient of dry land, agree With one consent to rush into the Sea."
What was the fashion in the eighteenth became the habit in the nineteenth century. Mr. Marsden describes with wit and colour the rapid growth of the seaside towns, and reflects in passing on such interesting topics as the significance of the bathing chariot, the part played by Royalty in encouraging the seaside habit, and the origin of the atmosphere of sexual exhilaration which he finds from early days to have pervaded our beaches.
Roughly half of the book deals with the developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The great period of expansion came with the Railway Age when the English coasts, free at last from the dangers of foreign invasion, became accessible to the masses. With the advertised excursion, the cheap day and the family ticket, came the nigger minstrels, Uncle Bones and his men, the brass bands, the new generation of avaricious landladies eagerly inspecting the latest victims from behind the fringed and dusty curtains of " Belle Vue." The scene was set for the annual middle-class holiday of the Victorian era. With railways, too, came a crop of new resorts, different in origin and character from the converted ports and fishing harbours like Wey- mouth, Hastings and Margate. Of these, about which Mr. Marsden says too little, Bournemouth is the best example : " the perfect ex- ample," so it was said in t84t, "among the sea-nooks one longs to have for an invalid." It is rare to know the name of the founder of an English town. On this account alone, the founder of Bournemouth, Lewis Dymoke Tregonwell, deserves a mention. But it is unfair to accuse the author of omissions from a book so small and so full of in- formation and amusing anecdote. Its size alone will commend it to those in search of the right kind of holiday reading who to-morrow will engage in a last desperate struggle with the already bulging
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