by Tom Blass
I paid my first visit in late November. It was a half-accidental detour from Brussels, a city to which Ostend possesses a sort of umbilical link by dint both of the Leopold connection and the railway. As the train thumped out of that great compote of Eurocrats and grime, I had a sense of the thinning of things (flatter fields, fewer people in the carriage, more Flemishness, the public address system giving up on earlier bilingual efforts). By the time we reached Ostend my fellow passengers looked bored and despondent, and convinced by their demeanour that whatever I would encounter would do me some disservice, I tumbled with some reluctance from the warm train carriage into a city of chilly boulevards, frozen footsteps and the occasional whisperings of a tram.
I’d booked a bed and breakfast on Eduard de Kuyperstrasse, well off the main drag – past the hippodrome with its statue of a cantering horse, along the colonnade of the Thermopylae Hotel. I arrived at the door of an immaculately restored circa 1875 house a hundred yards from the scowling sea, ill-lit by orange halide beyond the esplanade, or doigt. It was a boutique B & B, and a stuffed herring gull was suspended artistically above my bed. That evening I ate supper – fish baked in butter and cream – alone in a nearby pub. (Calorific and satisfying but not exciting. I thought of something I’d heard, of how a sixteenth century Spanish ambassador to Flanders described his posting as ‘a land where there grows neither thyme, nor lavender, figs, olives, melons, or almonds, where parsley, onions, and lettuce have neither juice nor taste; where dishes are prepared, strange to relate, with butter from cows instead of oil’.)
In the morning my host Annemarie gave me bread, jam, healthy cereals and camomile tea. She told me that she intensely disliked Ostend, even – especially – in the summer when her takings are sky high and thousands of Belgians come to frolic on the beach. ‘They eat their mussels and frites and pardy,’ she said with disgust. ‘Personally . . . my husband and I want to move to Berlin. There’s a big arts scene there. There’s nothing here in Ostend. Nothing but unemployment and old people.’ But Ostend is more than a seaside resort that has seen better days. Despite effusions of haut bourgeois conservatism, the city inspired an artistic movement as anarchic as it was subtle, and deeply wedded to the sea.
The bronze equestrian statue of Leopold I stands umpteen hands high above the beach huts and the Ostend sands, famous in the nineteenth century for nude female bathers and highly edible rabbits. The small bust of James Ensor by contrast is half hidden in a small park named after the king tucked a quarter of a mile behind the esplanade, overlooking a flower clock. Ensor died in 1949 only a few hundred yards away from where he was born eighty-nine years earlier, having created an oeuvre of paintings, prints, sculptures and musical compositions that defined genres and defied them, veering, or rather hopping, between deft naturalism and the gaudily grotesque via caricature, cartoons and the sublime.
Ensor’s father was an upper-class Englishman who spent a lifetime consummately failing in a number of professions. His mother was one generation away from the Flemish peasantry. Her sister, Ensor’s Aunt Mimi, ran a souvenir shop of a kind that can still be found in Ostend (there is a good one in the smaller of the market squares), and the class conflict within his family life seemed to manifest itself in Ensor in a number of ways. He battled with the art establishment, which was afraid of him, and yet became paterfamilias to a host of artists – Leon Spilliaert, Constant Permeke, Willy Finch, Théo Van Rysselberghe – who collectively came to embody the Ostend avant-garde, creating a prism through which the city and indeed the whole Belgian coast can be redeemed.
That first trip saw me hounded out by grim cold. Ostend’s inhabitants had fled, either indoors or abroad. Cafés and museums were closed, bar a handful. In my journal I wrote,
The yawning golden sands, that each summer stiffen beneath the feet of a hundred thousand Belgians, lie taut, silver and shivering. Silhouetted figures appear and disappear into the mist, in pairs or groups or tantalisingly alone, taking advantage of the chance to have the expanse almost all to themselves. But for these whirls and eddies of life and the warm glow of one or other of the few cafes to brave the off-season, the city, for the most part sleeps, its inhabitants elsewhere in body or mind.
The next autumn I returned, booking into a hotel remarkable for the hugeness of the proprietor’s walrus moustache and a dark warren of sour-smelling, curled and long-unfitted carpets lurking beyond the reception desk.
If the Hotel Theresen was neglected to the point of the grotesque, the Ensor House museum – the house where Ensor spent much of his life – is macabre by design. It also is a terraced house though smaller than the Theresen (and opposite a branch of Subway, an international fast-food chain). Inside it is almost as though Ensor had just left for a stroll along the esplanade, and though imperfectly preserved gives the sense of the man. Grinning masks, oriental objects and joyously and deliberately flawed works of taxidermy are arranged among the pot plants, harmonium and trinkets in an assemblage of Edwardiana manqué almost horrible but also almost beautiful. Ensor’s paintings – unaffordable for the museum – are absent.
James Ensor gave himself the nickname ‘hareng saur’, or ‘kippered herring’, because it almost sounds like ‘arts Ensor’. His work, he declared, was ‘beyond classification’, and the implicit challenge has yet to be refuted. But he also believed he knew the origins of his unique style, attributing it to nursery years spent in Aunt Mimi’s trinket shop, ‘in the midst,’ he wrote in his Écrits, ‘of gleaming, mother of pearl coloured shells with dancing, shimmering reflections and the bizarre skeletons of sea monsters and plants. This marvellous world full of colours, this superabundance of reflections and refractions made me into a painter who is in love with colour and is delighted by the blinding glow of light.’ Mimi would dress James and her pet Capuchin monkey in identical sailors’ costumes for the amusement of her customers. An early childhood memory was the sight of the monkey straddling a giant stuffed fish, their shadow cast on the shop wall by a flickering gas lamp.
Of all his inspirations, the sea was the most potent. He wrote about it often – how he was ‘guided by a secret instinct, a feeling for the atmosphere of the seacoast, which [he] had imbibed with the breeze, inhaled with the pearly mists, soaked up in the waves, heard in the wind’, and more playfully or mock-ironically, ‘Beneficent sea, revered mother, I offer humble praise with a fresh bouquet to your hundred faces, your gleaming skin, your dimples, your rosy lingerie, your diamond crown, your sapphire coverlet, your blessings, your blisses, your unfathomable charms.’
Between them, Ensor and his entourage represented not only the Belgian coast but also its denizens in all their permutations, lifting the lid on life beneath crinoline and starched shirt front and undermining the official narrative of respectability. An early guide to Ostend reads, ‘Probably no other seaside resort in Europe can present such animated scenes of pulsating life and vivid colourings . . . The sands literally “teem” with the rising generation, cosmopolitan in their sports as are the cafes across the way cosmopolitan in their provision for hungry, not to say thirsty, visitors . . . nowhere else is bathing indulged in with such joyous zest.’ An Ensor etching of 1890, The Baths of Ostend, puts flesh and all its temptations on those wholesome bones. Beneath a smiling sun (the spirit of Ensor?) the ‘teeming’ bathers flirt imprudently in the waves. A small dog mounts a young woman who does little to protest. A couple vigorously snogs in bathing hut number 69 while voyeurs endowed with telescopes straddle its pitched roof.
Away from the crowds Ensor found a tauter beauty in the sea. A neat, immaculately simple oil painting completed when Ensor was only sixteen years old depicts another bathing hut, a white shed on carriage wheels on a golden beach against a background of blue sea and dove-grey sky with promising hints of lapis. In a letter to a friend he muses on the delights that might attend living ‘in a big bathing hut whose interior is clad in mother of pearl shells, and to sleep there, cradled by the sound of the sea and an indolent blonde beauti
ful girl with salty flesh’.
Elsewhere, Ensor nodded to Turner with sunsets thickly daubed in rich colours and struck brutally realist chords by depicting rough-featured Ostend alcoholics, fishermen and sailors. He painted and drew his own portrait (a leonine large-featured face, both proud and self-doubting, whiskered and bearded but not disguised) obsessively and in a number of moods (self-mocking, self-quizzical), most famously wearing a woman’s feathered hat, the effect more theatrical than suggestive of transvestism, or of layers of skin peeling away to reveal a skull which remains undeniably his own. In one painting his own head is served, pace John the Baptist, by waiters upon a silver platter. And in a series of staged tussles photographed on Ostend beach Ensor, wearing smock and sou’wester, and his friend Ernest Rousseau Junior (in tartan coat and fez) brandish herrings (held between the constituent parts of a dismembered skeleton) at each other in faux menace.
Ensor had co-conspirators in his mischief. Leon Spilliaert, whose high-contrast self-portraits show him as lean-faced, hollow-cheeked and wild-eyed, was a sometime acolyte, also producing a body of satirical etchings. But his paintings and pastels have an elegance and spareness all their own – low-key evocative quests for the elusive architecture of the waves. Felicien Rops, who also produced exquisite pornography, captures Ostend characters: in one, two men squabble over the telescope that’s instrumental to their voyeurism; and in another, a pencil drawing simply titled God, a middle-aged man in a wide-brimmed hat stares out at the placid sea. Jan Toorop, another of the Ensor ‘set’, employs a kind of pointillism to portray his subjects, such as that of a figure dredging for scallops on the beach below a pink-imbued turquoise sky.
Ensor sat out both world wars and died five years after the end of the second having been made a baron by the very authorities he had often mocked and derided.
In dismal mood one might surmise that with him the city lost its wit and fizz, but the longer I’ve spent in Ostend, the greater the number of moments that shimmer (to use an Ensor word) like mischievous curios, dark and sparkling, that I’ve come to chance upon. Riding the coast tram in November – it was already cold and I was returning from a failed attempt to walk from the last town in Belgium to the first in France – I caught a glimpse of a girl who, beguilingly, fetchingly and improbably had strode into the North Sea until it caressed the tops of her knees. Entirely alone on the beach, wearing, as far as I can tell, a long charcoal-black dress, she could, should even, have been a fiction. But, hurtling past far too quickly, I watched her scoop up handfuls of foaming sea with which to splash herself, the dress’s hem floating around her in the surf like a dark petal. The tram rounded a bend, severing the sight but not the sense of intrigue.
Taking tea in a park, I watched a man wipe the rectum of his toy schnauzer with a distressing degree of assiduity before flicking the tissue into the depths of a herbaceous border. Later, killing time in the Café du Parc, itself an Ensorian anachronism, perhaps the most perfectly preserved café in the art nouveau style in Europe, I gazed out at a courting couple. She was evidently of African descent, tall, ramrod erect, blessed with the most perfectly straight nose and utterly graceful and forbidding features. Her cropped hair was dyed crimson, and she wore a coat of dark maroon. She was perhaps in her early forties. Her lover, a septuagenarian in a camel-hair coat, swung an umbrella as if it were a swordstick, sported a trilby hat, a military bearing and a black patch over one eye.
It was war and its aftermath that degraded Leopold’s Ostend. In the 1914–18 conflict the town of Nieuwpoort, half an hour’s tram ride along the coast from Ostend, marked the beginning of a line of trenches running from the North Sea coast to Switzerland. The Germans had hoped for total victory over the Belgians in order to push into France from the north. They were almost successful. But the Belgians prevented them from getting beyond the Yser Canal by opening the sluice gates and turning fields into impenetrable marsh, a centuries-old military trick in the Low Countries.
An aerial photograph of Nieuwpoort taken in 1917 shows its esplanade like the smashed jaw of a gargantnam, unfortunate beast. A single building protrudes from the rubble, with a handwritten note identifying it as the Grand Hotel which still exists, the one attractive structure facing the sea, now kept dubious company by the ubiquitous apartment blocks. Today Nieuwpoort is an almost excruciatingly dull suburb, its greatest attraction the canal that leads mournfully out to sea. It doesn’t go out of its way to exploit its gorily fascinating history, which is ironic given that only months after the armistice, British tourists were heading to Belgium to enjoy the spectacle of its ruin. There’s a sense in which the war has been buried with deliberate absence of pomp, as one might inter a roguish relative one would prefer not to have ever mentioned. You could find yourself looking all afternoon for traces of war before giving up and settling for moules frites in a local bar. But it is always somewhere.
Convinced that Ostend and Zeebrugge were being used by the German navy as submarine bases, the British launched a desperate assault on both ports on 23 April 1918. At Zeebrugge three obsolete concrete-filled cruisers, Intrepid, Iphigenia and Thetis, were to be towed to the harbour mouth, run aground and blown up to block the entrance. By the evening of the 24th an official narrative of what happened had been released:
Those who recall High Wood upon the Somme as it was after the battles of 1916 . . . may easily figure to themselves the decks of HMS Vindictive [another Royal Navy cruiser, badly damaged in the raid] as she lies today, a stark black profile against the haze of the harbour amid the stripped trim shapes of the fighting ships which throng these waters . . . the broken tools of war, that lavish ruin and that prodigal evidence of death and battle, are as obvious and plentiful here as there . . .
The navy thought it had the best possible conditions for the raid – there would be no moon, and the tide was favourable for an easy withdrawal. But by the time its ships arrived the Germans had got wind of them, and the sky was ‘illuminated by strings of luminous green beads shot aloft, the darkness of the night . . . supplanted by the nightmare daylight of battle fires. Guns and machine guns along the mole and batteries ashore woke to life.’
An agitated sea made coming alongside difficult, and when the gangways were lowered they scraped and rebounded from the high parapet of the mole as the Vindictive ground and bounced against it. The two officers leading the attack were killed even before the whistle was blown, Colonel Elliot by a shell and Captain Halahan by machine-gun fire sweeping across the decks. Even the attempt to get onto the mole must have felt desperately suicidal. ‘A passage across the crashing splintering gangways, a drop over the parapet into the field of fire of the German machine guns which swept its length and a further drop of some sixteen feet to the surface of the mole itself. Many were killed and more were wounded as they crowded up to the gangways; but nothing hindered the orderly and speedy landing by every gangway.’
On another of the assault vessels – a former Mersey ferry called Iris – a ‘single big shell plunged through the upper deck and burst below at a point where fifty-six marines were waiting the order to go to the gangways. Forty-nine were killed and the remaining seven wounded . . .’ The cowardly Hun offered ‘no resistance . . . other than intense and unremitting fire’, which could apparently be heard in Dover. Such was the insanity that one naval officer was attacked by a member of his own crew ‘with a hammer’; another man hit the water in a lifebuoy, igniting a calcium flare, and found himself ‘adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine gun giving him its undivided attention’.
Inevitable telegrams duly followed.
Sir . . . It is my painful duty to inform you that telegraphic information has reached this Department that Charles Pool, Acting Air Mexchanic [sic] 1st Grade, Official number F. 12787, was killed in action on the 23rd instant during operations off the Belgian Coast. I have to request that you will be good enough to telegraph to the Commodore whether you wish your Son’s body, if recovered, to be sent home for burial or
whether you would prefer to attend the funeral at Dover.
The Zeebrugge raid was played up as a great victory. The officer responsible, Admiral Keyes, was congratulated by King George, the prime minister and General Douglas Haig. Whether it achieved anything of military value is dubious at best. The block ships were not sunk at the correct location, and submarines left Zeebrugge on the next high tide.
More recently the apparently blighted Zeebrugge became a household name on account of the capsizing on 6 March 1987 of the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise. I was sixteen, staunchly convinced that Margaret Thatcher (along with the other culprits to whom adolescents tend to attribute blame – school, and parents) was responsible for most of the things that had gone wrong in my life or the world at large.
The official inquiry into the Herald’s sinking described what happened pithily.
Approximately 459 passengers had embarked for the voyage to Dover, which they expected to be completed without incident in the prevailing good weather. There was a light easterly breeze and very little sea or swell. The HERALD passed the outer mole at 18.24. She capsized about four minutes later. During the final moments the HERALD turned rapidly to starboard and was prevented from sinking totally by reason only that her port side took the ground in shallow water. Water rapidly filled the ship below the surface level with the result that not less than 150 passengers and 38 members of the crew lost their lives. Many others were injured.
A number of individuals took the rap for what happened. The easiest to blame was a crew member, Mark Stanley, who should have closed the bow doors. After opening them on the boat’s arrival from Dover he returned to his cabin for a snooze and remained ‘asleep in his bunk until thrown out of it when the Herald began to capsize’. The inquiry criticised Stanley but added that it was ‘right to record that after the Herald capsized he found his way out of the ship on to her hull where he set about rescuing passengers trapped inside. He broke a window for access and . . . his forearm was deeply cut. Nevertheless, he re-entered the hull and went into the water to assist passengers. He continued until he was overcome by cold and bleeding.’ The ship’s bosun Terry Ayling was also in the firing line. He too could have closed the doors, but, he told the inquiry, ‘it had never been part of his duties’. Also like Stanley, he behaved ‘heroically’ after the accident occurred, organising rescue efforts in the absence of a senior officer.