by Tom Blass
I rode over to Ramsgate and witnessed an astonishing sight. It was nearly high water at midday, and there were at least 30 Bathing machines in the sea, and close to the shore, out of which popped men just as they came into the world, while some hundreds of respectable looking females sat on the beach looking on. I was told that when the experiment was made of moving the machines a little further down from the pier, the chairs and stools of the females kept moving in the same direction as if by magic . . .
The author, gender undisclosed, regarded the phenomenon as a ‘blot’ on ‘an otherwise healthful and pleasant resort’.
For the purposes of leisure there is a multiplicity of seas, the one splintered on the anvil of demography, culture and class. In the United Kingdom a kind of coyness pertains even to the naming of the North Sea. It is as if the very brutishness so conveyed by its northern-ness must remain concealed in order to sustain the pretence that it is just ‘the sea’, generically indistinguishable from more glamorous, more blue, less coarse and grey seas populated by richer, happier and more deeply tanned holidaymakers. And there are fractions of fractions. When the Tuggses, a family of greengrocers invented by Charles Dickens, find that they have come into some money, they quickly decide that they must ‘leave town immediately’ as an ‘indispensable preliminary to being genteel’, but the question arises as to where they should go, and the following conversation ensues.
‘Gravesend?’ mildly suggested Mr Joseph Tuggs. The idea was unanimously scouted. Gravesend was LOW.
‘Margate?’ insinuated Mrs Tuggs. Worse and worse – nobody there, but tradespeople.
‘Brighton?’ Mr Cymon Tuggs opposed an insurmountable objection. All the coaches had been upset, in turn, within the last three weeks; each coach had averaged two passengers killed, and six wounded; and, in every case, the newspapers had distinctly understood that ‘no blame whatever was attributable to the coachman.’
‘Ramsgate?’ ejaculated Mr Cymon, thoughtfully. To be sure; how stupid they must have been, not to have thought of that before! Ramsgate was just the place of all others.
Long before the Tuggses made their fictional excursion to Ramsgate, the respective merits of bathing places inspired considerable discussion – as Alain Corbin describes: ‘In 1794, a debate arose between partisans of the Baltic and those of the North Sea. The arguments of the latter . . . included the amplitude of the tides, the power of the waves, the water’s saltiness and the fine sand. Defenders of the Baltic vaunted the merits of a more accessible sea that was calmer, with water made warmer by the slighter variation in tides.’
Soon there were already plenty of resorts for the sea junkie to choose from. In 1797 Dr Van Halem founded the resort at Norderney, on the North Sea coast of Germany. From 1801 the island of Wangerooge became popular. Entrepreneurs soon followed suit with offerings at Cuxhaven, Wyk, Fohr and Heligoland.
‘Sea-bathing,’ wrote Augustus Bozzi Granville, third son of the postmaster general of the Austrian province of Lombardy, ‘I hold to be . . . one of the most powerful means a medical man can wield for the restoration of his patients.’ This, he believed, was especially the case at Scarborough, where the arrangements were of the ‘most satisfactory kind . . . the almost insensible descent into the deeper water, with the softest bed imaginable for the feet to tread upon . . . and the peculiar transparency and purity of the returning tide . . . render it not only perfectly safe, but accompanied with almost luxurious feelings’.* Thus he describes a sensation that holidaymakers have sought to replicate and improve upon far beyond the shores of the North Sea.
Despite the affordability of Mediterranean and long-haul package holidays and the affectation of distaste for the habits and desires of our ancestors, we yearn to feel the North Sea shingle and cobbles beneath our soft feet, to gorge on greasy and unreconstructed seaside delights and experience the underworld of amusement arcades and to promenade upon the pier. For what such resorts as Scarborough lack in dignity they make up for with an old-fashioned cocktail of tradition, heightened sexuality and home comforts. And so it is that each summer we make our way with the somnambulant inexorability of pilgrims to Whitby, Texel in the Netherlands, la plage at Ostend, and to the Strande of the German North Sea and Baltic.
Nor are all the pleasures we discover plebeian or ‘low’. On (heavenly) Sylt, which juts out of the land at the point where Germany and Denmark meet, I stepped from a very ordinary bus into an enclave of super-wealth: Bentleys, BMWs and Porsches carelessly parked in the shadow of pristine dunes while their owners, media moguls from Hamburg, Berlin dot-com millionaires and Frankfurt bankers, sported on the pristine beach and refreshed themselves with champagne.
‘I had no idea I would find this,’ I told a native of Sylt, who was bemoaning the inflationary effect of the presence of such gilded visitors.
‘Everyone knows about Sylt!’ she said. But no one had told me. It was, in effect, a family secret.
Snobbery and the sea have a long and close relationship that’s laden with paradox: on the one hand the sea is a place to loosen inhibitions, relax, undress and free oneself from everyday social mores and convention. But who would want to do so in the company of the lower classes?
Granville mocked the pretensions of Scarborough visitors: ‘[They are] the greatest separatists in England, and would as soon think of returning a bow to some “small unknown” to whom they had never been regularly introduced as they would to dance with any one not belonging to their own set. This should be reformed, and the sooner the better.’ Today the middle classes that seek out the evocative beaches of North Norfolk at Holkham or Blakeney studiously avoid not-dissimilar shorelines close by. The perfectly respectable place name Skegness means ‘headland that juts out like a beard’, and the town sits at the end of one of the longest stretches of unbroken sand in Europe. Yet it has become a byword for cheap proletarian thrills, donkey rides, knobbly-knee competitions and orchestrated, institutionalised fun.
That the sea can be so easily socially taxonomised has long been known to tourist boards, who labour to sort us into the appropriate seaside bucket with commendable if patronising and pseudo-scientific diligence. Consider an English Tourist Board paper on the future of English seaside tourism published in 1974 which siloed English resorts into four main categories, lively, distinguished, pleasant and picturesque, thus.
Lively: ‘the strength of which is their activity, lots to do, sociability, appeal to children, welcoming informal accommodation, low cost . . . working class image . . . challenge from the Costa Brava’.
Distinguished: ‘offer a high quality holiday for older and better off people’.
Pleasant: ‘they excel in no characteristic nor are they worse than other English places except in the matter of food. While having no exceptional assets that might be rivalled by other destinations, description equally they have as a group no strong selling points.’
It added a white elephant category too: ‘bizarre’, which included Whitby, Salcombe and Aldeburgh (and Newquay and Brixham), of which it said, ‘It may be necessary to consider whether such places wish to opt in or out of the holiday industry.’
This refractive device put to work in Lincolnshire yielded the following analysis: ‘There are three traditional seaside resort towns: Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe and Skegness. According to research findings Cleethorpes and Skegness are regarded as “lively”, Mablethorpe is on the arbitrary dividing line between “lively” and so-called “distinguished”. Mablethorpe differs markedly . . . in one guidebook was described as a “shanty town”.’ In a wearied tone the report acknowledged that all this was no more or less than the great British public deserved, noting that while seaside caravan sites are ugly – an attribute all too evident in Lincolnshire, which lacks the valley folds or foliage in which to hide them – this ‘obviously fails to deter the people who do spend their holidays at such sites’.
What was the future of the English seaside resort in 1974? The board conceded that the weather was much less rel
iable in Yorkshire, Suffolk and even Cornwall than in Andalusia and Majorca, and that if they were to survive domestic resorts should offer ‘a total holiday experience’, although it failed to describe what such a holistic solution entailed. Given that even the English Tourist Board appeared so unexcited about the very thing it was paid to promote, how could it inspire anyone else?
Why is it that some resorts prosper and others fall out of favour and slump? Aesthetics must have some role – but not an exclusive one. Most of the Belgian coast is uncompromisingly ugly. At some point in the early 1960s developers began to bulldoze what remained of its former finery, erecting brutalist replacements so overwhelming in their disregard for either man or nature as to elicit a visceral reaction in anyone who chances upon them for the first time. Yet these serried ranks of cubicles promise their seasonal dwellers a covetable view of the North Sea, and in summer Belgium’s beaches are unfailingly occupied almost to the point of saturation by mussel-devouring habitués whose annual return is as bankable as that of the swallows.
Meanwhile, once-fashionable, even elegant resorts on the east coast of the United Kingdom have slumped into a kind of all-round dysfunction so complete or near complete as to be comic, the effect exaggerated by their architectural grandiosity so at odds with the listless micro-economy of benefits and burger bars. Other seaside towns possess insufficient merit to warrant any surprise that they have gone downhill, viz. the town of Withernsea on the Holderness coast of Yorkshire, a dull conurbation remarkable for the caravan parks that have spread like psoriasis around its housing estates, for the extraordinarily high rates of teenage pregnancy within them and for its lighthouse museum. As you enter the town, a sign bids you WELCOME TO WITHERNSEA and asks that you PLEASE VISIT OUR LIGHTHOUSE. On exit, another reads, THANK YOU FOR VISITING WITHERNSEA – DID YOU VISIT OUR LIGHTHOUSE? as if the town is collectively anxious that its visitors should take away more than the memory of its muddy beach, brown cliffs and sea, and a kebab.
It is not the fault of Withernsea, which rose on the whim of a local entrepreneur in the 1860s who saw the opportunity that lay in freighting the working class of Hull to the coast by train and providing their accommodation and refreshment. The place has few natural charms or features: not the natural grandeur of Flamborough, the prettiness of Robin Hood’s Bay or the endearments of Whitby. But the sea is the sea, and its early patrons were denuded of the choices that their descendants have come to expect.
The town now possesses the menacing air of the spurned, the once-but-no-longer-loved and the fallen-out-of-favour, a place which, like so many others on the coast, has reached the end of the line, its former glories reduced to mildewing relics in a local museum – if lucky enough to boast one.
Perhaps tourism is like a kind of prosthetic limb to stick upon the stump of an amputated ‘real economy’. Sometimes the illusion of genuine activity is almost convincing, but more often than not the impostor, with its heritage centres, holiday homes and ‘experiences’, gnaws on the marrow of the past. Where even tourism has failed, what then for a Withernsea?
I’m not sure that the distinction is between rich and poor towns. On Scotland’s Neuk of Fife sits a string of former fishing villages – Ely, Crail, Pittenweem and Cellardykes. Each is exceptionally pretty, with picture-postcard fishermen’s cottages, quaysides and drying sheds. But the cottages were long ago vacated by the fishing families, who fled in favour of bungalows with garages, bathrooms, living rooms and gardens well before the death of the fishing industry; thus the quirky little houses have made the inevitable migration from living homes to holiday lets and rich men’s playthings, while the only role the sea now plays in the local economy is in luring the golf-mad to the links. It all lends to such places something of the Victorian collector’s pickled specimen, essential form preserved but life long departed. The incomers seem embarrassed by their own complicity in the process, buying when the locals, often young adults in search of employment, moved out in search of jobs, ‘restoring’ the houses to a state of sleek perfection they probably never previously enjoyed, but rendering the villages mute, absent of the weft and warp of everyday comings and goings.
It is a paradox that the sea permits us to be inclusive to the point that we are indistinguishable from the herd, but also to indulge our snobberies and sense of appropriate social distinction. The slogan of the Dutch island of Texel is ‘Something for everyone.’ Depending on how tightly ‘everyone’ is to be defined, this is an unashamedly ambitious boast. Texel is known among the world’s stock farmers for its eponymous breed of sheep, a stocky unsentimental beast that thrives and produces good wool wherever you care to place it. Twitchers flock to the island in the autumn and spring, when it is rich in migrant birds, and it is also a source of perennial fascination for war buffs, the last shots of World War II in Europe being fired here, allegedly.
Despite the absence of cosmopolitan or topographical attractions, every summer the flat wind-lashed beaches of the island resemble the site of a mass skinning of seals, though thronging with bodies and pleasure. ‘Everyone’ is Dutch. For there seems to be a (loose) rule about North Sea beaches, that in the main they attract their own nationals. It is mostly Belgians that descend on the sands of Knokke Blankenberg, Germans upon those of Sylt, Amrum and Rügen, and British holidaymakers who head each summer to ‘Skeggy’, Yarmouth and Filey. A beach holiday within one’s own country constitutes a rebaptism in the wellspring of what the Germans call Heimat and the British call ‘home’. It is a kind of liberation from exoticism, from foreigners, odd food, pushy trinket vendors and the need to board an aeroplane. On a North Sea beach wind-driven knife-sharp shingle may lacerate the calves, but the voices you hear in the breeze are friendly and familial and the body shapes reassuringly like your own. Here there is no shame in celebrating sameness, however banal that may be.
It was the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and in the case of the resort of Borkum it is apposite indeed. Even before the 1800s bathing establishments were springing up across the East Frisians and the Baltic to complement the inland spa resorts of Bavaria and the Black Forest, and in 1844 a Dr Ripking of Hamburg opened a bathing establishment on the island of Borkum, the most south and west of the East Frisians and closest to the Dutch border. Regarded as the most beautiful of its siblings, it gained a reputation for the healing qualities of the sea, the tranquillity of its dunes and its beneficial climate, all attributes which the Borkum tourist board promotes today, along with ‘activities and religious festivals for children’.
Borkum provided a welcome summer retreat for the north German bourgeoisie, who patronised its cafés, hotels, boarding houses, sanatoriums and quacks. During the First World War the army transformed Borkum into a military base protecting the entrance to the River Ems. Subsequently, during the Weimar period, it sprang back to life with renewed vigour, the sea providing a balm to forget the agonies of the war. Many of its visitors were drawn from a Jewish population that had throughout the nineteenth century steadily absorbed into mainstream middle-class German society, intermarrying with Gentiles or abandoning the prescripts of their religion (among these, let it be noted, the family of a Dr Ludwig Blass, grandfather of the author).
Jews were inveterate holidaymakers. Partly driven by an eagerness to display the extent of their assimilation but also because they could afford to and desired to, German Jews became a mainstay of the German tourism industry. Whereas before the Great War there had been a tendency to visit relatives in parts of the east which now belonged to Poland, in the 1920s they sought new leisure activities, and were just as enthusiastically courted by the tourism industry – or by much of it at least.
Many Jews dismissed the anti-Semitism they encountered before 1933 as callow and uncouth loutishness – more a nuisance than an existential threat. When it came to holidays, it could be avoided by refusing to patronise the most egregious resorts. And at the beach there was little or nothing to distinguish t
hem. Borkum, with its thirty-six kilometres of tranquil white sands, was and remains one of the most desirable of the East Frisians, but in 1923, almost the height of Weimar liberalism, it declared itself Judenfrei and became notorious for the ‘Borkum Lied’ (Borkum Song), the last refrain of which proclaimed, ‘those who come with flat feet, crooked noses and curly hair (mit platten Füßen, mit Nasen krumm und Haaren kraus) must not enjoy the beach, but must be out! be out! Out!’ (der muß hinaus! der muß hinaus! Hinaus!).
This was a favourite of the local orchestra, and the crowd would join in with such fervour that participating in the singing of the ‘Borkum Song’ became a defining part of holidaying on the island. Other resorts, including neighbouring Wangerooge and holiday towns on the Baltic coast, quickly composed their own anti-Semitic ditties so as not to lose market share. When the socialist minister of the interior banned the song the island responded by appointing a local Nazi member of the Reichstag, who enjoyed immunity from arrest, to the post of spa manager. He ordered that the band should continue to play it.
The Jewish lobby wielded considerable influence in Weimar Germany. In response to the growing bullishness of explicit anti-Semitism at North Sea and Baltic resorts – and inland spas – Jewish associations took their own steps. At one resort such an association was successful in having a Nazi propaganda office removed, threatening a boycott by high-spending visitors. Other groups published blacklists of hotels that had treated Jews badly. Some proprietors pleaded not to be placed on the lists and provided testimonies from Jewish guests to the effect that they were treated with every possible civility. Others asked specifically that their establishments be included.
In the years leading up to the burning of the Reichstag the blacklists burgeoned, with many Jews choosing to visit resorts which had particular reputations for being friendly to them, like Norderney – less prestigious and more crowded than its near neighbour Borkum. The ghettoisation, foreshadowing darker successors, of Germany’s North Sea holiday resorts had begun, even in the absence of race laws.