by Tom Fort
I loved the rock pools. Roedean had its own tunnel down through the cliff to the shore with its entrance near the school’s main gates. It had been dug sometime in the pre-swimming pool era, as there were sepulchral changing-rooms at the bottom where Roedeanians of old had exchanged uniforms for very respectable bathing costumes before scampering across the rocks to the murky sea. It was dimly lit by feeble bare light bulbs. The air was still, stale, salty and the stairs were covered in a thin layer of sand, ages old, which muffled the slap of our plimsolls. It was more than slightly spooky, and I never went down or up without thinking of being trapped in there with no one to hear my cries.
The tunnel opened onto the sea wall. On sunny days we were blinded by the light off the chalk and the water, standing there in our shorts and Aertex shirts, with our buckets and the nets made for us by the school handyman. We would fan out across the rocks, searching for the deepest pools where the fattest prawns would be found.
The prime time was the hour either side of low tide. After that the incoming sea devoured the pools and we would trudge wearily back up the tunnel steps, swapping the heavy bucket from one hand to the other, slopping the water and an occasional crustacean onto already wet feet. Back home we would run our fingers through the prawns, lifting them and letting them drop back into the bucket, feeling their whiskers and little saws against our skin. Then they would be tipped into a big pan of boiling water and we would marvel again at that instant metamorphosis from translucent life to pink death.
In time we outgrew prawning and rock-pooling. My mother finished at Roedean and we did not go back to the rocks below the cliffs again, although I would occasionally wonder if it had changed much and if the prawns were still there.
In October 2012 we all went back to Roedean to attend the Founders’ Day service. My mother had died in January of that year at a great age, and the school wished to commemorate her time there. We had tea with the head teacher and I asked her about the tunnel, assuming that in these Health-and-Safety days it would have been shut up or even filled in. She surprised me by saying it was still in use, and that she would sometimes take senior girls down to the Marina for an ice cream.
By then I was researching this book and a notion took shape. It was time to find out about the prawns.
In August 2013 my eldest brother and I – the others were not available – headed for the south coast. It was a perfect prawning day, warm and sunny, not too breezy. It would have been nice to use the Roedean tunnel but it was the holidays so we parked near St Dunstan’s, the startling modernist home for blind service men and women along the clifftop from the school. We had ginger beer and bacon sandwiches at the café at the bottom of the steps there, then made our way west along the sea wall, our nets and buckets drawing some inquiring looks. The sand and shingle beach gives way after a while to rock, much as we remembered except for the encroachment in the distance of Brighton Marina, much talked about in my mother’s day although not actually built until some years later.
It was mid-afternoon, an hour or so before low tide. We went separate ways, very cautiously, James towards the tunnel and the Marina, me further east. I proceeded very slowly, fearful of a fall, until I found the kind of pool I was after. It had overhangs on one side draped in weed, and an island of rock in the middle, and when I lowered myself into it the water came up to my shins. I ran my net briskly beneath the bladderwrack and scooped upwards. Among the fronds of weed trapped in the mesh were half a dozen fat prawns and a little fish, a blenny, with flattened face and fan-like pectoral fins. I let out a little whoop of delight.
Further out towards the sea were two lines of brown, barnacle-encrusted blocks of concrete. I did not remember them, although they must have been there in the 1960s as they had originally been put there to carry Magnus Volk’s celebrated Seashore Electric Railway, which ran on stilts between Rottingdean and Brighton’s Palace Pier at the end of the nineteenth century. Around the base of the blocks the water was knee-deep and the dark holes were well-populated. I scooped back and forth, breaking off to transfer the better prawns to my bucket and release the lesser ones, together with the clods of weed and assorted crabs, gobies, blennies and weevers.
I looked towards the Marina and saw my brother bent at the business, his straw hat inclined low. Time raced by, measured only by the tide retreating to its outer limit then advancing again. It is very absorbing, this rock pooling. You feel very much on your own out on the rocks, detached by a great spiritual distance from the bustle of the Marina and the roar of the coast road.
The tide was halfway back in when we called a halt. The walk back to the car, like the ascent of the tunnel steps, seemed very much longer than it had a few hours before. We had a good haul of prawns, and when I got home that evening I boiled my share for a minute or so then peeled and potted them in butter with mace and cayenne pepper. They were highly unctuous and delicious, the butter and spices veiling but not masking the unmistakable taste of the sea.
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Brighton and the Palace Pier
The gravestone is close to the north wall of the churchyard of St Nicholas, the parish church of Brighton. It stands on a grassy bank, as upright as Brighton folk remembered the old man himself, both in his character and bearing. The name on the stone, Sake Dean Mohammed, is not quite right, but you can hardly blame the monumental mason, for a dark-skinned person from Hindustan was a rare bird in those days and their names were different from ours, and the man himself had spelled his in various ways.
The immense age of 101 recorded on the stone is dubious, too. He died in 1851, which would give a birth year of 1750. But in his own account of his life, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, he stated clearly: ‘I was born in the year 1759 at Patna, a famous city north of the Ganges . . .’ But was he? In another book, about the methods for which he became famous, Mahomet wrote: ‘I was born in the year 1749 at Patna, the capital of Hindoostan about 290 miles north of Calcutta.’
There are more riddles here. The inscription also records the death of his wife Jane in 1850 at the age of seventy, which would put her birth year at 1780. Yet by his account, he eloped with her in 1784, which is implausible. According to an American historian, Michael Fisher, who has closely studied the records of Mahomet’s life, the answer could be that he had two wives, both called Jane.
This much is known. Mahomet trained as a surgeon in Calcutta and was attached to the 27th Regiment of Native Infantry in the Bengal Army. At some point he became the protégé of a Captain Godfrey Baker, an officer of the East India Company from a well-to-do Protestant Anglo-Irish family living in Cork in the west of Ireland. In the 1780s he accompanied Captain Baker from India to Cork, where he formed a strong attachment for an Irish girl, Jane Daly. Against the wishes of her family he married her; they had several children and continued to enjoy the patronage of the Baker family for many years.
In 1807 Dean Mahomet and his family moved to London where he obtained a position working for one of the richest of the Indian nabobs, the Honourable Basil Cochrane. While amassing a vast fortune in India, Cochrane had become interested in the Indian practice of treating various medical conditions in a steam or vapour bath. The version developed by Cochrane consisted of a transparent chamber fed by steam, with a seat on which the patient would have a strange contraption made of flannel, whalebone and metal strapped to the chest to concentrate more steam. Cochrane had one installed in his mansion in Portman Square, and it is likely that Dean Mahomet worked there, possibly even installed it, and that he added to the treatment various methods of massage using exotic oils.
He and Cochrane soon went their separate ways, and Dean Mahomet opened his Hindoostane coffee house in George Street, said to be the first in London to offer authentic Indian cuisine. After running into financial difficulties he moved with his family to Brighton, where he set up a therapeutic bathhouse combining the vapour bath with massages using his ‘Indian oils’.
This time he found the right market. In the 1750s Dr Richar
d Russell had set up his famous practice on Old Steine, prescribing bathing in sea water and drinking it as a treatment for every ailment from gout to heart disease. Dr Russell had thereby established Brighton’s reputation as the resort of choice for the well-to-do in search of a cure. Initially the ‘original medicated shampooing’ offered by the Indian surgeon at Mahomed’s Baths was just one more in the portfolio of therapeutic treatments available to Brighton’s transient population of invalids and hypochondriacs. But its exoticism and originality, and the suave and soothing manner of its dusky practitioner, soon made it a favourite.
Mahomet’s ‘shampooing’ had little or nothing to do with the hair or scalp. The patient, having been encouraged to perspire freely in the vapour bath, was placed in a flannel tent. Medicated oils were applied, followed by pummelling of the muscles, ligaments and tendons by strong arms inserted through flaps in the side of the tent.
Extraordinary cures were claimed. Dean Mahomet built up a collection of crutches, spine-stretchers, club-foot reformers, leg-irons and other correctives which his patients had discarded as a result of his treatments. The Prince Regent himself came, and appointed Mahomet Shampooing Surgeon to the Royal Family. Where the Prince led everyone else followed. Testimonials flowed in. Mrs Kent, of Wimpole Street in London, was inspired to verse. She came to Mahomed’s Baths
Worn out by anguish and excess of pain
Hope seemed delusive and assistance vain.
But after a good pummelling, she was a new woman –
To thee, Mahomed, let a grateful heart
Its warmest thanks in gratitude impart,
By thy great skill and unremitting care,
One has been saved who might have perished there.
Who while she feels a pulse within her veins
Will bless the name if memory remains.
The Baths prospered, so much so that a sister branch opened in London. Its founder retired in 1843 – aged either eighty-four or ninety-four – handing over to one of his sons, Arthur. According to his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Mahomet ‘enjoyed uninterrupted good health and retained all his faculties unimpaired almost to the last hour of his life’. The Brighton Herald attributed his wellbeing to ‘temperate habits and a cheerful and contented mind . . . he was highly respected as a man of benevolence, candour and sincerity.’
One of his grandsons subsequently wrote to the paper to clear up the matter of his name – it should have been Deen Mahomed, the ‘Sake’ being a title which should have been rendered as ‘Sheikh’, meaning ‘elderly respected person’. The family remained in Brighton long after the fashion for medical shampooing had passed and Mahomed’s Baths had been pulled down to make way for a hotel. One of the grandsons is recorded as having died in Hove in 1935; he was the Reverend James Deen Kerriman Mahomed, which must be one of the more unusual names on the Church of England’s roll.
Brighton in the era of Mahomed’s Baths knew its business thoroughly. Its adoption by the Prince Regent in 1783 as his favoured playground added the dimension of pleasure to the round of water treatments advocated by Dr Russell and his followers. Under the Prince’s patronage, Brighton rapidly learned to offer a wide range of diversions and facilities. George’s notion of amusement encompassed bathing, shooting at chimneys, cards, masques, balls, hunting a stag down the Steine, philandering, gossip-mongering and much besides. Crucially, it also sanctioned the participation of social ranks outside the old aristocracy hitherto considered suitable as royal companions. In Brighton extravagance of dress, behaviour and spending were the norm. Money rubbed shoulders with quality, the flash with the elegant, the seamy with the smart.
In 1827 George IV – as he had become after a long wait – paid his last visit to his Oriental pleasure palace, the Royal Pavilion. His successor, William IV, loved Brighton as well, but he did not last long. Queen Victoria did not share the enthusiasm of her uncles. She and Albert objected to the ‘semi-Chinese monstrosities’ on display in the Pavilion, and much more strongly to the vulgar curiosity of the hordes of overdressed and immodest social butterflies flitting along the promenade. ‘The people are very indiscreet and troublesome here which makes this place quite a prison,’ she complained. They much preferred the understated charms of the Isle of Wight, and once Osborne House was built and fitted out appropriately, they kept away from Brighton altogether.
Brighton did not miss them overmuch. It was too occupied in providing for a clientele much increased and democratised by the opening of the railway line from London in the 1840s. Under challenge from Eastbourne and Bournemouth, its reputation as resort of first choice for the top tier of society declined somewhat. But the start of the winter season in November still witnessed a remarkable influx of titled personages, British and foreign, whose comings and goings were faithfully recorded in the ‘Local Fashionable Intelligence’ column of the Brighton Gazette. In 1870 it announced in successive weeks the presence of, among others, the Duke of Newcastle, Baron Rothschild, Lord and Lady Monson, the Duc de Persigny, the Earl and Countess of Shannon, the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, the Duke of Rutland, the Duchess of Cambridge, Baroness de Clifford and the Bishop of Chichester.
The routine was leisurely. In fine weather there was a general saunter along the promenade from noon to one o’clock, followed by lunch. Between three and five in the afternoon came the ‘carriage airing’, in which an enormous cavalcade of barouches, landaus, broughams, phaetons, waggonettes, flys, tandems, and dog-carts processed up and down the seafront, permitting the mob of the quality to take the air, incline their noble brows, doff their hats and exchange titbits of gossip.
In 1866 perhaps the most glorious of the pleasure piers that became an indispensable feature of Victorian seaside resorts was opened opposite Regency Square. The West Pier, with its ornamental houses, minarets and pinnacles and serpent-entwined gas lamps, was designed by Eugenius Birch to mimic the Oriental extravagance of the Royal Pavilion. It is tempting to see its fortunes and final fate as a barometer of the fortunes of Brighton itself.
Subsequent additions to the West Pier included a pavilion (later converted into a theatre), a winter gardens and a concert hall. In 1919–20 two million people paid to enjoy its attractions. But within ten years attendances were falling steeply as a result of competition from the Palace Pier and the proliferation of other diversions along the seafront. The days when dukes and duchesses and marquises strolled along the promenade were long gone, and Brighton – like other resorts – was forced down-market. The seedy side of Brighton life, always present but generally kept out of sight, asserted itself.
When Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock was published in 1938, councillors were appalled by its focus on gangland viciousness and small-time crime at the expense of visitor attractions. The film version of 1946, starring Richard Attenborough as the psychopath Pinkie, was even more dismaying. Its climax saw Pinkie throwing himself off a gaunt, rusted and dismally unloved Palace Pier into a heaving grey sea that no one in his or her right mind would want to swim in. By then both Brighton’s piers were in a sad state, as was most of the seafront. The decline of the Palace Pier was halted, but that of the West Pier continued. By the time Richard Attenborough returned to film scenes for his anti-war satire Oh! What A Lovely War it was literally on its last legs.
The West Pier’s recognition as a Victorian masterpiece came far too late to save it. It was given Grade One status in 1979, but it had closed four years earlier and was derelict and becoming hazardous. Storm and fire eventually completed the job of reducing it to the dismembered, blackened ruin that it remains today.
The challenge of saving the West Pier was beyond the competence of successive Brighton councils of varying political colour. But nothing, it seems, will discourage the elected leaders from embracing grandiose projects to restore the faded glory of Brighton and Hove. There have been many of these, but perhaps the most delightful was the recruitment of the American architect Frank Gehry, the prince of deconstructivism, to design a tw
in-towered complex of flats and recreational facilities with his trademark wavy walls on the site occupied by the incredibly shabby and dismal King Alfred Leisure Centre in Hove.
The news set off an explosion of excitement, particularly when it was revealed in the media that the Hollywood star and Gehry acolyte Brad Pitt had been ‘helping’ on the project, and was intending to visit Hove and even occupy one of the 450 luxury apartments himself. Dr Anthony Seldon, at that time the principal of Brighton College, later the biographer of Tony Blair and the extremely publicity-aware head of Wellington College, declared that to reject Gehry’s vision ‘would be an act of vandalism unparalleled in 200 years’.
Hove
Others – presumably vandals in Dr Seldon’s view – dared to question whether Hove, with its terraces and squares of decent, if slightly dull, low-rise Regency houses, really needed a shimmering monster of steel, concrete and glass blocking its view of the sea. Predictably the supposed backers of the plan failed to put their money on the table – another casualty, it was claimed, of the economic downturn.
The project went away, and the dreadful leisure centre still stands. But the appetite of Brighton and Hove Council for headline-stealing regenerative ventures remained very much alive. There was a plan to replace the Brighton Centre with something more architecturally interesting, which would – it was claimed – ‘create 380 jobs’ and ‘bring £865 million into the local economy over 30 years’. The Brighton Centre is still there.
There was a plan to put an £80-million arena and ice rink on the site left derelict since the closure and filling in of the famous Black Rock swimming pool in the 1970s. This, the council announced, would create up to 450 jobs and bring £8 million a year into the local economy. The ‘partnership’ with the developers foundered, the council began looking for a new partner, and meanwhile the site is given over to a ‘temporary sand sculpture theme park’, piles of rubble and a riot of graffiti.