The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  11. LEYSDOWN: THE “ON-SEA” SCENARIO

  When I’m alone on my island

  Surrounded by the sea

  There’s no more need to close my eyes

  ’Cos it feels like home to me.

  — Dave Sinclair, “Island” (Stream, CD Crescent Label, 2011)

  Uwe Johnson wrote a lot about trains and other systems of transportation, studying their routes and timetables and allowing parallels to emerge between their progress through space and the attempts made by his characters, or “invented persons”, to achieve a different sort of transit through remembered time. In the judgement of a recent critical essay about Anniversaries, he associates modern transit systems with “shocks and jolts” that reflect the traumatic past of displaced Germans living in New York City.1

  Jean Chesterton died due to an accidental collision between two not easily reconciled bids for the future, both of them introduced to this part of the island’s south-eastern coast after the opening on 1 August 1901 of the Sheppey Light Railway.2 This service ran for nearly ten miles east-west across the island from the South Eastern and Chatham Railway Company’s existing station at Queenborough on Sheppey’s western Medway shore, passing through four intermediate stations and two less formal halts before reaching its eastern terminus at Leysdown on the “uttermost verge” of this “remote and little known” place.3 The Sheppey service was one of sixteen built in rural areas by an engineer and Territorial Army colonel named Holman Fred Stephens (he owed his Christian name to the fact that his father, Frederic George Stephens, was a Pre-Raphaelite critic and artist who had been taught by Holman Hunt). Colonel Stephens’s moment came thanks to the Light Railway Act passed in 1896, with its aim of encouraging the creation of cheap lines in remote places, often with a view to bringing agricultural produce to markets from rural districts beyond the reach of tramways. Sheppey’s line, however, was built with a different aim in mind. It was envisaged from the start as “the means of developing this part of Sheppey Isle”.4

  Leysdown, which would benefit from the “Sheppey Light” until the service finally went out of business in 1950, lies a mile or so further north along the coast from Shellbeach. As the operating South Eastern and Chatham Railway Company also explained (while justifying the decision not to run trains as far as Leysdown on the light railway over the winter months), there was barely even a village here before the train came. Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the place would have seemed the epitome of the obscure Kentish settlements that Arthur Mee described as “like the end of the world, with a lonely church and not a living soul about”.5 The Rose and Crown Inn served as a coroner’s court when it came to adjudicating deaths that occurred on land or sea. There was a declining church of St Clements, once known to mariners for its leaning tower, another coastguard station on the shoreline and a small manor called Nutts, a lonely place whose eighteenth-century owners included Mr Edward Jacob, a surgeon with antiquarian and naturalist interests, who twice served as Mayor of Faversham and has also been claimed as the first person to suggest that the young William Shakespeare may have had a hand in writing Arden of Faversham, an anonymous late-sixteenth-century play in which Sheppey features as a cut-off land lost in a perplexing mist.

  There was also, as the 1897 ordnance survey map shows, a small rural school, across the road from Nutts farm, where a few may have noticed the energy of supplementary teacher Violet Clara McNaughton (then known as Violet Jackson), who taught there for a few years before quitting England at the age of twenty-nine in 1909 and emigrating to a homestead in Saskatchewan, Canada. Once there, she would rapidly emerge as a champion of “agrarian feminism”6 and co-operative enterprise of the sort she had learned about from her late fiancé’s grandparents in Sheerness. McNaughton may be long forgotten in Leysdown, but in Canada this determined woman, who had been rejected as too short for entry even into the lowest ranks of the British civil service, is remembered as the “Mighty Mite” who carried ancestral memories of Kentish radicalism with her as she campaigned for and among women farmers. She has recently been hailed as “one of Canada’s greatest and most formidable adult educators and co-operators of the twentieth century bar none”.7

  Visitors to the huge car boot sale nowadays held at Leysdown on Sundays will find other ways of recognising how much has changed since the light railway came. By the middle of the twentieth century the village had been converted into a seaside resort: optimistically named “Leysdown-on-Sea” but already struggling against decline, degeneration and the local authority. In 1958, a group of Leysdown chalet owners had contested the council’s valuation of their properties on the grounds that they received so very little in the way of public services. They cited the absence of water, electricity and mains sewerage, the unchecked crime, the flooding, the suspension-wrecking condition of the unmetalled roads, the lack of reliable rubbish collection, and noise from the disturbing forms of “commercialisation” that had been permitted to develop nearby. The claim that their much-burgled chalets were outrageously “over-rated” was rejected. The Valuation Officer stated that there were at that time 1400 separately rated bungalows on twelve or so camps in Leysdown, and that, “as every occupier of these bungalows knows”, they could command a rent of between £3 and £5 a week from holidaymakers during the summer. The chairman of the East Kent Valuation Panel sourly told one objector that he was surprised, given the dump this dissatisfied fellow plainly judged Leysdown to be, “that he had bothered to build his bungalow there at all”.8 That characteristic dispute took place in the claimed Golden Age of “Leysdown-on-Sea”.

  Over the years to come, it would often be the consequences of that allegedly chaotic “commercialisation” that brought Leysdown into the news. By 1960, the “rowdyism” of disorderly summer visitors was an established problem, with a Sheerness magistrate who fined five young offenders for smashing up a café in Leysdown (“It was Hell broke loose”, testified the owner), also telling them that “we are determined to stamp out this hooliganism. The only pity is these detention centres are so full we cannot send you all there”.9 In 1962, local residents organised a public meeting to demand action before the rough “type of customer” attracted by the “outrageously commercial development” — which, as the reporter asserted, the residents had foolishly allowed and even encouraged into existence — drove the “family holidaymakers” away from the Leysdown “Shanty”, thereby killing the goose that had laid the golden egg.10

  By 1971, the island’s own newspaper could surprise nobody by admitting that Leysdown was “a declining holiday backwater”.11 As for the “commercial” enterprises that had been brought into the place, often against the wishes of the county planners, many of these have since closed. The betting shop, which a punter in 1964 likened to “The Black Hole of Calcutta”, may survive under different ownership,12 but the jazz, funk and soul venue, Stage 3, was lost to a fire in 1989. The pub on the seafront, the Talk of the Town — appreciated by one Tripadvisor witness as a “Spit and sawdust pub” with karaoke or “a guy singing”, and deplored by others as “the worst pub in Britain” where “stabbings are quite normal” — was boarded up through my investigation, and, in October 2018, Merlin’s Entertainment Complex, a larger venue once played by the likes of Dr Hook, Chas ‘n’ Dave and Jim Davidson, was put up for sale as a demolition-ready site onto which, so the agent suggested, eight or nine “sea-facing” houses might be squeezed if anybody wanted them and the planners consented.

  The chalets, bungalettes and caravans of Leysdown-on-Sea have never been targeted by “Down from London” incomers of the well-off sort who have been buying places in Whitstable, Margate and other more favoured resorts along Kent’s recently designated “creative coast”. Yet this embattled settlement has continued to attract the eye of literary visitors, who come here to shake their heads in horror. “This is the end of the claims of civilization”,13 says the Sheppey-born Joblard, pre-empting them all as he sweeps through in the closing chapter of Iain Si
nclair’s east London novel Downriver, to register Leysdown as the last outpost of an east London that is finally being blown out of the city by government policy and development: “Leysdown-on-Sea is the ancestral dreamsite of a Lost Tribe: all the aboriginal cockney characteristics, celebrated in fiction and in song, have migrated here — and have been buried alive in pitches of caravans, mobile homes, wooden sentry boxes (inner-city privies), and upturned tin boats, veterans of Dunkirk”.14

  In the same year, 1991, the modernist gourmet Jonathan Meades also passed through. He arrived as a self-declared enthusiast for the bleakness of the estuary landscape who appreciated the informal charms of many of the DIY shacklands that sprang up as Londoners found cheap holiday spots on both sides of the Thames Estuary in the early twentieth century. Leysdown-on-Sea, however, managed to smash its way through his signature dark glasses and jab him rudely in the eye. This, wrote Meades in retaliation, is “terminal England, the last resort, the nadir of bungalow development. It makes Hayling look like Biarritz”.15 He found Leysdown’s human inhabitants no better than the fenced-off chalet parks and trashy arcades. “The English can be terrifying”, he muttered, citing the “double Doberman families”, the “beery croak” of the bingo-caller, the ferocious-looking white men who drive their Escorts at “sixty miles an hour anywhere”. His prize exhibit was a family that practiced synchronised spitting, allegedly issuing a perfectly timed “buccal explosion” of jellied eel bones as he slipped by without revealing that he was actually the Times’ restaurant critic.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the forlorn condition of Leysdown-on-Sea may have been taken as grotesque evidence of the politically induced “unmaking” of the English working class — a backwater of the betrayed and abandoned kind from which Brexit would soon come. That, however, would have seemed too grave a theme for Tim Moore, the “comic travel writer” who has more recently credited Leysdown with providing the opening inspiration for his book You are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain. Prompted by his remembered astonishment at discovering, during a disorientated drive from London in the Seventies, that “a fog-smothered mudbank in the Thames Estuary had ever become a holiday resort in the first place”, he opens by coming back forty or so years later to take another look at the static caravans and “garden-shed holiday chalets”. He reads the signs on the all-but-deserted seafront announcing that the levels of “faecal” coliform and streptococci in the sea water could be considerably worse. He shrinks from the fish and chip shops and the sunbeds bearing signs announcing “Max Weight of 16 stone”. Stepping into the Rose and Crown, this misplaced travel writer, who has since revealed his preference for the wilder regions of Iceland (“the desolation was thrilling: no building, no trees and, most conspicuously, no people”16), is greeted with the cry, “Fuckinell, wossat stink?” His reception is barely improved by the barmaid who volunteers that a nearby farmer must be spreading muck on his fields. Although far too much of the British periphery may well have come to resemble Leysdown by the time Moore passed through, the fact that his book — hailed by the Daily Telegraph as “funny and squirmingly vivid” — was published by Jonathan Cape also suggests a loss of ambition among literary publishers since 1969, when Cape issued the American translation of Uwe Johnson’s novella An Absence. The visiting West German journalist at the centre of Johnson’s story had definitely noticed the failure of the communist utopia in the GDR but he didn’t go there to strike metropolitan smirks off the surfaces of other people’s degradation.

  It is, though, not just roaming writers who register the fallen condition of Leysdown-on-Sea. Notices posted on reviewing websites leave no doubt that this sense of dismay is shared by some who, far from just passing through with the aim of recoiling in horror, have actually come here on holiday. They too declare Leysdown to be the crappiest of all crap towns, filled with rackety caravan and chalet parks, equipped with foul toilets and blood-stained sheets and populated by people who swear, take drugs, yell all night and can themselves be as terrifying as the Staffordshire Bull Terriers they allow to roam free around the chalets. Leysdown, so I have read, is “the tackiest place in Britain”, one that makes you “feel embarrassed to be British”. “Derrum”, who stayed in one of the parks in August 2015, employs the same comparative trope as Jonathan Meades, condemning Leysdown as “just a dump that makes Jaywick look like Malibu”. The Leysdown shudder has even become a going concern for the Kent Film Office, which has learned how to trade on estuarial bleakness and takes pride in the fact that Leysdown-on-Sea was chosen as a location for “The End of the F***ing World” in the first series of Jonathan Entwistle’s Channel Four drama of the same name (“I’m James, and I’m pretty sure I’m a psychopath”) in October 2017.17

  A Baltic contrast might help us turn the tide on this desolate commentary. Whatever may be said about Leysdown, the place was never as dismal as the colossal resort of Prora built in the late Thirties as part of the Nazi government’s “Strength through Joy” initiative. Conceived as one of five vast “Sea Baths” proposed for workers following the destruction of Germany’s trade unions, it consists of a series of huge six-floor concrete blocks placed along the 4.5 kilometre length of a magnificent Baltic beach on the spit — situated between those known to Johnson at Diewenow and Fischland — connecting the resorts of Sassnitz and Binz on the east coast of the Pomeranian Island of Rügen.

  Prora, Rügen.

  Robert Ley, the Nazi head of the German Labour Front (Uwe Johnson allows him a brief appearance as a “drunken pig”18), imagined Prora as a Nazi answer to Butlins that would provide compliant workers with a week of indoctrinated leisure. Every room would have a sea view. There would be cinemas, swimming pools, canteens and, at Hitler’s insistence, a central arena in which twenty thousand joyful workers could be addressed as a concentrated Sieg Heiling mass. In 1991 this never-completed line of Aryan barracks (construction was interrupted by the outbreak of war in September 1939) emerged from GDR military control as a set of disconcerting ruins. When I last visited the site, however, some of its reinforced concrete was acquiring an unexpectedly luxurious shine. The developers who had bought some of the blocks, themselves now listed for conservation, were bringing them to new life, although not as the centre for refugees that some critics have suggested might be appropriate. Two-bedroom apartments were being offered at €600,000 and upward. It was a relief to come across some old-fashioned graffiti written in English on one of the still unrefurbished blocks: “Heaven ain’t close in a place like this”.

  *

  Leysdown-on-Sea is indeed a chaotic mess, and perhaps also, as planners have suggested, proof of what can go wrong when decisions are made too locally. It was, though, a better resort than Prora. And who, meanwhile, are the knockers really laughing at? It is by no means just the shopkeepers, arcade operators and yobbos in the pub who have opposed the sense of horror with which refined onlookers may scrutinise the place. Asked to describe his earliest memory, the actor Eddie Marsan replied: “Hearing George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ on a caravan site on the Isle of Sheppey when I was about four”.19 Marsan, who was born two years before George Harrison’s song became the biggest hit of 1970, is joined by another contrary witness in Chris Difford of the band Squeeze, whose song “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)”, released in 1980, is drawn from memories of a week spent in a Leysdown caravan park one summer in the late Sixties, having driven to the Sheppey “Riviera” with his family from Deptford (the song memorialises both the pleasures of the beach and the “pulling” that went on “behind the chalet”20). The Sheppey website also contains many testimonies to the freedom, the light-heartedness, the simple attraction of cockling in the muddy sand or collecting shells on the beach, and the innocence of a time when a child could roam the island without fear or hindrance and the carcass of an old bus could make a perfectly adequate holiday home, as, indeed, might recycled carriages from the Light Railway after that service finally expired at the end of 1950.21
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  These memories reach back to the early Sixties, when Leysdown-on-Sea was still enjoying its modest prime as a “boom town” resort for east Londoners: a time when the chalet holiday camps were finding it difficult to cope with demand, and when the “streamlined”, “motel-like” and undeniably “with it” enterprise that was the Island Hotel and Country Club was owned by a former bingo operator who had become famous as the “King of Leysdown”.22 That informal monarch was none other than Stan Northover the First (father of the man who would build his family a shack utopia at Shellbeach in the Seventies), and his combined hotel and private club is said to have boasted more than two thousand members. The place was run by the former variety artist Harry Green who, together with his “blonde wife, ‘Skid’” was reported by the Stage to be “putting zip into their business with variety bills of a high order”. People in those days were said to be flocking to “this little Southend”, where variety shows by early TV stars and female impersonators was giving bingo a run for the holidaymakers’ money. Indeed, King Stan was said to be building a five-hundred-seat theatre in order to drive the “boom” further. Played by the Drifters, P.J. Proby, Joe Brown and Bill Haley, the Leysdown of that time is remembered as an agreeably “old-fashioned” party town that, as the websites attest, had a lot more to do with drag artists and wide-boy liberties than with the people-smuggling, drug-dealing and paedophilia of the world as it is today. A popular Golden Age, then, adequately represented by a photograph taken at the Leysdown Holiday Camp on 8 August 1957. It shows Neville Wood, a former fireman turned variety entertainer, frying an egg on the raised and flaming backside of his partner, Francis Capsoni.