Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (38 page)

Instead, it was becoming a resort of visitors - by the day, by the week, and for the whole season - and catering to the needs of those visitors was lucrative work. Just as Jolly’s of Bath and other shops had discovered the commercial benefits of spa towns, so many more fashionbased shops at the seaside and in big cities began to cater for the visitor, stressing the need for the fashionable to alter their regular city wear to meet new requirements. From the 1840s, London shops advertised special types of clothes for the seaside: ‘seaside paletots’ were on offer, or ‘Scarborough suits’. Clothing for holidays was, in general, cheaper than regular everyday wear, and not expected to last: the salt and sun were said to damage clothes, but in fact, as the goods were less expensive, the use of fugitive dyes and cheaper fabrics probably contributed.
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By the middle of the century Peter Robinson was advertising in the
Illustrated London News
its stocks of ‘Fancy Summer Cloth, and Beach Linseys. Yachting, Seaside, and Summer Jackets in endless variety. The Inverness with cape; the Seacoat with hood and sleeves.’
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In the early days of seaside wear, many men had sported an almost fancy-dress element to their clothes, taking in details from sailors’ uniforms or wearing ‘Turkish’ trousers, gathered at the ankle. As days at the seaside became more common, so the clothes began to match those
worn for leisure in the rest of the country - except for children, who continued to wear sailor suits throughout the year. Men now expected to wear their ordinary three-piece lounge suit, with rubber-soled canvas shoes, known as plimsolls, as the sole concession to the holiday.
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It was not until the 1880s that the blazer - a new piece of informal clothing, often made of striped flannel in lurid colours - appeared. Its attraction was that men could wear linen shirts and ties underneath, leaving off their stiff collars and their woollen waistcoats. Women did not indulge in these whims: until the arrival of sporting clothes at the end of the century (see pp. 460-63), they continued to wear the same fashions that they commonly wore in town.

Their concession to the seaside was in their bathing wear. Before the 1840s, bathing was entirely segregated (as it remained in many places for some decades), and men swam naked, while women wore long flannel shifts. Most people swam from bathing machines, which were first developed around the 1750s in Margate. The machine resembled a horse-drawn caravan. The swimmer walked up the back steps and undressed inside while a horse pulled the machine into the sea. Once the machine was far enough out, a canopy was lowered over the steps and the swimmer entered the sea entirely hidden from view. In the early days the swimmer (who probably could not swim) was led into the sea by a male or female ‘dipper’. Later, some resorts alleviated the problems associated with horses by setting up winches which hauled the machines up and down a plank running into the sea.
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In the 1840s men’s French-style red-and-white striped bathing shorts with a drawstring at the waist began to be worn, and a bathing machine, the shorts and a towel could now be hired for one all-in fee. By the 1860s, up to half the men at resorts had switched to these shorts, while the rest stuck to swimming naked.
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This was not surprising: without elastic waistbands, a man who began by wearing shorts often discovered suddenly that, embarrassingly, he no longer was. By the 1870s most men found the newer style arriving from France to be more convenient. It was a one-piece knitted jersey suit that looked like a short-sleeved shirt

attached to shorts: one stepped into it and buttoned it up securely. This remained the norm for men for the rest of the century. Women’s bathing costumes, however, went through a series of small changes instead of a few big ones. By the early 1860s the flannel sacks had been abandoned and many women had taken to wearing ‘Mrs Bloomer’ suits: a thighlength jacket was worn above a blouse, and a knee-length skirt went over trousers gathered at the ankle. These suits were trimmed much as day clothes were: when epaulettes became fashionable for dresses in the 1860s, bathing dresses had epaulettes too. By the 1870s advertisements were insisting that ‘Bathing costumes…are made more stylishly every season: pink, cream and even blue flannel are used…loose full trousers to the ankle, and a short blouse fastened at the waist or a long jacket.’ In 1880 woollen sashes and straw hats were added as stylish accoutrements, but it was the turn of the century before the vestigial skirt over trousers finally disappeared, as did the jacket over the blouse, and women’s bathing costumes were reduced to just two pieces.
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What one wore, and how one wore it, depended in great measure on where one was going. The railways had increased the numbers of visitors, and they had also created a hierarchy of resorts, which depended on the ease of travel and the cost of the fares. Thus Margate was inexpensive, and therefore for the lower middle classes, while Ramsgate and Herne Bay, with higher fares, were for the more prosperous, but still middle class. Broadstairs - not easy to get to, and expensive - was for those who liked to consider themselves more ‘select’.
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The types of pastime provided in each town also segregated audiences. Southport, when it built its pleasure pier in 1860, charged 6
d.
for promenading on it, or sheltering from the wind; then it added a refreshment room for the promenaders; then a tramway out to the head of the pier so that the walkers no longer had to walk at all. In the 1880s and 1890s it acknowledged the new kind of visitor who was using the pier by providing
‘pleasure pavilions’, concert halls, showrooms and other forms of mass entertainment.
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Bournemouth was an interesting example of a resort town that catered efficiently - and creatively - to the need for mass entertainment. More unusually, from the 1870s it began to do so in a centralized fashion: the Corporation had now become the impresario.
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Seaside towns for the most part made their money by supplying goods and services to visitors, or by supplying goods and services to those who were in turn supplying the visitors. All of these populations, therefore, at first or second remove, were entirely dependent on their town remaining desirable for whatever group of visitors they were appealing to: if better services, better entertainment, better deals appeared elsewhere and drew away their customers, the local inhabitants would lose their livings. The new model that was slowly emerging was for the town as a whole to take a financial stake in the infrastructure of the resort - in the obvious buildings such as theatres, piers and pavilions; in passing regulations to make sure that lodging-house keepers and shopkeepers did not cheat their customers and that standards of hygiene were maintained in hotels and restaurants; and, finally, in ensuring that the customers, wherever they came from, continued to hear about the town via advertising, to keep it a desirable location.

Sometimes a landowner, or a railway company, would try to act as impresario for the town, and might be significant in the investment in infrastructure in watering places in particular. Bath was partially brought to prominence by the financial and commercial acumen of the Duke of Chandos, John Wood and Walter Pultney - an aristocratic investor, an architect and a banker working with a single aim. The Duke of Devonshire put money into Buxton spa, near his Derbyshire home. For the most part, however, few individuals were powerful enough to impose uniform business standards. The civic corporations of towns were, and Bournemouth was a town in which the Corporation fulfilled the expectations of both the residents and the visitors. It aimed at - and achieved - a prosperous clientele, and its methods were novel.

There were two phases to the development of Bournemouth as a resort. In the first phase, from the 1850s to the 1880s, the town mostly drew winter visitors, who were there for the mild air and were often invalids or convalescents. They expected little more entertainment than attractive promenades or carriage drives. In the 1850s no grand plans
for the town were in train. The residents and, in particular, the local businessmen looked for a landowner or entrepreneur to invest in the building of a jetty for the steamer. Failing in that, in 1855 they banded together to create a public subscription for that purpose. A jetty was all they wanted: a pier seemed too ambitious a project altogether. Then it was decided that, via the local-government authority, the money could be raised through local rates. The Pier Committee was formed solely to develop the pier, and that is what it did: the first pier, a wooden structure 1,000 feet long, opened in 1861. By the mid-1870s it needed rebuilding, this time in iron, and the Committee organized that too. The new pier opened in 1880, and it was at this point that, having made the investment in the new pier, the local authority recognized that, to maximize returns, it needed to generate business both for the pier in particular and for the town in general.

It set to this new task with a will, forming connections with excursion companies and railways, and coordinating transport with the organizers of fêtes and regattas. It staged free band concerts. It took over the management of the seafront itself, supervising the cleaning and maintenance of the beach, enforcing by-laws, dealing with those who provided catering, huts and deckchairs to visitors, and even initiating the building of a lift to carry visitors up the cliff. Takings rose from £2,000 in 1881 to £10,000 in 1914, owing partly to the growth of the town, but also to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Pier Committee and its success in making the activities on the pier the centre of holiday visits. At the same time as this development was under way, the Corporation took over the lease of the Lower Pleasure Garden from its original proprietor; it then laid out a corresponding Upper Pleasure Garden, and from the 1890s continued to expand its holdings until, at its peak, the town had 620 acres of open grounds for the benefit of the general public, including 33 bowling greens, 20 tennis courts, 10 cricket pitches, 6 football fields, 3 croquet lawns, 2 golf courses, and 2 carriage drives.

The next phase in the entrepreneurial development of the town was to provide more structured forms of indoor entertainment, always under the control of the Corporation. In the 1850s the Belle Vue Assembly Rooms had flourished briefly under private management, but by 1875 the new town hall had become the venue for most entertainment. In 1877 the Winter Garden had opened, to stage concerts and art exhibits, but it had failed within the year; in 1881 a theatre was opened, but it
too swiftly failed. So in the early 1880s the Corporation took over the Winter Garden, and allocated £20,000 to be spent on the construction of a pavilion and bandstands. An amendment to the local government act was then passed to permit the rates to be used to pay for a town band - and by this act defined entertainment every bit as much a local amenity as street lighting or rubbish collection. In 1885 regular band concerts were scheduled in the summer; by 1888 the town had two bands, one of which played nightly (except Sundays) from July to September; in 1896 there were, in addition, morning, afternoon and evening variety performances.

With this increasing reliance on musical entertainment, Bournemouth was in harmony with developments elsewhere in the resort world at the end of the century. In Bournemouth in 1893, Dan (later Sir Dan) Godfrey had been appointed to lead a band of wind players on the pier, but he insisted on finding musicians versatile enough to form a string orchestra, also for performances in the Winter Garden; an audience of 5,000 paid 3
d.
each for the first concert, which included Schubert’s
Rosamunde
overture and selections from
The Gondoliers.
By 1894 this popular string orchestra had become the country’s first permanent municipal orchestra, which three years later had played 100 symphony concerts (and is today still playing, as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra). Similarly, Granville Bantock - later Sir Granville, and a respected composer - was employed at New Brighton, Cheshire, a quick ferry ride from Liverpool, to lead the town’s military band. The music he was required to play was easily read at sight, so he used his rehearsal time for serious music, and began to stage popular afternoon concerts with some additional string players. Audiences could attend as part of their 6
d.
admission to the grounds (another 6
d.
bought a seat), and by 1898 a typical concert included Tchaikovsky, a bit of Beethoven or Mozart, and some extracts from Wagner and perhaps Liszt.
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By the time Bantock left, he too had created an orchestra of national importance, which played full orchestral programmes including much new British work.

Even in less distinguished circumstances, music was everywhere at the seaside: at the band concerts, the symphony concerts, the theatres, at the minstrel and pierrot shows. Even teatime was accompanied regularly by ‘Viennese’ or ‘Hungarian’ bands. In 1889 in the Isle of Man more than eighty musicians were employed in three entertainment venues: a
hall for 2,000 dancers had a band of twenty-six; another band employed twenty-five players, including some from Hallé’s and de Jong’s Manchester orchestras (see pp. 369-72), who found this a lucrative way of spending their off season; and then there was the enormous Castle Mona Palace, which seated 5,000 for music-hall performances during the week, for which it required a thirty-piece band (whose players performed oratorios on Sundays). By 1892, 530 English towns had 1,300 places of entertainment - 200 theatres, 160 music halls, and 950 halls, galleries and gardens - drawing in 1 million visitors a year, and employing 350,000 workers directly, which was a quarter the number that worked in the textile industry, the largest industry of the Industrial Revolution.
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In 1861 in Paris, Benjamin Gastineau, a journalist, had described viewing the passing scenery from a train window as though it were a performance of a theatrical entertainment: