Eastbourne

“ However hard it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the sea-wall always offered the possibility of a constitutional. But the high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk. The air of Beachy Head, 560 feet up, was an unfailing tonic. In the summer he used to keep a look-out for the little flowers of the short, close turf of the chalk which could remind him of his Alpine favourites, in particular the curious phyteuma; and later on, in the folds of the hills where he had marked them, the English Gentians. ”

“ We have at last left the crowded streets of old London for green fields and the sea-side. Sea-side.All watering places in England have their seasons, and during the season-time they are crowded by people coming from London and other towns, while during the rest of the year they are quiet and look almost deserted. Eastbourne, a quiet watering place, is particularly so, as it is not yet the season-time. Eastbourne.As I am writing this letter to you, I am enjoying an extensive view of the deep blue ocean, a cool and refreshing sea breeze, and the ceaseless music of the waves. ”

“ Hastings has two advantages over both Brighton and Eastbourne: it can produce a genuine piece of antiquity, and seen from the sea it has a picturesque quality that neither of those towns possesses. Indeed, under certain conditions of light, Hastings is magnificent, with the craggy Castle Hill in its midst surmounted by its imposing ruin. The smoke of the town, rising and spreading, shrouds the modernity of the sea front, and the castle on its commanding height seems to be brooding over the shores of old romance. Brighton has no such effect as this. ”

“ To the befogged Londoner there is perhaps no greater treat than to escape for forty-eight hours to the seaside even in the depths of winter, and whilst spinning along by the London, Brighton, and South Coast express, there is a pleasurable sense of excitement in the feeling that you are going to breathe the fresh sea air of Eastbourne untainted by smuts and smoke. ”

“ Eastbourne's glory is Beachy Head, the last of the Downs, which stop dead at the town and never reappear in Sussex again. The range takes a sudden turn to the south at Folkington, whence it rolls straight for the sea, Beachy Head being the ultimate eminence. (The name Beachy has, by the way, nothing to do with the beach: it is derived probably from the Normans' description—"beau chef.") About Beachy Head one has the South Downs in perfection: the best turf, the best prospect, the best loneliness, and the best air. ”

“ Now its genial, pleasant society is in full swing, and merry golf parties are the order of the day. Few places have increased with more rapid growth during the last fifteen or twenty years, or become more popular as a residence than Eastbourne, partly owing to the excellent train service, partly to the well-organised supervision over every detail in the whole town, and again probably more to the bright, healthy [Pg 134] atmosphere, which registers three hundred days of sunshine as against sixty-nine in London. ”

“ When we reached Eastbourne we walked with our bags in our hands down to the sea front, and then, going into a poor back street, selected rooms. It was perhaps what he and I often called "the native malignity of matter," and his extreme ill luck in the matter of landladies, which pursued him for ever throughout his life in lodgings, that the particular landlady of the house in which we took refuge was extraordinarily incapable. The dwelling itself was miserably draughty and cold, and wretchedly furnished. ”

“ On 18 April 1808 he married Mary Ann, only daughter and heiress of Thomas Gilbert of Eastbourne. By this marriage he acquired very extensive estates in the neighbourhood of that town, which, added to the landed property in Cornwall he afterwards inherited from his father, placed him in very affluent circumstances. ”

“ Though it has only been constructed during late years, the gables and points give it an old-fashioned and picturesque look, but beauty and variety of style are studied at Eastbourne, and each house is apparently designed with a view to artistic effect. College Road is bordered on either side by Sussex elms. The approach is by gates right and left which open into a garden filled with shrubs. On seeking admittance you are taken up to a bright, cheerful room which faces the west, and has all the outward and visible signs of being devoted to literary and artistic pursuits. ”

“ Devonshire Park of 13 acres is pleasantly laid out, and contains a pavilion and a theatre. The duke of Devonshire is the principal landowner. Golf links are laid out on the neighbouring downs. A Roman villa was formerly seen close to the shore, but it is not now visible. The corporation consists of a mayor, 8 aldermen and 24 councillors. In 1910 the corporation promoted a bill in parliament to add the Hampden Park district in the parish of Willingdon to the borough and to make Eastbourne, with this extension, a county borough. ”

“ The sergeant put his helmet on the table, walked to a sideboard where a tray and decanter stood, and poured himself out a stiff dose of whisky without invitation. John Minute watched him without any great resentment. This was not civilized Eastbourne they were in. They were back in the old free-and-easy days of Gwelo, where men did not expect invitations to drink. ”

“ People seem to think that one can take a ticket to Eastbourne, or Bognor, or Ventnor, and come and stay at the seaside straight away, just as I have known new-hatched undergraduates tell people they were going to play billiards. Thousands and thousands of people think they have stayed at the seaside, and have not, just as thousands of people erroneously imagine they have played whist. ”

“ The most popular excursion from Eastbourne after "The Head" is to Willingdon, near which is Hampden Park and Wannock Glen, and, farther afield, Jevington. Willingdon has an interesting old church and is pleasantly situated, but the village is too obviously the "place to spend a happy day" to call for further comment. On the other hand, Jevington with its ancient but over-restored church, is quite unspoilt and, lying in one of the most beautiful of the Down combes, should certainly be visited. ”

“ Hastings is of the people; Brighton has a character almost continental; Eastbourne is select. Lawn tennis and golf are its staple products, one played on the very beautiful links behind the town hard by Compton Place, the residence of the Duke ”

“ From hence (Eastbourne) it was that, turning north, and traversing the deep, dirty, but rich part of these two counties (Kent and Sussex) , I had the curiosity to see the great foundries, or ironworks, which are in this county (Sussex) , and where they are carried on at such a prodigious expense of wood, that even in a county almost all overrun with timber, they begin to complain of their consuming it for those furnaces and leaving the next age to want timber for building their navies. ”

“ To plunder the fish-pond and be impertinent to the lady was not the way to obtain patronage. The impudent painter collected his pencils together, and returned to London to enjoy his inelegant pleasures and ignoble company."
[Pg 320] Horsfield states that "a custom far more honoured by the breach than the observance heretofore existed in the manor of Eastbourne; in compliance with which, after any lady, or respectable farmer or tradesman's wife, was delivered of a child, certain quantities of food and of beer were placed in a room adjacent to the sacred edifice ”

“ The "English Salvator Rosa"—Sops and Ale—Beau Chef—"The Breeze on Beachy Head"—Shakespeare and the Cliff—"To a Seamew"—The new lighthouse—Parson Darby and his cave—East Dean's bells—The Two Sisters—Friston's Selwyn monument—West Dean.
Eastbourne is the most select, or least democratic, of the Sussex watering places. Fashion does not resort thither as to Brighton in the season, but the crowds of excursionists that pour into Brighton and Hastings are comparatively unknown at Eastbourne ”

“ “You go to Brighton! I would not trust you so near it as Eastbourne, for fifty pounds! No, Kitty, I have at least learnt to be cautious, and you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever to enter my house again, nor even to pass through the village. Balls will be absolutely prohibited, unless you stand up with one of your sisters. And you are never to stir out of doors, till you can prove that you have spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner.” ”

“ Eastham is the finest old English village I have seen, with many antique houses, and with altogether a rural and picturesque aspect, unlike anything in America, and yet possessing a familiar look, as if it were something I had dreamed about. There were thatched stone cottages intermixed with houses of a better kind, and likewise a gateway and gravelled walk, that perhaps gave admittance to the Squire's mansion. It was not merely one long, wide street, as in most New England villages, but there were several crooked ways, gathering the whole settlement into a pretty small compass. ”

“ The tourist informed me that Eastport looked very well at a distance, with the sun shining on its white houses. When we landed at its wooden dock we saw that it consisted of a few piles of lumber, a sprinkling of small cheap houses along a sidehill, a big hotel with a flag-staff, and a very peaceful looking arsenal. It is doubtless a very enterprising and deserving city, but its aspect that morning was that of cheapness, newness, and stagnation, with no compensating pictur-esqueness. White paint always looks chilly under a gray sky and on naked hills. ”

“ XXXV At the distance of a mile up the bye-road from Tarrant Hinton, in Eastbury Park, still stands in a lonely position the sole remaining wing of the once-famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces which the flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past era loved to build. ”

“ Eastbury, of course, is haunted—so much is to be expected of such a place; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly four-in-hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain credence. So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e’en on through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid back-doors manner, down a narrow byway. ”

“ THE MEMORIES OF THE PAST I HAVE so often insisted that East London must be regarded as a city of many crafts—the working-man’s city—that it may seem contradictory to call attention to another aspect. That part of East London with which we have been most concerned is the densely populated part lying north of the river and including all that part west of the river Lea as far north as Dalston, Clapton, and Hackney, and east of that river, including Bow, Stratford, Walthamstow, Wanstead, Forest Gate, Bromley West, and East Ham and Barking. ”

“ I do not venture, for the obvious reason of ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere. ”

“ There is therefore no sensible diminution in the population on Saturdays and Sundays; the streets are never deserted as in the City. The manufacturers and employers of East End labor live in the country or at the West End, but for the most part in the suburbs beyond the river Lea, on the outskirts of Epping Forest, where there are very many stately houses, standing in their gardens and grounds, occupied by a wealthy class whose factories and offices are somewhere about East London. ”

“ Easton, which we entered soon after dark, is a pretty little town of seven thousand inhabitants, much more substantially built than towns of the same size in this country. Many of the houses are of stone, and to the sides of some of them you see the ivy clinging and hiding the masonry with a veil of evergreen foliage. The middle of the streets is unpaved and very dusty, but the broad flagging on the sides, under the windows of the houses, is sedulously swept. ”

“ The East End, they reported, was nothing like what it was said to be. You could see much worse places up West. The people were quite a decent sort, in their way: shocking Bounders, of course, but quite clean and quiet, and very comfortably dressed, with ties and collars and watches.
But the Missionaries were few, and the subscribers to the Elevation Mission were many. Most had been convinced, by what they had been told, by what they had read in charity appeals, and perhaps by what they had seen in police-court and inquest reports, that the whole East End was a wilderness of slums ”

“ Eastman thought he saw a grand opening just in this pretty spot. Property was ridiculously low. Here were farms and farms that might as well be cut up into building-lots, and turned into cities. Here was the river-front, here were railroads: why not have twice or thrice as many shops? why not call in the people from far and wide, and make Yerbury a place of note? Time had been when our fathers were content to dream and doze, but now it behooved everybody to be up and stirring. In the new race the laggards would fall far behind. ”

“ At Easton we take a day or two to drive about the open country and see the charming country estates, the houses standing on the shores of creeks and inlets, and having the double charm of the country and the sea, just as they do in Tidewater Virginia. ”