The Kentish CoastHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Kentish Coast
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Kent (England) -- Description and travel
It is an extremely dark and rather dirty church, tucked away in an
obscure situation, and thus not often seen by the chance visitor. It
stands at the back of the harbour, among little odd Georgian streets,
and tiny squares of a kind of dolls’-house type, and is surrounded by
a mangy churchyard containing trees which look as though they were
longing for the country. There are no fewer than thirteen brasses here,
all greatly worn, including that to John Daundelyon already mentioned,
and a late example, dated 1615, to Roger Morris, with a ship in full
sail and an inscription describing him as “one of the six principall
Masters of Attendance of his Mai^{ties} Navye Royall.” But the most
curious is the fragment of a palimpsest brass hinged in a frame on the
south wall of the chancel. The original was evidently a very large
example of Flemish make and is curiously engraved with vine-tendrils,
a shield of arms displaying three helmets on a field of crosses, two
odd nude creatures on stilts, one kicking the other, reckless of
maintaining his equilibrium; and a little monkish figure trying to
catch monstrous butterflies as big as himself with a net smaller than
the butterflies. This futile endeavour may or may not be intended as
a satire upon the vanity of human wishes; but, in any case, it is a
matter for rejoicing that butterflies larger than turkeys do not exist.
A favourite way of reaching Margate from London before the era of
steamships and railways was by what most of the passengers called “the
’oy,” a conveyance which appeared in print with an “H” denied it in
speech. The “Margate Hoy” was a type of sailing-vessel by which our
ancestral holiday-makers arrived with much pleasure, or intolerable
discomfort as the case might be, after a calm voyage of ten hours, or
a tempestuous passage of fifteen. The hoys set sail from the Thames,
near the Customs House quay, and conveyed passengers at the extremely
moderate fare of half a crown. In after-years, when steamships replaced
these clumsy, bluff-bowed old sailing-vessels, which after all looked
and behaved like sailing-barges, the “Husbands’ Boat,” steaming from
London on Saturdays, became the main feature of the Margate season.
To-day there are still Saturday steamers, of a very up-to-date type,
to Margate and Ramsgate; but the term “Husbands’ Boat” is altogether
outworn and hopelessly stale, now that uxoriousness is no longer even
the mark of the middle class and the ideal is, at the best of it, for
husbands and wives to make holiday apart, or, at the worst of it, with
some one else’s partner.
Margate saw the invention of the bathing-machine about 1765, by that
modest Quaker, Benjamin Beale. The immodest modesty of that cumbrous
and supremely uncomfortable affair has made the English at the seaside
the laughing-stock of other nations; but brother Broadbrim’s invention
still lags superfluous on many a seaside scene, although bathing-tents
actively dispute possession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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