At the beach, as elsewhere, the demands of morality grew more fierce as the Queen grew older.In mid-century naked bathing was commonplace and mixed naked bathing not unknown. As late as 1875 the Rev Francis Kilvert wrote in rhapsodic terms in his diary of a naked beauty he had seen on a beach in the Isle of Wight - "the gentle dawn and tender swell of the bosom and the budding breasts... Often, these middle-class families took themselves off to more remote, and more refined resorts, although in truth nowhere was immune to the new culture And the resorts grew. Rail fares were falling to match the means of these travellers, and cheap boarding houses were springing up to house them The resorts changed. At those within easiest reach of the rising working-classes, the traditional clientele, often to their intense annoyance, found themselves squeezed.
Street savings clubs, temperance societies, friendly societies and other bodies would run holiday funds. In that time, the trippers got a taste for the seaside, a taste for leisure, a taste for getting away from it all.By the 1880s, those who could, whether they were skilled factory workers or office clerks, were saving up all year for a family week at the seaside. Holidays in the modern sense, of at least a week, took longer to come, and then it was rising prosperity that brought them rather than Acts of Parliament. But the Bank Holidays made a difference: they introduced the notion of free time, time of your own to do with as you wished so long as your means permitted.
Christmas Day and Good Friday were already established days of leisure (or, more properly, of worship).All this was good for the trippers; it affor- ded them a day or two out now and then. There were four of them: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day. It was only in 1850 that Parliament decreed that women and children should have Saturday afternoons off, and it was 1871 before it introduced the Bank Holiday - so called for legal reasons, because bills of exchange due on that day were to be settled the next. But day-trips were what they were, by and large, and picnics were brought. The resorts did not at first have the accommodation or the facilities for mass, cheap holidays, and their more usual patrons frowned upon the rowdy "trippers".In any case, proper holidays required time off from work, and this was not to be had in sufficient quantity. They were relatively prosperous, and for them the sea, whether it was at Southport, Blackpool or Rhyl, was relatively close. Cheap excursion tickets on the railways helped to make possible a grand day out.
Improvement, cure, health, refreshment of body and spirit, that's what they were after To have been idle would have been sinful. It was the working classes, or at least the better-off among them, who brought the fun with them.They arrived at first in dribs and drabs, with the textile workers of Lancashire leading the way. Bathing was prescribed by the best doctors, but only if the pores were closed. This meant doing it when air and sea were good and cold, at the crack of dawn, and preferably in mid-winter (Fanny Burney, finding herself by the sea in June, decided not to bathe in case it was unhealthy). Patients were also urged to drink a pint of sea-water before their dip - sufficient, according to medical opinion, "to give three or four smart stools".Much of this bathing was done naked, although latterly with the benefit of bathing-machines complete with canopies to ensure privacy. Many could not and did not swim; instead they would be manhandled into the water by burly female "dippers" who, as popular hate-figures, were worthy forerunners of the seaside landladies.Not much pleasure there.
The Victorian middle classes, it seems, enjoyed themselves by not enjoying themselves. There they walked the promenades, attended concerts and lectures, studied flora and fauna, read books from the library and generally improved themselves. It was a style of leisure borrowed from the spas, and this was no accident.Ever since the time of George III, who holidayed famously at Weymouth, the seaside had been a place to be cured. The second is the arrival of free time.From mid-century on, the trains had carried the middle classes and their betters to the seaside for their annual holidays en famille.
