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The hidden face of the Victorian seaside: behind the scenes at Brighton |
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The other faces of Brighton
Road menders, police, working and middle class women on East Street
© Brighton History Centre - Museum and Art Gallery & Royal Pavilion Gardens |
All tourist centres have a hidden face of poverty and squalor behind the façade of the promenade and main shopping streets, and Brighton was no exception. The imposing hotels that studded the sea-front required uniformed front of house staff such as porters and waiters, but they also needed kitchen workers, from well-paid chefs to washers-up, as well as bed makers, cleaners and laundry maids. Some lived in, high at the back or in the attic, while others made shift as best they could.
The theatres, music-halls and other entertainments likewise had well-paid, gaily-attired or formally-clad performers who appeared on the advertising bills or were regular members of the orchestra, but a much larger number of extras, jobbing musicians and scene-shifters whose employment was irregular and income unpredictable.
The White Horse Hotel
© Brighton History Centre - Museum and Art Gallery & Royal Pavilion Gardens |
There were hundreds of seaside landladies trying to eke out a competitive living: significantly, a guide-book of 1885 said that Brighton's sheer size ensured that 'lodgings can generally be obtained in some part at a reasonable rate'. This good news for visitors was less entrancing for back-street landladies; and this whole industry, for such it was, had its own penumbra of servants, working long hours at a pittance for cost-conscious employers.
Then there were the lower strata of billiard markers, ostlers, and potboys, and the pub barmaids, the latter shading off from the arm's-length glamour of the mirrored and opulently decorated high street establishments to the sleaze of the back-street beerhouse, and from carefully-guarded respectability to the fringes of prostitution. As befitted 'London by the sea', and consonant with its reputation, Brighton had a numerous population of prostitutes, although the attempts to compile statistics were never convincing.
Words: John K. Walton
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