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The hidden face of the Victorian seaside: behind the scenes at Brighton |
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'Penny capitalists'
The opportunities offered by the holiday industry also encouraged a proliferation of small and miniature businesses, the 'penny capitalism' that flourishes in this kind of setting.
Brighton Fish Market, 1890
© Brighton History Centre - Museum and Art Gallery & Royal Pavilion Gardens |
There was endless contemporary comment, in tones ranging from affection to exasperation, on the impossibility of promenading on the sea front or spending time on the beach without being serenaded by street singers or 'German' brass bands, snapped by itinerant photographers, accosted by organ-grinders with monkeys, invited to partake of fruit, sweets, gingerbread, shellfish or ice cream, or urged to offer a copper or two to a puppet or performing animal show. Boatmen, music-hall shows, lodgings and cheap restaurants touted for custom, and it was sometimes physically difficult to find a way through the importunate throng.
The 'pandemonium of the sands' was common to all big resorts with a popular element, but it was particularly problematic at Brighton, where the Corporation wanted to preserve a measure of respectability on the central sea front without putting off the trippers who were also an important source of income, especially for the poorer elements of the town. The shift of the high-class season out of the summer months, leaving July and August week-ends to the trippers and those who enjoyed their company, was helpful here, but local government was never able to control the central beach and promenade as it would have preferred.
Piano Player on Western Lawns, 1899
© Brighton History Centre - Museum and Art Gallery & Royal Pavilion Gardens |
Some of the hawkers and street performers were outsiders, who came for the summer as part of a wider circuit of opportunistic migration, just as many of the servants, waiters and prostitutes came for a season, often from London. Others, however, were local residents who went back to more mundane ways of seeking occasional work in the winter, competing fiercely for jobs at the municipal gasworks and picking up labouring work wherever they could, as they reverted to invisibility in the slums of the back streets and hillsides.
Words: John K. Walton
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