Oh, One Does Like to Be Beside the Seaside!

The town was bedecked with banners proclaiming, ‘God Save the King’ wrote the courtier Fanny Burney: ‘ all the shops have it over the doors; all the children wear it in their caps, all the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors in their voices...’. The National Anthem was played wherever the King went – including into the sea!

The King bathed in the sea, using a bathing machine to help him enter the water in privacy. He attended the theatre, took walks along the esplanade or on the sands, visited country houses and nearby ruins and took trips on the bay. When this first holiday was over, the Queen told Prince Augustus that his father was ‘much better and stronger for the sea bathing’.

George III became a regular visitor to Weymouth between 1791 and 1805, enjoying the quiet seaside life, but his children found these annual retreats torturous. While the King loved the simple routine, it was a ‘humdrum’ ordeal for his family, with Princess Mary describing it as ‘dull and stupid’. Despite his family’s boredom, the King found exactly what he needed in the salty air and his presence  transformed Weymouth into a popular seaside resort. 

In 1811, when George became Prince  Regent, due to his father’ s ill health,  the Marine Pavilion was deemed too small for the large social events and entertainments that George intended  to host. Between 1815 and 1822, the  house was transformed into the magnificent ‘oriental’ palace, Brighton  Pavilion that still stands today. The architect John Nash superimposed a cast iron frame on to Holland’ s earlier construction to support a magnificent  array of minarets, domes and pinnacles on the exterior. No expense was spared on the interiors either, with rooms, galleries and corridors being carefully decorated with Chinese export furniture, hand-painted wallpapers and opulent ornaments.

Following his death in 1830, his successors William IV (1830-7) and Queen Victoria (1837-1901) continued to use the pavilion, but in a much more modest way. The pavilion was not to  Victoria’s taste, as she records in her diary: ‘Talked of Brighton, & it’s [sic] not being a pleasant place, the impossibility of getting any sailing  there, — the burden the Pavilion was, & whatever could be done with it’. In 1850 she sold the property to the town commissioners and turned her attention to her new seaside retreat at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, which provided the privacy and space she desired for her growing family.

Victoria was just 3 when she left Kensington Palace for her first holiday in Ramsgate. On 14 August 1822, she boarded the Hero steam packet at the Tower of London with her mother. On deck, the family sat down to wine, a ‘handsome dessert’ and that  most fashionable of fruits, pineapple.  After 9 hours at sea, they disembarked at Ramsgate and made their way under specially installed boughs of oak and laurel to their seaside home from home, Townley House. 

On fine days, little Victoria spent the morning riding her donkey on Ramsgate sands. In the afternoon, she returned to dig on the shore, toss stones into the water and, sometimes, wade into the  sea right up to her ankles! While running fast on the beach, she once took a tumble and had to be helped to her feet by a passerby. Blithely dismissing his concerns, she declared: ‘Oh no! I am not hurt, but mamma will say the Princess of England should not be so giddy.’ 

To one Ramsgate observer, little Victoria was ‘charming...very high spirited...much indulged’ and very determined to have her own way!

The image conjured up in this pen portrait is matched in a series of sketches made towards the end of the holiday by a family friend. These rare and charming vignettes show the rosy-cheeked Princess playing  peek-a-boo, riding her donkey and sorting seashells – the spoils of carefree afternoons on the beach. 

For teenage Victoria, the open sea at Ramsgate continued to offer freedom. In 1835, she captured the feeling of space and liberty in her journal: ‘The open, free, boundless  (to the eye), ocean looked very refreshing. There is nothing between us and France but the sea, here.’

Despite falling ill with a serious fever during her stay in 1835, Victoria  relished daily walks on the pier and encounters with sailors and fishermen from France, Spain and Portugal. ‘Upon the whole I like poor Ramsgate’, she reflected, ‘..the walks on the pier amused me very much. I liked looking  at the foreign ships & the little French boys & fishermen so much...’ Not only was it was freeing, but also eye-opening, giving the privileged princess a glimpse of unfamiliar cultures and the hard work of those who made their living at sea.

The woman who gazed at Frith’s painting of Ramsgate at the Royal Academy in 1854 had long since grown up and become a queen. But on hearing that Frith’s painting had been sold, she proved to be every bit as wilful as the little princess of 30 years earlier.

Managing to buy the painting against the odds, she showed the same determined streak seen all those years before in Ramsgate. 

Waves illustration: marukopum/Getty Images/iStock.