For more than a century and a half Margate has been a holiday-place, and therefore wears an air of permanency which not even Brighton can beat, although its front is more miscellaneous and less stately. In fact, it looks whimsically as though one side of Gower Street had come down from London, for a change—and had not yet benefited by it! Matthew Arnold must have been similarly impressed when he wrote that this was a “brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—let me add, all its salubrity.” He had, you perceive, an unworthy affection for the tawdry rags of Continental Roman Catholicism, however insalubrious their nature, and in spite of his much-advertised craving for “sweetness and light.”
Arnold’s sneer at Protestantism offended many, but we have travelled far and swiftly on the down-grade in the last half-century, and the thing that would once have seemed impossible has come to pass: Protestantism has become a term of abuse. We have lived to see that!
“Margate” may have been originally the “Meer-geat,” the Anglo-Saxon for “sea-gate”; or more probably the name derived from the “mere,” or little stream, which flowed down to the sea past St. John’s Church, along the line of the street now called The Brooks; “mere” being a well-known Kentish word for a stream. However that may be, Margate is really of ancient origin: an historical fact rather obscured by the growth of the town. Still, one has only to seek that old parish church of St. John to perceive that this was an established place in Norman times. Strange though it may seem, “Margate” was once considered a separate village or hamlet on the seashore, as we read in the itinerary of John Leland, in the time of Henry the Eighth: “Meregate lyith in St. John’s paroche in Thanet v miles upward from Reculver; there is a village and a peere for shyppes now sore decayed.”
FROM THE PALIMPSEST BRASS, MARGATE CHURCH.
FROM THE PALIMPSEST BRASS, MARGATE CHURCH.
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 Maities 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.