Frightening the old ladies, upsetting the Bath chairs,
Crumpling up the casual cyclist,
And, generally, playing the very deuce
With everything, it goes. Its licence plates
Boldly inscribed, designed by law to be
Legible to ev’ry eye, artfully obscured
With wraps and rugs. Give me my gun.
And so forth. There is room for lengthy eloquence on the subject.
Cromer has in these later years become the Motor Cad’s Paradise. Here are the gorgeous “hotels” beloved of his little soul, and here the good roads he can render dangerous to others with little risk to himself.
A wide gulf separates the Cromer of that poet’s time and ours, but the change that has taken place is quite recent, and astonishingly sudden. At the close of Georgian days a certain vogue had been established, and a Bath House was built under the cliff. This was washed away during the storm and high tide in 1836, but the “Bath Hotel” of that period, stuccoed, white-painted, midway between cliff-top and sea, remains, together with a few of the early Victorian bay-windowed seaside lodging-houses, small but comfortable, that line the narrow streets near the cliffs’ edge. It was following this great storm of 1836 that the first of Cromer’s defensive sea-walls was built; but the greater storm of 1845 wrecked it and washed away the timber jetty, built in 1822, at a cost of £1,400. What Cromer was like at this period may be judged from the illustration, which clearly shows how, from the picturesque point of view, it has been spoiled.