In those days before railways, sea-borne goods came cheapest to Cromer, on whose sands the cargo-boats of small burden were beached and unloaded between tides. The few houses for the accommodation of summer visitors had not overshadowed the fisher-village, and the narrow streets remained paved, as from time immemorial they had been, with cobble-stones. The great people, locally, of that period were the allied families of Gurneys, Buxtons, and Hoares, of whom the few petty shopkeepers stood so greatly in awe that no visitors could count upon being able to purchase anything until those tradesfolk had made quite certain those grand seigneurs were not likely to require the articles in demand. The railway, which altered all this, was long kept away by the exclusives, but it came at last, and, backed by the sentimental gush of Mr. Clement Scott’s writings on what he was pleased to call “Poppyland,” spoiled Cromer. The public read the articles on “Poppyland,” and fell all over the place. There are those—and among them the present writer—who are sick of the name of “Poppyland,” and for whom Overstrand is spoiled by that much-quoted poem, the “Garden of Sleep,” on which the Great Eastern Railway guide-book writers, and the manufacturers of pictorial post-cards have traded, in and out of season.
CROMER.
The evolution of Cromer from fisher-village to fashionable resort was well on the way in 1892, when Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1841 was born at the early nineteenth century mansion called Cromer Hall, took the title of Cromer on his being created a Viscount; and the process was completed in the summer of 1901, when the pleasure Pier, constructed at a cost of £43,000, was opened. It replaced the wooden Jetty built at a cost of £6,000, after the storm of 1845, and battered to pieces in 1897. The new Pier, ornamental, and rather alien in appearance, is evidence of Cromer’s determination to be select and to stand aloof from popular vulgarities. Here those who seek the automatic machine shall not find, and no stalls, and no advertisements are permitted. At Cromer, in fact, the higher vulgarity is cultivated, just as at Yarmouth you plumb the depths of the lower variety. The tripper, holiday-making at Yarmouth, who comes over to see what Cromer is like, and finds no whelk and oyster stalls, and no popular entertainments on the sands, thinks it dull; and the average man, wandering along the Lighthouse cliffs in danger of having an eye knocked out by the wealthy and selfish vulgarians who practise golf there, is prone to consider Cromer a fine place, except for the people who frequent it, and for whose benefit the giant hotels facing the sea have been built, and still are building.
Looking upwards from the Pier, you see a long line of these great caravanserai, skirting the cliff-top. The Hôtel de Paris, the Hôtel Métropole, and others with titles equally English, astonish the beholder, not only with their appearance on what was until recently the rural Norfolk coast, but also with the rashness that reared such heavy loads of bricks on a seaboard so notoriously storm-swept and on the crest of crumbling cliffs. It does not need a prophet of very great prescience to declare that either disaster must overtake them or the cliffs must, from time to time, be strengthened at enormous cost, to bear the weight. Cromer has been fortunate not to have suffered so much as thought inevitable three hundred years ago, but the cliffs on either side have been eaten away, and have lately suffered, to such an extent, that the land it stands upon will soon be a promontory, in advance of the general coast-line, and must accordingly be more exposed.
Meanwhile, the many-towered steep, whose sky-line is so picturesquely serrated with cupolas and spires, is wonderfully effective when viewed from the beach on some kindly day of hazy effects, when the raw edges of those fire-new hotels are softened down, and imagination is given a chance. Then the sea-front of Cromer is even more charming than it was in Creswick’s time, and has something of the Arabian Nights order of lordliness.
Such is Cromer, whose population is mounting up to 4,000 souls. The beauty of its situation is unquestionable, the purity and bracing qualities of its air proverbial, and the hardiness of its fishermen well known. But (to the great joy of the Great Eastern Railway) it is no longer unspotted from the world, and has become modish and sophisticated. It is a very pretty mode and a coquettish sophistication, and if indeed you do very speedily exhaust Cromer itself—why, then the magnificent hinterland of wild tumbled hills and dark fir-woods is well-nigh inexhaustible. But the solitude and the natural life of the seaboard villages are extinct, even as are those features of Cromer. Summer existence there is like that of the midges and butterflies; gay, without care.
In winter, however, when the holiday folk are gone, its modern status lies heavy, like a shadow, on one: for then the whole place, given over, body and soul, to providing for visitors, is in doleful dumps. This is the dark reverse of that bright summer picture, and the fact that Cromer’s season is only of eight or ten weeks’ duration means many little domestic miseries. To stand in the empty October streets and meet the last bathing machine being drawn up from the deserted beach to winter quarters; to see the restaurants and tea-shops without customers, and cards offering rooms to let in most of the houses, is to realise that a fisher-village on an open coast, without river or harbour, and consequently no trade, cannot suddenly become a resort without a tragical side to its comedy. I stand on the cliff-top as night shuts down over the North Sea, and I have the place wholly to myself. The hotels have switched on their electric lights, but those rooms, so gay and crowded in August, are now for the most part empty. I am sorry for the Cromer that was, and much more sorry for the Cromer that is.
THE END.