Mooching around….
One of a series of blogs with entertaining snippets of social history
by Professor Carolyn Oulton of Canterbury Christchurch University
It is a hot day in late Victorian Folkestone, and your stiff layers of clothing aren’t helping at all.
If you are a man your starched collar is probably giving you chin rash.
If you are a woman your underclothing alone weighs as much as a small child.
So you are less than amused when a strange man with his sleeves rolled up dashes past you up Tontine Street, almost knocking you over. A door opens and you hear shouts and a machine-like whirring noise.
The man disappears inside without a backward glance.
You are certainly in no mood to see the joke when another man immediately touches your elbow and says, ‘I do apologise for my friend Mr Hal Berte, he’s late today’. The man raises an eyebrow as if you should know, and offers you his card: ‘Luke Sharp. At your service.’
But what if you were to – what if you could – go into the coolness of the Grace Hill library and ask for old volumes of the Folkestone Visitors’ List and Society Journal (aka Holbein Visitors’ List and Court Directory, aka Holbein Visitors’ List and Folkestone Journal)? In the pages of this forgotten journal you would find the life of the town: local politics, the summer season with
‘our streets with Cockneys teeming, / And the golden pieces streaming’, the old lady on the Leas who let a crowd of boys pelt her with pebbles – and then when they got close enough, rolled up her umbrella and beat them with it.
The editor called himself Hal Berte, so it was only right that his friend and contributor should take the name of Luke Sharp. And look sharp you should, because this contributor to the local journal was actually a well-known author in his own right.
Robert Barr (to give him his real name) was soon to be the founder and co-editor of The Idler with Jerome K. Jerome. Apparently he had initially considered asking Kipling, but didn’t like the look of his jaw. Holbein’s List is the only source we have that proves Jerome spent a holiday in the town in 1890.
Admittedly he is supposed to have said that,
‘There is too much blamed much respectability there for me. I like a place where you don’t need to wear a collar and where you can “mooch” around’.
But that didn’t stop him including it in Three Men on the Bummelten years later.
So on your time travels to Victorian Folkestone, you will forgive Mr Berte, will you not?
I call him that because you won’t believe me if I tell you his real name.
It was actually plain John Brown…..
(Image from Wikipedia)
