_T^_0	ENGLISH    SAGA
classes. The annual seaside holiday had the supreme advantage
of catering for the whole family, and its healthful properties
gave a fillip to business. Many London families emigrated for the
summer to Margate, the breadwinner coming down the river
.for the week-end on Saturday night on the "husbands' boat."
The place was already an institution before the middle of the
century, with its trim houses and spired church, its famous
pier and fishermen, arbours and seats, its old ladies in deck-chairs
and gentlemen in straw hats and its rows of horse-drawn
bathing-boxes and bottle-nosed bathing women wading through
the water in great bonnets.
Though newer resorts of quality like Folkestone and Hastings
were winning favour, Brighton was still the first seaside town
in England with many survivals of its Regency heyday, including
"old, wicked-looking gentlemen with thin faces, long noses and
quaint hats who had drunk Regent punch with King George
the Fourth at the Pavilion." These mingled, a little incongru-
ously but in the English mode, with demure young ladies in
curls and bonnets, armies of children in jackets and knicker-
bockers, and fanatic-looking preachers in tall hats and white
ties who attempted to hold prayer meetings on the beach. The
normal costume of the seaside holiday-maker was a loose-fitting
check suit and a bowler. It was fun, after days in counting-house
and office, to stroll along the windy pier (where the French were
periodically expected to land) and watch the gulls and fishing-
boats and the old salts in jerseys and straw hats, to dine off turtle
and strawberry ices at Mutton's, to drive in an open fly from
one cliff to the other, eyeing the "gals" as they passed to and
fro in their crinolines and parasols before the rows of dazzling
white houses with green blinds and sun-blistered verandas, to
hear the fisherwomen hawking their prawns with shrill "Yeo
Ho'sP and, in the cool of the evening, to listen to the negro
melodists singing "I would I were in Old Virginny" and the
band playing the Overture to Zampa or the March from Athalie.
Even Victorian decorum relaxed a little by the seaside.
Monsieur Wey, a Frenchman of delicacy, noted with astonish-
ment how bathing took place in full view of a front swarming
with idlers of both sexes: at Brighton men bathing alone went
into the water stark naked. Never, he wrote, would he forget
his bathe there in 1856. It was on a Sunday at the time at which
worshippers returned from church. He had been assigned a