I confess I like tar

‘I like to go down on the beach among the fishing boats, and to recline on the shingle by a smack when the wind comes gently from the west, and the low wave breaks but a few yards from my feet. I like the occasional passing scent of pitch: they are melting it close by. I confess I like tar: one’s hands smell nice after touching ropes.’ This was written about Brighton Beach by John Richard Jefferies, an English nature writer born on this day in 1848. Although not well remembered, he turned his attention to Brighton in at least two books of essays - Nature Near London and The Open Air.

Jefferies was born on 6 November 1848 at Coate Farm, near Swindon in Wiltshire. His early years were steeped in rural observation - he studied the hedges, brooks and fields around him with a sharp eye and lyrical sensibility. He worked as a local journalist - reporting for the North Wiltshire Herald and the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard - and began to publish articles on natural history and rural life in the Pall Mall Gazette and other London papers. In 1874 he married Jessie Baden, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer at Syde near Cirencester, and the couple had three children, though the third died young.

Jefferies earned his living precariously as a freelance essayist and novelist; the success of The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) brought him a wider readership and regular commissions from magazines such as Longman’s, The Graphic and The Standard. His blend of realism, spiritual intensity and precise nature description made him one of the leading English nature writers of the Victorian age. Although his name is most often linked with Wiltshire, he moved south in later life, seeking sea-air and convalescence on the Sussex coast. He died in August 1887 at Goring-by-Sea in West Sussex.

In his last years, he published two books of essays: Nature Near London (Chatto & Windus, 1883) and The Open Air (Chatto & Windus, 1885) both with lyrical passages about Brighton and its seaside. These first two are from a chapter in Nature Near London called ‘To Brighton’.

‘The clean dry brick pavements are scarcely less crowded than those of London, but as you drive through the town, now and then there is a glimpse of a greenish mist afar off between the houses. The green mist thickens in one spot almost at the horizon; or is it the dark nebulous sails of a vessel? Then the foam suddenly appears close at hand - a white streak seems to run from house to house, reflecting the sunlight: and this is Brighton.’

‘Westwards, a mile beyond Hove, beyond the coast-guard cottages, turn aside from the road, and go up on the rough path along the ridge of shingle. The hills are away on the right, the sea on the left; the yards of the ships in the basin slant across the sky in front. With a quick, sudden heave the summer sea, calm and gleaming, runs a little way up the side of the groyne, and again retires. There is scarce a gurgle or a bubble, but the solid timbers are polished and smooth where the storms have worn them with pebbles. From a grassy spot ahead a bird rises, marked with white, and another follows it; they are wheatears; they frequent the land by the low beach in the autumn.’

The more extensive passages below are from ‘Sunny Brighton’ in The Open Air.

‘Some of the old streets opening out of the King's Road look very pleasant on a sunny day. They run to the north, so that the sun over the sea shines nearly straight up them, and at the farther end, where the houses close in on higher ground, the deep blue sky descends to the rooftrees. The old red tiles, the red chimneys, the green jalousies, give some colour; and beneath there are shadowy corners and archways. They are not too wide to whisper across, for it is curious that to be interesting a street must be narrow, and the pavements are but two or three bricks broad. These pavements are not for the advantage of foot passengers; they are merely to prevent cart-wheels from grating against the houses. There is nothing ancient or carved in these streets, they are but moderately old, yet turning from the illuminated sea it is pleasant to glance up them as you pass, in their stillness and shadow, lying outside the inconsiderate throng walking to and fro, and contrasting in their irregularity with the set facades of the front. Opposite, across the King's Road, the mastheads of the fishing boats on the beach just rise above the rails of the cliff, tipped with fluttering pennants, or fish-shaped vanes changing to the wind.’

‘I like to go down on the beach among the fishing boats, and to recline on the shingle by a smack when the wind comes gently from the west, and the low wave breaks but a few yards from my feet. I like the occasional passing scent of pitch: they are melting it close by. I confess I like tar: one’s hands smell nice after touching ropes. It is more like home down on the beach here; the men are doing something real, sometimes there is the clink of a hammer; behind me there is a screen of brown net, in which rents are being repaired; a big rope yonder stretches as the horse goes round, and the heavy smack is drawn slowly up over the pebbles. The full curves of the rounded bows beside me are pleasant to the eye, as any curve is that recalls those of woman. Mastheads stand up against the sky, and a loose rope swings as the breeze strikes it; a veer of the wind brings a puff of smoke from the funnel of a cabin, where some one is cooking, but it is not disagreeable, like smoke from a house chimney-pot; another veer carries it away again, - depend upon it the simplest thing cooked there is nice. Shingle rattles as it is shovelled up for ballast - the sound of labour makes me more comfortably lazy. They are not in a hurry, nor “chivy” over their work either; the tides rise and fall slowly, and they work in correspondence. No infernal fidget and fuss. Wonder how long it would take me to pitch a pebble so as to lodge on the top of that large brown pebble there? I try, once now and then.’

‘When this peculiar bank appears at Brighton it is an almost certain sign of continued fine weather, and I have noticed the same thing elsewhere; once particularly it remained fine after this appearance despite every threat the sky could offer of a storm. All the threats came to nothing for three weeks, not even thunder and lightning could break it up, - “deceitful flashes,” as the Arabs say; for, like the sons of the desert, just then the farmers longed for rain on their parched fields. To me, while on the beach among the boats, the value of these clouds lies in their slowness of movement, and consequent effect in soothing the mind. Outside the hurry and drive of life a rest comes through the calm of nature. As the swell of the sea carries up the pebbles, and arranges the largest farthest inland, where they accumulate and stay unmoved, so the drifting of the clouds, and the touch of the wind, the sound of the surge, arrange the molecules of the mind in still layers. It is then that a dream fills it, and a dream is sometimes better than the best reality. Laugh at the idea of dreaming where there is an odour of tar if you like, but you see it is outside intolerable civilization. It is a hundred miles from the King’s Road, though but just under it.’

‘There is a scheme on foot for planking over the ocean, beginning at the bottom of West Street. An immense central pier is proposed, which would occupy the only available site for beaching the smacks. If carried out, the whole fishing industry must leave Brighton,- to the fishermen the injury would be beyond compensation, and the aspect of Brighton itself would be destroyed. Brighton ought to rise in revolt against it.’

The portrait above is from Wikipedia, and the fishing boat image is from the collection of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.