Raging with the greatest violence

‘A severe hurricane and occurring at the spring tide, the low tracts along the coast were inundated and considerable damage occasioned thereby. I drove to Brighton and arrived there between one and two, at the time the sea was raging with the greatest violence, the surf dashed over the pier and occasionally hid it from our view.’ This is from the remarkable diary of Gideon Algernon Mantell - doctor, geologist, and fossil collector - who died this day in 1852. Born in Lewes, he moved to Brighton where he lived in a house on Old Steine becoming something of a celebrity palaeontologist.

Mantell was born in Lewes in 1790, the son of a shoemaker. Apprenticed as a teenager to a local surgeon, he later trained at St Bartholomew’s in London before returning to Sussex to practice. His first fame came not from medicine but from geology: he was the discoverer of the Iguanodon, among the earliest of the creatures that would come to be called dinosaurs. His book The Fossils of the South Downs (1822) made his name, and within a decade he had identified a second great reptile. Yet his ambition remained medical: he longed to establish a prosperous practice among the aristocracy drawn to Brighton by the Pavilion court of George IV and William IV.

In 1833 he finally moved his family to 20 The Steyne, at the heart of fashionable Brighton. To his frustration, he became less a physician than a celebrity geologist. Visitors besieged his home, eager to see his fossils. In 1838, the collection was purchased by the British Museum. That same year he bought a practice in Clapham Common, which soon became a success and allowed him frequent trips to London to attend institutional meetings. He moved again in 1844 to Pimlico, where he remained until his death on 10 November 1852. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and Dinohunters.

A lifetime of diaries kept by Mantell were edited in 1940 by E. Cecil Curwen, whose father had lived in Hove. Extracts were first published that year in Sussex County Magazine under the title The Diaries of Gideon Mantell, F.R.S., based on Curwen’s fuller transcription now held at Barbican House, Lewes. Many of Mantell’s original notebooks and letters, however, were taken to New Zealand by his son Walter Baldock Durrant Mantell and are preserved today in the Alexander Turnbull Library and at Te Papa Tongarewa. 

Later editions have sought to complete Curwen’s partial selection: John A. Cooper’s The Unpublished Journal of Gideon Algernon Mantell, 1819–1852 (2010) makes available the sections omitted from Curwen’s edition and is freely accessible online, while  another volume covering June-November 1852 was separately published by R. Dell in 1983. It is Curwen’s typescript, together with these supplements, that remains the principal record of Mantell’s day-to-day observations of life in Brighton and Lewes. They reveal a man of abundant restless energy, fired with an ambition to become immortal in the realms of science, but also one who sought solace in the sea air and who described with striking immediacy the changing moods of Brighton’s coast.

Here are several diary extracts about Brighton Beach contained in Curwen’s original The Diaries of Gideon Mantell.

16 August 1823

‘Drove to Brighton; the sea very rough and magnificent. I walked along to the beach and seated myself on a rock, viewing with delight the tempestuous foaming of the billows around me: the hull of a vessel wrecked the preceding night was lying near me, and was hurled to and fro by the impetuosity of the waves. The foam from the surges dashing through the piles of the pier was fine and imposing.’

23 November 1824

‘A severe hurricane and occurring at the spring tide, the low tracts along the coast were inundated and considerable damage occasioned thereby. I drove to Brighton and arrived there between one and two, at the time the sea was raging with the greatest violence, the surf dashed over the pier and occasionally hid it from our view. So soon as the water was retired so as to allow of walking on the esplanade, we went to the Pier, which was much damaged by the waves; the railing in many places washed away, and the platform destroyed, so as to render access to the Pier-head difficult and dangerous: however we ventured to the farthest end although every now and then a sea dashed over us, and completely drenched us, but the awful grandeur of the scene more than compensated for the inconvenience of our situation.’

29 October 1836

‘A dreadful hurricane from the SSW at about eleven AM it was terrific - houses unroofed - trees torn up by the roots: chimney-pots and chimneys blown in every direction - sea mountains high. Went to the Pier, and was present when violent oscillations began to be produced by the hurricane: the whole lines of platforms and chains were thrown into undulations, and the suspension bridges appeared like an enormous serpent writing in agony - at length one of the bridges gave way, and planks, beams, iron rods - all were hurled instantaneously into the boiling surge! The tension of the bridge being thus set at liberty, the remaining bridges gradually became motionless; the damage done to this beautiful structure cannot be much less than £1,000. Some persons were killed by the falling of chimneys and lead blown off the houses.’

See also Brighton’s oldest pier.