Huddlestone’s Brighton Story

It is 65 years since John Huddlestone’s series of illustrations about Brighton first appeared in the Brighton and Hove Herald. Beginning in 1960, his weekly cartoon strips traced the town’s story from the Domesday Book to the mid-twentieth century. The feature was so popular that, by the end of its first year, the strips were gathered into a 64-page pictorial booklet titled The Brighton Story, first published in 1961 by Thanet Books and sold for 2/6 (12½p). The original yellow-covered edition is now scarce and has become something of a collector’s item. A blue-covered facsimile reprint appeared in 1999, published by SB Publications of Seaford, which noted that all attempts to trace the author or his heirs had failed.

Despite the enduring appeal of the book, remarkably little is known about Huddlestone himself. He was described by Herald editor Frank Garratt as ‘a Northerner’, who developed an interest in Brighton after reading Unknown Brighton by George Aitchison. Huddlestone had already contributed historical illustrations of Kentish coastal towns to a local newspaper when, by chance, Garratt saw his work and wished aloud for someone with similar ability to do the same for Brighton. That same day, Huddlestone called at the Herald office and offered his services. Garratt, astonished by the coincidence, accepted immediately.

In his own introduction, written in May 1961, Huddlestone explained that he had known Brighton since 1930 and was especially drawn to its rich and colourful history. He claimed descent from the Northern Huddlestone family, which included Father John Huddlestone, the Roman Catholic priest who attended Charles II on his deathbed in 1685. He also recalled being particularly fascinated by the story of Charles’s escape from ‘Brighhelmstone’ to France. His aim, he wrote, was to stimulate interest in Brighton, ‘the oldest and largest and most famous of sea-side resorts’, and the birthplace of what he called ‘a great and happy tradition’.

The Brighton Story rearranges the original newspaper strips by theme rather than date, and omits contemporary advertisements. With Garratt’s editorial support, Huddlestone’s affectionate cartoon history drew responses from readers all over the world and helped to record the town’s unique atmosphere at a moment of civic pride and change. When the Herald closed in the 1960s, its parent company was taken over by Southern Publishing and later absorbed into the Newsquest group, which authorised the 1999 facsimile edition.

Here are two of the pages in which Huddlestone draws and writes about the Brighton seafront.

My only literary prize

In the early 1990s, I took part in a Brighton Festival writing workshop on the famous novel Brighton Rock. It was an interesting experience, if a little disappointing. The workshop included entry to a short story competition with a £50 prize, and I duly entered. On this day, in 1992, I received notification that I’d won the competition and the £50 - it remains the only literary prize I’ve ever won. But, at the time, I was convinced - as my diary reveals - that I must have been the only entrant. Here is the story of that prize - in two extracts from my diaries.

4 May 1992

‘Friday saw the opening of the Brighton festival with a splendid procession of children and their school-made dragons. For the whole of Saturday, I’d signed up for a Brighton Rock workshop but I had little idea what it would be like. I dutifully arrived on the Palace Pier a little before 10 and took a couple of pictures - the light was astonishingly bright and clear and the pier furbishings were looking as spanking new and clean as I’ve seen them; they must have had a coat of paint within the last few weeks and the glass in the windows had been spotlessly cleaned.

At 10 exactly, I approached the tiny group of people in the centre of the pavement at the entrance to the pier. The literature event organiser was there holding a wad of tickets; there was a large well-built man of around 50 introduced to me as Tony Masters who I didn’t know from Adam; otherwise there were two other punters like me - Jake, a dead ringer in character and pretensions for my old flatmate Andy, and Bob. Masters, who turned out to be quite a well known and prolific writer, never really recovered from the fact that so few people had signed up

We removed to a banquet suite in the Albion Hotel where Tony talked a while about his working methods, about Brighton Rock (he had known Graham Greene) and about what we were going to do during the day - i.e. a walk in the morning and writing session in the afternoon. 

I suppose I too was disappointed that the turnout was so small. The walk was certainly a disappointment - we walked up and down the pier, passed the Forte’s cafe on the corner directly opposite the pier which was the setting for Snow’s. Tony insisted it would have been more sleazy in the time Greene researched the book but I thought otherwise - Rose says she couldn’t get another job as good and I suspect it was quite posh then, even more so than now. Tony said the same thing about the pier and the Albion hotel (where Greene stayed when in Brighton) but again I would have thought the pier would have been quite rich in those days given the amount of visitors it used to get. Our resident writer seemed determined to impose the sense of sleaze and squalidness that exudes out of the whole book on all the locations. We then walked up to Nelson Place which is where Pinkie grew up and where Rose’s parents live. Tony seemed to insist he could really feel ‘a sense of place’ (the title of the workshop) in this location but I didn’t get anything from it all. 

For a while we sat in the pub Dr Brighton’s which in the book and formerly was the Star and Garter where Ida was often found. I suppose I knew Brighton too well already. There are dozens of locations around the city which have real character and feeling but, the pier apart, we didn’t go near any of them. After a short break for lunch we retired to the same room in the hotel. It became clear that Tony has a lot of experience of such workshops - he has worked a lot in schools it seems and written a lot for children - and was determined to maintain a highly positive attitude and wring something out of us. We had five minutes to write down the bone of an idea based on any inspiration we had had on the walk; then we were given a bit less than an hour to actually write up the idea.

Apart from general thoughts about the gaudiness of the attractions on the pier and the similarity perhaps with Brighton itself in some respects, three pictures on the pier had struck me: the sight of a lanky youth, standing silent and motionless staring at a video machine; a small boy who refused to walk over the slats of the pier because he could see water below and chose instead to walk along the boards laid down for pushchairs; and the colour of the sea - a translucent turquoise which seemed to have a light source of its own - as spotted between the slats when walking through a covered part of the pier.

Pressed into creating a story line and taking my cue from a simple example put forward by Tony himself, I turned the youth into a rather lonely character yet to leave home, addicted to the video machines, his only pleasure, and on the edge of making an important decision in his life. I have him watching the small boy choose the safe path over the boards and seeing himself. A group of lively youngsters enter the amusement arcade and stand near the youth. He starts thinking about how he has never met people like this and so on. I was surprised how much I actually wrote in the short space of time but I suppose that’s my experience as a journalist showing through. Although Tony insisted that one should not enclose one’s characters into a finished plot and allow them room, I had sewn up my plot before I began writing. Tony said all one needs is to be able to see four or five scenes ahead (have a narrative thrust) and then one can write. Well, I couldn’t do this, I had already found the end to my story viz: the group of lively youngsters tease the youth and eventually nag him to come along with them for a bit. The first thing they do is go up the helter skelter. The youth, tied up in the imaginary world of the video games, has never actually been on any of the fairground rides and he is frightened sick of going to the top of the helter skelter and sliding down round virtually over the sea. Moreover, he has to spend his last coin of the day. The story finishes as he begins his slide down - a symbol really that he must begin his real life.

Pretty crass eh! Well, what can one do in 45 minutes. Jake wrote three sentences in Tom Wolfe style about a film star (Cher-like) who has come to Brighton to film a few scenes but falls over on the pier and is going to have an affair with a young street-wise lad. Bob also wrote just a few words about a tailor’s shop he’d seen. They were highly descriptive and emotive even and promised well.

We talked for an hour or so about these attempts. Jake found my writing Kafkaesque, Bob liked it and Tony explained that I wrote rather economically without much description, that I didn’t waste words. He said whereas from Bob’s contribution he could touch the scene, with mine he got a strong visual sense. I don’t think he made any judgement as to whether it was any good or not, nor can I think of anything he said that might actually help me write the story better. Oh yes, he said I was very observant.

The cost of the workshop also includes the chance to send in a story (max 3,000 words) to the organisers who will then award a £50 prize as well as provide some constructive criticism. I shall certainly take advantage of that offer. If just three people turn up at the second of the two workshops and every participant sends in a story, I would still have a 15% chance of winning the prize!

I have to say that I liked Tony and found myself very much on his wavelength - I could tell in advance what pictures he might point out (at one point he was saying that one was unlikely to meet a Pinkie character these days but just at that moment two punks passed us in the street and we both acknowledged the irony of that) - and I could agree with much of what he said about other writers and films. At over 50, he has been a writer for thirty years he said, and is clearly much in demand, for films and television, and also pushes out a lot of books. I suppose if I were ever to be a writer, I would want to have as varied a portfolio as this man.’

5 August 1992

‘ “I am delighted,” Adrian Slack, organiser of the literature part of the Brighton Festival, writes, “to inform you that you have won first prize in the short story competition. I enclose a cheque for £50”. Well, well, well. My first ever literature success. Well, it would be if I wasn’t reasonably sure that I was probably the only entrant. Shame I didn’t get second and third prize as well. The story - Helter Skelter - was supposed to be read by several judges and a critique provided, that might have been more useful than the £50 prize.’

My policeman on the pier

‘We battled past the sodden deckchairs, fortune-tellers and doughnut stalls, my hair coarsening in the wind, and my hand, clutching the umbrella above Tom’s, going numb. Tom’s face and body seemed set in a determined grimace against the weather. “Let’s go back . . .” I began, but the wind must have stolen my voice, for Tom ploughed ahead and shouted, “Helter-skelter? House of Hades? Or ghost train?” ’ This is an extract from Bethan Roberts Brighton-set novel, My Policeman, published on this day in 2012. While themes of repression, betrayal, guilt, and enduring love are explored against a backdrop of post-war conformity, Brighton Beach provides both a place of apparent freedom and quiet entrapment.

Roberts was born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1973. She studied English Literature at university before returning to writing via a part‑time MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, which she completed over three years while working in television in Brighton. In 2006, she won the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook short‑story prize, which helped launch her literary career.

Her debut novel, The Pools, was published in 2007, earning the Jerwood/Arvon Young Writers’ Award. The follow‑up, The Good Plain Cook (2008), was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and selected as a Time Out Book of the Year. On 4 August 2012, My Policeman was published by Chatto & Windus. The novel is set in Brighton in the 1950s and explores a love triangle between a policeman, his wife, and his secret male lover. It was chosen as Brighton City Read 2012, became an Irish Times Book of the Year, and was turned into a film in 2022.

Mother Island appeared in 2014, winning Roberts a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize, and Graceland, a fictionalised account of Elvis Presley’s early life, was published in 2019. Roberts also writes short fiction and drama for BBC Radio 4; she has worked in television documentary production and has taught creative writing at the University of Chichester, Goldsmiths, University of London, and West Dean College. She is based in Brighton with her family. For more biographical information see The Royal Literary Fund or New Writing South.

My Policeman is a tragic love story set in 1950s Brighton, where social conventions and laws criminalise homosexuality. The novel centres on Tom Burgess, a young policeman who marries Marion, a schoolteacher, while secretly maintaining a romantic relationship with Patrick, a museum curator. The story unfolds through dual narratives - Marion’s confessional manuscript and Patrick’s diary - both written decades later, as the emotional consequences of the hidden triangle are laid bare.

Here’s one extract in which Marion, on her honeymoon, is choosing a fairground ride.

‘And so, a few minutes later, we were strolling arm in arm towards the noise and lights of the Palace Pier.

My bouclé jacket was a pretty flimsy affair, and I clung to Tom’s arm as we sheltered beneath one of the hotel’s umbrellas. I was glad there’d been only one available, so we had to share. We rushed across King’s Road, were splashed by a passing bus, and Tom paid for us to go through the turnstiles. The wind threatened to blow our umbrella into the sea, but Tom kept a firm grip, despite the waves foaming around the pier’s iron legs and throwing shingle up the beach. We battled past the sodden deckchairs, fortune-tellers and doughnut stalls, my hair coarsening in the wind, and my hand, clutching the umbrella above Tom’s, going numb. Tom’s face and body seemed set in a determined grimace against the weather.

“Let’s go back . . .” I began, but the wind must have stolen my voice, for Tom ploughed ahead and shouted, “Helter-skelter? House of Hades? Or ghost train?”

It was then I started to laugh. What else could I do, Patrick? Here was I, on my honeymoon, battered by a wet wind on the Palace Pier, when our warm hotel bedroom - bed still immaculately made - was only yards away, and my new husband was asking me to choose between fairground rides.

“I’m for the helter-skelter,” I said, and started running towards the blue and red striped turret. The slide - then called The Joy Glide - was such a familiar sight, and yet I’d never actually been down it. Suddenly it seemed like a good idea. My feet were soaked and freezing, and moving them at least warmed them a little. (Tom has never felt the cold, did you notice that? A little later in our marriage, I wondered if all that sea swimming had developed a protective layer of seal-like fat, just beneath the surface of his skin. And whether that explained his lack of response to my touch. My tough, beautiful sea creature.)

The girl in the booth – black pigtails and pale pink lipstick – took our money and handed us a couple of mats. “One at a time,” she ordered. “No sharing mats.” ’

The most delicious thing

This day in 1916, Cynthia Asquith, wife of the son of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, was to be found on Brighton Beach, so enjoying the experience of bathing from the pier that she wrote in her diary, ‘It was the most delicious thing I have ever done’. During the war, she and her children were often in Brighton, escaping from London and enjoying the sea air.

Cynthia Charteris was born at Clouds, her mother’s family estate, in 1887, but spent most of her childhood at Stanway House near Cheltenham, where she was educated privately. In 1903, she was sent to Dresden, the then fashionable European city for finishing young ladies, and there met Herbert Asquith. Since her family did not approve of the match, they became engaged secretly in 1907. The couple married in 1910, and found a home in Sussex Place, Regent’s Park in London. Their first child, John, born a year later, proved to be mentally backward and caused them much anxiety and grief. Two other children were born, in 1914 (Michael) and 1919 (Simon).

At the suggestion of a friend, she began to keep a diary during the First World War. This was published by Hutchinson, but not until 1968, as Lady Cynthia Asquith Diaries 1915-1918 - with a foreword by her lifelong friend L. P. Hartley. He wrote: ‘Lady Cynthia was one of the most fascinatingly beautiful women of her time - painted for love by McEvoy, Sargent, and Augustus John - and her lively wit and sensitivity of intelligence made her the treasured confidante of such diverse characters as D. H. Lawrence and Sir James Barrie, but when she died in 1960 she left a new generation to discover yet another of her gifts - as a rarely talented diarist. . .’

Her diaries - available to view online at Internet Archive - provide a startlingly open and self-absorbed account of a life so privileged on the surface but affected deeply and painfully by the pressures of marriage, children, war, and her own intense social needs. During the war, and the period of the published diaries, Cynthia was often in Brighton, where she first took her children to benefit from the sea air, and where she herself loved to bathe - as shown by these entries.

3 December 1916

‘We played the fool on the pier and went to the tourist’s whole hog by being photographed with our heads through burlesques.’

20 July 1916

‘Back in Brighton. After I had written some letters, I went out in search of a bathing cap, thinking I should find a suitable one nearby, but I had to walk for miles and miles in grilling sun, but God forbid that I should complain of any ray of heat vouchsafed to us during this awful summer! It was delicious in the water - really warm and heavenly.’

30 July 1916

‘Glittering, scorching day and the town teeming like an anthill. No signs of war, save for the poor, legless men whom Michael tried to encourage by saying, “Poor wounded soldiers - soon be better.” There is no doubt that Brighton has a charm of its own, almost amounting to glamour. I am beginning to be quite patriotic about this end of the town - Kemp Town as it is called - in opposition to the parvenu Hove, which has less character and is to this rather what the Lido is to Venice.

We joined the children on the beach - painfully hot and glaring. We took them in a boat to try and get cooler. Beb and I bathed from the rather squalid bathing machines - perfect in the water, except for the quantity of foreign bodies.’

31 July 1916

‘Grilling hot again. [. . .] I boldly decided to bathe off the pier as the machines were all full. I shall never bathe from anywhere else again! It was the most delicious thing I have ever done - down a ladder straight into the bottomless green water. Apparently there is no risk of drowning as there is a man in a boat, a raft, a life-buoy, etc. There was a strong current taking one inwards, so I rowed out and swam back. Luxurious dressing rooms, too. It’s a great discovery.

After dinner we sat on the pier, which was most delicious. Lovely lights on the water and in the twilight Brighton looked quite glamorous, and I like the teeming, happy crowds. Being here is strangely like being abroad.’

7 August 1916

‘Reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I shall have to make my home at Brighton, I feel and look so incomparably better there.’

13 August 1916

‘Banged at Basil’s door at seven [Lord Basil Blackwood who died on German trenches the following year]. We had agreed to bathe if awake. We just ran down to the beach with coats over our bathing clothes. A man, perhaps what they call a ‘beach policeman’, stopped me, saying it was only for men that station. I said, “Rubbish!” which, unfortunately, he overheard and was furious, threatening to send for the police and saying I must go to Kemp Town. My bathing dress was very wet from the day before and I didn’t at all like the idea of going either to Kemp Town or the police station in it. However, we found the situation could be overcome by going through the technicality of taking a bathing machine and leaving one’s coat. We had the most heavenly bathe - soft sand and delicious waves, exactly the right size.’

A tremendious rough day

‘This has been a tremendious rough day. I never saw anything half so grand as the sea looked. Indeed, there cannot be a grander sight than a rough sea. It looked like a large hilly plain, moor than like a piece of water. The waves rolled mountains high, and when two of these waves met, sometimes it was with such violence that the water flew into the air out of sight, foaming and frothing like a boiling furnace.’ This was written today in 1937 by William Tayler, a servant and footman on holiday in Brighton with his employer. Despite bad spelling, his observations on Brighton Beach - written down in a diary - are all the more precious an historical record because of his relatively low status.

Born in 1807, Tayler grew up with many siblings on a farm in Grafton, Oxfordshire. He was the first of his family to go into gentlemen’s service, initially for a local squire, and then for a wealthy widow in London, a Mrs Prinsep who lived in Marylebone. Also in the household was the widow’s daughter, and three maidservants - he was the only manservant. Mrs Prinsep died in 1850, and William moved his employment several times thereafter, rising to butler, and eventually being able to afford to rent a whole house in Paddington.

At the beginning of 1837, Tayler decided to keep a diary, to practise his writing.

1 January 1837

‘As I am a wretched bad writer, many of my friends have advised me to practise more, to do which I have made many attempts but allways forgot or got tired so that it was never atended to. I am now about to write a sort of journal, to note down some of the chief things that come under my observation each day. This, I hope, will induce me to make use of my pen every day a little. My account of each subject will be very short - a sort of multo in parvo - as my book is very small and my time not very large.’

And for the rest of the year, almost every day, he wrote short entries. The manuscript was first edited by Dorothy Wise and published - with the title Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837 - by the St Marylebone Society in 1962, but has been reprinted several times since then. There are extensive quotes from Tayler’s diary in my book, Brighton in Diaries (History Press, 2011) including the following:

18 July 1837

‘Went on the pier. This is a kind of bridge brojecting into the sea a quarter of a mile. It’s a great curiosity as it’s hung on chains. People can get from that into the boats without going into the water at low water.’ (Picture credit: Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.)

19 July 1837

‘I get up every morning at half past six and goes out on the beach looking at the boys catching crabs and eels and looking at the people batheing. There are numbers of old wimen have little wooden houses on wheels, and into these houses people goe that want to bathe, and then the house is pushed into the water and when the person has undressed, they get into the water and bathe, and then get into the wooden house again and dress themselves, then the house is drawn on shore again.’

29 July 1837

‘This has been a tremendious rough day. I never saw anything half so grand as the sea looked. Indeed, there cannot be a grander sight than a rough sea. It looked like a large hilly plain, moor than like a piece of water. The waves rolled mountains high, and when two of these waves met, sometimes it was with such violence that the water flew into the air out of sight, foaming and frothing like a boiling furnace, and the wind blows a mist from the waves that regularly pickle the streets, houses and everybody and everything from the salt water. It’s ruination to clothes. My hat is as white as though I had rolled it in the salt tub. The fishermen nor no one elce dare got out with boats such weather. Many of the people were obliged to put up their shutters for fear of haveing their windows broke by the wind blowing the stones and gravel about. I have seen many wimen with their peticoats over their heads. Most of them keep at home, and it would be as well if they was all to do so such a day as this.’

5 August 1837

‘The water very rough. A man rideing his horse in to wash it, the waves came and knocked them man and horse both down in the water. They both scrambled up again and got out, but the man lost his money.’

12 August 1837

‘Went by the water’s side and saw some fishermen bring a very curious fish ashore. They called it a sea monster. It was as big as a donkey and about eight feet long and a mouthfull of teeth like a lion. They erected a tent and showed it for a trifle each person.  They often catch some of these creatures which are of no use other than make a show of, as long as they can keep them fresh.’

A sea on fire

Alison MacLeod’s novel Unexploded, long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, was published twelve years ago today. Set in Brighton during the early stages of World War II, the story revolves around the lives of Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont, a married couple navigating the tensions and fears of wartime life as they face the imminent threat of a German invasion. In particular, the narrative contains vivid portrayals of the beach and piers being closed down and shut off from daily life, one character even imagining the sea on fire.

MacLeod is a Canadian‑British novelist, short story writer, and academic, born in Montreal and raised in Quebec and Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has lived in England since 1987, and has become a dual citizen. She was Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester until 2018. Since then she has been writing full time while maintaining visiting academic roles and serving as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. While Unexploded was published on 26 July 2013, and is her best-known work (having been serialised on BBC Radio 4), Bloomsbury has also published a story collection, All the Beloved Ghosts ( 2017), and the novel Tenderness (2021).

In Unexploded, Geoffrey is appointed superintendent of a newly improvised internment camp for enemy aliens, while Evelyn, restless and emotionally isolated, begins volunteering there. She meets Otto Gottlieb, a German‑Jewish painter labeled a ‘degenerate’ and interned under Geoffrey’s supervision. They begin an emotional entanglement that forces Evelyn to question her marriage, motherhood, and moral compass. Geoffrey, meanwhile, spirals into his own moral failures: prejudice, infidelity, and emotional cowardice. 

Unexploded can be previewed at Googlebooks. Here are two extracts. 

Chapter 14, page 103

‘A hundred yards from the Palace Pier, Geoffrey let himself loiter under the canopy of a derelict oyster stand. The day was overcast, the sea the colour of gunmetal, and the beach abandoned, closed for the war by order of the corporation. The signs had been hammered to the railings down the length of the prom.

He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. On the Pier, the rides stood quiet. Only a few defiant anglers tried their luck from the end of the deck. In the tide, mines bobbed beneath the surface, out of view, horned and deadly. Every fishing boat had vanished, as if by some ill-fated sleight of hand.

He tried to focus on the survey for the Committee, on the report he would need to compose to confirm that all was in place for Churchill’s visit. He’d been avoiding the task all week.

He cupped the flame of his lighter against the breeze and drew hard on his cigarette. Every beach chalet, including his own, had been strategically manoeuvred and filled with stones. Up and down the shingle, anti-landing-craft spikes lay in heaps, ready to be dug in. Vast coils of barbed wire blotted the views east and west, while concrete tank-traps stood five feet high, colonising the shore. Across the King’s Road, the elegant rooftops of the Grand Hotel and the Métropole had been upstaged by the guns on the new naval station.

Without the boats, without the herring dees and the winkle- pickers, the shingle was a bleak vista darkened by the apparatus of war and the rank of oil drums that stretched endlessly towards Hove. Each drum squatted beneath the prom, ready to be rolled down the beach, past the ghosts of erstwhile paddlers, children and old people, into the sea. Each bore ten thousand gallons of petrol, and, for a moment, looking out, he saw it, the impossible: a sea on fire.

Even as he walked the beach, white sheets and pristine table linen were hanging from every window on the Channel Islands. That was the morning’s news.

Any day. It could be any day.’

Chapter 22, page 169

‘If London looked to the steadiness of Big Ben and the gravitas of St Paul’s for a reminder of dignity in strife, Brighton’s emotional compass had been the ring-a-ding-ding and the music, the electric lights and the ticket-stub happiness of the Palace and West piers. When the Explosions Unit had arrived that evening back in June, the town prepared to lose its bearings. Even to the casual observer, each pier looked like nothing less than a welcoming dock, an unloading zone for any invading ship, and while both were spared outright destruction, section after strategy section - of decking, piles and girders - was blasted into the sea.

That year, Alf Dunn, Tubby’s middle brother, turned fourteen and craved something more than digs in bombed-out houses. As the starlings gathered and the sun slid from the sky, he and a dozen others also descended on the seafront.

It was no casual operation. They had wire-clippers for the barbed-wire fencing, rope from a builder’s yard, switchblades for cutting it, and mud for camouflage. The tide was rising, but the evening itself was calm, and there was just time to cast a rope bridge from gap to gap, using the stumps of the blasted piles and relying on Tommy Leach’s skill with knots.

The trick to a successful traverse, Ali explained, was to lie on top of the rope, bend a knee, hook the foot of that same leg over the rope, and keep the other leg straight for balance. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Your pins don’t move. It’s your arms and hands that get you from end to end. If you slip under the rope, don’t panic. Hook a leg and the opposite arm over, and push down with the other hand to right yourself.

Tubby and Philip had been allowed to bring up the rear, if only to bear witness and to carry the bucket of camouflage mud. They watched Alf army-crawl his way to the first, second and third landings, wave from the deck, and glide back.’

Two Grey Herrings

Here is the 12th of 25 stained glass window designs on the Palace Pier which AI and I are using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained Glass Window 1 for background. This one shows a stylised coastal landscape. In the foreground, two fish lie on a pebbly or rocky shore, their bodies rendered in shades of green and outlined in black, with prominent red eyes. Behind them, a golden-yellow beach meets a bright blue sea composed of layered bands of darker and lighter blues. In the distance, a white sailboat with a red sail floats on the water under a sky filled with stylised white clouds and pale blue light. 

A limerick starter

Two fish on the shingle lay low,

With clouds and a sailboat in tow.

Said one with a grin,

‘We’re caught in a spin -

Glass trapped us, but what a great show!’

Two Grey Herrings (with apologies to Agatha Christie)

It was just past eight on a damp August morning when Miss Ada Fossett, retired milliner and part-time crossword champion, made her habitual stroll along Brighton Beach. The tide was out, the air thick with salt and gossip, and the seafront unusually quiet - save for a small cluster near the Banjo Groyne.

Laid side by side on the shingle were two fish. Not just any fish - herrings, unmistakably grey, and arranged with such unsettling symmetry that Ada stopped mid-step. One pointed east, the other west, as though in disagreement over where the truth lay. Between them, embedded in the pebbles, was a torn page from The Times crossword, Tuesday’s edition - curiously, only one clue had been filled in: 8 Down: Red herring (6,7).

Inspector Blodgett of the Brighton constabulary was summoned. Gruff, sceptical, and already two sugars into his second tea, he at first dismissed the fish as the work of pranksters. But Ada, glancing sideways at the crossword, murmured, ‘Not red. Grey. Someone’s being precise.’

The investigation led them through a web of local characters: a disgraced professor of ichthyology turned beach artist, a jilted puppeteer whose seaside show had recently closed, and a fortune-teller with a vendetta against crossword compilers. All had motives - revenge, reputation, or riddles.

The breakthrough came not from forensics, but from fish. A witness recalled seeing a man in a pinstripe suit carefully placing the herrings at dawn. Not just any man - Mr Edwin Trellis, publisher of The Times puzzle section, known for his weekly beach swims and unorthodox marketing tactics.

Confronted, Trellis confessed. It was a publicity stunt for a new cryptic clue series, inspired by Christie’s own fondness for misleading leads. But the twist - and there always is one - came when Ada, flipping the paper over, found a scribbled name and date. That very morning. Trellis hadn’t written it.

The real mystery had been hijacked. Beneath the herrings, buried shallowly in the pebbles, police unearthed a small locket containing a photograph - and a name long believed lost in the postwar chaos. The fish were not just herrings. They were a sign. And someone, somewhere on the Brighton seafront, was using sleight of species to point towards a cold case, about to be warmed by the sun.

‘Grey herrings,’ Ada murmured, eyes narrowing. ‘Not a distraction. A direction.’

Burchill on the beach

‘The revamps, the facelifts and the attempts by a clumsy council to write the indigenous Brighton working class out of the upwardly mobile picture are real enough. But on the beach, you get the distinct feeling that Brighton will never completely pull its socks up.’ This is the Brighton treasure Julie Burchill - 66 years old today - writing about the seafront nearly two decades ago.

Born in Bristol in 1959, the daughter of a communist factory worker and a dinner lady, she left home at 17 for London to work at the New Musical Express. She quickly made a name for herself with a brash, slangy style and fierce opinions. Alongside fellow writer Tony Parsons, she helped define the paper’s punk-era voice, becoming a leading figure in a new, confrontational brand of journalism.

In the 1980s Burchill moved from music writing into broader columns and cultural commentary, writing for The Face, The Sunday Times, and The Mail on Sunday. She also spent several years as a star columnist at Cosmopolitan, where her wit and provocations reached a wide female readership. Her work was marked by controversial takes on everything from feminism to class, and she revelled in the notoriety. 

In 1991, Burchill with her husband Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young launched a short-lived magazine, Modern Review, under the slogan ‘Low culture for high brows’. Also in the early 1990s, Burchill relocated to Brighton. She became one of the city’s most talked-about residents, living out her fondness for seaside sleaze, nightlife and scandal. In 2007, she co-wrote Made in Brighton with Daniel Raven, a rollicking blend of personal memoir and city guide, paying tribute to Brighton’s gay culture, drugs scene, and enduring flair for eccentricity. The book can be previewed on Googlebooks. Here is a sample.  

‘Charlotte [Raven, fellow writer on the Modern Review] also called the old neglected seafront ‘a wonderful prompt for human narratives’ - and looking at the pristine Artists Quarter, Fishing Museum and Volleyball Court, where one’s responses are all cued up and ready to go, you could argue that prosperity has been paid for with sheer seedy character. And that this could be a chic, bustling promenade anywhere from Positano to San Francisco, as the beautiful people linger over a latte and plan a hard day’s antique shopping.

But I’m nit-picking. When it still feels like an honour to live somewhere after eleven years, how bad can it be? And it’s still so not London! Beyond the Palace Pier going east towards the Marina, the chill, slick hand of the style police has not yet crushed Brighton’s grand tradition of agreeable, ramshackle blowsiness, and you can still ride the quaint Volks Railway past the abandoned Peter Pan’s Playground and the desperately dated, utterly adorable ‘nudist beach’. Here Little Englander Modernists like me can find the rusty radiance of the resistance to the global village and the Euro-portion which is summed up in the county motto of Sussex: We Won’t Be Druv.

The revamps, the facelifts and the attempts by a clumsy council to write the indigenous Brighton working class out of the upwardly mobile picture are real enough. But on the beach, you get the distinct feeling that Brighton will never completely pull its socks up. Already the white-flight London breeders who came here to create a vast Nappy Valley - a kind of Clapham-on-Sea - are appalled by our unparalleled drug-taking [. . .] and assorted high jinks. Even between the piers, where the gentrification is most obvious and where every citizen should in theory be shopping for hand-painted objets, the vast dope cloud still rises, like a phoenix in reverse, silently and smilingly refusing to be born-again as an on-message, user-friendly unit of the ongoing British economic miracle which has seen us over the past decade come to work the longest hours in Europe - and along the way become one of its most miserable nations. But time passes so quickly in the blameless, shameless sun, on the eternal beach, where the going out and coming in of the ocean makes the only real sense. A working day can be lost forever in the blink of an eye, in forty winks, in a couple of cans of Stella and a cheeky spliff. And a good thing too.

[. . .]

Now I am one of those maddeningly jammy dodgers. I’ve been here in Brighton for twelve years, and the weird thing is that in the best possible way it still doesn’t feel like home. Instead it feels like I somehow got out of going home - time and time and time again - and that I escaped from the life that had been mapped out for me in the landlocked limbo of London; the slo-mo, stressed-out, wound-down fatalism of growing up and growing old. Now that’s lucky, if you like.’

The top photo is accredited to Dan Chung in a 2014 Guardian article. More on Burchill can be found at Wikipedia,

41 Places 41 Stories

‘Mark walks the shingle, slowly sweeping his metal detector from side to side listening for the bleep on his headphones? This isn’t his usual haunt. More often he’s down at the Volk’s Railway, where he takes his wife to get out of the flat. His wife’s not very well. She can’t go out on her own any more.’ This is the start of Story 32, about Brighton Beach, in William Shaw’s 41 Places 41 Stories (UnMadeUp, 2007). The small curio of a book was first published as a city-wide installation commission by the 2007 Brighton Festival.

Shaw, who now lives in Brighton, was once a music journalist but, around 2013, he turned - successfully to crime fiction (indeed, he has just published his latest novel - The Red Shore). 41 Places 41 Stories - which can be sampled online at Googlebooks - relates ‘true stories picked up on street corners, taxi ranks, pubs, car parks - even in public toilets’, with each one inhabiting its own geography: a specific place in the centre of a British seaside town. The publisher’s blurb explains; ‘If the essence of narrative is change, William Shaw distils it here in these tales of love, loss and self-discovery. Brighton is, after all, a place where people have always come to transform themselves.’ 

Story 32 is entitled The other day he found a 1966 American silver dollar on the beach. Makes you think, and it has a location subtitle - The beach between the piers. (The photograph above is my own, and has no direct link to Shaw’s book.) Here’s the piece: 

‘Mark walks the shingle, slowly sweeping his metal detector from side to side listening for the bleep on his headphones?

This isn’t his usual haunt. More often he’s down at the Volk’s Railway, where he takes his wife to get out of the flat. His wife’s not very well. She can’t go out on her own any more.

Today, though, his daughter’s down to visit. She’s taken her mother out, so he’s come down here for a change.

He bends down and starts to dig with his trowel. Just under the surface, a shiny 50p piece.

When he was a boy living in First Avenue in Hove, this is where he used to scavenge empty coke bottles for the 3d return money. He would climb up under the West Pier and scour the beams for sixpenny bits that had fallen through the gaps in the boards.

Some make their living down here with metal detectors. At dawn, a half dozen of them will be inching across the stones picking up cash dropped from the pockets of drunken clubbers.

Not Mark. He’s not interested in the money any more. He spent his life going ninety miles an hour. Last couple of years he’s just stopped. For him this is more like archaeology - finding something, wondering how it got there. The other day he found a 1966 American silver dollar on the beach. Makes you think. What’s the story? It’s just a buzz, not knowing what you’re going to pull out. Like fishing.

Tonight he’s cooking sea bass, his favourite. He does all the cooking at home. He is the glue, the one that holds it together.

See those buildings on the seafront? Mark’s been on the roofs of most of them. He used to be a tiler. Working so high up all your life gives you a perspective. Up there, you lose the fear of dying, and with it, your sense of selfishness.

Another noise in his headphones. He reaches down and picks up a rust-crusted penny. That one may have been down there for years.’

Pining for Sabrina Zembra

‘He began to think that if he passed away from this laughing and murmuring crowd, and went out to the end of the pier, and quietly slipped down into the placid waters, the world would be none the worse for the want of him, and a good deal of heart-sickness would come to an end.’ This is from Sabina Zembra, a lesser known novel set in Brighton by Victorian author William Black.

Black was born in Glasgow in 1841. He initially studied art, but became a reporter for Scottish newspapers. Later, in London, he worked for the Morning Star and Daily News, serving as a war correspondent during Garibaldi’s campaign and the Franco-Prussian War. His breakthrough novel, A Daughter of Heth (1871), marked the start of a prolific literary career. Known for his lyrical prose, romantic plots, and vividly rendered landscapes, he became one of the most widely read novelists of the 1870s and 1880s - see Wikipedia.

Black’s work often balanced sentiment with moral seriousness and featured strong, emotionally intelligent female characters. His best-known novels include The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872), A Princess of Thule (1873), and MacLeod of Dare (1879). Though his popularity waned after his death, in his lifetime he was widely admired, with some critics likening his descriptive power to that of Thomas Hardy or even early Tennyson.

While primarily associated with Scotland and London, Black and his second wife, Eva Simpson, moved to Brighton in 1878 - see The Victorian Web. And Brighton then featured in his 1881 novel, The Beautiful Wretch, and subsequently in Sabina Zembra. In this latter novel, the reflective opening scenes unfold along the town’s seafront and Chain Pier, capturing its blend of gaiety and melancholy. Black actually died in Brighton in 1898 and was buried near the church door of St Margaret's, Rottingdean, close to the grave of Edward Burne-Jones.

Sabina Zembra was first published in 1887 by Macmillan - the full work is freely available to read online at Internet Archive. It explores themes of love, melancholy, and social expectation against the contrasting backdrops of London and the English seaside. The story centres on Walter Lindsay, a sensitive, somewhat disillusioned man who escapes the pressures of life in London by retreating to Brighton. Though surrounded by crowds, he is inwardly solitary, his thoughts haunted by a woman named Sabina Zembra. Sabina is not just a love interest but a symbol of a purer, nobler affection in a world that feels increasingly hollow. As Lindsay wanders through Brighton’s piers and promenades, he contemplates life, despair, and romantic ideals. Here is a passage that opens chapter 15 entitled The Wedding.

‘It was a summer night at Brighton. The tall house-fronts were gray and wan against the crimson and yellow still lingering in the north-western heavens; but far away over the sea, to the south-east, there dwelt a golden moon in a sky of pale rose-purple; and the moonlight that fell on the wide waters was soft and shimmering, until it gleamed sharp and vivid where the ripples broke on the beach. Here and there the stars of the gas lamps began to tell in the twilight. There was a faint murmur of talking; young girls in their summer costumes went by, with laughter and jest; there was an open window, and somebody within a brilliantly lit drawing-room was singing - in a voice not very loud but still audible to such of the passers-by as happened to pause and listen - an old Silesian air. It was about a lover, and a broken ring, and the sound of a mill-wheel.

Walter Lindsay was among these casual listeners - for a minute or two; and then he went on, with some curious fancies in his head. Not that any young maiden had deceived him, or that he was particularly anxious to find rest in the grave; for this is the latter half of the nineteenth century, and he, as well as others, knew that Wertherism [morbid sentimentality, regarded as characteristic of Werther, the hero of Goethe’s romance] was now considered ridiculous. But somehow London had become intolerable to him; and he could not work; and - well, Brighton was the nearest place to get away to, while one was considering further plans. It was a little lonely, it is true; especially on these summer evenings, when all the world seemed, as it were, to be murmuring in happiness.

Over there was the Chain Pier. A few golden points - gas lamps - glimmered on it; and beyond it there was a small boat, the sail of which caught the last dusky-red light from the sunset, and looked ghostly on the darkening plain. In that direction peace seemed to lie. He began to think that if he passed away from this laughing and murmuring crowd, and went out to the end of the pier, and quietly slipped down into the placid waters, the world would be none the worse for the want of him, and a good deal of heart-sickness would come to an end. He did not really contemplate suicide; it was a mere fancy. Killing oneself for love is not known nowadays, except among clerks and shop-lads; and then it is generally prefaced by cutting a young woman’s throat, which is unpleasant. No, it was a mere fancy that haunted him, and not in a too mournful fashion.’

Dombey’s son on Brighton Beach

Charles Dickens, who died 155 years ago today, knew Brighton well. He first visited the seaside resort in October 1837 and returned frequently over the next 30 years, often staying at the Bedford Hotel (now replaced by the modern Holiday Inn on the seafront following the original building’s destruction by fire in 1964). He also lodged at the Old Ship Hotel and with friends in private residences. While in Brighton, Dickens worked on parts of several novels, including Bleak House, Barnaby Rudge, and most notably Dombey and Son.

Dickens appreciated Brighton not just as a place to write, but to observe. In a newly discovered letter, he wrote: ‘I feel much better for my short stay here, also the characters one meets at these seaside places.’ In 2012, a blue plaque was unveiled on the Holiday Inn to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, commemorating his strong links to the town. Further details of his Brighton connections are available at the Brighton & Hove Museums website.

In Dombey and Son, the Brighton coast plays a central symbolic and narrative role. The novel, a meditation on pride, emotional repression, and redemption, follows the life of Paul Dombey, a cold, ambitious businessman obsessed with his shipping empire and the hope of passing it to a male heir. The story opens with the birth of his son, Paul Jr., and the simultaneous death of his wife. Dombey’s daughter, Florence, is largely ignored - valued neither in business nor lineage.

The frail and introspective Paul Jr. is advised to spend time by the sea for his health, and so he and Florence are sent to Brighton. They stay first at the austere Mrs. Pipchin’s boarding house and later at the school of the formidable Dr. Blimber. These episodes mark some of the most poignant and poetic passages in Dickens’s writing, in which Brighton Beach becomes more than a setting: it is a landscape of revelation, sorrow, and spiritual inquiry.

In chapter eight, we discover Paul’s favourite place is not among the bustling crowds, but a quiet, remote stretch of beach, where Florence reads to him and he reflects deeply: ‘His favourite spot was quite a lonely one, far away from most loungers; and with Florence sitting by his side at work, or reading to him. . . he wanted nothing more.’ He becomes fascinated by the sea, sensing a hidden language in the endless waves: ‘The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?’ She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But I know that they are always saying something. Always the same thing.’

The beach also gives Dickens the chance to provide Paul with limited social interaction: a daily encounter with a gruff, elderly fisherman - ‘a weazen, old, crab-faced man in a suit of battered oil-skin’ - adds colour to his otherwise quiet days. Yet solitude and introspection dominate: ‘Another time, in the same place, he fell asleep, and slept quietly for a long time. Awaking suddenly, he listened, started up, and sat listening.’

The Victorian Web website has several illustrations of Brighton Beach from different editions of Dombey and Son. The one immediately above is by Harold Copping for Mary Angela Dickens’s Children’s Stories from Dickens and the one above that is by W. L. Sheppard for the 1873 American Household Edition of Dombey and Son.

One cannot say the novel ends happily since despite the hopeful associations of sea air and convalescence, Paul’s condition worsens, and he dies young. Florence is heartbroken and the emotional void between her and her father deepens. Nevertheless - this is Dickens after all - there is, ultimately, a sense of moral reckoning and eventual redemption.

Beyond writing retreats, Dickens’s relationship with Brighton was also marked by performance. He gave several public readings in the town, including a much-admired appearance at the Royal Pavilion on 9 November 1861, where his dramatic rendering of scenes from his novels drew packed audiences. Brighton featured again on his Farewell Reading Tour in 1867-1868, during which his health was already deteriorating. Indeed, he would die on 9 June 1870, Much more on Dickens can be found at Wikipedia.

The faintest and purest blue

It is 110 years since Eric Cyril Egerton Leadbitter published his first novel, Rain Before Seven, partially set in Brighton where the ‘dazzling sea [. . .] tumbles in white foam over the shingle’ and where the sea can be ‘washed [. . .] to the faintest and purest blue’. Little seems to be remembered of Leadbitter, though he seems to have abandoned a promising literary talent for a career in the civil service.

He was born in 1891, possibly in Hexham, and educated at Shrewsbury, but his early life and education are otherwise barely documented in public records. He began a literary career during World War I, publishing a series of novels that reflected the themes and styles of his era: Rain Before Seven (1915), The Road to Nowhere (1916), Perpetual Fires (1918), Shepherd’s Warning (1921), Dead Reckoning (1922), and The Evil that Men Do (1923). Wikipedia lists only these six novels for him, and, similarly, the British Library catalogue has only these same six titles.

Thereafter, Leadbitter built a distinguished career in the British civil service. Who Was Who lists Tunbridge Wells as his place of residence. In 1937, he was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO), an honour recognising his service to the Crown. His most significant administrative role came in 1942, when he was appointed Clerk of the Privy Council, a senior position he held until 1951. During his tenure, he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor in 1946 and, in 1951, was promoted to Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO), reflecting the high regard in which he was held within government circles.

On the personal front, Leadbitter married Irene Lloyd in 1918, though there seems to be no public information regarding his family life and whether he had children. He died in 1971. 

Rain Before Seven was first published in 1915 by G. Allen & Unwin. The story follows a young boy named Michael as he prepares to leave home for the first time. The narrative explores Michael’s emotions and experiences leading up to his departure, including his relationships with family members, his imagination, and his fears about the future. The book is divided into three parts: The Idle Apprentice, Obscurity and Enlightenment, and the US edition (1920) can be freely read online at Internet Archive. Incidentally, several books with the same title have appeared over the years, most likely because of the popularity of the traditional weather lore ‘Rain before seven, fine before eleven’.

The following extract about Brighton is taken from Leadbitter’s Rain Before Seven, chapter XXVI entitled The Prodigal Brother.

‘Brighton is a most deceptive town; the hints that it gives of its past are as little to be relied upon as those of certain of its lady visitors when they are in reminiscent mood. To a visitor who is enterprising enough to explore them, the little by-streets that lead from the Western Road appear to belong to a past when the town slept the sleep of gentle Georgian cathedral cities, untainted by the neighbouring metropolis. There are strangely huddled little houses that might date from an innocent youth that touched hands with the medievals. Nevertheless, as every Londoner and many natives know, a century ago nothing except a fishing village lay at the foot of the cliffs where Brighton with her flaunting pride now stands. Evil fairies attended her christening; George of ill-repute was her sponsor, and she has never thrown off the shadow of her early influences. Brighton with all her witchery is the British Paris; she is the pleasure suburb where Londoners pursue their vices in secrecy. But who can resist the witchery of the air? the dry and sunny wind, and the dazzling sea that tumbles in white foam over the shingle? Not, at any rate, a group of young people who were passing along the front one sunny April morning, a year later than the events recorded in the last chapter, with the brisk and ecstatic walk that vouches for an early bathe behind, and a voracious appetite for a breakfast to come. The previous day had been stormy, and mists of rain had washed the sea to the faintest and purest blue. On the foreshore, a few figures were bending over the pebbles, searching for the small treasures that a heavy sea like that of the preceding day usually unearthed. The party on the promenade stopped to watch them, and one of the girls asked her companion what they were doing.

“I don’t know much about it,” he replied, “but I have an idea they are called beach-combers, or something. They rake up old sixpences and things among the stones.”

“How exciting! I suppose they are always hoping to find a wonderful buried treasure. Rosie!” she called to an older girl who was behind her, “what do you say to having a shot at it?” ’

[NB: The portrait of Leadbitter has been screenshot from the National Portrait Gallery website.]

I am Brighton

This day seven years ago, Century published Dorothy Koomson’s The Brighton Mermaid. Said to be a gripping thriller, it follows the story of teenagers Nell and Jude who find the body of an unidentified young woman on Brighton beach. On her right arm is the tattoo of a mermaid, and below it are etched the words ‘I am Brighton’. The narrative shifts between past and present as Nell tries to uncover the truth about her death and the disappearance of Jude 25 years later. 

Koomson is a Brighton-based British novelist and journalist, widely regarded as one of the UK’s most successful Black authors of adult fiction, with her books translated into over 30 languages and sales exceeding 2.5 million copies in the UK alone. Born in London to Ghanaian parents, she wrote her first novel at age 13 and later earned degrees in psychology and journalism from Leeds University. She began her professional writing career in women’s magazines before publishing her debut novel, The Cupid Effect, in 2003. Her third novel, My Best Friend’s Girl, became a major bestseller, and The Ice Cream Girls was adapted into a successful television drama. 

The Brighton Mermaid - first published on 17 May 2018 - is said to be fast-paced and thrilling, and to explore ‘the deadly secrets of those closest to you’. Here is the moment, right at the start of the book, Nell is narrating, when the reader is first taken on to Brighton beach. It is 1993. 

‘From the promenade, I’d spotted her down on the beach, the light of the almost full moon shining down on her, and said we should check to see if she was all right. Jude had wanted us to keep going, getting back to her house after we’d sneaked out was going to be tricky enough without getting back even later than 3 a.m., which was the time now. But I’d insisted we check. What if she’d twisted her ankle and couldn’t get up? How would we feel, leaving someone who was hurt alone like that? What if she’s drunk and has fallen asleep on the beach when the tide was out and is now too drunk to wake up and pull herself out of the water? How would we live with ourselves if we read in the paper in the morning that she’d been washed out to sea and had drowned?

Jude had rolled her eyes at me, had reminded me in an angry whisper that even though our mums were at work (they were both nurses on night duty), her dad was at home asleep and could wake up any minute now to find us gone. He’d call my dad and then we’d be for it. She’d grumbled this while going towards the stone steps that led to the beach. She was all talk, was Jude - she wouldn’t want to leave someone who was hurt, she would want to help as much as I did. It wasn’t until we’d got nearer, close enough to be able to count the breaths that weren’t going in and out of her chest, that we could to see what the real situation was. And I said that thing about her being asleep.

‘I’ll go up to the . . . I’ll go and call the police,’ Jude said. She didn’t even give me a chance to say I would do it before she was gone - crunching the pebbles underfoot as she tried to get away as fast as possible.

Alone, I felt foolish and scared at the same time. This wasn’t meant to turn out this way. We were meant to come to the beach and help a drunk lady and then sneak back to Jude’s house. I wasn’t supposed to be standing next to someone who was asleep but not.

She must be cold, I thought suddenly. Her vest top was soaked through and stuck to her body like a second, clingy skin; her denim skirt, which didn’t quite reach down to her knees, was also wringing wet. ‘I wish I had a blanket that I could pull over you,’ I silently said to her. ‘If I had a blanket, I’d do my best to keep you warm.’

It was summer, but not that warm. I wasn’t sure why she was only wearing a vest, skirt and no shoes. Maybe, I thought, her shoes and jumper have already been washed out to sea.

I leant forwards to have another look at her. I wanted to make her feel more comfortable, to move her head from resting on her left arm at an awkward angle, and stop her face from being pushed into the dozens and dozens of bracelets she wore on her arm. Thin metal ones, bright plastic ones, wood ones, black rubbery ones, they stretched from her wrist to her elbow, some of them not visible because of where her head rested. I wanted to gently move her head off her arm and lay it instead on myrolled-up jacket. I didn’t dare touch her though. I didn’t dare move any nearer, let alone touch her.

Her other arm, the right one, was thrown out to one side, as if it had flopped there when she’d finally fallen asleep. That arm had only one slender silver charm bracelet, hung with lots of little silver figures. That arm’s real decoration, though, was an elegant and detailed tattoo of a mermaid. My eyes wouldn’t leave the tattoo, which was so clear in the moonlight. Usually when I saw tattoos they were a faded greeny-blue, etched into peach or white skin, but this one was on a girl with the same shade skin as me. Deep black ink had artistically been used to stain and adorn most of her inner forearm. I leant a little more forwards, not wanting to get too close, but fascinated enough to want to have a better look. It was truly beautiful, so incredibly detailed it looked like it had been carefully inscribed onto paper, not rendered on skin.

I could see every curl of the mermaid’s short, black Afro hair; I could make out the tiny squares of light in her pupils; I could count every one of the individually etched scales on her tail, and I could see droplets of water glistening on the bodice, shaped of green seaweed, that covered her torso. The mermaid sat on a craggy grey rock, her hands demurely crossed in her lap, smiling at anyone who cared to look at her.

I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was mythical, she was a picture, but she was also like a siren at whom I couldn’t stop staring. In the waters beneath the mermaid’s rock, there were three words in a swirling, watery script: ‘I am Brighton’.

Guest: Brighton Beach, Dunedin, New Zealand

Brighton Beach, the fifth of this column’s guest beaches, is situated just 20 kilometers southwest of Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. A rather idyllic settlement, Brighton offers expansive golden sands, gentle surf, and a family-friendly atmosphere as demonstrated by its annual Gala Day right next to the beach. As it happens, I have not only been to the place (diary entry below), but I have just learned that the renowned Kiwi poet James K. Baxter grew up in and around Brighton.

Brighton - with a population of about 1,500 - lies on the Otago peninsula within the city limits of Dunedin. It is connected by coastal road with the Dunedin commuter settlement of Waldronville to the northeast and with Taieri Mouth to the southwest. The settlement of Ocean View lies immediately to the east of Brighton, separated from it by a large bluff (simply known as ‘Big Rock’) which juts towards the ocean. The beach is popular for summer day trips from Dunedin; and, at low tide, visitors can explore tidal pools, and the nearby Otokia Creek which offers a scenic walking track through a nature reserve.

Nearby, the Beachlands Speedway in Waldronville offers stock car and saloon car racing events, while surfers can head to Blackhead Beach. In January, the Brighton Domain (a grassy area just behind the beach) hosts the community’s Gala Day, a family-friendly event featuring over 150 stalls, amusement rides, entertainment, and food vendors. 

The area around Brighton was not the site of permanent settlement by pre-colonial Māori, but was on their regular trails from their homes on Otago Peninsula to their traditional hunting grounds. Archaeological evidence suggests it was the site of seal and sea lion hunting, as well as hunting of moa. Stone tool making may have also taken place around the area. European settlement began in the 1860s. The town was named by an early resident, Hugh Williams, after Brighton in England. Early industries included coal mining, with lignite being plentiful at nearby Ocean View. 

As it happens, I lived in Dunedin for a year or so in 1975 (during my three-year long travels), and went to Brighton on two or three occasions. Here is a diary entry for one of those visits

September 1975: ‘Today I went for a little hitch-hike down a small coast road to a place called Brighton, a small village, and there I found a commotion as the people were standing around because a man in a power boat had been thrown out of it by the rough surf, for hours surf rescue teams and a sea place searched the rocky coast for the body and the tourists built up, cooing people and eager helpers, it all made me very sad. Then, when I got home, I had a phone call from someone who had found my kitten Ginquin because she had gone missing when I was away last week, so that made me happy again.’

While researching this article, I discovered that James K. Baxter grew up in the area. On his first day at Brighton Primary School (now Big Rock Primary School), he burned his hand on a stove, and, later, he used this incident to represent the failure of institutional education. Baxter is considered one of the preeminent writers of his generation, but he was a controversial figure (see Wikipedia), troubled by alcoholism and later converting to Catholicism and establishing a commune. He died aged only 46, in 1972, His Maori wife, Jacquie Sturm, collected and catalogued his prolific output of poems and plays, and managed his literary estate. 

During my travels, I was often to be found trekking along roadsides, hitchhiking, looking for my next ride, heading for the next unknown place. And I’d find myself reciting the same verse of poetry over and over.

Upon the upland road

Ride easy stranger

Surrender to the sky

Your heart of anger

High Country Weather (J. K. Baxter, 1945)

Roy Grace on the seafront

Exactly 20 years ago today (possibly!) Peter James’s first Roy Grace novel was published - Dead Simple. I say ‘possibly’ because while ChatGPT provides 5 May 2005 as the exact date it was first published, other sources offer 6 May, and various other dates, too. Peter James is, of course, a great advocate of Brighton and Hove with many of his much-loved crime novels set in the city.  

‘For me there was only ever one location for Roy Grace to be based,’ he told The Book Trail. my hometown of Brighton. To the outsider, Brighton is a hip, beautiful seaside city, but it has a long history of darkness - right back to its roots as a smugglers village! In Regency days it gained a reputation both as a fashionable bathing resort, but in 1841 when the London-Brighton railway line opened, criminals flooded down from London, finding rich pickings and a much nicer environment than their city! They brought cock-fighting, prostitution, pick-pockets, muggers, smugglers, burglars, and gangs. Simultaneously, with the railway enabling quick access from London, many wealthy Londoners brought their mistresses down here and it became known as a place for “dirty weekends”.

James, born 1948, is the son of Cornelia James, who, famously, was glovemaker to Queen Elizabeth II. He was educated at Charterhouse and Ravensbourne Film School, and spent several years in North America, working as a screenwriter and film producer. He has told interviewers that he briefly worked at the home of Orson Welles. Back in the UK, his literary career took off with the Roy Grace series of novels, selling more than 23 million copies worldwide and making him into a household name among crime fiction enthusiasts. His books are known for their fast-paced plots, unexpected twists, and authentic portrayals of modern policing. The list of awards on his Wikipedia bio is almost as long as the list of published novels! Since 2021, the Roy Grace novels have been successfully adapted for broadcast by ITV - giving Brighton yet more screen time!  

Here is James jogging Grace along Brighton Beach in that first novel, Dead Simple (extract taken from chapter 42).

‘Grace started his weekend the way he liked, with an early-Saturday-morning six-mile run along Brighton and Hove seafront. Today it was again raining hard, but that did not matter; he wore a baseball cap with the peak pulled down low to shield his face, a lightweight tracksuit and brand new Nike running shoes. Powering along at a good, fast pace, he soon forgot the rain, forgot all his cares, just breathed deep, went from cushioned stride to cushioned stride, a Stevie Wonder song, ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’, playing over in his head, for some reason.

He mouthed the words as he ran past an old man in a trenchcoat walking a poodle on a leash, and then was passed by two Lycra-clad cyclists on mountain bikes. It was low tide. Out on the mudflats a couple of fishermen were digging lugworms for bait. With the tang of salt on his lips, he ran alongside the promenade railings, on past the burnt-out skeleton of the West Pier, then down a ramp to the edge of the beach itself, where the local fishermen left their day boats dragged up far enough to be safe from the highest of tides. He clocked some of their names - Daisy Lee, Belle of Brighton, Sammy - smelled bursts of paint, tarred rope, putrefying fish as he ran on past the still-closed cafes, amusement arcades and art galleries of the Arches, past a windsurfing club, a boating pond behind a low concrete wall, a paddling pool, then underneath the girdered mass of the Palace Pier - where seventeen years back he and Sandy had had their first kiss, and on, starting to tire a little now, but determined to get to the cliffs of Black Rock before he turned round.’

And here is James, a year or so later, again jogging his detective along the seafront in the second of the series, Looking Good Dead (chapter 34).

‘His route took him straight down to the Kingsway, a wide dual carriageway running along Hove seafront. On one side were houses that would give way in half a mile or so to continuous mansion blocks and hotels - some modern, some Victorian, some Regency - that continued the full length of the seafront. Opposite were two small boating lagoons and a playground, lawns and then the promenade with stretches of beach huts, and the pebble beaches beyond, and just over a mile to the east, the wreck of the old West Pier.

It was almost deserted and he felt as if he had the whole city to himself. He loved being out this early on a weekend, as if he had stolen a march on the world. The tide was out, and he could see the orb of the rising sun already well up in the sky. A man walked, far out on the mudflats, swinging a metal detector. A container ship, barely more defined than a smudge, sat out on the horizon, looking motionless.

A sweeper truck moved slowly towards Grace, engine roaring, its brushes swirling, scooping up the usual detritus of a Friday night, the discarded fast-food cartons, Coke cans, cigarette butts, the occasional needle.

Grace stopped in the middle of the promenade, a short distance from a wino curled up asleep on a bench, and did his stretches, breathing deeply that familiar seafront smell he loved so much - the salty tang of the fresh, mild air, richly laced with rust and tar, old rope and putrid fish - that Brighton’s elder generation of seaside landladies liked referring to in their brochures as ozone.

Then he began his six-mile run, to the start of the Marina and back again.’