I suppose in terms of trying to form a picture of Thanet 200
years ago, the nearest you can get to sitting down over a meal or a drink with
a local resident from that time is reading Mockett’s Journal.
John Mockett (1775~1848) was a farmer in the Isle of Thanet
at the beginning of the 1800s. He was a churchwarden to St. Peters Broadstairs
in the Isle of Thanet at a time when the parish administered local government,
so he had considerable responsibility for the care of the population and the
environment.
His journal provides an insight into life at that time in
Thanet and particularly Ramsgate and St Peter’s.
He was partly responsible for, farming the poor sic. in
Thanet and notes that the keeper of St Peter’s Poorhouse erected a public cage
to display offenders.
Some of his thoughts involve a sort of mental triplethink,
eg. When coaches first appeared in England a law was passed to prevent men from
riding in them as it was thought too effeminate.
So the plan with this post is look at the picture of John
Mockett and read some of his journal,
we have the whole book in the bookshop, for the very keen.
The answers to the tricky Broadstairs pictures in yesterdays
post are, Trinity Church, with tower. Snow & Co was 17, High St. The Prince
Albert, High Street, midway between the station and the seafront and Balmoral
Hotel with Balmoral Gardens (facing the sea) Albion St.
Some of the scarcer Middleton Press local railway books went
out in the shop today, all of them under a tenner, see the bookshop blog http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/middleton-press-southern-in-bookshop.html
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.