Politics, war and religion in East Kent back in the good old days

300 years ago local government in this area was administered by the church through the church wardens, much of this was to do with what we now call social services, however back in the good old days (providing you weren’t poor, that is) this was called farming the poor.

As far as I can tell, back in the early 1700s Ramsgate was the fairly prosperous place in Thanet and probably the largest, John Lewis writing at that time says Margate was very run down.

Assuming, and there really isn’t much to go on that Ramsgate was the largest place on the island, something apparently based on shipping trade with the Baltic, then you can see it wasn’t very big    

from the Ramsgate map of 1723/36

The map of Margate also from 1723/36 looks pretty thin on the ground, Margate went through a particularly bad patch in the last half of the 1600s when they had to sell their fishing boats and as far as I can see were making do with boats that were too small to go far out to sea.

I think a lot of prosperity was much more related to what people grew close to home and it the Thanet towns what they managed to get from the sea, fish and shellfish. Bringing up a family without parish relief was seen as an achievement.

I think there is a sense in which this blog post is an advertisement for Thanet local history and more precisely for Thanet's first significant local history book, we do a cheap reprint of this book, so you can come to the bookshop after this bank holiday and browse it this is the link to the inevitable buy it now button associated with this type of advertising.

Here are a couple of the pages from the book about Margate

Apart from the S's being written like F's it's fairly readable.

This is the link to the rest of the Margate or St John's bit of the book

At this time most people would have worked when work was available, apart from on Sundays when they would have gone to church.

As John Lewis was the vicar of Margate and so responsible for farming the poor there, with the help of his churchwardens, what he has to say about the Margate then has to be from experience.

But it is also important to remember he is writing a history of Thanet and a lot of what he wrote is taken from earlier sources, so be careful to keep an eye on the marginal notes. 

 Next Ramsgate August 1940

 before

 and after

Yesterday was the anniversary of a bombing raid in Ramsgate killed 29 people, August 24th 1940. Hard also to accept that these events are slipping from living memory, when I was a child “the War” was a major topic of conversation among all of the adults, now for the most part it is becoming hazy memories of the very old.

Ramsgate is peculiar in as much as it was pretty much the first town in the UK to be blitzed, it is also among the last to lose its bombsites, with several still remaining after all this time.

I publish a booklet about the 1940 raid and most of it is available on the internet, click on this link for it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/1940/id3.htm if you want to buy the booklet click on this link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id130.htm

A bit of an odd approach to advertising, I know, either buy it or read it for nothing, but there you go.