When where did the first holidaymakers come to Thanet and what did they do?

Today I am going at local history from a slightly different direction. I think it would be reasonable to argue that the book was the first mass produced item, and from around 1400 to around 1750 history books detailing the lives of the rich and famous is mostly what we have to go on when it comes to working out how The Isle of Thanet developed. The first history book about The Isle of Thanet is "The History and Antiquities as well Ecclesiastical as Civil of the Isle of Tenet, in Kent" the best edition of this was published in 1736 here is the link if you want buy a copy

It is also from around this time that the rich and famous began to cause the development of our Thanet towns into what eventually became tourist towns. 

Around 1735 some London doctors discovered that if they had failed to cure most diseases with bleeding, mercury, quicksilver, purging and so on, then sending their patients of to the seaside for a few months to drink seawater and be ducked under the sea every day, by professional dunkers, would cure almost anything.  

Because only the rich could afford this treatment and the Thanet towns were the most accessible from London by sailing hoy in the days before railways, the seaside holiday developed out of watching rich friends and relatives being stripped and dunked.

This went on until 1815 when the steamboats arrived in Thanet, making this area cheaply available to the middle classes.

I have put rings on the 1780s painting by Benjamin West of Ramsgate Sands to decode what is going on

 The orange one shows the observers with the telescopes, the blue one the wealthy patient with his mug for his seawater. and the green one the professional health workers, called dunkers, who will hold him under the water once he has drunk his pint of seawater. Obviously the rich man being cured in this way is surrounded by his family, friends, servants and hangers on. He will have rented a house here where they will all be living for the duration of his cure. 

Also one without rings.

Quite soon this developed into the seaside holiday, fortunately one offshoot of this was that in 1763 Newbery and Bristow produced a guide to help people understand where to go and what to do here. You could call it a holiday guide, however as the holiday hadn't been invented and this is the first guide of its type, that I know of, it is a little strangely written. It does however give us some idea of what the Thanet towns were like 260 years ago. Nearly all of the previous books about seaside towns were histories of the area, with attempts to describe what had been going on hundreds of years before the were written.

Here are some pages from the book.

If this type of thing interests you I would recommend coming here to Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate  https://www.michaelsbookshop.com/index.htm and giving it a browse.

If you can't get here then here is the link to buy it online  http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/a_description_of_the_isle_of_thanet_1763.htm