News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 200 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.
Pretty much as a continuation of my previous post I am still trying to put together what people were doing in Thanet in the 1700s and at the moment it still does seem to be mostly the seaside medical cure. Although in this 1779 guide there is definitely something like a holiday season developing.
Ramsgate in 1795
Back in the late 1700s there were two ways of getting from London to Thanet, one was a Margate Hoy (type of boat)
Margate Hoy
The other was by stagecoach, I don't think there were any guide books for people traveling from London to Thanet by sailing hoy.
This map will expand, with a few clicks, so that it is big enough to read.
Starting with Margate, which up until the completion of Ramsgate Harbour in about 1795, was the main attraction for those wealthy enough to travel to Thanet.
On to Broadstairs
And then to Ramsgate
As you can see this guide was published before Ramsgate Harbour's inner basin was finished, the inner basin allowed the sand to be flushed out of the harbour making the harbour deep enough to admit large vessels.
A side effect of this increased the shipping in the harbour and with it the tourism in Ramsgate. Wealthy people coming to the Thanet towns brought prosperity.
The general picture I am developing is of Thanet being very poor at the end of the 1600s with a steady improvement through the 1700s, better housing, more work and better food.
As you can see I have been rereading some of the local history books we publish and putting some of the information on the internet, hopefully to inspire more local people to develop an interest too.
This week I have also been reading novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, starting with "Clara and the Sun" and now I'm on the "Buried Giant" Michael's Bookshop where I work has been busy recently so apologies if the blogging is a bit fragmented. here is the link to the most recent books we have put out on the shelves https://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.com/
I am having another go at trying to understand the internet’s
social media, Facebook is really the only other social media site I use and with
that I really only either put up what I post on my blog or link what I put up
on my blog.
With Facebook the main issue that I am getting at the moment
if spam friends requests, difficult for me as a lot of the genuine friends requests
I get are from people who have a common interest, rather than people who I would
know by name.
For the most part this is local history, but there is also a
certain amount watercolour paining related or related to the scandal involving
my old school.
I have now taken to messaging people who send me unlikely looking friends requests before approving the request.
Events on this week: 19th - 26th - York Street Gallery Exhibition 22nd - 1st May - Looping The Loop, Around Ramsgate 26th - Northwood Singers, St. Marks Church 26th - 3rd - York Street Gallery Exhibition 27th - Blend For Everyone Who Loves to Sing, The Salvation Army Church Hall 27th - Thanet Sound Crowd with Filipe Gomes, Newington Community Centre, Princess Margaret Avenue, CT12 6HX 27th - Xenia Rubinos, Ramsgate Music Hall 28th - Sam Brookes, Ramsgate Music Hall 29th - Mayor of Ramsgate Civic Dinner, Royal Temple Yacht Club 29th - Alex Paterson [The Orb] - DJ Legend Series, Ramsgate Music Hall 29th - Free Introduction to Bowls, Government Acre, The Esplanade 29th - Make Me A Star 2017 Heat Two, The Salvation Army, High Street
I pulled a skive today and went off sketching in
Broadstairs.
The main objective was to colour in the pen sketch I did at
the beginning of this month, a view looking down Albion Street from Costa.
Here is a photo for art critics.
Of course when I turned up the seat was taken so I did this
one
A sketch looking up Broadstairs High Street form Costa
Photo for art critics, whoops sorry not very good is it.
I then went off to The Old Bake House for lunch where I had
an excellent bread and cheese job, 3 types of cheese and loads of bread for £5,
I will be going there again.
As you see the angle of the view is really too acute to
sketch
All I can say about the result is that it was good practice although I will probably go back and finish it off.
All I can say is that I am starting to get some hillishness
into the picture but still have some way to go.
The political battle, with less than a week to go, is moving
into another dimension, potential Green Party ward councillor and un potential
PPC Ian Driver has tweeted
I can only take him to be
saying, "don't vote for me"
While TDC Green candidate Louise
Oldfield has accused SMA of a smear campaign because they sent out a leaflet
saying that she was against the reopening of Manston Airport. So perhaps we
have a Green Party candidate who supports TDC going for a cpo to start an
airfreight hub at Manston.
When it comes to the TDC ballot
paper, if you should vote for three candidates, you will be doing very well if
you can find three candidates there that you have even heard of.
If you, like me have got a
Waitrose card, then you will probably be getting emails from the, which you
either spam or delete without opening, I was just going to this to one when my
wife noticed the magic word "chocolate" you may find this hard to believe,
but printing this out and taking it into their shop in Ramsgate resulted in resulted
in them giving me a small box of chocolates which I ate.
Back in the local politics front, and I should say at this
point that the council's pneumatic drill, all part of turning the shop opposite
mine into social housing, has just started up again, something which hardly enamours
me to TDC or the current ruling Labour lot.
A couple of weeks ago I emailed all three of the
parties, with a cat in hell's chance of forming a leadership at TDC, Labour, Conservative
and UKIP, asking them if they had a TDC election manifesto, or at least some
document outlining their intentions if they should wind up running the council.
So far no manifesto from any of them, so perhaps they are all playing it by
ear.
This Pen and Watercolour Sketch from Marks and Spencer of
Westwood Cross Broadstairs painted today while the fairer sex in my family were shopping, used a size S Pitt pen Winsor and Newton artists
quality watercolours, mostly cobalt blue, paynes grey for the bluey grey and
ivory black for the window frames grey.
As you see the window frames are actually straight, the idea
of the curve was that it could either be a curve in or a curve out, depending
how you perceive it.
There is a sense here of taking a grey Volvo to Marks and
Spencer and looking out on purgatory, I guess purgatory isn’t so bad as long as
you are allowed paint, paper, brush and water.
I was unable to get away from work in my bookshop on Wednesday afternoon, so didn’t get any pictures of the bathing party, so many thanks to Janet Porter for letting me copy hers.
My day off today and I managed to get over to Broadstairs and take some more pictures of the people who go to considerable trouble to dress up in costumes of the period Charles Dickens wrote about.
Click on the links for the pictures for the pictures so far the bottom link is for today’s pictures if you have already seen the rest.
About 300 pictures taken today mostly of the people who make a considerable effort to dress up for the Dickens Festival.
As far as the copyright goes if it is for a non commercial purpose then please feel free to use the pictures how you like, if you need any of them in high definition email me, link on the sidebar, same if you want to use any of them for commercial purposes.
If you need any of them printed out all the libraries and most copy shops should be able to do this and I will do any that I can in the bookshop for anyone who wants them, remember it is closed on Thursdays and Sundays.
the main advantage with the large size originals is that I can crop out part of the picture and still get a fairly high definition print for you, so if there is something modern in the background or you were carrying a plastic carrier bag I can sometimes remove it.
The pictures started publishing to the internet at 5.25pm and it will be about an hour before they are all uploaded and you can see them all, it takes a lot longer to put things on the web than to view them.
Two lots of apologies here, one is some of the pictures are on their sides and I will endeavour to sort that out tomorrow, this is because the monitor I use on my day off is much smaller that the one in the bookshop.
The other is that shop and family commitments meant that I once again failed to get pictures of Margate’s Big Event.
I should point out that this isn’t a deliberate slight to the council or Margate but due to the fact that I run the shop on Saturday and like last year one of my children’s friends birthday parties falls on the Sunday and is held in Broadstairs on that day.
Finally a proper job of this one, maps are one of the most difficult things to reproduce with enough detail to be really useful tools for the historian.
The youth of Thanet has dived off of our piers for as long as anyone I know can remember and although the harbour authority here in Ramsgate are employing several security guards to try and stop this it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
Of course at one time we had the marina swimming pool with associated diving facilities, the other picture is of the diving board at Herne Bay in which is how towns that didn’t have a marina solved the problem. Well at the moment we are spending a great deal of taxpayers money inadequately policing our youth, who after all only want to engage in a healthy sporting activity.
My question here is why not pay people to operate proper diving stations instead?
The video is of Broadstairs last week.
Click here for today’s BBC news report about this.
Click here for a few pictures of Ramsgate Harbour taken today, it was far too early for the youth of today to be about, I also noticed that the BBC article seems to have changed its emphasis from Thanet to Folkestone.
Staying roughly on the theme of yesterday’s post, 1930s guides, I have put up more pages from, Come to Sunny Broadstairs the official guide for 1937.
This was a period of considerable social change mostly caused by WW1, prior to WW1 it would have been considered quite shocking for a woman to show her leg above the knee and bathing was done using bathing machines to prevent this from happening.
Between 1918 and 1937 we had advanced to the bikini as evidenced in yesterdays post.
From the historians point of view this is helpful when trying to date pictures.
There is another rather different effect caused by WW2 clothing rationing which meant that what people wore didn’t change significantly from 1939 to about 1955.
Looking through the 30 pages from this guide that I have published online I don’t think I could have dated many of the photographs closer than between those two dates.
Once again from this blogs web stats the number of people that come here by clicking on a link on another blog the only significant one not listed is Thanet Life as it has no live link to here.
This is not exactly a Thanet blog popularity chart but it is the nearest I can get to one the figures are for Absolute Unique Visitors.
I always manage to miss someone please let me know if you spot one missing.
This gives you some idea of this sites usage during the previous month. 5,328 Visits 2,269 Absolute Unique Visitors 9,005 Page Views 1.69 Average Page Views 00:02:41 Time on Site 36.32% New Visits
1,152 Visits 617 Absolute Unique Visitors 2,078 Page Views 1.80 Average Page Views 00:01:10 Time on Site 53.56% New Visits
This blog doesn’t have links from all of the major local blogs but does give a different perspective.
I put it online primarily so that recent documents produced by Thanet District Council appeared in an organised and timely manner with proper feeds, something I hope the council will eventually manage to do for itself.
Feeds are very important as it is these that make the live links (recent posts on other blogs on my sidebar or sites like http://thanetblogs.blogspot.com/ work) this is very significant with the modern web as evidenced in that no traffic at all came from the static link on Thanet Life.
As far as I can see the council feels that it is tied up in too much red tape to just embed a blog on there website and let the council officers writing the documents have access to it which would be an easy and cheap solution.
Much of the problem here relates to the fact that for ordinary people IT and the internet has become much more usable and much cheaper, after all if you post a comment here you are publishing to the internet, something that not so long ago required specialist skills and considerable expense.
All you have to do is click on the comments link at the bottom of the post, put your comment in the box and click on “publish your comment” anyone can do so.
From the councils point of view there are many people both council officers and outside agencies that benefit in maintaining some sort of mystique around IT, quite simply if they allowed the modern user friendly and often free IT facilites to be used they would be out of a job.
Various council officers that I know tell me that the situation with TDCs IT is very bad indeed, with access to normal office equipment like scanners being almost nonexistent.
Anyway back to the statistics useful to me as this blog helps to promote my local history publications and bookshop two things I hope are beneficial to Thanet.
Of further interest to me are the statistics from my little used blog http://thanetblogs.blogspot.com/ as most of the local blogs don’t have a link to it there is no point in showing where the traffic comes from, however the way a very few people use it quite intensively is very different to how my other blogs behave.
312 Visits 51 Absolute Unique Visitors 447 Page Views 1.43 Average Page Views 00:06:12 Time on Site 16.35% New Visits
One of my publications that has been particularly popular is Children’s Convalescent Homes of Broadstairs by Tony Euden click her to buy it online.
I have the following from one of my customers who would like to contact other people who stayed there as children.
“Thank you so much for the book The Children’s Convalescent Homes in Broadstairs. It was very interesting reading.
When I spoke to you on the phone, I wondered how I could get in touch with other children who had been at The Yarrow Home. You offered to put it up on your blog. It would be very kind of you if you could do so.
My name was Sally Barns and I was there in the late 1930`s, just before WW11. Perhaps there are not so many of us alive now, but I would be very interested in getting in touch with anybody who was there.”
I have put up some sample text and pictures from the book about the Yarrow Convalescent Home click here to read it.
I did a post about this tower earlier in the month and had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I had read something about it in one of my publications. It was in fact in the 1831 publication The Picturesque Pocket Companion To Margate Ramsgate Broadstairs & Parts Adjacent by William Kidd with woodcuts by G. W. Bonner, Woodcuts being favoured for this sort of guide as they can be printed with a platen press and therefore included in the text rather than having to be tipped in after the book is sewed.
Click here to see what Mr Kidd had to say about it and to look at Mr Bonners cut.
I have two copies of the original guide in stock as well as the cheap reprint.
If memory serves me right this tower was supposed to mark the highest point on the Isle of Thanet, the fact that it wasn’t actually on the highest point in Thanet only goes to show.
I thought it was one of the most attractive of the old prints that I bought today.
I have just published another reprint of a local guide, it’s undated but appears to be about 1920 most interestingly to me are the street maps within for Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Margate, Westgate, Birchington and Minster.
As this is pre the unification of the railways you can see the ways the two competing companies managed to reach both of the main towns.
The first railway to get to Thanet was the Southeastern and Chatham Railway the first station to open was in Ramsgate in 1846 as you see from the map it was at the top of the High Street, the present station, at the other end of Station Approach Road replaced it in 1924. Sometime after that (forgotten the date) the line was extended on to Margate.
Then came the London Chatham and Dover Railway via Margate that terminated at Ramsgate Sands Station that opened in 1863 and closed in 1926.
Now of course the two lines are connected together in a loop.
Click on the links below to look at to the information mentioned in this post.
Christmas shopping in the bookshop is fairly patchy today, jumping between quiet and busy, meaning that it is difficult to get on with much work, so I am publishing a few pictures that are on the pc that I don’t think I have published before.
Of all the books I have published over the past three years Mockett’s Journal is one that most needs a forum where the descendents of those named in it can comment and communicate with each other.
The old Thanet names Mockett Culmer Dewker Crampton and so on crop up throughout and I often ship copies to their descendents living all over the world.
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 at a time when local government was administered by the parish so he had considerable responsibility for the care of the population and the environment. Mockett also saw military service for 13 years as a “Yeoman of Thanet”.
This publication is the result of a journal kept by him and members of his family, it is filled with amusing information about our history the following are some examples.
When coaches first appeared in England a law was passed to prevent men from riding in them as it was thought too effeminate.
When the peace was celebrated at St. Peters Broadstairs in 1814, 436 poor persons and stewards were seated at a table 132 feet long, with about 8 inches of table each it must have been a bit cramped, admission was by ticket all had to bring their own knives and forks.
In 1828 Margate Savings Bank had to close because a clerk absconded with a large amount of money.
In the same year when Thanet people dressed up for fun at Christmas a young woman dressed as a crow was so frightened on seeing a man dressed as a bear that she died.
In 1829 the overseer of the poor in St. Peters built a cage for public offenders.
In the same year some of Thanet’s agricultural workers put out of work by the introduction of thrashing machines were deported for seven years for breaking up the machines.
Gaols at the time were fitted with treadmills for evildoers who if they didn’t keep up the pace caused a bell to ring.
Well at the moment we are spending a great deal of taxpayers money inadequately policing our youth, who after all only want to engage in a healthy sporting activity.
