Strangers on the shore

In the years before two weeks on the Costa Brava was a holiday aspiration within the reach of working families, the holiday resorts of the East Riding – known collectively in pre-war Yorkshire as “the sea-side” – all knew their place in the hierarchy of summer esteem.

Scarborough – with two bays and as many big hotels – claimed top place. Filey came a good second, tying with Whitby, which had less refinement but more charm. In bottom place, Bridlington, whose cheap and cheerful reputation was enough to keep its landladies content.

But Hornsea and Withernsea did not figure in this league table. Hardly heard-of outside the county and mostly patronised by Hull, they kept themselves to themselves; in proper Yorkshire fashion, got on with their own business. They still do.

Part of the slightly dilapidated charm of the coastline between Bridlington and Spurn Point is its detachment from the modern idea of a holiday. Its two principal “resorts” – if such an exotic word is appropriate – are certainly neither luxurious nor loud. On a glorious summer’s day, their beaches were virtually deserted – not, I regret in protest against the interdict on dogs. The explanation – repeated all the way down the coast in was, “Wait until the school holidays”. Hornsea and Withernsea are for families and all the better for it.

Hornsea and Withernsea have chosen to ignore the lesson taught to his subjects by the much maligned and misunderstood King Canute and attempt to hold back the tide. In Hornsea the sea wall is a concrete continuation of the sand dunes which might have been constructed in Normandy to frustrate the D-Day landings.

In Withernsea it is embellished with twin towers (improbably modelled on Conway Castle) which confirm that man is as destructive as nature. They were built as the ceremonial entrance to a wooden pier, 1,200ft long. So many ships collided with it – breaking off a yard or two in one decade and a few feet in the next – that the town council decided to demolish the stump which remained and declared the towers a civic monument in their own right.

On a cloudless afternoon with the waves lapping gently against the lines of breakwaters that divide the East Coast beaches into regular 50-yard segments, it is difficult to believe that the sea offers any sort of threat. In both Hornsea and Withernsea, local residents fish with a tranquillity that borders on the complacent and certainly avoids all unnecessary exertion.

Their tall fishing rods are leant against steel tripods which they have secured in the sand against a sudden gust of wind and their lines stretch so far out into the steel-grey water that the float is invisible to the naked eye. That does not matter. The fishermen do not watch anxiously for signs of a catch. They doze in plastic chairs, surrounded by vacuum flasks, baskets of provisions and cautionary umbrellas.

When they move at all it is to reach out to pour a cup or to adjust a portable radio. Unlike many fishermen, they are willing to have their concentration disturbed by conversation. Occasionally they catch cod. But a more realistic expectation is “school bass” – young fish which swim in clusters and are thought to find lug worm irresistible. Digging the bait out of the sand, must have been the fisherman’s most energetic activity.

At four o’clock one angler announced, “Here since half past eleven and haven’t caught a thing.” It was a statement of fact, not a complaint. He was happy just to be there.

It is not only contented fishermen that Hornsea and Withernsea have in common. Both towns have been buffeted by more than the North Sea. They have been overtaken by time and what passes for progress.

It is wholly appropriate that one of the few remaining rows of Hornsea’s boarding houses – which the locals now call “bed and breakfasts” – should be in Victoria Terrace. It runs behind the slightly forlorn Marine Hotel, which has clearly seen better days.

The elderly men and women, who were playing bowls on the green in front of the Floral Hall, represent the traditional attraction of such places. But modern holiday makers want something which is brighter and more brash.

Hornsea exudes the impression that it is unable –or perhaps, to its credit, unwilling – to provide it. No music blares on its promenade.

Most of the twenty-first century visitors who stay for a week are accommodated in great estates of shining white mobile homes that never move from their cliff top-resting places. Some of them are garnished with pot plants and window boxes which suggest that they are holiday homes which are owned and rented by East Riding devotees who spend regular summer weekends on the Yorkshire coast, hoping for sunshine and sometimes finding it.

If fourth millennium archaeologists sift through what the sea has left behind, they will probably conclude that the twenty-first century inhabitants enjoyed a restricted diet. In Hornsea, the fish and chip shops come not singly but in battalions. Sea Front Chips, Admiral Guest House Fish and Chips, Sullivan Fish and Chips, JB Fish and Chips – you can take your pick on the Hornsea sea front. The brochure – by which Withernsea, to the south, advertises its charms to the world – includes a profusion of fish and chip shops in its list of special attractions.

There was a moment in Hornsea’s history when it became famous for its pottery – so famous that the uninitiated – like me – believed that clay had been thrown and then baked in the town’s kilns since medieval times. In fact the Hornsea pottery was established in 1949 by local men who relied on local money to support their eclectic tastes. Some of their best work is on display in the Hornsea Museum in Newbiggin, the main street of the town, alongside tableaux of the town’s past. The collection illustrates the pottery’s two distinctive styles - crockery of severe design, glazed in white and plain primary colours and what are known in the trade as “posy vases” and “character jugs”.

The vases were decorated with embossed ceramic flowers –usually roses and violets – and the “characters”, which or whom adorned the jugs, were animals. Rabbits and squirrels predominated. After several incipient bankruptcies and matching rescue operations, the company collapsed in 2000. Its products are still collectors’ items. It says much for the discernment of the British public that the austere crockery is valued far more highly than the representation of cuddly animals.

Outside school holidays, Withernsea – like Hornsea – seems to go to sleep. At mid-afternoon on the day of my visit, all the cafés were locked and barred and only one tea-and sandwich-take-away was open for business.

Fortunately it was in the shadow of the town’s unique attraction – the Withernsea Lighthouse and Kay Kendall Memorial Museum.

The title needs some explanation. The Kay Kendall Museum is housed, as is a lighthouse museum, within the real Withernsea Lighthouse. Its light went out for the last time in 1976. But, illuminated or not, the whiter-than-white lighthouse is itself a wonder. It towers, 127ft high, over Hull Street in the middle of the town. One guidebook says that it was built among sand-dunes. But that suggests that the sea is retreating.

The lighthouse caretaker offers a more convincing explanation for its strange location. Had it been built – like an ordinary lighthouse – close to the sea, its foundations would have been washed away years ago.

An inland lighthouse – unlike those built at the edge of rocky promontories or on solitary pillars of stone in the sea – can accommodate its keeper in what approximates to a normal suburban house, rather than leave him to bed down in the lamp-house. The Kendal family were the lighthouse keeper’s neighbour. That, and her sister’s initiative, is why part of the lighthouse is dedicated to her memory. The centre piece of the memorial is a wax effigy of Miss Kendal herself, reclining elegantly on a chaise longue with a cardboard cut-out of Rex Harrison, her husband when she died, hovering supportively behind her.

The walls of the room which celebrates Hornsea’s most famous daughter are covered in posters for the films in which she starred – Genevieve and Les Girls, a confusing title which, as a boy, I assumed related to its eponymous hero – and glamorous photographs of the star herself. Sometime during her all-too-brief career, the bridge of her nose – which could easily have launched a thousand ships – changed from convex to concave. The museum does not tell us how often, if at all, Miss Kendall returned to Withernsea during her glory years. If she did, how – I wonder – did her old friends react to the new and improved version.

But then, both Withernsea and Hornsea are full of surprises.

Perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most important – is the demonstration that the old-fashioned summer holiday has not quite passed into history. The two towns have changed with the years. But faint echoes of a more innocent past remain. They may soon be submerged in a deluge of redevelopment. Enjoy them while you can.