Ravilious - Drawn to War

Like many others it seems, I enjoyed the new film about Eastbourne artist Eric Ravilious - "Ravilious - Drawn to War".  So much so I've already seen it twice - once at the cinema, once at home on Curzon's great new home streaming service.

The film is framed by Ravilious's death in the Second World War.  His life, marriage, affairs and of course paintings and designs are all explored - up to the point he disappeared on an RAF flight off the coast of Iceland.  The story's told in extracts from letters and his wife Tirzah's autobiography; interviews with admirers, experts and family members; and rare photographs from family collections and some previously unseen footage (of Ravilious and Tirzah's marriage in London in 1930). 

It's this footage which particularly sparked our interest - for what it showed about how Eastbourne's different social classes interacted in the first half of the last century. I thought I detected in the film's grainy sequence the unease felt by both Eric and Tirzah's families at what was happening that day.  

Tirzah was the daughter of a well-connected Lieutenant Colonel who'd retired to Eastbourne.  And her mother came from a wealthy Belfast shipping family.  Eric on the other hand was the grammar school educated son of a shopkeeper.  

Tirzah's class were those wealthy individuals and families who'd first holidayed in Eastbourne in the Victorian times, then settled in the large villas across the town in the decades following.  The villas now converted into nursing homes, split into multiple occupation, or otherwise knocked down and replaced by modern blocks of flats.  

The family home was on Arundel Road.  This was on the margins of the wide tree-lined avenues, elegant terraced squares and public gardens that made up what would have then been clearly identifiable as the Upperton estate.  (The house, like many of its kind, is gone now, replaced by a 1970s block of flats.  But some of the old trees remain in the gardens at the back - the house was called Elmwood, as is the block which replaced it.)

Tirzah's father served as a Poor Law Guardian, overseeing arrangements at the Old Town workhouse - a role then regarded as philanthropy.  He dabbled in politics, standing unsuccessfully for a ratepayers' party whose sole political aim was to curtail local government standing.  Tirzah attended one of the many private schools which existed in the town - West Hill, on the corner of Mill Road and Carew Road - again demolished.  Then to the art school, where her teacher was Ravilious.

Ravilious's background was the other end of the social scale.  His family lived in a modest terrace on Glynde Avenue, north of Hampden Park.  His father sold antiques (or maybe bric-a-brac) from a shop at the back of the Grand Hotel - so a living dependent on selling goods to people like Tirzah's parents.  He was declared bankrupt eventually, and also had an eccentric religious side - behaviour which caused Eric much embarrassment.

Tirzah was expected to marry someone else - a local man from a similar army family who took up a role with the Colonial Service in Africa.  Tirzah's account in her autobiography of how this dilemma played out is a screenplay waiting to be written.  But it was Ravilious she chose, and her life took a course quite different from the one on which her social background might otherwise have sent her.  

As ever in life, these things are never quite black and white.  Tirzah's father grew fond of Ravilious, and showed kindness to Eric's father during his final illness.  Her family always seemed at hand to support the couple as they navigated children and then her illness.  And Tirzah herself wrote warmly of Eric's mother.  

In the end, the thing which strikes anyone who grows familiar with the Ravilious story is this - the main characters all have their foibles, whichever layer of society they belong to; but they're still people you'd love to have known, to have met.

 

London by the Sea

As mentioned last time, I'm currently looking at some old academic articles that use Eastbourne as their subject of study.  I first examined one about housing development and its impact on local people's appreciation of the natural environment.  Now I'm looking at a study entitled "London by the Sea: Resort Development on the South Coast of England 1880-1939".  

The article was published in the Journal of Contemporary History in January 1987.  The author is Sue Farrant, who lectured in history and tourism at Brighton Polytechnic.  (I've since discovered that Sue is still writing about local history - under the surname Berry - and has published several books about Brighton).

The article introduces some of the economic and social forces driving development of resorts along the Sussex coast.  It then goes on to assess these resorts' similarities and differences in the decades that followed.  It covers a fair amount of ground, so I'm going to look at what it says about Eastbourne first, then write another blog about its analysis of the other resorts and the bigger picture.

Eastbourne is one of a group of Victorian resorts built on sites where there'd been some small-scale resort-related building in the Georgian period.  Bexhill is another.  The original settlement took the form of clusters of facilities with one or two boarding houses nearby. 

The town's subsequent development into a larger resort relied on risk-taking by the main landowner, the Duke of Devonshire, whose estate was directly involved in building and the funding of new infrastructure.  From 1849, his agents sought to develop the town into a high class resort.  And the town went on to flourish during the national building boom of the late 1870s and early 80s, becoming the fastest growing resort in Sussex.

Initially, the estate far outspent the town's local government on resort facilities.  It supported among other things construction of the pier, Eastbourne College, the Devonshire Baths -  as well as gas, water, drainage, the sea defences, the parades, and the scenic road from the town to Beachy Head.  

In 1891, the new Duke (the 9th) decided to reduce this spending.  The investment's original purpose - to generate income for the estate - was not being achieved.  The council stepped in.  By 1914, it was taking greater responsibility for the provision of basic services, and was maintaining the promenades,  developing landscape parks and providing facilities such as golf courses, libraries and museums.  

The initial development by the Devonshire estate (and by the Gilbert family, the other big landowner) was socially "zoned".  The south western area was a high class residential suburb.  The centre was shopping.  The north east contained working class housing.  The estates' agents imposed strong building controls which reinforced these differences.  Councillors - made up of builders, professional men, tradesmen providing for high class clients (for example, booksellers), plus those who had moved to the resort to live - continued to strive to preserve the town's image as a high class resort.  

Initially, Eastbourne's dependency on the railway and lack of any other form of cheap transport confined the development of facilities to inner towns and central seafront areas.  But by the 1890s, the advent of the motor car began to change this.  From 1920 onwards, a building boom led to increased urbanization.   The depressed price of land, the availability of capital to invest in building and greater choice of travel facilities (for example car, bus or train) resulted in large scale private and council housing development on newly released farmland.

The town was not without its employment challenges .  Agricultural workers from the Weald had come to Eastbourne and other resorts and worked in building.  Their wives and daughters sought positions in domestic service.  But the local economy was vulnerable to seasonal and cyclical recessions, which depressed demand for these services.  There was unemployment when the tourist season was poor or when demand for housing from newcomers to the town temporarily declined.  There was little other employment - the construction of a major railway engineering works which would have broadened the town's economic base and created jobs was blocked.  In 1887, there was a parade in the town to ask for more action to relieve unemployment.  In 1911, the local newspaper highlighted over-crowding in houses on small estates not owned by the Devonshires or Gilberts.    

So bringing all this together, Eastbourne enjoyed great success as a resort from the middle of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the Duke of Devonshire's patronage.  It sought to maintain its "superior" tone as it grew.  But like other resorts, it began to face challenges - changing clientele, suburban development, employment, and housing for the lower paid. 

I'll cover this bigger picture in a future blog.