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162

YARMOUTH AND LOWESTOFT

Sep. 21st 1869 [handwritten]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir, - Apart altogether from its claims as a water-
in-place, Yarmouth is thoroughly well worth a
visit. If Mr. Lecky's theory be sound, that more
intense pleasure is to be got from "the eccentric
and the grotesque" than from the perfections of
beauty, Yarmouth ought certainly to be the English
Eden. The beauty with which a patriotic historian
credits the place I must confess I have been quite
unable to discover. Its long, straight stretch of
shore, relieved by scarcely a curve, gives it a mono-
tonous, almost dreary look, while the country is so
level that one readily sympathizes with the youthful
David Copperfield's difficulty in reconciling its exis-
tence with the statement in his geography book,
that the earth was round, except indeed on the hy-
pothesis that Yarmouth lay exactly on the flat top
of one of the poles. One can, indeed, see at a glance
that it has no right to be land at all, but was
clearly meant to be a level expanse of water. It
has been unfairly filched from the sea, and a very
hard fight the robbers had for many a long year to
make their booty safe. No less than six havens
have been destroyed by the united forces of the
river from which the town takes its name - the
Yare - and of the sea, and even now, if the
German Ocean could only summon from the
tropics to its aid a good sized cyclone wave, one
vigorous dash might, to all appearance, recover its
lost ground, and once more turn Yarmouth into a
pool. It is to this long internecine war between
the sea and the amphibious bipeds on the shore that
the old part of the present town probably owes its
extraordinary construction, whcih for grotesqueness
and eccentricity has certainly no match in England,
perhaps not in the world. Placed between the
Yare and the sea, and not knowing the moment at
which a sudden rush from one might not sweep them
bodily into the grasp of the other, the wily natives,
instead of attempting to present a solid, unbroken
front of opposition to their too powerful enemy,
left a series of narrow openings in their ranks,
through which his force, broken into harmless frag-
ments, might charge and recharge in vain. These
openings are the famous Yarmouth "Rows," 154
in number, running parallel to each other, between
the river and the sea, and so narrow that the
meanest London lane would look a very Regent-
street if placed alongside of them. I measured one,
- it was I admit, the narrowest I saw, and found
that at the entrance it was little more than two
feet across. It is probably reserved for thin na-
tives, since no fat man with all his clothes on could
safely venture to thread it. In all points of com-
parison, however, but narrowness, the Yarmouth
rows have a decided advantage over the London
lanes, and it is this that makes their appearance so
extraordinary to a Londoner. He naturally ass-
ciates poverty, filth, squalor, and all sorts of misery
and crime with courts in which the inhabitants can
shake hands with each other out of the oppo-
site windows, or step at one stride across the so-
called street or lane. Every one with a watch
to lose carefully shuns such localities, or instinc-
tively buttons up his pocket if he happens to wander
into them. At night the narrow, gloomy jaws of
the Yarmouth rows must to a Cockney pilgrim of
lively imagination look even more formidable, but
in daylight one glance down them suffices to
show that they are widely different from anything
that his experience has taught him to expect. The
model row is respectability itself; its tiny toy pave-
ment of brick or stone is easily kept clean, and
shines like the deck of a man-of-war; the
houses on each side, so far from betraying
any signs of squalor or painful poverty, are,
some of them, so nicely kept, with rows of
flowerpots brightening the windows, and clustering
creepers draping the naked wall, that one begins to
wonder how people who are in a position to consider
the amenities as well as the necessaries of life
should consent to live in such close, crowded quar-
ters, and is driven to conjecture that they are a
jolly, neighbourly race, who like, out of pure good-
fellowship, to be always within talking and hand-
shaking distance of each other. And this theory
that the grotesque construction of the Yarmouth
rows is due not to strategic, but social considera-
tions, is supported by the fact that, in the "good
old times," each row took its name in friendly
fashion from the best known or the principal person
living in it. In these degenerate days of scientific
classification, arithmetic has triumphed over flesh
and blood, and each row is known by its number
with the single exception, I believe, of "Kitty
Witches'-row" - once a pet preserve of that invalu-
able public servant, the witch finder Hopkins, who
could always count upon unearthing enough ugly
women in Yarmouth, with the unmistakeable witch-
marks on their sea-tanned, shrivelled old shins, to
make a respectable official return, and satisfy Go-
vernment that public money was not being wasted.
The rows are, I am told, chiefly the resort of the
fishing population, who constitute Yarmouth's work-
ing-class; but I saw "A 1 Apartments" offered to
outsiders, and, having the curiousity to inquire, found
that a handsome suite, including kitchen, &c., could
be procured for 2s. 8d. per week; so to any tourist on
pleasure bent, but still of a frugal mind, I commend
a Yarmouth row. He will be surprised to hear that,
notwithstanding his narrowness, he can have his car-
riage driven through it up to his own door. Light
carts, as rare curiousities as the "rows" themselves,
and declared by antiquaries to be the lineal de-
scendants of the carts of the Ancient Britons, are
used to suit the narrow entrances, If not very
comfortable, they at least have all the charms that
belong to simplicity, for they consist of two boards
at obtuse angles to each other, with a pair of wheels
placed under them (instead of at the sides), in order
to economize width. Comfort is not much con-
sidered, as the only tourists they usually carry are
the fish.

I have been speaking only of the old town of
Yarmouth. The new town, built since, in his struggle
with the sea, man has got completely the upper
hand, presents as boldly unbroken a front to the
waves as any other sea-side town, and looks in con-
sequence quite as common-place. There is the
usual watering-place division between its Tyburnian
or genteel quarter, which turns by itself, in haughty
isolation, southwards, and the northern quarter,
in front of the town, where the fishermen, towns-
folk, and excursionists most do congregate. The
southerners are, I am told, a race of unimpeachable
gentility, but still they are too near the north-
erners to be really happy. No hill, as at Mar-
gate, protects them from invasion, and they
have to submit to see their own peculiar pier
crowded when the band plays with "all sorts of
people," and to hear donkeys ridden mid noisy
laughter and undignified jests beneath their own
windows, and sometimes almost against their own
sacrosanct persons. What is still worse, they are
most unfairly, though not unnaturally, themselves
confounded with their unpolished neighbours, and
taste the bitterness of feeling that the Lowes-
toftians, though only ten miles off on the same flat
coast, look down as it were from an immeasurable
height upon them, as belonging to "those queer
people in Yarmouth." The Yarmouthian Upper
Ten bear up bravely against this rare combination of
miseries, but it necessarily casts a tragic gloom over
their lives, and gives to the mildest of them a mor-
bidly misanthropic vein. They have a handsome
set of Assembly Rooms for reading and other amuse-
ments, and occasionally they attempt a dance,
struggling manfully to keep it select by excluding
all except regular subscribers. But gold, as the
poet observes, loves to make its way through sen-
tinels, and hence the company, though implicitly
to be trusted with pocket handkerchiefs or silver
spoons, is less sound on the question of pe-
digree. The residents distrust the visitors, and
visitors do not trust the residents. Hence
the tone of the ball-room becomes a trifle
too solemn and stately for these days, and suited
rather to the minuet of our grandmothers than to
the modern valse. A similar spirit of decorous
gravity is said to preside over the croquet played
on the lawn in front of the Assembly Rooms. There
is little conversation or frivilous flirtation to dis-
tract attention form the serious business of the
game, and the long solemn pauses preceding a
critical stroke suggest instinctively the low stage
music which warns a shuddering audience that the
heroine is about to do something which will plunge
her into misery for at least four acts.

The rude untutored Northerners of Yarmouth
lead a very different life. They crowd the beach,
one of the finest in England, and sprawl all
over it in divers attitudes, until it looks
all arms and legs, like a mammoth centipede.
Fruiterers, ginger-beer merchants, manufacturers of
ingenious toys and marine curiousities, carry their
stalls down to the very brink of the waves; and
visitors of a less sensual or more serious turn are in-
vited to try their weight for the small charge of one
penny, or to make scientific experiments upon
their nervous system by equally cheap shocks.