10 - On the Beach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
Summary
On the beach. The beach: location of holiday joy, of seaside pleasures, of time off in the sun at the coast – opened up for democratic leisure and pleasure by the Victorians, who invented the popular coastal holiday resort. It's where people liked to be. ‘Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside,’ sang the music hall star Mark Sheridan on his recording of 1909, making a popular hit of John A. Glover-Kind's 1907 expression of seaside desire:
Everyone delights to spend their summer's holiday
Down beside the side of the silvery sea
I’m no exception to the rule
In fact, if I’d my way
I’d reside by the side of the silvery sea.
But when you’re just the common or garden Smith or Jones or Brown
At bus’ness up in town
You’ve got to settle down.
You save up all the money you can till summer comes around
Then away you go
To a spot you know
Where the cockle shells are found.
Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside
I do like to be beside the sea!
I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play:
‘Tiddely-om-pom-pom!’
So just let me be beside the seaside
I’ll be beside myself with glee.
Glee on the beach. But being on the beach was also a metaphor for the miserably penniless, the forcefully unemployed, the jobless. This version of the beach was as a site of nautical misery, locale of forcefully retired, out-of-work, redundant sailors: the beached ones. OED beached, adj., sense 3: ‘Fig. Laid aside, discarded; unemployed (cf BEACH n. 3b)’: beach, n., sense 3b: ‘Naut. The shore, any part of the coastline off which a ship is at anchor; hence on the beach, ashore; retired… . By extension on the beach is used to mean “beachcombing, unemployed”; also (occas.) penniless, “broke”.’ The first OED illustration of which is from Jack London's novel about the poor, The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘England is always crowded with sailormen on the beach.’ Nevil Shute's apocalyptic 1957 novel about civilisation, the human even, at an abject ruined end, is aptly titled On the Beach.
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- Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century , pp. 186 - 199Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018