1950s Holidays in Dovercourt

The 1950s were the halcyon years of the British seaside resort. Working people had paid summer holidays, and earned enough to scrape together the money for a week’s seaside holiday in Blackpool, Brighton or Torquay. Or, statistically much more likely, at one of the dozens of lesser known resorts around the British coastline. Until I was nine years old, my summer holidays were spent at my grandmother's house in the gently decaying Essex resort of Dovercourt leaving memories of its musty, rusty Cliff Pavilion, choc-ices on the beach, exotic green Eastern National buses, and her tiony, cramped cottage a bus ride away from the beach.

(I have no pictures of my own from these holidays. My parents had an old roll-film camera, that gave twelve tony contact prints from a single 120 roll-film. But those pictures seem to have completely disappeared. All the pictures here are more recent or taken from various sources on the web. There are many more excellent pictures here.)

In the 50s seaside resorts were nothing new. They came into being alongside the railway network, which gave access for the middle-classes. Blackpool, which was a resort even before the railway, underwent spectacular growth from the train's arrival in 1846, and by the 1860s had its first amusement pier. By the 1930s the working classes could afford to go away for a day, especially on the bank holidays.

The Cliff Pavillion in the 1950s

By the 1950s, trainloads of happy families would descend on Torquay or Blackpool, to be met by swarms of eager landladies offering their boarding houses or bed-and-breakfasts. This was the apogee of the railway system, too, and any coastal town with a station was automatically a resort. Along the coast of Essex there were Southend, Brightlingsea, Clacton, Walton-on-the-Naze, and Dovercourt. Further north along the Suffolk and Norfolk coasts there were many more.

Our visits, though, did not involve the train, nor eager landladies. By the time I was born, my paternal grandmother had moved to Dovercourt. She had a colourful life. She grew up nearby in the Essex countryside, near Colchester, but moved to London in her 20s. From then until after the Second World War, she ran a boarding house in the very heart of London, in Soho’s Neal Street. When she retired she followed her brother who had already moved to Dovercourt. She chose a house just a few yards from his, but within a couple of years he had moved further away, so perhaps they didn’t get on all that well.

My grandmother's house in 2017

The house was in reality little more than a wooden shack, though decorated on the outside to look like the real thing. It was built on a wooden framework that sat on the bare earth, something I didn’t know about until much later when my father would spend whole weekends gradually replacing the rotten floor timbers. Amazingly it is still standing and in use as a house, over 50 years after her death.

The adjacent town of Harwich is much better known than Dovercourt. It has been an important port for centuries and has been associated with the ferry service to Holland since Victorian times. It was from just such a ferry that Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the ubiquitous engine, fell - or was pushed - on 29th September 1913. The reason for his death remains obscure to this day.

Modern Dovercourt dates from 1845, when a certain John Bagshaw bought much of the land of the existing settlement, which had existed since at least the year 1000. His idea was to create a Victorian seaside resort, but he ran out of cash and eventually went bankrupt. The house that he built for himself overlooking the sea has long since been demolished, but many of his other constructions remain.

We had no car, so our holidays always started with the Grey-Green coach that ran from Kings Cross in London to Harwich. It conveniently diverted through the housing estate where we lived. Even so it was about a mile from our house, my Dad struggling to carry two suitcases filled with our clothes and other necessities for the week. Suitcases with wheels had yet to be invented. 

The journey continued along the A12 towards Colchester and eventually Harwich. Today, it is like a motorway throughout. Towns and villages exist only as signposts at the exit ramps. But then, the road passed through the centres of all the towns and villages. Chelmsford and Colchester had old 1930s bypasses, but the bus had to stop there anyway so it couldn’t use them. Kelvedon in particular has an awkward dog-leg in its centre, so even with 1950s traffic levels, there were always jams as lorries and buses tried to negotiate their way past each other. Beyond Colchester it was just a narrow two-lane road, passing through tiny villages like Elmstead Market and Wix. In the 1950s, everybody smoked. The atmosphere in the unventilated coach was a barely-breathable miasma of rarely-bathed bodies and stale smoke. 

Once we arrived, our routine was always the same. A visit to the beach in the morning, on the exotic (to me) Eastern National green bus. Back for lunch, and back to the beach in the afternoon. We always went to the same spot, close to Cliff Pavillion so we were well-placed to walk into the town afterwards. By the 50s the Pavillion was distinctly decayed, smelling of damp, mould and rust, the waves washing up over the retaining wall that supported it. I think it was still used for the occasional evening event, though we never went.

For a small boy like myself, the beach was always about building sandcastles and other beach civil engineering. Every year I would acquire a new bucket and spade, the previous year’s having rusted away behind by grandmother’s shed. At some point during the day there would be the ritual choc-ice, eaten quickly if it was sunny, before it got a chance to melt.

Changing into swimming trunks was a complicated affair. Now, small children just undress on the beach. Nobody cares. But back then it involved wrapping a towel modestly around my waist, then fumbling under it to avoid the unthinkable possibility that someone might see something they shouldn’t. Another ritual was putting shoes back on afterwards. Rather than just walking barefoot to the promenade and brushing the sand off, it had to be washed off with buckets of water carefully collected from the waves. Then feet had to be dried, and socks and shoes reapplied, without letting anything touch the sand. At the time I just took all this for granted, as children do. But now, it seems mad.

From the Cliff Pavillion at its eastern end, the promenade stretched westwards for a mile or so. Heading westward, it got a bit wilder, until you reached the twin lighthouses. One was adjacent to the promenade and could be reached via a walkway. In the 50s you could still visit it. About a hundred yards out to sea was another, smaller lighthouse, that was quite derelict.

The two lighthouses

I never understood why there were two of them, and nobody could explain it to me. Only much later, I discovered that they worked like an ILS for guiding boats into Harwich harbour. If the two lights were vertically alined, you were on the right track. If the higher one was to the right, you turned slightly to the right, and vice versa (or maybe the other way round). This system was abandoned in 1919, so the lighthouses had been unused for 40 years already.

Beyond the lighthouses were brightly coloured beach huts, a uniquely British institution. Inside each one would be some deckchairs, probably a little gas hotplate for making the essential cups of tea, and other beach paraphernalia. Even now they are still as popular as ever.

The Promenade, in 2017

Further along you would finally come to the Warners Holiday Camp, before the promenade petered out altogether. I used to be mystified by what could be beyond it, until finally I got hold of a decent map which showed inaccessible estuaries and marshland all the way round the coast to Walton-on-the-Naze.`

My grandmother’s house was tiny. It had a small kitchen, a living room just about big enough for a dining table and a couch, and two bedrooms. I slept in what was normally my grandmother’s bed and bedroom. While we were there she retired to the other, tiny bedroom. The couch was an ancient design called a Put-U-Up which folded out to what must surely have been an extremely uncomfortable bed. This was where my parents slept. Why they had this and I had the best bed in the house, it never occurred to me to ask.

The toilet was the classic “outdoor privy”, a tiny wooden hut adjacent to the house, but you had to walk half way round it to get there. There was no bathroom. In those days a weekly bath was the norm, and while we were there, nobody took a bath.

For breakfast, the nearby general store sold fresh-baked rolls. From a very early age, maybe six or seven, it was my job to walk along the main road and fetch these - unthinkable now. Sometimes I walked further, to the road junction called Tollgate, where there was a garage and filling station. I was fascinated by cars since I was truly tiny, and I would watch in fascination as they filled up with petrol, savouring the smell of rubber, petrol and oil. I remember that the best grade of petrol, 100 octane then called five-star, cost five shillings (£0.25) per gallon.

The house was in Upper Dovercourt, a couple of miles from the town itself, and from the beach. Local buses were fairly frequent, about every half hour. But even so, we would aim for a specific bus time. My grandmother had a timetable somewhere, so we would pack up my bucket and spade and all the other beach paraphernalia and set out to get the 2.47 “country bus”. That was her term for buses that took the loop along the beach, rather than heading straight into town.

There were also less-frequent long distance buses, going to Clacton and Colchester. The Colchester bus, the 51, was an extraordinary long-distance route that went all the way to Tilbury, a relatively short bus ride from our home in Romford, passing through a long string of Essex villages on its way. In theory we could have used that to get to our holiday, though it would have taken all day and a great deal of “are we there yet?”.

Generally just once on each holiday we would take one of these to visit Clacton, Colchester or just once Walton. Clacton was the bright lights compared to Dovercourt. It had a proper beach front with fast food places, amusement parlours and souvenir shops. Dovercourt had none of that, at all, just a shack selling ice creams and soft drinks. For anything else, you had to take the short walk into the town itself. There wasn’t much there either, just the usual shops of a small provincial town. To me by far the best place was the Eastern National bus garage, a small brick building with room for half a dozen buses and that wonderful smell of diesel, old tyres and general mechanical decay.

A handful of times we ventured out on a different bus, Dick Hooks’ ancient Bedford, to go and see my grandmother’s relations in Elmstead Market, the village where she grew up. . Uncle Ernest had a real working farm, Elm Farm. He was Swiss, I think, and I never understood how he fitted into the family or how he ended up in rural Essex. I was very small and all I really remember is waiting for the bus.

Dovercourt did have a railway station, called Dovercourt Bay. It was a typical Great Eastern country station, at the far end of a back road as far from the sea as possible. The railway line ran along the bank of the River Stour, terminating at Harwich. This was an important line. There were regular express boat trains from Liverpool Street in London and from the Midlands and the North, and lots of freight. But we never took the train while we went on holiday there. 

There was a third town that made up the little metropolis, Parkeston. Soon after building the line the Great Eastern realised that the port at Harwich wasn’t big enough. They invested in a much bigger new port just up-river on the Stour, which they called Parkeston after their chairman, Charles Parkes. As well as the port they also built houses and a small town for the workers there. To serve their new town, they diverted the railway a mile or so to the north. I think my mother considered it a bit down-market, because we never went there.

My grandmother often talked about going for a walk in “The Hangings” an ominous-sounding name for a treee-shaded footpath that ran near her house. For some reason we neer went walking there. This was in fact the original straight-line route of the railway line, before it was diverted to Parkeston. It is still in use as a footpath even today.

We stopped spending our holidays in Dovercourt as soon as my parents could afford it, when I was 9. Only much later, I discovered how much my mother disliked it. We would still go down there for the day in my Dad’s delivery van, that he was allowed to use at weekends. Maintaining the decaying wooden structure of the house became a major undertaking for my Dad. It was during those visits that I would scrape together enough of my pocket money to take the train a couple of stops down the line, sitting just behind the driver and watching the journey through his windscreen.

My grandmother died in 1972. My parents inherited the house, which they sold for the princely sum of £3000. I’ve visited Dovercourt twice since. When my children were small we were looking at the house when the owner came and asked what we wanted. When we explained, we were invited in for tea. It had been completely modernised, with a proper indoor bathroom and toilet and a new kitchen. 

Another 25 years later, we visited again, this time with my grandson. The house is still there, surrounded by a tidy garden.

As for Dovercourt itself, it is sleepier than ever. The Cliff Pavillion has long since been demolished, and the promenade rebuilt. The lighthouses have been restored as a tourist attraction, over a century since they last served any useful purpose. The beach huts are still there, but the holiday camp was closed and demolished a long time ago. I doubt that anyone goes there for a week's holiday any more.