hope I could see them with fresh, unbiased eyes.
I particularly liked the idea of Cape Wrath. I know nothing about it—it could be a caravan park, for all I know—but it sounded rugged and wave-battered and difficult to get to, a destination for a serious traveler. When people asked me where I was bound, I could gaze toward the northern horizon with a set expression and say: “Cape Wrath, God willing.” I imagined my listeners giving a low whistle of admiration and replying, “Gosh, that’s a long way.” I would nod in grim acknowledgment. “Not even sure if there’s a tearoom,” I would add.
But before that distant adventure, I had hundreds of miles of historic towns and lovely countryside to get through, and a visit to the celebrated English seaside at Bognor.
Chapter 1
Bugger Bognor!
B EFORE I WENT THERE for the first time, about all I knew about Bognor Regis, beyond how to spell it, was that some British monarch, at some uncertain point in the past, in a moment of deathbed acerbity, called out the words “Bugger Bognor” just before expiring, though which monarch it was and why his parting wish on earth was to see a medium-sized English coastal resort sodomized are questions I could not answer.
The monarch, I have since learned, was King George V, and the story is that in 1929 he traveled to Bognor on the advice of his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, who proposed that a spell of fresh sea air might help him recover from a serious lung complaint. That Dawson could think of no better treatment than a change of scene is perhaps a reflection of his most outstanding characteristic as a doctor: incompetence. Dawson was in fact so celebrated for medical ineptitude that a ditty was composed in his honor. It went:
Lord Dawson of Penn
Has killed lots of men.
So that’s why we sing
God save the King.
The king chose Bognor not because he held any special affection for it, but because a rich chum of his named Sir Arthur du Cros had a mansion there called Craigweil House, which he offered to the king for his private use. Craigweil was by all accounts an ugly and uncomfortable retreat, and the king liked nothing about it, but the sea air did do him good and after a few months he was well enough to return to London. If he left with any fond memories of Bognor, he didn’t relate them.
Six years later, when the king relapsed and now lay dying, Dawson blandly assured him that soon he would be well enough to return to Bognor for another holiday. “Bugger Bognor,” the king reportedly said and thereupon died. The story is nearly always dismissed as fiction, but one of George V’s biographers, Kenneth Rose, maintains that it could be true and that it certainly would not have been out of character.
Because of the king’s short residency, Bognor petitioned to have the word “Regis” added to its title, and in 1929 this was granted, so that interestingly its supreme elevation and onset of terminal decline date from almost precisely the same moment.
—
Like so much of coastal Britain, Bognor has seen better days. Once everyone went to the seaside for holidays in Britain, but now hardly anyone does. It is cheaper to have a package holiday on the Mediterranean, where the weather is more reliably balmy, so many of the old resort towns wear a forlorn air. Bognor remained popular through the 1960s, but its real heyday was the twenties and thirties. It had a Theatre Royal, a grand Pavilion with what was said to be the finest dance floor in the south of England, and a much esteemed if not very accurately named Kursaal, where no one was cured of anything but patrons could roller skate to the music of a resident orchestra and afterward dine beneath giant palms. All that is distant history now.
The pier at Bognor survives, but barely. Seaside piers are a curious British phenomenon that I still don’t entirely understand. Years ago, when I was still quite new to Britain, I went with my future wife to Brighton for the day
I particularly liked the idea of Cape Wrath. I know nothing about it—it could be a caravan park, for all I know—but it sounded rugged and wave-battered and difficult to get to, a destination for a serious traveler. When people asked me where I was bound, I could gaze toward the northern horizon with a set expression and say: “Cape Wrath, God willing.” I imagined my listeners giving a low whistle of admiration and replying, “Gosh, that’s a long way.” I would nod in grim acknowledgment. “Not even sure if there’s a tearoom,” I would add.
But before that distant adventure, I had hundreds of miles of historic towns and lovely countryside to get through, and a visit to the celebrated English seaside at Bognor.
Chapter 1
Bugger Bognor!
B EFORE I WENT THERE for the first time, about all I knew about Bognor Regis, beyond how to spell it, was that some British monarch, at some uncertain point in the past, in a moment of deathbed acerbity, called out the words “Bugger Bognor” just before expiring, though which monarch it was and why his parting wish on earth was to see a medium-sized English coastal resort sodomized are questions I could not answer.
The monarch, I have since learned, was King George V, and the story is that in 1929 he traveled to Bognor on the advice of his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, who proposed that a spell of fresh sea air might help him recover from a serious lung complaint. That Dawson could think of no better treatment than a change of scene is perhaps a reflection of his most outstanding characteristic as a doctor: incompetence. Dawson was in fact so celebrated for medical ineptitude that a ditty was composed in his honor. It went:
Lord Dawson of Penn
Has killed lots of men.
So that’s why we sing
God save the King.
The king chose Bognor not because he held any special affection for it, but because a rich chum of his named Sir Arthur du Cros had a mansion there called Craigweil House, which he offered to the king for his private use. Craigweil was by all accounts an ugly and uncomfortable retreat, and the king liked nothing about it, but the sea air did do him good and after a few months he was well enough to return to London. If he left with any fond memories of Bognor, he didn’t relate them.
Six years later, when the king relapsed and now lay dying, Dawson blandly assured him that soon he would be well enough to return to Bognor for another holiday. “Bugger Bognor,” the king reportedly said and thereupon died. The story is nearly always dismissed as fiction, but one of George V’s biographers, Kenneth Rose, maintains that it could be true and that it certainly would not have been out of character.
Because of the king’s short residency, Bognor petitioned to have the word “Regis” added to its title, and in 1929 this was granted, so that interestingly its supreme elevation and onset of terminal decline date from almost precisely the same moment.
—
Like so much of coastal Britain, Bognor has seen better days. Once everyone went to the seaside for holidays in Britain, but now hardly anyone does. It is cheaper to have a package holiday on the Mediterranean, where the weather is more reliably balmy, so many of the old resort towns wear a forlorn air. Bognor remained popular through the 1960s, but its real heyday was the twenties and thirties. It had a Theatre Royal, a grand Pavilion with what was said to be the finest dance floor in the south of England, and a much esteemed if not very accurately named Kursaal, where no one was cured of anything but patrons could roller skate to the music of a resident orchestra and afterward dine beneath giant palms. All that is distant history now.
The pier at Bognor survives, but barely. Seaside piers are a curious British phenomenon that I still don’t entirely understand. Years ago, when I was still quite new to Britain, I went with my future wife to Brighton for the day
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