I should like to know how many grown Englishmen or Englishwomen, apart
from those unfortunates who are preparing for competitive examinations,
are aware of the existence of this place? No Englishman is bound to know
of it by any law of polite education acknowledged amongst us, for is it
not altogether ignored in Murray?
Even Bradshaw’s _Continental Guide_ is silent as to its whereabouts.
This is somewhat hard upon Blankenberghe, sturdy and rapidly growing
little watering-place that she is, already exciting the jealousy of
her fashionable neighbour, Ostend. It must be owned, however, that she
returns the compliment by taking the slightest possible interest in the
contemporary history of the British Empire. Nevertheless, the place has
certain recommendations to persons in search of a watering-place out of
England. If you are content with an hotel of the country, of which there
is a large choice, you may have three good meals a day and a bedroom for
six and a half francs, with a considerable reduction for families. Even
at the fashionable hotels on the Digue the price is only eight or nine
francs; and when you have paid your hotel bill you are out of all danger
of extravagance, for there is literally nothing to spend money upon.
Your bathing machine costs you sixpence. There are no pleasure boats and
no wheeled vehicles for hire in the place, and no excursions if there
were; shops there are none; and the market is of the smallest and
meagerest kind. There are no beggars and no amusements, except bathing
and the Kursaal. These, however, suffice to keep the inhabitants and
visitors in a state of much contentment.
But now for the geography. From Ostend harbour to the mouth of the
Scheldt is a dead flat, highly cultivated, and dotted all over with
villages and farmhouses, but somewhat lower than high-water mark. The
sea is kept out by an ancient and dilapidated-looking dyke, some fifty
feet high, on the slopes of which flourishes a strong, reedy sort of
grass, planted in tufts at regular intervals, to hold the loose soil
together. The fine sand drifts up the dyke and blows over it, lying just
like snow, so that if you half-close your eyes and look at it from fifty
yards’ distance, you may fancy yourself on a glacier in the Oberland.
Blankenberghe is an ancient fishing village, lying just under the dyke,
between eight and nine miles from Ostend. When it came into the minds
of the inhabitants to convert it into a watering-place they levelled the
top of their dyke for some 600 yards until it is only about twenty-five
feet above high-water mark. They paved the sea face with good stone,
and the fine flat walk on the top, thirty yards broad, with brick, and
called it the Digue, in imitation of Ostend. They built a Kursaal,
three or four great hotels, and half a dozen first-class lodging-houses,
opening on to the Digue, with deep verandahs in front, and they brought
a single line branch of the Flanders railway from Bruges, and the
deed was accomplished. There is no such a sea-walk anywhere that I can
remember as Blankenberghe Digue, from which you look straight away
with nothing but sea between you and the North Pole. From the Digue you
descend by a flight of twenty-four steps on one side to the sands, on
the other into the town, the chief of these latter flights being at the
head of the Rue d’Eglise, the backbone, as it were, of the place,
which runs from the railway station to the Digue. There may be
1500 inhabitants out of the season, when all the Digue hotels and
lodging-houses are shut up; at present, perhaps, another 1000, coming
and going, and attracted by the bathing.
Of this institution an Englishman is scarcely a fair judge, as it is
conducted on a method so utterly unlike anything we have at home at
present. My American friend assures me that we are 100 years behind all
other nations in this matter, that the Belgians conduct it exactly
as they do in the States, and that theirs is the only decent mode of
bathing. It may be so. One sees such rapid changes in these days, and
advanced opinions of all kinds are being caught up so quickly by even
such Philistines as the English middle classes, that he is a bold man
who will assert that we shall not see the notions of Brighton and Dover
yield to the new ideas of Newport and Blankenberghe before long. In one
respect, indeed, it is well that they should, for the machines here are
convenient little rooms on wheels, with plenty of pegs, two chairs, a
small tub, a looking-glass, and everything handsome about them. But the
wheels are broad, and very-low; consequently you are only rolled down
to the neighbourhood of the water, thinking yourself lucky if you get
within five or six yards of it. Now, as the occupants of the machine on
your left and right are probably sprightly and somewhat facetious young
Belgian or French women, and as the beach shelves so gently that you
have at least a run of fifty yards before you can get into deep enough
water to swim with comfort, the root difference between Blankenberghian
and English habits discloses itself to you from the first. Of course, as
men, women, and children all bathe together, costumes are necessary,
but those in which the men have to array themselves only make bathing a
discomfort, without giving one the consciousness of being decently clad.
You have handed to you with your towels a simple jersey, with arms and
legs six or eight inches in length, reaching perhaps to the middle of
the biceps and femoral muscles. Into this apology for a dress you insert
and button yourself up (it is well for you, by the way, if one or two
buttons be not missing), and then are expected to walk calmly out
into the water through groups of laughing girls in jackets and loose
trousers. Having threaded your way through these, and avoided a
quadrille party on the one hand, and an excellent fat couple, reminding
you of the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Bubb in the one-horse “chay,” who are
bathing their family on the other, you address yourself to swimming.
As you descended from the Digue you read, “Bathers are expressly
recommended to hold themselves at least fifteen yards from the breakers
by buoys designed.” You do not see any breakers, but there is a line
of buoys about eighty yards out to which you contemptuously paddle, and
after all find that you are scarcely out of your depth. When you have
had enough you return, poor, dripping, forked mortal, to a last and
severest trial. For the universal custom is to sit about on chairs
amongst the machines; and on one side of your door are perhaps a couple
of nursemaids chatting while their children build sand castles, on the
other a matron or two working and gossiping. Now, sir, a man who has
been taking the rough and the smooth of life for a good many years
within half a mile of Temple Bar is not likely to be oversensitive, but
I would appeal to any contributor on your staff, sir, or to yourself,
whether you would be prepared to go through such an ordeal without
wincing? On my return from my first swim I recognised my American cousin
in his element. He was clad in a blue striped jersey,--would that I
could have sprinkled it with a few stars,--and was sauntering about with
the greatest coolness from group to group, enjoying the whole business,
and no doubt looking forward complacently to the time when differences
of sex shall be altogether ignored in the academies of the future. He
threw a pitying glance at me as I skedaddled to my machine, secretly
vowing to abstain from all such adventures hereafter. Since that time I
have taken my dip too early for the Belgian public to be present at the
ceremony, but, like the rest of the world, I daily look on, and, unlike
them, wonder. As to the morality of it, I can’t say that I think the
custom of promiscuous bathing as practised here seems to me either
moral or immoral. Occasionally when the waves are a little rough you see
couples clinging together for mutual support more than the circumstances
perhaps strictly require; but there is very little of this. The whole
business seemed to me not immoral, but in our conventional sense vulgar,
much like “kissing in the ring,” which I have seen played by most
exemplary sets of young men and women on excursions in Greenwich or
Richmond Park, but which would not do in Hamilton Gardens or a May Fair
drawing-room. Meanwhile, I hope that as long at least as I can enjoy
the water we shall remain benighted bathers in the eyes of our American
cousins and of the brave Belgians. To a man the first requisite of a
really enjoyable bath is surely deep water, and the second, no clothes,
for the loss of either of which no amount of damp flirtation can
compensate, in the opinion at least of your contributor, who,
nevertheless in these Belgian parts, while obliged to record his
opinion, has perhaps a great consciousness that he may be something of
an old fogey.
I suppose that a man or nation is to be congratulated about whom their
neighbours have nothing to say. If so, the position of England at this
time is peculiarly enviable out here. I read the _Indépendance Belge_
diligently, but under the head “Nouvelles d’Angleterre,” for which that
journal retains, as it would seem, a special correspondent, I never
learn anything whatever except the price of funds. We occupy an average
of perhaps twelve lines in its columns, and none at all in those of the
_La Vigie de la Côte_, the special production of Blankenberghe, or of
the Bruges and Ostend journals.
Oh! wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Certainly a short residence at Blankenberghe should be taken in
conjunction with the volume of essays on international policy by Mr.
Congreve and his fellow Comtists, which I happen to have brought with
me for deliberate perusal, if one wants to feel the shine taken out of
one’s native land. I don’t.