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  The beach had not changed at all: shingle, patches of wet sand, water in several shades of grey, streaks of reddish mud and reddish weed, dark groynes poking sharp lines at the sea. Getting to Bognor along the shore was theoretically possible, but there was no path and all manner of obstacles to lug the bike over. I wondered irritably why there was no sea wall with a smooth cycle path on top of it. The answer, of course, is that Middleton is very attentive to its ‘a sought-after location’ status. It is also very close to humble Bognor while wishing it wasn’t, and Middleton does not want the riffraff infringing on its expensive seclusion.

  So I went around via Felpham, and approached Bognor along Sea Road, the skyline gradually filling with the white canopies and cones of Butlins, like an immense pudding pavilioned in meringue.

  Butlins and Bognor

  I’m afraid that Bognor seafront looks as if it has been overtaken by some slow-burning tragedy. The pier is a disgrace, a ramshackle stain on the face of the town. Many, too many, of the prime positions along the front have been annexed by dreary blocks of retirement flats, and if the local council gets its way, there are plenty more of the same to come. The one decently turned-out hotel left, the Royal Norfolk, looks entirely incongruous among the general tattiness, as if it had landed by accident in Bognor instead of Eastbourne or Torquay.

  For several years the great minds of Arun District Council have been trying in vain to address the wretched condition of what should be, and always was, Bognor’s greatest asset. Naturally enough, they have a Seafront Strategy, a document bloated with references to hubs, flagship projects, big pictures, landmark developments, branding challenges, public-realm guidance and all the other familiar stale jargon of planning pipe dreams. Its one substantive proposal is for a multiplex cinema and more flats on the one remaining sizeable seafront site – a masterstroke which has reduced the Bognor Civic Society to gnashing its teeth in impotent rage.

  It’s a great shame. Although Bognor was never counted among the elite watering holes, it had its moments and its admirers. The greatest of those moments, of course, occurred in 1929 when Buckingham Palace announced that George V would be convalescing from his recent illness at the seaside – more specifically at ‘Craigwell House, Bognor’.

  In the words of Bognor’s admirable historian, Gerard Young, ‘a sense of incredulity swept through the council chambers.’ Bognor, for goodness sake – the place only recently described by the writer Beverley Nichols as ‘the most agonisingly hideous creation of Man on earth.’ The fact that Craigwell House – the home of the president of Dunlop rubber, Sir Arthur Du Cros – was not in Bognor at all but the neighbouring parish of Aldwick did not deter the town from taking the King to their hearts and claiming him for their own.

  At 12.30 p.m. on Saturday 9 February an ambulance carrying the monarch, recumbent on white pillows, made its way to the gates of Craigwell House, which stood overlooking the beach and had its own private promenade. A large crowd looked on. Hats were respectfully removed and handkerchiefs waved. Then, in the affecting words of the Bognor Post’s reporter, ‘a thing happened that unlocked the floodgates of the crowd’s emotions – the King waved back a greeting and the cheers would not be denied.’

  For the next thirteen weeks his presence and that of Queen Mary kept Bognor and its journalists in a state of high alert. The Queen popped into town to shop at Woolworths and look for thrillers for the King. He was fond of light music and at Easter the Kneller Hall Band played a selection of favourites in the grounds of Craigwell, with hundreds of local people standing at a decent distance on the sand to share his pleasure. By then he was well enough to receive the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and was back on the cigarettes that seven years later would precipitate his final illness.

  The weather was mostly pretty vile, but by May George was pronounced fit enough to resume his duties. The official car taking him back to London stopped long enough in Bognor for him to receive good wishes from the chairman of the council, and to raise his hat to cheering crowds. The following month civic pride swelled to unprecedented volume with the announcement that the King had bestowed upon Bognor ‘the very greatest honour that, as a southern watering place, it could hope to attain’. From henceforth it would be Bognor Regis.

  Did George ever actually say ‘Bugger Bognor’? If he did, it was when his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, presented the humble petition from the town’s worthies (it is recounted that when Stamfordham returned to the delegation he said: ‘The King has been graciously pleased to grant your request.’). How the myth that they were his dying words took hold is a mystery – in fact his last utterance before the morphine administered by Lord Dawson took fatal effect was ‘God damn you’ and was addressed to a nurse who was giving him a sedative.

  One of the most touching glimpses of the King’s stay at the seaside was a photograph showing him sitting on a bench watching his six-year-old granddaughter Princess Elizabeth at work on a grand and elaborate sandcastle. The picture is a subtle illustration of the liberating and levelling influence of the beach. The immensely remote, whiskered patriarchal monarch is at a stroke humanised, while the child who herself will one day be Queen appears just like any other little girl moved by the urge to shape sand into structure.

  Bognor’s most notable literary connection is wonderfully improbable. A blue plaque on the outside wall of a nondescript semi in Clarence Road records that James and Nora Joyce stayed in the Alexandra Guest House – as it was then – in July and August 1923. While there Joyce wrote his comical treatments of the legends of St Kevin and St Patrick and the Druid, which were later incorporated into the immortal opacities of Finnegans Wake.

  Joyce liked it in Bognor, particularly lying on the beach and listening to the sea and the seagulls. His friend and great supporter, T. S. Eliot, arrived one day and took him off by car for a tour of the countryside inland. One of the stops was in the village of Sidlesham, in whose churchyard Joyce noticed the name Earwicker on several gravestones and borrowed it for the hero of Finnegans Wake, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.

  For a time in the 1930s Bognor had hopes of being admitted to the top tier of seaside resorts. Royal patronage and the acquisition of the extra handle to its name persuaded the council that first-class status beckoned. The one amenity the town clearly lacked – that would enable it to match Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Scarborough and the rest – was an elegant and comfortable venue for refined entertainment all year round. In short, a winter gardens.

  But Bognor’s worthies were intimidated by the cost, and while they dithered, property developers were busy making money and lowering the tone. The land that had been attached to Craigwell House was parcelled out and the house itself was demolished. Lady Diana Cooper, who with her husband Duff Cooper, owned a house in Aldwick, lamented that ‘the cornfields gave way to villadom.’ The arrival in Bognor of an eager and resourceful young entrepreneur called Billy Butlin can be seen, with hindsight, to have been the final nail in the coffin of Bognor’s pretensions.

  Butlin began with a funfair on the esplanade, which he followed by building a zoo. On the morning it was due to open, the London News Chronicle carried a report that its lion had escaped and was roaming the Sussex countryside. This sensation was followed by another: a sheep had been savaged near Pagham. In fact Butlin’s zoo was not due to have a lion at all, but he could see a publicity coup in the offing and swiftly arranged to buy one from a circus in Maidstone. Butlin and Bognor were on every front page, and the blaze of publicity was maintained when a local freelance journalist – coincidentally the son of a News Chronicle staff man – was convicted of the offence of ‘putting the public in fear by circulating false statements about an escaped lion and arranging for a sheep to appear as if it had been mauled by a predator.’

  In 1960 Butlin opened his famous holiday camp on a forty-acre site linking Bognor with its extremely status-conscious neighbour to the east, Felpham. Felpham was appalled; one resident referred to the horror of ‘hundreds
of people walking around with fish-and-chips’. But the council, intimidated by Butlin’s financial muscle and disarmed by his boundless personal charm, opened its arms to the legions of campers, the redcoats, the chalets, the fluttering flags and neon signs and floodlights, the boom of the conga. One dissenting voice was heard in the council chamber. Councillor Norman Lewis forecast that if the holiday camp were permitted, Bognor would become identified with Butlin’s. ‘Is it money we should be after,’ he demanded, ‘or a town to live in?’

  Half a century on Butlins has dropped the apostrophe and changed considerably in other ways. Chalets have made way for hotels, the outside pool has become an indoor pool; there is even a conference centre to go with the spa. But it remains a looming presence in the town, separate and self-contained but economically dominant. The Faustian pact alluded to by Councillor Lewis still stands, and his prophecy – that Butlins and Bognor would be perceived as one – hangs over the town like a curse that no one knows how to have lifted.

  9

  DID JESUS COME TO HAYLING ISLAND?

  Pagham Harbour

  West of Bognor and Aldwick is Pagham Harbour. A thousand years ago this natural inlet was much bigger, and deep enough for navigation. But silting and the action of the sea reduced it over time to a lonely, bird-haunted expanse of salt marsh, mudflats and tidal creeks.

  The coastal strip peters out beside the entrance to the harbour. It was an obvious place for plotlanders to head for, with the road going nowhere. Shacks and chalets sprouted above the beach, joined by railway carriages, and another remote, peaceful, self-contained and harmless little community grew. It survived the 1939–45 war but thereafter soon fell foul of the men in suits. According to Gerard Young ‘at County Hall they offer prayers that Pagham may be destroyed by a tidal wave . . . the very thought of it numbs the planners’ minds.’

  They need not have worried. Pagham, like everywhere else, was tamed. A handful of the old carriages may still be spotted, subsumed into respectable whitewashed bungalows, their origins recalled by names like The Buffers and Pagham Halt. The last houses look across the neck of the harbour which is narrow enough to chuck a cricket ball across. Alas the tide dashes in and out with tremendous energy between the settlement and the long tongue of sand curled around from the other side, and there was no crossing it; so in order to get to Selsey I had to loop far inland, via Sidlesham, stronghold of the Earwickers.

  When Pagham Harbour really was a harbour, Selsey Bill was almost an island. It extended far further out to sea than it does now, a broad foreland shaped like the head of a hammer. In 681 AD Saint Wilfrith landed somewhere along that shore, converted the Saxons to Christianity and – almost as important – showed them how to catch fish at sea.

  The abbey he founded has long since vanished. Although the story that its ruins lie somewhere out under the waves is generally discounted these days, the depredations of the hungry sea have always been and remain a constant element in the lives of those who live along this stretch of coast. Selsey has long been in retreat, as has West Wittering four miles further on. Between the two, efforts to keep the sea at bay have finally been abandoned. Over the past few years the Environment Agency has spent nearly £30 million on building a new system of flood defences well inland, and in the winter of 2013 the barrier along the beach was deliberately breached to allow the sea to colonise 180 hectares of low-lying land and turn it into salt marsh.

  Selsey Bill

  Selsey Bill in the 1930s was unspoilt and almost unknown. In summer the sun shone and the breezes blew across the empty beaches. It was an ideal location for men and women keen on the outdoors, vigorous exercise and organised games to come for a camping holiday – particularly if they also shared a contempt for luxury, soft sofas, nightclubs, aesthetes and homosexuals, and a hatred of left-wingers and Jews.

  Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts had held small-scale summer camps at Pagham, Aldwick and West Wittering between 1933 and 1936. In 1937 the leadership decided to organise a much bigger and more splendid camp on the western edge of Selsey, beside a familiar local landmark, the Medmerry Windmill. Stirring appeals were issued for donations so that cadets and poorer Blackshirt families could attend. In the event more than a thousand campers converged on Selsey, and the fields by the sea were covered in white tents. The August weather was fine and the days were filled with swimming, sandcastle building, games and races, rallies and the singing of rousing patriotic songs around the campfires.

  The highlight was the attendance of the Leader himself over the Bank Holiday. Newsreel footage shows a slim and smiling Mosley, black short-sleeved Aertex shirt tucked into tightly belted trousers, shaking hands with followers, waving to campers, lifting a little girl and patting her leg. He watched a boxing match and a demonstration of Diabolo, joined in the singing of the British Union of Fascists’ anthem ‘Britain Awake’ and gave a speech exhorting his Blackshirts to join him in building ‘the England of our dreams’.

  Among the welcoming committee of prominent local fascists was one outstandingly odd oddball. Although Sir Archibald Hamilton was long resident in Selsey – had indeed been president of the Selsey Conservatives – he was immensely proud of his Scottish ancestry. He dressed in a kilt and was attended on formal occasions by his own Rob Roy Pipers, whose showpiece was Sir Archibald’s favourite song, ‘Cock o’ the North’. He smoked eucalyptus leaves in his pipe and was a devout convert to Islam, becoming Sir Archibald Abdullah Hamilton.

  He died in 1939, the year before the British Union of Fascists was proscribed and Mosley himself was interned. His best friend in Selsey, Edward Heron-Allen – the historian of Selsey, translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a world authority on minute marine organisms – wrote a touching obituary in the Chichester Observer which ended by quoting Phao’s tribute to Akela in the Jungle Book: ‘Howl, dogs! For a wolf has died tonight!’

  Despite the undoubted underlying nastiness of the movement, there was a kind of innocence about the Sussex summer camps. In his book Blackshirts-on-Sea Jeremy Booker quotes the happy memories of a number of rank-and-file BUF members of the holiday at Selsey. One recalled veterans of vicious street battles building enormous sandcastles: ‘Instead of the grim, clenched-jaw faces you saw at rallies and marches when you could be slashed with a razor at any time, everyone was smiling and relaxed and happy. I thought, this is what it’s going to be like when Mosley wins power.’

  In his rallying speech Mosley looked forward to the day when ‘the young manhood and womanhood of Britain will gather in great camps the same as this.’ In a way he was right. The fields where the Blackshirt tents were pitched and the standards raised are now covered by Bunn Leisure’s West Sands Holiday Park; although whether the massed ranks of mobile homes bristling with satellite dishes correspond with Mosley’s vision of the ‘great comradeship of the Fascist future’ is open to doubt.

  Not far away, down a lane off the High Street, is Selsey Cricket Club’s ground. For many years this was a spiritual home of the astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, a Selsey institution and a worthy successor to Sir Archibald Abdullah Hamilton in the role of local eccentric. Well into his seventies Moore was still turning out for a Selsey XI; by his own admission he was a useless batsman and worse fielder, but his apparently guileless looping leg-breaks bamboozled many a hapless victim over his long career. Oddly enough, Moore’s political views were not dissimilar to Mosley’s. But with Moore, rampant racism, sexism and Little Englandism were somehow rendered innocuous and even lovable by his shambling presence and wide range of peculiar mannerisms.

  In East Wittering I met Neil, who was about to mow someone else’s lawn. He had long grey hair gathered into a ponytail, which made him look like an old rocker. It turned out that he was an old rocker, who had worked for many years as a roadie setting up gigs for the likes of Joan Armatrading and The Kinks. He had seen some wild stuff, had Neil, you could tell from his seamed face and knowing eyes and the slow way he nodded his head. Then he had met a local girl a
nd settled down. Now he looked after peoples’ gardens for them.

  West Wittering

  East Wittering, Neil said, was not as classy as West Wittering. Keith Richards had a house at West Wittering, as did Richard Branson’s mother. Keith had given thirty grand for the village hall’s new roof. And he came in the pub when he was around, which admittedly was not often. A real regular guy, Keith.

  Classier maybe, but East Wittering has the flood defences. West Wittering just has its beach, which at low tide is enormous. I watched a windsurfer plodding over the sand towards a distant pale sea, the sails of his board flapping like the wings of a huge blue injured bird.

  Behind the beach is a line of very smart, neat beach huts painted blue and green and red and white, with little verandahs and an immensity of sand in front. Keith Richards had one of them; paid £60,000 for it, according to the newspapers. They don’t come up very often and those on the waiting list are invited to submit sealed bids.

  The road ends abruptly, and the beach runs out, and you are at the mouth of Chichester Harbour and no longer on the Channel shore. Sussex is finished. Across the water are Hampshire and the riddles of Hayling Island.

  * * *

  Hayling Island

  There was an elderly man standing on the shingle staring peacefully at the shallow sea. It was mid-April, blowy and a bit chilly, the water choppy under a broken sky. He wore a black overcoat and black gloves and one of those hats worn by Russian leaders of the Brezhnev era. He told me he could not be happy unless he was near the sea. He had been born at Whitley Bay near Newcastle and had lived in Poole for thirty years before retiring to Hayling Island.