The following two sentences caught my eye in a recent (18 April
2018) review by James Hall in the Times
Literary Supplement:
“We all make our mental maps in which
the continents of our own cultural interests expand and contract, surface and
sink over the course of our lives. For porcelain lovers, China may loom
largest; for film buffs, Hollywood; for mountaineers, the Himalayas; for shoe
fetishists, Milan; for whisky drinkers, Scotland; for carpet dealers, Persia; for Goths, Whitby.” [emphasis added by
me]
I have known Whitby since I was tiny. An aunt and her husband lived there with
their three sons, my cousins, who were quite close to me in age. As they grew up they all married local girls
and settled in Whitby or nearby. My uncle
had an extended family in the town, and through repeated visits over many
summers I knew them well too. I have
been in Whitby in all seasons of the year: at regatta time in the summer when
the town pulsed with the rivalry of the two rowing clubs – the Friendship (of which one of my cousins, to my great
pride, was stroke in the winning boat) and the Fisherlads;
in September, when the herring boats from every port down the east coast used
to moor three deep along the quay; in April, when the seagulls’ cries seem
particularly mournful over the quiet streets with the smoke of the coal fires
gently descending as the town waits for its first summer visitors; and even
between Christmas and 1 January – the dog days of the year when I drove over
the moors on a bleak day with a fierce east wind blowing to attend my aunt’s
funeral.
My first memories of Whitby are of the prefab bungalow my
aunt and her family lived in, having moved back in from Runswick Bay where they had lived during the war as a result of bomb damage in Whitby. When I was about 6 they moved into a narrow Victorian house close to the garage owned by my uncle and
his father. We spent family holidays
there, and later, as a student, I would hitch-hike up from London to sketch or
to walk the moors and the cliff paths. Later we brought our own children here,
renting a little house on the East Cliff, a few yards from Fortune’s kippering
shed where, if my aunt’s name was mentioned, especially large fish were found
and sold at the standard price. I still
go back to Whitby from time to time, even though my aunt, uncle and two of my
cousins are no longer alive and the third cousin lives ‘out of town’ in
Sleights, up river.
What images does Whitby conjure in my mind? I have already mentioned the herring fleet,
and I guess that in the fifties and sixties a significant proportion of the
population was dependent, directly or indirectly, on the fishing industry. That has now dwindled to no more than a dozen
boats, several suitable for nothing more than in-shore fishing. There were a number of garages in and around
the town and my uncle, owner of one of them, seemed to make a good existence
out of rescuing cars that had failed to get up Lythe Bank or Blue Bank – 1 in 4 hills a little out of
town that once caused radiators to boil.
Today that trade has gone – in a modern car I can drive up Lythe Bank in
third gear. A number of those in the extended
family worked in shops, but many of these seem now to have become cafés or fish
and chip shops (I am always amazed at holidaymakers’ propensities to eat fish
and chips at any conceivable time of day – 10 in the morning, 3 in the
afternoon, 11 at night). And today the
big supermarkets are there on the edge of town, near the bypass that crosses
the Esk Valley on a high bridge and does away with the long queues of traffic
there used to be to cross the swing bridge that links the two halves of the
town. Local people now complain about the difficulty of finding anywhere to park in the town because of the throng of visitors in season.
What else does Whitby conjure up to me? Coach trips arriving from Newcastle,
Sunderland and Tees-side; steam trains pulling in to Whitby Town station; me racing
round the town with a cousin in regatta week trying to match the number in our
programme with a number in a window display and thus win a prize (we never
did); donkeys on the beach; the fog horn (known colloquially as the ‘Hawsker
Bull’); the 199 steps leading up to the church and the abbey; the bustle of the
fish quay in the mornings, with lorries waiting to take the catch away to
Tyneside or the West Riding or even further south; the distinctive Whitby
accent – a trace of Scandinavian intonation that I later came across when I
first went to Denmark; cakes from Botham’s in Skinner Street where a cousin’s
wife worked; and the pubs – seemingly dozens of them. A local resident told me there were more pubs
per head in Whitby than anywhere else in England – but I suspect that claim has
been made for many places. Oh – and the fashions and taste of the young people:
I once came on a geography field trip from London and my fellow sixth formers
were amazed that people of our age seemed to be dressed in the styles of five
years beforehand, and the juke boxes majored on songs from the same past
period. I was used to it from my frequent visits.
But Whitby as a place for Goths? Never. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, in my
recollection, that Whitby started to recognise and celebrate its role in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula as the place where
the creature first arrived from a shipwreck in the harbour, bounding up the 199
steps in the shape of a huge dog. The Dracula Experience opened on the
quayside where previously all the commerce had related to fishing. Ghost tours were started – with a need to
invent ghost stories as well since here, as in most places offering such
experiences, there was nothing authentic to offer. And then progressively, in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, one caught a glimpse of people dressed completely in black walking
through the streets of the town. I
suppose this was the start of the Goth interest.
Now, twice a year, Whitby hosts a ‘Goth Weekend’ (‘WGW’) –
in April and October. Its history goes
back to a first event in 1994. Whitby
was felt to be a place that was accommodating to strange happenings. And after a little further research, brought
on by the quotation from the TLS that
I started this blog with, I realise there are intersections between Gothic
Whitby and my family. (Is ‘Gothic’ an
appropriate adjective here? Surely it
normally applies to architecture?) My
aunt occasionally helped out in the local pub when there was a rush on – she
lived only two doors away and they would send for her. She never admitted her role to her teetotal
mother (my grandmother): she would say she was serving lemonade. Two of my cousins did oil painting as a hobby
– one while he was not on the bridge of the ocean-going ship of which he was
the captain. Some of their paintings
hung in the pub where my aunt helped out.
That pub was the Elsinore,
where the first Whitby Goth Weekends took place and which is apparently still
the centre of the action: my aunt may have served the first revellers – she
didn’t die until 1997. My surviving sea-captain cousin is now married to one of the daughters of the landlady of that period. Just along Silver Street from the pub, the showroom
of my uncle’s garage is now ‘The Great
Goth’ - a clothing store for the
well-dressed Goth (presumably, like Henry Ford’s choice of cars, in any shade
as long as it’s black).
Many small fishing ports around the coasts of England have
had to reinvent themselves or face decline.
Some have succeeded, others haven’t.
Wikipedia claims that Whitby Goth Weekend contributes £1.1 million to
the town’s economy. I hadn’t previously
realised how significant has been Whitby’s reinvention as the capital of
‘Goth-dom’.
