Abstract
Seven o’clock on a winter evening. Steel shrouds ringing against masts from the massed boats in Mitcham’s yard and the yacht club. Turks Lane flooded again, and rain on the roof of the scout hut, where in the back room a group of boys have compasses, protractors and photocopied pages of a map on the table. Projected in their imaginations to a boat off a rocky coastline, they measure the angles and draw intersecting lines from a chapel and a coastguard cottage. The third line extends south-east from a rock stack: the pencil traces over the blankness of the sea, and passes through the “X” of its fellows.
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Notes
Paul Nash, ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’, in Paul Nash: Writings on Art, ed. by Andrew Causey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.125–129 (p.127) (first pub. in Architectural Review, 79 (April 1936), 151–154).
William Foot, Beaches, Fields, Streets and Hills: The Anti-Invasion Landscapes of England, 1940 (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2006), pp.64–72.
Charles Harper, The Dorset Coast (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), p.46,
cited in Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p.129.
Bernard Becker, Holiday Haunts by Cliffside and Riverside (London: Remington, 1884), pp.5–6,
cited in Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), p.88.
C. Wright, The Brighton Ambulator (1818), cited in Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. by Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p.78.
Turner published Picturesque Views in England and Wales in two volumes in 1832 and 1838. These featured ten coastal views, which as Elizabeth Helsinger has observed, obsessively repeated scenes of such seditious activities. See Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Turner and the Representation of England’, in Landscape and Power, ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.103–125 (p.116).
Philip Brannon, The Illustrated Historical and Picturesque Guide to Swanage and the Isle of Purbeck (London: Longman; Poole: R. Sydenham, 1858), p.39.
E.D. Burrowes, The Sixpenny Guide to Swanage (London: Marchant Singer, 1879), p.18.
Clive Holland, The Gossipy Guide to Swanage and District (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1900), p.4.
Nude and mixed bathing appear to have been acceptable aspects of the ‘folk tradition of sea-bathing’, as John Travis calls it, citing examples recorded in Lancashire, Sussex and South Devon from the mid-to-late eighteenth century (John Travis, ‘Continuity and Change in English Sea-Bathing, 1730–1900: A Case of Swimming with the Tide’, in Recreation and the Sea, ed. by Stephen Fisher (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp.8–35 (pp.9–11));
Fred Gray concludes that ‘the evidence is fragmentary and argued over, but initially in the eighteenth century men and perhaps also women often took to the sea naked and also often bathed together’ (Fred Gray, Designing the Seaside (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p.151.).
C.W. Saleeby, Sunlight and Health (London, 1923), p.xi,
cited in John K. Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.100.
See Gray, Designing the Seaside, p.168, and Fred Gray, ‘1930s Architecture and the Cult of the Sun’, in Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, ed. by Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp.159–176 (pp.163–164).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p.96.
David Fletcher, Swimming Shermans: Sherman DD Amphibious Tank of World War II (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2006), p.14.
Ernest Swinton, the Official Observer of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, memorably called the tank ‘a species of gigantic cubist steel slug’ in his memoirs. Ernest D. Swinton, Eyewitness (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932), p.196,
cited in Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p.29.
H.G. Wells, ‘The Land Ironclads’, Strand Magazine, 26 (1903), 751–764, cited in Wright, Tank, p.25.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, trans. by George Collins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), p.39.
Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days (London: MacGibbon & Key, 1957), p.130.
Reproduced in Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), Illustration 14.
Rodney Legg, Dorset’s War Diary: Battle of Britain to D-Day (Wincanton, Somerset: Dorset Publishing Company, 2004), pp.40–41.
The Beach, Studland was painted on a separate visit, one year after Bell had taken the photographs of 1910, and the presence of a bathing tent here rather than bathing machines may indicate that Studland was moving with the times and updating its beach architecture. It seems unlikely, however, that there was a sudden shift: William Masters Hardy records the numerous kinds of bathing apparatus available in nearby Swanage in 1910, writing that ‘we now see between 200 and 300 of all shapes and makes, from the old-fashioned wooden bathing machines to the latest hygienic tents’ (William Masters Hardy, Old Swanage, Or Purbeck Past and Present, rev. edn (Dorchester: Dorset County Chronicle Printing Works, 1910), p.18.).
Olive Cook and Edwin Smith, ‘Beside the Seaside’, in The Saturday Book 12, ed. by John Hadfield (London: Hutchinson, 1952), pp.22–44 (p.33).
Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, in Vision and Design, 7th edn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), pp.16–38 (p.18).
Roger Fry, ‘The French Post-Impressionists’, in Vision and Design, pp.237–243 (p.239) (first pub. as ‘The French Group’ (1912)).
Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), pp.90–111 (p.104).
Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914), pp.108, 107.
Roger Fry, ‘The Grafton Gallery — I’, in Post-Impressionists in England, ed. by J.B. Bullen (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.120–124 (p.121) (first pub. in The Nation, 19 November 1910, p.331).
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), p.186.
Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p.18.
Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 72–73, 97.
Vanessa Bell, ‘Memories of Roger Fry’, in Sketches in Pen and Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook, ed. by Lia Giachero (London: Hogarth Press, 1997), pp.117–147 (p.126).
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Martin Secker, 1932), p.51.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, trans. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp.210–236 (pp.225–226).
Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Atmospheric Politics’, trans. by Jeremy Gaines, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp.944–951.
Antonio Stoppani, cited in Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind: The Anthropocene’, Nature, 415 (2002), 23.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (London: The Hogarth Press, 1944), pp.79–85 (p.79) (first pub. in The Athenaeum, 20 October 1920).
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (London: The Bodley Head, 1986), p.37 (Lines 288–289);
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp.59–80 (p.70) (Lines 300–302).
Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p.47.
Indeed, Paul Peppis’s analysis focuses precisely on Post-Impressionist painting and the Agadir Crisis as two significant arenas for pre-war clashes between ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘patriotic’ commentators. Both were litmus tests of English attitudes towards European affairs and perceived cultural or military competition from abroad. See Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.53–75.
David Peters Corbett, The Modernity of English Art, 1914–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p.44.
John Cournos, ‘The Death of Futurism’, in The Egoist, 4 (1917), 6; cited in Corbett, The Modernity of English Art, p.45.
Studland Beach Users Action Group, Information for Beach Users ([n.p.]:[n.pub], [2011(?)]).
Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s, ed. Gary Cross (London: Routledge, 1990), p.189.
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© 2014 James Wilkes
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Wilkes, J. (2014). Studland Beach. In: A Fractured Landscape of Modernity. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137287083_2
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