“At the Seaside” by William Merritt Chase 1849-1916

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It is nine o’clock.

There is still light on the sky.

Father and mother, basking in one another’s love, are sitting in chairs on the steps of the boarding-house; behind the front door peeps the inevitable castor oil plant in its china pot. Beside them sit the younger children, unnaturally good and quiet for fear they shall be sent up to bed while it is still light and while the moon rises huge and yellow above the purple bay.

The elder children, grown up now, are off to the dance halls. Only a few rejected young men sit sadly on the steps among the ancients and the infants.

The girls wear white dancing shoes and that is how you know whither they are bound. Two shillings or four-and-six, somewhere round that, is the cost of a ticket to dance.

I like the Palace dance hall best. It has a parquet floor of sixteen thousand square feet and room for five thousand people. It is in a gay baroque style, cream and pink inside, and from the graceful roof hang Japanese lanterns out of a dangling forest of flags.

A small and perfect dance band strikes up - ah, the dance bands of the Isle of Man! Soon a thousand couples are moving beautifully, the cotton dresses of the girls like vivid tulips in all this pale cream and pink, the sports coats and dark suits of the men a background to so much airy colour. The rhythmic dance is almost tribal, so that even a middle-aged spectator like me is caught up in mass excitement, pure and thrilling and profound.
[Extract from “The Isle of Man” by John Betjeman 1906-1984, published by Penguin Modern Classics in “The Best of Betjeman.”]

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Continuing the nostalgic theme, some seaside images from the past -

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And finally, this is probably the kind of music they would be dancing to at John Betjeman’s Palace in the Isle of Man.





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