The Dyce family is fully clothed. The women shawled and heavy skirted, gather
souvenirs and shells from the beach at low tide. Beyond them, the lowish chalk cliffs stand
over the receded tide, and above the whole scene, the distant tail of Donati's comet. William Dyce's painting of Pegwell Bay[i]
depicts an activity unchanged, and the bay itself, with its cliffs and strata, sweeps
to the west towards Sandwich and the Stour Estuary. Little moved over time, a site of ancient and
recent disembarkation. Hoverlloyd (later
Hoverspeed) operated cross channel services from Ramsgate to Calais up until
1982; the modern archaeologist or dog walker can explore the remains of the
hoverport. White markings are still
visible where the ramps enter the bay, and in the delineated parking zones partially
covered in scrub. The SR.N4 hovercraft, cossetted
in a great heavy skirt like the ladies in Dyce's painting, was powered by four
Bristol Proteus engines, one of which is preserved at Bristol M Shed museum. These powerful but thirsty engines propelled
the craft forward and also inflated the large black skirt that acts as a cushion
between hull and water and land.
I slipped into the sea below the West Cliff
beside the harbour, some children were playing on the sand, occasionally
running and paddling up to their wastes.
The water takes on a milkiness, chalk leaching a fine sediment that
drifts with the current until a point some twenty yards out where it meets deeper
bluer water, the whole mixing in swirls of khaki, white and cyan. May sea temperatures are around ten or eleven
degrees Celsius.
In his account of his father, Life,[ii]
Edmund Gosse writes. At
the head of the procession, like Apollo conducting the Muses, my father strides
ahead in an immense wide-awake, loose black coat and trousers, and fisherman's
boots, with a collecting basket in one hand, a staff or prod in the other. Then follow gentlemen of every age, all
seeming spectacled and old to me, and many ladies in the balloon costume of
1855, with shawls falling to a point from between their shoulders to the edge
of their flounced petticoats, each wearing a mushroom hat with streamers.
[i] William Dyce (1858-60) Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858. Oil on canvas. Tate Britain
[ii] The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890). Philip Henry Gosse was a pioneer of marine
science and a populariser of natural history.
