13: Alice Bonny in Blackpool: the early 19th century

In 1886, an old inhabitant described to a reporter the village as he remembered it in 1806 when Alice was 18 years old and he was six. 

Mr Bagot remembered a village of 36 houses and 6 hotels – thatched cottages, labourers and fishermen, the dealer in toys, the shrimp dealer, the oyster shop, the butcher and the baker – and the village characters.  

There was the old woman known to everyone simply as Jemima, the yeoman Richard Walsh who for years bathed in the sea on Old Christmas Day, and George Cooke who was appointed the village's first postmaster by the government when he came back from America because he wouldn't fight against the British in the War of Independence.  Mr Bagot said he returned with "a little black girl, who had been born in slavery, she was baptised at Bispham church soon after her arrival, and named by her liberator, Polly Cook".  

In 1789 George Cooke began selling high class goods to the quality trade – he stocked his shop for the summer season with teas, cocoa, wines, liquors, chocolate, sugar, spices, sago, tapioca, together with jewelley "of the newest Fashions", and hosiery, millinery, perfumery, bathing caps … In short, everything a visitor of discernment could require.  He set up a Public Room with a Library of Books, and a billiard room with a "handsome table".  Alice Bonny and her sisters must have clamoured for a little pin money to spend at Mr Cooke's.  And Mr Bagot remembered "John Bonny, gentleman farmer and innkeeper, who lived on Bonny's road".

Blackpool continued to grow, but slowly.  The hoteliers were still reluctant to invest capital in offering more entertainments in the hope of attracting more visitors and, according to the Revd Thornber, some people were loathe to sell their land to provide more accommodation.  I wonder if he was thinking of John Bonny.  So, even though the more well-to-do had to take their holidays in Britain because Europe was closed to them by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, other resorts overtook Blackpool.

All the same, in 1813, Richard Ayton (in his A voyage round Great Britain, undertaken in the summer of the year 1813, and commencing from the Land's-End, Cornwall) was struck by the number of visitors

• he saw the beach at high water, "for the length of nearly a mile, darkened with thick clusters of people, full of motion, and continually splashing in and out of the water"

• "I could not help admiring the honest confidence with which both sexes, among the lower orders, bathed together, as if really, during this act of immersion, there was a temporary suspension of every feeling of dignity and decorum, which, for the most part, makes breeches and petticoats absolutely necessary."

He remarked on

• the "crowds of poor people from the manufacturing town" who came to Blackpool because they maintained that in August and September "there is physic in the sea"

• many came in carts, but some walked the 40 miles from Manchester in a single day, even if it was only to stay in Blackpool for 3 or 4 days

• they came at a spring tide when they said the water had the most strength

• "they bring their tea and sugar with them, and nine-pence a day each for their lodging" and they were crammed into the cottages – "five or six beds are crammed into each room, and five or six people into each bed" – sometimes they slept in shifts, because there weren't enough beds.  He was shown a small cottage and was told it took 50 sleepers per night

These visitors from the Lancashire mills put themselves through quite an intensive and gruelling cure after their long walk

The earliest act of the morning is a draught of salt-water, a quart, and sometimes two, which is followed, under the notion of fortifying the stomach, by an equal quantity of gin and beer.  This mixture swallowed, a man is properly prepared for the bath, in which he continues to paddle, either in or out of his clothes, for the remainder of the day

Ladies' dress 1813

At the more expensive end of the scale, Richard Ayton noted that "there are four or five boarding-houses for the politer part of the company, and even in these a system of packing is adopted".  He dined at one of them, 

in company with nearly a hundred persons, who must certainly have slept in families.  People live here, in every respect, on very familiar terms.  They meet regularly five times every day, in full concert, to eat together; and a general sense of friendliness and fellowship springs from this community of wholesome indulgences, that renders them little fastidious about the division of their rooms at night.

Meanwhile, Alice and her sisters and brothers grew up in the traditional world that their family had always known, surrounded by relatives, friends and acquaintances – people with long roots in the Fylde.  

Not far from her home was the farm of her grandfather William Bonny of the Hill.  

According to that slightly unreliable witness, the Revd Thornber, old Mr Bonny was an advertisement for Blackpool's healthy air.  He was amazingly hale and hearty into old age and "in his 80th year it was a task of little difficulty to walk to Preston and return on the same day, a distance of forty miles".  But Mr Bonny and his forebears were yeomen and he would have ridden to Preston, not walked – so it is probably a garbled tale.  Perhaps all we can assume is that William Bonny at the age of 79 could still ride to and from Preston in a day.

What was Alice Bonny like?

• her granddaughter Mary Hopkinson describes her as "calm, equable and more reticent" than her husband John, while sharing his "essential qualities of truth and kindness" – and comments that John was "decidedly autocratic" in the home

• she had very poor health by the time Mary knew her, so that she couldn't give any vivid description of her grandmother, but she remembered that her mother used to "speak with admiration of her uncomplaining patience and her great power of endurance".

Alice was the first of her siblings to be married.  She was 27 years old when she married John Dewhurst on 11 November 1815 at All Hallows' Church in Bispham, and went to live in Skipton. 

The Revd William Thornber's An Historical and Descriptive Account of Blackpool and its Neighbourhood (1837) can be found here

 https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/An_Historical_and_Descriptive_Account_of.html?id=4RAvnQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y 

Next:  14: The Bonnys of Blackpool after 1815