‘Some wild beasts (in cages) have come down here, and involved us in a whirl of dissipation. A young lady in complete armour — at least, in something that shines very much, and is exceedingly scaley — goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards etc, and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion’.

If this description by Dickens is anything to go by, it is easy to see why Broadstairs had become the destination of choice for the 1850s tourist. Things had clearly moved on since 1831, when one visitor complained that the town had ‘not enough company to make it lively, but it has too much to make it retired.’

With the arrival of the railway in the 1860s, ever greater numbers of Londoners were able to take their summer holidays in the town, and by the 1880s it was the natural choice for a clerk like George and Weedon Grossmith’s Pooter, narrator of The Diary of a Nobody.

The comic journal Punch, always ready to share a joke at the expense of ‘Arry and ‘Arriet (otherwise the Victorian “chav”), threw political correctness to the winds as they joyfully imagined the cockney tourist by the sea, writing a ‘wish you were here’ to his friend in London:

The weeds as I’ve blown is a caution;—I’m nuts on a tuppenny smoke.

Don’t care for the baths, but there’s sailing, and rollicking rides on a moke.

I’ve sung comic songs on the cliffs after dark, and wot’s fun if that ain’t?

And I’ve chiselled my name in a church on the cheek of a rummy stone saint.

So, Charlie, I think you will see, I’ve been doing the tourist to rights.

Good grub and prime larks in the daytime, and billiards and bitter at nights;

That’s wot I calls ‘oliday-making, my pippin. I wish you was here,

Jest wouldn’t we go it extensive! But now I am off for the pier.

Poor old Pooter, who gamely persuades himself that he and his wife Carrie have procured ‘Very nice apartments near the station. On the cliffs they would have been double the price’, would be horrified to learn that he had entered this dubious company, with his new ‘coloured shirt and a pair of tan-coloured boots, which I see many of the swell clerks wearing in the City, and hear are all the “go.”’’ Throughout the diary he remains bewildered by the younger generation, not least by his son Lupin, who reluctantly accompanies his parents on this holiday: ‘The landlady had a nice five o’clock dinner and tea ready, which we all enjoyed’, observes Pooter, ‘though Lupin seemed fastidious because there happened to be a fly in the butter.’ On the last day of their holiday the family visit Margate, where Pooter’s friend Cummings ‘suggested we should play “Cutlets,” a game we never heard of. He sat on a chair, and asked Carrie to sit on his lap, an invitation which dear Carrie rightly declined.’

So much for the Kent coast involving people in a whirl of dissipation. Ever hopeful, George Grossmith ultimately retired to Folkestone, where he died in 1912.