Reminiscences of Old Hastings.
Arthur Ransom
Temple bar, June 1898-Dec. 1901; Oct 1899; 118, 467;
The Hastings of to-day might easily be mistaken for a mere modern creation of a syndicate of railway shareholders and builders. But when I was a boy it had a character of its own. Now, it is like a score of other places, all of which have the same raw-new terraces, parades, piers, bathing-machines and banjo minstrelsy.
Then, the glamour of a long and dramatic history still hung over it. Its streets, its houses, its people and their ways and manners, not a little of its vocabulary, belonged to the past. The tide of modern life was beginning to flow into it; but the newcomers were not cordially welcomed by many of the true sons of the place. “Who are you? You are only a —— stranger!” was the vigorously expressed protest of a native in his cups to a new resident; and the expression was so characteristic of the sentiments of the hereditary ”Hastingers,” that it became among the friends of the “stranger” in question a colloquial definition of a newcomer: “One of old S——’s men, a —— stranger.” The utterance was the expression of a prophetic instinct; the stranger has conquered the place, has, it is true, given it a kind of prosperity, but has dissipated the glamour that hung over it. Goths and Vandals are now in possession. Stucco and villadom, the lodging-house keeper and the tripper, are all very well—but Hastings is not what it was. What was once an archaic almost an ideal, home has become a caravanserai.
In the early decades of the century, it was still not difficult to detect some historic continuity between the old partly legendary times and the present. The past lingered as if loth to go. A suggestion of Celtic days lingered in Minnis Rock; Tor Hill must have got its name from the Saxons. Does anyone in Hastings now know shrimps by the archaic name of “ pandle”? The men who pushed their hand-nets through the shallow water on the sands were “ pandlers”; now, if such nets are used at all,-
