Miss Joydays Ramsgate and the French lie about bikinis

The French claim that the bikini was invented by French engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946 and first appeared on July 25 of that year at a fashion show at Piscine Molitor in Paris.

As you can see from the cover of this 1939 guide to Ramsgate we didn’t seem to realise it would require the expertise of and engineer to produce one.

I am afraid to say that when I trained in engineering I didn’t know that bikini engineers existed or I may have made a different career choice.

Anyway having ploughed through the local blogs just now there is rather a lot of political infighting going on it’s all a bit sad really and has reached the point where Tony Bignews Margate has had to turn comment moderation on.

So I thought I would stick up a few more pages of Miss Joydays guiding us around pre-war Ramsgate would cheer people up click here for them.

Bizarre and secretive working party in Thanet District Council

O.K. this is probably just me and my perception of the council but having just put up the latest TDC documents I psyched myself up to the task of reading them just in case there was anything there of great import.

If you have the pdf reader required for many government documents you may wish to click here to confirm what I am about to say the Local Development Framework Working Party meets on Wednesday, 22nd July, 2009 2.00 pm and I have just published the link to the agenda at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ they are to discus:

AIRPORT MASTERPLAN - PRESENTATION AND REPORT

DRAFT THANET CORE STRATEGY – SUSTAINABILITY

DRAFT THANET CORE STRATEGY – WESTWOOD

DEVELOPER CONTRIBUTIONS SPD

THANET LDF – CEMETERIES

The caps are theirs I just pasted them in and don’t mean to shout, for every item this group are to discuss all of the documentation is secret, the public and the press are excluded from the meeting.

I can see that they may wish too keep the airport masterplan or the core strategy for Westwood a secret but what could they possibly want to do to the cemeteries that they would want to keep a secret?

Update I have discovered that Matt Clark of KIA will attend this meeting and that Martin Cassell, TDC, will be there to give a presentation on sporting facilities.

When one sees the things that TDC seem to feel the need to keep secret from us the mind truly boggles.

Sunday afternoon dodging traffic in Ramsgate High Street.

Due to the rather peculiar rules that surround the pedestrianisation of the centre of Ramsgate on Sundays we have a situation in some ways reminiscent of the 60s.

As most of you will know Ramsgate is a busy shopping centre even on Sunday when some of the shops are closed but on Sundays traffic is allowed into the pedestrian part of the town centre.

As there are no yellow lines, cars park just about anywhere and pedestrians dodge around them trying to avoid what can be quite fast traffic.

Click on the picture to enlarge it, it was taken yesterday afternoon at about 3 and is fairly typical of the situation.

The pedestrianisation of Ramsgate turned into a total mess as the special organisation set up to design it and consult with local people left before it was completed, so TDC stopped the work where it was three quarters finished.

The man from the ministry, Pamplona bull run and other thoughts for Sunday.

An old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for some time dropped in for a chat today, he now works in what we once would have called the ministry of education but is now probably made up of a great many government departments, at local, national and European level.

We had quite a considerable chat about the coming of the end of the public service gravy train, partly as the government department he works in is one that David Cameron says he will close if he gets elected.

My notion that the whole UK education system could be improved for nothing, just by ensuring that the teachers took the examinations with their students and that as long as the same examiner marked all of each classes and their teachers exam papers, many of the problems in our education system would be resolved, went down quite well with him.

Interestingly he considered that many civil servants including him were grossly over paid, he considered that pay in the public sector was now markedly better than in the private sector, for similar jobs.

Catching up on this week’s news, “Man gored to death by bull in Pamplona run,” was one I had missed click here for story and video footage, it seems hardly credible that this should still be going on in modern Europe.

Having read the article and watched the video I am trying to get my head round how I feel about this, I suppose this is probably the most dangerous legal public event still in existence.

From the point of view of the young chap who got killed, I don’t suppose he really thought of the danger or the awful consequences for his family. I would like to say that when I was in my late teens or early twenties, especially if goaded on by my friends, I would have been too sensible to what he did, but am not so sure.

From the bulls point of view as the bulls that are bred for Spanish bullfighting are just that and wouldn’t exist without the sport, this is more difficult for me than just saying it’s barbaric and has no place in a modern world.

If I had been born a bull in the UK, castration, intensive farming and the slaughterhouse would have been my lot.

The bulls bred for Spanish bullfighting however pretty much range freely, as close to the bovine natural habitat as one is likely to find in Europe today, I think reaching maturity intact and dieing relatively quickly has more appeal for me.

Anyway moving away from the Hemmingwayesk to the more mundane, I have just put last weeks planning applications on http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ and am once again pondering the bizarre nature of TDC planning online.

The most ridiculous aspect of the plans as they appear online is that pretty much all of them are scans of scale drawings, the only way one can work out any of the dimensions on them is to use a scale ruler against the paper sheet.

This means that when viewing the planning drawings online it is impossible to tell how long any of the lines are i.e. the height, width or depth of any of the proposed buildings, rendering most of the documents published on the site next to useless.

I have been asking TDC to get linier scales added to the drawings before they are scanned for some time, this wouldn’t be difficult, it could be done as simply as having a rubber stamp of each scale made and applying it to the plan.

I know that TDC are working on a new planning site, which should be working by now, however they tell me that this has been beset with technical problems. Not having got as far as putting liner scales on the sheets yet suggests there will be quite a long wait before we get anything really useful.

Pondering our local water contamination a question that occasionally flits through my mind is, would the combination of government agencies that appear to be incapable of insisting in basic safety measures, like a flood risk assessment for Pleasurama, combine through incompetence or design to supply contaminated tap water in a first world country click here to read.

Still on the water issue, some of you may be interested to see how Thanet Earth have addressed some of the problems that China Gateway will have to solve click here to view, as you can see it will a mammoth and expensive task. I believe something like this sort of solution will have to be used for the car and lorry park runoff, looking at the size of these parking areas the tanks will have to be massive

I will endeavour to add more as I get time today.

Margate and Ramsgate all about and round about them. A gossiping guide to some pleasant places in the Isle of Thanet

This is an unusual guidebook to The Isle of Thanet, written by By Chas. H. Ross, it comes from the Victorian satirical publishing house that produced Judy magazine. Judy was an offshoot, possibly a rival to the better-known Punch magazine that started in the 1840s.

As far as I can tell this book was first published in about 1880 its humorous approach equates to Gilbert and Sullivan and Diary of a Nobody. Judy started in 1867 and seems to have vanished in about 1900.

As a child I lived in a Victorian house, bound volumes of Punch lurked in the corners of bookcases both at home and in my friend’s houses. I read through them, as they were obviously supposed to be funny; you could tell from the pictures. I suppose as a child I assumed that humour was something that one learned, as the other things from the adult world. I don’t think it ever occurred to me then that as the volumes of Punch were mostly around 100 years old, they had ceased for the most part to be funny to anyone. We didn’t have any bound copies of Judy, I don’t think my Victorian ancestors many of whom were still alive at the time, would have approved of it.

Always for the local historian one of the greatest difficulties is extracting from histories and guidebooks what the place was really like at the time they were written. For the most part the books about The Isle of Thanet try to tell us about the past as it was perceived at the time of writing.

This book goes one step further, in that aspects of it are so quintessentially Victorian that one finds oneself starting to think somewhat like a Victorian.

I found during reading it that I was to some extent travelling in that foreign country which is called the past.

The original book was a piece of cheap, throw away, publishing. The pages were not very well printed, so I have done my best with it to make it all legible. Most of all though I have endeavoured to retain the atmosphere of the original in my reprint.

These ephemeral guidebooks are extremely scarce, they appear on the secondhand book market far less frequently than the more respected academic histories of Thanet.
The price of one of the original copies would be very hard to judge. I bought mine at auction and was pleasantly surprised to get it for just under £100 as neither you nor I will probably never find another copy so its price is unlikely to be of great import.

On the other hand the value of the book is not diminished in this modern reprint. The humour is there both intended and created by the passage of time, if one sort don’t make you laugh the other probably will, hopefully a little of both.

It is as well to remember that at this time both Ramsgate and Margate were two of the busiest resorts in the world. The Granville hotel in Ramsgate ranked among the top hotels in the world. The tower on the Granville hotel houses the tanks to supply pressure for the many types of bath available in its astonishing spa. Politicians, celebrities and even royalty wandered our streets mixing with the crowds down from the London season. Even special luxury trains ran from London.

Anyway so much for my rambling on click here for sample pages from the book and click here should you wish to buy it.

The mystery of Thanet District Council TV

One of the things I post regularly on http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ are the new videos that Thanet District Council put up on Youtube, some of these are obviously professionally made for the council, probably at considerable expense.

Don’t get me wrong here they are very good well made videos and the latest batch to go up here http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2009/07 water-safety-code.html on an important subject that may save lives.

When I first started posting them I noticed that many of them had hardly been viewed at all, the problem being that in quite a few cases there doesn’t seem to be any discernable use of them made on the councils website.

Occasionally one may appear embedded in a news item on the council’s homepage but these items vanish after a relatively short space of time, strange really like the councils press release photographs.

Here is the latest one, Youth Matters meet Gary Rhodes at the National Junior Chef competition 2009, not something you would think they would want to hide, it shows Thanet College in an exceptionally good light.



when I embedded it here it had been up for two days and only had 7 viewings three of which were me messing about getting it to embed properly.

The pedigree of the family of Curlinge, Curlying or Curling, of Chilton in the parish of St Laurence, in the county of Kent.

One of the local history books that I publish is The History and Antiquities of the Church and Parish of St Laurence Thanet in the County of Kent.

Click here for sample pages from the book.

Click on the image to enlarge it the pedigree of the family of Curlinge, Curlying or Curling, of Chilton in the parish of St Laurence, in the county of Kent from this book.

This book has an index of people named in it so it can be a useful tool for those researching their family history.

Click here to view the list of names.

One thing this leads to is questions from people who are trying to track down information about their ancestors that once lived in this area, often I find I can’t answer them so I have posted some of them here in the hope that others may.

Below today’s question.

“Dear Michael

I don’t suppose you’d have a book which would tell me anything about a school run by a Rev G Abbot in Ramsgate in 1819? I have a copy of a letter dated September 4th 1819, written by my 4x great grandmother Catherine Curling to her grandson Thomas Curling and addressed to

Master Curling

The Rev G Abbot’s

Ramsgate

Kent”

As you see my answer below may have had something useful in it though not exactly what was asked for.

Good news and bad no mention of a school run by school run by a Rev G Abbot in the only book I know of that covers the Ramsgate schools during that period. Information is sketchy and mostly drawn from old averts and maps.

However Richarson’s Fragments of History of Ramsgate 1885 does mention several Curlings mentions as sea captains that went to sea from Ramsgate between 1750 and 1754 William Curling of North End Thomas Curling of North End and William Curling of East End.

We have in stock a cheap reprint of this at £6.99 + p&p or a first edition at £120 + p &p.

There may be some mention of Curlings in Mockett’s Journal links to the whole thing published online here http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/02/mocketts-journal-special-treat-for.html

I will make your enquiry the subject of a post on my blog as a lot of people interested in Ramsgate History read it and someone may come up with further information.