They were all taken by one man, George Woods, between about 1891 and 1897. They give an intriguing glimpse into what life was like in the town’s fishing industry and tourist trade just before the prosperous resort was hit by a major recession in the Edwardian era.
George Woods was born in St Albans, Herts, in May 1852. His family owned a drapery and grocery business, which provided him with enough income to move to Hastings in the late 1880s, and then devote much of his time to taking photos.
He is known to have taken about 2,500 pictures of Hastings, St Leonards and the surrounding countryside using ‘plate glass’ cameras, capturing the image on a glass plate. Photography with plate cameras was hard physical work, as each negative required its own sheet of glass, while the camera itself was substantially built, usually of wood. Some of his seafront pictures show photographers using this type of camera.
George, his wife Mary and their daughter Margaret probably came to live in Hastings, in Mount Pleasant Road, because Mary was in poor health, and the seaside was then believed to have special curative powers for invalids. But Mary had an operation for breast cancer in 1893 and died in 1896.
In 1902 George married a well-off local woman, Ethel Rant, and they acquired 75 Priory Avenue. In the late 1920s they employed a housekeeper, Helen Collins, who later recalled George as being a rather cantankerous old fellow, a perfectionist who wanted everything to be just so, but who was also very kind. He was quite tall, with a beard, and was quite sprightly when he was young. He loved talking to people and cycling, and he collected books, butterflies and medals. George died at Priory Avenue on 4 April 1934, aged 81.
His photos are not so much pictures of places but instead are images of Victorian people at work and play: the crowded, varied life of a major seaside resort, fishermen struggling to make a living in small sailing boats, and the slow, traditional way of life in the country just before the internal combustion engine changed the face of rural England forever.
Strangely, although George Woods was such a prolific photographer his work has not been widely known. This is because he seems to have made no attempt to publish or exhibit his pictures during his lifetime, while after his death in 1934 his negatives and prints were simply preserved by his widow Ethel. She died aged 90 in a Hastings rest home in 1962. George also worked alone, taking his photographs out of an intense personal interest in his subjects, and apparently without joining any photographic societies that would have brought his work before a wider audience.
Hastings had been one of Britain's leading resorts for many decades, but just at the time George was taking his pictures it was at a crossroads in its history. Until the 1880s the town had attracted many wealthier visitors, including the 'carriage folk' who came with their own horses and carriages to stay for months. A big attraction was Hastings Pier, which opened in 1872 and was an immediate success. This prompted the building in the late 1880s of a rival pier at St Leonards, almost opposite the Royal Victoria hotel (now all gone). In the 1890s, however, the better-off people were deserting Hastings for the fashionable continental holiday, or the more modern attractions of new resorts like Eastbourne and Bexhill.
It was in the 1890s that Hastings had to choose between trying to stop the disappearance of the wealthier visitors by investing heavily in upgrading its ageing facilities, or instead moving 'down-market' to specifically cater for the masses of trippers, seen in George’s photographs, who actually wanted to come to Hastings. Unfortunately for the town, Hastings Council made what can now be seen as the fundamental mistake of trying to lure the wealthy (but with very little new investment), while at the same time discouraging the trippers by passing restrictive byelaws against many of the beach activities that attracted them.
When the wealthy failed to return to Hastings, the town lost its sense of direction as a resort and entered a major decline, captured by Robert Tressell in the early 1900s in his book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. By chance, George was taking his photographs of Hastings beach in the early and mid-1890s, just before the new byelaws began to be effective in 'quietening down' the seafront. His pictures therefore provide an invaluable record of Victorian seaside life at its liveliest and most fascinating.
The exhibition will be on display for several months in the Fishermen’s Museum, which is open every day from 11.00 till 4.00. Admission is free (but donations are most welcome). Copies of many of the pictures are for sale.
Many of George’s pictures can be seen on my website https://hastingshistory.net/images-alias.