He was the king who suffered from porphyria, interpreted at the time as ‘the madness of King George’. I can’t help wonder, sitting here on this sandy beach, if he’d discovered Weymouth sooner, we’d still have America as a colony. Probably not, plays go the way they go regardless of the actors sometimes. Nonetheless, some years later, the doctors thought the sea air might do him good.
Well. It’s not doing me any good. Against all reason the breeze is kicking my hay fever into overdrive today. My face is running and my nose is blocked. That’ll be all that grass you get in the sea I presume.
Anyway, we’re here somewhere between the ocean and the Gloucester hotel. Once a day, along this same sandy shore, footmen would have rolled two white ‘bathing machines’ out from the Gloucester, into the shallow waves. A bathing machine, if you’ve not seen one, is a sort of one-person cabin set on a cart. I can see the wheels kicking up the wet sand even now as they pushed it along.
Quite the palaver. Though to be fair, it’s not a bad prayer when the naked monarch leaps into the English Channel from a wooden box.
After George’s time, the railways made towns like Weymouth suddenly accessible. It became a hotspot for tourists from Bath and Bristol, from London, and perhaps further. King George III would probably never have seen the kind of place it would become.
I dipped my toes in earlier. The water was freezing but of course, very refreshing. I really like the way the motion of the waves erodes the sand between your toes, and the waves cascade around your ankles. For the briefest moment I forgot my hay fever.
No band though. Probably just as well.
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