Introduction

The Belle Vue, a prominent hotel equipped with or connected to an assembly hall, featured often in community activities held at early Victorian Bournemouth. These events taken together illustrate the range of activities that gathered the town’s inhabitants, permanent and temporary.

The Belle Vue

Boarding house, hotel, community centre

At first a boarding house, the Belle Vue stood on the sea front, a prime position of value to the resort’s visitors. Nearby, lay the Bath Hotel. The two properties catered for the bulk of Bournemouth’s visitors at the very beginning. Samuel Bayly, a prominent local resident, may always have had the property’s lease but a variety of managers came and went. One, Mrs Slidle, supervised the Belle Vue’s transition into a hotel during 1843. This included acquiring a drinks’ license but perhaps also involved physical changes to the building. These may have increased the building’s capacity to accommodate public events. At first, these included dancing, but later spread to a variety of social gatherings. In the early days, the dances occurred in the adjoining library, connected for the occasion, but, by the 1850s, the press referred to the Belle Vue’s ‘Assembly Rooms’.

Classless crucible

Social distancing at early Bournemouth appeared when two New Year dances occurred, one for trade, one for gentry. The Belle Vue hosted both, perhaps encouraging the social gap to narrow. A decade later, however, ‘the gentry and tradesmen of the place’ dined together to celebrate the Crimean War’s conclusion. They ate at the Belle Vue. Although the Marquess of Exeter stayed at the Belle Vue by the end of the early period, the Bath Hotel perhaps retained its earlier affluent associations. In the 1860s, whereas colonels stayed at the Belle Vue, generals chose the Bath. At the time no other venue had sufficient capacity. Hence, the Assembly Room became the context where a range of social types might encounter each other. As such, therefore, it perhaps became an unofficial community centre, a classless crucible for social, cultural, and political development.

A venue for public entertainment

Music and dancing

In addition to the balls that occurred at the Belle Vue during Bournemouth’s early period, nomadic musicians found an audience there. These included several known performers. The Bath Hotel had hosted earlier concerts but soon press reviews of musical events suggest that the Belle Vue surpassed it. The Jacobowitch musical family had appeared there during the early 1850s. Any classical music, however, did not guarantee automatic success. Mr Sturmey, an organist from Poole, performed at the Belle Vue, but only attracted a ‘limited attendance’. As already discussed, music of this nature would appeal to the more affluent, higher social sections of the community. For the most part, such people would consist of resort visitors. If the Belle Vue retained traces of lower social status, this did not seem to deter professional musicians from making the then difficult journey to Bournemouth.

Popular entertainment

In 1852, a professor brought his electro-biology show to the Belle Vue in Bournemouth. This included a description of ‘electrical philosophy’. Two years later, Professor Llewellyn Bushell, another electro-biologist, came. Professor Bushell went through ‘his Mysterious, Astounding, and Laughable performances, which will be found to be by far the most wonderful entertainment that has ever been witnessed.’ The show, ‘well attended’, depended on audience participation to create entertainment and interest, though ‘without the aid of trickery, collusion, or deception’. The show’s ‘useful instruction on mental science and improvement’ made the entertainment respectable. The Rogers Company of Comedians also performed at this venue. The audience for such activity might have included more of Bournemouth’s residents than visitors, including a range of social types. Despite the Belle Vue’s also hosting elite musical events, a different audience did not feel excluded from the venue when it became a musical hall.

A breadth of community activity

Religious bodies

Religious groups tried to raise funds at the Belle Vue. The British and Foreign Bible Society collected £5, perhaps a small amount. Two years later, they tried again in Bournemouth, at an unspecified venue, but the press glossed the meeting as ‘thinly attended’. In 1855, however, the Wesleyan Methodists put on a fund-raising tea at the Belle Vue, aimed at clearing the remaining debt on their chapel. The venue hosted around 400 for tea but raised only about £10. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, however, raised more money at their event. This took place at the new school room, perhaps in the iron grip of the Reverend A. M. Bennett. Methodists aside, perhaps contemporaries did not associate the Belle Vue with religion.

Fraternal groups and charity events

During the early 1850s the Hengist Masonic Lodge, dormant at Christchurch, became resurrected at Bournemouth, centred on the Belle Vue. J. Sydenham, the Past Master, gave way to Samuel Bayly, now Worshipful Master. The former had the library and reading room attached to the hotel, the latter owned the Belle Vue. Their sumptuous dinner did not omit to mention charities connected with them. A couple of years hence saw the arrival at the Odd Fellows, another charity body, based at the Royal Arms, but one of their processions ended in tea at the Belle Vue. An amateur concert held there in 1854 to support Crimean war widows. The Belle Vue hosted a charity ball dedicated to raise funds for the time’s most important good cause: the Sanatorium. These groups seemed to draw membership from most levels of society, the classless nature of the Belle Vue well-suited for their meetings.

Takeaway

Following the early history of the Belle Vue provides an index of the public life in which Bournemouth’s first residents and the resort’s visitors participated. The apparent classless nature of the hotel qualified it as suitable for a wide range of social events: music, music-hall, fraternal groups, charities, even political meetings. As such it may have acted as a communal centre for the new resort.

References

Thanks to Alwyn Ladell for his pictures of the hotel.

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