Information
After trying other careers, Hollingshead turned to journalism in 1856 when a contribution he sent to 'Household Words', the weekly journal edited by Charles Dickens, was well received. Thereafter, he became a regular contributor of articles to the journal and to its successor, 'All the Year Round', using the kind of humorous and graphically detailed style favoured by its editor. His dedication to authenticity is demonstrated by the way he went about preparing the two articles he wrote on Whitstable, one on oyster fishing and the other on diving. He lived in the town for a while, getting to know the oyster fishermen, the divers, and their local meeting places, such as the Duke of Cumberland public house in the High Street, the traditional head-quarters of the oyster dredgers. In later life he turned to theatre management and was the first English manager to stage Ibsen productions.
In 'All the Year Round' for 26 November 1859, under the title of ‘The Happy Fishing Grounds’, Hollingshead described Whitstable thus:
Quotations
Many important towns in many parts of England, exist upon one idea; and Whitstable, although not very important, is amongst the number. Its one idea is oysters. It is a town that may be considered small, that may be considered well-to -do, that is thoroughly independent, and that dabbles a little in coals, because it has got a small muddy harbour and a single line of railway through the woods to Canterbury, but its best thoughts are devoted to oysters. Its aspect is not sightly, if looked at with an eye that delights in the stuccoed terraces and trim gravelled walks of a regular watering place; for the line of its flat coast … is occupied by squat wooden houses, made soot-black with pitch, the dwellers in which are sturdy freeholders, incorporated free-fishers, or oyster-dredgers joined together by the ties of a common birthplace, by blood, or by marriage, capital, and trade. It has always been their pride, from time out of mind, to live in these dwarfed huts on this stony beach, watching the happy fishing-grounds that lie under the brackish water in the bay, where millions of oysters are always breeding with marvellous fertility, and all for the incorporated company’s good. How can the free-dredgers, and the whole town of Whitstable, help thinking of oysters, when so many oysters seem to be always thinking of them?
But there was more to Whitstable than the oyster industry, as Hollingshead acknowledged in ‘Another Whitstable Trade’, which appeared in 'All the Year Round' on 14 January 1860:
If it had not fallen to the lot of Whitstable to be celebrated for its oysters, and its company of ‘free-dredgers’, it might have claimed a word of notice for producing that rarest of all workmen, the sea-diver. As the oyster exerts such an obvious influence upon Whitstable men, and lives at the bottom of the sea, it would almost seem as if this stationary shell-fish were the father of this other Whitstable trade.
The Whitstable divers may be from thirty to fifty in number, strong, stout, healthy, temperate men, who look like able-bodied sailors. Though not incorporated as a joint stock company, and protected by a charter, like their friends and neighbours, the free-dredgers, they form themselves, by a kind of Whitstable instinct, into a working brotherhood, under the presidency and guidance of a captain – Mr. Green …
In stormy seasons, when the wreck of some heavily-laden, homeward-bound vessel is an every-day occurrence round our fatal coast, the rooms at the King’s Head Inn, in Whitstable, the house of call for divers, are very thinly attended, and the men, with their boats and apparatus, are hurried off in all directions to profitable work. … Mr. Green is communicated with to furnish help; and his divers are sometimes sent for from the West Indies, and distant, unknown seas.
