Angela France

Martha Gunn

The dippers all know I’m the Regent’s favourite, give me
green-eye as I go to take my fill of the Pavilion
kitchen. The upstairs staff look askance at my salt-split
clothes and reddened skin but can’t deny me my pocket
load of sweets and rich treats. I can keep myself fat
on what I earn from dipping the rich and gullible
but have never seen such fat living as this;
he surely takes all the cream and leaves the skim
for the town. He laughs and says I should make free
with his larder lest I should lose breadth and strength
to hold him when he roars into the waves.

Gotch-gutted and hopper-arsed I may be, yet it takes
every ounce I own to hold him once he lumbers
down the steps to wet his royal head. My weight works
hard for its being: it is buttress against the tow, blanket
against the cold and anchor through the swell.
His fat does nothing but soak up taxes; he is all
tripes and trillabubs, a gundiguts, a baby, a big white
grub. I can’t stretch my arms around all the rolls
of lard he carries yet must hold him somehow.
They call me Queen of Brighton now, the Prince’s
dipper, but they’d cheer me all the way to Newgate
and watch me dip at Tyburn if I should let him drown.

Companion Piece — Martha Gunn

To Brighton came he,
Came George III’s son.
To be bathed in the sea,
By famed Martha Gunn.
(Old English rhyme, author unknown)

The bathers and dippers of regency Brighton were tough — they had to be. Long days spent in the sea, even in August, were cold and exhausting. Their role was to receive the gentry as they stepped down out of their “bathing machines” and not only to support them in the waves, but to plunge them completely under the water in order for “the cure” to be effective.

The men and women who worked as bathers and dippers were of the underclass. Constable (the painter) referred to the women as hideous hermaphrodites and described them mixing the speech and oaths of men ... in endless indecent confusion. It’s hard to imagine how it would have been for a genteel young woman, bathing for the first time: she would probably never have been near such people, and certainly never held, restrained and pushed by them. Usually, men were assisted by male bathers and women by female dippers. However, it was a hard life for small earnings and competition was fierce. If a customer took a liking to a particular dipper or bather then they certainly wouldn’t refuse and Martha Gunn became a firm favourite of the Prince Regent.

The Prince Regent — later to become King George IV — was well known for extravagance and excess. He was a bacchanalian character whose hedonistic lifestyle frequently left him with huge debts. He built the Royal Pavilion, an extraordinary oriental fantasy, for his seaside adventures at great cost.

Martha Gunn was large, strong and hard-working. She worked as a dipper for an astonishing 64 years until the year before she died at 88. It is said that the Prince found her coarse language and forthright manner amusing: he gave her permission to visit the Pavilion at any time and to help herself to treats from the kitchens. One well-repeated story is of her being trapped near a fireplace by the Prince’s attentions so that the butter in her skirt pocket melted and ran down her clothes.

Whatever the reason for this odd relationship, this tough old woman is remembered with much greater affection than the extravagant and dissolute Prince. Martha, known as The Venerable Priestess of the Bath, The Empress of Brighton and The Queen of Dippers, is immortalised in pub names, in music and in art. Her house is preserved and visited, as is her gravestone which records her “Peculiarly Distinguished” career.