The British connection

BRITONS have been visiting and staying in Dieppe for centuries. The first encounters, in the Middle Ages, were mostly warlike when the land of Normandy was often fought over by rival kings and dukes from either side of the Channel.

A more peaceful connection developed in the nineteenth century when a regular ferry line was developed, linking the two coasts. The seaside was invented first in Brighton and then in Dieppe as a pleasurable pursuit for the leisured classes: the working classes were to have their turn in the twentieth century, when paid holidays were won by the trade union movement.

Dieppe became a haven for artists and writers from across the Channel during the reign of Queen Victoria. It is fascinating to reflect that, at the close of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm and Walter Sickert, along with Prince Edward and Lord Salisbury, could all have been enjoying their separate pleasures in Dieppe at the same time. And they undoubtedly all repaired for refreshment at the Café des Tribunaux, at some time or other.

Before and after the First World War, several thousand English people lived in Dieppe, many of them in search of cheaper living to ease the strain on their modest middle-class or depleted aristocratic incomes. They (or their wives, or servants) frequented the English grocer, whose faded sign was recently restored on the wall opposite the Tribunaux.

The story of the English colony in Dieppe, and its pleasures and dissensions, during the century before World War Two, is charmingly told in two books of Simona Pakenham: Pigtails and Pernod and Sixty Miles from England. The author, who died aged 94 in 2010, was an enrichment of that story herself. 

The British connection continues today, if less evidently so than a decade and more ago when duty-free crowds tumbled daily off ferries into the centre of town, making many purchases and sometimes much noise. A trickle of Dieppe-loving commuters from across the Channel continues to help the ferry line going, and some, such as Nick Wellings, the fan of Flaubert and railway timetables, and the recently deceased and much loved jazzman John Boyett, get regarded as colourful local characters.

The town that has attracted such an odd collection of English-speaking people as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, King Edward VII, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Walter Sickert, Simona Pakenham, Edward Ardizzone, John Willett and Gavin Henderson (to name just a few) will accept and absorb your oddities, too.