The Beaches
Cliftonville
Beaches, huts, and ritual shaping Jewish summer life by the sea.
Researched and Written by Katie Blythe
A Jewish Coastal Landscape
For much of the twentieth century, Cliftonville’s beaches formed the centre of Jewish holiday life on the Kent coast; its seaside geography shaping its sociability. Moving eastwards from Margate, the promenade began at the Lido Complex before reaching Newgate Gap, where the descent to the beach ran between Hoser’s Corner and Tea Gardens on one side and the busy Butlins Holiday Camp on the other. From here, the seafront opened onto Walpole Bay, famous for its vast tidal pool completed in 1937. Further east lay Hodge’s Gap, and finally Palm Bay Beach, whose wide sands made it a favourite among local and visiting Jewish families.
The atmosphere of Cliftonville left a lasting impression on those who spent their summers there. Brian Sacks remembers “walking along the wide, brightly gravelled cliff top promenade with the salt water seaside air. It was the most invigorating air I have ever inhaled.” The cliffs and promenade were as much a part of the holiday landscape as the beach itself.
That atmosphere was also measured, debated, and quietly monitored. Brian recalls that he and his brothers followed the Evening Standard’s Sunshine League, which recorded and ranked the hours of sunshine at Britain’s seaside resorts. Margate, he notes, usually held a respectable position in the top half of the table, a fact observed with the same mixture of pride and competitiveness as a football league. Arnold Schwartzman recalls that as a child, he was even involved in measuring the temperature for the newspaper, a practical ritual that made the weather itself part of the holiday routine.
For Jean Gaffin, the coastline retains its old sensory character: “Even now, when I go back, the sea still smells the same. Salt, seaweed, and chips.” Though she notes wryly that “it did used to rain a lot,” recalling one Easter holiday when it even snowed, her memory of the summers is warm and sunlit.
Together, these memories paint Cliftonville as a landscape of mood and sensation: invigorating on the cliff tops, familiar in its scents, carefully observed and recorded, unpredictable in its weather, yet remembered as warm and restorative.
Adrienne Wallman on holiday in Cliftonville in the 1960s
Bev Finkletaub and brother Mark with their mum down on Walpole Bay in 1969, showing the raised decking where they had cafes and shops, and where the children enjoyed looking at the saucy postcards.
Daily Rhythms and Childhood Freedom
For many Jewish families, both local and visiting, the beach was as familiar as home. Perrina Hoser remembers living so close to Palm Bay that “every day, the whole summer holidays, we would go on the beach and get full of sand,” with her mother calling out to shake it all off before they entered the house.
Nearby at Walpole Bay, Ernestine Ruback describes how her family went straight from Norfolk Road each morning, spending entire days in the beach huts owned by her uncles and aunts. This easy movement from home to beach each day shaped a familiar, comforting summer pattern.
Brian Sacks recalls a similar daily rhythm at Palm Bay. After lunch, his family packed a sturdy wheeled basket with towels and provisions and walked down to their beach hut for the afternoon. As a young child, he relished steering the heavy basket around the turn of Avenue Gardens, across Beresford Gardens and down the gentle slope to the beach, his senses heightened by the sea air, blue sky, and the anticipation of the hours ahead.
Cliftonville offered an extraordinary sense of freedom for children. Brian remembers playing games on the clifftop: cricket, frisbee, and flying kites. On the beach, he dug immense holes “sometimes deeper than my own height.” Another favourite diversion was polishing copper coins in the sand until they shone like new, a small, absorbing ritual from the pre-decimal days when pennies and halfpennies were heavy, tactile objects with real value. Even the most mundane needs became part of the landscape: “spending a penny” meant clambering up the stairs of the platform, running barefoot over hot concrete past the huts and kiosks, along a boardwalk to the gents’ toilet built into the cliff. “In my mind,” Brian writes, “I can still hear the clatter of my feet on that boardwalk.” The tidal pool offered its own challenges, encouraging balance, daring and the thrill of seawater held by stone walls, where Arnold Schwartzman recalls floating on a large rubber ring.
Brian Sacks and a family members dog, sitting in front of his family's Palm Bay beach hut.
Brian Sacks, his cousin Ruth Raphael, older brother Jonathan (later Chief Rabbi), and younger brother Alan, sitting on the beach beside the gantry in 1959.
Food was central to the seaside experience. Families organised picnics each morning. Jean remembers the pleasure of fish and chips on the front, often followed by a turn at the slot machines. The Sacks brothers treasured their daily ice creams, often with a Neapolitan wafer, while occasional visits to the café on the platform offered cheese straws and the pleasure of sliding trays along metal rails. Nearby kiosks and shops also drew children’s attention, especially the bold displays of saucy British seaside cartoon postcards, part of the visual clutter and easy transgression of the promenade.
Other memories are more dramatic. Arnold vividly remembers a storm at Walpole Bay that caused the jetty to buckle and the lighthouse to fall “in slow motion,” lying on the sand the next morning “like a broken Corinthian column.”
The beach cafe at Walpole Bay, as it would have looked mid 20th century.
The Beach Hut Neighbourhood
Cliftonville’s beach huts formed a lively summer neighbourhood where local Jewish families like the Rubacks mingled with London families such as the Sackses, who returned every year to the same hut.
Jean Gaffin offers one of the richest portraits of this world. Each morning, her family packed sandwiches and picnic food and headed to their hut on the gantry. She, her husband, and her sister would sit and chat while the children ran down to the sand. The row of huts, “kind of private, but everybody went past,” created the perfect blend of intimacy and sociability. People would stop to talk, children drifted between huts, and conversations lasted entire afternoons.
Brian Sacks sitting with a family member's dog under the Palm Bay gantry.
The gantry itself was part of the daily geography: a huge raised platform standing on metal columns above the sand, accommodating rows of beach huts alongside an ice cream kiosk and a small café, and forming a shared meeting point between shore and promenade.
Next door was the hut of the Sacks family. Jean recalls that Mrs Sacks, descended from the well-known Frumkin wine merchant family, “was a chatty woman… like I am,” and the two quickly became holiday friends. Mr Sacks, by contrast, preferred to sit quietly with a big broadsheet newspaper. Their children mixed naturally. Jean remembers that one of the Sacks boys was her son’s age and how she once took the two to Kent’s St Lawrence cricket grounds, a memory echoed in Brian’s own writings. The children often discovered sea urchin fossils embedded in the chalk cliff, and Jean would help to dig these out to take home later.
Brian’s perspective adds the child’s-eye detail of this shared hut landscape. He recalls how “in August the beach was filled with holiday makers. Children were digging holes and building sandcastles. Adults were relaxing in their deckchairs or playing quoits or carving up the water in their speedboats.” Along the shoreline below the platform lay a thick bank of seaweed, which his father would sometimes gather to take home for his mother to add to her bath. This was the world he grew up in: busy, warm, and full of movement. His father and cousin Philip would bring the canvas panels from their garage every summer to rebuild the hut “in the same place every year,” anchoring the family in the same cherished spot.
Jean recalls the excitement when one of Mrs Sacks’ sons became engaged. These small moments show how deeply the holiday hut friendships ran. Families knew each other, sought one another out, and followed each other’s news from year to year.
Together, Jean’s and Brian’s memories capture the hut community perfectly: a sociable, generous seaside village bound together by sun, conversation, children’s laughter, and the steady sound of the waves.
A young Brian, sitting on the duck, and big brother, Jonathan Sacks, at Palm Bay beach in the late Fifties.
Evening Rituals and Charedi Visitors
Jean’s memories highlight a defining Cliftonville rhythm. Around five o’clock, “all the boarding house people would go back for supper,” she explains. Within minutes, the busy beach thinned dramatically. Jean cherished this early-evening quiet: “It was very nice to be there when the sun was going down, and people went.”
For local families, this quieter hour was often part of their own routines. As Tania Hoser recalls, “in the summer, we would sometimes walk down to the front after tea. My mother liked to sit by the seawall and watch the people.” These evening moments, filled with soft light and calmer air, became one of the most appreciated times of the day.
Not all visitors mingled. Jean remembers that every year, Charedi Jews came to Margate, mostly Belgian families from the jewellery trade. She recalls a young boy approaching her to ask, “are you Jewish?” and then declaring, “you can’t be. That’s not kosher milk,” after seeing her make tea. These families tended to sit together in close “huddles,” with women bathing “very late, late evening, when the crowds had gone down.”
Not all encounters were solemn. Bev Finkeltaub recalls her mother returning from her morning clifftop walk laughing as she described a group of Charedi men “stripping off starkers” before taking an early mikvah dip in the Walpole Bay tidal pool.
That sense of separation was sometimes bridged in unexpected ways. Hannah Schwartzman, Arnold’s daughter, recalls being taken on as a teenage babysitter by one of the Charedi families staying nearby while they attended Shabbat services. She accompanied the women and children to the beach, while the men used a separate, private stretch. The differences could be bewildering. On one occasion, she was asked to put a baby’s milk “in the sand bucket.” She dutifully poured it in, taking the instruction literally, to the mother’s horror. On another, she was sent back to her grandparents’ house to change after arriving in shorts and a T-shirt, her arms and legs uncovered.
The arrival of the Charedim changed synagogue life, too. “My father disliked that period,” Jean notes, as the normally small, orderly congregation became noisier: “the kids were allowed to run up and down the aisle… and people talked.” Still, their presence “filled the synagogue.”
An aerial image of the Cliftonville coastline.
Change, Return, and Enduring Memory
As the Jewish holiday trade declined, Cliftonville’s beaches became quieter. Jean remembers Palm Bay “packed when we were young,” but years later found it almost empty. “You could not bring them back now because there are not the people,” she says. Brian found Palm Bay “deserted and neglected,” a painful contrast to his childhood summers.
Yet the pull of the place has not vanished. As Bev Finkeltaub reflects: “What is it about Cliftonville? Whether it’s Jewish or not, everyone waxes nostalgic about holidays around Walpole Bay.”
For Brian, the loss of Palm Bay as a holiday centre only deepened its importance. “All my life I have had a love of holidays by the sea,” he reflects, formed by his family’s annual August stays in Cliftonville during the 1950s and 1960s. Those weeks were anticipated throughout the year and remembered as restorative rather than indulgent. Brian believed the renewal he felt each summer helped sustain his academic life, leaving him refreshed and ready to return to study. All four Sacks brothers followed the same academic path through Cambridge, including his elder brother Jonathan Sacks, who would later become Chief Rabbi.
For Arnold Schwartzman, returning to Cliftonville carries one ritual above all others. As a boy, he searched the tideline at Walpole Bay for cowrie shells, small, smooth treasures he never forgot. As an adult, each time he returns to the beach, he walks to the very same spot to look for them again. The shoreline may have changed, but this quiet act of searching connects him to the child he once was, and to the Cliftonville of his memory.
For Jean Gaffin, the connection between family memory and the Cliftonville coastline endured into the very last chapter of her sister Helen’s life. When Helen passed away in 2024, Jean’s niece, Leah, and nephew, Alan, travelled to Cliftonville the day before the stone setting. They returned to Palm Bay, the same stretch of beach where the family had spent so many bright, carefree days in their youth with their parents, grandparents, extended family, and friends. Leah and Alan carefully gathered flints from the sand. These stones were brought back to London and distributed among the family. In keeping with Jewish custom, these were then placed upon Helen’s grave. It was a simple act rooted in tradition, but also a profoundly personal tribute; a way of carrying a piece of Cliftonville to rest with her, binding the memory of those summers to her final place of peace.
The grave of Helen Bramsted nee Silver, covered with stones collected from Palm Bay beach by her family.
Despite these changes, the emotional significance endures. “It was like another street down there,” Jean says. For many Jewish families, especially those of limited means, “the beach made holidays possible when we could not afford anything else.” Brian fondly recalls a childhood where Palm Bay was “the best beach in the known world,” while Perrina remembers that “it was always lively there. People were in holiday mood.”
Today, the coastline still follows its familiar pattern: the Lido, Newgate Gap, Walpole Bay with its tidal pool, Hodge’s Gap, and the long sands of Palm Bay. Though quieter now, these beaches hold the stories, rituals, and relationships that shaped Jewish life in Cliftonville for decades. Through the memories of those who lived it, this seaside landscape remains a cherished part of Jewish heritage in East Kent.
Another angle of the gantry, with the cafe and shops.
© Katie Blythe 2026
Primary Sources & Further Reading
Finkeltaub, Bev (2025), email correspondence with Arnold Schwartzman and Katie Blythe.
Cole, Leah (2025), email correspondence with Katie Blythe.
Gaffin, Jean (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project and Exhibition. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
Hoser, Perrina (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project and Exhibition. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
Hoser, Tania (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project and Exhibition. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
Lawrence Ruback, Ernestine (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project and Exhibition. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
Lawrence Ruback, Ernestine (2011), oral history interview. Jewish History Thanet archive. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
Schwartzman, Arnold (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project and Exhibition. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
Schwartzman, Hannah (2025), email correspondence with Arnold Schwartzman and Katie Blythe.
Sacks, Brian (2016), Memories of Margate. Margate Civic Society Newsletter, Summer, Issue no. 383, pp. 8–9. http://www.margatecivicsociety.org.uk/MCS%20Newsletter%20383%20-%20Summer%202016.pdf
Sacks, Brian (2025), Odd Man Out – Volume 1: Through the Eyes of a Child. Memoir. More information available at: https://www.briansacks.com/