Though you and old Davy should get up a breeze,
The waves up at Halton are only of trees;
And these you’re known turbulence only will tease,
Nor care for your bluster and fluster.
So blow, if you like from all parts of the compass,
Both you and Old Davy, to kick up a rumpus;
Yet, holding good cards, you shall not even trump us;
We’ll hold our intended Regatta!
Yes! and had it they did, as “X” said they would, as the following preface to a report in the Hastings News is sufficient to show:-
Amongst the folk lore which finds currency as well as believers in the world, is a saying that “a change of luck” comes once in seven years. Whether to attribute the successful holding of the Hastings regatta of 1861 on the day appointed for it to that cause; or whether to adopt the theory of a cycle of weather changes and suppose that the 10th, 11th, and 12th of August were return days of appropriate weather, we are at this moment undecided. The trouble of resolving the problem may be foregone in the congratulations we are enabled to offer the town that the regatta was to be and has been on the day originally appointed for it – for the first time during seven or eight years. Without reproducing a chronicle of the various states of the weather on the firstly-appointed regatta day since last it was held as originally advertised; without consulting our poet “X” as to what mollifying influence it has been his pleasure to exert upon Boreas and Davy; whithout(sic) enquiring whether the former bluff gentleman has gone home to his own parish, i. e. to the North, and Davy started to the Antipodes; and without comment upon all the changes from fog to fine, rain to storm, calm to breeze, ad libitum; we may proceed to record that a more beautiful day for regatta purposes than that with which Old Hastings was favoured on Monday need not be wished; a day doubly welcome in view of the sea and wind on Monday. A truly August sun was tempered with just enough of a Sou’wester to mak(sic) a lively sea, and a town thronged with visitors and excursionists – added to whom were the tradesmen and assistants from the places of business – the majority of whom closed in the afternoon – produced a company of sight-seers at our nautical spectacle outdoing in number anything of the kind yet seen on a similar occasion.
Death of the Registrar of the Cinque Ports.
On the 4th of September occurred the death of Thomas Pain, Esq., the registrar of the Cinque Ports, at the age of 84 years. This gentleman, whose residence was at Dover, was admitted as an attorney on the 9th of May, 1799, and was appointed registrar of the Cinque Ports and clerk of Dover Castle on the 29th of December, 1807, by Lord Hawkesbury, the then Lord Warden, and served successively under that noble lord, the Earl of Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington, -
