'You made sure you always drove your car around with the board on the roof': The surfing scene in Sandgate in the early 1980s.

Title

'You made sure you always drove your car around with the board on the roof': The surfing scene in Sandgate in the early 1980s.

Subject

Mark Steeple

Description

In this excerpt, Mark describes his first (homemade!) wetsuit, the nascent surfing and windsurfing scene in the Folkestone area in the early 1980s, and the chauvinism around surfing and windsurfing at this time. (Transcript attached.)

Creator

Michael Romyn

Source

Mark Steeple Oral History Recording

Publisher

Kent's Sporting Memories

Date

Interview recorded on 4 April, 2019

Contributor

Mark Steeple; Michael Romyn

Rights

Kent's Sporting Memories

Relation

Mark Steeple Oral History Recording ; Mark Steeple Oral History Recording Summary

Format

MP3 file

Language

English

Type

Sound Recording

Identifier

Mark Steeple

Transcription

Kent’s Sporting Memories Oral History Transcript (Excerpt)
Interviewee: Mark Steeple
Interviewer: Michael Romyn
Date: 4 April, 2019
Location: Mark Steeple’s home in Burmarsh, Kent.
Recording Time: 28:05 – 34:52

Mark Steeple: There was a windsurfing shop in Sandgate when it was kind of brought into this country. It was one of the first ones, if not the first one, and of course they had wetsuits there so I bought a wetsuit from there. Previously I had a homemade one when I was kayaking, we bought a homemade wetsuit – we just got a huge sheet of neoprene and made patterns, you chalked it out and cut the shape, and, you know, it was an inch thick and you stood in it, and it had a flap under the crotch with the buttons at the front, and then – it was basically a deep-sea diving suit but it was all that was available, you know, and you stood in it and you could barely move. It was like having bungees on your arms trying to return them to the down ways side position, so it was quite a bit of exercise just walking in this thing. I had that for a while, it eventually fell to pieces.
Michael Romyn: Did you surf in that as well?
MS: No, I never surfed in that. I windsurfed in it actually. No, someone gave me one like it, actually, when I started windsurfing, someone gave me a wetsuit, and that was a waterski wetsuit but it was mentally thick. It was so thick, it was actually difficult to raise your arms because with waterskiing – it was an ex-racer – and with waterskiing you just stand like that, you don’t move, you know, and so it was fine, but with the dynamic you need for windsurfing, it was a bit awkward!
MR: Did the windsurfing start around the same time as the surfing?
MS: I probably was – around the same time, yeah, but I got more into windsurfing because it was a new sport and that did fascinate me, and I went a did a course on windsurfing and I ended up moving into – got very friendly with the windsurfing instructor, he became a really good friend and he was living in a horrible squalid bedsit above, well just a room really, above the windsurf shop, and there was another room up there and they let me live there as well and of course I loved it. My parents must have despaired, but – it was foul but, you know, you don’t care about that when you’re twenty, nineteen, twenty, and yeah, and so I lived there and it was of course right on the seafront in Sandgate and I used to windsurf a lot then, yeah. Again, it’s funny, I am a very experienced windsurfer but I never became that great at it. I could do all the things but I was never what you’d call technically a really good windsurfer. I could do a lot of the manoeuvres and tricks but never consistently well or never perfectly or whatever, you know, I kept persisting at it, and I could just about do it, but there were people technically – a lot of the local guys were far better than me, well, certainly better than me, some of them far better than me, but I loved it, I didn’t care.
MR: So it was pretty much a brand-new sport when you picked it up?
MS: It was pretty young, yeah. Because I came back from France and discovered it when I came back so I guess it must have turned up in about 1980, eighty-one, and I came back in eighty-two, eighty-three, so I was pretty, yeah, an early adopter, but the kit was still pretty rudimentary then, but I wasn’t right at the beginning, no, it had been going for a bit.
MR: And you think that shop might’ve been one of the first?
MS: Yeah, it was run by a guy called Barry James, he unfortunately died, crikey, he must’ve died twenty years ago now, but he was into skateboarding and he, I think he maybe, I don’t think he’s credited with bringing it into the country but I think he may have been the guy who did bring it into the country, yeah, I think he may have been, but he was certainly there right at the very beginning.
MR: Was he your flat mate?
MS: No he wasn’t. He sold the shop when I moved down, down to it, to a couple of other guys, Jim and Alex, they, Alex ran a business, he worked for an office on the first floor and I lived in a sort of pigsty on the second floor.
MR: Was there a kind of scene around it?
MS: Yeah, very much so. I mean the scene was a lot smaller than the people who windsurfed. It was quite a mixed group of people, a few ex-water skiers so they had a, cliques not really the right word but they would kind of group together and – because there was a bar in the basement and they tried to run it as a club, too, but there were only probably a handful of people that regularly went there, maybe ten, maybe twelve on a busy day, but a lot more than that actually did the sport, but in terms of having it as asocial thing as well people did come and do it and go away again, but there were a few of us who became friends and ended up as a group of friends who thought we were surfers and, you know, you made sure you always drove your car around with the board on the roof, you know, just to let everyone know. And one of my friends, Dan, he’s still a friend – he had a VW Beetle, so his was the car we always wanted to be going anywhere in because of course it was a bit more surfy, but yeah, it was good fun, yeah, it gave us a focus really I suppose, yeah.
MR: Was it a male dominated scene?
MS: Yeah, it was, I mean girls were always around you, and I suppose always, again, you felt quite good about yourself and quite – there were very few of us doing it so you felt quite elite if you like, quite special really, and certainly there were girls around but there weren’t really girls taking part in it. There were a few involved in the sport but very few, because windsurfing is quite a strength thing, you know, you do have to be physically quite strong to do it and I think that would put a lot of girls off. Once you become able then the strength become less of an issue, but there weren’t that many girls doing it really. I can’t think of a girl locally that was windsurfing, apart from on a very light wind day when the seas are millpond flat because you can just have a go at it like you would sit on the top of a dinghy, but getting a bit more advanced I’d have to say no, there just weren’t.
MR: Was that the same as surfing?
MS: Surfing there were a lot more girls doing it, but again there was a great film and I remember watching it in the eighties called Puberty Blues, an Australian film, I remember reading about it in a Sunday supplement and then seeing it, and it was about, it was an Australian film, but it was about how chauvinistic the surf scene was and it was unthought of, girls, you know, it’s a guys’ thing, you stay away from the water, you know, you lay on the beach and look good but you stay out the water kind of thing, so surfing had a fairly male dominated dynamic really. These days, I don’t think so. There’s a lot of girls very successful in competition and, you know, are just as good surfers as the guys.