THE HISTORY OF

The Old Ship Hotel

In 1650 another hostelry that also called itself the New Ship Inn (now Hotel du Vin) opened across this broad cobbled street, and so the older property became known as the Old Ship Inn. At this time coastal buildings of any value were always set back from the shore, which would have been a rough and smelly place where fishermen beached their boats and sold their catch from meagre cottages.  Even in 1787 when George, Prince of Wales, began building his Royal Pavilion he did so on the Steine, an area of grassland a quarter of a mile inland of the shore.

In 1671 the Old Ship Inn was purchased by Captain Nicholas Tettersell with money given to him by King Charles II. Tettersell went on to be High Constable of Brighton. His successors extended the Old Ship Inn by purchasing adjacent buildings, extending towards the sea along Ship Street, house by house. The first two houses (today containing bedrooms 157- 153) were linked by a single stonespiral staircase that is still within the hotel. In the eighteenth century

these unusual houses were occupied by two sisters who lived separately, but shared the stairs.

A great storm in 1703 brought the sea much closer to the hotel when it swept away thirteen shops and cottages at the bottom of Ship Street. This left the Old Ship and its neighbours pretty much on the new coastline. New sea defences were created in 1723 and in due course the Kings Road was built on top of a mighty sea wall with a series of lofty bow-windowed houses facing on to it. Two of these, constructed in 1782, were incorporated into the Old Ship Inn in 1836 giving the hotel a series of bedrooms with views on to the sea.

The English attitude to the seaside was slowly changing. Already in the 1730s the influential Dr Richard Russell of Lewes was sending wealthy patients to “take the cure” at Brighton. This fashionable treatment involved not just bathing in salt water but drinking it too. In the 1780s George III gave respectability to the idea by sending four of his children to Eastbourne, 25 miles along the coast from

HISTORYThe first record of a hotel on the site of the Old Ship Inn comes from Tudor times. In 1559 a cottage that belonged to the brothers Richard and John Gilham in what is now Ship Street, was recorded as functioning as the Shippe Inn. The site of the original Shippe Inn can still be seen emblazoned with a modern sign “Old Ship Rooms”, its Paganini Ballroom hidden behind an unremarkable façade.

CHARLES II

Behind reception there hangs a portrait of the youthful King Charles II aged 21. In the year 1651 young Charles Stuart fled to Brighton after the Battle of Worcester had put paid to any idea of the King’s Party winning the English Civil War. King Charles I had already been executed and there was a price on his son’s head. The young king was desperate to get a passage to France. 

Various people in Brighton recognised the fugitive monarch and his companion Lord Wilmot, but no one betrayed him and eventually a coal merchant called Nicholas Tettersell agreed to take two passengers on his coal brig, The Surprise for a massive payment of £60.

When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 he rewarded Tettershall with the rank of captain in the Royal Navy and the command of the HMS Monk. Some stories suggest that Tettersell, who had renamed his brig The Royal Escape, pushed for greater rewards.  Certainly in December 1663, Tettersell, his wife, son and daughter were granted a pension of £100 per annum for 99 years. The King also gave him a ring as a memento. In 1671 Captain Tettersell bought the Old Ship Inn with his new fortune and in due course the prow of The Royal Escape was put on display in the hotel where it remained for many years.

Brighton,  but it took a while for the idea of a coastal property to become inherently attractive. King George’s son, the Prince of Wales (later George IV) who first visited the Old Ship Inn in 1797 was considered a barometer of fashion and he most definitely built his Pavilion inland from the coast. Forty years later however when Queen Victoria came to stay at the Pavilion in 1837,  she was disappointed that it lacked a sea view.

In tune with popular taste in 1840, the hotel entrance was moved from Ship Street to where it now stands in the middle of the second of these two Kings Road houses facing the English Channel. The eighteenth century entrance on Ship Street (still visible under its little white hooded porch) was then closed off.

In his portly old age George IV ceased visiting the Old Ship Inn but his younger

brother, who succeeded him as King William IV, often attended the Assembly Rooms when in Brighton.  He required the hotel to keep him informed of new arrivals in case there was anyone interesting in town worth inviting to dinner at the Pavilion. In December 1831 however King William was not in the Royal Box to hear Brighton’s most distinguished visitor, the celebrated Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini play from the balcony of the Assembly Rooms. The King had already met Paganini at the start of his UK tour in London. The famously demonic musician stayed that night at the Old Ship Inn and the Paganini Ballroom was subsequently renamed in his honour. Other celebrities followed, including Charles Dickens who gave one of his public readings in the same room in 1841. Five years later, Dickens’ rival W. M. Thackeray stayed at the Old Ship Inn and even

incorporated the hotel into his novel Vanity Fair as the location for Amelia and George Osbourne’s honeymoon.

The coming of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway into Brighton in 1841 made the resort accessible to London’s burgeoning middle classes and encouraged greater expansion of the Old Ship Inn. In 1852 the hotel was bought by the Bacon family who would run it for the next 147 years. During this time two more houses on the Kings Road are absorbed into the Old Ship, making it the largest privately-owned hotel in Brighton. Finally between 1963 and 1964, the last stage of the hotel’s development added the oversized east wing and 55 more bedrooms.

While the structure of the building has not altered since fresh discoveries have been made, in 1995 a series of smugglers’

tunnels leading from the beach into the town and as far north as the Royal Pavillion were discovered in the basement. Lined with French stone and English brick they attest to the scale of the smuggling on this shoreline for hundreds of years.  The hotel reopened these tunnels as wine cellars and for private dining.

In 2009 the Paganini Ballroom was refurbished as part of celebration for the hotel’s 450th birthday. In 2014 the Old Ship Inn, one of the jewels of the English seaside, became part of The Hotel Collection. Discussions are currently underway to return the prow of The Royal escape, the ship on which Charles II fled to France from Brighton, to the hotel lobby where it could be in full view for those checking into the resort’s most historic hotel.

THE PAGANINI BALLROOM

Before the Old Ship Inn’s nineteenth-century expansion along the sea front, the hotel had already expanded down Ship Street. This meant that in 1759 the original Tudor inn could be remodelled to create a much-needed function room for Brighton.  A first-floor assembly room, low-ceilinged and accessed by a single staircase was fashioned out of the old inn but this was damaged soon after in one of the great storms that periodically raged up the English Channel.

In 1769 work was begun on a new function room with a higher ceiling, a Royal Box, a musicians’ balcony and a double staircase.  George, Prince of Wales who first visited Brighton in 1787 was interested in the development of the assembly rooms.  With his encouragement – if not his money - a gracious retiring room for the royal personage was added overlooking Ship Street. This is now known as the Gresham Suite and can be visited by arrangement with the hotel’s front desk.

The Old Ship HotelKings RoadBrightonEast SussexBN1 1NR

TEL 01273 329 001

© 2015 Adrian Mourby - Contributing Editor Famous Hotels

PAGANINI

On 9 December 1831 the violinist Niccolò Paganini visited Brighton and stayed at the Old Ship Inn, the first of a number of visits to this hotel. Paganini’s playing was so mesmerising and extraordinary that it was rumoured he had sold his soul to the devil. This notion only added to the popularity of his concerts. That night the demonic maestro played a recital in the Assembly Rooms organised by Henrietta Simon, a local widow who supported herself by teaching singing and promoting concerts. We’re fortunate that her son, George Augustus Sala, who went on to become one of the  most popular journalists of the nineteenth century, writing for Dickens’s Household Words, Punch and the Illustrated London News, left us this account of life backstage at the Assembly Rooms.

It was Henrietta Simon’s tactic to present her angelic children to the stars she was about to pay, in the hope that the artiste might be moved to forgo some of his – or her – fee. The celebrated soprano Malibran swept off without even acknowledging young George, but Paganini took more of an interest in the boy: 

“He looked at me long and earnestly; and somehow, although he was about as weird a looking creature as could well be imagined, I did not feel afraid of him. In a few broken words my mother explained her mission and put the fifty guineas down on the table. When I say that he washed his hands in the gold, that he scrabbled at it, as David of old did at the gate -- and grasped it, and built it up in tiny heaps, panting the while, I am not in any way exaggerating. He bundled it up at last in a blue cotton pocket handkerchief with white spots and darted from the room. And we -- my poor mother convulsively clasping my hand -- went out onto the landing and were about descending the stairs, when the great violinist bolted again from his bedroom door. “Take that, little boy,”  he said, “Take that;”   and he thrust a piece of paper, rolled up almost into a ball into my hand. It was a bank note for fifty pounds.” 

This was the Paganini who had refused earlier that year to play for William IV in London because the King had only offered him 50 guineas.