All the Devils are Here

All the Devils are Here is a 2002 work of creative non-fiction by the British author and journalist David Seabrook. The book investigates the seaside towns of England’s Kent coast, weaving together stories about the area’s contemporary economic decline with stories about artists and other lurid figures from the area’s past. The central focus is on British writers with links to the Kent coast— Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Robin Maugham, and John Buchan—but the book’s style is associative, anecdotal, and digressive. Hanging over the narrative are unspecified “private matters” which color Seabrook’s storytelling. All the Devils are Here is notable, in part, for its publication history. After Seabrook died alone in his flat at the age of forty-eight, his handwritten manuscript came into the hands of the editors at British publishing house Granta.

Seabrook begins his narrative in Margate, immediately setting the book’s bleak tone: “There’s no money in Margate. Eye contact has replaced it as the root of all evil and, yes, this town’s as ripe as ever for a low-budget remake of Brighton Rock: the joyless amusement arcades, the facial scars.”

Seabrook is searching for evidence of the time T.S. Eliot spent in the town. The poet stayed in Margate in 1921, recovering from a nervous breakdown. Seabrook discusses Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land, which contains a reference to Margate; according to Seabrook “the only occasion [in the poem] on which he described a real scene before his eyes at the time of writing.” Seabrook imagines Eliot’s time in Margate to place the lines in their grim context, telling the anecdote of an ex-serviceman who committed suicide that year in a nearby town.



From Margate, Seabrook proceeds to the more depressed town of Rochester, where Charles Dickens spent the “largely unhappy” final decade of his life. Seabrook analyses with horror the growth of a retro Victoriana tourist industry in Rochester, with local schoolchildren impersonating chimney sweeps. He draws a distinction between “historical time” and the “heritage time” in which Rochester now seems to exist. From Rochester, Seabrook proceeds to the former naval dockyard at Chatham—now derelict—and points out that worse than “retro” is “necro.” He witnesses young prostitutes “pound[ing] locked cars like gibbons at Longleat.”

Seabrook traces the appearances of the Kent coast in Dickens’s novels: in Great Expectations, Magwitch escapes from a prison ship on the Medway, while Miss Havisham lives in (then somewhat more upmarket) Rochester. Seabrook—whose first book Jack of Jumps concerned an unsolved murder—speculates that Dickens may have been obsessed with a grisly patricide that took place in the Medway area.

In Broadstairs, Seabrook finds a connection to John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps and from there weaves a complex and intriguing picture of life in Broadstairs in the thirties, focusing on the sinister figure of Dr. Arthur Albert Tesler, a con-man who may have been in the pay of the Nazi secret service. He almost certainly had ties to the British fascist Oswald Mosely (and to Aubrey Hepburn’s father). Seabook visits Tesler’s palatial mansion in Broadstairs and tells the story of Tesler’s flight from Kent in 1938. His loyalties and his business practices under suspicion, Tesler disappeared, only to die on the Transylvanian border, trying to flee to Hungary with a passport bearing Hitler’s signature. It was reported in the local Thanet Express: “many Thanet people have read with interest this week reports received from Bucharest.”



Throughout the narrative, Seabook’s narration reveals a gloomy hypersensitivity. He refuses to talk to people, lingering for hours at dingy points of historical interest. Finally, the story peels away from historical figures and follows Seabook as he visits his friend Gordon, an aging gay man, full of anecdotes and gossip about the penis-sizes of semi-famous figures from Kent history (and Seabrook’s own social circle). After drinking with Gordon, Seabrook goes cruising at a local pub and offers the only information the book contains about its narrator’s private pain: “Let's face it, there are things I haven't mentioned. Private matters. They're on me all day long.”

As he flirts with a stranger, Seabrook is inspired to a new digression, this time about Charles Hawtrey, former star of the British camp comedy “Carry On” series of films, who spent years of alcoholic disgrace in Deal, frequenting bars where he would try to pick up sailors from the Royal Marines’ School of Music. Seabrook notes that Hawtrey was banned from every pub in the small seaside town before he died: despite being a much-loved actor, his funeral drew just nine attendees.

From the story of Hawtrey, Seabrook segues to the story of Freddie Mills, a lightweight boxing champion who once appeared onscreen with Hawtrey. Mills was involved with gangland figures and bent cops in the 1960s, which leads Seabrook onto his pet topic: the unsolved “Jack the Stripper” murders of 1964-5, which formed the basis of his first book.



All the Devils are Here explores marginalization in many forms: the marginalization of provincial England and its seaside towns, the marginalization of gay men, of migrants, of the unemployed, even the marginalization of certain kinds of history.