Carnbeg Population
Our editor, Cornelia Hohenlohe, writes:
A population census was published this week.
It tells us that the sum total of individuals living in Carnbeg is 10,583.
First thing: this is an increase on the last ten years ago, when we were home to 7,607 souls.
We've put on nearly 3,000.
I got to wondering just when we were 10,583. Six months ago, a year, two years? How can the configurationists in Edinburgh be so specific? Could they have missed a couple of dozen, or under-estimated by doing their survey during the summer when people are away?
What does 10,583 mean anyway in the context of a town like Carnbeg, a spa resort which makes its income from a round-the-year trade in tourism? The visitors on any one day in high summer will double that figure, easily - see how crowded the streets get, especially at the narrowest points of the Old Town, and it certainly doesn't feel like a town of 10,583 denizens. But even in what used to be the off-season we can be as busy, except that the increase in population consists of conference delegates, who tend to keep to their hotels. At the big medical conference last year it was reckoned that there was full occupancy in every hotel and B&B in the town and also within a radius of five miles.
We don't have the sort of railway station that would have been built to serve a town of however many were here in the early 1900s. We were promised one with (can you believe?) six platforms and a vaulted glass roof; instead we got three platforms and three strips of glass roof, but we were honoured with a state-of-the-art (for 1907) signal box. Even then a population census didn't tell much, when households had servants (were they included when the owners had two or even three homes?), when families came to the big hotels and weren't under any obligation to say how long they were likely to stay. What about the itinerant farm workers, the fruit pickers and the howkers who sort-of belonged to Carnbeg, here for this or that seasonal employment? During two Wars the population swelled again, with Forces personnel - both invalided and vacationing - accounting for an add-on 50%.
Nowadays we have workers for the leisure industry, both legit and - let's hurry past the term - black market. (WW2 Carnbeg knew all about that too.) You hear Polish and Russian and South American-Spanish and all-what-else being spoken every day of the week now, so that it's like living in the cosmopolitan dream town which the developers of Carnbeg wished it to be. The Ca'd'Oro now has Baltic and Mexican and Australian troupes to give us our opera, who stay for months, just like the repertory actors and behind-the-scenes crew at the Jubilee Theatre, and they bring their families and friends, and - thank God - the town stays open late and lives it up.
If you accept the figure of 10,583 - either paying council tax or family members or tenants - then you have to define it in a different way, and say 10,583 living people. You die, and you're discounted. But Carnbeg has always had a very strong sense of the past for me: it includes those I remember, who used to live here and left or who lived here and died here. In a sense they're as real - forgive me, reader - as the living and breathing people I know, and more real to me than the proportion of the 10,583 I have never met and clapped eyes on. I've always enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - my strolls in the graveyards of the town, frequenting myself with our predecessors (particularly longing to know about those poor Victorian matrons who went to their Maker identified only as the Daughter and/or Wife of).
A population census was published this week.
It tells us that the sum total of individuals living in Carnbeg is 10,583.
First thing: this is an increase on the last ten years ago, when we were home to 7,607 souls.
We've put on nearly 3,000.
I got to wondering just when we were 10,583. Six months ago, a year, two years? How can the configurationists in Edinburgh be so specific? Could they have missed a couple of dozen, or under-estimated by doing their survey during the summer when people are away?
What does 10,583 mean anyway in the context of a town like Carnbeg, a spa resort which makes its income from a round-the-year trade in tourism? The visitors on any one day in high summer will double that figure, easily - see how crowded the streets get, especially at the narrowest points of the Old Town, and it certainly doesn't feel like a town of 10,583 denizens. But even in what used to be the off-season we can be as busy, except that the increase in population consists of conference delegates, who tend to keep to their hotels. At the big medical conference last year it was reckoned that there was full occupancy in every hotel and B&B in the town and also within a radius of five miles.
We don't have the sort of railway station that would have been built to serve a town of however many were here in the early 1900s. We were promised one with (can you believe?) six platforms and a vaulted glass roof; instead we got three platforms and three strips of glass roof, but we were honoured with a state-of-the-art (for 1907) signal box. Even then a population census didn't tell much, when households had servants (were they included when the owners had two or even three homes?), when families came to the big hotels and weren't under any obligation to say how long they were likely to stay. What about the itinerant farm workers, the fruit pickers and the howkers who sort-of belonged to Carnbeg, here for this or that seasonal employment? During two Wars the population swelled again, with Forces personnel - both invalided and vacationing - accounting for an add-on 50%.
Nowadays we have workers for the leisure industry, both legit and - let's hurry past the term - black market. (WW2 Carnbeg knew all about that too.) You hear Polish and Russian and South American-Spanish and all-what-else being spoken every day of the week now, so that it's like living in the cosmopolitan dream town which the developers of Carnbeg wished it to be. The Ca'd'Oro now has Baltic and Mexican and Australian troupes to give us our opera, who stay for months, just like the repertory actors and behind-the-scenes crew at the Jubilee Theatre, and they bring their families and friends, and - thank God - the town stays open late and lives it up.
If you accept the figure of 10,583 - either paying council tax or family members or tenants - then you have to define it in a different way, and say 10,583 living people. You die, and you're discounted. But Carnbeg has always had a very strong sense of the past for me: it includes those I remember, who used to live here and left or who lived here and died here. In a sense they're as real - forgive me, reader - as the living and breathing people I know, and more real to me than the proportion of the 10,583 I have never met and clapped eyes on. I've always enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - my strolls in the graveyards of the town, frequenting myself with our predecessors (particularly longing to know about those poor Victorian matrons who went to their Maker identified only as the Daughter and/or Wife of).
June 13, 2008