A complaint

The Hazelwood cads

Isle of Wight Observer, June 17, 1893

A gentleman residing in the upper part of the town sends us a complaint of the manner in which the young men who attend Hazelwood behave. They are not only charged with going along the streets at night in groups singing objectionable songs full of double entendre, but also with downright insolence and rudeness. The gentleman we refer to states that one day this week he was going along Swanmore Road carrying a bouquet of flowers when he met four or five of the “young cads” from Hazelwood. Other people, he noticed, cleared off the pavement at their approach, but he declined to do so. The others certainly opened out at his approach, and allowed him to pass, but, as he did so, one of them deliberately put up his arm and, with a sudden and unexpected jerk, knocked the bunch of flowers out of his hand. He wrote a letter to Mr Jacobs, the manager of Hazelwood, and received this reply: “Dear Sir, – I am greatly grieved that you should have had your flowers knocked out of your hand. The young man that did it is the son of one of the most influential and popular ministers in London, and he assures me that it was purely accidentally done, and he would have made a suitable apology had not the party turned round and said “D- you” which precluded me from saying another word.” Our informant denies that he used the language imputed to him, and asserts that so insolent was the bearing of the young fellow who misbehaved himself, and so far was he from apologising, that he had the greatest difficulty in restraining his impulse to knock him down. We doubt whether many of these Hazelwood young men are respectably connected. If so, it is a melancholy fact, of which we have had ocular demonstration, that most of them, when they come to the seaside, seem to have left their manners behind them, and appear to be only desirous of emulating the coarseness of ‘Arry and ‘Arriett.

This postcard shows Hazelwood, Ashey Road, Ryde, which was given to the town in the 1870s for use as a holiday home for young gentlemen.