Dorset Accents (John Fowles and Lyme Regis)

According to John Fowles (1995), writing about Lyme Regis, "Full Dorset accents began to disappear around Lyme about 1900...By that time strong accents were already risible, and their associated ways of thinking distinctly old fashioned.

Lyme was always rather more prone to lose (or 'bury') its old voices because of the constant influx of holiday-makers from abroad- anywhere more than ten miles from Lyme- in summer. We call them grockles in local slang nowadays. This 'other' Lyme, the one formed by external visitors, began about 1760, when we have a first bill recording the painting of some bathing-machines. Grockles now outnumber natives by some five to six to one every high summer, but the Dorset accent was still heavy enough in the 1880s to warrant study."

I don't think many members of the William Barnes Society would agree with John Fowles (Foreword to  Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, by Crispin Tickell, 1996).

The residents of Lyme Regis were never very happy with his views on grockles, either.
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