SWANAGE
THE name of Swanage shares with that of Swansea, the honour of being,
perhaps, the most poetic that any seaside resort ever owned. It is a
corruption of the Danish name of “Swanic,” or “Swanwich,” and there seems
to be no reason to doubt—although there exists a school of antiquarians
sceptical enough to doubt it—that the place was then, as its name
indicates, a place of swans. Your modern antiquary, disgusted at the
childish legends once everywhere accepted as sober historical facts,
rushes to the other extreme, and, although a thing be obvious, will not
allow its obviousness, unless supported by documentary or other tangible
evidence. He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and
unavailingly in attempts to prove that “things are not what they seem.”
Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here are based
upon the known fondness of royal personages for preserving that bird,
once thought a table delicacy, and upon the existence from ancient times
of the famous Abbotsbury swannery, along this same coast. But it is
needless here to labour the point; and although the little stream, more
and more pollutedly with every year of the extension of modern Swanage,
still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook, the
argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of the
place-name shall be no further pursued.
But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past given a very
different character to Swanage than that of a village with a marshy creek
inhabited by swans. Few places ever proclaimed the industries by which
they lived more prominently than did this little port, until well within
recent recollection. A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes the
circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage displayed
evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of stone-working and
stone-exporting.
The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of Swanage are among
the most famous building and decorative stones in the world; for here we
are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck, where, not only the oolitic
limestone of the same nature as “Portland stone” is quarried, but that
(to antiquaries at least) far more generally known material, “Purbeck
marble,” as well. No ancient church or cathedral of any considerable
size or elaboration was considered complete without shafts and font and
other decorative features of Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other
times left in its native state; and thus, from very early times until the
beginning of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly coloured and
patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England, Swanage
in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing prosperity.
Swanage in Mr. Hardy’s pages is “Knollsea,” and is described in _The Hand
of Ethelberta_ as a village:—“Knollsea,” we learn, “was a seaside village
lying snug within two headlands, as between a finger and thumb.” A very
true simile, as a glance on the map, upon the configuration of Swanage
Bay, will satisfy those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary
images. But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of what
follows:—“Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier,
unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a
quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half and had been
to sea.”
“The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their
pursuits. The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology,
the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the
ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had
a clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
than of any inland town in their own country. This, for them, consisted
of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull
portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports,
which they seldom thought of.”
This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained, very little
blurred by change, until well on into the ’80’s of the nineteenth
century, when it occurred to exploiting railway folk that the time was
ripe for the construction of a branch railway from Wareham. With the
opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equally primitive
people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and complete
as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their heads.
There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the Swanage people.
They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all quarry folk, mining the great
blocks of stone from mother earth, a strangely reserved and isolated
race. A man who, felling timber, might conceivably remain all his life
mentally detached from his occupation, following it only mechanically,
could not long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of
myriads of humble creatures living in the palæozoic age, remain
unaffected by his surroundings. An imaginative man might, not inaptly,
conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant working in some vast
petrified graveyard among the petrifactions of a world infinitely little;
and, as the dyer’s hand is subdued to the dye he works in, and—a less
classic allusion—as the photographer acquires a permanent stain from his
collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable mental twist
resulting from the surroundings.
And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually peculiar,
so collectively they retain their exclusiveness. Still, with every
recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at Corfe, under the
presidency of warden and steward; and even in these days it is not open
for an outsider to become a Purbeck quarryman. It is an industry only to
be followed by patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the
prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court with a
penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and a sum of six
shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid down.
With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows nowadays,
save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were, locally “Swanage
Turks”? When—outside Swanage, of course—you asked why so named, you were
apt to be told “Tarks, we al’us carls ’em, ’cos they don’t know nawthen
about anything.” The informant in this particular instance was a Poole
man. None could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and
thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that ancient
port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to believe the
history books—which there is no reason we should not do—by ruffians who
were by no means unspotted of the world, but had plumbed the depths of
every wickedness. Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch
railway and become a seaside resort, its “Turks” have acquired a very
considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and chop logic with
you, as well as the best.
To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has come with
its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those who have not so
known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast with Bournemouth, a
place strangely undeveloped. The trouble with the first-named is that
development has been all too rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its
immemorial character as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was
shipped. Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now
stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front of what
used merely by courtesy to be called “the town,” but is now actually
grown to that status. The “bankers”—rows upon rows of stacked slabs of
Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the shore, and
were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a moonlit night, to look so
grisly, as though this were some close-packed seashore cemetery—the
circumstance of facetious irony—the grown prosperity of Swanage has built
banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily from the
profits of their summer trading.
[Picture: The Old Church, Swanage]
In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there has arisen
with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand hotel, and in the
town itself—the folly of it!—uninteresting modern commercial buildings
have replaced the quaint old cottages that, built as they were, in a
peculiarly local fashion, with great stone slabs and rude stone tiling,
had their like nowhere else. Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are
such as have their counterparts in every town, and you can dine _à la
carte_ or _table-d’hôte_ at the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their
announcements boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great
cities. All, without doubt, very refined and up to date, but perhaps not
to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious appetites of our
beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time (of which Kingsley speaks)
when a simple glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at a rustic
inn was all one wished, and certainly all one could have got.
Of those times there are but little “islands,” so to speak, left in the
surging mass of modern brick and stone. One of them is the ancient
church, whose tower is thought to be Saxon—the church where Ethelberta
Petherwin, in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, marries Lord Mountclere.
Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with some
difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up. No dread Bastille
this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house, twelve feet by eight,
and lighted only by the holes in the decaying woodwork of its
nail-studded door. It was built in 1803, “erected” as the old
inscription tells us, “for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the
Friends of Religion and Good Order.” The inference to be drawn from the
small size of this place of incarceration is that the “Wickedness and
Vice” of Swanage were on a very insignificant scale. Although Swanage
has grown so greatly, and now owns a very fine and large police-station,
it is not to be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in
proportion, but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and
that Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.
Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it by the
late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem and Burt, is
the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled structure now
ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the private gardens of “the
Grove.” But “the Grove” has now, like many another seashore estate, been
cut up, and new villas now take the place of the older exclusiveness.
The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke of
Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of London Bridge,
but was removed when the roadway was widened at that point. Once
removed, the good folk of Southwark were at a loss what to do with it,
and so solved their difficulty by presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem,
the contractor. They thought he had been saddled with a “white
elephant,” and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man. He
considered the relic “just the thing” for his native town of Swanage, and
accepting it with the greatest alacrity, despatched it hither, and
presented it to his friend Mr. Docwra, of “the Grove.” This poor old
monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle has been
blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like a dish-cover.