GREENWICH--THE ROYAL NAVAL HOSPITAL--THE “FUBBS YACHT”--THE
GREENWICH WHITEBAIT DINNERS--WOOLWICH--THE “PRINCESS ALICE”
DISASTER--LESNES ABBEY--ERITH--DARTFORD
To fully appreciate the majestic appearance of Greenwich, you must
view it from the river. Indeed, none of these waterside places from
Deptford all the way to Gravesend, show to advantage on shore. Their
historic associations and original scenic beauties are too overwhelmed
with recent squalid developments. But from the busy Thames, Greenwich
has a grandeur that is not easily to be expressed. This is due, of
course, chiefly to the architectural interest of Greenwich Hospital,
whose stately water-front is in part the work of Sir Christopher Wren.
It began as a Royal Palace, arising on the site of the ancient palace
of Placentia built here by Henry the Sixth, who also enclosed the park.
In that vanished palace Henry the Eighth was born, and there died
Edward the Sixth. Queen Mary in 1516, and Elizabeth in 1533 were born
at Placentia, and from its terrace Elizabeth watched the sails of her
adventurous seamen setting forth to realms that Cæsar never knew. When
Charles the Second found himself firmly established, he began to build
himself a new and gorgeous palace on the site of Placentia, which had
suffered much in the time of Cromwell. The beginnings of it alarmed
Pepys, who was afraid it would cost a very great deal of money; but it
was never finished as a royal residence, and was incomplete in 1692
when Queen Mary selected it as a home for wounded sailors returned
from the battle of La Hogue. She died in 1694, and William the Third
continued his wife’s scheme. The buildings were completed and opened as
a hospital in 1705.
I do not think there was ever a Greenwich Pensioner who liked living
in Greenwich Hospital. That they ever reasoned out all the causes of
their dissatisfaction is not to be supposed, but it must be quite
obvious that residence amid these stately colonnades of Wren’s design,
and in these monumental buildings of such prodigious scale, was not a
little like living in a mausoleum. Then there was the feeling of being
a mere part of a system and subject to a certain degree of control
which, together with an embarrassing public curiosity, must have made
burdensome the life of any Greenwich Pensioner of independent mind.
They are nowadays much happier in living with friends and relations;
and probably suffer less from rheumatism than they did amid these
draughty waterside colonnades, pleasant enough in summer, but where
the bitter blasts of winter can be really murderous. The views of
an old Greenwich Pensioner on Wren’s stately architecture would be
interesting, but probably not at all flattering to the memory of that
great master. They would not be worth listening to on the score of
ideas about architectural style, but as criticisms of the Hospital as a
dwelling-house they would be very much to the point.
[Illustration: GREENWICH HOSPITAL.]
In course of time, somewhere about 1870, the Greenwich Pensioners
plucked up courage sufficient to express their dislike of the place;
and at last prevailed upon those Pharaohs, the Governors of the
institution, to let them go from the House of Bondage and Draughts, so
to speak, and to betake themselves and their pensions wheresoever it
pleased them to live.
The Royal Naval College now partly occupies these great ranges of
buildings; and other portions, are, of course, well known as a museum,
in which the Nelson relics and a curious collection of ship-models are
to be seen.
There are, in one way and another, a good many recollections of Charles
the Second at Greenwich. One of them is found in the name of the
“Old Fubbs Yacht” inn, which stands in Brewhouse Lane, hard by the
“Ship.” “The Fubbs Yacht” is nowadays more in the nature of an obscure
public-house than an inn, but the back of it looks upon the river, and
passengers by steamer to and from Greenwich Pier may easily see the
odd and not beautiful name. No one, however, is in the least likely to
associate it with Charles the Second; but the sign derives directly
from his royal yacht, _Fubbs_, which succeeded his first yacht,
the _Cleveland_, just as his favourite, the Duchess of Cleveland,
was succeeded by Louise de Kérouaille, whom he created Duchess of
Portsmouth, and whom he nicknamed “Fubbs” because of her “plump and
pleasing person.” Singularly enough, these are exactly the words in
which the vicar describes Mrs. Partlet, the pew-opener, in the comic
opera, _The Sorcerer_.
[Illustration: THE “OLD FUBBS YACHT” GREENWICH.]
But you will hear nothing of this history at the inn itself, where the
vague idea prevails that “Old Fubb” was a sportsman, who, at some time
unspecified, sailed racing yachts. The situation of the house is now of
the grimiest, with a busy coal-wharf on either side, but it is sung by
a modern poet--not Tennyson, nor Alfred Austin, nor Kipling, but by
one J. G. Hamer, who writes thus, in the advertising way:
“There’s an ancient house near the subway,
‘Fubb’s Yacht,’ kept by William Pring,
In the old royal borough of Greenwich,
Where the bells of St. Alphage ring.
“Do you want a good sixpenny dinner,
From twelve o’clock till two,
You’ll get what you want at the ‘Old Fubb’s Yacht,’
From steak-pie to Irish stew.
“A jolly good tea for fourpence,
You can have at this well-known spot,
And enjoy yourself by the silvery Thames,
At the cosy and smart ‘Fubb’s Yacht.’”
Together with much more to the same effect. I fear no contradiction
when I say that Tennyson never wrote anything like this.
Beyond the stately Hospital, along a humble waterside street where
the riverside “Yacht” and “Three Crowns” inns hang out their signs,
the inquisitive stranger will find the Hospital of the Holy Trinity,
sometimes called Norfolk College, an alms-house for a number of old
men, founded together with another at Clun in Shropshire, and one
for women at Castle Rising in Norfolk, by Henry Howard, Earl of
Northampton, in 1814. It is a quaint, white-painted group of buildings,
enclosing a little cobble-stoned courtyard with a central garden and a
fine large lawn at the back. In the chapel, otherwise uninteresting,
is the monument of the founder; removed in 1696, together with his
body, from the then ruined and roofless church of St. Mary at Dover
Castle, where he had been Constable. His life-sized, white marble
kneeling figure, with the Garter on his left leg, looks stately and
dignified in the chancel. It is indeed among the best works of that
notable sculptor, Nicholas Stone. Other portions of the monument, in
fragments at the west end of the building, show signs of having at
some time been long exposed to the weather. The figures are rather
speculative, and may be either a galaxy of Virtues and Graces, or wife
and children.
Trinity Hospital is overhung and pitifully dwarfed by the great
electric power-house of the London County Council’s electric tramways,
whose chimneys rise to a height of nearly 300 feet. They are typical of
the great change that has come over Greenwich in modern times, tending
towards degrading it to a mere indistinguishable part of London.
Fortunately, it possesses too many beautiful natural features to become
ever quite that.
But no longer is Greenwich dignified by the ministerial whitebait
dinners that were once held at the “Ship.” These once famous
entertainments that generally marked the close of the parliamentary
summer session originated in a casual way, about 1798, when the
commissioners of Dagenham Breach invited Pitt to be a guest at their
annual fish dinner at Dagenham. The occasion was successful enough
to be repeated, and the scene was eventually changed to a tavern,
sometimes at Blackwall and sometimes at Greenwich. By this time the
annual feast had developed into a Tory ministerial event, and proved
so useful in the strengthening of party ties that the Whigs, when in
office, adopted the custom.
The Greenwich ministerial whitebait dinners, held either at the “Ship,”
the “Crown and Sceptre,” or the “Trafalgar,” were formerly accompanied
by something of what, in less exalted circles, we should style the
showy “beanfeast” element; for the Royal and Admiralty barges, gay
with bunting, conveyed the guests to the scene of jollity, and back.
Only the concertinas were lacking. The function was first broken
during the Gladstonian administration of 1868–74. In that last year,
with the triumph of the Conservatives, Disraeli revived it, but the
excursion was made by steamer instead of by barge. And so it continued,
through the next Liberal term of office, until 1883, when it was again
discontinued; to be revived on only one occasion since, in 1894, during
the short-lived administration of Lord Rosebery.
Not only Ministers of the Crown resorted to Greenwich for whitebait
dinners: they were long popular with Londoners in general; but now
that the swiftest of communication with London is obtainable, this
most easily perishable of fish is just as readily to be had there, and
Greenwich has suffered in consequence. Whitebait, supposed by some to
be a distinct species of fish, and declared by others to be merely the
small fry of herring, are caught between Blackwall and Greenwich, said
to be the only waters in which they are found.
All the way from Greenwich to Woolwich, a matter of three miles, run
the electric trams; the river going in a bold loop almost due north,
along Blackwall Reach. A fine, broad, new road runs across the dreary
flats to the Blackwall Tunnel; and all along these once solitary levels
great modern factories are springing up. The explorer will not get much
joy of going that way; nor indeed will he find much by going ahead into
Woolwich, for the mean things that fringe about the skirts of a great
city are abundantly evident.
Woolwich looks imposing from the river, with its crowded houses backed
by the wooded heights of Charlton and Shooter’s Hill, but it is
disappointing on close acquaintance. Its streets, of the narrowest,
described to the present writer by a contemptuous attendant at the
Free Ferry as “not wide enough to wheel a bassinette,” are old without
being either ancient or picturesque, and although they own such
attractive names as “Nile” and “Nelson” Streets, “Bellwater Gate,”
and “Market Hill,” are grim and repellent. The parish church, in
midst of these unlovely surroundings, is exactly in keeping: a grim,
eighteenth-century affair of dull stock brick, like a factory. Many of
the crowded tombstones around it were removed in 1894. Among them was
one to a certain Emmanuel Skipper, who died in 1842, whose epitaph
concluded:
“As I am now, so will you be,
Therefore, prepare to follow me.”
To which some one, apparently a stone-worker engaged in the churchyard,
added in very neat lettering:
“To follow you I’m not intent,
Till first I know which way you went.”
North Woolwich, whose name will be found by the diligent student of
maps, on the opposite shore, is not, as might reasonably be supposed
from its situation, in Essex, but is a portion of the county of Kent.
There are, of course, many instances throughout England of detached
portions of shires and counties islanded in others, but perhaps none
so oddly arbitrary as this, where a broad river separates the two
portions. Rarely ever do we find an altogether satisfactory explanation
of these peculiarities. In the present instance it is held to be owing
to the ancient local manorial possessions of Count Haimo, Sheriff of
Kent in the reign of William the Conqueror, lying on either side of the
Thames, and that, therefore, the smaller portion of his holding was
included in that county in which his greater interests lay. It is an
ingenious, if not altogether convincing theory.
Woolwich is associated with one of the most terrible shipwrecks of
modern times. A good many years have passed since the wreck of the
pleasure-steamer _Princess Alice_ thrilled London, but there are
many yet living who remember the occasion. The _Princess Alice_
plied frequently in the summer between London and Gravesend, and was
generally crowded. She was exceptionally well filled on that fatal day,
September 3rd, 1878. More than eight hundred people were aboard. London
trippers are proverbially jolly, and those who in those days made
holiday at Gravesend and Rosherville were folk of exuberant spirits.
Music and dancing occupied the attention of the holiday folk on the
return voyage, and all went well until after passing Gallions Reach and
rounding Tripcock’s Tree Point. Night had fallen upon the broad and
busy river, and coming swiftly down-stream appeared the lights of a
large screw-steamer, the _Bywell Castle_ collier. The captains of both
vessels were taken by surprise, and both lost their presence of mind,
with the result that the _Bywell Castle_ struck the _Princess Alice_
immediately forward of her engine-room, and cut her in two. In less
than four minutes the _Princess Alice_ had sunk, and 670 persons were
drowned. Some few, with the exercise of much agility, jumped aboard
the collier at the moment of the collision, but many were women and
children, and many more were in the saloon, and were caught there, as
in a trap.
It was finally decided in litigation that the _Princess Alice_ was
alone to blame for the disaster. Some of the drowned were buried in
Woolwich Cemetery, where a monument stands, erected by a “national
sixpenny subscription” contributed by over 23,000 subscribers. Around
it are long lines of small stones, marking where the dead lie. The
inscription on the monument gives figures considerably at variance from
those given in books of reference. It states: “It was computed that
seven hundred men, women, and children were on board. Of these about
550 were drowned. One hundred and twenty were buried near this place.”
This melancholy spot is situated on the one-time pleasant hill-side
above Plumstead, between Woolwich and Abbey Wood; close to where Bostal
Woods still look down from their craggy heights upon the wide-spreading
marshes of Plumstead and Erith. This was once an exceedingly delightful
escarpment, densely clothed with noble woods and vigorous undergrowth,
stretching away to Erith, but the suburban expansion of London is
spoiling it. Cemeteries--the abodes of the dead--and little mean
streets of houses, scar the once rustic hill-sides, and along the road
that goes to Erith, down in the levels, the electric trams run swiftly.
But the place-names are still fragrant: Abbey Wood, Picardy, Belmont,
and Belvedere; and indeed the great Abbey Wood is still very much more
than a name.
Here is Lesnes Abbey Farm, whose 260 acres comprises 200 acres of
woodland. The lands, now and for long past the property of Christ’s
College, are of much romantic and antiquarian interest, for here
was situated the Abbey of Westwood, or Lesnes, founded in 1178 for
Augustinian Canons by Richard de Lucy, Lord Chief Justiciar of England,
and at one time protector of the realm. The founder died within a year,
and was buried in his abbey church. For 347 years the Abbey of Lesnes
continued in existence, and was then suppressed by Cardinal Wolsey,
in 1525, and its revenues seized for the purposes of his educational
endowments. The Abbey ruins and lands passed in succession to a number
of owners.
So long ago as 1752 the buildings had become a mere heap of rubbish,
with little remaining above ground, and that greatly overgrown
with trees. Excavations were then made and numerous monuments were
discovered, but they appear to have been all covered up again; and not
until 1910 was the site again explored. Work was then undertaken by
the Woolwich Antiquarian Society, and some highly interesting remains
have been unearthed. There, close by the modern farmhouse, deep down
in pits dug in the accumulated soil, you see the bases of pillars of
the Lady Chapel and the Chapter House, with floors of encaustic tiles;
and there, too, are five Purbeck or Bethersden marble coffin-lids
of the abbots and brethren of this vanished Abbey. One, bearing a
shepherd’s crook, is that of Abbot Elyas, while another, on which
the word “medicina” may be clearly traced, is obviously that of a
brother who acted as doctor. A museum of relics has been established
in a room of the farmhouse. Chief among these was the life-size,
cross-legged effigy of a knight in chain-mail, supposed to represent
one of the De Lucy family, about 1301; the shield on his arm bearing
the “flower-de-luce.” The colours and gilding are still perfect. This
interesting relic has now been removed to the South Kensington Museum.
The name of Belvedere is curiously un-English, but the village is
sufficiently British, with a very ordinary “Belvedere” railway station.
The origin of the place takes us back to early in the eighteenth
century, when a mansion of that name was built on the wooded hill-top,
in a pleasant park whence the estuary of the Thames and its crowded
shipping could be seen. Hence “Belvedere,” a word deriving from the
Italian, _bello vedere_, a pleasant view. Look-out towers commanding
fine prospects, and known as “belvederes,” or sometimes as “follies,”
are familiar objects all over the country, in ancestral parks. This
mansion of Belvedere was rebuilt in a “classic” style, in red brick,
about 1764, by Lord Eardley. A still wider view is obtained from a
prospect-tower in the grounds. The park was greatly cut up for building
purposes in 1859, and the village of Belvedere then sprang up. The
mansion itself was purchased for £12,000 and opened in 1867 as a home
for old sailors: the Royal Alfred Institution for Aged Merchant Seamen.
Any expectation of beauty in the village, or wretched forlorn
settlement, of Belvedere that fringes the road to Erith would be doomed
to disappointment, and Erith, which succeeds it, is simply beastly:
there is no other fitting word for the place nowadays. “Aer-hythe,”
whence the place-name is said to derive, is considered to mean the “old
port,” and a picturesquely dilapidated old place it remained until
recent years, with a quaintly ramshackle old wooden jetty projecting
into the Thames, and a curious wood-and-glass house at the head of it.
Coal was leisurely landed here, in a way that was, by comparison with
the present methods, altogether amateurish. Nowadays the street of
Erith is mean and squalid, and filthy coal-yards and busy power-houses,
together with a network of railway-lines, occupy the shore. Modern
industrial conditions have rendered Erith a place eminently desirable
to leave unvisited. Nor do the marshes and low-lying fields beyond it,
towards the mouth of the river Darent, reward the explorer, whose only
course is now to turn inland and so come, past the hamlet of Perry
Street, through Crayford and along the Dover Road, into Dartford town.
Dartford does not greatly concern us here, because, for one thing,
it is not upon the coast, and, for another, it belongs to quite a
different subject, the DOVER ROAD; and in a book on that highway I have
described the town at some length.
It is a matter of some two miles from the town, more or less beside
the river Darent, across the low-lying and sometimes marshy meadows,
to the Thames-side. You pass the scattered hamlet of Joyce’s Green
and evidences of gunpowder works; and, nearing the Thames, there opens
before you a view of Long Reach, with the smallpox hospital-ships, and
on the Essex shore the very striking picture of Purfleet, a busy little
place, nestling at the foot of its bold, chalky hill. A place very
little, yet very busy and grimy when you come closely into touch with
it, is “Portflete”--thus to style it by its older name.