STONE--GREENHITHE--NORTHFLEET--HUGGENS’S COLLEGE--ROSHERVILLE--
GRAVESEND--SHORNEMEAD--CLIFFE--COOLING--THE HUNDRED OF HOO--
THE ISLE OF GRAIN--HOO ST. WERBURGH--UPNOR CASTLE--STROOD
Rising steeply out of Dartford, we come by the Dover Road, the ancient
Watling Street, up to the lofty plateau of Dartford Brent; here
taking the left-hand fork where the road branches. To the right goes
the Watling Street, the Roman road, our left-hand route conducting
gradually past Stone to the waterside at Greenhithe. Industrial England
is prominent on the way, greatly to the disadvantage of the older
England of romance. The thoughtful man asks himself, on passing the
huge City of London Lunatic Asylum at Stone, and coming into a region
of chalk-pits and cement-works, whither we are tending.
Here, where the hill-sides are being cut away for sake of the chalk,
and where lofty chimneys send forth clouds of smoke, stands the lovely
Early English church of Stone, built, it is thought, by the designers
and craftsmen who created Westminster Abbey. The clustered shafts of
the nave-arcade, and the general decoration of the interior, bear a
marked resemblance. The exceptional elaboration of this parish church
is due to the offerings of pilgrims on their way to and from the shrine
of St. William of Perth at Rochester. The church stood beside the
road, and thus came in for the pilgrims’ alms. The modern pilgrim will
only note that this church, begun on this beautiful and costly scale,
was completed on a minor note. This is due to a falling-off of those
wayfarers’ gifts.
Greenhithe sits beside the river, in a queer little byway. From it
sailed away into the northern ice and an obscure death, Sir John
Franklin and his crews of the Arctic expedition, on board the _Erebus_
and _Terror_, 1845. Many an one must, since then, have reflected upon
the peculiarly ominous names of those ships.
Greenhithe is just a quaint, waterside street of houses running
parallel with the Thames, with shops of a kind which give you the
impression that they are kept by people who never expect to sell
anything, and that they, in fact, never _do_ sell anything; that
they would resent the very suggestion of a sale, and are a kind of
shop-keeping anchorites, who keep shop in fulfilment of vows to deny
purchasers the satisfaction of making purchases. Though, I honestly
declare, I have never seen any article in Greenhithe shop-windows in
the least desirable by any reasonable person. Almost the oldest house
in this queerest of queer streets is one which bears the initials and
date:
E.
I. M
1693
I believe it must have been only a little later than this period when
some of the goods exposed to view in these windows were added to stock.
[Illustration: INGRESS ABBEY.]
In the broad reach off Greenhithe and Northfleet are anchored the
training-ships _Arethusa_, _Warspite_, and _Worcester_; and at the
eastward end of this street, which leads to nowhere in particular,
you come suddenly upon the handsome mansion of Ingress Abbey, built
about 1834 by Alderman Harmer, then proprietor of the _Weekly
Dispatch_. It was built from the stones of old London Bridge, which
had been pulled down two years earlier. Sweetly pretty, almost
noble, must the Alderman’s lordly mansion have looked, in its lovely
waterside park, rich in noble trees. So, indeed, it does even yet,
although the house has been long empty, and although it and the park
are about to be abolished for the building of a huge wall-paper
manufactory. The entire neighbourhood, in fact, is being thoroughly
commercialised, and rendered a fuming, striving horror of machinery
and belching factory-chimneys. Enterprising people have even plans
for factory-building on that projecting spit of desolation between
Greenhithe and Northfleet, known as Swanscombe marshes; while as for
Northfleet, that old-time village has become a sprawling place of much
squalor.
The chief feature of the long street is the rather striking group
formed by the dwellings and the chapel of Huggens’s College, in
grounds secluded behind a lofty wall. In the years 1844–7 the amiable
John Huggens, a city merchant, founded and endowed this college, as
almshouses for the benefit of gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances;
and here forty of these collegians, with their wives and one woman
relative, reside and enjoy an annuity of £52 apiece, and live, like all
pensioners, to the most preposterous and incredible ages, much to the
disgust of those in the waiting list. Over the archway leading into the
grounds is a statue of the admirable Huggens, seated and habited in a
tightly buttoned-up frock-coat. He seems to be seeking inspiration in
the skies, and holds a roll of papers in his right hand, while the left
appears to be groping in something that resembles a coal-scuttle. The
street at this corner is quaintly named--in allusion to Huggens, no
doubt--“Samaritan Grove.”
Here we are again on the DOVER ROAD, with modern developments of
electric tramways leading on through Rosherville to Gravesend. Let us,
as soon as may be, turn off to the left from the dust and the traffic,
and seek the waterside at Rosherville Pier. The famous gardens created
in the great chalk-pit by the enterprising Jeremiah Rosher, 1830–35,
were for many years the scene of Cockney jollity and the wildest
of high-jinks; all thought very daring by the early Victorians who
indulged in them. “Rosherville, Where to Spend a Happy Day”: that was
the legend. You made excursion by steamer from London and indulged in
tea and shrimps--“s’rimps” in the Cockney tongue, you comprehend--
taken in earwiggy arbours in gardens decorated with plaster statues;
and possibly took part in some dancing, later on, under the illuminated
trees. These things, considered awfully wild then, we look back upon
with disgust for their mingled slowness and vulgarity.
Of late years Rosherville Gardens have had but a precarious existence.
Now you find them closed, and then they are reopened for a space, and
again they are closed once more. The place that Rosher created outside
his moribund gardens--this Rosherville--is a grim and grisly spot,
with gaunt, would-be stately stucco-fronted mansions and a vast hotel,
empty. A melancholy Parade or Terrace faces the river, and a broad road
leads up from it to the Garden entrance, on whose gate-piers are great
gilded sphinxes: the whole presenting, even its prime, an awful aspect
of Egyptian mysticism, qualified, it is true, by plaster, but still
not, you know, ever of a gay and gladsome kind. Children, involuntary
partakers of those “Happy Days,” were appalled by these surroundings,
and usually howled with dismay at sight of those gate-piers, refusing
to be comforted at the explanation that the awful beasts on them were
only “spinkses.” Many an unhappy child dreamt horribly afterwards of
being pursued by spinks.
The mile-long walk along the shore from Rosherville to Gravesend
affords much food for reflection. Here you notice for the first time
that the water is salt; obviously sea-water, because the wooden piles
are hung with sea-weed. At this time of writing the “Marine Baths” that
once were well patronised are being demolished, after a long period
of disuse and decay. They fronted upon this parade, in a forbidding,
Pharaonic type of architecture that gave to bathing an aspect of
partaking in the dread rites of the ancient Egyptian worship of
Osiris and all that weird hierarchy of bird-and-beast-headed gods and
goddesses. Sea-bathing at Gravesend is a thing of the past, and on the
site of these baths the commercial spirit of the age is rearing vast
factory-buildings. Thus ends Gravesend’s Early Victorian dream of being
a seaside resort; but one would not declare that the place is the less
interesting. It is, indeed, of a greater interest than ever, and the
busy waterway presents a grand panorama of the might and majesty of
modern shipping. For there, on the opposite shore, are Tilbury Docks,
to and from whose capacious basins come and go the great liners and
cargo boats. There, too, glimpsed across the half-mile of waterway, is
Tilbury Fort, where modern and unhistorical batteries stand in company
with that old historic blockhouse where Queen Elizabeth reviewed her
troops before the threatened arrival of the Spanish Armada.
[Illustration: TILBURY FORT.]
The chief feature--ornament it can scarce be styled--of Gravesend’s
river-front is the Royal Terrace Pier. It is a construction for use
rather than display, and is in fact the headquarters of the sea and
river pilots who, to the number of nearly 300, wait here and navigate
vessels up and down river to and from London, or out to sea by the
“North Channel,” as far as the Sunk Lightship, off Harwich; or by the
“South Channel,” as far as Dungeness. At the head of these men is an
official of “the Trinity House,” with the title of “Ruler.” The “Ruler
of the Pilots” settles all official business and disputes that are not
serious enough to be referred to the Trinity House headquarters on
Tower Hill.
“Gravesend” is not a pleasant name, even though it may suggest to the
imaginative the final triumph of the Christian: “O grave, where is thy
sting? O Death, where is thy victory?” with visions of the shining
Beyond. But the place-name has not, in fact, anything to do with these
considerations or speculations; and refers to some prehistoric trench
which in the dim past formed a boundary-line between neighbouring
tribes.
Leaving Gravesend, you come down again to the shore by turning to the
left out of the main road by the tramway terminus and through the
unlovely region of “Coal Road,” past the “Canal Tavern,” and over the
Thames and Medway Canal by a footbridge. Here, along the waterside, is
the office of a person described on his sign-board as an “Explosive
Lighterman.” The place where this alarming creature carries on business
is Denton Wharf. Adjoining is the “Ship and Lobster” tavern. Out in
front stretches the Thames estuary. It is the spot referred to by
Dickens in “Great Expectations,” Chapter LIV., in which Pip is engaged
in smuggling the convict, Magwitch, out of the country. The building
seen in the distance, by the waterside, is Shornemead Battery.
[Illustration: CURIOUS OLD BOAT-COTTAGE AT CHALK.]
It is a curious region: the deserted Thames and Medway Canal on the
right, the busy Thames on the left; and it is rendered yet more curious
by the whimsical old cottage presently seen, standing in the narrow
space between canal and river; an odd, amphibious building, the lower
part brick, the upper portion made of an old man-o’-war’s barge,
placed keel upwards. It is almost exactly such another as Peggotty’s
boat-house on Yarmouth sands, imagined and described by Dickens in
“David Copperfield.” The old _Wellington_ man-o’-war’s boat was sold
out of the service about 1822, and the cottage has been here since
then; obviously, therefore, it must have been well known to Dickens,
whose honeymoon days were passed at the neighbouring village of Chalk
in 1836. “David Copperfield” was not written until 1850, so it is plain
he must have had this queer old place in mind.
It is true that the Peggotty home is described as being in its natural
position, keel downwards, and that this old boat of the _Wellington_
man-o’-war is upside down, and forms both roof and upper floor of the
cottage; but these are mere matter-of-fact details easily surmounted in
a work of fiction.
In all these years these stout timbers have served to shelter the
present occupant and his father, and if the occasional tarring they
receive is not forgotten, they bid fair to last many generations
longer. The upper floor is divided into two bedrooms, and you “come
aboard” into them from the brick-walled lower story up a very
maritime-looking hatchway. The interior is very quaint, showing the
ribs, and, in fact, the whole construction of the boat, while the
bedroom, which has the additional advantage of a window cut in the
stern, quite realises David Copperfield’s view of the bedroom in the
Peggotty establishment, as “the completest and most desirable bedroom
ever seen.”
The melancholy shore-line may be followed as far as Shornemead Battery,
a heavy masonry fort designed in modern times for the protection of
the Thames, its design discredited by later military engineers. Worse
discredit is cast upon the design of Cliffe Creek Battery, a mile and
a half lower down, and the fort near Coalhouse Point, on the opposite
shore, whose fire, it appears, would enfilade one another and do more
damage to friends than enemies. Shornemead is the _ultima thule_ of the
riverside explorer here. It is alike unpleasant and unprofitable, if
not actually impossible, to proceed farther. The point now to be aimed
at is Cliffe, and that village is reached by retracing the shoreward
path and crossing the railway and canal and then taking the road on
left which leads to Chequers Street, near Higham Station, and on past
Cliffe station.
[Illustration: SHORNEMEAD BATTERY.]
The village of Cliffe, as might be expected, stands high, on a kind
of upland whence the ground breaks rapidly away to Cliffe Creek,
remarkable for nothing but cement-works, a coastguard station, and
mud. Always mud. At low water, mud thick and slab; at high water, mud
in solution. Cliffe is otherwise called “Cliffe-at-Hoo,” and is the
“Clofeshoch,” or “Cloves-hoo,” (_i.e._ “Cliff’s Height”) of early
Anglo-Saxon synods, long held here annually. They were established by
Archbishop Theodore in the seventh century.
[Illustration: CLIFFE BATTERY.]
Beyond Cliffe we come by a winding road into Cooling, or Cowling, whose
name means “cow pasture.” In advance of the few and scattered houses
forming the village is that romantic old building, Cooling Castle
gatehouse, almost all that now remains of the fortress built here
towards the close of the fourteenth century by Sir John de Cobham, the
third Baron Cobham. The work occupied six years, and was the cause of
much excited comment among the peasantry. Those were the times of Wat
Tyler and Jack Straw and the peasants’ rebellion--threatening times,
when it behoved even great nobles to go warily; and so Lord Cobham
sought means to avoid criticism and the muttered threats to pull his
castle down about his ears. He did this by letting it be understood
that his stronghold was built, not for the purpose of overawing the
mob, but in view of foreign invasion, and he put his intent on record
by placing on one of the gatehouse towers the curious inscription on
enamelled copper plates which still remains in its original position.
It is designed to resemble a legal document, or charter, and runs thus:
“Knowyth that beth and schul be
That I am mad in help of the cuntre
In knowyng of whyche thyng
Thys is chartre and wytnessyng.”
[Illustration: COOLING CASTLE.]
The curious word “beth” we may read as “be-eth,” _i.e._ “it is”;
or, as a rustic might say, even to this day, “it be.” These words
are enamelled in black on a white ground. Below them, on a seal,
are Lord Cobham’s arms: gules, on a chevron or, three lions rampant
sable. He died in 1408, at a very great age; about ninety-five.
His granddaughter, Joan, married, as her fourth husband, Sir John
Oldcastle, the “good Lord Cobham,” friend of Henry the Fifth and of
Wycliffe. He became a religious reformer and friend of the Lollards,
and thus incurred the enmity of the Church; churchmen then, as now, and
at all times, being eager in heresy-hunting. He was cited to appear
before Archbishop Arundel, but when the apparitor appeared he shut
himself up behind these formidable walls and defied the citation. But
eventually he was brought to trial in London. He denied the doctrine
of the Real Presence, and in the disputes with the bench of bishops
declared the Pope was Antichrist, the prelates his members, and the
friars his tail. He was condemned to be burnt, and although he escaped
and wandered about the country nearly four years, he met a martyr’s
fate at Christmas 1417, when he was hanged, and burnt hanging. Thus
ended the “good Lord Cobham,” one of the earliest victims of a
bloodstained Church without pity or remorse.
Of the castle little remains except the gatehouse towers with their
bold machicolations, the moat, and the crypt of the Great Chamber. A
modern house has been built in the enclosure.
[Illustration: THE “CHARTER,” COOLING CASTLE.]
Cooling is in midst of the grim fenland associated with Dickens’s
story, “Great Expectations,” and in fact is the scene of the opening
chapter, in which Pip meets the dreadful convict, Magwitch, at night,
in the churchyard. According to the story, the district of “the Meshes”
is “a most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work,” and it
is, truly, dreariness itself in winter or in bad weather. Dickens,
of course, stage-managing his story, which opens on a “raw afternoon
towards evening,” made the most of these unpleasant surroundings; and
those atmospheric conditions, in Cooling churchyard and in company
with the grisly row of graves of the Comport family, just to the south
of the church-tower, would be sufficient to dishearten any one. Pip,
looking out upon “the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,”
began to cry; and no wonder, for he is represented among the tombs
of his father and mother, Peter Pirrip and his wife, and of his five
brothers. The Comport tombs, which formed the originals for Dickens’s
idea of the Pirrip family, actually number ten in a line, with
three more behind, and are presided over by a headstone bearing the
inscription, “Comport of Cowling Court, 1779.” They are of the most
odious and gruesome shape, roughly cylindrical and widening at the
shoulders, suggestive of coffins and mummified bodies, and plastered
with grey cement over brick. To the imaginative mind, they strikingly
resemble so many human chrysalids, awaiting the day when they shall be
hatched out as cherubim.
[Illustration: GRAVES OF THE COMPORT FAMILY, COOLING: “LIKE
CHRYSALIDS.”]
This is a kind of country that responds magically to sunshine, and,
given a fine day, the marshes that stretch away for two miles down
to the river form a beautiful picture, inviting to exploration. But
it is better to keep along the road that goes winding away through
High Halstow, Hoo St. Mary, and Allhallows, than to attempt reaching
the shore at Egypt Bay, where the convict hulks used to be stationed,
and where a coastguard station now stands. Only the most devious and
primitive tracks lead that way, and the marshes that look so beautiful
in the distant view, grey-green and golden in the sunshine, are
commonplace enough on close acquaintance.
At High Halstow we come into the Hundred of Hoo and into the centre
of this little-visited region, projecting, out of the beaten track of
everyday commerce, between the outlets of the Thames and Medway. “Hoo”
signifies a height, and is often found spelt “hoe” in place-names. “The
Hoe” at Plymouth is in the nature of a cliff-top. The quaint sound
of the word sometimes leads to misunderstandings, as we see by the
following newspaper account of some proceedings at the Gravesend Police
Court, March 13th, 1914.
Solicitor: Where do you live?
Witness: Hoo.
Solicitor: You.
Witness: Hoo, sir.
Solicitor: You, I mean; you yourself.
Witness: Hoo.
Solicitor: Oh! at Hoo?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Following the road on to Hoo St. Mary, where the large church stands
prominently ringed about with trees, the remote little village of
Allhallows is reached, rather over half a mile from the shore. Here is
an ancient church, with little western bellcote instead of a tower.
Turning to left here, along a very bad track, the waterside will be
reached at Allhallows Fort, a modern masonry work at the spot called
“Bell’s Hard,” looking across to Southend, some four miles away.
Southend from this point looks almost as red and yellow, and the sea,
under favourable conditions, as blue, as the places pictured on the
familiar advertisements of the railway companies. “Almost,” you will
observe, not quite! There is nothing on earth really so gorgeous as
those. But Southend, from these muddy shores, on a glorious day in July
wears the likeness of some Celestial City or New Jerusalem.
In the peaceful times which until recently prevailed the only apparent
inhabitant of Allhallows Fort was usually one soldier of the Royal
Garrison Artillery, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be the
potatoes, cabbages, and beans of a garden at the rear. A mile or so
eastward is the muddy Yantlet Creek, which separates the Hundred of
Hoo and the Isle of Grain. At the mouth of it, besides a coastguard
station, is the obelisk called “London Stone,” marking the limits of
the Lord Mayor of London’s jurisdiction as Conservator of the Thames.
[Illustration: STOKE.]
The only way to reach the Isle of Grain is to return through Allhallows
and proceed to Lower Stoke, a hamlet at the cross-roads, occupying
as it were a strategic position midway between a number of extremely
small, so-called “villages.” They have nothing in the nature of a shop,
and thus the “General Stores” at Lower Stoke fulfils the enviable
position of a central emporium. At Lower Stoke, turning left, we come
along a marsh road, bordered with deep ditches, across a narrow bridge,
into the Isle of Grain, with the railway to Port Victoria running
companionably alongside. Port Victoria is glimpsed a mile or so away on
the right: all you see of it, across the marshes, being the big funnels
of the steamships, some huge oil-tanks, and the great lonely bulk of an
hotel. There is no special feature in the Isle of Grain, whose name,
by the way, has nothing to do with corn or wheat. It is cognate with
the word “groin,” and means a projecting piece of land. Near the shore,
overlooking the mouth of the Thames, Southend, and Nore Lightship on
one hand, and the Medway and Sheerness on the other, is the village of
Grain and the recently restored church, for a number of years little
better than a ruin. Here, too, is Fort Grain, with the newly-built
naval seaplane station.
Retracing the road to Lower Stoke and turning to left at the
cross-roads, we come through Stoke village, with its Early English
church and scattered houses set amidst vast flat fields. On the left
stretch Stoke saltings, accessible only by water, and frequented only
by wild-fowling sportsmen, who thread the oozy channels in their
flat-bottomed punts. Along these many salt marshes on either side of
the Medway the wild-fowl abound. At a spot oddly called “Beluncle,”
where the single-track railway to Port Victoria crosses the road, the
vast new sheds and other evidences of the Kingsnorth Medway Airship
Base have recently arisen in the open fields. You will seek in vain for
“Kingsnorth” on maps, for it is an entirely new name.
[Illustration: ST. JAMES GRAIN.]
Reaching Hoo St. Werburgh, we find a considerable village and an
old church with weatherbeaten tower and an interesting interior
containing, sculptured on one of its pillars, an example of those
ancient grotesques which puzzle the modern wayfarer, and seem to him
purposeless. They generally, however, represent the Divine gifts
either of sight, hearing, or speech, and their grotesque character is
often accidental, rather than a matter of intention. This particular
example, a monkish head, with left hand approaching the mouth, appears
to typify the Gift of Speech; but to a casual observer it might very
well be an attempt to portray the horror of some unfortunate person who
had accidentally taken poison.
From Hoo St. Werburgh, across Hoo Common and past the hamlet of
Wainscot, we come to the turning for Upnor Castle, which lies to the
left; paradoxically enough, it would seem, down a village street of
the narrowest, steepest, and most rugged description. Surely, thinks
the stranger, one should ascend to Upnor. But “Upnor,” which means
“up-shore,” refers, not to a height, but to the upper reaches of the
Medway estuary.
The castle is a rambling, grey-walled fortress with a series of rugged,
cylindrical towers facing the waters of the Medway and looking over
to the Chatham Dockyard Extension. Upnor was built in the time of
Queen Elizabeth, as a defence of Chatham and Rochester, and seems
to have justified itself in the reign of Charles the Second, during
that inglorious war of 1667, when the insolent Dutch with sixty
vessels took the fort at Sheerness, sailed up the Medway, burning and
destroying, and later ascending the Thames to Tilbury Fort, humbled
the ancient pride of the Mistress of the Seas. A chain was stretched
across the Medway, from Hoo Ness to Folly Point, to bar the passage
of the enemy to Chatham, and the men-o’-war _Matthias_, _Monmouth_,
and _Royal Charles_ stood by, to help repulse De Ruyter’s forces. But
the feeblest attempts were made: the Dutch broke the chain, burnt the
ships, and continued up-river, capturing the _Royal Charles_, which was
taken by two boats, under the command of one Captain Tobiaz, without
any attempt at defence. Next morning, with the purpose of burning
the large men-o’-war at anchor above Upnor, the Dutch sent up two of
their fighting ships, with six fire-vessels, under cover of a heavy
cannonade. Here Upnor Castle was of some service, and considerably
hampered the enemy’s operations; but the fireships succeeded in
burning the _Royal James_, _Loyal London_, and _Royal Oak_. And then,
half-hearted themselves, the invaders retreated. It was well for us
they were so cautious, for they might have done what they would. The
observers of that time were not indifferent to this indignity. Evelyn,
in his diary, styles it “as dreadful a spectacle as Englishmen ever
saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off”; and Pepys, Secretary to
the Admiralty, was divided in three parts about it. He shared the
general shame of the nation; he feared, as an official who might be
held personally responsible, and thought dolefully of either being
committed to the Tower, or else having his throat cut by a furious mob;
and he dreaded, as a citizen, the dangers of an invasion affecting his
property and ready cash.
Opposite Upnor the naval activities of the dockyard are very
noticeable. There you see battleships and cruisers dry-docked and
refitting. When last I was here the waterside loungers readily told me
their names. As to the correct rendering of one there was considerable
variation, for while one would have it, “Airy-ale-house,” giving a
pleasant mental picture of a hedgerow tavern of the type which would
have pleased Piscator and Venator, others preferred to style her
the “You’re-a-lias,” and some made it “You-rile-us,” which gives a
distinctly threatening _nemo me impune lacessit_ kind of braggadocio
turn to her proper title, _Euryalus_. There are other versions of the
name--“Airy,” or “Hairy Alice,” for example--which prove the risks of
classic nomenclature.
Upnor Castle is not nowadays a strong place, but the long stretch of
foreshore between it and the waterside, down-river, is occupied by
great naval powder-magazines, and a pier for the Government light
railway running at the rear is a feature. The castle has a certain
picturesqueness, and is worth sketching; but the sketcher, selecting
the best view-point by the riverside, is soon made aware that he has
become an object of interest to the Metropolitan Police on watch
within, and presently finds himself plied with amiable inquiries; these
being times when espionage is very much to the front.
[Illustration: UPNOR CASTLE.]
The inquisitive stranger having thus attracted the attention of the
police, and having--let us hope--duly satisfied them, may now make
his way up the steep street again, and, reaching the cross-roads,
soon come into Frindsbury. From this village, with its hill-top church,
whose spire is a prominent landmark, a descent is immediately made into
the tramway-infested streets and congested areas of Strood; and from
Strood the Medway is at once crossed, into Rochester.