THE CHANNEL PASSAGE--THE NATIONAL HARBOUR AND ITS STRATEGIC PURPOSE--
SWIMMING AND FLYING THE CHANNEL
Dover has ever been a favourite port with travellers. The advantage
of lying near to the opposite coast determined its fortunes from the
earliest times, for sea-sickness has naturally always rendered the
shortest passage the most popular. Little need, then, it might be
thought for proclamations and Acts of Parliament insisting upon this
being the port of arrival and departure. Yet we find enactments in the
reign of Edward the Third not only regulating “the fares of the passage
of Dover” (1330), but in 1335 a law passed that “no pilgrim shall pass
out of the Realm, but at Dover.” This was supplemented in 1464–5 by an
ordinance, “For compelling persons to take passage and land at Dover.”
They well knew, those old travellers, the miseries of _mal-de-mer_;
the rich and powerful among them no less than the poorer sort, and it
was one of these--none other than the great Hubert de Burgh, Earl
of Kent and Chief Justiciar of Kent, who, about 1208, founded the
Maison Dieu, with its establishment of Master, brethren, and sisters,
for the lodging, and entertainment of “poor strangers and pilgrims on
their way beyond seas.” It may be supposed that pilgrims coming as
well as going were guests of this charitable establishment. In fact,
they did you so well at this place that several shabby-minded monarchs
and their retinues, and others who were certainly not poor, did not
scruple to quarter themselves here. King John, who was mean enough
for anything, set this fashion. A somewhat older place of sojourn for
travellers was in St. Martin’s Priory, where the Strangers’ Hall, of
Late Norman architecture, is still to be seen. The manor of Archer’s
Court, some three miles out of Dover, is associated with the sea, in a
quaint tenure, by which the owner held it of the King on condition that
“he should hold the King’s head when he passes to Calais, and by the
working of the sea should be obliged to vomit.”
Dover has regained in the last few years all its ancient importance--
and more, and has in four or five respects bulked largely in public
affairs. The completion of the great National Harbour stands easily
foremost; and next in importance comes the story of the proposed
Channel Tunnel; followed by the long-drawn search for coal that is
still being prosecuted; by the many attempts to swim the Channel; and
the several successful flights across it, to and from this point.
The first attempt to make a national harbour at Dover may be traced to
the reign of Henry the Eighth, when a long pier formed of timber piles
and heavy stones was built out to sea on the site of the modern arm
known until recently as the “Admiralty Pier.” It cost some £80,000, but
seems never to have been quite completed, and was, like the Admiralty
Pier itself, until the completion of the great harbour in 1910, merely
a breakwater, not a harbour. It broke to some extent the force of the
strong set of the currents that sweep towards the east through the
narrow Straits, but was washed away at last. The loss of Calais, the
last relic of the English possessions in France, during the reign of
Mary, led to renewed activities here, for in the words of Raleigh, “no
promontory, town, or harbour in Europe is so well situated for annoying
the enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches
from the Continent”; but the English seamen of that great age dealt
roundly with the enemy on the high seas, outside harbours, and,
although other works were casually undertaken, the making of Dover a
great war-harbour and place of assemblage was not yet.
The great works now happily completed originate in the foresight
displayed by the Duke of Wellington, who, convinced of the strategical
value of Dover, strongly urged the construction of a harbour here,
where the Navy could rendezvous at the threat of war. In 1840, and
again in 1844, a Royal Commission sat upon the subject, took evidence,
and issued a report; but the estimated cost of such an undertaking,
then placed at two millions sterling, appeared to be too great, and
only a portion of it was built. This, the Admiralty Pier, was begun
in 1847. It occupied twenty years, and was built largely by convict
labour. In its well-remembered original form it extended a distance
of 2,000 feet, and was finished off at the seaward end with a fort
mounting two big guns, which were but rarely fired, because the
concussion generally smashed all the windows along the front.
[Illustration: THE NATIONAL HARBOUR, DOVER.]
It was not until 1894 that the old question, then mellowed by half a
century, of providing a National Harbour was revived. The Admiralty
were urged to consider it anew, in view of the altered conditions
of naval warfare brought about by the gradual perfecting of that new
engine of destruction, the torpedo, which had rendered the Downs, that
old rendezvous of the fleet, no longer safe from attack. The result
of these new deliberations was the letting of a contract in November
1897 to Messrs. Pearson & Sons, by which enormous works, costing
considerably over £3,500,000, and taking twelve years to complete, were
embarked upon.
To construct a deep-sea harbour at Dover, open at all states of the
tide, was an anxious work. Nature has appeared to sternly deny to any
of the South Coast towns between Ramsgate and Portsmouth anything of
the kind, and such small havens as existed have been mostly silted up.
That is the familiar tale of Hythe, of Winchelsea, and of many another.
Ramsgate harbour has been kept open only by dint of constant and costly
dredging, which has made its harbour-dues almost prohibitively heavy.
The natural haven of Dover, in the hollow of the hills, long ages
ago became a portion of the town; and the inset of the coast is so
insignificant that it is fighting elemental forces in the open to build
strong granite piers and breakwaters in deep water, ranging to a depth
of forty feet at low tides, which rise eighteen feet nine inches and
through which runs a five-knot current. But the contest is ended, and
the eye now ranges from the heights of Shakespeare’s Cliff or those of
the Castle upon such a harbour as Raleigh never dreamed. The length
of the old Admiralty Pier has been doubled; an eastern arm stretches
out from under the Castle to a length of 2,942 feet, and between their
seaward extremities stretches, parallel with the shore, a breakwater
4,212 feet long, enclosing, together with the Commercial Harbour,
the vast area of 685 acres. The eastern and the western entrances,
at either end of the breakwater, are respectively 650 feet and 740
feet wide. The entire Navy can assemble comfortably in Dover Harbour,
without fear of torpedo or submarine attacks, and guarded by the
frowning forts of the Castle and the Western Heights while other forts
and searchlight stations are placed on the piers and breakwaters. In
addition, there are torpedo and submarine stations here for attacking
any foe.
The proverbial luck of England is very marked here. When the great
harbour was decided upon, the menace of a German Navy and of the
remarkable German war preparations at Emden had not arisen. The Germans
themselves were still enjoying the fun of calling the German Emperor
“gondola Willy,” in ridicule of his desire to create a fleet. No one
laughs now at the spectacle of a German Navy, which is emphatically
“a fleet in being”; and the strategy of the Board of Admiralty is
now directed, in consequence of that new factor, rather to guarding
the North Sea than the seas patrolled by the old Channel Fleet.
Bismarck once rightly described the Baltic Sea as “a hole,” in which
a German fleet could be easily shut up. The Baltic Canal was cut by
the Germans as a way, and a short way, out of that hole; but the new
British strategic base at Dover, closing the English Channel to the
passage either way of a hostile fleet, has, together with other naval
bases, constructed, or constructing, along the East Coast and up to
the extreme north of Scotland, and in the Orkneys, rendered the North
Sea itself something of a “hole,” on a larger scale. If we take a map
and look at the relative positions of Great Britain and Germany, we
shall clearly see that Britain, with the will to do it, can stop the
way, and in the event of war close both the Channel and the way round
by the North; thus preventing an attack upon the British possessions
over-seas, even though we bear the shock of war along our whole eastern
face. But Harwich, Grimsby, and the Tyne; Rosyth, Dundee, Wick, and
Scapa Flow, will in due course be able to stiffen the new front of our
position. That the rise of the German Navy has made the North Sea our
front is seen in the new dispositions, by which the Channel and the
Mediterranean have lost their relative importance, while the North Sea
is now the cruising-ground of some thirty of the foremost ships of the
Navy.
The last word, the final appeal, is with the land and sea forces of
the nation. Orators in Parliament, or stumping the country, may thrill
audiences with enthusiasm or indignation, but there is no thrill
to equal that which comes of conscious power. Such a thrill the
Englishman may experience here. Let us hope politicians, in their party
juggling, may not starve our defences too often, so that they be found
wanting in our hour of need.
We have beheaded a King, with some justice, we have shot an Admiral,
without justice or sense in the doing of it, and we have from time to
time degraded Generals; but, strange to say, we have never yet hanged
a statesman, although the occasion has warranted, often enough. It
seems a strange immunity! Yet in the coming great struggle, if we be
unprepared, it may well be that this immunity will no longer hold.
Tennyson, many years ago, contemplating some such national disaster,
had a vision of the mob’s way with recreant ministers:
“The wild mob’s million feet shall kick you from your place.”
It was mildness itself--that is to say, if we take the million kicks
figuratively. The proper treatment in such an eventuality would be,
not merely to remove those ineffectual persons from their place, but
to hang them from the most prominent lamp-posts available; no adequate
revenge, but as earnest of popular feeling.
In these later and more striving and hard-working times for the
Navy, and in the new strategical dispositions necessitated by modern
political developments, the new harbour of Dover is destined to
play a prominent part. The old--but still quite recent--days of
the Channel Fleet are done. The English Channel was never an ideal
cruising-ground: it has its moods--some of them extremely vicious
and surly--but the proximity of the kindly coastwise towns and their
snug harbours, and the entertainings and courtesies and general social
amenities of a sailor’s lot that were generally to be enjoyed ashore
savoured life in that fleet with a pleasant flavour. Things are
something more Spartan in the North Sea, or--horrid alternative--
“German Ocean,” and although courtesies are given and received, they do
not bulk so largely as in the days when the generous hospitality aboard
sent many a guest ashore incoherent but voluble in praise of the way
they had with them in the “Flannel Sheet.”
The Government works here are by no means the only great undertakings
that have been in progress for some years past. The Dover Harbour
Board, in conjunction with the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway
Companies, has been engaged in providing a great new Commercial Harbour
within the shelter of the Admiralty Pier. It was long before those
bodies obtained parliamentary sanction for their proposal to widen
the pier at its landward end, and to build wharves and a great new
station, rather larger than Charing Cross, where for many years past
weatherbeaten travellers have been landed in all the discomforts of
what was at its best a makeshift arrangement. The railway and steamship
companies had for long, by special permission, used the Admiralty
Pier as a landing-stage; but the great increase of traffic, no less
than the discontent of passengers put ashore in the open, on a narrow
breakwater exposed to the full fury of sea and wind, led them to seek
powers for very ambitious new works. The difficulties encountered in
dealing with no fewer than seven Government Departments interested:
the Treasury, Admiralty, War Office, Board of Trade, Home Office,
Post Office, and the Board of Works--give a comic-opera touch to the
negotiations; they were at last overcome, and now close upon £2,000,000
has been spent upon the works, a sum provided largely by the income
derived from the proceeds of a poll-tax levied on all passengers
embarking or landing at Dover. When first introduced, in 1891, it was a
shilling a head; but in the way usual with most taxes not strenuously
resisted, this proved only the modest beginning of things, and it was
raised in 1900 to half a crown.
I have read somewhere a funny story, which really appears to be true as
well as funny, of a witness in the local police-court, who, asked his
occupation by the Bench, replied that he was a professional man.
“What profession?” inquired the magistrate.
“Well,” said the witness diffidently, “I walk on the pier of an
afternoon, and see the boats in!” This sly humorist--if that is his
proper description--narrowly escaped committal for contempt of court.
But the Admiralty Pier has ever been the resort of people, resident
in Dover, whose chief interest in life has seemed just this same
seeing in the boats; and now that the Admiralty Pier and the great
new harbour-works have provided a much more extended promenade, the
“profession” has become correspondingly enlarged.
Dover is an ambitious place, and intends to compete vigorously with
Southampton, Plymouth, and Liverpool for overseas traffic. That is all
very enterprising, but what it gains as a strategic base, as a place of
arms, and as a great commercial port, it will inevitably lose in its
capacity as a residential and seaside town. For the rest, it is rapidly
becoming a place of monuments. Prominent among these is the bronze
portrait-bust of Captain Webb, the first person to swim the Channel.
It was unveiled early in 1910, and stands upon a red granite obelisk
bearing an inscription recording his famous swim from Dover to Calais,
21 miles in 21 hours 55 minutes, August 24th, 1875.
Many attempts--much advertised and conducted with every aid to
success--have since been made to rival Webb’s fine performance; but
all proved failures until September 6th, 1911, when Thomas William
Burgess, after numerous disappointments, swam from near the South
Foreland, Dover, to Le Chatelet, near Calais, in 22 hours 35 minutes:
40 minutes longer than the time taken by Captain Webb. It was his
sixteenth attempt. The occasion was made the very most of, in the
hysterical manner of the age; from a congratulatory telegram from the
King down to the excited comments of the halfpenny press. Webb’s finer
performance of thirty-six years earlier was a comparatively obscure
affair. It is a rather saddening instance of the decay of the national
character, under the lead of advertisers and half-educated journalists,
bent upon sensation-mongering.
The Channel crossing is no longer solely concerned with tunnelling,
swimming, or steamboat travelling. The conquest of the air provides a
newer way. So long ago as March 22nd, 1882, Colonel Burnaby crossed
in a balloon from Dover. Starting at 10 a.m., he landed at Montigny,
Normandy, at 2.15 p.m.
Burnaby knew Dover well. An out-of-the-way association with him will
be found in the hill-top cemetery, where one epitaph at least has the
rare quality of true sympathy. It was placed by him over the grave of
his servant, George Radford, and runs: “True as steel. This stone is
erected by the man he served so well.”
Nowadays, in flying matters--in aviation, as the new word has it--it
is the aeroplane, the heavier-than-air machine with the petrol-engine,
that attracts attention and performs most of the marvels. Already,
at the present time of writing, there have been numerous successful
attempts to fly the Channel by aeroplane. It was on Sunday, July 25th,
1909, that the pioneer, M. Blériot, voyaged by monoplane from Calais,
landing on Dover cliffs in thirty-seven minutes. A monument, in the
shape of a concrete model of his machine, has been let into the grass
of the North Fall Meadow. On May 21st, 1910, the Comte de Lesseps, from
the same starting-point, landed near St. Margaret’s Bay, in two minutes
less. These exploits were followed on June 2nd, 1910, by the Honourable
C. S. Rolls, flying from these Dover cliffs to the French coast near
Sangatte and back again; and on August 17th by Mr. J. B. Moisant,
an American, of Spanish extraction, who, in the course of an effort
to fly from Paris to London, crossed the Channel from Calais with a
passenger, and landed at the inland village of Tilmanstone, midway
between Sandwich and Dover. With the flight of eleven airmen across the
Channel, on July 3rd, 1911, on their way from Calais to London, the
brief era in which such things were regarded as marvels may be said
to have ended. Already the newspapers have ceased to decorate their
accounts of these doings with the startling headlines first accorded
them; and there now appears to be no reason why more astonishment
should be exhibited at such sights than at the familiar one of a
motor-car careering the road: itself a spectacle thousands of people
assembled to see, not so many years ago. Wonderful! But some things--
really, after all, the essential things--are as impossible as ever to
combat. Age and pain, poverty, sorrow, and death, remain the lot of
mankind, and none may make flight from them.
A fine bronze statue of Charles Stuart Rolls, “the first man to cross
the Channel and return in a single flight,” stands on the Parade of
Dover, looking seaward. It is a good likeness, in a characteristic
pose, of that ill-fated airman, killed little more than a month later
at Bournemouth, July 12th, 1910. He is represented standing, in his
well-remembered stooping pose, hands behind his back, and gazing with
a peculiar intensity out across the sea, towards the misty coast of
France; with rather a fateful look, as though with prescience of his
end. Something of the sculptor’s romantic imagination is in that, for
Rolls was essentially of a joyous and forceful nature.