by the then irresistible forces of nature. Already, in 1205, it had
suffered political ruin; for, as the chief port in the intercourse
between England and Normandy, its trade became extinct on the severance
of the Dukedom of Normandy and the Kingdom of England, in the reign of
King John. Five years before even that event the port was far gone to
decay, for it could furnish but six of the twenty-one ships that in its
prime formed its contribution to the nation’s defence.
Apparently the inhabitants of the Hastings that bordered this haven
early realised its inevitable doom; and those of the neighbouring New
Burgh—the Old Town of our time—did not shift for themselves, to form a
harbour, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And even then they were
reduced to “sending round the hat” for contributions and donations from
more prosperous places. Pity the sorrows of a poor old port!
They were led to this course by the destruction of their old wooden
pier; but it was not until seventeen years had passed that sufficient
funds had been accumulated and a beginning was made in the spring of
1595. Even so, fate dealt hardly with the place; for although the new
pier was built “all of huge rocks, artificially pyled, edge-long, one
close by another,” so that it was considered highly permanent, it
needed only the first storm of the following winter to overthrow it.
Something daunted by this mischance, but not beaten, the Hastings
people built the pier anew, and of a different construction, with
“tymbor braces and barres, crosse dogges, and suchlike up to the top:
bowtyfull to behold,” and much else in that quaint way. Woe, woe! This
much-admired work had not stood a year when, like the earlier, it was
washed completely away. It happened on “All saints’ daie, 1597,” when
“appeared the mighty force of God, who, with the finger of his hand,
at one greate and exceeding high spring tyde, with a south-east wynd,
overthrew this huge worke in lesse than an hower, to the greate terrour
and abashment of all beholders.”
The inhabitants this time acknowledged defeat, and, recognising
the futility of further endeavour, folded their hands and did—that
easiest of things to accomplish—nothing. So, finally, ended the active
existence of Hastings as a Cinque Port.
It is true that projects were from time to time raised, but they were
never translated from words to deeds. At the beginning of the reign
of Charles the First a very promising scheme was reported, by which
a Dutch engineer, one Cranhalls, proposed to excavate and reopen the
ancient haven at a cost of £220,000; but the beginning of that reign
was also the beginning of trouble, and, as the condition of the country
at the time was unfavourable for the prosecution of public works,
nothing, again, was done.
Had it been possible to undertake those proposed works, Hastings at
this time would be a vastly different place from what it is. You are
to picture the scene—the bygone haven restored, and all that space
now occupied by the very centre of the modern town—the Queen’s Hotel,
the Albert Memorial, and Queen’s Road—a basin, with quays, wharves,
and warehouses. The thing could be accomplished to-day, were it
thinkable that the valuable house-property covering the site could be
removed; but what might have been done with vacant land has long become
impossible in a crowded town.
Yet, as the merest glance will show the casual visitor, the port and
harbour idea is not dead. In these days of questing after the seemingly
impossible—of eating your cake and having it too, of having things
all ways and every way to your own advantage, an aim which worries
individuals and corporations alike—it is not to be supposed that
Hastings should be content with its present condition. If it were,
it would be exceptional. But it is not. In the eyes of many who know
Hastings well and love it much, it is well enough; but the town will
never be content until it has acquired a harbour. It calls aloud for a
harbour, just as the proverbial baby cries for the moon, but with this
very important difference, that if it calls loud enough and long enough
it will eventually get that harbour.
Time was, as we have seen, when it had such a haven, duly provided
by Nature, and it now has, or had, a prospect of a newer, provided
by private enterprise; not on or near the old site, but to be formed
by building concrete piers out to sea from the East Hill and the
fishermen’s quarters. One such arm has for some years been completed,
but the works now appear to be finally abandoned, and all there is to
show for the expenditure of the matter of a hundred thousand pounds
is that long, unrelieved wall where the melancholy surges still sweep
toward an unprotected shore.
LIV
Modern Hastings, like Brighton, dates its rise from the ultimate
quarter of the eighteenth century, and its emergence from the status
of a fisher town is due to the same prime cause: the discovery by the
medical profession of fresh air and sea-bathing as specifics for that
mysterious eighteenth-century _malaise_, “the vapours,” and all manner
of other ailments. No royal favour, however, helped Hastings; only the
recommendations of Dr. Baillie in the first instance, and secondly the
fine brisk air of the place itself. Indeed, the climate of Hastings is
a matter of as great concern to the town as her looks to a woman: it is
her chief asset. You may read strange things of the Hastings climate,
and indeed of that of any seaside town whose business is to attract
visitors; and you will find, as a matter of curiosity, that Hastings
claims not one climate, but several, according to height and position.
Like the artful sinner who tried to get the best of both this world
and the next, Hastings wants it both ways, and would have you believe
it has actually got it, too. Thus, with a reminiscent shiver at the
thought of the winds we have faced elsewhere, we read appreciatively of
how the town is “screened from the biting blasts of the north and east
winds,” and open to the “healthful and uncontaminated vapours” from
the south and west, is saved from “the unwelcome calms which envelop
some holiday resorts.” This, I take it, is one in the eye for Bath,
for example, where in summer the visitor is stewed as effectively as
any prune, or for Torquay, whose “gridiron” even St. Lawrence might on
occasion find uncomfortably warm; while I think, on the other count,
the withers of Brighton and of Weymouth—among other places where the
east wind is capable of freezing your very marrow—are severely wrung.
In short, Hastings, by her own showing, is one of those favoured (not
to say miraculous) places each of which has the better climate than
any other, where the sun shines just so long and so brilliantly as you
please, where the winds are never rude and the air never stagnant, and
there are four hundred fine days (at the very least of it) to the three
hundred and sixty-five of every year.
When Hastings really did begin to rise it grew quickly, and speedily
overspread, not merely the old-time site, but brought into existence
the twin town of St. Leonards as well. Theodore Hook was as it seems
to us—strangely enthusiastic on the subject of those never-ending
terraces, squares, and streets of stucco, new in his day. Says he:
“Under the superintendence of Mr. Burton, a desert has become a thickly
peopled town. Buildings of an extensive nature and elegant character
rear their heads”—he meant, in plainer English, that they had been
built, only perhaps a phrase without those eloquent frills would not
have been “literature” as then understood—“where but a few years since
the barren cliffs presented their chalky fronts to the storm and wave;
and rippling streams and hanging groves adorn the valley which twenty
years since was a sterile and shrubless ravine.”
Something is decidedly wrong in that description. The “extensive”—might
he not equally well have said the “expensive”(?)—buildings and the
“thickly peopled town” we allow, but those “hanging groves” and
“rippling streams” are just the delightful objects the coming of
the octopus streets abolished, and Hook sacrificed truth to a showy
antithetical outburst.
I do not think Hook was sincere. I hope he was not, for surely one
would sooner forgive literary insincerity than such a perverse taste.
Lamb, who wrote of Hastings in 1823, we know was sincerity itself when
he said he loved town or country; “but,” he says, “if this detestable
Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out
their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty,
innutritious rocks, which the amateur calls ‘verdure to the edge of the
sea.’ I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for
the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.”
_He_, at any rate, saw nothing of Theodore Hook’s “rippling streams
and hanging groves.”
“There is,” continues Lamb, “no sense of home at Hastings. It is a
place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and
stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with
the ocean, if it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it
ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it
were something—with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about,
artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it
were something.”
True; but all that is merely a memory. Something of that vanished
Hastings may be recalled by those who discover the Brassey Institute
in the centre of the town, and climb to where the collection of local
prints and paintings is housed; and something more of it may be seen,
still in being, by those others who prowl inquisitively in rear of
High Street, and there discover the old parish church of St. Clement,
fellow to All Saints. It stands in a tightly wedged corner, on rising
ground, surrounded by houses and puzzling alleys, and looks very
reverend. It is, in fact, over five hundred years old. An ancient
cannon-ball wedged into the western face of its tower is a relic of one
or other of the several hostile appearances off the town that were not
uncommon in the old days; but whether it be the evidence of Dutch good
marksmanship in the seventeenth century, or of French gunnery in in the
early eighteenth, there is no evidence to show. The corresponding ball
on the other side of the belfry window is by no means a miraculous
follow-on shot, but is an instance of the eminently British passion for
the _pendant_, for things to match and balance. Just as the average
householder must needs have a vase or a statuette on either side of
the clock on the dining-room or drawing-room mantelpiece, or else feel
uncomfortably one-sided, so the burgesses of Hastings were uneasy until
they had duplicated the insult some passing privateer had put upon
their town; and so one of these warlike objects is a sham.
[Illustration: ST. CLEMENT’S CHURCH.]
LV
I am told that Hastings discourages the “tripper,” and that no longer
do cheap day-tickets for weekdays or Sundays prevail. He is discouraged
because he brings his nose-bag with him, because his children grow
fretful and annoy the select, and because he brings no trade into the
town and is off again by nightfall. Thus, paradoxically, he is required
not to come because he goes so soon. But perhaps the delays and the
peculiar methods of the railways serve more certainly to discourage
that variety of holiday-maker. However that may be, no one can deny the
“popular” character of the holiday-making in August, which is not the
select season at Hastings.
Sunday cheap trips to Hastings were early and for long a feature,
and eventually roused the wrath of the Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest
Association. We need not here go into the rights and wrongs of Sunday
tripping; but should any one discover a little book called “The Story
of our Sunday Trip to Hastings,” published on behalf of that excellent
body, let him read it, and find therein a fund of unconscious humour.
The whole and sole intent and purpose of the book is to show, not
merely how sinful it is to take a cheap Sunday trip by railway—and
especially, it would appear, to Hastings—but how inevitably
uncomfortable and even disastrous it will be. It is a tale of how,
one August, a decent working man and his wife and little girl, and an
assortment of friends, tripped one Sunday to this seaside. They started
betimes—arising at four o’clock in the morning—probably with some
foreboding sense that if you want to journey anywhere by South Eastern
Railway it is well to get up in advance of the early bird, if not even
to start the day before. They drove to Charing Cross in a cab, and it
was already very warm. The cabman, indeed, “used a strong expression”
to enforce his opinion that they would find it very hot. I think we all
know the poetical phrase that cabman made use of.
Of course, the object being to paint this trip in very strong colours,
mischances early began; but the party need not have been quite such
fools as they are described. Passing over the inevitable dispute
with the cabman, we follow them on to the platform, where they saw a
porter slip and nearly get killed, whereupon “a sickening horror came
over them at the thought of the scene they might have witnessed.” As
for that, if you are to speculate upon the grisly “might be,” the
blood-boltered “if,” the catastrophic “may happen,” why then there is
no peace of mind for you at all, week-day or Sunday.
Friends who were to have been met on the platform were all but missed,
and when found insisted upon quarrelling with strangers and quizzing
other members of the party, until at length the train “ceased to
move, and we were at our journey’s end.” It did not just “stop,” as
ordinarily it does.
See now our party at Hastings. The day was blazing hot, and no shelter
was to be found. The glare off the sea seared their eyes, and they took
refuge in the streets, with the bitter reflection that they need not
have left their home in happy Islington to see pavements and closed
shops. Dinner was suggested, and they resorted to a dining-room, rich
in the mingled odours of sage and onions and tobacco-smoke, where they
dined off what purported to be gosling, but was really an old and
half-starved fowl. If the dishes were lukewarm, the room, on the other
hand, was blazing hot. “Mr. Peters,” one of the party, called for “malt
liquor”—could it by any chance have been “beer”?—and saw that somebody
else paid for it; and, this princely and elegant meal over, the party
dispersed in various directions.
Then the brilliant idea occurred to one who claimed to know Hastings
that a breeze and shady trees would be found in the Castle gardens, on
the cliff-top. They climbed that “terrible” road, only to find that
the gardens were closed on Sundays, and that, even had they been open,
no trees and no shade existed there. Finding at last some stunted,
insufficient trees, they rested awhile, descending only to give the
girl a chance of fainting in the heat.
And so the weary day dragged on until it was time to return home. They
all assembled at the railway-station, much to the reader’s surprise.
Why had not some of them taken a boat and been drowned, or been eaten
by a sea-serpent? Why had they not even missed the train? We shall
learn.
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day,” says the poet; but
disasters seem inevitably to wait upon those who “trip, trip, trip
it” to the sea on Sunday; especially if they dine upon emaciated fowl
sinfully masquerading as a young goose.
No appalling disaster happened to the swift South Eastern train. It
did not, strange to say, break down, and still less did it come into
collision with another. Nor even were train-wreckers prowling along the
line, to place obstructions upon the metals and so bring the sinful to
an appropriately ghastly end. No: nothing of that kind happened; but
when two-thirds of the journey had been accomplished a thunderstorm
broke. “Never mind, we’ll soon be at home,” said Martha. “Alas! it
seemed as if home grew more distant than nearer.”
But at last London was reached and an omnibus with difficulty found. On
the way, however, a horse, overworked with Sunday labour, fell dead,
and the journey had to be miserably finished in the rain. What, by the
way, would have been made to happen to a motor-omnibus? _That_ could
not fall dead.
The party reached home at last, but Martha fell ill, and eventually
died of consumption. “Never,” declares the supposed narrator of this
elegant piece of fiction, “shall I forget our Sunday Trip to Hastings.”
I should think not, indeed!
Let us therefore go to Hastings by road: and be sure it is not on a
Sunday.
[Illustration: A SLAIN NORMAN.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
INDEX
Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 71-74
Baldslow, 238
Battle, 188, 199, 228, 231, 232
—— Abbey, 188, 219-34
—— of Hastings, 188, 200-219
Bayham Abbey, 157-59
Beauport Park, 234
Bedgebury Park, 167
Bell Green, 25
Bellingham, 23
Bewl Bridge, 164
Bodiam Castle, 182-86
“Bohemia,” 237
Bromley, 4, 26-47
—— Common, 44-48
Carriers, The, 4, 10
Catford Bridge, 23
Chelsfield, 56
Chevening, 62
“Church in the Wood” (_i.e._ Hollington Church), 236
Coaches:—
Express, 7
Hastings Mail (afterwards Hastings and St. Leonards), 6-8, 54-56
Paragon, 7
Regulator, 7
Royal William, 7
United Friends, Sevenoaks, 78
Coaching, 3-10, 54-56, 63, 78
Coaching Notabilities:—
Gray, Robert, 6, 8
Horne, Benjamin Worthy, 6, 8, 78
Peacock, 78
Stockdale, 8-10
Corbett Estate, The, 24
Crowhurst Park, 234
Cyclists’ Rests, 141-43
Darenth, River, 69
Downe, 52
Dunton Green, 63, 66-69
Edward the Confessor, 189-93
Etchingham, 171-76
Farnborough, 52
Flimwell, 2, 108, 168-70
Forest Hill, 23
Frant, 140
Green Street Green, 53
Halstead, 64
Halton, 248
Hare, Augustus J. C., 239-46
Harold, King, 190-201, 209, 210, 214-19, 231
Hastings, 248-84
“High Rocks,” 137-40
Highwaymen, 48-52, 54
Hildenborough, 112
Hollington, 235
Holloway, 26
“Holmhurst,” 238-46
Hops, 144-53
Hop-pickers, 52, 111, 147-53
Hurst Green, 170-77
Inns (mentioned at length):—
Bell, Bromley, 43
Blackboy, Sevenoaks, 78
Blue Boys, Kipping’s Cross, 143
Bolt-in-Tun, Fleet Street, 6, 8, 9
Bricklayers’ Arms, Sevenoaks, 79
Cats (or Three Cats), Sevenoaks, 79-81
Chequers, Lamberhurst, 5, 157
—— Tonbridge, 118
George, Robertsbridge, 181
George and Dragon, Farnborough, 52
Harrow, Knockholt Pound, 58
Porcupine, Richmore Hill, 57
Star, Madamscourt Hill, 58
White Hart, Bromley, 43
—— near Sevenoaks, 104
John’s Cross, 188
Kipping’s Cross, 143
Knockholt, 57-62
Knole, 79, 84-102
Ladywell, 16
Lamberhurst, 4, 144, 153-57
Lewisham, 10, 11, 12-23
Lindridge Causeway, 144
Loampit Hill, 11
Lock’s Bottom, 48
London Bridge, 1
Longford, 69
Madamscourt (_i.e._ Morant’s Court) Hill, 62
Malfosse, 216
Mason’s Hill, 44
“Montreal,” 71, 74-76
Mountfield, 186
Neville Family, The, 141
New Cross, 1, 11
North, Lord, 120-22
“Old London Road,” 235, 238, 248, 250
Old Roar, 236
Old-time Travellers:—
Evelyn, John, 49-51
Islip, Archbishop, 104
Jeake, Samuel, jr., 4, 120
Walpole, Horace, 177, 180
Ore, 246
Pembury Green, 141
Pilgrims’ Way, 63
Polhill, 57, 65
—— Tunnel, 64
Pratt’s Bottom, 54, 56
Quaggy, River, 12
Ravensbourne, River, 11, 26
Riverhead, 70
River Hill, 105, 106, 108, 110-12
Robertsbridge, 177-82, 186, 188
Rother, River, 178
Rushey Green, 23, 25
Rushmore (or Richmore) Hill, 57
Sackville, Family of, 80, 87-98
Salehurst, 182
Scotney Castle, 159-64
Seacox Heath, 169
Senlac, 188, 199, 206, 231
Sepham Hill, 66
“Seven Oaks, The,” 104
Sevenoaks, 3, 76-84
Sevenoke, Sir William, 82
Shangden, 104
Silver Hill, 177, 180
Silverhill, 237
South End, 25
Star (otherwise Madamscourt) Hill, 63
Starr’s Green, 234
Stone Crouch, 140, 164
Telham Hill, 234
Toad Rock, The, 134-37
Tonbridge, 3, 4, 5, 112-20
Tonbridge Ware, 131-34
Tunbridge Wells, 3, 4, 5, 111, 120-37
Vine Hall, 188
Watch Oak, The, 199
Webster, Family of, 224-28
Whatlington, 188
Wilford, James, Benefactor to Roads, 106-108
William the Conqueror, 190-98, 203, 207-220
Woodgate, 4, 120
_Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury._