BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE

Bournemouth, the “Sandbourne” of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and of minor incidents and passing allusions in others of Mr. Hardy’s novels, is one of the principal gates of entrance to his Wessex. Just within the western borders of Hampshire, or what he would call “Upper Wessex,” the heart of his literary country is within the easiest reach of its pleasant districts of villa residences, by road or rail, or indeed by sea; for Swanage, the “Swanwich” of a Hardy gazetteer, and Lulworth Cove, his “Lullstead,” that azure pool within “the two projecting spurs of rock which form the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean,” are the destinations in summer of many steamboat voyages.

“Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.” Thus Angel Clare, seeking his wife somewhere within its bounds. Large indeed, and growing yet. Census officials and other statisticians toil after its increase in vain. I find a guide-book of 1887 speaking of its population as “nearly 18,000.” I find another, of 1896, putting it at “about 40,000,” and then referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further risen to forty-seven thousand souls, and a few over. By now it doubtless numbers full fifty thousand, and has further rubricated and underscored its description in the last pages of Tess: “This fashionable watering-place with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was to Angel Clare like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the CÆsars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.”

“By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this new world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.

“The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought it was the pines, the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the sea.”

Bournemouth: The Invalid’s Walk

This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians was until well on into the nineteenth century a lonely waste, whose only frequenters were smugglers, fishermen, rabbits, and seagulls. In the midst of its pine-woods, sands, and heather a little stream, the Bourne, which now gives this great concourse of villa paradises, palatial hotels, and fashionable shops its name, flowed into the sea, just where, in these days, tricked out with cascades, and fountains, and made to wander circuitously at the will of landscape-gardeners amid the neatest of lawns and the gayest of flower-beds, it at last trickles exhaustedly into the sea, under the pier. Its natural course from the neighbourhood of Kinson, down Bourne Bottom, to that smallest of “mouths,” is some six miles, but in these days it is made to work hard in the last stretch, through the public gardens, and where it once covered one mile, is now looped here and turned back there upon itself, and exploited generally, until it has become as sophisticated a stream as anywhere to be found. The Bourne is, indeed, like the humble parent of some overwhelming social success, made to alter its ways and put aside its rustic manners, to do credit to its offspring.

The country folk who live in the background of this oft-styled “City of Pines,” still call it merely “Bourne,” as it was when, many years ago, Dr. Granville made the fortunes of the hamlet, frequented by a few invalids and others rejoicing in the spicy odours of the pine-woods, that had grown in a scattered and chance fashion upon the heath. “No situation,” said that authority upon spas and watering-places, “possesses so many capabilities of being made the very first sea watering-place in England; and not only a watering-place, but what is still more important, a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring a warm and sheltered locality at this season of the year.” Then follow comparisons favourable to the site of Bournemouth, and derogatory to other seaside resorts.

Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this weighty pronouncement, and advantage being taken of it. Consumptives came and found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth grew suddenly and astonishingly upon a lonely coastline; arising in that residential all-round-the-calendar character it has kept to this day, in spite of those holiday-folk, the excursionists and trippers whom its “residential” stratum discourages as much as possible. But when even so thoroughly exclusive a residential health-resort has been so successful, and has grown so greatly in that character as Bournemouth has grown, there comes inevitably a time when the workers and tradesfolk, ministrants to the wants of those residents, themselves become an important section of the community. It is a time when suburbs and quarters, invidiously distinguished from one another in the social scale, have established themselves; when, in short, from being just the resort of a class, a place becomes a microcosm of life, in which all classes and degrees are represented. The seal was set upon the arrival of that time for Bournemouth with its admission to the dignity of a municipal borough, fully equipped with Mayor and Town Council, in the summer of 1890, and again, later, with the opening of electric tramways. Railway-companies urge the attractions of Bournemouth upon holiday-makers, with great success, and nowadays one only perceives the place in anything like its former characteristic air at such time when the summer has gone and the holiday-maker has returned to his own fireside.

Bournemouth has already gathered together some odds and ends of sentimental associations. Mary Wollstonecraft, widow of Shelley, died here in 1853, and lies in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, beside Godwin and his wife, whose bodies were brought from the London churchyard of St. Pancras. Keble died here in 1866, and the present St. Peter’s is his memorial. Robert Louis Stevenson, Bournemouth’s most distinguished consumptive, resided at “Skerryvore,” in Alum Chine Road, before he took flight to the South Seas.

But—singular and ungrateful omission—one looks in vain for a statue to Dr. Granville, who, by his powerful advocacy, made Bournemouth, just as Dr. Russel made Brighton a century earlier. In this it is not difficult to find another instance of “benefits forgot.”

The juxtaposition of a place so new as Bournemouth with one so ancient as Poole is a piquant circumstance. When Bournemouth rose, not like Britannia, from the azure main, but from beside it, there was a considerable interval of open country between the hoary seaport and the mint-new pleasure-town. That interval has now shrunk to vanishing-point; for, what with Bournemouth’s expansion, growing Parkstone’s position midway, and Poole’s own attempt to sprout in an eastwardly direction, to meet those manifestations, the green country has been abolished beneath an irruption of bricks and mortar.

The piquancy of Poole’s ancient repose being neighboured by Bournemouth’s wide-awake life is italicised when that port—the “Havenpool” of To Please his Wife—is entered. It would not be correct to say that the days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in size of modern ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose recesses it is tucked rather obscurely away, prevents any but vessels of slight draught coming up to its quays. For that reason, large ocean-going steamers are strangers to Poole, more familiar with wooden barques and brigantines and their maze of masts and spars, than with the capacious steamships that, although of much greater speed and tonnage, carry very slight and insignificant sticks; and were it not for the china-clay shipments and for that coasting trade which seems almost indestructible, Poole would assuredly die.

But Poole, besides being ancient, has been a place to reckon with. Already, in 1220, when by a proclamation of Henry III. the ships of many ports were sealed up, Poole appeared among the number. In 1347 its contribution towards the siege of Calais was four ships and ninety-four men, and it was the base from which the English army in France was provisioned. Then in 1349 came that fourteenth century scourge, the Black Death, and Poole, among other towns, was almost depopulated, and lost the Parliamentary representation it had long enjoyed. But it made a good recovery, and in the time of Henry VI. regained its Parliamentary representation. Leland, writing of the place describes it, two hundred years later, as “a poore fisshar village, much encreasid with fair building and use of marchaundise of old tyme.” Poole, after that description was penned, continued to recover itself, and fully regained its lost prosperity. Fifty years later it is found carrying on a thriving trade with Spain, and how truly it was said that its merchants were men of wealth and consideration may be judged from their large, and architecturally and decoratively fine, mansions still remaining, although nowadays put to all kinds of mean uses and often occupied as tenements.

Poole, however, long enjoyed a very bad reputation, and the wealth of which these were some of the evidences, was not often come by in very reputable ways. When it is said that Poole “enjoyed” a bad reputation, it is said advisedly, for Poole was so lost to shame that it really did enjoy what should have been a source of some searchings of heart. It was a veritable nest of pirates and smugglers, and the home of strange and original sinfulnesses; so that at last an injurious rhyme that still survives was circulated about it:

“If Poole were a fish-pool, and the men of Poole fish,
There’d be a pool for the devil, and fish for his dish.”

So early as the close of the fourteenth century, the buccaneers of Poole were infamous, and at their head was the notorious Harry Page, known to the French and the Spaniards as Arripay, the nearest they could frame to pronounce his name. Arripay was a very full-blooded, enterprising, and unscrupulous fellow; if without irreverence we may call him a “fellow,” who was the admiral of his rascally profession. There can be little doubt but that tradition has added not a little to the tales of his exploits, and it is hardly credible that he and his fellow-pirates should, on one occasion, have brought home a hundred and twenty prizes from the coast of Brittany. His forays were made upon the shipping of the foreigner, and with such system that no ship, it was said, could successfully run the gauntlet of his lawless flotilla. His success and power were so great that they necessitated the sending of an expedition to sweep the seas of him. This was an allied French and Spanish force, commissioned in 1406, and sailing under the command of Perdo Nino, Count of Buelna. Adopting the tactics of raiders, they burnt and ravaged the coasts of Cornwall and Devon, and, coming to Dorset, swept into Arripay’s hornets’ nest of Poole Harbour, and landing at Poole itself, defeated the townsmen in a pitched battle. The brother of the redoubtable Arripay was among the slain.

A worthy successor of this bold spirit in the pike and cutlass way—although he was no pirate, but just an honest stalwart sailor—was that bonny fighter, Peter Jolliffe, of the hoy Sea Adventurer. Off Swanage in 1694, he fell in with a French privateer having a poor little captured Weymouth fishing-smack in tow, and attacked the Frenchman repeatedly, and at last with such success, that he not only released the smack, but drove the privateer ashore near Lulworth, its crew being made prisoners of war. For so signal an instance of bravery Jolliffe received a gold chain and medal from the hands of the king himself.

Jolliffe’s example fired enthusiasm, and the following year, William Thompson, skipper of a fishing-smack, aided only by his scanty crew of one man and a boy, attacked a Cherbourg privateer that had attempted to capture him, and actually succeeded in capturing it and its complement of sixteen hands, instead. He brought his prize into Poole, and he too, fully deserved that gold chain and medal awarded him.

In St. James’s church itself—disclosing an interior not unlike that of a stern cabin of an old man-o’-war, writ large—is a monument to the intrepid Jolliffe. From a reminiscence of it, no doubt, Mr. Hardy chose to name Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, that shipmaster engaged in the Newfoundland trade who is the ill-fated hero of To Please his Wife.

For the rest, Poole figures so largely in the Civil War, as a town ardently in favour of the Parliament, that it has a long and stirring story of its own, in the varying fortunes of Roundheads and Stuarts. It is too lengthy a story to be told with advantage here.

The High Street of Poole, a mile long, is busy enough to quite dispel any idea that Poole is not prospering; but, on the other hand, the many puzzling narrow streets that lead out of it are so rich in what have been noble residences, that they tell in unmistakable tones of a greater period than this of to-day.

These byways lead at last past the church of St. Paul, the fellow to St. James’s, with its dolphin vane, to Poole Quay, where the most prominent feature is an ancient Gothic building, looking very like some desecrated place of worship, or a monastic tithe-barn. It is, as a matter of fact, neither, but the “Town Cellar,” a relic of a past age when Poole was part of the manor of Canford. The lords of Canford, away back to that ubiquitous John o’ Gaunt, “time-honoured Lancaster,” who seems to have owned quite half of the most desirable properties in the England of his time, took toll in money, when they could, and in kind when silver marks and golden angels were scarce; and in the “Town Cellar” were stored those bales of wool, those spices from Ind, and those miscellaneous goods, which were made in this manner to render unto the CÆsars of Canford, in times when such things were. It is a picturesque old building, its walls oddly composed of flint intermingled with large squared pieces of stone that, by the look of them, would seem to have been plundered from some older structure.

Opposite stands the Harbour Office, not altogether unpicturesquely provided with a loggia supported by columns, and still retaining the sundial erected when clocks were scarce. The Mayor of Poole, who in 1727 presided over the fortunes of the port, is handed down to posterity by the quaint tablet let into the gable wall, showing us the quarter-length relief portrait of a stout personage in voluminous wig and mayoral chain and robes, lackadaisically glancing skyward, as though longing to be gone to those ethereal regions where double chins and “too, too solid flesh” are not.

Poole Quay—its old buildings, waterside picturesqueness, and the shipping lying off the walls—is an interesting place for the artist, who has it very much to himself; for the holiday-maker does not often discover it. But waterside characters are not lacking: sailors, who have got berths and are only waiting for the tide to serve; other sailors, who are in want of berths; town boys, who would dearly like to go to sea; and nondescript characters, who would not take a job if offered to them, and want nothing but a quayside bollard to sit upon, sunshine, a pipe of tobacco, and the price of half a pint: these form the natural history of Poole Quay, which though it may have been—and was—one of the gateways into the great outer world, in the brave old days of Arripay and his merry men, is now something of a straitened gate, and Poole itself for the land voyager very much in the nature of one of those stop-blocks at the end of a railway siding: what a railway man would call a “dead end.”

Poole Quay

For Poole is not a main road to anywhere, and when you have turned down into it, on those three and a half miles from Bournemouth, you are either compelled to return the way you came, or else cross a creek by the toll-bridge to Hamworthy, where there is nothing but a church built in 1826—and precisely of the nature one might expect from that date—and, a little way onward, a lonely railway junction in midst of sandy heaths and whispering pines, which, even at night, “tell the tale of their species,” as phrenologists say, “without help from outline or colour,” in “those melancholy moans and sobs which give to their sound a solemn sadness surpassing even that of the sea.” It is the district of The Hand of Ethelberta, and if we pursue it, we shall, as Sol says, in that novel, “come to no place for two or three miles, and then only to Flychett,” which, in everyday life, is Lytchett Minster, a place which, despite that grand name, can show nothing in the nature of a cathedral, and is, as Sol said, “a trumpery small bit of a village,” where possibly that wheelwright mentioned in the story still “keeps a beer-house and owns two horses.” That house is the inn oddly named the “Peter’s Finger,” with a picture-sign standing on a post by the wayside, and showing St. Peter holding up a hand with two extended fingers in benedictory fashion, as though blessing the wayfarer. The origin of this sign is said to be the custom, once usual in Roman Catholic times, of holding manorial courts on Lammas Day, the 1st of August, the day of St. Peter ad Vincula—that St. Peter-in-the-Fetters to whom the church on Tower Green, in the Tower of London, is so appropriately dedicated. On that day suit and service had to be performed by tenants for their lands, which thus obtained, in course of time, the corrupted title of “Peter’s Finger” property.

Around the village so slightingly characterised in The Hand of Ethelberta there is little save “the everlasting heath,” mentioned in that story, “the black hills bulging against the sky, the barrows upon their round summits like warts on a swarthy skin.” It is true the road leads at last to Bere Regis, but it has little individuality and no further Hardyesque significance, and so may be disregarded in these pages.