HYTHE AND FOLKSTONE

From Dymchurch, five miles of excellent road bring one into Hythe, that old Cinque Port whose early Saxon name means "harbour," and thus tells those among us who are thinking men how important a place it was of old. "The Harbour," definitely and emphatically it was, of capital importance in those far-away times when Sandwich, Romney, Dover, Folkestone, and others were of less moment; but even by the time the Cinque Ports came into existence it had declined to inferior rank among its brethren, and when Dover was required to furnish twenty-one ships for the defence of the nation, and Winchelsea and Hastings respectively ten and six, Hythe, Sandwich, Rye, and Romney were assessed at only five each. Where is that harbour of which some vestiges remained to the time of Elizabeth? that haven which, according to Leland, was "strayt for passage owt of Boloyn?" Where but choked up, embedded, and deeply overlaid beneath a mile-long waste of shingle! The glory of that storied port is buried "full fathom five." Everywhere is shingle. A world of it expands before the vision as one comes out of the marsh towards the town, and Martello towers and forlorn congeries of more modern forts stand islanded in midst of it. From the sunlit glare of this waste the road enters Hythe, through an exquisitely beautiful woodland, open and unfenced from the highway, with the landward ridge of hills and the Military Canal approaching on the left.

"Hythe hath bene," says Leland, "a very greate towne yn length, ande conteyned IIII paroches, that now be clene destroied." The greatest surviving evidence of that ancient estate is the one remaining church of St. Leonard, which tops the hill behind the High Street and is the crown and distinguishing mark of Hythe from afar off. It is chiefly of Early English architecture, and an exquisite example of its period, with a noble chancel like the choir of a cathedral, and a remarkable crypt or undercroft, stacked with a neatly-disposed heap of many hundreds of skulls and large quantities of human bones. No one knows in any definite manner how, why, or when these gruesome relics were brought here, but legendary lore tells how they are the remains of those who were slain in some uncertain fight—so uncertain that whether between Britons and Romans, Romano-British and Saxons, or Saxons and Danes is not stated. Borrow, in his Lavengro, plumps for Danes, more perhaps because he had a prejudice for that hypothesis than from any evidence he could have produced, if asked. That many of the owners of those skulls did actually meet a violent death is quite evident in the terrific gashes they exhibit. One may see these poor relics for threepence, and Hythe does a roaring trade with the morbid in photographs of the shocking collection; but it were better they were decently buried and given rest from the handling and the flippant comments of the shallow-minded crowd.

One refuses further to discuss skulls in the holiday sunshine of Hythe, whose long, narrow street is cheerful and pulsing with life. Hythe street is one of those humanly interesting old thoroughfares which one is inclined, in the mass, to call picturesque; but on reflection it is seen to be really always about to become so, as you advance, and never to actually arrive at any very remarkably picturesque climax. The Georgian town hall, standing on pillars, is interesting, and so, too, is that queer little building called the "Smugglers' Nest," claiming to be a look-out place of some of the many "free-traders" who carried on operations from the town. For the rest, Hythe is old-fashioned and by no means overwhelmed, as many of its neighbours are, by modernity. Here the four separate and distinct streams of seafaring, military, agricultural, and shop-keeping life pool their interests and mingle amicably enough, under the interested observation of a fifth contingent, the summer visitors who find the unconventional attractions of the shingle and the unspoiled place more to their taste than the modish charms of Folkestone.

Just where Hythe ends and Seabrook begins, the Military Canal comes to a dusty and somewhat stagnant conclusion on the flat foreshore. Lest the dreaded invader should not play the game properly, and meanly attempt to land his troops on the open and undefended beach beyond the tract of country cut off by that "not very practicable ditch," a Martello tower was set up on the little shoulder of a hill overlooking this spot, and there it remains to this day. A grey, grim, giant hotel stands isolated out upon the shingle-banks, and would offer a splendid mark for any modern invader who should descend upon the coast and do the neighbourhood the kindness to blow its hideous presence away.

That stranger who might pass from Hythe to Sandgate and know nothing of the separate existence of Seabrook would have every excuse, for it bears every outward appearance of belonging to one or other. It is largely a recent development, and in so far a pleasing one, for its pretty new gabled seaside red-brick cottages, giving immediately upon the shore, are in the best of taste and have delightful gardens, where the little bare-legged boys and girls of the visitors sit in the sun or sprawl, book-reading, upon the steps. Opposite these, evidences of an enlightened taste, some grey "compo" villas cast a gloom over those who glance upon them and tell us how stupid were those times of some thirty years ago, when such sad-faced houses arose everywhere at the seaside in this grey climate that calls aloud for the cheerfulness of colour in building.

Sandgate, into which Seabrook insensibly merges, sits so close upon the shore that it is credibly reported the lodging-house landladies live on the upper floors of their houses in those empty winter months when the winds blow great guns and the seas come pouring into the basements, bringing with them large deposits of that plentiful shingle, fragments of sea-wall, and twisted remnants of promenade railings. Year in and year out, the sea and the Local Board, or Urban District Council, or whatever may be the name of the authority that rules Sandgate, play a never-ending game. In the summer the authority builds up a sea-wall, and, in effect, says to the sea, "You can't smash that!" And the sea sparkles and drowses in the sun and laps lazily upon the shore, and artfully agrees. But when the visitors have all gone home, and the equinoctial gales go ravening up and down the Channel, then Londoners open their morning papers and say to their wives, "You remember that sea-wall at Sandgate, my dear, where we used to sit in the shade: it was entirely washed away yesterday by the sea!" But by the time their next holiday comes round there is a newer wall there, on an improved pattern. That, too, is either utterly destroyed in the following winter and flung in fragments into neighbouring gardens, or else, with the roadway and the kerbs and lamp-posts, the pillar-boxes and the whole bag of tricks, swept out to sea and lost.

And so the game goes on. It is a costly one, and a heartbreaking for those folks who have semi-basement breakfast-rooms and ever and again experience the necessity of excavating their furniture out of the shingle-filled rooms, like so many Layards digging out the Assyrian relics of Nimroud and Baalbec. When such things can be, the desire of adjoining Folkestone for Sandgate and the determination of Sandgate not to be included within the municipal boundaries of its great neighbour are not readily to be understood.

Dramatic things happen at Sandgate. Vessels are cast away upon the road, their bowsprits coming in at the front doors, while shipwrecked mariners, instead of being flung upon an iron-bound coast, are projected against the palisades of the front gardens. At such times the variety of jettisoned cargo that comes ashore is remarkable. One day it will be a consignment of Barcelona nuts; another, a ship-load of boots; what not, indeed, from the jostling commerce that goes up and down that crowded sea-highway, the Channel. When the Benvenue was wrecked inshore here, at the close of 1891, and lay a menace to passing ships, that happened which sent Sandgate sliding and cracking in all directions. The wreck was blown up with dynamite, and soon afterwards the clayey clifflet that forms the foundation for the north side of Sandgate's one street slipped suddenly down, wrecking some houses and cracking many others from roof to foundation. Many, including the London newspapers, thought it was an earthquake.

Since then, Sandgate has largely altered, and instead of being rather an abject attempt at a seaside resort, has been brightened by re-building and cheered by the overflow to it from Folkestone's overbrimming cup of prosperity. Still stands Sandgate Castle on the sea-shore, one of Henry VIII.'s obese, tun-bellied blockhouses, very much in shape like that portly Henry himself, as we may safely declare now that Tudors no longer rule the land; but the very thought would have been treason, and its expression fatal, in that burly monarch's own day.

There is a choice of ways into Folkestone—by steeply-rising Sandgate Hill, or by the flat lower road, where a modern toll-gate stands to exact its dues for the convenience. This way the cyclist saves the climb, and pilgrims in general are spared the villa roads of the hill approach to the town, coming to it instead through pleasant woods, with the tangled abandon of the Leas undercliff rising up to the left.

Folkestone chiefly interests the Ingoldsby pilgrim because of that eloquent and humorous description of the old town to be found in "The Leech of Folkestone." There was then no new and fashionable town to be described, and the place was "a collection of houses which its maligners call a fishing-town, and its well-wishers a watering-place. A limb of one of the Cinque Ports, it has (or lately had) a corporation of its own, and has been thought considerable enough to give a second title to a noble family. Rome stood on seven hills—Folkestone seems to have been built upon seventy. Its streets, lanes, and alleys—fanciful distinctions without much real difference—are agreeable enough to persons who do not mind running up and down stairs; and the only inconvenience at all felt by such of its inhabitants as are not asthmatic is when some heedless urchin tumbles down a chimney or an impertinent pedestrian peeps into a garret window.

"At the eastern extremity of the town, on the sea-beach, and scarcely above high-water mark, stood, in the good old times, a row of houses, then denominated 'Frog Hole.' Modern refinement subsequently euphemised the name into 'East-street'; but 'what's in a name?'—the encroachments of Ocean have long since levelled all in one common ruin."

Nothing of the sort has happened. East Street is still there, and "East Street" yet, but no one has ventured to identify any house with that occupied by that compounder of medicines, "of somewhat doubtful reputation, but comparative opulence," Master Erasmus Buckthorne, "the effluvia of whose drugs from within, mingling agreeably with the 'ancient and fishlike smells' from without, wafted a delicious perfume throughout the neighbourhood."

It was to this picturesquely-described place that the Master Thomas Marsh of the legend and his man Ralph wended their way to consult that learned disciple of Esculapius with the fly-blown reputation; coming to it by "paths then, as now, most pseudonymously dignified with the name of roads."

Folkestone, the fisher-village, the "Lapis Populi" of the Romans and the "Fulchestane" of Domesday Book—stood in a pleasant country now quite lost sight of, built over, and bedevilled by the interminable brick and mortar of the great and fashionable seaside resort that Folkestone is at this day. It lay, that fisher-haven, in a hollow at the seaward end of a long valley bordered by the striking hills of the chalk downs that are only now to be glimpsed by journeying a mile or so away from the sea-shore, past the uttermost streets, but were then visible at every point. Down this valley came, trickling and prattling in summer, or raging in winter, a little stream that, as it approached the sea, flowed in between the crazy tenements of the fisher-folk and smugglers who then formed the sole population—who then were the only folk—of Folkestone. This was the "Pent Stream," which found its way into the sea obscurely enough, oozing insignificantly through the pebbles where the Stade and the Fishmarket now stand, by the harbour. Alas! for that forgotten rill; it is now made to mingle its waters with a sewer, and to flow under Tontine Street in a contaminated flood.

It is true that the small natural harbour was improved so early as 1810, or thereabouts, by Telford, but it was not until after 1844, when the South-Eastern Railway was opened, that Folkestone began to grow, and the original village began to be enclosed within the girdle of a "resort" quite alien from it in style, thought, and population.

There is no love felt for modern Folkestone by the inhabitants of the old town, who resent the prices to which things have been forced up by the neighbourhood of the over-wealthy, and resent still more the occasional descent from the fashionable Leas of dainty parties bent on exploring the queer nooks, and amusing themselves with a sight of the quaint characters, that still abound by the fishing-harbour. To those parties, every waterside lounger who sports a peaked cap and a blue jersey, and, resting his arms upon the railings by the quay and gazing inscrutably out to the horizon, presents a broad stern to the street, is a fisherman, and the feelings of a pilot, taken for a mere hauler upon nets and capturer of soles and mackerel, are often thus outraged.

For the spiritual benefit of the fisher-folk and others of the old town, there is planted, by the Stade, a "St. Peter's Mission," established there by well-meaning but stupid folk who look down, actually and figuratively, from the modern town upon this spot, and appear to think it a sink of iniquity. But iniquities are not always, or solely, resident in sinks; they have been found, shameless and flourishing, in high places. There are those among the fisher population who take the creature comforts—the coals and the blankets—of the mission, and pocket the implied affront; but there are also those others who, with clearer vision or greater independence of character, do not scruple to think and say that a mission for the salvation of many in that new town that so proudly crowns the cliffs would be more appropriate. "What," asked an indignant fisherman—"what makes them 'ere hotels pay like they does?" and he answered his own query in language that shall not be printed here. "If them as goes there all had to show their marriage-lines first," he concluded, "it's little business they'd do"; and his remarks recalled and illuminated the story of a week-end frequenter of one of the great caravanserais whose Saturday to Monday spouses were so frequently changed that even the seared conscience of a German hotel-manager was revolted.

Folkestone's fishing-harbour is wonderfully picturesque. Beside it stands the Stade, a collection of the quaintest, craziest old sail-lofts and warehouses, timbered and tarred and leaning at all sorts of angles. Down in the harbour itself the smacks cluster thickly. The rise and fall of the tide here is so much as eighteen feet, and at the ebb to descend upon the sand and to look up and along toward the Leas is to obtain the most characteristic and striking view in the whole place. There, perched up against the sky-line, is the ancient parish church of St. Eanswythe, in modern times frescoed and bedizened and given up to high church practices. There, too, the custom has recently been introduced of going in procession, with cross and vestments, to bless the fishing-nets. One wonders what scornful things Ingoldsby would have said of these doings within the Church of England, and indeed the fishery seems neither better nor worse for them.

That sainted princess, Eanswythe, daughter of the Kentish King Eadbald, is said to be buried within the church. She was one of the most remarkable of the many wondrous saints of her period, and performed the impossible and brought about the incredible with the best of them. She brought water from Cheriton to Folkestone, making it run up hill, and incompetent carpenters who had sawn beams too short had but to invoke her for them (the beams, not the carpenters) to be[Pg 137]
[Pg 138] instantly lengthened to any extent desired. Monks, too, it was said, whose cassocks had been washed, and shrunk in the process, could always get them unshrunk in the same marvellous way; but this must be an error of the most flagrant kind, for we know that those holy men washed themselves little, and their clothes never. But whatever marvellous things she could do, she was not capable of the comparatively simple feat of preventing her original conventual church being washed away by the sea.

Folkestone people were of old very largely the butt of the neighbouring towns. They were said to be stupid beyond the ordinary. Twitted on some occasion that has escaped the present historian with not being able to celebrate a given event in poetry, the town produced a poet eager to disprove the accusation. To show what he could do in that way, he took as his theme a notable capture that Folkestone had just then made, and wrote:

He was, it will be conceded, not even so near an approach to a poet as that mayor who read an address to Queen Elizabeth, beginning with,

to which Her Majesty is said to have replied,

But doubtless these be all malicious inventions. Certainly, though, "great Eliza" did visit Folkestone, and we can have no doubt that the usual address was read—can even see and hear in imagination that mayor reading abysmal ineptitudes "um-um-er-er," like some blundering bumble-bee, the atmosphere growing thick and drowsy with falsities, platitudes, and infinite bombast, until that virginal but vinegary monarch cuts him rudely short. We can see—O! most clear-sighted that we are!—that tall and angular spinster, sharp-visaged, with high, beak-like nose, greatly resembling a gaunt hen—but a very game hen—actually cutting short that turbid flow of mayoral eloquence! we wonder she does not peck him.

Still hazardously up and down go those old streets and lanes of the old town—Beach Street, North Street, Fenchurch Street, Radnor Street, and East Street, whence you look out upon Copt Point and the serried tiers upon tiers of chalk cliffs stretching in the direction of Dover. Still the Martello tower stands upon that point, as it stands in the illustration of Folkestone by Turner, but the swarming population of to-day has blotted out much of that obvious romance that once burst full upon the visitor. The romance is still there, but you have to seek it and dig deep beneath the strata of modern changes before it is found. Trivial things dot the i's, cross the t's, and generally emphasise this triumph of convention. "Lanes" become "streets," and that quaintly illiterate old rendering, "Rendavowe" Street, was long since thought by no means worthy of more educated times, and accordingly changed to the correct spelling of "Rendezvous" it now bears.

Modern Folkestone is already, by effluxion of time, becoming sharply divided into modern and more modern. The ancient Folkestone we have seen to be the fishing village, the first development from whose humble but natural existence, in days when seaside holidays began to be an institution and the "resorts" set out upon their career of artificiality, was the "Pavilionstone" of Dickens and Cubitt. The trail of Cubitt, who built that South Kensington typified by the Cromwell Road, and was followed by his imitators throughout the western suburbs of London in the 'fifties and 'sixties, is all over the land, and is very clearly defined on the Folkestone Leas, whose houses are in the most approved grey stucco style. The Leas therefore are not Folkestone, but, as Dickens dubbed them, "Pavilionstone," or, more justly, Notting-Hill-on-Sea. They and their adjacent contemporary streets are the seaside resort of yesterday; the red-brick and terra-cotta houses and hotels, in adaptation of Elizabethan Gothic and Jacobean Renaissance, that of to-day, a newer and grander place than Cubitt conceived or Dickens knew.

All those magnificent streets, those barrack-like hotels, all those bands and gay parterres, and all the fashion that makes Folkestone the most expensive seaside resort on the south coast, are excrescences. That only is Folkestone where you really do smell the salt water and can seek refuge from the cigar-smoke and the Eau-de-Cologne, the wealthy, the idle, and the vicious, to come to the folk who earn their livelihood by the sea and its fish, and are individual and racy of the water and the always interesting waterside life.

The inquirer fails to discover why that hotel, the "Pavilion," of which Dickens was so enamoured, and from whose style and title he named the newly-arising town "Pavilionstone," was given that sign. Napoleon declared, in the course of his great naval works at Cherbourg, that he was resolved to rival the marvels of Egypt; was Cubitt, in his building and contracting way, eager to emulate the plasterous glories of George IV.'s marine palace, the "Pavilion" at Brighton, or, at any rate, to snatch a glamour from its name? The "Pavilion" has been once, certainly—perhaps twice—rebuilt since Dickens wrote, and is now, they say, palatial, and with every circumstance of comfort; but when Pavilionstone was in the making, it seems to have been a sorry sort of a hostelry, in which voyagers for Boulogne had sharp foretastes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which awaited those who resigned themselves to the cross-Channel passage at that period. This, says Dickens, is how you came here for that discomfortable enterprise: "Dropped upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone Station at eleven o'clock on a dark winter's night, in a roaring wind; and in the howling wilderness outside the station was a short omnibus which brought you up by the forehead the instant you got in at the door; and nobody cared about you, and you were alone in the world. You bumped over infinite chalk until you were turned out at a strange building which had just left off being a barn without having quite begun to be a house, where nobody expected your coming, or knew what to do with you when you were come, and where you were usually blown about until you happened to be blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed. At five in the morning you were blown out of bed, and after a dreary breakfast, with crumpled company, in the midst of confusion, were hustled on board a steamboat, and lay wretched on deck until you saw France lunging and surging at you with great vehemence over the bowsprit."

The miseries of crossing between Folkestone and Boulogne are very greatly assuaged in these times, but still the summer visitants who have exhausted a round of pleasures find a perennial and cruel joy in repairing to the pier, where they can gloat over the miserables who, yellow and green-visaged, step uncertainly ashore after a bad passage.