CHAPTER III 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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