CHAPTER XX 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.

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:

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.

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