Channel Shore Read online

  Folkestone would do well to heed Professor Walton’s wisdom.

  Sandgate

  The town is badly let down by the seafront, but up behind The Leas are leafy avenues and crescents that retain a certain elegance and air of comfortable living. They merge imperceptibly into Sandgate, so I wasn’t aware of having left one for the other until I noticed several front windows displaying a sticker: ‘Sandgate says No to Unrestricted Development’. I met an elderly, white-haired man striding vigorously along the pavement and asked him if Sandgate took a dim view of speculative developers. Very, he answered. So you come down on them like a ton of bricks? I ventured. Harder, he said, smiling.

  Sandgate has been a favoured seaside resort for a long time. The Kentish Gazette reported in 1809 that ‘the lodgings are full . . . Purdey’s Library, recently fitted up with an elegant reading-room, has become very fashionable . . . The balls at Strood’s Rooms, which are every fortnight, have been fully attended . . . the sea-bathing is of the greatest perfection.’A visitor in the same year said ‘it has an air of neatness which cannot be exceeded.’ Sandgate is still distinctly neat and clean, with a fine esplanade for taking a stroll. The sea looked grey and unappetising to me, but my acquaintance said his wife swam often. I asked him what he liked about the place. ‘I like the space of the sea,’ he said. ‘With the land so steep behind, you need the openness in front.’

  It is agreeable to note that intensely respectable Sandgate’s most notable resident was the extremely unrespectable H. G. Wells. He came to live there with his wife Jane in 1898, first renting a cottage directly on the beach, then a semi-detached villa in Castle Road, and finally moving into Spade House, a splendid example of English vernacular style with massive chimneys, steep slate roof, broad eaves and sloping buttresses designed for him by Charles Voysey. By 1903 Jane had given birth to two sons, after which – according to Wells – sexual activity between them ceased.

  ‘I have never been able to discover,’ he mused much later, ‘if my interest in sex is more than normal.’ It was certainly keen. During the building of Spade House Wells had affairs with the writer Violet Hunt and with Rosamund Nesbit, officially the daughter of the children’s writer E. Nesbit although in fact born to the family governess. Many other liaisons followed, including one with the exponent of ‘stream of consciousness’ fiction, Dorothy Richardson, whose ‘interestingly hairy body’ Wells recalled with more affection than ‘her vein of evasive, ego-centred mysticism.’

  Sandgate was evidently good for Wells’ creative juices. He is hardly read today, but in his time he was the best-known popular novelist in the land, and several of his tales – including Love and Mr Lewisham, The History of Mr Polly and Kipps – were partially or wholly written within sight and sound of the Channel. It was Wells’ notorious affair with the Fabian feminist Amber Reeves – ‘a great storm of intensely physical sexual passion and desire’, he recalled with relish – that precipitated his move from Sandgate to Hampstead. He never came back, and Spade House has for some years fulfilled a more sedate and suitable role as a nursing home.

  In addition to other outlets for his energies, H. G. Wells was a keen cyclist. He would write in the morning and pedal off in the afternoon to explore the Kent countryside and drop in on one or other of his literary friends who lived within striking distance – among them Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Wells sometimes inserted cycling scenes into his fiction – a key scene in Kipps has the hero being rammed at a junction in Folkestone by another cyclist in knickerbockers whose intervention changes the course of his life.

  Zooming down the hill from Spade House, I felt an affinity with Wells, and made a kind of promise, not yet fulfilled, to have a crack at him. On the esplanade I came upon a memorial bust of Sir John Moore, the hero of Corunna and the subject of what Byron considered one of the finest odes in the English language:

  Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

  As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

  Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

  O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

  We buried him darkly at dead of night

  The sods with our bayonets turning,

  By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light,

  And the lanthorn dimly burning.

  It is stirring stuff, written by a young Irish clergyman, Thomas Wolfe, in the finest tradition of celebrating military fiascos in heroic stanzas. Moore was fatally wounded by a cannonball as his army sought to escape by sea from the port of Corunna after a desperate retreat across the mountains of northern Spain in the winter of 1809. He lived long enough, his ribs, left arm, breast and shoulder all shattered, to be told that the bulk of his men had managed to get away safely.

  Seven years earlier Moore had been given command of the newly built army training camp at Shorncliffe Redoubt, on the high ground above Sandgate. From outside his tent Moore was able to look across at Boulogne and see the fires of the 120,000-strong invasion force assembled by Napoleon. Bonaparte himself stalked the opposing clifftop, telescope in hand: ‘I have seen the English coast as clearly as one sees the Calvary from the Tuileries,’ he stated. ‘It is a ditch which will be leaped whenever one has the boldness to try.’

  It is not recorded what Sir John Moore had to say as he stared across from the other side; being a Scot by birth, probably not much. Understatement was the British way. ‘My lords, I do not say that the French cannot come,’ Lord St Vincent, commander of the Channel fleet, famously reported to the Admiralty. ‘I only say that they cannot come by sea.’ Napoleon had two thousand transports ready, but no warships to protect them. In July 1805 he ordered the Grand Army to prepare to invade, and sent word to Admiral Villeneuve in Cádiz: ‘Sail, do not lose a moment . . . England is ours . . . we will avenge six centuries of insults and shame.’ A month later the Emperor addressed his men: ‘Brave soldiers, you are not going to England. The Emperor of Austria, bribed with English gold, has declared war on France. New laurels await beyond the Rhine.’

  * * *

  Hythe is at least as respectable as Sandgate, possibly more so. Its wavy old High Street is lined by unimpeachably genteel shops, so that the appearance of an Iceland food store comes as a shock, as if one had stumbled on a knocking-shop. I came across no deposits of dog shit at all, a sure indicator of a community with the highest standards of behaviour.

  Having left my rucksack with my very respectable landlady, I took the cycle path along the Royal Military Canal to West Hythe. As one would expect, it is a very well-behaved path, keeping company beneath the shade of willows and alders with the still, brown, duck-infested water.

  It is curious to think that it and all the pleasant land around, with its villages and hamlets, was covered by the sea within the era of modern history – say, when Henry went off to thrash the French at Agincourt. At West Hythe the ruins of St Mary’s Church stand beside what is now a quiet country lane just north of the canal. It is five miles from the sea. Yet it used to stand on the edge of the harbour serving the port of Hythe, one of the original Cinque Ports given charters under Henry II and his son, King John, to trade and defend the realm.

  Of the original five, only Dover and Hastings are still by the sea. The others – Hythe, Romney and Sandwich – have against their will retreated well inland, as have the so-called ‘Antient Towns’ of Rye and Winchelsea that were appointed to support the original Cinque Ports. At the time of Julius Caesar’s landing, the sea probably reached what is now a line of hills that stretches in a sweeping inland curve between Hythe and Hastings. But it was a very shallow sea, and the relentless depositing of silt by one sluggish river after another combined with the accumulation of sand and shingle pushed east by the prevailing winds eventually repelled the sea and turned the bay into a marsh, and later – assisted by artificial drainage – into a dry and fertile strip of land.

  The process was disputed by the ports, which depended on their sea trade. Romney, Hythe, Rye and Winchelsea all mad
e strenuous, expensive and unavailing efforts to keep their harbours open. The last to give up the struggle was Rye, which as late as the 1760s was still striving to divert the flow of the river Rother away from its harbour. Long before that, however – certainly by the time Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 – the Cinque Ports had ceased to perform any useful service to the Crown. The once-important post of Lord Warden became purely honorary, and in 1828 the salary that went with it was withdrawn. But there were still perks, among them the use of the official residence, Walmer Castle.

  It is alleged that another was a droit du seigneur – also known in French as a droit de jambage or ‘right of the leg’ – over the daughters of the keepers of lighthouses along the stretch of coast once controlled by the Ports. It is further alleged that this right was exercised by Winston Churchill, who was Lord Warden between 1941 and his death in 1965, and that this accounted for the unusual incidence of Churchill lookalikes along the south coast. When I say ‘it is alleged’, I have to admit that the source of these allegations is my eldest brother, a notable storehouse of arcane facts. When challenged he insisted that he had read about it many years ago in the correspondence pages of the Guardian but could be no more precise than that. I have spent many hours scouring histories of the Cinque Ports detailing the privileges and duties of the Lord Warden, and I have not come across a shred of evidence to support my brother’s contention, which I am reluctantly forced to conclude is not true.

  * * *

  In May 1804 William Pitt was restored as Prime Minister of a Britain convulsed with fear of a French invasion. The Duke of York, the vocal if not exactly battle-hardened commander-in-chief of British forces, pressed for a defensive system to thwart the Grand Army. In September of that year Pitt ordered the construction of what became known as the Martello Towers at intervals of six hundred yards along the stretch of coast closest to France.

  At the same time serious consideration was given to a proposal to flood the whole of Romney Marsh to block a French advance. Pitt agreed with the Duke that this would be impracticable, but that security would be enhanced by constructing a canal sixty feet wide and nine feet deep to run in a loop twenty-eight miles long from just west of Folkestone to just east of Hastings.

  That October Pitt himself addressed a meeting of Romney Marsh landowners. He convinced them that even if the nightmare of invasion never came to pass, the canal would improve drainage, alleviate floods and provide irrigation, thereby enhancing the yield and value of their land. After a slow start, the canal was dug as far as Rye by 1806 and completed three years later. The seventy-four Martello Towers along the eastern Channel were built over roughly the same period, by the end of which the danger of the French army arriving on our shores had receded out of sight. Neither the towers nor the canal ever served any military role and the combined cost of one-and-a-half million pounds – a huge slice of the defence budget – caused them to be much mocked. The social reformer and fierce radical William Cobbett called the towers ‘ridiculous . . . a monument to the wisdom of Pitt’, and was far from alone in wondering ‘how the French who had so often crossed the Rhine and the Danube were to be kept back by a canal thirty feet wide at the most.’

  But the farmers were happy. The canal and its attendant network of cuts, ditches and sluices kept the saltwater from surging inland when storms coincided with high tides, and retained the freshwater when needed to serve the stock and crops. Until 1939 sheep predominated on the Marsh, but during the Second World War the transformation to arable was effected and these days less than a tenth is pasture. The Royal Military Canal has become a precious leisure and heritage asset. It accommodates all manner of healthy pastimes – cycling, fishing, canoeing, bird-watching – and is fitted out with dinky footbridges and picnic sites and weatherproof panels conveying interesting historical titbits.

  As for the Martello Towers, those squat, ugly, brown relics, some have been cleared away after falling into disrepair. But many survive – why would they not, with cannon-proof walls ten feet thick? A few have been converted into private houses; the rest stand as reminders of that unimaginably remote time when invasion talk panicked the nation.

  3

  DUNGIE

  Dymchurch

  One of the key control points for the Romney Marsh drainage system is the sluice on the sea wall between Hythe and Dymchurch. Guarded by the Dymchurch Redoubt, which was built at the same time as the Martello Towers, it is a cheerless spot on a murky morning with the breeze coming off a leaden sea.

  Immediately to the east is the Hythe Firing Range, where generations of infantry soldiers have been taught how to shoot straight. It and its beach are generally forbidden territory for the public at large, although at the weekend the red warning flags are sometimes lowered and people can trudge along the shingle foreshore.

  Further east still is Hythe Beach, where the famously peculiar Lord Rokeby was accustomed to bathe. I think even Lord Rokeby would have thought twice about taking a dip on the morning I passed through. It was high tide, and the sea was lapping hungrily at the blocks of Norwegian granite piled along the wall. I met two Bulgarian women huddled in thick coats against the wind. They were staying with their children at the New Beach holiday park, one of two spread across the flat land behind. ‘The pictures showed sand,’ one of them wailed. ‘Where is sand?’ I said they would have to wait a few hours until the tide went out. ‘It is so cold,’ she said, smiling bravely. They had come in April instead of May because a caravan sleeping six cost £180 for the week instead of £400.

  A week behind the Dymchurch sea wall in April? I wished them luck and pedalled on. The wall is not a thing of beauty but it makes a satisfactorily flat and firm cycleway, as well as protecting the holiday parks from sea invasion.

  Halfway to Dymchurch I saw an angler on the shingle in the lee of his umbrella. He fished most days, he told me, and ate fish every day. You look well on it, I said. I’m seventy-three, he said, inviting congratulation. He’d had a flounder and a couple of dogfish the day before and now had hopes of a bass, with the wind shifting into the west and warming the water. He asked me where I was heading. When I told him he nodded encouragingly. Yeah, Dungie, he said, good spots for bass at Dungie if you knew your way around. And fish-and-chips. He advised me to go to the Pilot. Best fish-and-chips around.

  The most handsome house in Dymchurch – not a fierce competition – is the one used for holidays by E. Nesbit. The household, outwardly highly proper in the Edwardian way, seethed with hidden currents and passions. It comprised Edith Nesbit, by then an acclaimed writer of stories for children, her husband Hubert Bland, several children and a governess. H. G. Wells, a frequent visitor, observed of Bland that he ‘presented himself as a Tory . . . he was publicly emphatic for social decorum, punctilio, the natural dependence of women and the purity of the family.’ In reality he was, like Wells, an irrepressible philanderer, and two of the children were his by the governess, including Rosamund, whom Wells seduced.

  Among other visitors were a brother and sister, Russell and Sybil Thorndike. They came with their mother, who liked Dymchurch so much she bought a pair of coastguard cottages on the sea. They both became actors, but Russell was eclipsed in fame by his sister, and anyway much preferred writing stories. He loved the village and set a series of popular adventure stories in and around Dymchurch and the marsh behind. His hero was Doctor Syn, a clergyman who somewhat loses his moral bearings when his wife goes off with his best friend, and takes to a life of smuggling and general derring-do.

  The first adventure, Doctor Syn: a Tale of the Romney Marsh, appeared in 1915 and ended with the hero’s death, harpooned through the neck by a mute mulatto. Twenty years later, his acting career in abeyance, Russell Thorndike returned to the errant cleric and provided him with an incident-packed earlier life spread over six more tales. Bestsellers in their day, they have long since gone the way of other swashbuckling literature in the Scarlet Pimpernel genre. But the character is still celebrated ever
y other year in Dymchurch’s Day of Syn when villagers dress up in eighteenth-century costume to re-enact skirmishes between smugglers and revenue men and parade to the church for evensong and a good old-fashioned sermon.

  Present-day Dymchurch’s attractions include a small amusement park, a storm-battered Martello Tower with a glass-covered viewing platform and the beach below the concrete wall. On that basis it advertises itself as a Children’s Paradise, which might be pushing it. The wall continues as far as Littlestone, where I had to divert onto the A259 coast road, which passes an interminable line of bungalows and villas comprising the seaward side of Littlestone, Greatstone and Lydd-on-Sea, all indistinguishable one from another. Ahead is Dungeness, the skyline ruled by the brooding bulk of its famous power stations.

  There is a disused gravel pit behind the strip settlement of Greatstone where you can, with considerable difficulty, inspect one of the more curious relics of the coastal defence system patched together in the years before 1939. Sound mirrors, otherwise known as acoustic defences or Listening Ears, were the brainchild of a now-forgotten pioneer in the science of sound waves, William Sansome Tucker. While stationed in Belgium during the 1914–18 war, Tucker noticed that the report of an artillery shell being fired at a distance was followed by a draught of cold air being expelled from a mousehole near his bed. He experimented with a device which registered the pressure waves from artillery fire on a platinum wire stretched across a hole. From this he developed a microphone able to fix the position of enemy guns and determine how big they were and in which direction they were aimed.