The Dover Road Part 5

Donkin, the historian of Dartford, wrote in 1844:--"On the Brent are the outlines of the 'Deserter's Grave,' cut in the turf, formerly frequented by the scholars of Hall Place School: the sod of which is still continued to be cut away by the country people in memory of the unknown, traditionally said to have been shot in the adjoining pit."

Some light on this tradition is shed by an item in the churchwardens'

accounts:--

1679. Payed the coroner for setling on a soldier that hanged himself 13_s._ 0_d._ Payd for a stake to drive through him 0_s._ 6_d._ Drink for the Jury 1_s._ 6_d._

Here the road branches--the Dover Road to the left, the Roman Watling Street to the right; although, the Roman road being older and itself based on an immeasurably more ancient British trackway, it would be more fitting to say that it is the existing Dover Road which branches off from the parent trunk road. From this point of departure on the Heath, until at the north end of Strood High Street the ways again come to a meeting, over eleven miles of the original route have been abandoned for what in mediaeval times proved to be the more convenient route round by the waterside at Greenhithe and Gravesend.

But although not for many centuries have these eleven miles or so of abandoned Roman way been in use as a through route, they are not all lost.

The first three miles across the Heath form a good local road, which then turns off to the right, leaving the Watling Street to climb the hill of Swans...o...b.., steeply up, as a tangled lane amid the dense woods. It is a very considerable elevation. Here and there the footpath deviates from the original Roman line, and the ridges, banks and hollows of it can occasionally be glimpsed amid the undergrowth; but in any case it seems evident that the Watling Street in these eleven miles was not straight, but re-aligned in some four limbs or individually straight stretches, partly to avoid going over the extreme crest of Swans...o...b.. Hill. On the shoulder of that hill there was at the time of the road being made or remodelled by the Romans a British village, established inland here away from the Thames estuary probably as being a safer place than any settlement by the riverside.

[Sidenote: WATLING STREET]

Here, on the slope of the hill, the Watling Street is cut through by the vastly deep and broad excavation in the chalk made by the activities of the a.s.sociated Portland Cement Manufacturers. The construction of it may even thus be studied in section.

Below, in the levels of Springhead, where a lane takes up the line of the ancient road, there may have been that Roman station called _Vagniacae_; although it may possibly have been by the waterside at Northfleet or Southfleet, for it is by no means certain that the Romans themselves had no lesser riverside route along the line of the present Dover Road.

However, to lay down a dogma upon so uncertain a matter as the Roman road-system in Britain proves to be would not commend itself to those best qualified by study to judge.

From Springhead the Watling Street continued through Cobham Park, and so at length to a junction with the Dover Road, as already noted, at Strood.

Meanwhile, the more or less modern highway goes on through a dusty district where the builder is contending with the country, and, judging from appearances, he seems likely to get the best of it. All around are glimpses of the Heath, and problematical-looking settlements of houses and inst.i.tutions are grouped together on the sky-line, with weird, bottle-like towers, extravagantly grotesque, like the architecture of a nightmare, or "Alice in Wonderland." The City of London Lunatic Asylum is here beside the road; penitentiaries and their like are grouped about; a huge black windmill stands awfully on the Brent; while everywhere are puddles, bricks, old boots, old hats, and fragments of umbrellas. Dartford Brent is a singular place.

At the old hamlet of John's Hole, just past here, called often in coaching days, "Jack-in-the-Hole," was one of the Dover Road turnpikes. The old toll-house still remains beside the way. To this succeeds, at a distance of three quarters of a mile, the melancholy roadside settlement of Horns Cross, where a post-office, two inns, and a blasted oak look from one side of the road, across great fields of barley, to the broad Thames, crowded with s.h.i.+pping, below.

Stone Church, one of the most beautiful and interesting in Kent, stands on a hill-top, a short distance from the left-hand side of the road, and commands a wide view of the Thames. To architects and lovers of architecture it is remarkable on account of the striking similarity its rich details bear to those of Westminster Abbey, and it is generally considered that the architect of the one designed the other. This is the more remarkable since the Abbey, with this exception of Stone Church, stands alone in England as a beautiful and peculiarly personal example of Gothic thirteenth-century architecture as practised in France. The architect of Westminster Abbey must have been of French nationality; and so curiously similar, in little, are not only the details of both church and Abbey, but also the varieties of stone of which they are built, that they are most unlikely to have been the work of different men.

[Sidenote: THE QUARRIES]

Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and fronts on to the Thames. The road, all the way hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high walls with tall factory-chimneys on either side; or pa.s.ses between long rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage-fields in the last stage of agricultural exhaustion. Docks; huge and ancient chalk-pits; great tanks of lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere about, for Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and have been for many years, the chief places of a great export trade in flints, chalk, and lime. The flints are sent into Derbys.h.i.+re, and even to China, where they are used in the making of porcelain; and many thousands of tons are s.h.i.+pped annually. The excavation of chalk and flints during so long a period has left its mark--a very deep and ineffaceable mark, too--upon this part of the road, and, to a stranger, the appearance presented by the scarred and deeply quarried countryside is wild and wonderful. s.p.a.ces of many acres have been quarried to a depth, in some places, of over a hundred and fifty feet, and many of these great pits have been abandoned for centuries, acc.u.mulating in that time a large and luxuriant growth of trees and bushes. Others are still being extended, and present a busy scene with men in white duck, corduroy, or canvas working clothes cutting away the chalk or loading it into the long lines of trucks that run on tramways down to the water's edge. Not the least remarkable things in these busy places are the great bluffs of chalk left islanded amid the deepest quarries, and reaching to the original level of the land. They rise abruptly from the quarry floors, are generally quite inaccessible, and have been left thus by the quarrymen, as containing an inferior quality of chalk, mixed with sand and gravel, which is not worth their while to remove.

In midst of scenery of this description, and surrounded by shops and modern houses, stands Northfleet Church, beside the highway. It is a large Gothic building of the Decorated period, and has been much patched and repaired at different times without having been actually "restored." There are some mildly interesting bra.s.ses in the chancel; but the ma.s.sive western embattled tower is of greatest interest to the student of other times, for it was built, like many of the church towers in the Welsh marches and along the Scots borders, chiefly as a means of defence. The enemies who were thus to be guarded against at Northfleet were firstly Saxon pirates, then the fierce and faithless Danes, and (much later) the French. This defensible tower at Northfleet was largely rebuilt in 1628, but a part of it belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and it even retains fragments of an earlier building, contemporary with the terrible Sea-rovers who sailed up the estuary of the Thames, burning and destroying everything as they pa.s.sed.

A significant sign of the quasi-military uses of this extremely interesting tower is the tall stone external staircase that runs up its northern face from the churchyard to the first-floor level. The small doorway that opens at the head of this staircase into the first floor was originally the only entrance to the tower, and before the church could be finally taken the enemy would have had to storm these stairs, exposed to a fire of cloth-yard shafts from arrow-slits, and of heavy stones cast down upon them from the roof.

XV

Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in s.h.i.+p-building. Here, too, were "Rosherville Gardens," or shortly, "Rosherville." A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has been sold to an oil company.

Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens.

It was so far back as the 1830's that he conceived the grand idea of building a new town between Northfleet and Gravesend, on an estate he owned here, beside the Thames. The idea remained an idea only, for although a pier was built and the Gardens formed, Rosher never lived to see his "ville," in the sense of being a town. But his Gardens were a hugely-compensating success. It is not given to many to make a success of a hole (unless the hole is a mine), and the site of that celebrated c.o.c.kney resort was, and is, nothing else; being in fact one of the oldest and largest of the chalk-quarries, excavated to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet in some parts.

[Sidenote: WATERCRESS]

There a curious kind of rusticity was tempered with an equally curious urban flavour; there the succulent shrimp and the modest watercress ("Tea ninepence; srimps and watercreases, one s.h.i.+lling"), were supplemented romantically by the strains of husky bands. There art was represented by broken-nosed plaster statues of Ceres and a variety of other heathen G.o.ddesses, some supporting gas-lamps in sawdusty bars and restaurants; others gracing lawns and flower-beds. To those who delighted in plaster statues grown decrepit and minus a leg or an arm, like so many neo-cla.s.sic Chelsea pensioners, Rosherville was ideal.

"Where to spend a happy day," as the advertis.e.m.e.nts used to invite--"Rosherville." The watercress consumed there, and at the other popular places near by, came from Springhead, which will be found in the country at the back of Gravesend. In 1907 died the last surviving daughter of the man who "invented" watercress as an article of food. It was about 1815 that William Bradbery, of Springhead, began to cultivate from a green weed that grew in the ditches this favourite addition to tea-tables.

He cultivated with care, and laid out extensive beds, then, when he had a marketable crop, sold it locally. It soon became a famous table dainty, and nothing would satisfy him but the patronage of London. He filled an old tea-chest with cress, and, with this on his back, trudged off to the metropolis, a score or more miles away. The sample was satisfactory, and he quickly developed a London trade.

Bradbery (it is said) when he was building up his London connection, paid a vocalist to go at night from one place of entertainment to another, singing a song in praise of the famous brown cress from the waters of Springhead.

Be that as it may, Bradbery made a fortune by cultivating his cress on the extended area. He seized an opportunity where another man would not have seen one.

Watercress is now cultivated largely, and in numerous districts. It is known, botanically, as _nasturtium officinale_.

Electric tramcars now rush and rattle through Northfleet and Rosherville, and no one contemplates journeying to these scenes with the object of spending a "happy day." The great group of semi-ecclesiastical looking buildings on the left is "Huggens' College." Almshouses continue to be built, for the fountain of benevolence is not yet dried up. It was in 1847 that this foundation came into existence, pursuant to the will of John Huggens (born 1776), who was a barge-owner and corn-merchant of Sittingbourne. Looking upon a world rather astonis.h.i.+ngly full of almshouses for people of humble birth, he conceived the somewhat original idea of founding what, with extreme delicacy, he termed a "College" for gentlemen reduced to poor circ.u.mstances. The establishment, strictly secluded behind enclosing walls, in well-wooded grounds, houses fifty collegians. Huggens himself, in stony effigy, is seen over the gateway, seated in a frockcoat and an uncomfortable att.i.tude, and displaying a scroll or the charter of his "College." The bountiful gentleman is sadly weatherworn, for the factory fumes of this industrial district have wrought havoc with the Portland stone from which he is sculptured. Huggens was wise among the generation of benefactors: he founded his charity in his own lifetime, and personally supervised it. He died in 1865, and his body lies in Northfleet churchyard.

We will now proceed to Gravesend, noting that in 1787 the slip road between the "Leather Bottle" at Northfleet and the beginnings of Chalk, two miles in length, was made. It would, in the language of to-day, applied to incandescent gas-mantle burners and to avoiding roads alike, be called a "by-pa.s.s."

[Sidenote: GRAVESEND]

Gravesend was at one time a place remarkable alike for its tilt-boats and its waterside taverns. The one involved the other, for the boats brought travellers here from London, and here, in the days of bad roads and worse conveyances, they judged it prudent to stay overnight, commencing their journey to Rochester the following morning. To the town of Gravesend belonged the monopoly of conveying pa.s.sengers to and from London by water, and it was not until steamboats began to ply up and down the reaches of the Thames that this privilege became obsolete. Thus it will be seen that, besides being a place of call for s.h.i.+ps, either outward bound or proceeding home, Gravesend was in receipt of much local traffic. The railway has, naturally, taken away a large proportion of this, but has brought it back, tenfold, in the shape of holiday trippers, and the continued growth of the town is sufficient evidence of its prosperity. One first hears of Gravesend in the pages of Domesday Book, where it is called "Gravesham"; but the difficulty of distinctly p.r.o.nouncing the name led, centuries ago, to the corrupted termination of "end" being adopted, first in speech, and, by insensible degrees, in writing. It has an interesting history, commencing from the time when the compilers of Domesday Book found only a "hyhte," or landing-place, here, and progressing through the centuries with records of growth, and burnings by the French; with tales of Cabot's sailing hence in 1553, followed by Frobisher in 1576, to the incorporation of the town in 1568, and the flight of James the Second, a hundred and twenty years later.

Gravesend was not, in the sixteenth century, a model town. Its inhabitants paved, lighted, and cleansed their streets, accordingly as individual preferences, industry, or laziness dictated. Spouts, pipes, and projecting eaves poured dirty water on pedestrians who were rash enough to walk those streets in rainy weather, and people threw away out of window anything they wished to get rid of, quite regardless of who might be pa.s.sing underneath; and so, whether fine or wet, those who picked their way carefully along the unpaved thoroughfares, stood an excellent chance of being drenched with something unpleasant. An open gutter ran down the middle of the street, full of rotting refuse; every tradesman hung out signs which sometimes fell down and killed people, and in the night, when the wind blew strong, a concert of squeaking music filled, with sounds not the most pleasant, the ears of people who wanted to go to sleep.

Things were but little less mediaeval in the middle of the seventeenth century, although the trade and importance of Gravesend had greatly increased. Troubles arose then on account of the disorderly hackmen, "foreigners and strangers"--any one not a freeman or a burgess was a "foreigner"--who plied between Gravesend and Rochester, and took away the custom that belonged of right to members of Gravesend guilds. Two years later the Corporation of Gravesend was distinctly Roundhead in its sympathies, for in 1649 we find the town mace being altered, the Royal arms removed, and those of the Commonwealth subst.i.tuted, at a cost of 23 10_s._ 0_d._ In 1660, things wore a very different complexion, for in that year the Gravesend people welcomed Charles the Second with every demonstration of joy. They had the mace restored to its former condition at a cost, this time, of 17 10_s._ 0_d._, and allowed the mayor and another 2 5_s._ 7_d._ for going up to London to see that the work was done properly. They paid 3 10_s._ 0_d._ for painting the king's arms; 14_s._ to one John Phettiplace for "trumpeters and wigs"; and 5_s._ to Will Charley "for sounding about the country." Having done this, they all got gloriously drunk at a total cost of 12 15_s._ 8_d._, of which sum 10 7_s._ 8_d._ was for wine, and 2 8_s._ 0_d._ for beer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RIVERSIDE, GRAVESEND.]

It was, indeed, during this latter half of the seventeenth century that Gravesend experienced one of its great periods of prosperity; and so the loyalty was well rewarded. Of this date are many of the fine old red-brick mansions in the older part of the town, together with the Admiralty House, official residence of the Duke of York when Lord High Admiral. To Gravesend he came as James the Second, a prisoner.

Embarking from Whitehall, on December 18, 1688, he reached here as late as nine o'clock at night. The next morning he was conducted hence to Rochester in the charge of a hundred of the Prince of Orange's Dutch Guards, and a melancholy journey it must have been for him, if his memory took him back to the time when, twenty-eight years before, he came up the road with his brothers, Charles the Second and the Duke of Gloucester, happily returning from exile.

To Gravesend came Royal and distinguished travellers on their way from Dover to London, and hence they embarked for the City and Westminster, escorted, if they were sufficiently Royal or distinguished by the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and the City Guilds, and fitly conducted in a long procession of stately barges by this most impressive entrance to the capital of England. And even ordinary travellers preferred this route. For two reasons: the river-road was much more expeditious than the highway in those pre-MacAdamite days, and by taking it they escaped the too-pressing attentions that awaited them on Shooter's Hill and Blackheath at the hands of Captains Gibbet and Pick-Purse.

XVI

[Sidenote: OLD TIME TRAVELLERS]

Many of these distinguished travellers on this old highway have left written accounts of their doings, and very interesting readings they make.

Foremost among the "distinguished" company was Marshal de Ba.s.sompierre. He came to England in 1626, on an Emba.s.sy from the King of France, and arrived at Dover on the 2nd of October. There he stayed to recruit, for the sea, as usual, had been unkind, until Sunday, the 4th, departing thence on that day for "Cantorbery," where he slept the night, going on the Monday as far as "Sitimborne," and on Tuesday to "Rocheter" and Gravesend, where he was met by the Queen's barge. Three months later, and he was returning home. On December 1st he began his farewells at the Court of Saint James's, and bade adieu to, amongst others, such fearful wild fowl as the Earl of Suffolc and the Duke of Boukinkam; this last the dissolute "Steenie"--none other! On the 5th, imagine him at Dover with an equipage of five hundred persons s.h.i.+vering on the brink of the Channel, and stormbound there for fourteen days at a cost of 14,000 crowns.

This imposing company embarked at last, and, after braving winds and sea for a whole day, were compelled to put back again. When they _did_ finally set off, they were five days crossing to Calais, and it was found necessary to jettison the Amba.s.sador's two carriages _en route_, in which was, alas! 40,000 francs' worth of clothes. Also this unfortunate diplomat lost twenty-nine horses, which died of thirst on the voyage.

Another French traveller, Monsieur Jouvin de Rochefort, greatly daring, visited our sh.o.r.es in 1670. He took the ordinary coach for "Gravesine," in order, as he says, to embark thence for London, pa.s.sing on his way from Canterbury, Arburtoon, Baten, and Asbery; Grinsrit, Sitingborn, Nieuvetoon, and Renem[2] and coming to Rochester through a strange place called Schatenne, which I don't find anywhere on the map, but suppose he means Chatham. All along the road he remarked a number of high poles, on the top of which were small kettles, in which fires were lighted to warn the countryside of the robbers who would come in bands and plunder the villages, were it not for the courage of the villagers, who formed themselves into guards. These poles were about a mile distant from each other, and to every one there was a small hut for the person whose business it was to keep the beacons burning. "G.o.d be praised," though, he reached "Gravesine" safely!

Samuel de Sorbiere, Historiographer Royal to the King of France, visited our sh.o.r.es in 1663. The normal pa.s.sage from Calais was three hours, but on this occasion seven hours were consumed in crossing, and although the weather was very fair, the "usual Disorder which those who are not accustomed to the sea are subject to"--but no matter! To make matters worse, contempt and affronts were put upon him in Dover streets by some sons of Belial in the shape of boys who ran after him shouting, "a Monsieur, a Monsieur," and who, when they had retired to a safe distance, proceeded to the extremely impolite depth of calling him a "French dog,"

"which," says M. de Sorbiere, sweepingly, "is the epithet they give us in England."