Working in Pompey dockyard (Portsmouth people call their city ‘Pompey’, I don’t know why, but then, neither do they) was no picnic either, though better than going to sea in one of His Majesty’s ships.
Once upon a time there was, in Pompey dockyard, a carpenter called Chips – well people always call carpenters ‘Chips’ – and his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him had all been great carpenters – but they’d owed a lot of their greatness to the fact that they’d sold their souls to the Devil. The price the Devil had paid for their souls was an iron pot, a bushel of sixpenny nails, a half-ton of copper and a rat that could speak. None of them had wanted the rat, he was just a nuisance, but they’d wanted the rest. Well an iron pot was useful and expensive, a bushel was a whole lot of nails, and copper was wondrous and handy stuff. At that time the Royal Navy was ‘copper bottoming’ all her bigger war ships – copper protected their hulls from corrosion and being eaten by shipworms.
Now, it was one day when Chips was all alone, down in the dark hold of a seventy-four-gun ship called the Argonaut, that the Devil paid a visit. The Devil had round staring eyes that shone in the darkness below decks, and sparks flew out of his mouth when he spoke.
‘A lemon has pips, a dockyard has ships, and I’ll have Chips,’ said the Devil, who was always rather fond of speaking in rhyme.
The Devil held an iron pot, and next to him was a bushel of nails, and on the other side of him was a half-ton of copper. Sitting on his shoulder was a rat.
‘What you want, Devil?’ said Chips.
The Devil didn’t answer, so Chips ignored him and carried on working.
‘What you doing, Chips?’ asked the rat.
‘I’m putting in planks, where you lot have eaten them away,’ answered Chips.
‘Oh, we’ll just eat them too,’ said the rat, ‘and then the ship will sail away, sink, and all the crew will drown.’
‘Oh will you indeed?’ said Chips. ‘Well, that’s as maybe, but a job is a job, and I’ve got a job to do.’
But Chips couldn’t keep his eyes off the iron pot, the sixpenny nails and the half-ton of copper.
‘You know the deal,’ croaked the Devil, ‘same as for your father, your grandfather and your great-grandfather.’
‘Yes, but I don’t want that rat.’
‘You want the rest – you get me,’ squeaked the rat.
So Chips thought to himself, ‘I’ll kill the rat and have the rest,’ so he agreed to the deal, and the Devil disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Well, Chips sold the nails and the copper, and he thought to himself, ‘Now I’ve got enough money, I can marry the corn chandler’s daughter.’
But he couldn’t sell the pot, because whenever he offered it for sale, the rat would pop out.
‘Right, rat, I’ll kill you,’ thought Chips.
So one day, whilst working at the dockyard, Chips saw that the rat was in the pot, and he poured boiling pitch into it. Pitch is black and sticky, like tar, and is used for caulking up the gaps between ships’ planks. Chips then sat and watched the pitch harden. After this he went to see the smelter, the man who produced copper, and he put the pot into the smelter’s furnace. When it came out of the furnace it was white hot, and the pitch was steaming like hell itself. Out popped the rat, stuck its tongue out at Chips, and said, ‘A lemon has pips, a dockyard has ships, and I’ll have Chips,’ after which it gave a terrible, squeaky laugh.
Well after this things turned from bad to worse; rats kept popping out of everything Chips had anything to do with. They popped out of his pocket, swam in his beer, stood on his head, peeked over his pillow when he was in bed, and jumped out of the old wooden toilet when he sat down on it. Worse, though, was when he put his arms around the corn chandler’s daughter. Rats ran out of his sleeves, and hid in her bodice, burrowed into her hair, and jumped up and down on top of her hat. Naturally enough she screamed and shrieked, and completely changed her mind about marrying Chips.
Well, all this sent Chips quite mad, and he was forever walking around and shouting at the rats, and he got careless with his work – so one day the press gang came, and took him for a sailor.
The ship they took him to was the Argonaut, and she sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour, over the Spithead anchorage, and out to sea, with an enormous rat sitting on her figurehead.
One night, out at sea, Chips awoke in his hammock, and the rat was sitting on his head.
‘We’re nibbling through, and we’ll drown the crew,’ the rat whispered into Chips’ ear.
Well, Chips went to the captain, and he said, ‘Sir, your honour, sail for the nearest port, or the ship will go down.’
‘Are you mad, my man?’ said the captain. ‘The nearest port is Le Havre, and I’m not going there.’
‘You must, sir, your honour,’ pleaded Chips, ‘if you ever want to see your family again. The rats are down there now, and they’re going “nibble, nibble, nibble”, and when they’re not nibbling they’re laughing and singing that they’re going to float to France on our dead bodies.’
‘The poor fellow has gone completely mad,’ said the captain to the quartermaster, ‘take him to the doctor, and see if the doctor can knock some sense back into his noggin.’
So Chips was dragged off to the doctor, and whilst the doctor was examining Chips, and tapping him on the noggin with a small hammer, the rats nibbled right through the bottom of the ship, in poured the sea, the Argonaut sank, and everybody was drowned.
One particular rat floated ashore on top of Chips’ body, or what was left of Chips’ body. When the startled French people pulled the body ashore, the rat upped and said, ‘A lemon has pips, a dockyard has ships, and I’ve had Chips,’ but the people didn’t understand, because the rat couldn’t speak French.
Well, that’s not a very nice story, but then it does come from Portsmouth. I first read it in a book of folk stories, but when I investigated further, I found that it had been written down in a book called The Uncommercial Traveller by Charles Dickens. Dickens, however, claimed it was a folk story – in his book he writes that it was told to him when he was little, by a woman who was looking after him. In his story he says her name was ‘Mercy’, probably because she wasn’t really having much mercy on the little boy she was terrifying.
The histories suggest that she was called Mary Weller. Dickens was born in Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk in the Royal Navy pay office, but when Charles was little the family moved to Chatham in Kent, taking Mary with them. Chatham was a dockyard much like Portsmouth, though this story is set back in old Pompey.
So, it is a folk story because Dickens says it is – though I do wonder a little bit whether he made it up – I gather that there are some writers who make stuff up, and that this drives the people who collect folk stories completely round the bend.
If he did make it up, however, it is because it is along the lines of all those grim Portsmouth stories, stories that Pompey women would use to frighten the living daylights out of small children.
Read it, though, as written by Charles Dickens. I’d read the story as I found it in a folk tale book first, but I loved his version. I suppose you have to get used to a certain old-fashioned way of writing, but that’s part of the pleasure. I’d much rather read it as written by Dickens, than as written by me!
PART TWO
JACK THE PAINTER
As far as I know, which isn’t very far, Dickens never wrote about Jack the Painter. Jack the Painter was a revolutionary, and his real name was James Hill, though it might have been James Aiken, or then again, James Hinde. He was a Scotsman who came to work in Pompey dockyard, and, as you may have guessed, he worked as a painter. There was plenty of painting to be done on those old wooden ships, both inside and out – and just look at those glorious yellow and black stripes on HMS Victory.
This was in 1776, during the time of the American fight for independence from Britain, and Jack sympathised with the rebel American colonists. So – he de
cided to strike a blow against the Royal Navy.
Now, if you look at a picture or model of an old-fashioned square-rigged sailing ship, you’ll see that the ship couldn’t be worked without miles and miles of rope: the rigging. In Portsmouth dockyard there were very long buildings called ‘rope houses’, which are now museums, where the ropes could be stretched out as they were made. So Jack, looking to cause maximum damage, set fire to the rope houses. The fire was put out, though, and Jack was captured.
Well, I don’t suppose he had much of a trial before they hanged him. They took the mizzenmast of a ship called the Arethusa (the mizzen is the mast closest to the stern), erected it outside the dockyard gates, and that’s where they hanged Jack. It was all very public – the authorities wanted the people to see what would happen to revolutionaries. There was revolution in America, revolution threatening in France, and the powers that be were afraid of revolution in England.
Jack’s body was tarred and gibbeted – that means it was covered in tar and put in an iron cage – and the cage was hung up from a gallows on Fort Blockhouse, a place that guarded the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour. This meant that as the ships sailed in and out of Portsmouth, the sailors would all see the body. The authorities were afraid of mutinous and revolutionary behaviour from sailors, and indeed there was a great mutiny at Spithead, the anchorage just outside Portsmouth Harbour, in 1797; so this fear wasn’t an unfounded one.
However, sailors aren’t so easily cowed, and one night some drunk members of His Majesty’s Royal Navy (well, this is Pompey) nicked a rowing boat, rowed out to Fort Blockhouse, and stole the skeleton of Jack the Painter. They then sold bits and pieces of the skeleton to the landlords and landladies of pubs throughout Portsmouth; well, Pompey people are a gruesome lot and love that sort of thing: ‘Oh, I’ve got a rib from Jack the Painter, that’ll bring the customers in!’
The prize part of the skeleton was the skull, and they flogged that to the landlady of the London Tavern, which was just opposite the very place where Jack was hanged. It was knocked down a long time ago now, though there is another pub there, called the Ship Anson.
Well the trouble was, not only did the pub get the skull, it also got the ghost. Folk didn’t always worry too much about that, sailors are never too fussy about who they drink with, but the room upstairs was a lodging, a hotel for rather grander people, including merchants and the wives of ships’ officers – and Jack, being a revolutionary and, by his own reckoning, a champion of the common people, liked to clank and clatter about, and give them a really good fright. In consequence, the London Tavern was losing custom.
Fed up with this, the landlady took the skull down to the docks, and lobbed it into the briny.
Jack didn’t seem to be too upset by this – his ghost just started to cause mischief all the way around Old Portsmouth – usually to those who might consider themselves a bit high and mighty. He still does it.
Sometimes he clatters around the road by the old sea wall, and if there’s someone important staying in one of the guesthouses, he peers through the windows and grinds his teeth. That scares the living daylights, or should I say nightlights, out of them, something that always seems to give him satisfaction.
In the 1980s marine archaeologists were busy salvaging the wreck of the Mary Rose, a sunken Tudor ship that had sat at the bottom of the harbour since long before Jack the Painter was born. A very important person was invited down to Portsmouth to have a look, and so he joined the diving team over the wreck. The lead diver told everyone to stick together; the waters there are murky and gloomy, and it is important that divers behave in a safe manner. However, the very important person wasn’t used to being told what to do, so, on a whim, he left the team and swam off in a different direction. This was the perfect opportunity for old Jack. Slowly he rose from the seabed, and gnashed his teeth at the very important person, whilst howling in a most terrifying manner. They say that ever since then the very important person has been quite mad – but no one can tell him so, because he is, after all, a very important person.
Another of Jack’s more recent pranks was the most noticeable of all. By the side of Portsmouth Docks there is a wondrous construction called the Spinnaker Tower, built in 2005. It used to be a pure sunlight white, which suited its graceful, soaring form, but one night, in 2015, Jack crept out of the sea, and – he is after all, a painter – painted its legs blue. The once graceful tower now looks like it’s wearing blue socks, something that amuses Jack the Painter, who likes to see the mighty look fallen.
So – mischief around Pompey Docks – and it’s all likely to stem from the ghastly, skeletal ghost of Jack the Painter:
Whose corpse, by ponderous irons wrung,
High upon Blockhouse Beach was hung,
And long to every tempest swung?
Why truly, Jack the Painter’s!
Whose bones, some years since taken down,
Were brought in curious bag to town,
And left in pledge for half-a-crown?
Why truly. Jack the Painter’s!
That’s a poem written in 1820, by a poet called Henry Slight. Everyone’s forgotten poor Henry Slight, except, that is, for these verses, and you won’t hear them anywhere much except Pompey. That’s because, to this day, old Jack’s bones still go a’clattering around the old dockyard.
10
The Stones
OF
Rotten Hill
There seems to be a tradition of walking stones in Hampshire. In the village of Farringdon, near Alton, there are some stones which are said to be a young couple who went for a walk, and a kiss and a cuddle, on a Sunday. Kissing on a Sunday! What a sin. For this they were turned to stone, stones still seen alongside Brightstone Lane in the village. Sometimes, on a Sunday, the stones have a little stroll.
Then there are the three stones that gave their name to Three Stone Copse in Titchfield. It was said that every so often they’d cross the road and settle for a while on the other side. You would never actually see them move, but you would never know what side of the road they would be on in the morning. One night they wandered to an open wooded space at the side of West Street, and they’ve been there ever since. You can go and have a look.
Then there were the three stones that used to sit at the foot of Bevois Mount in Southampton, the place where Sir Bevois himself was reputed to be buried. Every so often they used to wander into a pub called the Bevois Castle Hotel, and have three pints whilst no one was looking, but then some new owners changed the name of the pub, and the stones, shocked at this disrespectful insult to tradition, disappeared and were never seen again.
Then, by the side of the Silchester Road, on the border between Hampshire and Berkshire, there is the Imp Stone. Some people say that every midsummer night, at midnight, it turns into an imp, and hops all the way to the treacle mines at Tadley, where it causes chaos by pouring the treacle everywhere, and singing songs out of tune. Other people say that there was an imp that used to shout very rude things at a giant called Onion, who lived in the old Roman city of Calleva Atrebatum, and one day the giant threw a rock at the imp and flattened it – so the stone is actually on top of the imp, and if you look you can see the giant’s fingerprints on its sides. I don’t know which story is true, so you’d better go there yourself and have a look – then you can make your own mind up.
And then – as if we needed any more – there was once a stone circle at a place called Rotten Hill, near the village of Overton. Probably there were once stone circles all over Hampshire, but over the years farmers ploughed up the land, and people took the stones to build houses, barns and churches.
In neighbouring Wiltshire a lot of the stone circles survived, possibly because the local people were too lazy, drunk and feckless to put them to the good use that hard-working Hampshire people did. Avebury and Stonehenge are famous, whilst others, like Marden, have lost their stones but still have the embankments, and were once as spectacular as Avebury. The area in the middle
of Wiltshire – Salisbury Plain, the Vale of Pewsey, and surrounding regions – must have once been the centre of a great culture, and many roads must have led there.
Many of these roads crossed Hampshire, and one was The Old Way. This ancient track lead from the seaports of Kent, and the city of Canterbury, all the way across the land to the port of Seaton, in Dorset. In medieval times the eastern part of the The Old Way became a pilgrimage route, called The Harrow Way, along which pilgrims walked and rode from Winchester to Canterbury.
The Old Way goes past Rotten Hill, near the village of Overton. Once upon a time (so the stories say) there was a stone circle on Rotten Hill. I want to tell you a story about this stone circle, but firstly I need to tell you about the Overton Sheep Fair. Overton was an important central place for Hampshire and the surrounding counties, and shepherds would bring their flocks there for sale. Drovers, men who take sheep or cattle over long distances, would bring flocks of sheep to Overton along The Old Way. The drovers were tough men; they had to cope with driving these flocks for hundreds of miles, protecting and caring for the flocks as they did so, sleeping out in the open in all weathers, and dealing with robbers and thieves. On occasion there were drovers who were not incapable of a bit of robbing and thieving themselves.
One such drover arrived in Overton, after droving a flock of sheep for a farmer in faraway eastern Sussex. The drover had originally come from Whitchurch, a nest of thieves and rogues not so far from Overton, but the innocent Sussex farmer trusted him, and never dreamed that the drover might never return – taking all the money that the sheep would fetch at market.
The sheep were auctioned, and the drover, with a purse full of money, fell into the appalling and licentious pubs of Overton, some of the worst dens of iniquity in Hampshire.
After several days’ drinking, and eating masses of pork scratchings, all the money was gone, and he staggered out of Overton and fell asleep upon a hill. The hill was Rotten Hill, and he was in the middle of the stone circle.
Hampshire Folk Tales for Children Page 8