The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Phoenicopterus antiquorum.

  The grazing marshes on which the bird claimed as England’s first flamingo was shot for pennies may, for the while, remain much as they were. The bird itself, however, was not at all what it seemed. Within a few days, the Field published an addendum to the story in which the editor of its “Poultry and Pigeon Department”,8 Mr William Bernhardt Tegetmeier, insisted that “the immediate destruction of any scarce bird that puts in an appearance in this country is lamented by all true naturalists”.9 Were this not so, he suggested, “the Hoopoe, the Stork, the Golden Oriole, the Bustard, and other rare birds might be as common here as they are in the adjacent parts of the Continent”. Unfortunately though, no sooner had such a bird decided to take its chances in England than “some wretched pot-hunter destroys it”. The “sapient editor” of the local paper would then dignify this gun-happy wretch with the title “naturalist”, even though he was, perhaps, only “some village skin-stuffer, who would destroy the last remaining pair of a species if he thought he could sell the skin for a sovereign”.

  Shellness from the west.

  As for the unfortunate bird that tried its luck on the salt marshes here, Mr Tegetmeier had an authoritative witness to justify his caustic assertion that “the history of the flamingo shot in the Isle of Sheppey strongly illustrates the intense love of natural history which is characteristic of the British boor”. He had recently received a letter from Mr Abraham Dee Bartlett, the revered superintendent of the Zoological Gardens at Regent’s Park in London, who had described how, “on the 19th of July last we lost a fine, healthy, and perfect flamingo (Phoenicopterus antiquorum). The wing of the bird not having been cut since its moult was the cause of its loss, for it rose on the wing like a wild bird, and went away at once. I see by the last Field that a bird of this species had been shot at Elmley, Isle of Sheppey, on the 2nd of August. I have no doubt whatever that the bird mentioned was the same individual that made its escape from these gardens”. Tegetmeier finished by aiming his own volley at the so-called “naturalists” of north Kent: “to have captured this bird alive and returned it to its owners would have evinced some skill and tact: any fool could have shot it”. One hundred and fifty years later, it would be a small thing for the Sheerness Golf Club (founded 1887) to restore the island’s forgotten firebird to its proper place alongside the sheep and rising fish (or are they porpoises?) that already frolic on its crest.

  II. An Island Word for Mr Johnson

  As readers of Anniversaries soon discover, Johnson respected the regional dialects of the German Baltic: including a West Slavic variation of Polish known as “Kashubian” and the Low German “Platt” favoured by the Mecklenburger and socialist carpenter Heinrich Cresspahl — as in “my father didn’t talk about bombs, he talked in Platt about ‘dropping shit’”.10 His employment of regional idioms — grounded words which are never, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, simply “escapees from the lexicon”11 — has been counted among the many reasons why Anniversaries is so hard to translate into English or, for that matter, any other foreign language. Sheppey had unconventional offerings for its author in this regard too. We might begin with a dialect word that quickly shows the divergence between poetic and prosaic perceptions of the island. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “cotterell” to the much expanded and posthumously published 1748 edition of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Here it is stated that “at Sheppey Isle”, there “are several Tumuli in the marshy parts all over the island, some of which the inhabitants call Coterels: these are supposed to have been cast up in memory of some of the Danish leaders who were buried here; for the Danes have often made this Island the scene of their ravages and plunder”.12 This story has been augmented in other accounts of Sheppey’s mounds, not least those alleging that these inconsistently spelled hillocks actually mark the corpses of people murdered by English patriots during the St Brice’s Day massacre of 13 November 1002, when Aethelred the Unready ordered the slaughter of all Danes living in England, later justifying his decision with the help of an organic metaphor that may leave him qualified to serve nowadays as an early ancestor of encroachment-hating Brexiteers: these illegal immigrants had, in the phrase attributed to Aethelred, been “sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat”. Yet the Oxford English Dictionary also contains an entry that deflates such fanciful conjecture and brings Sheppey’s enigmatic mounds back to earth. It cites a Dictionary of Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms of 1887, alleging that a “coterell” is neither more nor less than an eminently practical structure: “a little raised mound in the marshes to which the shepherds and their flocks can retire when the salterns are submerged by the tide”.

  Moving inland from the salt marshes along the Swale, the clay soil of the arable land around the Sheppey prison cluster, near the village of Eastchurch, was described as “stone-shattery and friable”13 in an early Victorian survey of Kentish agriculture. This, however, is not the language with which those gently sloping fields, a couple of miles inland from Shellness, confront the sensibilities of the “new nature writing” pursued by present-day English followers of the American geographer John R. Stilgoe. In his founding text, Shallow-Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English,14 Stilgoe rows a bilge-bottom boat through the vast, empty and, given rising sea levels, doomed salt marshes of Massachusetts, having already burrowed through old dictionaries and forgotten nineteenth-century memoirs to recover the “quiet, almost mute vocabulary” of this watery terrain’s historical existence. He identifies words such as “creek”, “gutter”, “flotsam”, “wrack”, “skiff” (here traced back to the German “Schiff”) and also “guzzle”, the latter meaning a low dip in a dune or bank over which the high tide pours, and identified as an import from the “Kentish marshland dialect” of immigrants who reached this part of America in 1633. Given the appropriate light and a little mist, people in the salt-marshes along the Swale may still “loom” indistinctly as their seventeenth-century forebears had sailed off to do in Stilgoe’s Massachusetts, and there may still be colours in the marshes at Elmley that are largely lost to the contemporary eye — although it is not impossible that one of the English revivers of traditional paint, Rose of Jericho or Farrow & Ball, may one day rediscover shades such as “manila” and “chartreuse”, both of which, as Stilgoe tells us, were evicted from Kodachrome’s spectrum during the post-war years when that since crashed company concentrated on the commercially more attractive colours of skin, sand, sky and sea. There is, however, nothing elegiac, subtly nuanced, nor, unfortunately, moribund about the “landmark” word that is said, once again by the Oxford English Dictionary, first to have been recorded in the fields around Eastchurch.

  Towards the end of August 1837, the Times reported a “desperate affray” that had broken out one recent Saturday night in this inland village, when “resident labourers” came to blows with “strangers who have come onto the island for harvesting”.15 The summer “influx” had been larger than usual that year and it was said to have consisted chiefly of “gems from the Emerald Isle”, who tended to live in tents by the roadside or under hedges.16 This year’s migrant harvesters had included several “pugilists” who, having finished their work on the evening in question, walked around the meadows “tossing up their hats, as is the custom with such people” and challenging the best men in the village to fight. When nobody reacted to this provocative invitation, the Irish itinerants were said to have gone into the village and “molested several labourers in order to provoke a fight”. The villagers may have been shy of single combat, but forty or fifty of them later combined and, at about midnight, “went about the roads and fields demolishing the tents of these men, and wreaking their vengeance on men, women, or children that might come under them”. It was a small incident in a normally overlooked place, but it would bring the Isle of Sheppey a place in history all the same. The Times followed the Kent Herald in calling the Irish strangers “‘pikey-men’, as they are termed”
, and the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary would later register this as the first recorded use of the word “pikey” in the English language.

  Sheppey’s claim to originality may be doubted, not least because only slightly later usages employ “pikey” not to describe vagrant types who might hang around at turnpikes, but as a name for the gatekeeper, whose job was to collect money from travellers as they passed through.17 We may also regret that the word first netted in the fields and hedgerows of Sheppey is by no means a “lost word” of the kind that the nature writer Robert MacFarlane has recently recovered in his popular series of “Spells”.18 On Sheppey, as elsewhere, “pikey” has survived into the present day unaided, still sufficiently vigorous in its insulting application to “travellers”, to appear in the adolescent tweets that, in April 1991, cost a sixteen-year-old resident of Sheerness her job with the unforgiving Kent police as the county’s newly appointed “Youth Police and Crime Tsar”.19

  III. An English Priest for an East German Atheist

  - Brüshaver without his biretta was a sight you did not want to see. The remains of a wound were still visible on his temple — a reddish indentation the size of a walnut.

  - What was the Old Lutheran Church?

  - Idiosyncracies about justification, atonement, the trinity. If you ask me, a dispute about the right of association.

  — Anniversaries II, p. 1,402.

  “On the streets, the Salvation Army has emerged from its lairs: trumpets and handbells”.20 For Johnson, that was part of the “visual assault” called Christmas in Manhattan, but what sort of salvation did the Church of England offer to anyone — believer or not, washed up incomer or proud resident — at the sparsely populated “East End” of the Isle of Sheppey in the Seventies? How much, if at all, had things improved since the late 1880s, when, as Somerset Maugham remembered, the vicars of the isolated parishes on the marshes near Whitstable were a pitiful bunch of abandoned and twisted souls. “Every kink in their characters had free play”,21 so Maugham said of the drunkards, tyrannical wife-beaters and indebted incompetents who would sometimes cross the lawn at his uncle’s vicarage. Johnson would find good reason to suspect the same of the vicar in charge of souls at Leysdown, a mile or so further north along the coast from Shellness, although we have to understand a rare word of ecclesiastical jargon to comprehend why. “Ultramontane” means “beyond the mountains”, and there are none of those on the Isle of Sheppey. In church history, however, we are talking about the Alps and the separation between the papal authority of Catholic Rome and the Protestant north. That is how things were for Father Peter Blagdon-Gamlen, the “ultramontane” Anglo-Catholic ritualist who, since 1968, had been rector of Leysdown and Harty, as well as of his principal church of All Saints in the inland village of Eastchurch.

  Among those of High Church persuasion, Blagdon-Gamlen is remembered for his Church Traveller’s Directory (revised edition, 1973), an inventory of the ever-shrinking number of Anglican churches offering full or partial Catholic Privileges, which is said to have been embraced as a spiritual companion to the Good Food Guide by some of its more sybaritic admirers.22 He was also a man with a record of controversy that extended far beyond his insistence on using incense, processing the Sacraments around the streets, performing Marian devotions and sticking to the officially redundant English Missal. Father Blagdon-Gamlen had opened his battle for “the Catholic Faith” as the “birthright of every Englishman” when still a lay member of the Anglo-Catholic Party during the Second World War.23 In 1954, when leaving for Yorkshire at the end of a two-year stint as an assistant priest in Evesham, he had urged the grateful friends of All Saint’s Church to “continue the fight for Catholic privileges”.24 By 1957, as vicar of St Bartholomew’s in Derby, he was taking the message out into pubs and factories while also using the regional press to pour vitriol on the “cranks” who wished to see criminals treated by psychologists, and leading a campaign to use “block votes” in every constituency, thereby forcing MPs to yield to the demand for the sterilisation of sex offenders and the “rigorous imposition of the death penalty on murderers”.25 In 1959, he recommended that the Church of England should “consider encouraging football pools as a way of raising money for church funds”. He was already doing this in Derby and he urged the church to consider “moving with the times” on a larger scale and thereby to “put those enormous football pool promoters out of business”.26 In January 1961, while still at Derby, he had protested publicly after being refused a curate (the Bishop denied making a “whipping boy” of Blagdon-Gamlen and justified his decision by pointing out that this uncompliant vicar was using “certain services”, including the Benediction, that were not in the Book of Common Prayer).27 A few months later, Blagdon-Gamlen had called for the formation of a trade union for vicars. Hoping this body would campaign for a living wage and also a pension for widows, he explained, perhaps unnecessarily, that “The bishops would not be in the union, for they are more like the employers”.28

  Blagdon-Gamlen’s war against liberal progressivism was not confined to skirmishing with bishops who espoused the rising secular creed of management and perhaps even took the Bishop of Woolwich’s doubting book Honest to God seriously. In 1962, People condemned this outspoken vicar of Derby for allowing an article he’d written for his parish magazine to be reprinted in Combat, the magazine of the British National Party.29 The views expressed in the offending article were proudly racist: “When I pass through the Dairyhouse Road and Arboretum areas, and see these folk lounging about, often on National Assistance, and knowing that decent English people cannot get jobs, it makes my blood boil”. He would repeat his views on immigration, and also his judgement of liberal-minded bishops, after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech of 20 April 1968. By this time, he was the vicar of Harrold, near Bedford, and using the pages of the Acton Gazette to support Father Wills of St Thomas’ in Acton, who had backed Powell in his parish magazine.

  Blagdon-Gamlen cheered him on, declaring that “the idea of a multi-racial society was ‘nonsense’”, insisting that “it is generally admitted that about 97 per cent of English people support Mr Enoch Powell including a large number of churchmen, both laity and clerics”.30 Unfortunately, “a few anti-British and anti-white agitators who happen to be bishops and canons of cathedrals have been loud in their integration pleas, but many of us priests feel that the pulpit — as well as the sports field — is not the place for politics … Surely the lowest depth has been reached when St Paul’s Cathedral, St Martin’s in the Fields, and Coventry Cathedral can be used for memorial services for a neo-Communist political agitator and commemorative stamps issued”.31 The suddenly deceased “agitator” in question had indeed been likened to John Bunyan’s Mr Valiant for Truth by the Dean of St Paul’s at a memorial service on 10 April, and hailed as “the most authentic black Moses of our day” by an African-American Baptist, the Rev. David Rice, at a parallel service in Glasgow Cathedral.32 The South African provost of Coventry Cathedral, Dr H.C.N. Williams, had only joined the hymn of praise a couple of weeks later: hedging his address with repeated and vigorous condemnations of the “parrot cries” of British protestors against the Vietnam War and nuclear submarines, but admitting that the non-violent Dr Martin Luther King was “by any measurement … a ‘prophet’”.33

  Father Blagdon-Gamlen, who may still be remembered in Eastchurch for the green pom-pom he used to wear on his biretta and for employing the full arsenal of “bells and smells” even when hardly anyone turned up for the service, certainly hadn’t used his rustication as an opportunity to adjust his views about liberal bishops or the immigrants they were sometimes inclined to defend. Indeed, by the time Johnson moved to Sheerness, the vicar of Eastchurch and Leysdown had found a new evil to add to his lurid host of modern encroachments on the English way of life. In July 1975, he would make an appearance in Uwe Johnson’s copy of the Sheerness Times Guardian, justifying his decision to make the National Front’s Nationalist News
available to the church-goers of Eastchurch on the grounds that he agreed with “the anti-Common Market views expressed”.34 In case anyone missed his point, it was reiterated by a letter writer who praised the National Front for its policy of “putting Britain first” — its slogan during the 1975 referendum campaign had actually been “Make Britain Great Again” — and declared that “the putting of the foreigner and his outlandish ways first has brought this once-respected country to the verge of bankruptcy and perdition”.35

  In 1973/4, Max Frisch noted in his journal that “It is not only God who sits in the local details but also fascism”.36 Johnson, too, knew what to make of this sort of talk. In the second volume of Anniversaries, he had registered the murder of Martin Luther King as it inflamed white minds in New York City:

  - There’s going to be white blood on our streets tonight.

  - We’re trapped here like in a cage.

  - The Negroes will be able to block all the trains by tonight.