There may be a lot of rose-tinted nostalgia about these invocations of the Leysdown of old — and in some instances a thick coat of retrospectively applied whitewash too. Yet there is more to be said than that. The attractions of Sheppey as a Cockney Arcadia were recognised by Somerset Maugham, who is likely to have remembered Victorian Whitstable’s view over the sea to Sheppey when he wrote his final stage play. First produced with Ralph Richardson in the leading role, Sheppey opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in London on 14 September 1933 — a month after Miss Jean Chesterton was accidentally shot through the heart at Shellbeach. Maugham evokes the world of a London hairdresser who lives in Camberwell and works at a salon in Jermyn Street. His name is Joseph Miller but everyone knows him as “Sheppey”, since he was born on the island, spends all his holidays there and won’t stop going on about it: “To hear him talk about it you’d think there was no place like it”, says the manicurist Miss Grange.23 “The garden of England, that’s what it is”, replies Sheppey: “I know the very ’ouse I’m going to buy when my ship comes home. Two acres of land. View of the sea. Just the place for me and my old woman”. Although Maugham’s hairdresser goes on to win a fortune on a horse in the Irish sweep, he never quite gets around to buying the “dinky little ’ouse” to which he has long dreamed of one day retreating.24 Instead, he starts reading the Bible and finds it like “a great white light” illuminating the path he must follow to achieve “peace and ’appiness”.25 The rich, so Sheppey generously observes, may need to keep their vast fortunes for themselves, but he himself has no expensive habits to maintain. Fired by an entirely literal reading of the scriptures, he resolves to use his money to “Clothe the naked and visit the sick, give food to ’im that is a’ungered and drink to ’im that is athirst”.26 He becomes so busy loving his neighbours and giving away his money (Sheppey always “’as liked people”27) that he never gets round to buying his imagined retirement “’ouse”. When the Grim Reaper finally turns up at his bedside, he can only remark, wistfully, “I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn’t ’ave thought of looking for me there”.28
Neville Wood fries an egg. Variety at Leysdown Holiday Camp, 8 August 1957.
A more systematic attempt to get to the roots of Sheppey’s twentieth-century reinvention as an island of freedom, independence and convivial retirement for people who aren’t oligarchs or lottery millionaires was made in the early Eighties by Colin Ward, the anarchist writer, journalist and former officer of the Town and Country Planning Association. While Margaret Thatcher waged war on “socialism”, the welfare state and the “enemy within”, Ward was celebrating the practice of “mutual aid” as it survived, more or less, in various unconquered corners of British life (allotments, holiday camps, urban squats, new towns, etc.) that had yet to be regulated out of existence by the state or fully surrendered to corporate enterprise. Conservationists and others might have despised coastal developments such as Leysdown as ruinous sprawl, but Ward and his collaborator in this endeavour, the planner and historian of alternative communities Dennis Hardy, took a much more appreciative view of the scruffy, informal settlements that had emerged in such places before state planning controls were introduced. They at least understood that the Englishman’s Paradise is far more likely to be a “bungalette” than a stately mansion founded on slavery.
Plotland house, Sheppey.
Ward seems to have opened his investigation of Sheppey by enlisting the help of a fellow contributor to the weekly journal New Society. The sociologist Ray Pahl, who started probing Sheppey in the late Seventies, was already reviewing Leysdown and its seasonal employment practices for their contribution to the island’s marginal economy and also, as he had learned from some Sheppey teachers, to the reluctance of some of the island’s school-leavers to accept conventional forms of work discipline:
Leysdown-on-Sea attracted hustlers and cowboys and provided apprenticeships in mild crookery for generations of school leavers who, in the Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies, went “down Leysdown” to work as cheap labour, cleaning the chalets in the holiday camps, serving in cafes and bars and minding stalls and (later) machines in the fairgrounds and amusement arcades. The holiday trade provided myriad opportunities for small business enterprises to start with little capital, and the regular flow of new clientele prevented the build-up of bad reputations. Fiddles could be perpetrated all summer; prices could be exorbitant; and high labour turnover prevented possible protest but spread bad practices. Some parents refused to let their sons and daughters go off in the summer to pick up bad ways. However, such seasonal employment also had the useful function of providing independence, some pocket money and the experience of a number of bosses, without any opprobrium resulting from having “changed jobs frequently”.29
Having been shown around Leysdown by the sociologist, who remembered suffering a slipped disc while trying to lift his car out of the mud during a shared island “safari”,30 Ward and Hardy went on to appraise Sheppey’s much-condemned DIY developments as examples of a distinctive kind of popular Arcadia that had emerged on both sides of the Thames Estuary during the early twentieth century. Where others saw only chaotic eyesores, they discovered a “unique landscape” that seemed closer to “the American frontier” than to cultivated ideas of what England should look like: “It was”, they wrote, “a makeshift world of shacks and shanties, scattered unevenly in plots of varying size and shape, with unmade roads and little in the way of services”.31 You can see it in the early photographs of Leysdown — shacks, “bungalettes” and old busses parked up and allowed to settle, as the air leaked out of their tyres, into static holiday homes. The postcard chosen by a south-east Londoner named “Doris” in August 1921 and sent to her family at home from “Wild Rose Cottage” in Leysdown appears to show the conical frame of an improvised tepee planted at the head of the sands. Another, sent from the island by “Hankie” to “Milly” in the early Sixties, says: “I am enjoying myself trying to put the garden to rights as well as mixing cement for Harry. It’s a lark.”
A number of the happenstance “plotland” Arcadias surveyed so sympathetically by Hardy and Ward had been pioneered by a developer named Frederick Francis Ramuz (1855–1946), a land agent born in Leytonstone, east London, who initiated his estuarial activities in the new municipality of Southend-on-Sea (declared a municipal borough in 1892) on the Essex side of the Thames Estuary.32 Ramuz’s trick, which he pursued in partnership with his eldest son George, was to buy up depressed agricultural estates cheap, subdivide the acquired land into many small plots, arrange a quarterly payments scheme, and then auction the plots with the help of a marquee, free food and drink, and a special train or, sometimes, a Belle steamer chartered to bring potential buyers downriver from London.
Having started out at Southend, Ramuz, who was twice mayor of that recently established town, expanded his operations to include the north-east coast of Sheppey where, within weeks of the opening of the Light Railway, his “Land Company” was offering 275 “really ripe, safe investment” plots “adjoining” the new station at Minster, emphasising that there was now “unlimited demand” for small villas on the island.33 Ramuz bought his first one thousand acres on the seaward side of the ancient village of Minster, a site that the Daily Express obligingly described as an “unknown paradise” consisting of a “semi-circle of grassy cliffs, swept by the breezes of the German Ocean”.34 He then applied his usual technique — putting in (or at least marking out) dirt roads, dividing up the land to create some three thousand plots, and offering working-class Londoners a free return ticket on the train that would bring them from Holborn Viaduct to his “sale party” in the no longer so isolated place he described, with what Boris Johnson calls “plausibility” rather than strict truthfulness, as “the nearest point on the Kent coast to London”. By June 1903, Ramuz was offering “Minster-on-Sea” as “the new El Dorado for land buyers”.35 A Minster Development Corporation was formed, and the si
te was duly commended by compliant journalists (“a place to take one’s summer rest. Here on the nearer coast of Kent is the ideal holiday home.”36). In 1904, an illustrated advertisement about the “great enterprise” that was producing this “refuge for Weary East Enders” informed readers of the East London Observer that Sheppey was the most remarkable “find” in “the Garden of England”.37 While the illustrator showed happy children digging sand on beaches that were actually shingle, the Ramuzes’s copywriter magicked Sheppey’s crumbling mud and clay cliffs into tall structures of chalk, proclaiming them as “part of the White Walls of Old England”.
Ramuz’s “new Paradise” was to be built plot by “salubrious” plot, and considerable profits surely awaited the “pioneers” of the coming “peace-land”. If the “clerks and artizans” of east London needed more encouragement, they only had to consider the duly proffered words of the island’s medical officer. Dr Julius Caesar, F.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., had no doubt at all that Minster-on-Sea would prove a “bracing and invigorating” locale for Londoners. “You buy the land”, said the company, and “we do the rest”. Large plots were offered for aspiring poultry farmers, and the fine old seventeen-room Queen Anne mansion known as “Borstal Hall” would surely make a good boarding school or private hotel. The core of the offer, however, consisted of smaller plots of 20 by 160 feet on which a villa or bungalow might be built. These were offered freehold, and it only took an initial payment of £2 to secure a patch of paradise that could then be paid off at one shilling and eightpence a week over the following four years. The promise, made in the East London Observer, that the Minster Cliff’s Estate was “going like wildfire” was repeated on the postcard with which the “Development Corporation” also publicised its “New Health Resort”. This offered “miles of quiet and interesting cliff walks” and “splendid opportunities for bathing”. The watercolourist responsible for the picture did manage to paint the cliffs of Minster the colour of raw mud rather than chalk, but those who received the card had to use their own powers of deduction to realise that considerable sections of the “interesting” cliff path appeared already to have fallen into what was also, now you mention it, a very muddy sea.
“Minster-on-Sea: the New Health Resort”, the Development Corporation’s postcard.
While Ramuz and his son George were busy selling seaside plots on both sides of Minster, a rival company of London land agents, F.G. Wheatley and Son, was running a similar speculation at Leysdown and Shellness. The redevelopment here began in April 1903, when Mr S.A. Gillespie sold the Manor of Leysdown by private negotiation “for immediate commercial development”.38 The lordship of this ancient manor was included, but it was the land that mattered to the purchasers: 2,740 acres in all, much of it “rich pasture and meadow land” but also the extensive foreshore — “a sea beach of over three miles of fine shell and sand” — and the same system of promotion was soon underway. “Facing the German Ocean” was among the slogans that had been launched by 27 July 1903, when 108 freehold plots were offered for auction at a marquee luncheon on the “Shellness-on-Sea and Leysdown Estate”. Mr Wheatley, who served as his own huckster and auctioneer, promised “Free conveyances. Immediate possession, and payments by instalments extending over 10 years (if desired).”39 He spoke of creating golf links on “a considerable proportion of the estate”, and was confident that “the anchorage at Shellness Point” would “prove a benefit to yachtsmen”. He promised that the new “Marine Parade” that would soon stretch along the coast from Leysdown to Shellness would be nearly three miles long when completed: it was “suitable for bungalows, shops, and villas of all classes” and would have “an avenue and promenade 150ft. wide, fronting on the open sea, with an extensive lawn reserved for public use”.40 Repeated sales were conducted on the site (the Shellness and Leysdown Estate Company is said to have maintained a base at a remote farmhouse close to the site known as “Mussell House”41), assisted by special trains from London and a free meal (complete with “Sheppey sauce”) served in a large marquee. The latter amenity was especially well chosen considering how many of these events were challenged by mist, rain and delayed trains, which added considerably to the leap of faith required if purchasers were to believe in the promise of “profit”, to say nothing of the motor track that Wheatley and Son generously tossed into the offer as yet another encouraging prospect.42 Here, as at Minster, buyers might build immediately, but those who were not in a position to do so were encouraged to understand that plots allowed to lie idle had doubled or even trebled in value “in the course of a few years”.43
By the end of 1904, the Hendon & Finchley Times was reporting that “very extensive purchases of building plots” had been made on the Shellness-on-Sea and Leysdown estate. Most of these sales had taken place in the summer “when a trip to the seaside is among the pleasures of the inland dweller”.44 That December, however, the auctioneers had decided to “vary this order”. On 2 December, they attracted two hundred guests to a “sumptuous well-served dinner” at the Holborn Restaurant in London, and then launched into a sale in which “thousands of pounds were expended”. Mr Wheatley led the toasts (to the King and “the success of the estate”) but was assisted in the local pitch by a Colonel Peddar, who promised that “a great deal of money had been expended on the property in the way of road making, sewering, and other work”. As for the vision of a new Marine Parade with houses and shops extending over three miles between Warden and Shellness, there may have been a hint of warning in the conditional nature of his promise that “if the plot owners would start building, the estate had a great future before it”. It was said that exceptionally high prices were achieved at the Holborn sale — significantly above those paid for adjacent plots at sales on the site. The lucrative event was rounded off with an “excellent” concert.
Nuts Farm, Leysdown-on-Sea, February 2019. The site of Messrs. F.G. Wheatley and Son’s promised Marine Parade.
The golden name of El Dorado had been bagged by the Ramuzes for “Minster-on-Sea” but at Leysdown-on-Sea and Shellness-on-Sea the prospect of a quick gain surely also animated more faces than were moved by the spirit of mutual aid, especially among the buyers who chose to pick up two or three or perhaps ten plots rather than one. For decades, however, time remained at least partly on the side of those who continued to think Leysdown and the low spit leading down to Shellness Point would be better left to the birds, the sea purslane and the yellow-horned poppies for which the area is still known. Some shacks may have been swept away during the emergency measures of the Second World War, when the Isle of Sheppey was largely taken over for military purposes, but one only has to try to walk along the seafront at Leysdown to realise that — perhaps in anticipation of the brave new world promised by the more excited pushers of Brexit — the three-mile-long Marine Parade Messrs Wheatley and Son had imagined stretching down towards Shellness never actually happened. Even in the centre of Leysdown itself, the “promenade”, such as it is, only extends for a few yards in either direction, its potential route firmly blocked by the various private holiday camp operators, who have staked out their access to the beach and are plainly determined to maintain their “exclusivity” with the help of wire and railings as well as forbidding notices.
In reality, Leysdown never achieved a “Marine Parade” of any length, and the plotland world that did emerge was not created with brick houses and bungalows of the kind imagined by the auctioneers, even less with white modernist villas such as can be found at Frinton-on-Sea across the estuary in Essex. Messrs Saunders and Son somehow managed to squeeze the outline of their promised “new seaside watering place” onto the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map when it was revised in 1906. This shows a network of “avenues” bearing names of the kind developers tend to come up with: “Dorothy”, “Ingoldsby”, “Beach”, “Seaview”, “Raleigh” and “Drake”. All the ghosts are there, locked into a grid behind a “Marine Parade” that stretches south along the seafront, just as promised by Mr S
aunders, coming to an end across a marshy field from the farmhouse (“Mussel House”) now known as Muswell Manor. In truth, this lucrative fantasy land remained unbuilt, leaving the Ordnance Survey no choice but to set about quietly rubbing out its streets in time for their revised map of 1933. There are some bungalows a little inland, but visitors looking for “villas” in which to stay would have to make do with chalets and static caravans in wired-off camps from which, by the Seventies, lurking murderers and kidnappers from London were (if the sociologist Ray Pahl is to be believed) sporadically being removed by the police.
So the transformation came, although perhaps not in the way anticipated by the Sheerness Times when it observed, on 1 August 1903, that “The rural portion of Sheppey bids fair to become thoroughly metamorphosed”.45 There would be no place in “Leysdown-on-Sea” for the ancient manor of “Nutts” that once ran down to the sea here. The local paper reports that many of the plots were bought in a single block in 1903: Nos. 91–99 went as a single package for £165.46 The first developer of “Nutts Avenue” installed Arcadian bungalettes fabricated out of corrugated iron and cement or asbestos sheeting, and the metamorphosis continued after that. By 1930, when “Mummie” wrote a postcard from this “very nice” place to “Miss Bennett” in East Croydon, she put an X in the grass to show where “Mr J.’s” bungalow had been built since the photo was taken.
Nuts Avenue, Leysdown-on-Sea, postcard 1930.
*
“We are going to make it a success”, so George Ramuz had said in 1908 of his development on the Minster Cliffs Estate, to the north-west of Sexburga’s ancient abbey: “we are going at it hammer and nails”.47
Yet his attempt to turn Minster into “a prominent water place” would also struggle over the following decades. An early indication of the difficulty he faced was supplied in October 1911 by a journalist from Richmond who, while claiming to be determined not to criticise a “new seaside resort” until it is “up (in other words developed)”, nevertheless got a damning article out of a visit to “Minster-on-Sea”.48 Having walked up the hill from the station, he spent two hours being sent from pillar to post in an unsuccessful search for accommodation. After exhausting “the alimentary resources of Minster” by buying a pound of cheese and some crackers from the only grocer, he discovered even the chocolate machine at the station to be empty before boarding a train and fleeing to Whitstable, where he found the congenial fortnight’s holiday he claimed to have anticipated. Twenty years later, Arthur Mee also recoiled from the “tasteless world” of bungalows that the Ramuzes had piled up around Sexburga’s abbey at Minster, a site that surely deserved better as “one of the marvels of all England”.49
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 14