13. TWO WAYS DOWN TO THE SEA: THE TRADE UNION BARON AND THE SUFFRAGISTS
Now and then talk turned to the house with the sundial, so near the Shoreline Cliff. When would that crumble into the sea, do you think.
— At Ahrenshoop, Anniversaries IV, p. 1301.
Houses on the Shoreline Cliff, Ahrenshoop, postcard sent 1958.
In the winter of 2016, I visited the Warden Springs Caravan Park just south of Warden Point, the low cliff that forms the northern-most point of Sheppey as it is viewed from Whitstable. I was intending to stand at the high point here — at the spot identified as “Land’s End” on Edward Hasted’s map of 1797 — and look back across the water towards the place where the Sir William Nottidge School once stood above Whitstable. The mist put an end to that idea, but I did come across a garden fork and spade sticking out of the ground at the edge of the cliff.
Rising to a fraction more than fifty metres above sea level, the cliffs facing the wide open North Sea at Warden Point are considerably higher than the crumbling sand cliffs along the shore at Ahrenshoop on Fischland. Both, however, can be classified as “active” as well as “soft”. The one along the spit at Ahrenshoop is regularly reconfigured by storm surges and the currents that sweep a lot of sand along the coast in an easterly direction towards Darss Point. At Warden Point, the collapses are caused by events that Natural England describes as “impressive, deep-seated, rotational landslips”,1 produced as the sea penetrates and undercuts the London Clay. On the Baltic site, coastal protection works are carried out on a more or less constant basis. Not, however, at Warden Point, where local residents are expected to watch the ground disappearing beneath their feet under a policy the Environment Agency dignifies with the name “managed retreat”. The workers at Warden Springs Caravan Park may have knocked off for lunch by the time I passed by, but they were plainly engaged in pulling their wooden fence back a few yards from the brink of the advancing void.
George Harrison had a less muddy idea of mutability in mind, but here at Warden Point, the understanding that “All Things Must Pass” follows from the unstable nature of the cliffs. Each slumping fall exposes new tranches of the London Clay, dropping a new crop of fossils onto the beach below. Collectors have long been coming to search the shore or, more likely, to haggle with those shore-walking residents of the ridge-top road, who once made their living by scouring the beach for unusual fossils after high tides and storms, and then offering visitors a chance to buy these relics from a time when the Thames Estuary was a steaming and tropical place inhabited by palm trees as well as sea urchins, whales, and the biggest turtle whose head was ever found. In 1750, Mr Edward Jacob, of Nutt’s Manor at Leysdown, had been astonished when he discovered the fossilised bones of a vast elephant sticking out of the cliff at Warden. The skull of that monster’s avian consort — an alarming flying machine named Dasornis, which one expert has likened to an “ocean-going goose” with a five-metre wing-span and a ferocious saw-toothed bill — would not be disgorged from Sheppey’s geological heart of darkness until 2008.2
For centuries then, Warden Road, which makes its way from Eastchurch to Warden Point, has been coming to an unexpectedly sudden end. A large stretch of planted field went sliding down in the summer of 1870, remaining sufficiently intact for the farmer to harvest his crop before this vast clod dissolved into the waves.3 Three acres of land dropped seventy or so feet in 1883, prompting one paper to observe that while “each decade shows a greatly-diminished acreage in the island of Sheppey”, the landowners preferred to suffer these losses rather than “spending large sums of money on ‘defences’”.4 A smaller chunk sank away just after the occupiers had walked over it in the spring of 1890,5 and another slid down in 1894, leaving the cliff at Warden Point “almost perpendicular”6 and prompting observers to foresee a day when all of Sheppey would disappear under the waves just as the Goodwin Sands (said once to have been the Sheppey-like island of Lomea), off the Isle of Thanet at Deal, had done before it.7
In the last year of the nineteenth century, when the cottage-lined road leading to Warden Point still bore the “inelegant” name of “Mud Row”, the oozing cliff struck the London Daily News’ cycling correspondent with alarm. He warned that only a “rough bar” saved the curious cyclist from riding into “a scene of the wildest desolation. The cliffs… composed of dark, greasy and crumbling clay, have slipped and fallen in every direction, and the sea at the bottom is discoloured far out with the debris”.8 Most of Warden, an estimated eighty acres, had already been swallowed up by these long-running “encroachments by the sea”. Once a well-known landmark for ships, the Parish church of Saint James had been taken down in 1832 and rebuilt further inland with stone salvaged from the old London Bridge (itself demolished and replaced by a distinguished engineering builder named Edward Banks who had come to Sheppey to work on the Admiralty dockyard at Sheerness). In 1877, it had to be pulled down again. Some of the more recently interred bodies in the churchyard were removed and reburied at Minster before the churchyard finally disintegrated in the landslip of 1883. That cycling columnist had seen children at the spot “engaged in the gruesome and morbid occupation of digging out skeletons for “amusement”. And not the children of ignorant cottagers, for whom there might possibly be some excuse, but of “people of perhaps some pretensions to culture and right feeling”.
The end of the road at Warden Point
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It was once thought that the great Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, might have been among the Victorians who came to this insecure spot to gaze into the firmament9 — perhaps during the years when William Higgs, the builder of Spurgeon’s vast Metropolitan Tabernacle at London’s Elephant and Castle, was lord of the manor here at Warden. Be that as it may, the encroachments would continue through the twentieth century, carrying off not just cottages and bungalows but coastguard observation points, redundant First World War pillboxes in which children had sheltered as they watched the Battle of Britain,10 a curious concrete “sound mirror” intended to capture the sound of approaching aircraft, and, a little further round the coast from here, an isolated smugglers’ pub named the Royal Oak.
There are still a handful of properties to go before time has to be called on Warden Manor itself. Dating back to the early thirteenth century, this ancient building was given to the non-denominational Christian organisation Toc H in 1933, and used as a holiday and conference centre by members of this branch-based movement which started out as a rest and recreation centre established for Allied soldiers at Poperinge, Belgium, during the First World War. Military ranks and hierarchy were to be left at the door and the principles guiding the fellowship within would be summarised as “to love widely, build bravely, witness humbly and think fairly”.11 After the war, Toc H sought to engage men of all classes in the work of remaking their communities in reaffirmation of the principles and ideals for which so many had died — an idea of service that, in the words of one advocate, came “straight from Flanders”12 and, according to the later declarations of the famously dissolute Prince of Wales (who would go on to resign the throne as Edward VIII at the end of 1936), made Toc H “the War’s truest, because most fruitful, memory”.13
In 1988, a year after the retirement of the Anglo-Catholic rector of Eastchurch, the National Front-supporting Father Blagdon-Gamlen, Warden Manor was taken over by a group of “Transalpine Redemptorists”, a similarly “ultramontane” group who blamed a “crisis in the liturgy” for the many problems besetting the Roman Catholic Church. They came here to establish a “Monastery of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary” in which they would follow the old Redemptorist Rules and celebrate the “Seemingly forbidden” old Mass. They kept it up for a decade, using garden sheds as well as a barn as cells for aspirants determined to save their souls by quitting the world for “the solitude of the desert”,14 before shifting their retreat to the more truly deserted Orkney island of Papa Stronsay, and leaving the manor to be sold back into private use.
Not everyone who has sought to hide out at this end of Warden Road has been able to make such a well-organised retreat. The “colossal landslide” that occurred here at 3.30 pm on Sunday, 21 November 1971, carried away “nearly three acres of clifftop land”.15 “We have lost everything” lamented Peter and Sheila Bryant, a young couple who were expecting their first child in three months’ time. Half their home, “Cliff Cottage”, had tumbled over the edge, including the kitchen in which Sheila had been working moments before disaster struck. A large chunk of the “adjacent landscaped garden” had gone, although it, like some of its predecessors, remained weirdly intact in its new resting place: “It was as if a giant had silently taken a large section of the cliff top 150 ft down”. Over the following days other residents here would be “scared out of their minds” as they watched cracks appear in their walls. Mr Sidney Smith at the Post Office convinced himself that the gaps between his floorboards were widening, and quickly moved into a neighbour’s caravan. He was among those who called for an immediate stop to the “loud bangs” that kept bouncing across the Thames Estuary from the government’s weapons testing site at Shoeburyness in Essex. Suspected of destabilising the cliffs and widening cracks in the Post Office’s walls, these demands would only be heeded after a second, smaller fall which occurred directly after a “terrific explosion” from Shoeburyness four days later, bringing the brink disconcertingly close to farmer Victor Wickin’s concrete pig house.
Farewell to Hugh Scanlon’s lawn, November 1971.
The onlookers who flocked to Warden Point risked their lives to peer down on the fallen section of neighbouring garden that had followed the Bryants’ kitchen into oblivion. They could see that trees were “still growing in the same position” and that “even the summer house” was “absolutely unharmed”. There could be no doubt, however, that Mr Hugh Scanlon, the Marxist trade union leader who had refused, two years earlier, to remove his tanks from Harold Wilson’s lawn at Chequers, had now lost a considerable portion of his own at the Sheppey hideaway where he had been able to escape the press. The newspapers had, to be sure, watched his every move on the mainland, making an MI5-assisted meal of, say, the 61% pay increase he was said to have been awarded in May 1970,16 or his embarrassment at the hands of the shop stewards at Ford who condemned him as a sell-out when he agreed to the secret ballots that obliged workers to vote for or against industrial action as individuals rather than in the pressurised collectivity of smoke-filled rooms,17 or denouncing his inflammatory rhetoric at the TUC, where he gave the delegates “the fighting stuff that makes them feel good”18 in order to win the day for his own composite motion banning affiliated unions from registering under Edward Heath’s new Industrial Relations Act.
The golf-loving President of the Amalgamated Engineering Union happened to be in Florida at the time of the landslip that put an end to his clifftop retreat. His wife Nora, however, flew back to England in time to witness its end: “Demolition work on Mr Scanlon’s home started on Thursday afternoon… A distressed Mrs Scanlon watched as builders removed the outdoor stairway”. While she and her husband were “very sad to see their home go”, she made it clear that they did not “contemplate another home in Sheppey”. Neither would the Scanlons linger to join their neighbours in fruitless arguments about compensation (rightly considered “unlikely” from the start), or about the possibility of getting the public authorities to build sea defences that might at last put an end to the continuing “encroachments of the sea”, and perhaps also to acquire the last seven hundred feet of Warden Road, clear it of such houses, shacks and bungalows as may be necessary, and grade it into a gentle and stable slope down to the sea. Within a month, Hugh Scanlon, whose primary residence was in Eltham, south-east London, would be leading a delegation of worker golfers to Yugoslavia, where they’d been invited to demonstrate that their sport was not, as was widely thought in the Eastern Bloc, just a “bourgeois game” reserved for the “management class”.19
So the Scanlons vanished from the island (they would eventually retire to a villa overlooking the white cliffs at Broadstairs), leaving their former neighbours on Sheppey to joke — in accordance with since confirmed suspicions that Scanlon, who had long since quit the Communist Party, was being closely monitored by MI5 — that it was surely not just natural erosion that had undermined his clifftop retreat. Mr Sid Smith of the Post Office was not in any position to move on so lightly. As was reported in one of the earliest copies of the Sheerness Times Guardian saved by Uwe Johnson, he and his wife Lucy had bought the 140-year-old post office in October 1971, only a month before the landslip that left only sixty feet of unreliable land between them and the end of the world. A former motor fitter from Abbey Wood, Smith had at first tried to get permission to extend his bungalow in Minster. When the planners refused, he had made the purchase he now regretted so bitterly. The Smith’s had hoped to run the post office and shop, and to rent out camping plots in the summer, but their fields were now poised to disappear and their house was unsaleable. Smith’s opening skirmish with the military at Shoeburyness soon gave way to another more enduring battle with public authority, this time the Nature Conservancy Council, whose officers kept insisting that Warden’s unstable cliffs were a recognised Site of Special Scientific Interest, and must be allowed to continue releasing fossils from the exposed London Clay onto the beach below. After three or four years of calling unsuccessfully for action, Sid Smith wrote a letter not to any trade union but to the Queen, pointing out how he and his wife were being victimised by the state, and insisting that it is “people not fossils that matter”.20 “Surely”, he explained to the Sheerness Times Guardian, “by now the conservationists have sufficient samples without endangering the cliffs even further” with their digging.
Despite the struggles of that period, in which islanders found their own way of lining up against the impersonal powers of the state, the erosion along Sheppey’s northern shore is set to continue into the future. Nowadays, the Swale Borough Council passes the blame on to the Environment Agency, which has diverse ways of insisting that there is no practical way of stopping it. On 13 December 2017, the Conservative MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Gordon Henderson, who himself lives on the island at Eastchurch, raised the shrinkage of his constituency in the House of Commons, pointing out that both homes and holiday parks were threatened — with some pitches standing “now only feet away from the crumbling coastline”.21 He had supported the local farmer who recommended that waste spoil from “major infrastructural projects, such as Thameslink and HS2” should be brought here, and dumped in the sea offshore in order to “reclaim some of the lost land and create a country park along the north Sheppey coastline that would have stopped any further cliff erosion and, at the same time, boosted tourism”. Even though this scheme was proposed as “self-financing” and capable of being carried out by private interests, the statutory bodies opposed it. “There we have it”, concluded the scandalised MP as he urged the government to reconsider the SSSI status of the cliffs: “In Natural England’s eyes, fossils and slumping clay are more important than the homes and livelihoods of my constituents”.
Dr Thérèse Coffey, the fellow Conservative who replied to Henderson as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, had nothing useful to offer the threatened islanders, except to point out that she knew the area well: “I expect that the post office at Warden Point is no longer there and has gone into the sea, but I remember several childhood holidays there”. As for the abiding expectation that there was more to come, this would be confirmed at the end of May 2020, when residents of Surf Crescent, Eastchurch, heard the ground “groaning” just before a chunk of road, an orange Seat Ibiza, a shed and then a house named “Cliff Hanger” tumbled away, leaving little more behind than a teetering swimming pool. In the words of a swiftly evacuated neighbour, “It’s not right to have people’s homes, their livelihood, falling into the sea”.22
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It isn’t only Tr
ansalpine Redemptorists and engine-fitters, reclusive trade union leaders and Cockney types like Somerset Maugham’s lucky barber or retired boxers such as Frank Bruno who have found their way to the easterly heights of the Isle of Sheppey. Among the summer visitors in the first decade of the twentieth century was the American-born Alys Pearsall Smith Russell, a Quaker reformer who was among the founders of the School for Mothers in St Pancras, London, and also the first wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. She turned up here in August 1909, and reported on her experience in Common Cause, a paper formed that year to promote the campaign of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. “Sheppey”, she wrote, “ though less than forty miles from London, seems very remote and out of the world, and is an ideal place for an inexpensive and unconventional holiday”.23
Stepping off the Sheppey Light Railway at Leysdown-on-Sea, Russell and her little party found “a beach, a coastguard station, and a yard for building aeroplanes, but practically no population”. Determined to combine their summer holiday with some political campaigning, she and her friends chose instead to hold their meetings in the “flourishing agricultural centres of Minster and Eastchurch”. At the former, which surely had “a tradition in favour of women, as a Dowager Saxon Queen, Sexburga, founded an abbey there”, they went round every house in the village inviting people to rally that evening on the “grassy slope” by the “beautiful old Abbey Gate House”. A few ladies took the front seat while children, some from the village and others on holiday from London, “swarmed behind them”. The assembly was chaired by a “cliff-cottage-holder of Eastchurch”, Mr W.A. Jewson, described as “a member of the Men’s League” whose wife, also present, was a member of the National Women’s Social and Political Union and an “ardent supporter of our cause”. A crowd of about fifty gathered as he spoke, “mostly sailors or trippers from Sheerness” but also the “venerable clergyman”, the Rev. W. Bramston M.A., and his daughter. Alys Russell admitted that her own address was “rather curtailed” by “noise and dust and heat”, but Miss Kate Raleigh, who was “a prominent member of the Uxbridge National Society”, delivered “an impressive and dignified answer to the physical force argument”. The meeting, which Miss Raleigh would later suggest was “as far as I know, the first Woman’s Suffrage meeting ever held in Sheppey island”, was also addressed by one Miss Dawson, described as “a Suffragist from Philadelphia, U.S.A”.24 The crowd had taken a while to gather (the fierce reputation of the radical “Suffragettes” had plainly reached Sheppey before these more moderate “constitutional” campaigners), but its members had listened “most attentively, and 2s. and 51/2d. was collected in a child’s sand pail”.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 17