The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Alys Russell was delighted when some members of that audience turned up again, three evenings later, for a second rally at the more agricultural inland village of Eastchurch. This time the pleasant historical background was provided by fields, trees and the gatehouse of Shurland Hall, which Kate Raleigh at least knew to be the last surviving fragment of a mansion where Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn are said to have been received in 1532. The campaigners also had the use of “a ‘real’ chair”, in the form of an old landau lent by a friendly publican, Mr Woollett of the Crooked Billet. Miss Raleigh regretted that some “most intelligent Eastchurch people” stayed away, apparently because “they could not spare time to be arrested”. The constable turned out to be friendly, however, and about a hundred did show up — a crowd that, with the exception of the clergyman and a sprinkling of summer residents from Warden, “was composed almost entirely of labourers and of their wives, who had come into Eastchurch for their Saturday’s shopping”.

  Some of these agricultural onlookers may well have wondered what exactly this summer visitation was all about. One or two may even have been descendants of the beered-up villagers who gathered to assault itinerant Irish “pikeys” as they slept in their tents in the middle of a Saturday night in the summer of 1834. In the event, however, they listened attentively for over an hour, “the only disturbance coming from an old man in a smock, Benjamin Bunk, who very evidently had already had his ‘arf pint’, and who, to our relief, soon went off to get another one”. Russell insisted that she had “seldom addressed such a perfectly serious audience before: one very roughly dressed young labourer, in particular, standing immovable and rapt the whole time, only relaxing at the end to drop several coppers into our pail”. The resolution in favour of votes for women was raised by Mr Jewson and passed with a “very good show of hands”. A fleeting visitor, Mrs Russell had left the island shortly afterwards, but Miss Raleigh, whose family had a summer residence there, would remain to press on with the campaign. She would give her Sheppey address as “Cliff Cottage, Eastchurch” — not a mean clifftop cottage perched above the crumbling cliff at Warden, but a substantial property that has since been demolished and, like its grounds, replaced by a considerable chalet park — adding her “Home address” after a “PS” as 8 Park Road, Uxbridge. Reserving the 5s. 8d. raised at the two August meetings for the formation of a Sheppey branch of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies, she and the Jewsons intended to “carry on this work among those friendly and intelligent island dwellers”.

  So it was that Kate Raleigh and her friends went into action again during the second week of August in 1910, holding a repeat round of “village meetings” in Minster and Eastchurch, involving members of four Suffrage Societies, and featuring Mrs Fagan and Mrs Beith, who were respectively Treasurer and Secretary of the New Constitutional Society for Woman’s Suffrage,25 and also Mr Sidley of the Men’s League as speakers.26 By this time, Miss Kate Raleigh was hon. Sec. of the Sheppey chapter, and the campaigners also travelled in sisterly association with the Women’s Freedom League, which had broken away from the National Union under the presidency of the socialist and pacifist Anglo-Irish campaigner Mrs Charlotte Despard, who was herself in no doubt that “Seaside and holiday resorts are good recruiting grounds for new members” of societies working for the “resurrection of woman”.27

  Raleigh would report that the “not-yet-quite-enough-educated” constituency MP did not attend, and could therefore be trusted to persist in the ignorance revealed in his recent declaration that “If only these women could agree about what they want we might perhaps see about giving it to them”. However, the meetings also had to face more serious challenges. The speakers were at pains to distinguish their “constitutional” cause from the “regrettable” antics of the more radical, law-breaking women around Christabel Pankhurst — there would be no running in front of race horses or burning down churches and powerful men’s holiday cottages on the Isle of Sheppey. They declared that the present was “an age of social reform” and that the campaign for enfranchisement was an essential part of the wider struggle to “help those who cannot help themselves”. They spoke of conditions in the potteries, where women worked for three farthings an hour and the lead poisoning was such that 264 children in every thousand died before reaching the age of one: conditions that were truly “a blot upon civilisation”. They insisted that, far from throwing men out of work, equal pay for women would benefit everybody but a few exploitative “capitalists”, putting an end to the days in which poorly-paid women were involuntary “blacklegs” used to throw men out of work, and creating conditions “where it was possible to bring a child into the world in decency”. Whether the problem was the persistent and quite unnecessary use of “lead glaze” in the potteries — or, in the more rural example put before the people of Eastchurch, the fact that “there were many villages where there was no such person as a midwife” — the time had surely come “to stand for better things, and there was only one way — the vote”.

  This was enough to convince the man, identified only as “The Rambler”, who wrote the “Notes & Comment” column in the Sheerness Times. Having never before “heard a Suffragette speak”, he was relieved to discover that they weren’t the mad harridans of popular reputation. Indeed, he could find no fault with “the ideals” expressed by these “much-abused Suffragettes” nor with the manner in which they placed “their views before the public”.28 Agreeing that the conditions under which so many poor women worked was “absolutely shameful”, he jumped off the fence with a gentlemanly thump that surprised even himself: “I say that if women, by having a vote, can do anything to alter this state of things, then by all means give them the vote”. This he added, was “the nearest I’ve ever been to politics in print”.

  The Eastchurch meeting wasn’t all plain sailing. The fierce wind, which so frequently sweeps across the island, kept the women clinging to the railings as they struggled to prevent their poster from blowing away. They also had to deal with a boy who “announced very gory treatment in store for anyone who should class his mother with lunatics and criminals”. This interruption, was noted by “The Rambler”, who blamed the “older people” in the audience for “not preventing the unseemly conduct of a group of half-grown youths, who tried to ridicule what they were far from understanding”.

  Given the reputation possessed by “Suffragettes”, attendance could be disappointing. In the village meetings with which they opened their “holiday campaign” of 1910, Raleigh’s band of women found themselves addressing as “Friends” a tree, a cow, and one or two people peering out of a lane and trying to appear as if they were not looking at “those Suffragettes”. This changed, however, when they made their descent from Sheppey’s rustic uplands and headed down across the marshes to the military town and resort of Sheerness, on the north-west point of the island. They had chosen to make their stand on “Regatta day”, on the calculation that this annual celebration of masculine prowess would produce “large crowds ready-made”. The assault was carefully prepared over several days — “all on the nail”, as Raleigh would recall. A time and place for the evening rally was agreed with the council. Banners were prepared, advertisements posted in the newspapers, and many notices distributed in the town. On the day itself, the women adopted a custom that Raleigh alleged to be “well known in the East”. In order to “remind our guests at the last moment that we were expecting them”, we “walked round the town and along the parade carrying a banner and an announcement of the hour”. Through this “simple and practical” measure, they found the “spectators thrilled with the notion that ‘those women were up to something’”. The response proved that “a yard or two of bunting on a stick may be a symbol of the highest ideal which a man or woman can aspire to… Soldiers and sailors appreciate this fact, and ’neath the merriment in which we joined, we felt, we might say, with John Bunyan’s pilgrims in the river, ‘I feel the bottom and it is good’”.

  The advertiseme
nt Miss Raleigh had placed in the Sheerness Guardian and East Kent Advertiser was poorly repaid by the paper’s reporter, who preferred to linger over the “Scene on the promenade”, where “the ladies in their brilliant and multi-lined and delicate toilette provided a beautiful profusion of colour which was heightened by the more sombre garb of the masculine onlookers”. The Suffragists, however, did what they could to turn the regatta into a side-show. Things were livening up nicely by 6.30pm, when they got their “waggonette” in position in its allocated space on the Recreation Ground: “men, women and children approached it at a run, and we had the pleasing experience of beginning to a full meeting”.

  Writing for the Sheerness Times a week later, Miss Raleigh declared: “Large audiences I have seen, but never a more appreciative one than that formed by the few hundreds round our brake on the spot assigned to us courtesy of the Urban Council. Everyone seemed to realise that we were ‘up to good’, that we were claiming a privilege with the fixed resolve to use it in an upright and reasonable manner. After some interesting arguments and information, the audience were asked to spread the new ideas (if they are new) among their friends. Many copies of Votes for Women and The Vote were bought, and back numbers given away”. Miss Kate Raleigh reserved her closing word on the triumph of the Isle of Sheppey “Holiday Campaign” for readers of the latter journal: “We are pleased with our Sheerness meeting, the first on Woman Suffrage ever held there”.

  PART III.

  THE FIVE TOWNS OF SHEERNESS (DEFINITELY NOT BERLIN, NEW YORK OR ROME)

  Sheerness is not only a fortress, but a kind of town, with several streets in it, and inhabitants of several sorts; but chiefly such whose business obliges them to reside here.

  — Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724-6.

  A stranger visits the Isle of Sheppey in the mouth of the Thames and goes for a walk there, on the streets of Sheerness-on-Sea.

  — Uwe Johnson, “Oh! You’re a German“, Die Zeit, 3 February 1978.

  Luftwaffe aerial photo of the “war harbour” at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, 1943.

  14. MOVING IN

  As a poor and much denigrated town on a shore where England ends and the wider world no longer begins, Sheerness may never have been the easiest place in which to sell a house. In January 2012, however, Katherine Bishop had an unusual reason to feel modestly optimistic as she blogged about her “large family home” in the late-Victorian district known as Marine Town. The upper storeys of the four- or five-bedroom Victorian terraced house looked directly out over the sea, and the building retained attractive “original features” including “internal wooden shutters and parquet flooring”. 26 Marine Parade had also, as Bishop added to her list of the house’s attractions, once been “home to German author, Uwe Johnson”.

  26 Marine Parade.

  Bishop’s post was soon attracting comments from across the North Sea. She was surprised by the suggestion, written in German, that there might be something indecorous about using Johnson’s name to increase the value of her property, and also by the query seeking confirmation that the interior of No. 26 had been painted black in the writer’s time. This vision, in which the house appeared to alternate between a gloomy melancholic’s tower and the grimmest cell in a forced labour camp, didn’t accord with her recollection of the family home in which she had lived happily with her parents and two sisters for over twenty-five years. Her denials prompted her German-speaking interlocutor to confess that he may have been taken in by “an urban myth circulating in German literature classes”.

  Having talked again with her mother, Bishop returned to admit that “the wooden panelling on the wall alongside the stairs leading down into the basement” may well have been black when her parents bought the house after Johnson’s death in 1984. When we spoke on the phone a few months later, she remembered that the lower walls inside the front door had been covered with a very dark paper of black and red — “quite hideous really”. She also explained that German visitors had kept turning up throughout her childhood — photographing the house from the promenade along the sea wall opposite, sitting on the steps, knocking on the door and asking to be shown inside. Sheerness was not on the conventional tourist trail, but Bishop even remembers the odd coach pulling up so that rows of unlikely pilgrims could peer in at the windows. Her father had tried to accommodate this interest for a while but it had all become a bit difficult. He was busy running his accountancy business from home and there was really nothing left for visitors to see. Meanwhile, the circumstances of Johnson’s death in the house in February 1984 had, as the Bishops knew, been miserable. When some of the author’s admirers in Germany sent Katherine’s parents a commemorative plaque to mount on the wall, they’d decided against encouraging further attention and put it up in the kitchen they’d made on the lower ground floor inside. It would be the new owners who, having bought the house for a little less than Bishop’s asking price, proudly granted the thing its intended place beside the front door.

  Why England?

  Johnson was by no means the only dissenting citizen of the GDR who felt drawn to Britain in the early Seventies — attracted by its modestly socialised liberal democracy, its sense of liberty and perhaps also by the comic potential of its anachronistic class system (there was copy of David Frost and Antony Jay’s best seller of 1967, To England with Love, on Johnson’s shelves). “England” offered an alternative both to state communism and to the strident capitalism of America and West German cities such as Düsseldorf. Even in the very worst of its years as the crisis-ridden “sick man of Europe”, England was attractive as “a land of silver rather than gold”, as one researcher remembers being told by an incoming East German writer at the time.1

  Johnson may have owed much of his own “initiation”2 into Englishry to his landlady in Rostock: born to an English mother and a German father in 1900, Alice Hensan had become an abiding friend during the two student years in which he had a room in the lower ground floor of her house at Sankt-Georg-Straße 71. Meanwhile, the idea of England as a “haven” or a “safe hiding place” has also been found to feature in Johnson’s work “since the earliest known instances”.3 Much of his posthumously published first novel, Ingrid Babendererde, is set in a school derived partly from his own experience of Güstrow’s John Brinckmann Oberschule, at a time in 1953 when the official communist youth organisation is implementing the state’s attack on the Christian youth movement Junge Gemeinde. One student, Klaus, opposes this policy, whereas his friend Jürgen supports it. Their discussion takes place in the class of an English teacher nicknamed “Sir Ernest”, an old-fashioned and gentlemanly chap said to have been modelled on an Oxford-educated man who had taught Johnson at the school before he saved the increasingly Stalinist state the bother of sacking him by retiring. Under the cover of parody, so Colin Riordan has suggested, the English language becomes the free medium in which Klaus is able to float dangerous views, citing things that happened during the reign of Elizabeth I to condemn the ongoing persecution of a Christian student named Elisabeth Rehfelde, while Sir Ernest confines his comments to matters of pronunciation and usage.

  An often ironically presented idea of England features in the early volumes of Anniversaries too. Given the late-twentieth-century trials of the British textile industry, some readers may be touched to learn that in the early years of the GDR — a state that would soon be encouraging its citizens to sweat in revolutionary materials (including, as Johnson notes, “Dederon, the miracle synthetic fabric of the East”4) — England was associated with enduring traditional cloths. After the end of the war, a different teacher, the battered and compromised Ottje Stoffregen, lives in a room above Jerichow’s pharmacy, wearing clothes made of “English tweed” that “wasn’t shabby even after having been worn for ten years”.5 Durability, then, and, by the time Johnson gets to New York, a certain sartorial dodginess too: as in the “gorgeous trench coat of British manufacture”6 the author wraps around a nosey
and perhaps unreliable Polish-Russian émigré who is now doing very nicely for himself as a sociologist at Columbia University. Meanwhile, an expectation of old-fashioned British restraint is extended to Johnson’s primary character, Gesine Cresspahl, by a news vendor who one day shows her Time magazine’s latest splash of lurid colour photos documenting the ongoing slaughter in Vietnam, and is surprised by this regular customer’s “tasteless” suggestion that people need to know what the war is like: “You’re all about tact and reserve, it’s almost English, and now you are telling me this?”7

  Johnson’s employment of the clichés of Britishness recognises that the assumed fixtures of national identity can, like displaced individuals, themselves suffer homelessness, dereliction and historical redundancy. Not content with registering the British ancestry of the hypocritical old aunt he makes of the New York Times, he lodges microfilmed back issues of the Richmond and Twickenham Times (with the help of which Gesine reconstructs her carpenter father’s pre-war life in England) in the archives of an “Institute for the Preservation of British Customs”, which he places next to a high society funeral parlour on Madison Avenue and 83rd St. The first translator to try bringing Anniversaries over into English, Leila Vennewitz, was so taken by Johnson’s evocation of this shabby-genteel bastion, where the leather armchairs look like they have been imported from a gentleman’s club in London and the staff behave as if they are in a country house only open to the plebs because of its owner’s unexpected “impecuniousness”,8 that she set off to find it. Was the author perhaps thinking of the English Speaking Union? she asked, after failing to discover anything like it on the appointed corner. Her query prompted Johnson to confess: “I am loath to admit that this institution exists only in my book”.9