There were escape attempts long before Charles Dickens created Magwitch in Great Expectations in 1861. In October 1810, seven convicts had stolen the Retribution’s “hulk boat” and sailed across the Medway to the Isle of Grain, where they were pursued and hunted down — two of the fugitives escaped, one was said to have drowned in a fleet and four were captured and returned to the disciplinary regime that a condemned murderer from the Retribution had recently described, while proclaiming his innocence just before being hanged in front of a baying Kentish crowd, as “the lash of tyranny”.37
The difficulties of maintaining order among the five hundred or so convicts housed on the Retribution’s three decks were aggravated by the fact that, before work began on Rennie’s new dockyard in 1815, there really hadn’t been sufficient “hard labour” in the Sheerness dockyard to occupy them all. The work of loading and unloading, and of pumping water out of the old dock, was irregular and dependent on the fluctuations of the tide. With the exception of “a few shoemakers and tailors employed in keeping the shoes and clothes of the others in repair”, those who remained on the ship were allowed to be “idle”, or to “work for themselves, at their own pleasure; the materials for their work are procured on their own account, and they dispose of the articles made, either by sending them up to town, or selling them in the Dockyard”. Attempts to improve the situation included the introduction of a school at which some convicts might learn to read, and also the decision to remove some of the “most refractory” of the five hundred for further “transportation” to New South Wales on 14 August 1811.38
It is possible to sense how much had been going wrong on the hulks by reading the detailed instructions prepared for John Henry Capper, who became Superintendent of the hulk establishment in 1815. These stipulated that overseers must “constantly reside on board”,39 and that “all healthy convicts” must be sent on shore to work, with the exception of those engaged in shoemaking and tailoring. A “Character Book” was to be kept in each hulk and the Chaplain would be expected to group the convicts into classes, using a scale of six categories ranging from Good to Bad. Food allowances must be published for the convicts to see, and the food itself should be weighed and measured in their presence. Overseers must use “justice and humanity” and attend the services in which the chaplain was expected to preach and read prayers every Sunday. A great many of the rules introduced in 1815 were plainly aimed to prevent the overseers setting up despotic regimes on their hulks. On disciplinary matters, they were to try “mild and persuasive means” first, and only resort to punishment on board if this fails — and the punishment was always to be carried out in the presence of the surgeon as well as the other convicts. They must understand that the hulk’s boats should never be “employed for pleasure”, that there were to be no fees or gratuities, and no pigs or chickens kept on board by overseers for selling to convicts. Cards and dice should be taken away from convicts. Temperance was to be the rule of the day, and officers supplying “spirits or beer” to the convicts must be dealt with.
The chaplains of the two hulks in Sheerness were assisted in their battle for redemption by the Sheppey Auxiliary Bible Society, whose members were delighted, in 1817, to hear the Rev. Mr Edwards of the Bellerophon report that the prisoners were attentive to “the reading and learning by rote” of “large portions of holy writ”.40 Speaking to the Society at a meeting in Sheerness, Edwards ventured that it would be hard to find less “swearing and profane language” being used in “any like number of labouring men”. Among his homilies was the story of a convict who had found twelve shillings while working on shore and immediately taken it to the officer, asking him to “adopt means to find the owner” (who turned out to be “a labouring youth, whose whole week’s wages did not amount to that sum”). The Rev. Mr Price of the Retribution had also reported great improvements since the government adopted new measures, themselves believed to have been first suggested by Price himself. He too spoke of the convicts’ “attention to religious instruction”, noting that “a considerable number had, unknown to him started a prayer-meeting among themselves”. One poor fellow had even composed some appropriately pathetic lines of verse — no mention of the “atrocious vice” here nor, indeed, of any lash other than that of the evangelically awakened conscience — that were duly presented at the Bible Society’s first anniversary celebration:
To the British and foreign Bible Society, by a Convict on board the Retribution Hulk, Sheerness
When torn from friends — imprison’d on the deep,
The wretched Convict bends his head to weep;
When burning tears in plenteous streams are shed,
And black despair sits brooding round his bed,
Where can he turn — to who for comfort go —
But to that Word, which comfort can bestow?
Though we are outcasts, fast in mis’ry bound,
We gladly hear the gospels joyful sound;
Not only Hear, but feel its pow’rful sway,
And humbly bend our sinful knees to pray,
The word of God has pierc’d our darkness through,
And said, though fainting, ‘Ye shall still pursue.’41
Perhaps there was a harsh kind of relief to be found in the reported fact that, even before the opening of Rennie’s vast new basin in 1823, the work his rebuilding had brought to the dockyard was no longer sufficient to employ all the men on the two convict hulks. Another “early embarkation”42 for New South Wales would that year help to correct the surplus on the Retribution. The Bellerophon, meanwhile, had been “wholly appropriated” to accommodate “the juvenile convicts of the country”, who were to be taught “useful trades” such as shoemaking and tailoring by adult convicts: it was hoped that in time they would make clothes for “the whole establishment of convicts throughout the kingdom”.43
From “Sea Breakers” to “Blue Houses”
It wasn’t just convicts who lived aboard derigged hulks at Sheerness in the early years. In November 1767, the Christian revivalist and founder of Methodism John Wesley, who visited Sheerness no fewer than nine times in all, had found himself in a “town” of a kind that “is scarcely to be found again in England”. As he wrote in his diary, it consisted of six old men-of-war in the dock beside the fort: “These are divided into small tenements, forty, fifty, or sixty in a ship, with little chimneys and windows; and each of these contains a family. In one of them, where we called, a man and his wife, and six little children lived. And yet all the ship was sweet and tolerably clean; sweeter than most sailing ships I have been in”.44
Some of these floating “tenements” lasted into the early nineteenth century. According to the Morning Post the “Old Sea Breakers”,45 which would finally be buried under Rennie’s new jetty, had been laid out along the shore of the Medway directly to the south of the dockyard. Having served in grander days as “the wooden walls of England”, these hulks were placed by the sea wall in an attempt to reduce the force of tidal “surges”, which the government of the day had been warned were both increasing and threatening to break through.
Once the “Breakers” were in position, it had been decided to “convert their internal capacity to some useful purpose”. Their decks were surveyed and “speedily fashioned into public streets, skirted with convenient dwellings from head to stern, for the habitations of the workmen belonging to his Majesty’s dockyard adjoining; and this proved a most salutary relief to the industrious, who, before, for want of local habitation, were forced to resort to their labours from unpleasant distances, greatly to their loss of time and health”. The “marine village” that emerged on these hulks had “many entrances on the land side, and bridges from the main deck of one ship to the other. They had their King Street and their Queen Street, their George Street and their Princess Street, with a variety of other names for distinction. Out at the port-holes were their hanging gardens, where many things were cultivated for the use of their families. A great portion of the workmen in his
Majesty’s yard at Sheerness, are natives of the Breakers”.
“Hulks at Sheerness”, etching, Henry Moses, 1824
A billet on these tide-breaking hulks may have been a lot better than nothing but there had from the start been voices clamouring for improved arrangements. As far back as 1675, the dockyard workers had petitioned for “houses, a market, and a minister”, saying they were “living in a manner like heathens”.46 The first landed settlement emerged to the south and east of the dockyard, and just inland from the “Old Sea Breakers”. Formed early in the eighteenth century it was, according to the Pevsner guide, a “do-it-yourself development”.47 Unlike the successive “new towns” of nineteenth-century Sheerness, it had no proud and powerful men who claimed to be its founder. Some of the first buildings may have been planned by the military authorities but many were built with “recycled” naval timber (Admiralty dockyards customarily allowed workers to take home “chips” of wood, and successive government inspectors would worry about the extraordinary size of the “chips” being hauled out of the gate48). First known as “the blue houses” on account of the fact that, as Uwe Johnson explained to his Dresden friends the Menzhausens in 1980, “the Royal Navy … has a preference for blue paint and slowly but surely … almost every worker’s house was prettied up with the colour they’d swiped”,49 this English shanty grew into Blue Town — a densely packed warren of alleys, courts and lanes with many shops and pubs filled with soldiers and sailors, a small Jewish community with a synagogue and a nearby burial ground, and, by the 1780s, a large non-conformist chapel too.
Inside the wall: The Superintendent’s House, Sheerness Dockyard
If the garrison’s cannons pointed out to sea from Sheerness, there were powerful moral forces that, having been incubated in the dockyard, aimed their cleansing fire inland. A town cannot be built with “chips” or, as it had become by the early nineteenth century, bricks alone, and the modern English town that emerged after Blue Town, on the landward side of the military establishment’s moat, would be made of softer materials too: patriotism, to be sure; and a reverence for naval warfare, not least as the guarantor of employment; and quite a lot of speculative greed too. That, however, was by no means the end of it. During the hardship that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816, a group of dockyard workers formed the Sheerness Economical Society as a co-operative venture that acquired flour, meat and other foodstuffs, and brought them to the island by barge for the use of members otherwise faced with excessive prices. The men leading this exercise in collective solidarity, which is likely to have been informed by knowledge of the co-operative mill set up by dockyard workers at Woolwich and Chatham in 1760,50 crossed the moat to rent their first shop on what is now Sheerness High Street, and eventually took on further properties across the island (including a large warehouse that still stands beside the railway track in modern Sheerness). The Society remained a major force in the island economy into the 1960s.
Some of Sheerness’s first co-operators will also have been followers of non-conformist Christianity, represented not just by the Methodism of John Wesley but also by the small congregation of dockyard workers who had started meeting to read the scriptures after Sunday services in the 1720s, and who went on to find their leading preacher in a young shipwright named William Shrubsole. Born in Kent and raised as an apprentice in the Sheerness dockyard, Shrubsole became a devout defender of his fellow shipwrights. In 1770, when the shipwrights in the Royal dockyards were suffering under cuts imposed after the close of the Seven Years War against France and Spain, he had published a pamphlet defending their appeal for a pay-rise and testifying that, thanks to the cancellation of overtime and associated economies, “those that had families saw, with terror, Poverty, like an armed Man, making hasty strides towards them”. Convinced that poverty and moral dissolution ran together, he urged respect for his fellow shipwrights — “artificers”,51 as he insisted, who had developed their own most extraordinary integration of intelligence and skill, of reasoned calculation and practiced technique, born from years of shared learning and experience. Far from being viewed with “contempt” for the size of the “chips” they brought home, these men should be celebrated and rewarded for having perfected irreplaceable skills that were demonstrated in the final assembly of every one of the King’s ships: “To see the various and multiform pieces of timber that compose a Ship’s frame, taken from their scattered situation in the dock-yard, and placed in their proper order [to be assembled into] a 100 gun Ship &c. and with such exactness as not to require one quarter of an inch to be taken off with the adze; this to a mind capable of reflection is at once an argument for the IMMORTAL REASON of MAN, and a strong plea for the encouragement of those ingenious Artists”.52 Shrubsole insisted that the great warships built by these men were equal to the great country houses of the age. If the Royal dockyards lacked a Palladio, an Inigo Jones, or a Vanbrugh to personify their genius, this was because the “miraculous machines” they built, and which had conveyed “an idea of the glory of Britain to the remotest parts of the World”, were the products of a more social and collective kind of production. There were, to be sure, men of genius in the Royal dockyards, but they were “only part of this respectable body of men: they served a regular apprenticeship for a title to it; and rose by the gradual steps of merit to the exalted Station in which they now shine”.53 Like weapons manufacturers down the ages, Shrubsole praised the Royal Navy’s warships as bringers of “peace” to the world.
It was Shrubsole’s urgent search for redemption that would lead him and his congregation out into the world beyond the dockyard. In the 1770s, he had written and published the first edition of a Kentish retelling of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a devout “allegorical narrative” entitled Christian Memoirs, in which Blue Town, like the rest of the human world, becomes “Darkland”, a benighted kingdom full of perversion, destruction and Godless rebellion, while Sheppey’s marshes are converted into the “Slough of Despond:” a “filthy bog” covered with a thick eye-stinging fog obscuring the stones on which the faithful pilgrim must step if he is to escape “the dissolution of the world” and reach the Celestial city he seeks.54
One of the stepping stones on Shrubsole’s own pilgrimage still stands in Blue Town today. His congregation’s first premises, created in the wake of an inspiring sermon delivered by the itinerant evangelical preacher George Whitfield in 1756, could accommodate three hundred in the upper floor of a brick house on Blue Town High Street. By the 1780s, however, members of the “great congregation” and their masonic brethren had built a larger chapel of Zion, known as the Bethel Chapel, which soon went through further enlargements to accommodate the swelling congregation. It remained in service until the congregation relocated to new premises in modern Sheerness after the First World War. Having survived nearly a century of industrial use since then, it now accommodates Blue Town’s best known local industry, a cement gnome and garden ornament factory founded by a rag-and-bone merchant in 1974 and run by his son, Andre Whelan, who knows a lot about the shipbuilding methods used in the creation of the wide roof of the Bethel Chapel, and has also employed his own familiarity with moulding techniques to cover the entire imperilled structure with fibreglass (an effective conservation measure under the circumstances, although not of the kind normally recommended by English Heritage).
While something of the chaos that could be Blue Town surely reverberates in William Shrubsole’s onslaughts against drunkenness, the surviving records of the Sun Insurance Office remind us that there were people with material as well as spiritual things to lose in “the Blue Houses” by the 1790s. A considerable number of “victuallers” appear among the policyholders living here, but so do grocers, bakers, a pawnbroker, a surgeon, a dealer in china and glass, a watchmaker (he lived in the garrison), a trader in hats and a number of self-declared “gents” too.55 These were among the people who found themselves in “great anxiety of mind” when, 120 years after the Dutch invasion of She
ppey, history came ashore once again in 1797. That was the year of the famous “Mutiny of the Nore” in which sailors aboard the warships anchored offshore from Sheerness took control of much of the fleet, demanding an improvement in conditions and blocking traffic on the Thames. The people of Blue Town, mindful of the terrifying things they’d heard about the French Revolution a few years previously, feared that the rebels would come across the water and burn their ramshackle settlement to the ground. According to one eye-witness, the mutineers landed for the first time on 13 May, parading through Blue Town and the garrison with a large red flag and a band of musicians in tow. On hearing complaints at the “Old Swan”, where sick people were kept, the mutineers are said to have interrogated the doctor, Mr Saffery, with such ferocity that he was “thrown into a fever” and proceeded, during a fearful “paroxysm”, to cut his own throat.56 Despite the evident moderation of their elected “President” — by many accounts a thoroughly decent fellow named Richard Parker, who would soon enough be hanged from the yard arm for his troubles — the marauding mutineers were said to have behaved in a manner that was “sufficiently threatening to try the stoutest hearts”. They visited three hospital ships, approving two but not the third, the Spanker, and ducked, flogged and beat up both the steward and the butcher against whom complaints were also raised. Such was the panic that, by the time talks broke down and the soldiers in the garrison started firing the fort’s cannons at the mutinous fleet, Blue Town had emptied in a rush: “mothers were carrying their suckling children at their breasts, and disconsolate husbands carried their little property down to the Chatham boat”.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 22