The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  The Bethel Chapel, Blue Town.

  The warren of ale houses, hotels, shops, shacks and alleys forming Blue Town was only the first phase of landed settlement at Sheerness and, by the early nineteenth century, a lot was running against it. There were still fewer than one thousand people living there in 1821, when the Morning Post commended the idea of “throwing down the blue houses”57 and laying out a new town on the far side of the moat as the builder Edward Banks proposed to do now that his work on Rennie’s new dockyard was approaching completion. By 1827, indeed, it was reported that “the greater part of the old dilapidated houses which flanked the dockyard at its eastern extremity have been pulled down, and others are still destined to share the same fate” as the dockyard was expanded and the point at Sheerness turned into “an almost impregnable fortress”.58 More of Blue Town was razed to make way for the high dockyard wall that still runs along the north side of its High Street, and further destruction was caused by a huge fire in 1830.

  Less drastic forms of improvement were also tried. In 1847, Blue Town’s unruly denizens were confronted with a new County Court House, planted among the public houses in a building previously known as the Emporium (at the first session, Judge James Espinasse, Esq., heard a colourful assortment of cases in which unpaid debts were the prevailing cause of offence, including one owed by a defendant who “rejoiced” in the name of Thomas Wellington Waterloo Spiers59). The evangelical voice of Christian redemption continued to oppose the chaotic vitality of Blue Town, insisting that even the most debased might find “fields of delight” in the scriptures. The unsanitary nature of the marsh on which Blue Town actually floated was also still attracting condemnation, by now based on considerably more scientific terms than were possible in the days when “marsh fever” may have contributed to the passing of William Shrubsole: his demise, in his sixty-seventh year on 6 February 1797, is said to have started with “a shivering aguish fit”, after which he took to his bed, fell into sleep, and died without waking, even when “his whole frame agitated with convulsions”.

  The Humanity of Drains

  The population had risen to little short of four thousand by 1858, when a long and closely informed letter to the London Daily News condemned Blue Town as a deplorable threat to the fighting power of the British Navy.60 The writer, who wrote under the name “Sanitarius”, was reacting not to the allegedly lawlessness of the haphazard settlement beyond the dockyard wall, but to the fact that a quarterly report from the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages had revealed Sheerness to have “the highest average of death and disease in … the valley of the Thames”.61 London was showing definite signs of progress, thanks to ongoing work to improve sanitation and water supply, but the Isle of Sheppey, which actually shared its distinction with other places on the Thames Estuary, was singled out as “a type” of the marshy districts, in which mortality was raised from seventeen to twenty-four in one thousand due chiefly to “the noxious emanations from a rich ill-drained soil”.

  Extracted in the Morning Post, the Registrar-General’s report had described how the people of Sheppey showed “that pallid blue aspect which characterises aguish districts; they frequently suffer from ague, and sometimes from typhoid fever”. It had also noted that “a considerable number of men in the Sheerness dockyard and in the ships on the station have been struck down and disabled by fevers during the present year”. This was, so the report had declared, a consequence of the fact that much of Sheppey consisted of “marsh, drained imperfectly by ditches containing stagnant water and putrid vegetable and animal matter. The owners of this property are absentees, and the tenants mostly commit their farms to the care of a bailiff. No effort is made at improvement by the small occupiers, although experience has shown that the investment of money in the deep effectual drainage of the marsh is remunerative in a high degree”.

  The accusation here levelled against landowners and farmers was supported by a statistical analysis proving beyond doubt the value of improvements of the kind achieved over the previous four years — with the help of funds from the Government Drainage Fund — at the 439-acre Rayham Farm on the Isle of Sheppey. Without such commitment, the owners of marshland on both sides of the estuary would continue to “prejudice the health of the inhabitants, and deter people from building in the neighbourhood”. It was evident to the Registrar-General that “a large portion of our naval reserve may be paralysed by ague and fever at the very time that it may be called upon to fight. A force that lives in an aguish atmosphere is necessarily enervated, and loses some of its courage. It cannot be always ready to meet the enemies of England at the gate with the Thames and the Medway”. Although four decades still had to pass before Sir Ronald Ross established (through investigations carried out in India) that malaria was actually spread by Anopheles mosquitos, enough was known about the “miasma” emanating from stagnant water for the Registrar-General to declare it a matter of national interest that “Sheerness should be immediately drained and supplied with pure water”.

  Drain, Blue Town, Sheerness, 2016.

  “Sanitarius”, whose letter was published in the London Daily News nineteen months later, on 28 December 1858, was in no doubt about the lessons to be drawn from the Registrar’s warning. In his view, the scandalous “insalubrity” of Sheerness stemmed from a complete failure on the part of government authorities to exploit increasingly well understood principles of sanitation (he was thinking of the arguments associated with the reformer Sir Edwin Chadwick, and turned into policy by the Public Health Act of 1848) in “the humanity of preserving life”.62 The “perquisites of science and common sense” had been applied at Windsor, to ensure that Queen Victoria, who had recently been evacuated for her own safety, was able to return to her upriver castle without being poisoned by “deleterious gases”, but nothing at all had been done for the poor and blighted downriver souls of Sheerness. Here, indeed, “the public service has actually caused the evil”.

  The justification for that assertion was provided by the condition of Blue Town, which “Sanitarius” plainly knew well:

  There is no efficient outfall for drainage in Blue Town. Surface open gutters along the middle of narrow lanes and alleys are the receptacles for all household slops; the water slowly flows down them in wet weather, at other times the obstructed moisture lies, throwing up its miasma to crowded (often half-ruinous) two-storey houses; a few cabbage stalks make an overflow for yards. Oozing cesspools lie beyond, and the barriers of dock wall on one side and ramparts on the other keep off sun and sea breeze. All is squalid and unsightly — a crowded den for humanity, inferior to habitations of Arabs, nay, even Kurds, marsh and sea-bank with one single aperture for storm water close in the rear, but no system of drains and sluices, as found everywhere in Holland and Belgium … In Blue Town the one public well has been useless for years. Three thousand people and more positively have no water but that given them on sufferance by a tap to the dockyard Artesian well, allowed to run under protection of a sentry, for one hour at noon and one in the evening.

  It was true that water could be bought at the cost of a penny for three buckets, but this meant that it was kept in pans in rooms “to the great injury of house dwellers”. No wonder, then, that “children are dirty and floors unwashed”. As for the possibility of creating common wells, there was no point trying to sink them in the area — they merely filled with brackish sea water — unless they, like the dockyard well, were sufficiently engineered to penetrate through the London Clay “200 or 300 yards below”.

  Illness was endemic given “the old island ague-breeding marsh”, but the lack of adequate sanitation in Blue Town had added typhoid to the lethal mix. Whichever version he contracted, “the fever-struck dockyard labourer had little chance of recovery”. His home rendered it impossible. “After sundry attacks he is discharged, or he leaves of his own accord. Even the record of death is not allowed, as a warning in Sheerness. In the narrow rooms dames’ schools become nests of disease, and c
hildren come home pale and haggard. A ragged school has latterly been started with apparent good hope, but hospitals, dispensaries, clubs, savings’ banks — even a magistrate are English luxuries unknown”.

  “Sanitarius” conceded that the climate was disadvantageous and the population devoid “of the protection of the upper classes”, who knew better than to live in such areas. “Three-fourths of the evil” was preventable, however, and there was an additional reason why the situation must be addressed by the government. The high incidence of “fever and ague” in the dockyard revealed that the squalor of Blue Town was “sapping the strength of men who are often called on for sudden exertion”. Considering the nation’s reliance on its dockyards — not just the labourers but also the riggers, shipwrights, engineers, firemen, and A. B. seamen — it was fair to conclude that “our neglect of justice and humanity will otherwise recoil upon ourselves as it has often done before”.

  16. FRITZ J. RADDATZ’S PERAMBULATION

  Sheerness, Ordnance Survey map c. 1865 (dockyard and garrison blanked out top left).

  Johnson was well settled by 1977, when he wrote to the chief literary critic of the West German newspaper Die Zeit, providing a “description of the route” this flamboyant man of letters should follow when he joined the select list of intellectual and literary figures who came from both sides of the divided Germany to visit him in Sheerness.1 Fritz J. Raddatz was to start by taking a taxi to Victoria Station from outside his London hotel (Johnson recommended Brown’s in Mayfair partly because William Faulkner used to stay there, and no doubt also on the safe assumption that Raddatz would be travelling on an expenses account). Johnson then detailed every stage of the journey until Raddatz stepped off the train that had hauled him past the “great hulking steel mill” then standing on Well Marsh, south across the track from Blue Town, before finally depositing him at the terminal named “Sheerness-on-Sea”. After leaving the station, Raddatz was to cross the road and “walk towards the notice board with the city map that you will have long since noticed diagonally across from you next to the phone boxes. Then all you have to do is go right on the High Street, then left on Broadway until it turns into Marine Parade. It’s number 26, you have to knock because the bell is broken”.

  A short perambulation, then, during which, we are free to hope, Raddatz may have registered more of the history written into the town’s buildings than Johnson’s earlier visitors appear to have done. As he left the railway station behind him, he entered what may be the only authentically Georgian town in England that remains unbothered by tourists. Step out to photograph a building here, and you risk an unexpected response along the lines of the one I once got from a group of young mothers on the pavement: “Are you from the council, then?”

  Starting just across the road from the once free-standing hotel, No. 1 High Street (one of several island addresses at which Horatio Nelson is said to have stayed), Raddatz set out along streets that still testify to the vision, industry and founding ambition of Sir Edward Banks.

  Having completed the new docks, to which various architects would add notable buildings over the following years, the late John Rennie’s builder set about laying out a new town on the considerable acreage of land he had acquired across the moat to the south-east of both Blue Town and the dockyard. In the respectful words of Sheppey’s early-twentieth-century historian, “it was owing, in a great measure, to his commercial acumen and foresight that many unsightly old rookeries were demolished, and in their place rows of elegant terraces and streets erected, imparting much of the charm which pertains to this healthful seaside resort to-day”.2 Whatever the success of Banks’ attempt to create bricks from the clay beneath the “salts, or wastelands” lying next to the beach on his newly acquired Sheerness estate,3 his transformation of the town remains unmistakeable. Not content with founding the settlement that Victorian speculators would further expand, Banks initiated Sheerness’s longstanding and, to some, preposterously unlikely quest for reinvention as a fashionable seaside “resort” rather than just another dependent barrack or, in the words William Cobbett had used to deplore the war-funded expansion of Chatham a few years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, another rash of vile “white swellings” and “odious wens”4 thrown up at public expense to accommodate soldiers, sailors, dockyard workers and their families.

  The Broadway from the Crescent

  Thanks to its proximity to the dockyard, the first new town here came to be known as Mile Town, and Fritz J. Raddatz can hardly have failed to notice that the shops, pubs and cafes on its High Street had escaped anything like the so-called “economic miracle” that had transformed bombed-out towns and cities in West Germany over the post-war decades. Unaware of the guidance provided by the appropriate Kentish volume of the Leipzig-born German émigré Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s survey, The Buildings of England, he may still have been surprised, on reaching the Crescent, by the grace with which the buildings here curved back to reveal a well-defined semi-circular space that reaches out of the past to counter any more recent sense of desolation. The neo-classical Crescent retains the ornate iron clock tower that Johnson cited as both a landmark and a seasonal target for drunken climbers on New Year’s Eve (the most recent edition of Pevsner’s Kent: North East and East dismisses this implant of 1902 as “showy but stunted”5). Although the gentleman’s outfitter Burton has long since withdrawn, the windows abandoned by this once design-conscious company — founded in 1903 by a Jewish refugee from pogroms in the Russian Empire who went on to thrive as Sir Montague Burton — still promise Sheerness its place on a gilded roster of more prosperous towns and cities around the British Isles: Dublin, Bristol, Southampton, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester…

  Turning left off the High Street at the Crescent, Die Zeit’s feuilletonist had already entered a district known as “Banks Town” in its early days, which extended east along a street called “Edward Street”. The three-storey flat-fronted terraces on either side of “The Broadway”, as this spinal street was later renamed, are modest in comparison to Adelphi Terrace, the Adam brothers’ neoclassical development off the Strand in London where Banks maintained his London address. They do, however, and as is duly registered in the Pevsner guide, persist in “the classical idiom” initiated by the Crescent.

  Like John Newman, the peppery English architectural historian responsible for Pevsner’s two Kentish volumes, Raddatz may have felt inclined to shield his eyes as he walked along the Broadway. It was, as this hunter of Kentish monstrosities had warned, on the north side of the street that “the choicest specimens of the town’s secular architecture are arrayed. None is good and most are exceedingly bad”.6 First up was the “pompous” porch and “colossal” windows of the “ebulliently self-confident” redbrick and terracotta Conservative Club, a men-only bastion in a gross version of the Queen Anne style, where members might at least take a bath even if they could not afterwards sink into deep leather armchairs of the type Uwe Johnson had placed in his Institute for the Preservation of British Customs in New York. Dated 1897, and opened a decade after the club itself was inaugurated “under very auspicious circumstances”7 by the Under Secretary for War, there is certainly no mistaking this grandiose monument to the conservative political culture of the dockyard (as one dockyard worker explained to the sociologist Ray Pahl in the late Seventies, “the Tories are the people for war, they support that kind of thing and they were the people for a big navy, big army, you see, so you’d have a job to get the people in the dockyard to vote Labour”8). Banks Town resumed after that disruptive late-Victorian implant, but the return to earlier modesty was not necessarily a consolation. Newman found Holy Trinity Church, a commissioners’ or “Waterloo” church on the south side of the street, to be “unimpressive”, “most uninteresting” and built in “a wretched lancet style”.9 Designed by G.L. Taylor, previously responsible for the “exceedingly grand” Garrison Church outside the entrance to the dockyard, this lesser building stood on land p
rovided by Edward Banks and had been consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury on the last day of August 1836.10 A few more paces brought Raddatz to another redbrick interruption on the north side, this one still named the Royal Hotel but actually a late-Victorian replacement for the considerable and, of course, roughly neoclassical mansion that Edward Banks had built here in the 1820s.

  Edward Street, Sheerness-on-Sea (postcard sent August 1910).

  Known at first as Kent House, Banks’s sea-facing version of the Royal Hotel had sat back from the road a little to the east of its successor, with the six fluted columns of its portico (a loose version of “Greek Doric”, so the present editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides informs me11), facing extensive gardens stretching down to the sea. In April 1827, it was reported that the Admiralty were buying the recently completed building with its ten acres of grounds as a residence for the Port Admiral of Medway, who was to be moved from Chatham to Sheerness.12 This arrangement never came off and, on 11 June that year, Banks would advertise the building briefly known as “Kent House” as available for lease with its original purpose once again in mind. His notice in the Morning Post described it as a “new, large, and commodious hotel, with coach house for four carriages, stable for sixteen horses, large garden, with green and hot houses, and every convenience”.13 He also assured applicants brave enough to consider buying into his speculative vision that “a steamboat will run from London to the above hotel every day”. Banks had over-reached himself with that last promise. The military authorities may have helped to ensure that the new pier he had apparently imagined building out into the sea directly in front of his hotel never happened, but the steamboats were by no means an idle fantasy. In 1824, he and his building partner William Jolliffe had founded the world’s first General Steam Navigation Company, and both of the company’s first vessels, the Lord Melville and the Royal Sovereign, had visited Sheerness a year previously for the opening of the new dockyard basins. Although a daily service to Banks Town was not to be, it would be reported three and a half years later that the Royal Hotel’s winter balls, where aspiring guests were encouraged to look forward to meeting an admiral among other senior officers from the dockyard, were “rapidly rising in estimation”.14