“Benevolence” Carnival assembly at the Royal Hotel, Banks Town, Sheerness. Photo: Robert Israel Hider, c. 1890.
The General Steam Navigation Company would soon concentrate its efforts on the more profitable business of sailing excursionists between London and Margate. Banks, however, had established himself in local reputation as both the entrepreneurial founder of the new town and a generous benefactor who, in a cruel winter, would in the most “handsome and liberal manner” produce £100 to be distributed among the poor of the neighbourhood in the form of “warm clothing”.15 His vision of “Banks Town” as a resort for respectable Londoners had won influential supporters on the island, including the self-declared “inhabitant of Sheerness” who, in August 1833, cited the coming of gas lighting among the increasingly civilised charms of a town that could surely be made into “one of the finest watering places in the kingdom”. It only remained for the residents to “bestir themselves” a little more vigorously by, for example, campaigning for a bridge to be built across the Swale or setting up a company that really would run steamships into the town.16 There was further praise for Sir Edward’s new resort a week or so later, when his son Delamark (who may conceivably have been that very same concerned “inhabitant”) went to the Wellington Inn in Mile Town to chair a meeting of two hundred people, who resolved to establish a “Sheerness and London Steam Packet Company” (shares are said to have been “taken with spirit”),17 which promised to take up the unfulfilled challenge of bringing visitors from London to the pier that was by then about to be built out into the Medway from Blue Town.
Only fifteen years previously, so a self-described “Citizen of the World” informed readers of the Kentish Gazette, Sheerness had been “a dirty bustling sea-port” with its streets “(if such they could be called) full of drunken sailors and their partners”.18 That, however, was not to be the story in “Banks Town”. As proof of the town’s ongoing transformation from a disease-infested military “wen” to a resort for urbane visitors, both the Kentish Gazette and the Morning Post quoted heavily from a description of the now “considerable” town provided in the publisher Samuel Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary of England. Looking out from the low cliffs near Minster, Lewis’ witness ignored the mosquito-infested marshes behind him, inviting readers to concentrate instead on what was surely “one of the most splendid and interesting views in the kingdom — the German Ocean on the east; the Thames and Medway bearing innumerable vessels of all sizes, with the town and harbour of Sheerness to the north and west; and the fertile valleys of Kent, with the Medway winding through them, and the towns and villages interspersed, towards the south, combine in presenting diversity and sublimity of landscape rarely excelled”.19 There were by now bathing machines on the beach in Mile Town, and the “great scarcity” of fresh water was also being remedied. “Subscription wells” had been sunk to a depth of 350 ft, requiring their workmen to burn their way through a “complete prostrate forest” discovered at two hundred feet, samples of which were welcomed by learned museums as “a remarkable confirmation of the history of the Deluge”. As for Sir Edward Banks’s Sheppey home at Red House Farm, which stood on Halfway Road to the south-east of the town, he had by this time replaced it with Sheppey Court, thereby giving the no longer so thoroughly shunned island a two-storey country house in Greek Revival style.
As the central institution of “Bank’s Town”, the Royal Hotel would remain open for business through much of the nineteenth century. By 1843, when Mr J.T. Smithson was the proprietor, it was commended for being fitted up in “a very superior manner”, for having splendid views on both sides that a sensitive guest might spend many happy hours sketching, and for possessing its own “omnibus” with which to convey guests to and from the pier in Blue Town. No less a figure than the Bishop of Nova Scotia was said to have declared himself “highly gratified” with its comforts after a recent visit.20
The nineteenth-century proprietors of the Royal Hotel tend to appear in the local papers on two accounts. They feature positively as stalwart and welcoming hosts in advertisements designed to attract visitors and continue the work of pressing back against the dismal impressions created by Blue Town. The good things were still in place in 1863, when a new proprietor advertised the “Extensive and Well-arranged Premises” as “a cheap and comfortable Hotel to sojourn at … The Hotel faces the Sea, and the excellent beach for bathing is approached from the lawn”.21 They also feature in court reports thanks to troublemakers from the other Sheerness, who might rob the place, smash its windows or, if still just unruly boys, rampage about in the proprietor’s ten-acre garden and hurl clods of earth at any gardener who tried to see them off.22
By that time, both Sir Edward Banks and his son Delamark were long gone. Their best tribute may be the one paid by the president of the Gravesend Mechanics Institute, the Rev. Dr Joynes, while speaking at that organisation’s first annual meeting on 19 January 1839. Having made his stand against those who seemed to consider it wise to keep the working class ignorant and, indeed, to abandon its “mechanics” to the ruinous attractions of “the gaming table and the tap room”, he asked the assembled company to consider the case of the late Sir Edward, a great prodigy who had surely proved by personal example that “knowledge is power”.23 Having started out as a humble labourer, Sir Edward had “risen to rank and wealth by the exertion of his own thoughts upon the substances around him”. Joynes also praised Delamark as the loyal son who actually lived on the island and was “liberally using the riches acquired by the skill and industry of his parent, and gladdening the hearts of the poor on the very soil where his parent worked”. The President’s words were commended by the assembled mechanics: “‘Hear, Hear’ and loud applause”.
Marine Town and the Battle over England’s Most Notorious Ditch
The ongoing economic slump and the dust and yellowish grime from the Blue Town steel mill being what they were, Fritz J. Raddatz may hardly have noticed that — having avoided “Blue Town”, as people arriving by train now do, and passed through the remnants of both “Mile Town” and “Banks Town” — he had entered a fourth new “town” as he walked east along the Broadway. By the time he reached the junction with “Berridge Road”, he was in a district known as “Marine Town”. This Victorian extension of Sheerness was created by a later generation of developers who may be said, no less than Sir Edward Banks and his son Delamark, to have exercised their will on “the substances around them”. There was, however, less likelihood of the feuding founders of Marine Town being praised for their virtues by vicars in nearby estuarial towns.
Berridge Road, Marine Town, Sheerness.
Having once lived near Rochester on the Medway, Richard Berridge did have some Kentish connections to start with. Like Sir Edward Banks before him, however, he conducted his affairs from smart addresses — 36 Bloomsbury Square and later 18 Great Russell Street — in London. He was managing partner in the brewery of Sir Henry Meux, whose father had owned the Horse Shoe Brewery where the Dominion Theatre now stands in Tottenham Court Road (the firm was notorious for the “London Beer Flood” of 1814, in which a vast deluge of beer escaped from collapsing vats, drowning at least eight people as it engulfed surrounding buildings in the poor area of St Giles). Berridge and his managing partner Henry Bateman Jenkins (the son of an engraver, who was also in the employment of Meux and Co.), acquired a great deal of the marshland on which modern Sheerness now stands at the sale of Delamark Banks’ estate in Sheerness in August 1852. Their timing was fortuitous, since the Crimean War, which opened the following year, brought a great boom to the dockyard and, by extension, to the rapidly developing eastern quarter that would become Marine Town. Sheerness would never match the California gold rush, but there was definitely money to be made, and all the more safely so given the government’s reliance on the dockyard and garrison.
Marine Town, so the Sheerness Times declared in 1873, had “the date of its origin indelibly fixed upon it”. It owed everything to the b
oom brought to the Admiralty dockyard by an Anglo-French expedition against the Russian Empire that required — as Uwe Johnson might have gathered from his copy of Denis Judd’s The Crimean War — separate British fleets in both the Baltic and the Black Sea. To this day, the memory of this war, during which Sheerness gained two prison hulks full of captured Russian soldiers24 as well as greatly increased demand for more conventional accommodation, was inscribed in the names of the area’s streets, terraces and pubs too: the Hero of Crimea, the Napier Tavern, and the Heights of Alma, which Johnson could glimpse from his back window. Such was the momentum that the rising town gained from this victorious conflict, that the patriotic inhabitants of Marine Town had been joined by the Sheerness Guardian in renaming the entire area “the Crimea”.25
“Marine Town” appears to have started out as little more than the Napier Tavern and, teetering on the seafront opposite, the exuberantly ornamented Neptune Terrace, which Pevsner dates rather approximately to the 1840s. Four years after Berridge and Jenkins acquired large areas of the “One-hundred-acre Field” on which cricket matches and agricultural shows had customarily been held, the Kentish Independent advertised an auction of new Marine Town properties to be held by the London-based estate agent Mr H.W. Rowlstone. On the evening of 7 October 1856 he would come to the Napier Tavern, then a free-standing building on a track that had yet to become part of The Broadway, to auction off fifteen “brick-built cottages” in Green Street, all of them let to “very respectable tenants” and in much demand, together with five “brick-built houses” in Napier Terrace, directly to the east of the tavern.26 It was anticipated that the houses would prove “most desirable for small capitalists”. They would be offered on ninety-nine-year leases, thereby “avoiding the fines and expenses resulting from the objectionable practice of leases dependent upon lives, so much the practice in Sheppey”. The town, meanwhile, was “rapidly improving”, and prospective purchasers were also made aware of “the great increase of families consequent upon the important, and permanent enlargement of the Government Establishments”,27 which rendered such housing “most valuable”. Further sales followed in March 1857, when Mr Rowlstone returned to auction off another clutch of new houses, including fourteen in Constantia Terrace (built by Berridge and Jenkins on open ground directly to the south of the Napier Tavern), and more in both Napier Terrace and Green Street, now known as Berridge Road. By this time, “the great scarcity of housing in the area” had been further increased by demand “consequent upon the ongoing construction of the Sittingbourne and Sheerness railway”.28
Looking West from Marine Parade, with Neptune Terrace to the right and Marine Terrace to the left (postcard, sent 1910)
Two years later it was announced that, having already disposed of some of their land for building purposes, Berridge and Jenkins, the latter now well-established as Berridge’s man on the ground in Sheerness, proposed to lay out the remainder in streets on which “several hundred houses”29 might be built. By this time, the new railway line was in service, having carried its first train to the terminal at Blue Town in time for the official opening on 19 July 1860. This transformative connection with the mainland is said to have been welcomed in “an exceedingly enthusiastic manner” by thousands of islanders. There were ovations and toasts. A band played on the platform and a “magnificent déjeuner à la fourchette” was laid on for the visiting dignitaries, some of whom were still reeling from “a most unpardonable piece of negligence” committed by the 13th Kent Artillery Volunteers, who had been invited to fire a welcoming salute over the arriving train. Unfortunately, one of the amateur “gunners” had aimed his cannon too low and fired “point blank” into the carriages full of important personages, so that “one gentleman was thrown from his seat, and a second was injured in the face, a third had his head ‘twisted round’, a fourth suffered a severe cut in the forehead, and many others were exceedingly annoyed”.30
This embarrassment did nothing to slow the development of the town on the far side of the moat. By 1861, things were going so well that the auctioneering estate agent, Mr Rowlstone, had himself bought into Sheerness, becoming the new proprietor of the late Sir Edward Banks’ Royal Hotel. By this time Berridge’s partner, H.B. Jenkins, was arranging for the construction of “a number of small tenements” that would “adjoin ‘the Crimea’” on the western side and lead into Mile Town High Street.31 It was, however, as they pressed on to the east of Napier Tavern that Berridge and Jenkins came up against their most formidable local rival. As Melville and Co.’s Directory and Gazetteer of Kent for 1858 had declared of the area in which Johnson’s house appears to stand, “there are many new buildings springing up, which form a separate district called Ward’s Town”.32
If Berridge and Jenkins achieved a reputation unlike that of the “heart-gladdening” Bankses, this may partly have been due to their habit of using the courts, rather more than good works and charitable donations, to advance their interests. In their early dealings at Sheerness, they could reasonably have assumed the sympathy of better-off residents as they set about squashing the claims of a bunch of desperadoes in Blue Town. In July 1856, a judge at the Kent Assizes in Maidstone heard a case concerning two cottages and a beer-shop named the Fishing Smack.33 Messrs Meux and Co., the brewery with which both Berridge and Jenkins were already associated, had bought the properties for £120 from an indebted owner named John Benstead in 1849. They then sold them on for £150 to a Sheerness innkeeper named Nathanial Woodhard, who had never been able to get the Bensteads to vacate the premises. Indeed, John Benstead’s son, Robert, had subsequently claimed to be the true owner of the properties, declaring that he, rather than his father, had bought them in 1839 with money made by various means including “hovelling” (i.e. assisting — although the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that this Kentish word could also imply activities indistinguishable from looting — distressed ships) with the help of his “whaler”.
By the time the Fishing Smack had been recovered, Sir Henry Meux, the prodigiously wealthy Hertfordshire MP who had inherited the brewery Meux & Co. on his father’s death in 1841, was providing the nation with a different kind of entertainment. In 1855, and somewhere far from Sheerness, his eye had fallen on the nineteen-year old daughter of Lord Ernest Brudenell-Bruce. He had married Lady Louisa Caroline Brudenell Bruce in January 1856 and a son was born not long afterwards. Sadly, though, Sir Henry had also started to behave strangely. His young wife claimed that the first sign of his distemper only occurred in September 1856: while stalking deer in Scotland, Meux had developed certain “delusions” about the number of stags he had bagged.34 Other reports suggest that he also peppered a fellow sportsman on a shoot in Cambridgeshire. In 1858 a Commission of Lunacy declared him insane and incompetent to manage his affairs: a verdict delivered after a long and very public hearing in which his three disgruntled sisters tried unsuccessfully to push the origins of his madness far enough into the past to invalidate a recent codicil to his will, in which he bequeathed his vast fortune to his infant son and, should this beneficiary die, to his wife — without so much as a penny retained for them.
After Sir Henry’s withdrawal, Berridge and Jenkins fought their battles over Sheerness under their own names. Their primary antagonist appears to have been Mr James Ward, the solicitor who was trying to turn his stretch of marsh to the east of “Marine Town” into “Ward’s Town”. As the owner of land directly adjacent to Berridge and Jenkins’s property, Mr Ward claimed that these London extractors had no right to assume public use of the track — Marine Parade in the making — crossing his land towards Minster. This claim was also a matter of controversy for the Local Board of Health, the elected governing body that was responsible for paving the public road that some of its members also wanted to see along the shore between Marine Town and Cheyney Rock to the east. At a meeting of the board in December 1859, Jenkins had informed the Chairman — none other than Mr James Ward himself — that he would not allow residents and owners of
the “new town” he and Berridge were creating to be inconvenienced by Ward’s outrageous claim. “It was”, he said, “a monstrous pretence for any man holding a public position, and an unparalleled act of presumption, to lay claim to a portion of a public roadway”.35
Ward lost his case as a private land owner in “Ward’s Town”, but he found another way of attacking Berridge and Jenkins. Founded through an election of qualified property-owning ratepayers on 29 August 1849, Sheerness’s Local Board of Health governed the developing town under legislation designed to prevent cholera and other waterborne diseases.36 At first, the two brewers may have felt encouraged by reports not just that the members of this new local authority had resolved to spend £10,000 on “extensive operations” to improve “this place, which has so long been notorious for its agues, arising chiefly from the want of drainage”, but also, that “the government” was likely to bear “a portion of this expense”, since “the population consists almost entirely of the military artisans employed in the dockyard, and others in government employ”.37 They would surely also have approved of some of the board’s later decisions — including its determination to stop “night soil” being gathered in Blue Town and spread on the ground between Constantia Terrace and the Royal Hotel, i.e. in the heart of their new developments at Marine Town.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 24