Drains, however, could cause disputes, especially in a booming town where powerful men were already squared off against one another. While the Local Board of Health was responsible for their efficiency, the ongoing development of Sheerness actually required the filling in of a considerable number of drainage ditches (the maps of 1860/1 are full of examples marked “ditch filled in”). It was in the tension between these two undertakings that James Ward found a new front for his feud with the hated imposters from London.
In 1860, the Local Board of Health had decided — the matter was clinched by Chairman Ward, at a very lightly attended meeting — to launch a Chancery Suit against Berridge, his partner Henry Bateman Jenkins and also the Secretary of State for War, Sidney Herbert. All three stood accused of “stopping up a certain ditch butting the High-street”, and thereby interfering with the Board’s right to use it as “a ditch for sanitary purposes”.38 The ditch in question was said formerly to have served to take waste from Mile Town. However, the Commanding Royal Engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Montagu, had decided to fill it in, judging it to be a source of “malaria” that was injurious to the health of soldiers stationed in the neighbourhood. The case of Sheerness’s “Chancery Ditch” would become a source of wonder and amusement all over the country as it dragged on — and so, more locally, would the “surly, snappish, irascible, abrupt, and unpardonable”39 manner in which Chairman Ward conducted meetings. According to one witness, he ran the supposedly democratic board as nothing less than “a Star-chamber of the nineteenth century”. His response, when confronted about his tyrannical tendencies, was characteristically blunt: “I’ve power, and I will use it”,40 he told a Board meeting on 5 January 1860.
The ditch in question had, as the Solicitor to the War Office would explain, originally been cut in 1829 to differentiate the Board of Ordnance’s land from that being sold to Sir Edward Banks. It stood on the Board of Ordnance’s side of the division, but Berridge and Jenkins were included in the action because of their more recently acquired interest in the adjacent soil. Ward had plainly not learned the lesson of Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House, published nearly a decade previously and plotted around an endlessly protracted Court of Chancery case known as Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. His intemperate action in going to the Court of Chancery was deplored by a minority of members of the Local Board of Health, including the former chairman Richard Brightman, who was well disposed towards Berridge and Jenkins. Having previously proposed Jenkins for election to the Board, only to find that chairman Ward had written the word “disqualified” next to his name on the voting papers,41 Brightman now dissociated himself from this “most suicidal act”, claiming that Ward was “involving the town in an expensive lawsuit from which no good could result”.42 Demanding that the action be withdrawn, he also insisted that a simple conversation with the admirable Colonel Montagu, would have seen the matter sorted out quite amicably for a few pounds. Ward, however, was not to be deterred from the ruinous adventure into which he had launched the town’s increasingly horrified ratepayers — not, he swore, for as long as he “had a shilling in his pocket, or a shirt on his back”. He insisted that Colonel Montagu was “treating the Board as a set of nonentities”,43 and that this was exactly what they would prove to be if they buckled and withdrew.
James Ward had no time for the “memorial” these dissenting ratepayers duly presented to the Board, accusing at least one signatory of being “the worse for drink”,44 and dismissing their accusations of “trickery” as a disgrace. One of his allies declared that Mr Jenkins himself was probably the “chief author” of the memorandum and Brightman’s demand that the Chancery suit be withdrawn was thrown out by eight members to two. By this time the board had heard from the Solicitor to the War Department, who had written to insist that, since the Secretary for War, Sidney Herbert, could only be sued by petition of right, he would not be “putting either the plaintiff or the public to the expense of his appearance in this litigation”. The discovery that he had “no interest whatever” in the result meant that the case became a contest between the Local Board of Health and Berridge and Jenkins alone.
The battle dragged on through the next four years, racking up huge legal fees as it went. At first, Ward and his camp felt reinforced by the Board’s Inspector of Nuisances, who reported the ditch in question to be “an intolerable nuisance”, overgrown with weeds and with the pipe “leading from the High Street, half-full of ‘sullage’”.45 Jenkins and Berridge, meanwhile, had no intention of building a “covered drain” as the board had demanded. They would also benefit from a growing revolt among the ratepayers who convened to condemn the Local Board of Health for pursuing this “much to be regretted” course after “intrenching themselves behind their imaginary dignity”.46
The longer the case extended, the higher the cost was going to be for the losers. The ratepayers of Mile Town were definitely at risk, yet battles between absentee owners and the people of Sheerness had not invariably gone well for the offshore interests. This was the lesson of the Sheerness Gas Company, one of the first initiatives funded by outsiders who had hoped to profit from the emerging town. When the company collapsed towards the end of 1862, the shareholders had lost everything and then incurred additional liabilities when the works had to be sold for less than the outstanding mortgages on the property.
The Gas Works at West Minster: “That’s me standing by the fence in a tam o’ shanter”. “Winnie” to her aunt, “Mrs. Pass”. Postcard sent 2 May 1910
For the Sheerness Guardian, the moral of that defeat had been plain to see. The shareholders of the busted company were all “strangers” who suffered “a want of local influence”. Despite local remonstrations, they had continued to fleece the townspeople by charging “exorbitant” rates for their gas. This may indeed have been a foolish strategy in a coastal town that could easily get cheap coal from Newcastle, but there was another characteristic of Sheerness that these offshore extractors might sensibly have borne in mind. Ten years previously, in 1852, there had been complaints to the Admiralty about the co-operative ventures through which dockyard workers were provisioning themselves, thereby curtailing the profits of conventional traders in the town. Not content with creating non-conformist chapels and building societies, the workers had established coal clubs, a baker’s shop, a flour store and a grocer’s shop, the latter turning over “upwards of seven thousand pounds”.47 Thanks to these co-operative initiatives, so the objectors had declared, “private trade is very greatly injured, and the value of property much depreciated; in fact, they bid fair to ruin the trade of this place altogether”. The absentee owners of the gas company had eventually dropped their prices but too late and only after “the consumers” had taken the matter into their own practised hands, using their superior “local influence” to form their own rival company, the Sheppy Gas Consumers Company, which went on to take possession of its defeated rival’s much “depreciated” works in West Minster at a very agreeable price (the new company was still selling gas on Sheppey when the industry was nationalised in 1948).
Berridge and Jenkins would not suffer this fate. They proceeded both to divide opinion in the town and to maximise the Local Board of Health’s financial embarrassment. The two developers did what they could to extend the hearing in the Court of Chancery, thereby increasing the costs that would eventually fall on the ratepayers. They did this by their now familiar means: disputing the affidavits of the Board’s witnesses, trawling up other locals prepared to speak on their side of the case, and then submitting contrary affidavits that would necessitate yet more expensive weeks of examination by lawyers. As the already extended case of the Chancery Ditch looked as if it were finally drawing to a close, they produced no less than twenty-five such affidavits, submitting them on 21 October 1863. This act, which took place after the counsel for both sides had accepted the Lord Chancellor’s suggestion that no further evidence should be produced, provoked Thomas Morton Rigg, the founding owner and editor of the Sheer
ness Guardian, into an explosion of fury.
Like everyone else in Sheerness, Rigg knew about Mr Ward and his cronies on the Local Board of Health. He admitted their lack of process, their failure to prioritise or negotiate, their shifty way of publicly berating their own surveyor and accusing their clerk of cooking the accounts. He was, nonetheless, firmly on the side of the ratepayers of Sheerness and therefore also of the all too flawed Local Board of Health in its battle with these incoming London developers. “Thus we see”, he wrote with Jenkins rather than Ward in his sights, “what a local curse an evil-disposed person, seeking to set his will above the law and for his own profit setting public rights at nought, may become”. Berridge and Jenkins were plainly loathsome extractors bent on screwing the town from outside, but Rigg was even more excoriating about the “simpletons” who had provided affidavits for them, claiming that the ditch had actually been improved by being filled up “so as to leave only a small ‘grip’ for the passage of water”, and that the sides of the grip were actually of “stiff clay” and not silt as the Local Board of Health’s surveyor had declared. Such blockages as occurred when the sides collapsed were nothing to do with structural inadequacy, so these gullible fools had suggested, but the fault of “children jumping on them”.
Rigg published the names of the twenty-five affidavit-producing offenders (including Jenkins), listing them as they had been read out and mocked by Chairman Ward at a meeting of the Local Board of Health, where Ward had taken aim at “the parties themselves” rather than their comments. The affidavits had “the very questionable merit of cleverness in making the worst appear the better side. They are artfully concocted, so as to entirely pervert the true merits of the facts they profess to elucidate”. Some of the signatories had since admitted that they had only written what they were told to say, or that they had “only signed what they were asked to sign”. Rigg called these men “gulls”, “tools” and “traitors to the public interest”, who had given their support to “an enemy of their town”, without apparently realising that, in doing so, they were landing the cost of the Chancery Suit upon themselves and their fellow ratepayers. He recommended that, when the case of the Chancery Ditch was over, the town should “erect a monument on the site thereof”, bearing the names of each and every one of Berridge and Jenkins’s “simpletons” so that posterity could continue to pay tribute to the memory of these men who “did all that it laid in their power to do, to saddle the town with ruinous law costs, and to assist the evil-doer who forced the town into the Suit that he might evade the just desserts of his conduct”.48
The owner of the Sheerness Guardian fell victim to his own fury. He was found to be in contempt of court for his comments about Berridge, Jenkins and some of their affidavit providers, and spent thirteen days in Whitecross Street prison in London before he was released at the end of January 1864, having reluctantly published an apology of sorts and agreed to give £50 to the accused to cover their costs.49 Once at home in Sheerness, he went on to publish extracts from national papers condemning the decision to find him in contempt, insisting that “To call a man a gull is no more a slander than to call him a goose”, and that the radical Liberal politicians, Bright and Cobden, would prove themselves to be motivated by “mere party spirit” if they did not rise up against this “flagrant outrage” against the “freedom of the press”.
By that time the case known as “Chancery Ditch” had been decided against the Local Board of Health, and the Sheerness ratepayers were coming to terms with their liability for costs that would, as feared, turn out to be crippling. Faced with having to extract a sum that might well rise to £5,000 from the ratepayers, dissenting members of the Local Board of Health, continued their condemnation of their chairman Mr Ward and, in some cases, gave loud voice to the relief they found in the fact that they themselves had joined the board after the fatal decision to embark on “this miserable affair”.50
Slight consolation was provided by the defeated board’s much harangued surveyor, who reported at the meeting of 1 March 1864 that there was plenty of water in the well his contractor was then drilling on the board’s orders — “ample to drown Sheerness” as he reassured (or threatened) the residents of this flood-prone place where the high tides had already demonstrated their ability to reverse the flow of sewage in the Local Board of Health’s drains. This was another problem in which chairman Ward had a personal interest: at the board’s first meeting of 1864, he had demanded that the surveyor give priority to sorting out “the inconvenience and damage arising from drain pipes which ran through his back garden, when the tide got into them”.51 Berridge and Jenkins, were not sympathetic. Having humiliated the board, they went on, in March 1864, to send the authority a bill for £250 in “compensation” for sewers passing through their land, a demand that the board rejected as, in the words of Mr Thomas, “only another money-making job out of ratepayers’ pockets”.52
The case of the Chancery Ditch can be registered as a founding moment in the development of the Isle of Sheppey’s libertarian mistrust of the improving potentialities of the reforming state. It was as a direct result of this affair, in 1868, that the town’s recently formed second newspaper, the Sheerness Times, felt obliged to defend the new approach to local government against a strong tide of contrary opinion: “There are some people who appear to think that the existence of a Local Board of Health in a town is an evil and a misfortune, to be deplored alike at all times and under any circumstances”.53 The people who had pressed for this form of local government, including the social reformer Edwin Chadwick, were loudly reviled for their interfering creations, and the wildest accusations abounded in the town: “so blind is this prejudice that we have but recently heard it gravely contended that our present Water Supply is worse than it was in the historic days of donkey-barrels and small buckets”. People seemed to delight in knocking the Local Board of Health, without being troubled by, or even aware of, the fact that they as ratepayers were likely to find the bill arriving on their doorstep. The problem, concluded the paper, was not with the system, but with Mr Ward and the other incompetent men who had been elected to office thanks in part, so it was suggested, to the manoeuvres of a “partisan” returning officer who had no conception of the duties of his office.
Berridge Exposed
Jenkins cut a familiar profile in Sheerness but where, as people may have wondered as the case of the Chancery Ditch dragged towards its dishevelled conclusion, was his senior partner Richard Berridge? Before the Chancery Ditch fiasco was over the people of Sheerness had seen this remote speculator engulfed by a scandal that may have done quite a lot to raise spirits even among the town’s disgusted chapel-goers. “Very fair, rather stout, with large whiskers and moustache, and his hair beautifully combed and parted down the back”.54 That is how Marine Town’s absentee developer was described, in December 1862, by the landlady from whom he had earlier rented lodgings at Dorothy Cottage, Highgate, for the use of a certain “Mrs Faulkner” together with her new born daughter. “Mrs Faulkner” was said to have described Berridge as her “guardian and banker”. He was actually, as would be admitted in one of the most widely reported divorce proceedings of 1862, her lover and the father of her baby.
As the hearing continued, it emerged that “Mrs Faulkner” was actually the wife of Major William Forster, who had been born in India and spent his life in the Indian Army, and she had been sent to England with her four surviving children for reasons said to be connected to her own health. Arriving in London in 1854, Mrs Forster had met Richard Berridge at 40 Bloomsbury Square, where they both lodged in the house of Mr and Mrs Dove (Mr Dove was said to be “connected with Sir H. Meux’s brewery”,55 of which Berridge was then a junior partner). Berridge continued to visit her when, after six months or so, she moved east to 12 Heathcote Street, a detached house near Mecklenburgh Square. In the summer of 1858, he found lodgings for her at Gravesend, roughly halfway to Sheerness, before moving her back to Highgate. A servant who worked fo
r Mrs Forster in 1858, claimed to have seen them “lying on a sofa” together.56 She had also found the door to the drawing door unexpectedly locked on occasions when he was in the house. Ditto the bedroom — where the couple were said sometimes to have dined together.
Major Forster’s counsel claimed that, having seduced his client’s wife, Berridge had abandoned her as soon as the child was born — an unutterable dog, in other words, whose own former butler was happy to testify about the confrontations that followed. Thomas Sandolf told the court how the outraged Mrs Forster used to turn up unannounced at Berridge’s house in Bloomsbury to berate him for the “niggardly way he was a supporting the child”. She plainly made a proper nuisance of herself, pushing her way into the dining room when he was entertaining, returning to engage him in his counting house as he was preparing to attend the Derby, and not leaving until she had ripped his shirt. Another lady, a former friend of Mrs Forster’s who was dining there at the time of one of Mrs Forster’s unwanted visits, ended up “hiding in a closet”, from which she could only be released when, after many hours of wrangling and recrimination, Berridge was persuaded to leave the house on the accurate expectation that Mrs Forster would follow him out of the door to continue accusing him in the street.
While not denying the charges, Berridge and Mrs Forster chose to pursue an aggressive line of defence, claiming that their behaviour had been provoked by “desertion, wilful neglect, adultery, and other conduct” on the part of Major Forster himself. Their counterattack rested on the allegation that the unhappy Major, while sailing from India in order to prosecute this case, had become friendly with an allegedly invalid and less than entirely vigorous Lieutenant Ellis and his wife, and then started his own affair with Mrs Ellis. Berridge and his lawyers had mustered some unlikely witnesses to support these charges, having persuaded Major Forster’s own sister and daughter to attest that they had heard him commend Mrs Ellis for her beauty. More lurid details were contributed by various wide-eyed servants, who offered snapshots of the Major volunteering to lace up Mrs Ellis’s dresses as tightly as only he could, or eyeing her charms through an open door while she faced him, “quite naked” in a hip bath. These witnesses failed to convince the judge that they had not been paid for their testimony, and Mrs Ellis was not obliged to testify. Firmly directed by the judge, the jury found against Berridge, who was ordered to pay not the £10,000 demanded on behalf of Major Forster but the still considerable sum of £5,000 in damages — the same as the estimated cost that fell on the ratepayers of Sheerness thanks to the loss of the Chancery Ditch case.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 25