However badly things may have gone for Mrs Forster and her daughter, the London developer whose name adorns “Berridge Road” survived this scandal, and would continue to rise, as his various businesses flourished, through an ever improving series of addresses — from Bloomsbury to a splendid house named The Cedars overlooking the Thames in Putney, and then, apparently, to Knowle Hall near Bridgewater in Somerset. In 1873, some five years before he finally retired from Meux and Co., Berridge bought Ballynahinch Castle, a vast sporting estate in Galway, which he and later his son would improve and redevelop. By the time of his death in 1887, the developer of Marine Town had become the largest landowner in Ireland, where his 170,000 acres dwarfed the mere seventy-nine he held in Kent.
Berridge’s partner, Henry Bateman Jenkins, had died in 1871. On his side too, though, upriver people would continue to benefit from the streets Uwe Johnson could survey from his back window. Jenkins left his property to his brother, Joseph John Jenkins, also of 5 Newman St, off Oxford Street.57 An engraver as well as a long-standing member of the Old Society of Painters in Watercolours, Joseph Jenkins achieved some reputation as a painter of domestic and theatrical subjects (he captured the young actress and abolitionist Fanny Burney before she moved to America) as well as bucolic rural scenes. He was unmarried, and after his death in 1885, his share of Sheerness freeholds and ground rents was divided between three of his artist friends. So it was that the respected maritime painter Edward Duncan of 36 Upper Park Road, Haverstock Hill, the painter of landscapes and “idylls”, Thomas Watt Café, and the much travelled orientalist artist Edward Angelo Goodall of 57 Fitzroy Road, Regent’s Park became beneficiaries of Berridge and Jenkins’s adventures in Sheerness.
Lest we form too negative an impression of these metropolitan inheritors, we should acknowledge that in 1888, a year after Berridge’s death, his trustees and those three artists, gave the Minster-in-Sheppey school board a plot of land on Alexandra Road directly to the south of the Ebenezer chapel so that its officers might build the school — since made over into flats like the chapel itself — that Uwe Johnson could glimpse from his back window upstairs.
17. BECOMING “SHEERNESS-ON-SEA”: THE SCRAMBLE FOR A SECOND HORSE
The architectural historian John Newman had no praise for the Rio Cinema — a fantastic 1600-seat Art Deco building with a frontal “fin” that soared up to a circular look-out tower — which had been opened at 27 the Broadway by the Kay Brothers chain in 1937. Indeed, Nikolaus Pevsner’s English deputy deplored this “vicious modernistic”1 imposition, which had long since fallen into industrial use. He didn’t really compose himself again until, further east along the same street, he found some reassurance in the “well composed W. front” of the Roman Catholic Church of St. Henry and St Elisabeth, with its “row of five lancets and a rose window rising to a typically steep bell-gable”.2
As for Die Zeit’s Fritz J. Raddatz, Johnson had said nothing to encourage him to pause at either building. Had he been following cues from their earlier correspondence, his visitor from Frankfurt might have more inclined to glance past the church and adjacent presbytery to make out Neptune Terrace where, as his relocated friend had once told him, Elisabeth’s favourite bewildered garden lay between the building and the sea. He may also have been musing more generally about Johnson’s enquiry about the summer months in 1931 that Kurt Tucholsky, the already exiled anti-fascist writer of Germany’s Weimar Republic, had spent in a rented farm cottage half an hour’s drive away on the Kentish mainland at Ashford.3 Neither Raddatz nor Johnson were in any position to realise that, if you turn a nineteenth-century British riot into a church, you could well end up with something like the one in which Newman had been pleased also to discover a “lofty, taut interior”.
Designed by E.W. Pugin and situated next to its presbytery on the Broadway just to the east of the stump of the old One-Hundred Acre Windmill preserved in the car park of the Sea View Hotel, the Church of St Henry and St Elizabeth was built in 1863–4 on land originally leased from the Admiralty. It was financed by a Major Henry Mostyn and his wife Elizabeth in response, so one Catholic website claims, to the quartering of the Tipperary Artillery Militia at Sheerness in 1860.4 This decision is said to have brought some eight hundred soldiers to the garrison beside the dockyard, and also to have quite overwhelmed previous arrangements for Roman Catholic worship in the town.
Church of St Henry and Elizabeth, seen from the East, with the Sea View Hotel beyond.
The Tipperary men had been commended by the London Times, which observed their conduct during an outing to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. The reporter praised the “freshness of look, breadth of shoulder and the roundness of limb” of these well-behaved soldiers, raised as they had been from “the heart of once lawless Tipperary”, and counted their strict discipline proof of what could be done with a diet of “British beef and beer”.5 Two years earlier, by contrast, members of the North Cork Rifle Militia had rioted in Sheerness. In English accounts of their uprising, the trouble started on the evening of Thursday, 7 October 1858, when a group of riflemen chased a seaman through a shop in Chapel Street and into a private room at the back, where they used their belts to “inflict severe wounds on his head and face”.6 Having smashed up chairs and tables for weapons and torn strips off sheets to create slings, they had gone out looking for more trouble. When one of the rioters was apprehended, a picket of riflemen from the North Cork Regiment arrived on the scene. Far from restoring law and order, they are said to have advanced with their “Cork blood”7 excited, using “drawn bayonets” to force the release of their countryman. Sheerness’s entire force of three local policemen soon withdrew and the inflamed militia had the run of the town for an hour or so, causing traders to flee and confronting all attempts to calm them with volleys of stones and bloodcurdling cries reported as “Brain the -----, Brain ’em”.
The riot went on, more or less unchecked, for five nights in a row, with hundreds of militia members marching out of their barracks to gather stones (an easy task given the new kerbs and paving then being laid in the town) and attack “the inhabitants wherever they saw any number of them assembled”. The riflemen also chased their own officers, forcing one to “take shelter in the Fountain Hotel” in Blue Town, where many windows were smashed, shutters were torn off houses, and residents attacked and threatened. This mayhem was said to have been accompanied by a chorus of terrifying threats: “We’ll have the ----- town down, and do for all hands”. Eventually a detachment of men from the Royal Artillery force at the garrison combined with an incoming detachment from the Kent county constabulary to get the situation under control. Outraged commentators hoped the disgraced North Cork militia would be removed from the garrison and, perhaps, also be “disbanded at once”.8 The force was promptly removed to Aldershot in order to “restore the tranquillity” of Sheerness.
That was the English version of the story and yet, as the Irish papers were quick to note, a Court of Inquiry held at Sheerness concluded, with the full support of both the Admiral and the garrison chief, that the Cork rifles were “not the original aggressors in these riots which have acquired so unpleasant a notoriety”9 and that their record of conduct before this provocation had been entirely flawless. This news was no surprise to the Cork Examiner, which remembered its own experience of having the English Royal Elthorne Militia “domiciled amongst us” during the years following the Great Famine (the main activity of the privates seemed to be “robbing their officers or the public”). Unlike the English press, in which the cause of the outbreak was little discussed, this paper pointed out that the violence began when the wife of one of the North Cork Rifles’ sergeants was “grossly insulted, and the men themselves annoyed and provoked by offensive allusions to their country and religion”.10 It had no hesitation in condemning the “calumnies”, so damaging to the “Irish character”, which had been “diligently circulated” about the “otherwise excellently-behaved” North Cork regiment in England. The imperial Brit
ish press might have enjoyed excoriating the “Cork ruffians”,11 but the Cork Examiner turned the tables to declare the people of Sheerness “utter savages” with “less feeling of the influences of civilization than the inhabitants of the wildest part of Ireland. They have only one feeling in common with the more cultivated of their fellow countrymen, that of a detestation of the ‘Irish papists’”
In Sheerness, the suggestion that “the inhabitants” of the town had any responsibility for the riots was roundly repudiated at a meeting, allegedly attended by over six hundred townspeople, who gathered to insist that they were blameless for a dispute that had broken out between different “branches” of the service at Sheerness, and that “resident working men” had only congregated at the top of streets and courts in order to “prevent the belligerents forcing their way out of the High-street and injuring their property or the persons of their families”.12 No such plea would change the mind of the Cork Examiner, which had declared the Court of Inquiry’s finding a proper repudiation to “the brutes of Sheerness”, whose “mental picture of Paddy is drawn, with a shillelagh [a weighted club of blackthorn or oak] in one hand and a whiskey bottle in the other”.
An awareness of the troubles drink could bring to an isolated garrison town was also reflected, nearly twenty-five years later, in one of the first decisions made by those in charge of the Victoria Working Men’s Club and Institute, an imposing, four-square building standing a couple of hundred yards back along the Broadway. Built at a cost of £3,000 on land acquired from the War Department, the club, which is likely to have spurred on the men responsible for the more grandiose Conservative Club built some five years later, was opened on 8 July 1882 by Mr Hodgson Pratt, secretary of the Working Men’s Club Union, with delegates from the principal clubs across Kent, and some five hundred of the club’s six hundred members present with their wives.13 Created without patronage in accordance with the Union’s motto (“self-help”) and the wider conviction that, as Pratt declared, “the future rested with the working classes”, the Working Men’s Club — which Pevsner’s largely unimpressed investigator granted another exceptional reprieve as “pure vernacular, and good fun”14 — had stone (or cement) lions reclining on either side of its entrance and individually dedicated rooms for chess and cards, billiards and bagatelle.15 It had a Committee Room, a Conversation Room, and also an Assembly Room in which events of the sort once offered by the town’s allegedly “moribund” literary institute, might take place. Baths were to be added as soon as funds were available. Like other working men’s clubs this one would promote the “interchange of opinion” between people of diverse parties and thereby “multiply the intelligence” of their class around the country. It would provide its members, many of whom were employed in the dockyard, with a sober as well as improving alternative to the town’s many pubs. The “moderate” drinker would be allowed to join the virtuous teetotaller in working towards the “new era” promised by the national boom in working men’s clubs, but not everyone was welcome. As soon as they had securely bought the initially rented land on which the Victoria Club stood from the War Department for £300, its founders had passed a resolution barring “military men” from “entering the precincts”, either as members or as a member’s friends.16
Victoria Working Men’s Club
Meanwhile, military requirements continued to govern the pace at which the at first free-standing “terraces” of Marine Town were joined up to form streets of continuous housing. The Admiralty might suddenly announce, as it had done in the late 1850s, that several hundred new jobs were to be added. At such moments property owners and landlords stood to benefit from an acute shortage of stock that posed a moral danger to others, or so the Sheerness Guardian believed. A bad house, it explained, wrecks the “cleanly, tidy, thrifty mechanic’s wife”, who all too easily “degenerates into the ‘slut’ in both ‘person’ and ‘place’”.17 The mechanic husband, meanwhile, senses the change at home and takes to the pub with such regularity that the house becomes “only his eating and sleeping place”. In the Sheerness Guardian’s view, the answer to this problem was not to be found in the manoeuvres of “small capitalists” of the sort attracted to the early sales of properties in Marine Town. The paper recommended that the working man of Sheerness should “make himself acquainted” with “the social, moral and physical advantages” afforded by building societies including the Sheerness Permanent Benefit Building Society, which had recently held a very well attended meeting in the Bethel School Room in Hope Street. Some readers might have been tempted further in that direction by an advertisement from “the Brotherly Unity Society”, which was looking for a few young, healthy and respectable newcomers who might join its existing members in saving with the Sheerness Permanent (interested readers were invited to get it touch with the Treasurer, who turns out to have been Mr J. Ward, of 8 Alma St, Marine Town).18
Johnson, meanwhile, only had to glance at his own front door to realise that Ward’s Town, as this easterly stretch of Marine Town was briefly known, wasn’t built only to service and improve the dockyard workers living in its humbler terraces. Each of the front door’s two upper panels were fitted with cast-iron lattices through which freshening zephyrs might be encouraged to waft on balmy summer days. These ventilating fixtures, against which hinged interior windows could be closed during less exceptional weather, demonstrate that the sea-facing houses on Marine Parade had been erected with a seasonal diversification of the local economy in mind. Together with the house’s other “original features” — the shuttering and canopy work, the parquet flooring, the tiled bathroom at the back — that hygienic front door revealed No. 26 to have been among the “commodious” lodging houses with which later developers of the seafront had sought to advance the bid for a second horse initiated by Sir Edward Banks with his Royal Hotel, steamboats, and inviting notices about “Banks Town” in the more respectable London papers.
26 Marine Parade
The people of Victorian Sheerness were well accustomed to the fact that the threat of collapse and inevitable retreat was contained within every incoming wave of growth. The town might boom as a “Royal Naval station and Dockyard” during times of war and imperial adventure. When peace intervened, however, it was rarely long before upriver politicians could be heard wondering about cuts or worse. William Shrubsole wrote his already cited defence of the shipwrights in the naval dockyards in 1770, during the reassessment that followed the Seven Years War, but Sheerness had actually been haunted by the threat of closure from the very first. Samuel Pepys may have sailed downriver to lay out the future dockyard in 1667. By June 1686, however, he would be in pursuit of “economy and efficiency” on behalf of a new monarch, James II, and convinced that the “disestablishment of Sheerness” was desirable. Since there was only a guardship and one other vessel receiving attention there, it was ordered that the workers should be sent back to Chatham and the officers posted to other dockyards as the occasion arose.19 Doubts had also pressed in on John Rennie the Elder, the Scottish engineer who eventually designed and started construction of the new Georgian dockyard in the early nineteenth century. Visiting Sheerness in 1807, he had found the old dockyard to be “composed only of some old wooden ships imbedded in the mud, a few storehouses, a wretched basin lined with wooden walls, and some similar jetties”.20 He saw many reasons why the place should be “abolished” rather than rebuilt — it was on the lee or wrong side of the harbour, the foundation for new works consisted only of sand and quicksand, and the space available for rebuilding was “very confined” thanks partly to the haphazard adjacent settlement of Blue Town. Given the high cost of working on such a dismal site, Rennie had urged the government to abandon Sheerness, along with Woolwich and Deptford, and to concentrate on the creation of “a new complete establishment” that would, he believed, be far better placed further up the Thames, at Northfleet beyond Gravesend. He was over-ruled that time. A decade after the opening of Rennie’s completed dockyard, however, the
founders of “Banks Town” were galvanised by plausible rumours that the government was considering withdrawing ship-building activities from Sheerness, and using the site instead as a “depository for quarantine merchandise”.21
As those lattices on Johnson’s front door tell us, the great fear returned to stalk the streets of Sheerness during the years when Berridge and Jenkins were battling their way through the courts as they pursued their development plans. In the wake of the Crimean War, the Committee of Dockyard Economy, chaired by Rear-Admiral Robert Smart and appointed at the order of a Tory cabinet in the spring of 1858, found the Royal dockyards in a deplorable condition, filled with lethargic officers who were shockingly incompetent in their account-keeping, and all the more dysfunctional thanks to local systems of management in which unashamed favouritism triumphed over merit and efficiency. In the Spectator’s view (which echoed that of Captain Sir Adolphus Slade, who had complained in 1846 of “the absence of science in the dockyards”22 and who refined and repeated his scathing accusations in 185923), the problem was aggravated by the fact that the naval dockyards were overseen by a succession of senior captains, commodores, and admirals appointed to the position of superintendent despite knowing nothing at all about building, repairing or fitting ships. The obvious shortcomings of this situation were aggravated by rapid turnover (there were no less than five superintendents at Sheerness between 1846 and 1857), and by the Admiralty’s all too apparent presumption that it was possible to manage such inconvenient and unhealthy places “by correspondence alone”.24
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 26