The Sea View Has Me Again
Page 27
Having been returned to power on a wave of popular acclaim in 1859, Lord Palmerston’s second Liberal government responded to the uproar provoked by the Committee on Dockyard Economy by establishing a Royal Commission on the Control and Management of Naval Yards. Reporting in 1861, this body repeated many of the earlier criticisms, pointing to the “incompetence”25 and “indifference” of many master shipwrights, calling for stricter management and clearer lines of accountability and also for the power to sack incompetent or corrupt members of the “established” staff, who had formed their own labour aristocracy and systems of preferment in the dockyards. As for the dockyard accounts, the Commission’s summary conclusion relied heavily on the words “absence” and “want”.26
The Commission had initially recommended the closure of dockyards at Deptford, Pembroke and Woolwich, but predictable jockeying followed and Sheerness, which the Secretary of the Admiralty had at first described as “a station of great importance, especially for North Sea purposes”, was soon rumoured to have replaced Pembroke and Deptford among the sites “destined eventually to be abandoned”.27 On that occasion, the defence fell to the Liberal MP for Kent Eastern, a baronet named Sir Edward Cholmeley Dering, who loudly rehearsed the “special advantages” of Sheerness — where, after all, large ships could be “brought up close to the yard” at all tides (aware of the coming ironclads, Dering emphasised that “at a trifling expense the largest ships in the navy might be docked in this harbour at low water”). He also invited the Secretary to the Admiralty to remember the words of a former First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, who had suggested that “any Government that should seriously entertain the idea of selling or abandoning so useful a harbour as Sheerness would be trifling with the best interests of the country”. A retiring Superintendent of the dockyard would later be more emphatic, reassuring apprehensive townspeople that anyone who conceived such an absurd idea “must be a lunatic” as well as, so he implied, a member of the Liberal Party.28
Dering’s warning was issued in 1865, near the beginning of a “long, deep slump”29 that brought the virtual collapse of shipbuilding on the Thames and heavy cuts to the dockyard workforce. The threat against Sheerness remained in September 1869, when “the 18,000 inhabitants of this rising town” once again sought reassurance from the Lords of the Admiralty that there was no truth in the whisper that their dockyard was, “most injuriously”, to be closed.30 The rumour was not killed off by the granted denial, and there was forceful feeling in Sheerness about the “constant reductions” in the town’s dockyard (the Liberal MP for Pontefract, Mr Childers, won no friends in Sheerness when he declared that “a more extravagant yard in a more wretched place could not be conceived”).31 By the following year, indeed, it was reported that twenty workmen were being discharged every week, and the dark cloud over Sheerness would not be dispersed by the announcement that “the eventual abandonment of that yard depends upon the completion of arrangements in progress and in contemplation at Chatham”.32 According to the Sheerness Times, “Sheerness has kept faith with the government”. The guilty party was “the private ship-builders, and their desire that our vessels of war should be offered by private firms to be built by contract”. This Victorian attempt at privatisation was “synonymous with jobbery and malversation of the public money”.33
The town’s defenders did what they could to secure the dockyard against Liberal reformers and commercial privateers. They urged those who maligned Sheerness as a most “wretched” place, to consider how great port cities such as Liverpool and Birkenhead might have looked in their early days, and they did what they could in their statements to thicken up the Medway fog that so frequently placed Chatham beyond the safe navigation of ships at times when the point at Sheerness remained “perfectly clear and accessible”.34 Keen to break their dependency on unreliable authorities upriver, they also looked for other ways of keeping the town afloat. So it was that, on Monday, 8 September 1873, the “principal residents” of Sheerness had gathered at the recently opened Victoria Hall on the Broadway and Trinity Road to form an association, through which they would renew the project of establishing their town as a convenient resort for “tired metropolitans”.35 As the Sheerness Times editorialised on 16 August 1873, this group of “public-spirited inhabitants” were determined to “assert very persistently” that Sheerness was quite capable of attracting visitors from London and, indeed, of rivalling “the attractions of Margate or other resorts as popular as Margate”.36
Mainland “depreciation” was a familiar problem for Sheerness, but the association seeking to transform the town — “which the meeting agreed would henceforth be known as ‘Sheerness-on-Sea’”37 — also had to face up to the possibility that, despite the best efforts of Sir Edward Banks and the more recent pioneers of Marine Town to create a resort, public scepticism remained all too justified. In order to succeed in their task, the aspiring residents must, so a horrified recent visitor wrote from the safe distance of his home in Fleet Street, find some capitalists with the means to help them “‘unSheerness’ the place”.38 This job would involve removing buildings presently spoiling access to the town’s only asset (the sea), constructing a proper parade along the beach, creating lodging-houses to which visitors might be willing to return, raising the sights of the recalcitrant local authorities, and doing something about the upsetting condition of the town’s ill-treated cab-horses (“Poor dear dumb brutes!”).
In the absence of the new town pier in which so much hope had been invested in the days of “Banks Town”, there was no alternative but to use the existing one in Blue Town, which could hardly give the visitor a worse impression. The Sheerness Times described the journey that the ardently desired London excursionists would have to make if they were to reach the new watering place on the far side of the moat. The voyage from London might be congenial enough but “all pleasure was gone”39 as soon as the visitor walked along the five hundred-foot pier and stepped down into the chaotic warren that was Blue Town. Fearing that she or he had come all this way only to stumble into “Wapping by the Sea”, the apprehensive visitor “must, of necessity, turn back to the boat, and wait there the time of return”. Frustrated excursionists would never discover that “beyond Blue Town, there is a Sheerness which is worth visiting. There is a good beach, quite equal to any to be found at more favoured watering places, and there is for excursions the whole of the very small but very interesting Isle of Sheppey. From the beach the visitor has an ever-varying panorama, for past him, and wholly within sight, must go the vessels, large and small, which make the port of London the wonder of the world”. Sheerness had long had “a bad name as an unhealthy, slow, and neglected place”. Thanks, however, to the improvements of drainage and water supply carried out since the highly critical report published by the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in 1858, Sheerness-on-Sea was actually now “about the most healthy town on the English coast” with a death rate “lower than at any other seaport resort, with the exception of Eastbourne”.
The champions of “Sheerness-on-Sea”, who plainly had their own ways of doing the new science of statistics, were determined that Marine Town rather than the dockyard or its immediate environs should become the centre of “Sheerness proper”. Despite the “grim significance” the area held for the patriotic residents who still insisted on calling it “the Crimea”, it was “to this new part of town that the visitor should hasten. There are already one or two commodious hotels, but nothing like the accommodation which such a place should have”. Further improvements were essential if “Sheerness-on-Sea” was to become more than a cheating phrase that only provoked snorts of contempt from arriving visitors. Some amenities had already been pulled out of Blue Town and reconfigured as part of the town proper. The Bethel Chapel had retreated or, perhaps, advanced into Mile Town early in the century, and the post office moved into “commodious” new premises in the new town in 1876.40 In order to create a more salubrious point of entry for the he
alth-seeking Londoner, the active residents would eventually manage to adjust the railway too. Having arrived in Blue Town in 1860 it would be encouraged to keep going, turning east along a new spur that brought it to the still-existing new “central terminus” opened in Mile Town in 1883.
It was never going to be possible to convert the town’s shingle beaches into golden sands that might truly rival those of Margate, yet other improvements were achieved. In the summer of 1876, an asphalted rollerskating rink had been opened by the lower esplanade, which promised to be a “fair success”.41 Plans been announced to add a Ladies Bath and also a Private Bath to the recently constructed swimming pool.42 Marine Town could already boast a “handsome Public Hall”, complete with reading rooms (the Sheerness Literary Institute had benefited from new public rooms at the Victoria Hall and theatre, opened on the Broadway in February 1870). Like Sir Edward Banks before them, the visionaries of “Sheerness-on-Sea” wanted to see a “promenade pier” on the beach, and a new esplanade to help in “the erection of lodging-houses”. The latter wish would be satisfied after 11 December 1875, when it was decided to proceed with the esplanade — partly to encourage the visiting promenader but also “to serve as a defence from the sea in Marine Town”.43
Thanks to this independent effort, a resort named Sheerness-on-Sea really had come into existence by the end of the nineteenth century, even though, as the founders well knew, the odds remained stacked against it. The case for bringing the railway on from Blue Town to a new station in the heart of “Sheerness-on-Sea” may have been the only thing in the town that was assisted by the sinking of the paddle steamer Princess Alice on 3 September 1878. 650 summer excursionists drowned that night in water filled with recently discharged raw sewage after their ship collided with a collier in Gallion’s Reach while returning to London Bridge at the end of a “moonlight trip” to Sheerness. Johnson, whose house was no longer equipped with the venetian blinds or the overhead “gaseliers” that had once seemed as vital as indoor W.C.s to householders offering rooms to attract paying guests, will have learned about that too. It remains possible, however, that his visiting friend Fritz J. Raddatz had come all the way to his door without noticing that picking out the still undemolished residues of Marine Town’s Victorian future, with its mixture of commercial, political and Christian visions of redemption, remains the primary attraction of walking east along the Broadway.
Figure 57. Sheerness. “The Girls are Very Playful”, Postcard, Davidson Bros, c. 1910.
18. “BLACK TUESDAY”: THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED
By the time Fritz J. Raddatz arrived at 26 Marine Parade and knocked loudly on the door as instructed, Johnson’s bell was by no means the only thing in Sheerness that was broken. A year later, on 19 September 1978, the Sheppey Gazette would place the title “streets of Drabness” at the head of an article about Marine Town. Having explored the working-class streets directly behind Johnson’s larger house, the journalist Martin Collier described the area as “very much in the mould of an old-fashioned community”. It had many elderly residents, a selection of six “back-street pubs”, and a strong sense of “community spirit” that could “perhaps only be sustained in an area with such a strong working-class tradition”. The recent arrival of a Chinese takeaway in these “drab old streets” hinted at the changes that might come as younger people moved in. There could be no doubt, though, that the traditional community was dying. Featured as one of its heroic survivors, “Tubby Ward” was sixty-seven years old but still younger than many who had come to rely on him. Interviewing him in his front room, Collier noted that the ceiling was “so full of holes it looks like a pin cushion”. This was the consequence, not of decay or infestation, but of Tubby’s seasonal habit of buying Christmas presents for the neighbourhood’s children, pinning them up with thread so that they would dangle temptingly in his front window, and then, as the day approached, inviting the passing children to come in and choose one for themselves. Tubby, whose seasonal generosity might nowadays expose him to dire suspicions, also ran errands and chopped firewood for older pensioners, delivering it to their homes in a long barrow. “People here just carry on smiling — it’s all you can do. Helping other people and keeping busy is what keeps me going. Everybody knocks me up if they want anything”.
Pauline and Harold Huggins in the local corner shop on the junction of Richmond Street and Alma Street were also practised in the art that the one-man blues band Duster Bennett had called “smiling like I’m happy”. Friendliness and the “personal touch” still made a difference in their general store, little more than a stone’s throw from Johnson’s house. The elderly residents commended the shopkeepers, Tubby Ward, and the two women roadsweepers, thanks to whom the area retained traces of its traditional identity. They knew, however, that Marine Town was going to Hell. Mrs Florence Lee, who had lived in Clyde Street for thirty-five years, declared that “The area has lost its character. It is terrible here now”. New “social problems” were partly to blame, but the incompetence of the council was a persistent source of grievances too. Marine Town had indeed been designated a “Housing Action area”, a status that enabled the council, which was already providing mortgages of up to 90%, to offer improvement grants to some three hundred families who were still coping with outside lavatories and no bathrooms. In other ways, however, the local authority’s record was poor — it was failing to repair properties or to rebuild on the derelict sites left when decrepit properties had been bulldozed. The old folk of Marine Town were by no means the only ones yearning for the past in James Callaghan’s bankrupt Britain. In Sheerness, however, it was possible to name the day “The End of the World as We Know It” had arrived in town.
*
“Most of our people have never had it so good”. So the Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had told an enraptured Conservative Party rally at Bedford in July 1957. In Sheerness, as in other naval establishments around the shrinking British Empire, people had been offered a different phrase to worry about. “Outline of future policy” was the title of a White Paper presented to Parliament some three months earlier by Macmillan’s Minister of Defence. The defence budget had already declined as a percentage of GDP over the previous four years, but this had not been enough for Duncan Sandys, who horrified the service chiefs by demanding “the largest change in defence policy ever carried through in normal times”1 and declaring it justified on many different grounds. The national economy was struggling, and there was an urgent need for capital and scientific expertise to be concentrated on the modernisation of industry. A few diehard imperialists might still be nursing illusions about Britain’s singular role in the world, but the country was no longer likely to fight wars except in association with allies, including the USA, now that the breach caused by Anthony Eden’s humiliated Suez intervention of the previous year was being patched up. The existence of NATO meant that Britain’s armed forces were no longer required to be “self-sufficient and balanced in all respects”. Meanwhile, both military planning and “world strategy” were fundamentally challenged by “sensational” changes in military technology: nuclear weapons and “rocket weapons” equipped to see if not yet think for themselves.
The largest of the savings demanded would be found by abolishing National Service in Britain, but Sandys’ “Outline of Future Policy” also announced the end of a long era for British sea power. “Radical revision” would mean “basing the main elements of the Royal Navy upon a small number of [aircraft] carrier groups” and reducing the number of other large ships to a minimum. Determined “to prune to the utmost the elements which do not directly contribute to fighting capacity”, Sandys demanded a reduction in the navy’s historical accumulation of shore establishments both at home and abroad. It was too early to say exactly where the axe would fall, but it would not be possible “for the level of work in all factories, dockyards, depots and establishments to be maintained; and some will have to be closed”.
“Wells drops dockyards Employme
nt Bombshell”. That was how the Sheerness Times Guardian announced the coming of the long-feared day of extinction on 14 February 1958. Percy Wells, the respected Labour MP for Faversham, had gleaned the news not from chums in Westminster or the Admiralty, but from trade unionists involved in the Admiralty Joint Industrial Committee. There would be cuts across the world. The East India Command would be closed. Hong Kong would lose its dockyard. The base at Trincomalee (Gokanna) was already being transferred to the Royal Ceylon Navy. The dockyard in Gibraltar would be maintained, but the one at Malta was open to offers.
It was, however, changes to the naval establishment at home that worried Wells most directly. He understood that 12,000 jobs were to be lost across Britain and also that the Admiralty committee charged with making the economies demanded by the Sandys report had resolved to merge all “yardcraft” services, cutting 25% and concentrating what was left at Portsmouth.
The news that Duncan Sandys’ naval economies meant the end for Sheerness was confirmed to both Houses of Parliament a few days later on 18 February 1958. It had been decided to abolish the Royal Navy’s Nore Command and to close Sheerness dockyard, together with the one at Portland in Dorset, the Aircraft Repair Yard at Donibristle in Fife, and “five other air establishments”.2 The First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Selkirk, told the House of Lords that “the decline in naval repair work resulting from the planned reductions in the Fleet”3 had to be faced. In order to allow for the development of other forms of employment in the area, Sheerness dockyard would be run down gradually, not finally closing until April 1960. The abolition of the Nore Command would be completed by April, 1961. Chatham dockyard would be retained, although the barracks and other naval establishments there would be shut by April 1961. The Scottish unionist and Civil Lord of the Admiralty Tam Galbraith regretted the impact this decision would have on the affected forces, and also among civilian employees, promising that “special employment services” would be set up under the Minister of Labour inside the affected establishments before the discharges began. £7 million would be saved by the cuts, which would entail the loss of 2,700 naval jobs ashore and seven thousand civilian posts.