The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  In his first issue of the Sheerness Guardian, published on 10 January 1858, the printer and bookseller who also ran the post office in Blue Town, Thomas Morton Rigg, had proudly announced that “We are islanders”, and that from this point of view “the mainland of Kent is a foreign land”. As founder of the new paper, Mr Rigg was definitely not suggesting that Sheppey was a parochial backwater occupied by rooted natives with no interest in the world beyond their limited horizon. On the contrary, he was seeing off his competitor, the recently launched Sittingbourne & Sheerness Gazette, by conjuring Sheerness as a widely connected and outward-looking new town that had nothing in common with small-minded and tradition-bound mainland communities such as Sittingbourne. Sheerness was open to the wider world via the naval and military establishments that formed the primary reason for its existence. As a place that hadn’t existed before their coming, it was equipped with “scarcely any aboriginal race”. It was instead “a colony of emigrants from all parts of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales” and “to such a society, the affairs of the neighbouring country are, in most cases, about as interesting as the local policy of Timbuctoo”.

  As we have seen from the case of the Chancery Ditch, the Sheerness Guardian was launched in a town that had yet to acquire the habits governing polite public debate upstream. Indeed, the paper had carried its proprietor into a buffeting series of libel suits, personal threats and punch-ups. In 1861, Rigg felt obliged to sue Mr Joseph Henry Burley, landlord of the Duke of Clarence Hotel in Sheerness, who had bloodied Rigg’s nose in the coffee room of the Lion Inn, Gillingham. Rigg had turned up to witness a meeting in which Burley was giving final instructions to the solicitor representing a group of thirty disgruntled ratepayers being taken to court by Sheerness’s Local Board of Health for refusing to pay a private improvement rate. Burley, who had no illusions about the neutrality of the Sheerness paper, had warned his solicitor that Rigg was using his access as a newspaperman to “collect information for the other side”.19 On hearing this, so the Kentish Gazette continued, Rigg “became exceedingly excited, struck the table several times with his clenched fist, to the detriment of his knuckles, and called Mr Burley a ‘liar’”. Burley threatened to “knock his head off” if Rigg repeated the insult, and when Rigg did just that he “instantaneously tapped rather smartly the nasal organ of the plaintiff, causing the carmine to flow profusely”.

  Unbowed by the two weeks he spent in jail in January 1864 after refusing to apologise for his intemperate reports about “the Case of the Chancery Ditch”,20 Rigg would be back in court the following year to sue the landlord of the Oxford music hall in Blue Town, who had “threatened him” after objecting to comments printed in the paper.21 In 1872, he was himself successfully sued for publishing a letter, written above the signature “General Fact”, libelling a lawyer working in the interests of Mr Ward, the Chairman of the Local Board of Health, who was himself alleged to have got into the habit of ruling “Sheerness like a small king”.22 The entangled nature of Sheerness life in those years is indicated by the fact that, as Rigg himself pointed out, the offended lawyer in question, Mr Mole, was a good friend of his.

  The Sheerness Times, meanwhile, had hoped to do rather better than its older rival. Launched on 15 February 1868, it announced its existence with an editorial in which the founder, a man of “progressive” views named John Cole, promised the people of Sheerness a properly local paper — “cheap, concise, and carefully prepared” — and that he was determined to criticise “public men” on behalf of the true public interest without falling captive to any one party or opinion. The paper had gone on to expose the town’s closed and unaccountable system of local government as a form of “one-man” rule, and, under John Cole’s successor, Samuel Cole, continued to attack the “misrule” imposed on the town by the Local Board of Health. His paper took sides in the controversies of this period, backing the members of the board who opposed the chairman. It did so with sufficient force to persuade Chairman Ward and his cronies to impose a ban on the Times’ reporters attending local committee meetings, a proscription that Cole and his dissenting faction on the board ridiculed and campaigned against, eventually forcing the “exclusionists” to withdraw their own proscription. As a descendant would later recall, “‘Scenes’ were prevalent in those days”.23

  Much, of course, has changed since the time when Sheerness gave the Wild West a run for its money. In September 2012, a friend sent me a picture of something he had encountered after sailing across the Thames Estuary to Queenborough a couple of miles upstream from Sheerness along the island’s Medway shore. Having moored in the creek, he stepped onto the High Street to find a stand for the Sheerness Times Guardian — the town’s rival papers were amalgamated in 1939 — emblazoned with the week’s top headline: “Second escape from Cattery”. No doubt the story mattered greatly to the owners of the cats, Nesta and Smokey, and also to those at the offending Appleyard Cattery in Sheppey’s inland village of Eastchurch. This manifestation of local life nevertheless suggests that island horizons may have narrowed since its newspapers first went into action. It might also be taken to confirm the apprehensions of those among the BBC’s national news presenters who don’t always manage to hide the sense of relief with which they hand viewers over to the poor regional colleagues who will now report on events “where you are” — as if being local is only for losers in this globalised world.

  Johnson liked cats, allowing these spies from the animal kingdom to run through his pages quite freely, and sometimes to acquire considerable significance too. His new paper, however, was plainly neither an aunt nor a sanctimonious uncle — more like a disconcertingly weird provincial cousin. The collection retained at the Uwe Johnson Archive in Rostock reveals that, for the first four years of his residency, the writer was punctilious in preserving his household’s copies of the Sheerness Times Guardian — a fact that may confirm Eberhard Fahlke’s suggestion that he was thinking of one day writing a collection of “island stories”. The first issue he saved dates from 16 August 1974, a ten-page broadsheet that he must have picked up during a preliminary visit when he and Elisabeth were still considering the purchase of 26 Marine Parade. The collection extends into 1978, after which Johnson appears to have cancelled his subscription — he would complain of finding delivered papers and mail jamming his front door when he got home from trips abroad — and continued his scrutiny of the local press for free in the pub.

  Johnson read the Sheerness Times Guardian with more distanced curiosity than he had applied to the New York Times: scouring its pages for English peculiarities, both humdrum and picaresque, that could be passed on to his friends in New York and Germany, just in case they weren’t already sufficiently worried about his unusual choice of residence. Writing in March 1978 to the secretary of his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, at Suhrkamp in Frankfurt, he notes: “Here the poorer or more assiduous schoolboys deliver the papers in the morning, just like in fairy-tales. On Friday, the ‘Sheerness Times Guardian’ arrives, and you couldn’t possibly overestimate the excitement with which we await it”.24 There was the prosaic everyday stuff of local reportage — “clothes iron stolen, dog tangled in rebar, Susan and Colin married, relatives visiting from New Zealand” — but that was by no means the full extent of it. Johnson also invited his German correspondents to savour the monstrous stories that occasionally broke through the routines of Sheppey life. The following example was for Christa Wolf: “two young men, eighteen years old, were talking with a sixteen-year-old girl at a friend’s house. One Paul says: You want to have sex? She just laughs, Ruth does. The other Paul says: Let’s go through with it. The first goes into the kitchen, comes back with a bread knife, and stabs her with it in the heart, from behind. Now Mummy is sitting there weeping: the girl, yes, God rest her soul, but Paul is such a good lad”.25

  That may have been a fictionalised cameo but it draws on things that can be found in Johnson’s collected copies of the Sheerness Times Guardian. The maternal assu
rance that one of these murderous Pauls “is such a good lad”, doesn’t stray far from the headline: “‘He is a good boy’ — mother”, used to introduce a story about a sixteen-year old who had spent an entire term truanting from school.26 Another of the copies Johnson kept includes an arresting account of a trial, in which a twenty-one-year-old man was sentenced for apprehending a fourteen-year-old girl from Minster, whom he had allegedly already abused during babysitting sessions, threatening her with a knife and taking her to the “grassy hill by the seafront” where he raped her: “I expect I just wanted to be loved”, so the offender explained at Maidstone Crown Court, after prosecutors had drawn ample evidence of depravity from his mouth.27 The alarming facts reported by the local group of Gingerbread (a charity for single-parent families) had also passed before Johnson’s eye: the number of illegitimate births on the island was twice the national average; the frequent “schoolgirl pregnancies”, which inclined Gingerbread to conclude that young girls on the island thought of babies as like having dolls; the case of the twelve-year-old girl — the paper counted her among the island’s “gymslip mothers” — who’d become pregnant when babysitting with boyfriends and “didn’t know which boy was responsible”.28

  To read through the papers Johnson collected between 1974 and 1981 is indeed to confront a number of persistent themes. There were, for example, very good reasons for not driving on the island. The roads were poor, neither incorporated nor tarred in some former plotland areas, but the drivers could be terrifying too. The frequency of reported accidents suggests that anyone taking to the roads risked sudden death or terrible injuries at the hands of men — young, old and often drunk — who didn’t always confine the carnage they caused to members of their own wild fraternity. Considering that Sheppey tended to be an island of freeborn libertarians, there is an associated reflex of blaming all the ills of island life on the state, be it the water authority, the Department of Health and Social Security, or, thanks to the reorganisations of 1974, the now largely offshore local authority known as the Borough of Swale, which had absorbed the responsibilities of the island’s three abolished district councils. There were repeated complaints about the problem of apathy and also about vandalism of the “mindless” variety that proved capable of undermining every attempt at improvement or basic safety. The lifeguards lost their outboard motor and other rescue equipment provided to help endangered swimmers. The signs warning of the dangers of the soft and claggy mud of the cliffs around Warden Point were uprooted and hurled over the cliff not long before a fourteen-year-old boy sank up to his neck while exploring during his first evening on the island and died in dreadful distress before rescuers could extract him the following morning.

  When it came to the industrial disputes of the period, the Sheerness Times Guardian would also give generously. The very first copy that Johnson saved reported that ninety-five striking craftsmen at Sheerness Steel, as the plant was by then called, had forced the wholescale closure of “Britain’s biggest private producer of reinforced steel”.29 They would not repeat the performance in January 1980, when they alone among British steelworkers refused to join what had been loudly trumpeted as the first national steel strike in the United Kingdom since the General Strike of 1926. This later dispute, among the first to take place during Margaret Thatcher’s leadership, would prove a call too far not just for the workers, but also for their wives, who remembered the impact of combined closure of the dockyard and garrison on Sheerness in 1960, and organised to keep their men at work. Supported by a deputation of burly farmers who came to Sheerness to lend muscle to their defence of “the right to work”, the workers and wives found themselves well supported during the “Siege of Sheerness Steel”. The government saw to it that large cohorts from the Metropolitan Police who were on hand to control the hundreds of flying pickets bussed in from steel towns in the north, together with their militant wives who promised that more sisters were on the way from Scunthorpe to “sort out these local women”.30 The leader of the “Sheerness Workers’ Wives”, Christine Lissen, would soon be speaking next to Norris McWhirter, of the right-wing Freedom Association at Speaker’s Corner.31 While right-wingers saw a heroic stand against socialism in the scuffles and arrests around Sheerness Steel’s plant on Wellmarsh, observers on the left remembered another momentous strike that had extended for nearly two years from August 1976, setting workers, mostly very low-paid Ugandan Asian women, against the unyielding owner of the film-processing plant where they had faced degrading conditions. As one said of the island’s shame, Sheerness was now “a name worse than Grunwick … whatever the outcome the name of Sheerness Steel will ring a bell for a long time to come”.

  Johnson may have remained silently “non-committal” when the nurses at Sheppey General Hospital’s maternity unit likened their employment conditions to “working in a concentration camp”.32 He did, however, comment on reports of the action taken by the island’s schoolteachers in 1978. “You could hardly be expected to know the curious variety of strike they’ve come up with here”,33 Johnson told Burgel Zeeh. In those inflation-ridden days, the National Union of Teachers was holding out for a rise of 10%, having rejected the offered 9% — and the Sheerness Times Guardian was reporting the Sheppey teachers’ decision to enforce their union’s ban on voluntary meal duties. As Johnson explained of this unusually considerate English dispute, “the teachers want a higher salary. For the children not to receive instruction as a result is something they do not want to be responsible for. Supervising the children during lunch, however, voluntary it is true, and paid only with a free portion of school lunch: that they will not do. And since the children left to themselves might have mishaps that they would be responsible for, the little as well as the bigger of England’s younger generation have to spend that time on the street, where responsibility for any mishap is easier to distribute”.34

  Ministers and “Zulus”

  The Sheerness Times Guardian would also supply the Johnson household with a regular stream of material to “satisfy our attacks on religion”.35 Johnson’s difficulties in the GDR may have followed from his defence of the rights of Christian students to participate in political life, but it was as a man of strongly secular outlook that he savoured the shots at redemption attempted by the Isle of Sheppey’s ministers as they stepped up to pen uplifting homilies for the paper’s occasional column “With Faith in Mind”. This rotating festival of stretched metaphors was launched on 10 March 1978 by the Rev. Robin Murch. As the vicar of Queenborough, Murch likened Sheppey to a crowded train on which scrutinising and wondering about the lives of fellow passengers was a “fascinating way of passing time”. Thanks to the new column, he promised, readers would from now on be provided with regular indications about what was really going on in the minds of the island’s Christians.

  Johnson might have hoped for an early contribution from Father Peter Blagdon-Gamlen, the anti-Common Market Anglo-Catholic vicar of Eastchurch, Leysdown and Harty, but he had stirred up a lot of controversy by backing the National Front in 1975, and was not among the Sheppey ministers who contributed to “With Faith in Mind”. There was, however, a rich choice to consider all the same. Johnson might have quoted the Rev. John Williams of St Peter’s Church, Halfway, who marked the approach of a new school year by stressing the importance of not planting “that most destructive worm called ‘Failure’”36 in the minds of the island’s young people, or, indeed, the vicar of Queenborough himself, who returned a few years later to offer some accommodating English thoughts on the American suggestion that prayer was like chewing on “the Minty Gum Ball of life”.37

  In the end, however, Johnson chose the Rev. John Cockrell, minister of Sheerness’s United Reform Church, as his primary representative. Overlooking the column in which Cockrell tried to convince readers that “the life of faith is in some respects rather like regular care of your car”,38 he asked the East German novelist Christa Wolf to imagine the minister seeking to advance God’s cause with the help o
f no less than three fleetingly registered visual aids: a three-legged dog he had lately sighted on the east of the island, a submarine glimpsed offshore at Sheerness and a Japanese man encountered on the Canterbury Road, riding a unicycle in the direction of London. The fact that Cockrell’s own wife had refused to believe his reports of any of these sightings, brought him, so Johnson informed the novelist he had got to know when both were students in Leipzig, to “one of the fundamental problems of the Christian church: We relate things whose truth we know, but disbelief raises its head, and when you look for the thing, it is gone. Different, how different, in contrast, is the world of God”.39

  The Sheerness Times Guardian provided Johnson with quite a lot to stand back from, whether in puzzlement, dismay or the distanced curiosity of a newly arrived anthropologist musing over G.J. Renier’s famous question: “The English, are they human?” He was, for example, alerted to the existence of the “Sheppey Zulus” by the very first copy of the Sheerness Times Guardian in his collection. Announcing that “Carnival time is here again”, the front page for 16 August 1974 showed the “Zulus” preparing to invade the beach near the town recreation ground in four metal boats: on the approaching day, they would leap ashore with their spears and skull-adorned shields and go into battle against the “white men” from the Sheerness Round Table. They were back the following summer, brandishing weird clubs (worse than Irish “shillelaghs”, perhaps), wearing grass skirts and necklaces made of teeth, and bombarding the Round Tablers with bags of soot and flour.40 Johnson also saved a copy of the carnival programme from 1977, perhaps for the sake of the cover photograph showing a gruesome militia of some thirty “Zulus” mustered in preparation for the assault wearing “fuzzy” wigs, blackface and already brandishing their shields and spears. That year’s performance was singled out for praise by a visiting couple from Rainham, across the estuary at the edge of Greater London, who told readers that “Sheppey should feel proud of their small but lovable tribe of Zulus”.41