The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  These were alarming facts for the town and its ratepayers to face. In the national perspective, however, public apprehension of the “fearful calamity” that might come with flooding gave priority not to Sheppey, Canvey Island or any other flood-prone site in the estuary, but to the City of London itself. Indeed, if Sheerness featured at all in the capital’s deliberations about flooding this was, according to a prescient article in the Builder, because it surely had a role to play in the “early warning system” that must be developed to protect the capital rather than itself.28 Believing that modern methods made it possible to calculate “to what height a tide will rise at London that has attained a certain height at Sheerness”, the author considered it “requisite” that a tidal gauge be placed at “a proper spot near Sheerness” so that London might be given time in which to take hasty measures with planking, cement and similar materials to ensure that Lambeth and other riverside areas of the capital never flooded again”. This was a flawed proposal, since no one in 1881 actually knew how to predict the surges that wind and storms might add to a rising tide.

  In Sheerness, meanwhile, the struggle for an adequate sea wall continued to test local resources. A storm drove the high tide back to cause even greater calamity on 29 November 1897, sweeping away much of the Co-Operative Society’s pier at Cheyney Rock, and drowning livestock and a farmer on the marshes at Elmley and Harty.29 During this unusually extreme version of Sheerness’s recurrent “Great Disaster” the sea smashed a “huge breach” in the breakwater by the Roman Catholic church on the Broadway and then poured into Neptune Terrace, flooding the lower rooms (including some that are now part of an old people’s home). Townspeople gathered to stare at the “truly pitiable” sight of a brand new piano floating up to bang against the ceiling — touchingly unaware that the sea was at the same time pouring into their own encircled homes, a few streets inland. Not content with breaking through Sheerness’s western defences along the Medway, it also poured over the Marine Town Esplanade “in considerable volumes”,30 rushing down Telescope Alley and Richmond Street in “one uninterrupted course”31 and leaving three feet of water in Clyde Street and Unity Street. Once again, occupants retreated to the first floors of their houses, and the railway line was drowned, leaving Sheerness “completely cut off from the rest of England”.32 Viewed from the ruins of the sea wall at West Minster on the Medway, Sheerness “appeared as if it had been transported to the shore of a lake”. It was given “quite a Venetian aspect” as people started rowing boats along streets…33

  Rose Thomas’s postcard.

  Further adjustments to Marine Town’s inadequate “breakwater” were carried out in the following years. By 3 July 1914, when a visitor named Rose Thomas sent a postcard home to Gosport, the promenade had acquired a bench and, on the seaward side, a little vertical wall. This “dwarf wall”, which stood about two feet high, included a gap for “storm boards” at the traditional access point near Neptune Terrace. Although it may well have left the view from the houses along Marine Parade largely intact, anyone versed in modern coastal hydraulic theory would recognise it as a monument to prehistoric ignorance. It was shaped in a way that would simply fling breaking waves up into the air, where the driving wind would catch them, just as it was said to have done in 1852, and sweep them over into the road. It was also placed on quite the wrong side of the promenade, which should have been used to stretch, slow and exhaust the advancing wave before impact. A pitifully inadequate thing, it could do nothing to reduce the growing case for a thoroughgoing rebuild along the entire length of the street.

  1933: “Something more substantial”

  So it was that, by 1974, when Johnson moved into No. 26, the residents of Marine Parade had long faced a vast concrete rampart, conceived and planned in the year of the Wall Street crash, funded through a public works programme set up by Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government, and built, not without difficulty, by Sheerness Urban District Council in the early Thirties.

  Known locally as “the Garages”, the concrete sea wall and promenade over which Johnson imagined looking with his philosopher friend Hannah Arendt was the product of a period of twentieth-century British history that Johnson had researched for the first volume of Anniversaries. It was in 1925 that Gesine Cresspahl’s father, Heinrich, a guild-minded cabinet-maker and social democrat who had left an increasingly hostile Germany for the Netherlands soon after being locked in a potato cellar during the right-wing Kapp Putsch of March 1920,34 moved again to England. He settled in Richmond, on the Thames upriver from London, where he lived in two rooms near the gas works and, from 1928, ran a carpentry firm, Pascal & Son, for an English owner who liked to brag about his heroism in the Great War even though he had actually only ever “counted caps”35 at Dartmouth naval supply base, and who also turned out to be an anti-Semitic follower of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. “Twenty per cent unemployed in England”,36 Johnson had noted in Anniversaries, and he now only had to glance at the looming anti-sea protection rampart outside his window to recognise that the problem had weighed on Sheerness too.

  Marine Parade’s re-engineered promenade and sea wall was an indirect outcome of the First World War. Germany’s submarine blockade had demonstrated the importance of protecting vital low-lying agricultural land from flooding. When it came to sea defences, it had also revealed “the obvious imperfections of the existing piecemeal and disorganised state of affairs throughout the country”.37 The problem was put to the Royal Commission on Land Drainage, established under Lord Bledisloe in 1927, which reviewed the nation’s flood defence system, condemned the existing laws (some of which dated back to the time of Henry VIII) as “chaotic” and “obscure”, and insisted that a matter of such obvious national importance could no longer be left to 361 under-resourced land drainage authorities, which only had the power to raise funds from the direct beneficiaries of any proposed defence works. Following the Commission’s report, the Land Drainage Act 1930 created Catchment Boards in each of the main river areas, granting them the power to raise funds from county and borough councils throughout their river’s catchment area.

  The inadequacy of existing systems of tidal prediction also had to be addressed if early warning systems were to be improved. This work had fallen to the Meteorological Office and also the Liverpool Observatory and Tidal Institute, founded in 1919, which used data recorded at Southend to analyse the ways in which high tides might be increased by winds. It was this work that would eventually produce the theory of the “storm surge” caused by “the drag” of the wind on the sea, which was shown to be all the greater when the wind’s “fetch” is long, and capable of wreaking havoc if it coincided with a high tide.38

  The sea, meanwhile, kept coming. Sheerness had escaped the worst on Tuesday, 1 November 1921, when a north-westerly gale lifted the spring tide about three feet above expectation, raising the ships in the naval harbour high over the heads of disconcerted onlookers in Station Road.39 It was only by rare fluke that the town escaped inundation on 6 and 7 January 1928, when a “tidal wave” nearly a foot higher than previously recorded reached London just after midnight and without any warning from downriver. Overwhelming the embankment, it drowned fourteen people in basements along the Thames and caused extensive damage (not least at the Tate Gallery, where the water wrecked important works of art stored in the basement, including sketches by Turner).40 Despite some flooding in the dockyard and around the creek at Queenborough,41 Sheppey was saved — allegedly thanks to the vigilance of the local manager of Queenborough Port and Contracting Company. Mr W.S. Fenton, who had responsibility for the dams on the island, happened to overhear men on the Nore lightship talking over the radio with colleagues having “a rough time”42 at Goodwin Sands. Alerted by a voice predicting “they will be having some water up the river tonight”, Mr Fenton had despatched his workmen to secure the dams. Aware of the happenstance nature of his decision, he joined those who demanded a more formal early warning system.

/>   By the beginning of March 1929, Sheerness Urban District Council was also being challenged to do something about the dire condition of the town’s sea defences by the highly concerned chairman of its Works Committee. Having forced the question onto the agenda despite the reluctance of colleagues, Councillor S. Carpenter insisted that the town was living in “a fool’s paradise”.43 He declared the danger of flooding so high that he really “could not understand people travelling along the sea walls with perambulators”.

  There were all too many excuses for the council’s inertia. Lack of resources was a familiar complaint for a town aware of the straitened condition of many of its ratepayers, and the difficulty of raising an adequate response to the threat was increased by the division of the island into three different local authorities, including the Minster Rural District Council which had tended, in the critical judgement of the Sheerness Times, to “stand aloof”44 — its jurisdiction was placed on higher ground — from Sheerness’s worries about flooding. The town’s Urban District council was also hampered by the fact that the War Office, which owned the defences at the weak length near the battery at Barton’s Point, was reluctant to repair the disintegrating groynes on the shore there or, indeed, to accept that the shingle so vital to the town’s security really was being swept away by high tides.

  Councillor Carpenter may at first have had to “accept the flogging” imposed on him by his more resigned fellow councillors, but his repeated insistence that Sheerness was in “real danger”45 gained ground over the coming weeks. While the council continued to believe that the cost of sea defences was “becoming more than some of the coastal towns could bear” and should be made into a “national charge”,46 it was soon countenancing action along the lines suggested by Carpenter, who was by now also declaring that three or four large concrete groynes were needed to prevent the erosion of shingle between Neptune Terrace and Cheyney Rock.

  By the end of March, more “definite” plans for a new scheme were being prepared.47 Having admitted himself “no expert” on sea defences, Councillor Carpenter attended a conference organised by Lowestoft Council as part of the preparation for the Coastal Protection Bill (brought to the House of Commons on 29 October 1929). He also visited London to discuss his council’s developing ideas with George Lansbury, the idealistic East End Christian socialist who was First Commissioner of Works in Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government, and also with officials of the Unemployment Grants Committee, responsible for loaning money to local authorities for public works intended to relieve unemployment in depressed areas. Carpenter became the driver of the council’s proposed scheme, and also of its application for a loan of £25,000 from that committee.

  Introduced in 1929, the “Marine Town Improvement Scheme” would involve a great deal more concrete than was required by Councillor Carpenter’s groynes along Marine Parade’s seafront. As the clerk to Sheerness Council alleged at a public enquiry into the application, held in Sheerness under the auspices of the Department of Health (which supervised the Unemployment Grants Committee’s schemes) in January 1930, the Victorian wall was a woeful thing, which the rising sea had repeatedly exposed as inadequate. Lacking even rudimentary foundations, it was, so Councillor Carpenter explained, really “only mud plastered over”. The idea of “global warming” was for the future but, as Carpenter also pointed out, the town’s high tides were already estimated to be nearly two feet above those of the 1890s. Since 1904, when Sheerness council had bought the foreshore from the Lord of the Manor, they had swept away much of the protective shingle from the beach and the water regularly now rose right up to the “dwarf wall” on the promenade.

  The council’s new scheme would extend along the full length of Marine Parade, from Neptune Terrace all the way east to Cheyney Rock. Made of concrete, both reinforced and mass, it would be thirty feet wide in all and five feet six inches higher than its predecessor. It would have foundations of shingle, varying from four to twelve feet deep, which would rest on clay upwards of two feet thick. It would include three if not four concrete groynes built out towards the sea to prevent the shingle drifting.

  If keeping the sea out of the town was a priority, the Marine Town Improvement Scheme was also intended to help Sheerness cope with its oldest fear. As a naval town, Sheerness had boomed during the First World War. Once the armistice was signed, however, naval expenditure shrank as it so often had at such moments, and workers were being laid off in the time-sanctioned manner. By 1931, concerned residents would be urging the constituency MP to seek an official denial of rumours alleging that the shrunken dockyard and naval station, on which the town was still utterly dependent, might be closed altogether.48 In this depressed post-war climate, the members of Sheerness Urban District Council had felt “forced”, once again, to “develop their town as a seaside resort”. Various steps had already been taken to make the place more attractive. These included the creation of new leisure facilities near the main beach in Mile Town and the intensification — in 1923 — of a longstanding campaign to persuade the County Council to abolish the hated toll on the Kingsferry Bridge across the Swale. (“Freedom is ours”, the Sheerness Guardian would blaze when this discouraging “stranglehold”49 on the island and its summer trade was finally broken in July 1929.)

  As the council was pleased to note, these improvements had already enabled Sheerness to draw summer visitors from south and south-east London, as well as from nearer industrial areas such as Gillingham, Maidstone and Chatham. The local papers reveal that a new kind of “lost property” was turning up on the beach: a pile of clothes, including trousers and a mackintosh, left unclaimed in front of Neptune Terrace; or an old sock with £31 in treasury notes stitched into its toe, eventually reclaimed by a couple of Londoners who had not dared to leave their savings at home. More glamorous visitors were counted in too, including the recently married artist Frank Medworth, who passed through in September, together with his wife and the new baby whose arrival had kept them close to home that year. Though he would not deny his accustomed preference for Spain when interviewed over a cup of coffee by the Sheerness Guardian, Medworth was happy to declare Sheerness much improved since the summer visits of his childhood as the son of a Southwark joiner. The “natives” seemed “very pleasant” although “not easy” to approach by those they judged strangers:

  He was stopped by a man who exclaimed, “You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?”

  “Well”, replied Mr Medworth, “we are cosmopolitan”.

  “Oh”, replied the man, “I knew you weren’t English”.50

  The Marine Parade Improvement Scheme would also seek to mitigate one of the remaining shortcomings of the developing resort — i.e. Sheerness’s unpredictable weather — by providing three “ornamental shelters” on the new promenade, and more shelters and changing facilities in the space below. Thanks to the new bathing area at the western end, the council would also be able to sweep away the unsightly “wooden bathing huts” still littering the main beach. In the language of the town’s publicity committee, the Marine Parade Improvement Scheme would clean all this up, thereby contributing to the “booming” of Sheerness as a resort.

  But who was to build this prodigious, multipurpose rampart? With the dockyard employing a thousand fewer workers, and five hundred of the five thousand men on the town’s national insurance register being unemployed, the Marine Parade Improvement Scheme was proposed as a labour-intensive two-year initiative that would, so the Unemployment Grants Committee had been assured, help to decrease “some of the suffering of a very large part of the population”.

  If anyone is still counting, Marine Parade’s anti-sea protection rampart might rightfully be registered (alongside the bathing facilities on the Serpentine and other examples of “Lansbury’s lidos” in London’s parks) among the rare achievements of Britain’s short-lived second Labour government. That, however, was not how some residents of Marine Parade saw it. They used the Ministry of Health’s public enquiry to rep
eat objections previously articulated in letters to the local paper. They were worried, as Mrs Cole at No. 32 frankly admitted, about the impact on the value of their properties. They denied there was any genuine need for the “improvement”, claiming that the sea had never flowed over the wall in living memory (on that score, Mrs Cole could only speak for the last nine years but her older neighbour, Mrs Beale of No. 33, had a full forty covered). They tormented themselves with the thought of the raised promenade, which surely threatened to confront them with an experience like that of the residents of Blue Town High Street, whose windows were blinded by the high brick wall isolating the dockyard. There was some dispute whether the council really intended to raise Marine Parade’s defences by ten feet as Mrs Cole feared or only, as the surveyor insisted, by five feet six inches, but residents had reason to suspect that the height was determined primarily by the council’s determination to create shelters for summer visitors beneath as well as on top of the esplanade. They anticipated that unruly “youngsters” would congregate in these shelters at night, and there were rumours — which turned out to be partly true even though they were vehemently denied at the hearing — that the financially stretched council, which had been far from forthcoming about its plans, secretly intended to build rentable garages and perhaps even shops on the landward side of its new rampart.