The Dover Road Part 1

The Dover Road.

by Charles G. Harper.

PREFACE

_It has been said, by whom I know not, that "prefaces to books are like signs to public-houses; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind of entertainment to be found within." But this preface is not to be like those; for it would require an essay in itself to give a comprehensive idea of the Dover Road, in all its implications. A road is not merely so many miles of highway, more or less well-maintained. It is not only something in the surveyor's way; but history as well. It is life, touched at every point._

_The Dover Road--the highway between London and that most significant of approaches to the Continent of Europe--would have been something much more in its mere name had it not been for the accident of London: one of the greatest accidents. It would have been considered a part of the great road to Chester and to Holyhead: the route diagonally across England, from sea to sea, which really in the first instance it was._

_For the Dover Road is actually the initial limb of the Watling Street: that prehistoric British trackway adopted by the Romans and by them engineered into a road; and it would seem that those Roman engineers, instructed by the Imperial authorities, considered rather the military and strategic needs of those times than those of_ LONDINIUM; _for London was not on the direct road they made; and it was only at a later date, when it was grown commercially, they constructed an alternative route that served it._

_It would be rash to declare that more history has been enacted on this road than on any other, although we may suspect it; but certainly history is more spectacular along these miles. Those pageants and glittering processions are of the past: they ended in 1840, when railways were about to supplant the road; when the last distinguished traveller along these miles, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, came up by carriage to wed Queen Victoria._

CHARLES G. HARPER.

FEBRUARY, 1922.

I

Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history, nor one so crowded in every age with incident and a.s.sociations. The writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to keep his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to take to his heels at any moment.

And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road, and demand attention! Caesar's presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp of the legionaries along Watling Street on moonlit nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, n.o.bles, saints of different degrees of sanct.i.ty, great blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the s.p.a.ce the record of their doings would occupy; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian.

How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarra.s.sing the acc.u.mulated wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest justice in this one volume! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the telling of this story; and for the proper presentation of its pageantry, for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon these seventy miles of highway, the rugged-wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of Thomas Hardy's rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with s.p.a.ce to command one might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of the Dover Road; while, with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of their art, Morland and Rowlandson, ill.u.s.trations might be fashioned that would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration of all. Without these gifts of the G.o.ds, who shall say he has done all this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compa.s.s of these covers the doings of sixty generations?

The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters of a mile long.

II

[Sidenote: THE COACHES]

If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with coach-travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne's "Foreign Mail," which left the General Post-Office in Saint Martin's-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes later at the "Cross Keys," Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road.

If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the "Express," which, starting from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the journey in nine hours; or else by the "Union" coach, which, travelling at an equal speed, left the "White Bear," Piccadilly, at 9 a.m. Not that these were the only choice. Coaches in plenty left town for Dover; the "Eagle," the "Phoenix," Worthington's Safety Coaches, the "Telegraph,"

the "Defiance," the "Royal Mail," and the "Union Night Coach," starting from all parts of London. The famous "Tally-ho Coach," too, between London and Canterbury, left town every afternoon, and did the fifty-four miles in the twinkling of an eye--that is to say (with greater particularity and less vague figure of speech) in five hours and a half; while Stanbury and Rutley's fly-vans and wagons conveyed goods and pa.s.sengers who could not afford the fares of the swifter coaches between the "George,"

Aldermanbury, and Dover at the rate of six miles an hour.

Besides these methods of conveyance, numerous coaches, vans, omnibuses and carriers'-carts plied between the Borough and Chatham, Rochester and Strood; or served the villages between London and Gravesend. Indeed, at this period, we find the crack coaches, the long-distance mails, starting from London city, leaving to the historic inns of Southwark only the goods-wagons, the short-stages, and the carriers'-carts. In 1837, also, you could vary the order of your going to Dover by taking boat from London to Gravesend, Whitstable, or Herne Bay, and at any of those places waiting for the coach. The voyage to Herne Bay took six hours, and the coach journey from thence to Dover occupied another four, the whole costing but ten shillings; which, considering that you could get horribly sea-sick in the six hours between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays.

The traveller of this time would probably select the "Express" from the "Golden Cross," because this was a convenient and central starting-point from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was well-aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called at every tavern where the coach stopped--and at a good many where it had no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic hue, and a plum-coloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what Shakespeare would call a "purple-hued malt-worm." He shaved scrupulously.

A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed, and his talk, which consisted of "_Gee_-hups," biting repartees administered to pa.s.sing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely professional.

Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the approved fashion.

III

[Sidenote: LONDON BRIDGE]

And the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty years previously.

[Ill.u.s.tration: South Gateway, Old London Bridge]

So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and pa.s.sing close under the projecting clock of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The view was eminently picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring Monument with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick and shovel. In previous ages there were gates both at the London and the Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen Elizabeth's time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilised kingdom as that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore's bloodstained castle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "GEORGE."]

[Sidenote: BRIDGE FOOT]

"Bridge Foot" was the name of the Southwark end of London Bridge. It was a narrow lane leading to Southwark High Street, paved with k.n.o.bbly stones and walled in with tall houses. Bridge Foot is a thing of the past, and London Bridge Station stands on the site of it. "High Street, Borough,"

too, is very different from not only mediaeval days, but even from coaching times. The many old inns that used to front toward the street, dating their prosperity back to the twelfth century, and their fabric to some time subsequently to the fire of 1676, are nearly all either utterly demolished, or are put to use as railway receiving offices. The "Queen's Head" is gone; the "George," most interesting of all that remain here, is threatened; the "Spur" is left, little changed; the "Half Moon" is still the house for a good chop or steak and a tankard of ale; but the "White Hart," where is it? Where the "Tabard," the "King's Head," the "Catherine Wheel," the "Boar's Head," the "Old Pick my Toe," or the "Three Widows"?

In vain will the curious who pay pilgrimage to Southwark seek them. There still are many cavernous doorways, stone-flagged pa.s.sages, and great courtyards; but nothing more romantic than railway vans is to be seen in the most of them, and the yard where Sam Weller was first introduced to an admiring public is quite gone.

The most romantically named of the Southwark inns now left is undoubtedly the "Blue Eyed Maid," so named, possibly, in connection with Tamplin's "Blue Eyed Maid" coach that used to run between Southwark and Rochester in the twenties. The building, though, does not share the romanticism of its name. Near it, let into the seventeenth-century brick frontage of No. 71, High Street, is the old sign of the "Hare and Sun," the trade-mark of Nicholas Hare; and this, together with the stone half-moon sign in the yard of the "Half Moon Inn," is the sole relic of the many devices that once decorated the street. The hop trade has taken almost undivided possession of the place nowadays. The Hop Exchange is over the way, and hop-factors are as frequently to be met with here as diamond-merchants in Hatton Garden; and with their coming the old-fashioned appearance of Southwark High Street is gone.

Even when Hogarth painted his "Southwark Fair," in 1733, the street was suburban, and in the distance, seen between the crowds gathered round old St. George's Church, are the hills and dales of Kent. The church was pulled down in the following year, and the present building put up in its place. The fair was suppressed in 1762.

At that time, Kent Street was the only way to the Dover Road, and, even then, the dirt and over-crowding in that notorious thoroughfare were phenomenal. Englishmen were ashamed of this disgraceful entrance into London, and one whose duty lay in bringing a representative foreigner from Dover to London craftily contrived that he should enter the Metropolis at night, when the dirty tenements of Kent Street, by which their carriage would pa.s.s, would be hidden in darkness. When Newington Causeway was made, and direct access gained to the Old Kent Road, the horrors of Kent Street were no longer to be braved by travellers. The street is here still, but somewhat civilised, and now called "Tabard Street"; but to "give a bit of Kent Street" is yet understood to mean language for which Billingsgate has also been long renowned.

[Sidenote: THE TELEGRAPH TOWER]

A singular structure standing in Tooley Street, and visible for a very great distance up or down the river, was the so-called "Telegraph Tower,"

which was burned down in the great fire of August, 1843. It had at one time been a shot-tower, and had always completely dwarfed its next-door neighbour, St. Olave's Church. It was very ugly, and so its loss was a distinct gain; but with its disappearance went all recollection of the old system of signalling that had no rival before the electric telegraph was introduced in 1838.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD TELEGRAPH TOWER, TOOLEY STREET.]

This system was introduced in 1795, at the suggestion of the Rev. Lord George Murray, afterwards Bishop of Saint David's. He proposed to the Admiralty to erect signal-posts or towers on the heights between London and the coast, and upon experiments being made, it was found easily practicable to send messages in this way to our ships in the Downs. That year, then, witnessed the establishment of a line of telegraph-towers between the Admiralty and Deal, with a branch to Sheerness. The original apparatus of revolving shutters was in use until 1816, when it was changed for a semaph.o.r.e system, resembling very closely that in use upon railways at the present day, the chief peculiarity being that, instead of only two movements of the semaph.o.r.e arms, each one could be made to a.s.sume six different positions. Some old prints of the Admiralty buildings in Whitehall show a telegraph-station of this kind upon the roof, with the little wooden cabin in which were stationed the men (generally four) whose duty it was to read through telescopes the signals from the nearest station, and to work the shutters or semaph.o.r.es above their own. One of these stations has given the name of "Telegraph Hill" to that knoll at Hatcham, by New Cross, which was opened as a public park so recently as April, 1895. From hence was signalled news of Nelson and Trafalgar, of Wellington and Waterloo; here worked the arms that carried orders from the Admiralty to the admirals in the Downs to sail east or west; to proceed home or fare forth to foreign stations; to summon Courts Martial, and to put the sentences of those stern drum-head tribunals into execution.