The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries Part 20

[Sidenote: _POOR JACK_]

Another, and a much more spirited, plate by Isaac Cruikshank, dated 1797, and ent.i.tled, "True Blue; or Britain's Jolly Tars Paid Off at Portsmouth,"

shows a coach-load going off to London without more ado, accompanied by Poll and Sue, Nancy, Kate, and Joan; all (nay, I will not say uproariously drunk) in the merriest of moods. The horses gallop, hats are waved in every direction, and those who have no hats flourish beer-bottles instead.

Some jolly Jack-a-Dandy stands upon the roof, at the imminent risk of his neck, and sc.r.a.pes a fiddle to what, considering the pace of the coach, must have been a tune of the most agonizing description; while an amorous fellow hugs his girl behind. The Union Jack is, of course, in a prominent position, and a riotous, devil-me-care figure sits one of the horses backwards. I do not observe any one of this merry company "heaving the lead overboard," as became the pleasing fashion among sailor-men flush of money who rode outside the day coaches to town. These merry men would purchase long gold chains at Portsmouth, and on their journey would now and then hang them over the side of the coach with their watches suspended at the end by way of plummets, and would call out, in nautical style, so many fathoms. Some home-coming sailors would walk up the road, either because they had spent most of their money in drink and debauchery at Portsmouth, or else because the idea commended itself to their freakish natures; and the people of the inns and beerhouses on the way reaped a fine harvest from this cla.s.s of customer. I have told you, on another page, how most of these sailor-men were accommodated, as to their sleeping arrangements, by being given a shake-down in the clean straw of some outhouse. They in many instances threw themselves down amid the straw, hopelessly drunk; and then entered unto them the honest innkeeper, who would not rob his guests, but saw no objection to taking them up by the heels and shaking them vigorously until the money fell out of their pockets among the straw. If they found the coin in the morning, why, it was bad luck from the publican's point of view; and if they reeled away, leaving their money behind them, it was a happy chance for mine host, who came and gleaned a golden h.o.a.rd from his straw. But if some indignant sailor, full of horrid oaths and terrible threats, came and swore he had been robbed during the night, the virtuous publican could suggest that before he made such serious charges, it would be better if he made a search. He _might_ have dropped his money!

Sometimes the Portsmouth Road was traversed by long processions of wagons containing treasure captured at sea and landed at Portsmouth for greater security in transmission to London. Such an occasion was that when Anson, returning in 1744 from his four years' cruise in South American waters, brought home a rich cargo of spoil in the "Centurion." This treasure was valued at no less than 500,000, and was stowed away in twelve wagons, which were sent up to London under an escort of sailors and marines.

Eighteen years later, another splendid haul was made by the capture of the Spanish galleon "Hermione," from Lima, off Cadiz, and on this occasion the value was scarcely less than before. The prize-money distributed amounted to handsome fortunes for the officers, and conferred competencies upon every man and boy in the two ships' companies that took part in the capture. Such windfalls as these were not everyday occurrences, and many a man gave and took hard knocks all his life, to die in his old age in poverty and neglect. Very few, probably, of those fortunate prize-sharers from the "Hermione" treasure-chest retained their wealth.

[Sidenote: _QUOTA-MEN_]

The people who dwelt along the highway all shared to some degree in this marvellous good fortune, but they lived in fear of the murderous rascals who began to infest the roads in 1795, tramping or being sent down from London to join the navy at a time when every man was needed to help the nation through the vast wars we were continually engaged in. At that period of England's greatest struggle for existence the press-gang was in full tide of activity, but the pressed men were few in proportion to the number required to man the ships, and so Acts of Parliament were pa.s.sed in order to provide a certain number of men from each county and from every seaport for the service of the navy. The men thus provided were induced to join by the extraordinarily large bounties offered, some of which were as much as 30; and many of these "quota-men," as they came to be called, belonged to the most depraved of the criminal cla.s.ses. The _personnel_ of the navy was lowered by these men, and the sailors were disgusted with them. The "quota-bounty," says an authority, "we conceive to have been the most ill-advised and fatal measure ever adopted by the Government for manning the fleet. The seamen who voluntarily entered in 1793 and fought some of the most glorious of our battles received the comparatively small bounty of 5. These brave fellows saw men totally ignorant of the profession, the very refuse and outcasts of society, flying from justice and the vengeance of the law, come on board with a bounty to the amount of 70. One of these objects, on coming on board a ship of war with 70 bounty, was seized by a boatswain's mate, who, holding him up with one hand by the waistband of his trousers, humorously exclaimed, 'Here's a fellow that cost a guinea a pound!'"

Criminals were allowed as an alternative to long terms of imprisonment, to volunteer for what was evidently regarded by the authorities as an equivalent to the gaol--a man-o'-war. "All the bad characters of a neighbourhood, loafers, poachers, footpads, possible murderers, men suspected of any crime, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence, were arrested and sent on board, with a note to the captain begging him to take measures to prevent their return; which, as such men were commonly stout-built fellows enough, he was no ways loath to do. The gaol-birds from the towns were unquestionably worse; worse physically, worse morally, and perhaps worse hygienically; they were not infrequently infected with gaol-fever, and brought the infection to the fleet; they were largely the cause of the severe, even brutal, discipline that ruled in the navy towards the end of last century." According to the sailors themselves--"Them was the chaps as played h.e.l.l with the fleet: every gra.s.s-combing beggar as chose to bear up for the bounty had nothing to do but to dock the tails of his togs and take to the tender." They used to ship in shoals; they were drafted by forties and fifties to each ship in the fleet; they were hardly up the side, hardly mustered abaft, before there was "Send for the barber, shave their pates, and send 'em for'rd to the head, to be scrubbed and sluished from clue to ear-ring, afore you could venture to berth 'em below. Then, stand clear of their sh.o.r.e-going rigs--every finger was fairly a fishhook; neither chest, nor bed, nor blanket, nor bag escaped their sleight-of-hand thievery; they pluck you, aye, as clean as a poulterer, and bone your very eyebrows whilst staring you full in the face."

[Sidenote: _ROADS INFESTED_]

These were the men who, instead of bringing prosperity to the innkeepers and country folk, robbed and plundered stray travellers and lonely houses by the way. Singly, they robbed hen-roosts and old market-women; in bands their courage rose to highway robbery on a larger scale, and even to murder. An official posting down to Portsmouth with money for a ship's company came within an ace of being relieved of several thousands of pounds; for on his coach being upset on Rake Hill a number of fellows appeared with offers of help, and would have carried off the gold had not the boxes in which it was contained been too heavy. As it was, while some of them were engaging every one's attention in attempting to raise the coach out of the slough in which it had become embedded, the remainder of the band had got hold of the specie-boxes, and were battering them in with great stones, when a party of marines opportunely arrived and caught them in the very act.

Men of this stamp were the curse of the navy. They were more often town-bred weaklings than robust countrymen, and to their const.i.tutional disabilities they added the vices of the towns from which they came, and a sullen habit of mind that could leave no room for discipline. Those were the days of the press-gang, when likely fellows, whether seamen or landsmen, were taken by force from their occupations, shipped under guard upon men-o'-war in the harbours, and sent to fight, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, for King and country. Merchantmen, coming home from long and tedious voyages, were seized and hurried off immediately upon their stepping ash.o.r.e, and, in fact, any well-built young fellow, an apprentice or clerk, who could not prove himself to be a master-man became at one time the ordinary prey of the press-gangs that roamed about the seaboard towns in search of prey.

Seamen only were their proper quarry, but when more, and still more, men were required as time went on, it mattered little whether pressed men were landlubbers or sailors; and as the members of the press-gang came to be paid so much a head for all the st.u.r.dy fellows they could seize, it may be seen that they were not apt to stand upon trifles or to weigh evidence very narrowly. There were exemptions from the press, and it was open to a man who considered himself to have been illegally seized to send a statement to the authorities. These became known as "state-the-case-men,"

but as, in many instances, the ship upon which they had been sent sailed almost immediately, this formality was simply a cruel farce. If their statements were ever forwarded to their destination, they only arrived by the time the ships were well out to sea; and if their complaints were ever investigated, the inquiries would most likely take place while the subjects of them were in the thick of an action with the enemy; perhaps wounded, possibly even already dead.

[Sidenote: _THE PRESS-GANG_]

The forays of the press-gangs were battles in themselves, and many a man on either side was killed in these man-hunting expeditions. "Private mischief," said the Earl of Mansfield, "had better be submitted to than that public detriment and inconvenience should ensue;" but the men who fought with the press-gangs did not see matters in this light, and neither did their womenkind. The beautiful decorative drawing by Morland that forms the frontispiece to this book puts the sentiment of the time against impressment in a poetical way, but Gillray's more nervous and satirical pencil gives, in his "Liberty of the Subject," a realistic and satirical picture that shows how strenuously the press was resisted. It is a most graphic and humorous representation of a "hot press" in the streets of some seaport town, at a period immediately following upon the American War of Independence, when men were particularly scarce. A gang has seized a tailor, a poor, miserable-looking wretch with no fighting in him, almost literally as well as metaphorically the "ninth part of a man," and his captors are dragging him off, knock-kneed and incapable of resistance. But if he submits so easily, the women of the crowd have to be reckoned with, and are doing nearly all the fighting. The furious virago in the foreground is pulling at a midshipman's hair with all the strength of one hand, while with the other she is lugging his ear off, kicking him, at the same time, with her knee. A sailor in the rear, with an animated expression of countenance, has hold of her arm, and appears to be aiming a blow at her head with the b.u.t.t-end of a pistol; while another woman with a heavy mop is preparing to fell him to the ground.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT, 1782. _By James Gillray._]

One of the "hottest presses," and at the same time the most successful, ever known, was that of March 8, 1803, Portsmouth. Five hundred able seamen were obtained on that occasion by the strategy and cunning of a certain Captain Brown, who a.s.sembled a company of marines late at night with all the fuss and circ.u.mstance he could display, in order, as he gave out, to quell a mutiny at Fort Monckton. The news of this pretended mutiny spread rapidly, and great crowds came rushing down to see the affair. When they had all crossed Haslar Bridge they were cooped up like so many fowls, and that master of strategy, having posted his marines at the bridge end, seized every suitable man in the crowd.

But the pressed men, although they tried every dodge to escape this forced service, and though their unwillingness to serve his Majesty afloat has made a cla.s.sic of the saying, "One volunteer is worth three pressed men,"

did good service when once they were trapped and trained. For one thing, they had no choice. 'Twas either a cheerful obedience to orders and readiness in action when once afloat, or else a flogging with the cat and a remand, heavily ironed, to the hold. Seeing how useless would be any malingering, the pressed men turned to with a will, and fought our battles with such spirit that the victories of Trafalgar, of "the glorious First of June," off Cape St. Vincent, and many of the other notable exploits of the British Fleet, are due to their courage and resolution.

[Sidenote: _REVELRY_]

When the pressed men came home (if ever they were so fortunate) they were as a rule so inured to sea-service and hard knocks, that, so soon as they had had a spree and spent their money, they were ready for another cruise. But meanwhile they enjoyed themselves with the reckless prodigality possible only to such men. When the ships came home (and ships were always coming home then), Portsmouth ran with liquor, riot, and revelry; and on fine summer days the gra.s.sy slopes of Portsdown Hill were all alive with the jolly Jacks engaged with great earnestness in the business of pleasure. Here, in the taverns that overlook from this breezy height the harbour, the town, and the distant mud-flats, generations of soldiers and sailors, fresh from battle and the salt sea, have caroused.

Here, opposite the "George" and the Belle Vue Gardens, where "the military" and the servant-girls, the sailors and their la.s.ses, still disport on high-days and holidays, with swings, Aunt Sallies, cocoa-nut shies, and, in short, all the fun of the fair, have the look-out men of a hundred years ago shivered in the wind while scanning the distant horizon for signs of Bonaparte and his flotilla, the inglorious Armada that never left port.

x.x.xVI

When workmen were engaged in lowering the road opposite the old "George"

Inn, that stands so boldly and with such a fine last-century air on the hill brow, they opened a tumulus which was found to contain, at a depth of only eighteen inches, the well-preserved skeletons of sixteen men, the victims of some prehistoric fray. Their feet were all placed towards the east, and in the skull of one was found the iron head of a spear. Who were these vanquished soldiers in a forgotten fight? Were they Belgae? Surely not. Were they Christianized Saxons, slain in battle with Pagan vikings, marauders from over sea? This seems more likely than any other theory.

That they were Christians appears certain from the position of their skeletons, east and west; that they fell in battle is evident from the silent testimony of the spear-head.

Down goes the road in a long steady slope, flanked by the great forts of Purbrook and Widley, whose dingy red-brick walls and embrasures command the entrance to the harbour. Away, to right and left, for a distance of seven miles, runs a succession of these forts, from Fareham to Purbrook, cresting the ridge of the long hill, connected by telegraph, and furnished with extensive barrack accommodation.

Cosham village comes next, crouching at the foot of the ridge, with the great guns high overhead to the rearwards: Cosham, neither town nor village; busy enough for a town, sufficiently quaint for a village; with a railway-crossing barring the road; a station adjoining it; the tramp of soldiers re-echoing, and the blare of bugles familiar in the ears of the people all day and every day.

[Sidenote: _SUBURBS_]

These are suburbs indeed, with the beginnings of pavements and the terminus of a tramway that runs from here, a distance of three miles, to Portsmouth itself. We cross over the bridges that span salty channels, oozy and redolent of ocean and sea-weed during the hours of ebb. Here we are immediately confronted with the ceinture of forts that embraces the towns and garrisons of Portsea Island in a ring of masonry, earthworks, and steel. The fortifications straddle across the road on brick arches containing Royal Engineers' stores, and ornamented with the device "18 VR 61," done in red brick upon yellow; and obsolete cannon, buried up to their trunnions, guard the brickwork piers against the wear and tear of traffic.

Now come Hilsea Barracks, with Hilsea Post Office opposite, and further on, opposite the "Green Posts" Inn, an obelisk, marking the eighteenth-century bounds of the borough of Portsmouth, with the inscription, "Burgi de Portes.m.u.th Limes MDCCXCIX. Rev. G. Cuthbert praetore." And so by stages through North End into Landport, past ever-growing settlements and suburban wildernesses where new-built rows of hutches miscalled villas look out upon market-gardens and those forlornest of fields already marked out for "building sites," but still innocent of houses; where builders' refuse c.u.mbers the ground, and where muddy pools, islanded with piles of broken and slack-baked bricks, and wrinkled into furious wavelets by the bl.u.s.terous winds, resemble miniature seas in which (to aid the resemblance) lie the discarded iron pots and kettles of Portsmouth households, their spouts and handles rising above the waters like the vestiges of so many wrecked ironclads.

Successive eras of suburb-rearing are most readily to be noted. First come the red-bricked suburbs still in the making; then those of the '60's and the '70's, brown-bricked and grey-stuccoed; and then the settlements of a period ranging from 1840 to 1860, contrived in a fashion fondly supposed to represent Italian villas, characteristically constructed of lath and plaster now very much the worse for wear, but at one time wearing a spick-and-span appearance that would have delighted Macaulay, to whom the sight of a row of "semi-detached suburban residences" gave visions of progress and prosperity that seem to us inexpressibly vulgar. The sight of wealthy tradesfolk and of plutocratic contractors seems to have warmed Macaulay into an enthusiasm which became eloquent in enlarging upon the rows of villas that encircle every great town. To him the ostentatious surroundings of the despicable rogues--the typical contractors of the early and mid-Victorian epoch--who contracted to supply hay and fodder for our armies in the Crimea, and forwarded in their consignments a large proportion of bricks and rotten straw--the vulgar display of men of this stamp recalled the most prosperous times of the ancient Romans, and was therefore to be approved. But these men have long since left their lath-and-plaster fripperies for a place where (let us hope) their bricks and their rotten straw will be remembered against them, and their descendants have mounted on the heaps of their inherited money to a very high social scale indeed. The eligible residences themselves, with their "grounds," are mostly to be let, and the firesides across which unctuous purveyors and middlemen and their wives grinned at one another and ate b.u.t.tered toast at tea-time, and drank "sherry wine" at night, are cold.

Following upon this suburban stratum come the egregious houses of the Regency period: pseudo-cla.s.sic houses these, bay-windowed and approached by steep flights of stone steps surmounted by ridiculously skimpy little porches, with attenuated neo-cla.s.sic pillars and pediments, done in wood.

Some of these are gone--pulled down to make room for shops--and doubtless many more will shortly go the same way. Let us hope one or two will be preserved for all time, for, although by no means beautiful, they are interesting as tending to show the manners of a period now removed from us by nearly a century; the taste in domestic architecture of a time when the First Gentleman in Europe ruled the land.

[Sidenote: _'ROADS' v. 'STREETS'_]

Here, where we come into Landport, we also come into the less affected region of "streets." In the newer suburbs nothing less than "roads" will serve the turn of the jerry-builder; his ambitious phraseology soars far above what he thinks to be the more plebeian "street"; but perhaps, after all, he is wise in his generation, and is amply justified by the preferences of his clients; and if that is the situation, let us by all means condole with him as a much-maligned man, who does not what he would, but what he must.

Here, too, in these beginnings of the old town, shops jostle villas with "grounds," and they in turn elbow artisans' dwellings, where children swing with improvised swings of clothes-lines on the railings, and manufacture mud-pies in the "gardens"; sticking them afterwards upon the shutters of those ultimate shops of the suburbs which seem to be in a chronic state of bankruptcy, and hold out no hopes of a living for the pioneer butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers who, having served the purpose and gone the way of all pioneers, leave them richer in experience but light of pocket.

It was in these purlieus that Charles d.i.c.kens was born, at 387 Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport, on February 7, 1812; the son of Mr.

John d.i.c.kens, Navy pay-clerk, who is supposed to be portrayed in the character of Micawber--no flattering portraiture of a father by his son.

Writers who have fallen under the spell of d.i.c.kens have tried to do some sort of poetic representation of his birthplace; and, truth to tell, they have failed, because there never was any poetry at all about the place,--and probably never will be any, so long as its scrubby brick front and paltry fore-court last: while as regards d.i.c.kens himself, he was a very excellent business man among authors, and as little poetic as can well be imagined.

x.x.xVII

[Sidenote: _PORTSMOUTH TOWN HALL_]

Landport left behind, one came, until within only a comparatively few years ago, upon Portsmouth town through a series of ditches, scarps, counterscarps, bastions, and defensible gates. They are all swept away now, as being obsolete, and where they stood are parks and barracks, military hospitals, and open s.p.a.ces devoted to drilling. The surroundings of Portsmouth are, in fact, very modern, and probably the most ancient edifice here is the High Level railway station: a cla.s.s of building which age has no power to render venerable. The latest effort of modernity is to be seen from this point in the Town Hall, of which every inhabitant of the allied towns of Portsmouth, Southsea, Gosport, and Landport is inordinately proud. And if size should count for anything, they have cause for pride in this munic.i.p.al effort; for Portsmouth Town Hall is particularly immense. This is no place in which to enlarge upon its elephantine dimensions, nor to specify how many hundreds of feet its tower rises above the pavement; but it may be noted that it is a second-hand design, having been closely copied from the Town Hall of Bolton, in Lancashire. The architectural purist is at a loss how to describe its architecture; for it is neither good Cla.s.sic nor pa.s.sable Renaissance, although it partakes of the nature of both: it is, in view of the number of munic.i.p.al buildings put up in this fashion over the country during the last forty years or so, perhaps best described as belonging to the Victorian Town Hall order of architectural design; and that seems to me a perspicuous definition of it. It has, however, an advantage that Bolton altogether lacks. The sooty atmosphere of that dingy manufacturing town has clothed the surface of its Town Hall with a mantle of grime, until the building, from topmost pinnacle to pavement level, is, to use a colloquialism, "as black as your hat." The fresh breezes that blow over Portsmouth at least spare its Town Hall this indignity, and the design, such as it is, seems as fresh to-day as when the building was first inaugurated.

In Leland's time Portsmouth was "mured from the est toure a forelonge's lengthe, with a mudde waulle armid with tymbre, whereon be great pieces both of yron and bra.s.sen ordinauns"; and in later ages these primitive defences had expanded into great bastions and ma.s.sive walls, in which were no less than six gates. When the military authorities dismantled these town walls, with the gates and the fortifications, they did away at once with a great deal of inconvenience and annoyance experienced by the civil population of Portsmouth in being cooped up within bounds at night, and by their reforming zeal destroyed the greater part of the interest with which strangers viewed this old stronghold.

To-day one obtains too little historic colour in the streets of the old town. The "Blue Posts," where the midshipmen stayed and joked and quarrelled, was burned down in 1870, and the "Fountain" is now a Home for Sailors, conducted upon strictly non-alcoholic lines, and Broad Street, which was at one time so very, very lively a place, has declined from the riotous days of yore into a more or less sedate old age. The inns with which it abounded are still there, but how altered their custom, their use and wont, from the hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting days of old!

One may look back upon those old days with regret for a vanished picturesqueness and yet not wish them back; may know that the sailor who drinks cocoa and banks his wages in the Post-office Savings Bank is better off and immeasurably happier than his ancestor who, if he survived to receive any pay at all, squandered it instantly upon all conceivable kinds of drink and debauchery, and yet can see that his was by far the most interesting figure. It is the same with the ships of the navy. No one will contend that life was healthier upon the old wooden line-of-battle ships than it is on the modern ironclads of the fleet; not a single voice could be raised in favour of the dim and dirty orlop-decks of the old men-o'-war, in comparison with the light, airy, and roomy quarters on board our battle-ships of to-day; and yet there is scarce an Englishman who does not heartily regret the old three-deckers that rode the waves so gallantly, whose tier over tier of guns rose high above the waves and made a braver show than ever the "iron pots" of modern times can do.

[Sidenote: _OLD AND NEW_]

The old-time aspect of Portsmouth is gone for ever. An almost complete transformation has taken place in appearance, in thought, and manner in little over a century, and where the body of Jack the Painter hung, high as Haman, from a lofty gallows on Blockhouse Beach, no criminals swing to-day. Even the "cat," that instrument of discipline, too barbarous to be honoured even by immemorial usage, no longer flays the backs of A.B.'s, and is relegated to the cold shades of a museum, to rest beside such long-out-of-date instruments of torture as the branks and the thumb-screws.

But, tide what will betide, a fine martial-naval air clings about the old town, and will last while a bugle remains to be blown or a pennant is left to be hoisted. The salt sea-breezes still bl.u.s.ter through the narrow streets; the dockyard clangs louder, longer, busier than ever; the tramp of soldiers echoes; the boom of cannon peals across the waters, and G.o.d's Englishmen are ready as ever they have been, and ever will be; though out yonder at Spithead and in foreign waters their forebears have strewed the floor of the sea with their bones, and though, with treacherous iron and steel beneath their feet while afloat, they may at any moment, be it peace or war, be sent to the bottom to join the ill-fated ships' companies of the "Mary Rose," the "Royal George," the more recent "Captain,"

"Eurydice," "Atalanta," or "Victoria."

Here, where the stone stairs lead down into the water, is Portsmouth Point. Mark it well, for from this spot have embarked countless fine fellows to serve King and country afloat. What would we not give for a moment's glimpse of "Point" (as Portsmouth folk call it, with a brevity born of every-day use) just a hundred years ago? Fortunately the genius of Rowlandson has preserved for us something of the appearance of Portsmouth Point at that time, when war raged over nearly all the civilized world, when wooden ships rode the waves buoyantly, when battles were the rule and peace the exception.

[Sidenote: _A PATHETIC FIGURE_]