Trafficking in Contraband

 At one time smuggling was big business in and around Gravesend and the purloined goods were transported through the local malarial marshland with regularity and enormous success.  It was rumoured that a number of families, previously of good character, felt it was not such a bad trade to be involved with.  One such enterprising group were the Roots brothers who formed a consortium to bring goods from Ostend during the 1720s albeit on a modest scale.  A mysterious Londoner called Thomas Pigmore put up the capital and the Roots boys provided the vessel, The Mermaid, which carried a mere 500 pounds of tea on each trip and occasionally small quantities of calico and silk.  Over one year, 1727 to 1728 they made ten regular voyages landing cargoes on the Hoo Peninsula.  They commonly used churches on the Chalk and Cliffe marshes as hides together with the basement of a house in Higham.   The contraband tea was then taken by horseback to the Duke of Montague's gardener at Blackheath who met them on Shooters Hill.  It was finally sold in the alehouses of Deptford at ten shillings a pound.  It is not altogether clear as to the final destination of the calico and silk but from time to time local ladies were said to have squabbled over whether or not they had reserved a place in the fabrics queue.  This was obviously a small scale but well-run local enterprise which as my mother would have said, undoubtedly kept the wolf from the door during times that were hard.

It was David Reynolds who first brought up the subject of smuggling at school one afternoon.  This was in response to Billy Elliot saying he might become a pirate when he grew up but only if he couldn't get into the Merchant Navy.  There was initially a silence, possibly because there did not seem to be a direct connection between these two career choices.  Maureen Barlow seized the opportunity to suggest that possibly the Merchant Navy was a Calling like Nursing but she only said that because she was hoping for a discussion about her becoming a nurse.  Everyone knew that since she was five years old and had her tonsils out her future had been mapped out.  Mr Clarke ignored her which was in itself unusual because her father was a teacher so she was normally treated just a little more seriously that the rest of us because of her presumed intellect.  He said that although smuggling was not to be entirely condoned, enough time had passed since the peak of its popularity for us to be more aware, although perhaps not exactly proud of the local families involved in it.

For example, one infamous individual had been one Joss Snelling who had not always been local because he originally hailed from Broadstairs but that Margaret Snelling in our class might very well be distantly related to him.  He said that Joss was so famous that he had eventually been presented to Queen Victoria when she was a young girl and before she became Queen.  He left Broadstairs after some years and moved into the Thames Estuary having recruited both his son and his grandson into the business.  He certainly was not afraid of hard work and was said to have still been active in the area when well into his nineties.   A day or two later Margaret reported that her father thought it unlikely their branch of the Snellings had anything to do with Joss but he liked the fact that he was a hard worker and so he would certainly keep his ear to the ground.

At St Botolph's that year we usually had poetry on Friday afternoons because Mr Clarke liked poetry.  On the Friday following the Joss Snelling discussion he introduced us to Rudyard Kipling's Smugglers' Song and nobody, not even the oldest boys, thought it was boring.   Furthermore, Alan Spooner did not fall asleep as was his usual habit on poetry day.  We were all captivated by the vision of five and twenty ponies as they trotted through the dark.  Some of us, well the girls at least, definitely envied the child who might be given a dainty doll all the way from France and I was one of them

My father was unquestionably more than keen on the local smuggler tales and went to great lengths to explain to me how the business had not only taken place outside the town but in many cases contraband goods were being moved around close to the heart of it, under everyone's noses.   The Three Daws supposedly had seven staircases at one time so that those involved might make a rapid getaway from their meetings if necessary.  Another famous haunt was The Ship & Lobster which back in the eighteenth century was some way out of town and squashed between a windmill and a sulphur mill.  Goods unloaded at far-off Folkestone were carried overland to Denton where cellars beneath the three buildings provided hiding places.  Confirmation comes from none other than Charles Dickens himself who featured The Ship & Lobster in Great Expectations, describing it to be a dirty place and the haunt of smugglers.

A recurring theme in the most sensational smuggling stories is that of secret tunnels and Molly from No 31 said that when you came to think about it, the same was true of the best Enid Blyton books because the most exciting part of the story was always the discovery of the secret tunnel.   We were both thrilled to learn that in the Gravesend area there were once quite of number of them and in fact several local landmarks were said to be tunnel linked.  Though much of this information is probably untrue, it is nevertheless notable, if only because it throws light on how smuggling tales in general become distorted and exaggerated over time.

Some local historians, however, think there are good reasons for believing that an extensive system of underground passageways did exist at one time all for illicit purposes.  Some of these have been supported by proof of a reasonably reliable kind during excavations over the years.  Apparently passages were cut through the chalk from Cobham Hall to Wombwell Hall and I certainly wish I had been aware of that particular piece of mythology when I was a student at the latter.   Others are said to have existed from Swanscombe Woods to Parrock Manor and from The Ship & Lobster to Perry Street.  It all seems highly unlikely but if any of this is accurate it would have required a great deal of effort and ingenuity when the local geology is taken into consideration.  One enthusiast admitted that the whole of Swanscombe Woods would have had to be demoloshed to provide sufficient pit props.  However, the very best of smuggling stories along with the very best of Enid Blyton generally fail to mention detail.

It's more likely that nothing as dramatic as these secret byways ever existed in the first place and that Gravesend back in its smuggling heyday was not so very different from the place it is today.   However the riverscape would undoubtedly have looked different if only because of the solid sea wall.   Not everybody likes it though as time passes more and more thoroughly enjoy walking on it.  It would be fair to say that it has changed our corner of the estuary giving it a hard edged outline and a more business like appearance.  Two hundred years ago plotting a course through the myriad of precarious river channels and mud banks required more than a modicum of attention to avoid an unscheduled stop.  Unplanned stops, however, were very often due to the business of contraband rather than on account of poor navigation.  An overnight wait for the tide at least meant that neatly parceled tea and tobacco could be off-loaded with ease and transferred effortlessly to the patiently waiting five and twenty ponies.   The smugglers themselves might then look forward to a pint of ale and a fish supper at The Three Daws.

Back then the Gravesend quayside itself was a busy, bustline place where customs officers boarded incoming vessels ready to provide safe escort to valuable cargo ensuring it reached London wharves intact.  True there had always been abuses to the system long before the business of smuggling reached its peak but generally these were on a less impressive scale.  The records document that in 1410 a monk was caught red handed at Gravesend hiding gold jewelery and a great deal of money on his person.  Not long afterwards a woman from Flanders was found to have twenty one gold rings and a number of books with coral encrusted bindings in her luggage.

These were incidents the officials were accustomed to because from time to time the rules were going to be broken.  Organised rule breaking was another matter altogether and it would be fair to say that not one of the riverside towns wholeheartedly welcomed ponies trotting through the dark no matter how exciting the pupils in Mr Clarke's poetry class in 1950 thought they were!

The Little Town of Swanscombe

  

The name Swanscombe comes from Old English, a reference to a camp within an enclosed piece of land that also has something to do with a Danish warrior called Swaine who was said to be the landowner.  The Domesday Book chronicles the area as Suinescamp.   

 

My earliest memory of Swanscombe is being taken to view the terrible damage inflicted upon the Morning Star pub where thirty people had been killed the night before.   Apparently, body parts were scattered throughout the adjacent area.   I was pushed all the way there, quite a long walk for my mother but in those days we were all used to long walks.   The only thing I recall about this one is being restrained in my pushchair and told that I was not allowed out under any circumstances.

 

Swanscombe, with a certain amount of right on its side, claims to be the most bombed town in England and Auntie Queenie said that was because local schoolgirls were sending messages with mirrors to the Luftwaffe signalling where they should drop their bombs.  They did this apparently because two of them were of vague German extraction, one having a great-great grandfather from Hanover.  At the time Auntie Queenie lived in Broad Road, close by the pub and she was said to be no better than she ought to be as well as not having much sense.  A little later she moved into a room in Stonebridge Road Northfleet and began to frequent a pub near the station.

 

Unlike Northfleet, a riverside village that had uneasily made a change to town status in a sprawling and untidy manner, Swanscombe seemed to have tackled the changes necessitated by nineteenth century industry tidily and with sensible planning.    As far as my mother was concerned this meant that the most interesting shopping was conveniently situated in the High Street quite close to the station and for a number of years she frequented the local draper because the stock of knitting yarns was extensive.

 

By the time I was ten years old I was completely familiar with the fact that tools and bone fragments representing the earliest people to have lived in England were found at Barnfield Pit, just a couple of miles from the town.  The man in question was destined to become very well known among schoolchildren and is now thought to be a woman.  She is either a late Homo Erectus or early Archaic Homo Sapiens.  Greater investigation of Barnfield Pit over time was to yield evidence of Clactonian Man, an even earlier human.   When the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was being constructed, further digs revealed a 400,000 years old site complete with human tools and the remains of a Straight-Tusked Elephant.   Tony Robinson and his cronies would undoubtedly have loved to be part of this action!  Had he been involved we might very well now be able to watch the progress playing out on TV from the comfort of our arm chairs.

 

But before Tony was born it was to be Alvan Marston who on Saturday 29^th June 1935 happened to be searching Barnfield Pit in the hope of finding flint tools.  Just as he was about to give up and go home for tea and scones with jam and cream, he thought he recognised a human occipital bone.  Knowing that his find would undoubtedly cause a certain amount of controversy he marked the spot, and went hurriedly to send an urgent telegram to the British Museum.  Months later on a Sunday in 1936 he found another part of the very same skull.   Astonishingly a third part of the skull was discovered some twenty years later on 30^th July 1955 by an enthusiast called John Wymer.

 

All very exciting but at a more mundane level, unless of course you happen to be extremely fond of churches, it should be noted that Swanscombe parish church is a Grade 1 listed building dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul.  This 12^th century stone building replaced a Saxon Chapel which to me sounds more appealing.   The Saxon altar carved there by Saxon Bishops, remained after the rebuild.   The partially Saxon tower had a spire until 1902 when it was seriously damaged during an electrical storm.   In the churchyard there stands The Invicta Monument which records the meeting in 1067 at Swanscombe between the Men of Kent, Kentish Men and William the Conqueror.   The outcome of the meeting was the confirmation of the county’s ancient rights and liberties and thereafter the motto Invicta (unconquered) was added to the county badge.

 

Although as a young child, my mother and I were frequent visitors to Swanscombe it was to be years before the history of the area had any meaning for me.    I knew it only as a place totally involved, as were other local settlements, in the production of cement.   The first works were said to have been commissioned there as long ago as 1820.  It is also said that the very earliest of Kent’s railway lines were laid in the town, years before any passenger lines appeared elsewhere.  Swanscombe rapidly and perhaps self-importantly became home to the country’s largest and busiest cement works.   These afforded employment to thousands over the decades, only completely closing down in 1990.  All that now remains of the industry are the vast, drained and exhausted pits and forlornly abandoned lines of tracks.    

The Lost Village of Merston

I only knew one person who actually lived in the village of Shorne, near Gravesend.   Her name was Sally and my mother definitely approved of her because her parents were hard working.  What’s more they were what we might now call socially upwardly mobile but of course we didn’t use such a term at that time.   They did all their hard work, I was told, on a smallholding just outside the village.  Smallholding was another term I wasn’t familiar with but one of my many Hendy male cousins from Waterdales said it was what you had when you couldn’t afford a proper farm.  

My Grandmother was of the opinion that as a village Shorne was not much cop which meant that she didn’t think much of it.  She added that once upon a time there was a village called Merston on its border but by the time we reached the 1950s nobody bothered to mention it.   Shorne was the only name you heard to do with the area and when you came to think about it, not a great many people were drawn to live there. 

However a few years later an archaeological investigation revealed the foundations of a small Norman church where Merston was said to have been.   This was widely reported and people began to change their thinking to some extent.   Sally of the smallholding told me when I bumped into her in Woolworths one Saturday morning, that her father was of the opinion that The Black Death had been the finish of Merston.  That’s precisely what a lot of people thought and clearly Shorne and Merston elicited a certain amount of controversy one way and another.  

In the nineteenth century a man called Tufnell Carbonell Barratt who appears to have been a speculative builder put considerable effort into the recovery of boggy land nearby previously felt to be not suitable for building.  He then erected a number of Elizabethan style cottages which were widely commented on as most attractive.  He must have thoroughly agreed because he then built himself a house nearby!   I now wonder if he said he lived in Shorne or in Merston.

 

A Few Words About Watercress

Watercress grows in the shallow moving water of streams.  I recall we used to regularly collect it growing wild and abundantly at Springhead when I was a child.  The flavour is sharp and peppery and we added it to soup and put little piles of it on top of Welsh Rarebit (which we pronounced Rabbit).   It seems to grow effortlessly, all the year round and old Mr Bassant next door told us that was because the water kept the temperature mostly even.   In wartime when oranges were in short supply it supposedly stopped you getting scurvy.  His adopted daughter Ina said the best watercress beds were in Hertfordshire near Croxley Green where she went for her holidays in the thirties and that was because the springs around there were the best in England.   I privately thought our own Springhead springs were probably just as good and most likely better.  

We used watercress regularly but it wasn’t always popular with everyone in fact it only gathered a following after someone called William Bradbury who lived in Gravesend, opened what he called his Hygenic Watercress Farm in 1808, later moving the business to Rickmansworth.   Henry Mayhew reports in 1861 in London Labour & The London Poor that its first coster cry in London Streets urged householders to try `Fresh woorter-creases’.   A young hawker called Eliza James and known as The Watercress Queen was selling it through areas of Birmingham as a five year old some years later and apparently sourced hers from established beds in Surrey. By then it seemed to be known as Vitacress.

There seems to be some argument as to whether Springhead is in Northfleet or Southfleet which is just a tiny bit annoying because I do rather want it to be Northfleet.   I’m informed, however, that the whole reason behind Sir John Sedley in his will of 1637 bequesting five hundred pounds for the establishment of a free school in Southfleet is precisely because of the success of the watercress business – Southfleet’s watercress beds!    Apparently the iconic red brick front of the school still survives and remains firmly in use as an education facility.  It’s incorporated into the structure of the local primary school.    Maybe someone will have a photograph.    

A Place Called Chalk

 

No prizes for guessing how Chalk got its name of course.   Apparently, the flint in the soil was celebrated far and wide for use as gun flints.  As early as the 17^th century it was being worked in the Chalk area for flintlock firearms being exported to Europe.

I must admit this was totally new information as far as I am concerned because I had only thought in terms of the chalk we all know and love.  But apparently once the flint had been removed from the chalk it was dried then tested to see how weak it was and split into small flakes.   It was then was worked into appropriate sizes for musket, pistols and more besides.    Apparently the craft began to die out in the 18^th century.  

Furthermore, and perhaps more interestingly at least to me,  Charles Dickens apparently spent his honeymoon in a cottage at Chalk. 

Allhallows-on-Sea

 

Allhallows-on-Sea …… people who don’t really know the place say this is a seaside resort that never really got off the ground.  Others say they’re delighted it didn’t because they like the peace and quiet and definitely prefer it the way it is.   Apparently the area at Avery Farm, just north of the village, was planned as a holiday area and in the early 1930s holidaymakers could travel there by train from Gravesend.   Nowadays the station has been replaced by a caravan park.   When we were children groups of us were always planning to ride our bikes to Allhallows.   I didn’t even have a bike but I joined in the general plan regardless.   How many locals remember the Gravesend train?   How many actually made the journey by bike eventually?

Games We Played Back Then

Although we didn’t have television back in the 1940s and by the 1950s longed to own a set we rarely seemed lost for something to do.   The wireless was very important and we listened in a very different way from today because rather than using it as background noise and chatter we actually paid attention to what was happening.   There was always absolute silence for The News for instance even when the war had been over for a number of years.   

When I was very small the government closed down all radio stations except the BBC to stop people listening to Nazi propaganda though I do wonder how many of us would have done so.  For quite a while there was only the Home Service and that seemed to exist solely to inform on the progress of the war.   But before long the populace became quite fed up with the lack of entertainment and so after a while another radio station was allowed to broadcast.  It was called The Light Programme and my mother said it was more for People Like Us.   There was a lot of more music and comedy shows.    Back then the stations were known as Sides and people would ask each other which side they were planning to listen to that evening.  Channels only emerged later on with television.  Once the war was over a new station was launched by the BBC called The Third Programme which we never listened to because it was definitely for the toffs and far too highbrow for the likes of us.  Nevertheless, when I heard snatches of it I was quite impressed, particularly with some of the music.

Apart from listening to the wireless we engaged in a number of activities that both amused us and filled in the time especially during long winter days.  One of the first I remember was cutting out paper people.   I didn’t actually cut them out myself because as a pre-schooler I was not too adept with scissors but my mother tirelessly produced them for me to colour in – rows and rows of little girls holding hands to whom I gave yellow hair and pink dresses with my crayons.   To play this game in the first place you needed a supply of paper which was hard to come by in wartime.   However, we were in the fortunate position of always having a store of various paper types in the corner kitchen cupboard of the house in York Road, Northfleet. In fact we had so much that occasionally I was able to donate some to Molly from number 31 so that she too could draw beautiful pictures.    The paper itself was courtesy of my Uncle Walter who luckily for us worked at Bowaters Paper Mills and I am now sure he acquired it via foul means rather than fair.  My favourite variety was what my mother called greaseproof and I liked it best because I could use it as tracing paper and with determination produce splendid pictures by tracing the outlines of whatever was in any magazine or book lying around.   On the more ordinary opaque variety I regularly made my own signature drawing which was always a house between two trees with two stick figures nearby representing my mother and myself.  This was at a time when my father was away at the war and my brother had not yet been born.

As the days grew warmer and the evenings lighter Molly and I sat on our front door steps and attempted to draw rows of houses.  This required a great deal of concentration and our efforts were not wonderful although hers were always considerably better than mine.   Those wartime summers were always very long and light because from 1941 to 1945 Britain was two hours ahead of GMT, operating on British Double Summer Time.  This was presumably done as an aid to farmers.  It certainly was a popular move as far as the children of North Kent, and no doubt elsewhere, were concerned because it gave endless hours for those already attending school, to play in the streets once the school day ended. 

As time passed and we grew older and definitely once winter was upon us again drawing games lost some of their appeal.   When toys appeared in the shops once more we were introduced to a new range of games that were played on a regular basis.  One of our favourites was Ludo a popular board game that I discovered to my amazement decades later originated in India and was once called Pachisi.  As long ago as the 1890s one Alfred Collier applied for an English patent for the game and pretended he had invented it but all he really did was change the name to Royal Ludo.  Most households seemed to have a Ludo game so most of us were familiar with the rules.   My Crayford cousins came by a set before I did and sometimes we made the trip on the 480 bus to the stop at The Jolly Farmers simply to devote an entire afternoon to the game usually seated by the fire in Aunt Mag’s Iron Mill Lane front room.   Then the aunts drank tea, tended to their knitting and exchanged gossip about the those who were not present whilst we children squabbled about who had to have the unpopular green counters and whether or not Little Ann had really and truly just thrown a second six so soon after the first one.

The board itself was split into four different coloured areas, yellow, green, red and blue and each player was assigned a colour and had their own personal hoard of tokens.  The object was to progress around the board by rolls of a dice and reach a place called Home with all these tokens before the other players could get there.     As everyone had to roll a six before they could begin to play the start of each game was extremely tense with much room for disharmony. 

My grandmother always demanded to join a Ludo game if she knew one was about to be played which was not great news as far as anyone was concerned and this was because she was totally unable to control her behaviour if she thought she was not going to win.   She was more than capable of accusing us of cheating, of somehow making sure that she was not able to throw sixes and more than once was known to throw the board in the air ensuring that the game was spoiled for the rest of us.   Invariably all games involving her ended with several of those under twelve dissolving into tears which was anything but a happy state of affairs.  Even at the time I was completely aware that her conduct was quite unbefitting an adult of her advanced age.   Somehow my mother and aunts managed to tolerate her tantrums, laughing them off and telling us she’d always been the same and the trick was to not allow her to play.  Easier said than done when you are seven or eight years old and in any case preventing Old Nan from doing anything she set her mind to was unthinkable.

I was given a Snakes & Ladders set on my seventh birthday but I never grew to enjoy the game as much as Ludo.  Clearly neither did Old Nan because I never knew her to demand to play.  Each time my mother suggested a Sunday afternoon family game my heart sank because I was quite frightened of the slide downwards on each malicious looking snake.   Again it seems to have first been played in India long ago and had been created by Hindu spiritual teachers for children to enforce the idea of good deeds and bad deeds and the importance of living a good life.   The ladders represented values such as faith and kindness and humility and the snakes were bad omens and amounted to everything you didn’t want in your life.   I definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with them and most of the time did not want to have much to do with the game.  The underlying message had originally been that a misbehaving child can attain salvation through performing righteous deeds whereas incorrigibly bad children were destined to mingle forever with others similar to themselves in a lower form of life.  This was of course way back in a time when the young could safely be labelled Good and Bad rather than Going Through a Stage and none of us had even heard of Aspergers.   This rather scary game eventually made its way to Victorian England where it fortunately took on a more benign form and was enjoyed by generations of the young and often the not so young as well.  

One of my favourite games was Consequences and for a number of years it was at the very top of my list and I was always very keen to initiate a game.   It was played as follows.  Each player was given a sheet of paper and wrote down the name of a female and usually this would be someone in the family such as Aunt Mag or someone famous like Shirley Temple.   The word `met’ followed the name and the paper was folded over to obscure the name before handing it to the person on your right.   They wrote down a male name such as Uncle George or Charlie Chaplin.   Another fold in the paper was made before it was handed on.  The place where they met was then added – The Majestic Cinema in Gravesend for instance.   The players continued to contribute sentences without of course knowing what had gone before.   At the end of the game the stories created were read out and might go something like this: 

Aunt Mag met Charlie Chaplin at The Majestic Cinema in Gravesend.  She wore a swimsuit and he wore his best suit.  He said to her `would you like to dance?’   She said to him `It’s raining today’.   The consequence was that they ate fish and chips together.

For some extraordinary reason, especially as a young teenager I found this game hugely entertaining though my enormous enthusiasm was not shared by the rest of the family, certainly not by the Crayford aunts and cousins and Old Nan said it was as dozy a game as she’d ever come across.  But then as Aunt Martha’s Pat sensibly commented, she would say that because she couldn’t read and write so was never in any danger of being asked to play. 

The games my father encouraged us to play were generally of a more informative nature like The Minister’s Cat where players described the cat with adjectives going through the alphabet but my mother always got completely confused and agitated so we didn’t play it very often.  She was much happier with Noughts & Crosses and quite liked a card game called Snap.

When I was younger and my father newly home from the war, he introduced the game of Shadow Puppets which my brother and I found quite magical.   On winter evenings after Sunday tea he would turn out the lights and begin to cast images of animals against the kitchen wall.  He would curl in his index finger, lift his thumb and suddenly there was a Labrador or a spaniel in our house.   Sometimes he would show us a rabbit or an eagle.  From time to time there was a witch on a broomstick and once an angel looking down on us from Heaven.  At times he would tell us a story to go with the shadows and then of course we were completely captivated, including my mother who seemed quite unable to perform this magic herself.  My little brother, then under two years of age would squeal in delight and at the same time be just a little bit afraid of what was happening.   Years later in his house at Cape Wrath he said one of his fondest memories of our father was the shadow puppet stories.   He added tentatively that overall although we were always very poor, at times we didn’t have an especially bad childhood – what did I think?   So I did think and to some extent I was forced to agree.  But then all my schoolmates and my cousins seemed to be totally familiar with similar family activities and therefore joined us in our not especially bad childhood.   I have to wonder how many children these days would recognise any of the games we played.