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.