When I first came to New Zealand I was a little surprised to find that, oddly to my mind, my newly adopted country had a few definite ties with Gravesend. Those who proudly told me their ancestors were from England, often added that in fact they left from a place called Gravesend, one or two adding to be precise, Bawley Bay. The only connection I had previously had with Bawley Bay was going there with my mother and Old Nan to buy shrimps for tea; always a treat. So when next on a revisit we headed for Bawley Bay because by this time my husband had discovered that his own forebears had made that self same journey and he was therefore now keenly involved in family history.
In general the most
memorable tie was for New Zealanders interested in the history of
aviation. Apparently the town had
developed an airfield by the 1930s and by the middle of the decade the much
revered New Zealand aviator, Jean Batten, took delivery of her new Percival
Vega Gull from there. Later the RAF
took the facilities over and by the time I was a young adult it had become a
housing development called Riverview Park.
My own personal memories
of the town start as a five or six year old being taken to the market on
Saturdays and watching Old Strongey sell china tea-sets and the finest wool
blankets, then walking past Papa’s Ice Cream Rooms and being told he was
Italian and anyway his ice cream was nowhere near as good as the British
variety which we would be able to get again soon once rationing was over. And always coming into view that iconic
Clock Tower, nearly twenty metres tall and made of Portland stone. Later as a schoolgirl I learned about
Princess Pocahontas with great interest because she was the daughter of a real
Indian Chief, they who were always the Baddies in the movies we saw and thus seen
as totally exotic by me and my best friend, Molly. It took a while for us to process why
Gravesend had a connection to her but eventually we learned that she had died
in the town in 1617 and was buried in St George’s Churchyard though the actual
site of her grave had been long lost. Sometimes we went looking for it, convinced we would be successful.
Sometimes I reluctantly
went shopping with my grandmother and she told me tales of what life was like
in the town years before, boring facts concerning the time when buses took over
from trams because, believe it or not, by 1930 there were no more trams and
when that happened you could have knocked her down with a feather because she
did so love them no matter how slow and noisy they were. However, they put on new routes and one went
right out to the Kings Farm Housing Estate which was good for anyone who wanted
to go there though for the life of her she wondered why they would.
I loved many of
the old buildings, the Town Hall which had been replaced in the mid 1700s, the
new building added to in 1836 and dramatically enhanced by an impressive
classical entrance portico. I told
myself that it had been built by the Romans because I didn’t know of any other
ancient culture including the Greeks and anyway I ignored all facts that did
not fit this narrative.
My favourite street was
Harmer Street for the elegant houses and particularly the Grand Theatre
building for its links with times past.
I was devastated when it was finally demolished without much ceremony
late in 1952. Why wasn’t there outrage? There should have been outrage – and I felt
the same when the arch at Euston Station met a similar fate a decade
later.
Old Nan said never mind
theatres and stations because what she missed was the hotels of long ago like
The Mitre in King Street where when she was a young mother Mr Harold Mott was
the licensee of both it and the adjacent Public House. The pub had been up and running from the
early seventeen hundreds and at one time was called The Pelican and didn’t
become The Mitre for a hundred years or more.
At the time she spoke of it, the building remained intact, the pub still
doing well and wasn’t to be closed until 1970 by which time she had definitely
departed from this life herself.
Her hotel of choice,
however, was The Prince of Orange which had been built in the early nineteenth
century when the New Road was first developed.
At the time it was built the pub of the same name in Windmill Street was hastily renamed The Old Prince of Orange.
However, by the 1930s Burtons had firmly replaced the newer version.
When I was growing up
Gravesend offered a multitude of pubs, and the family favourite seemed to be
The Three Daws which I was told was the oldest pub in Kent. Always an attention grabbing building, much
of its structure dates from medieval times and it is said to have seven
staircases and three underground tunnels reputed to have been for the
convenience of smugglers and those avoiding press gangs. It remains to this day a firm favourite for
me when visiting the old town.
The Tilbury Ferry always
seemed to be up and running and in fact my father maintained that the Gravesend
crossing to Tilbury was the oldest of its kind and could be traced back to the
thirteenth century. We used it
frequently because it was the easiest way to get to Southend for a day by the
sea. When I attended Wombwell Hall
school several girls in my class who lived in Essex used the ferry on a daily
basis. I was particularly friendly with
one such river traveller, whose name was Gloria Glover and whose parents had
both died of cancer and so she lived with an aunt. She said she had to be especially well
behaved or she might be thrown out. Because of Southend and Gloria the ferry
crossing has a firm place in my memory.
My mother and aunts felt
that nobody with an ounce of common sense would say that Gravesend had a beach,
well not a respectable one at least. And
by New Zealand standards the idea of the town beach is even vaguely
embarrassing. However, the line of
pebbles and the lapping waves certainly made it a beach for me and as a very small child I very much enjoyed sitting on the sea wall and contemplating the town pier extending out into the
river.
Those old wooden clad
houses I fondly recall have now largely disappeared and I wonder how that was
allowed to happen. In New Zealand that
style of building is known as weatherboard but in Gravesend I seem to recall it
was called clapperboard. Whatever the
correct term, for me the old houses made up a firm childhood memory. I had no idea how old they were, who lived in
them, whether they were comfortable or not but lining the narrow streets down
by the river they seemed to me that they had always been there and would remain
part of the town’s configuration and structure. In fact in that first year or two in
Auckland, when feeling particularly homesick I often retreated into the inner
suburbs of Ponsonby and Parnell simply to sit and look at houses of
similar construction because they were like a comfort blanket and reminded me in
many ways of what I had left behind. I
was cheered in recent years to notice that a modern block of waterside homes,
smart flats looking out across the river now echo the traditional design of
those white wooden clad houses of old. Progress has a habit of throwing little arrows of consolation from time to time.
