CHAPTER III

STONE--GREENHITHE--NORTHFLEET--HUGGENS’S COLLEGE--ROSHERVILLE-- GRAVESEND--SHORNEMEAD--CLIFFE--COOLING--THE HUNDRED OF HOO-- THE ISLE OF GRAIN--HOO ST. WERBURGH--UPNOR CASTLE--STROOD

Rising steeply out of Dartford, we come by the Dover Road, the ancient Watling Street, up to the lofty plateau of Dartford Brent; here taking the left-hand fork where the road branches. To the right goes the Watling Street, the Roman road, our left-hand route conducting gradually past Stone to the waterside at Greenhithe. Industrial England is prominent on the way, greatly to the disadvantage of the older England of romance. The thoughtful man asks himself, on passing the huge City of London Lunatic Asylum at Stone, and coming into a region of chalk-pits and cement-works, whither we are tending.

Here, where the hill-sides are being cut away for sake of the chalk, and where lofty chimneys send forth clouds of smoke, stands the lovely Early English church of Stone, built, it is thought, by the designers and craftsmen who created Westminster Abbey. The clustered shafts of the nave-arcade, and the general decoration of the interior, bear a marked resemblance. The exceptional elaboration of this parish church is due to the offerings of pilgrims on their way to and from the shrine of St. William of Perth at Rochester. The church stood beside the road, and thus came in for the pilgrims’ alms. The modern pilgrim will only note that this church, begun on this beautiful and costly scale, was completed on a minor note. This is due to a falling-off of those wayfarers’ gifts.

Greenhithe sits beside the river, in a queer little byway. From it sailed away into the northern ice and an obscure death, Sir John Franklin and his crews of the Arctic expedition, on board the _Erebus_ and _Terror_, 1845. Many an one must, since then, have reflected upon the peculiarly ominous names of those ships.

Greenhithe is just a quaint, waterside street of houses running parallel with the Thames, with shops of a kind which give you the impression that they are kept by people who never expect to sell anything, and that they, in fact, never _do_ sell anything; that they would resent the very suggestion of a sale, and are a kind of shop-keeping anchorites, who keep shop in fulfilment of vows to deny purchasers the satisfaction of making purchases. Though, I honestly declare, I have never seen any article in Greenhithe shop-windows in the least desirable by any reasonable person. Almost the oldest house in this queerest of queer streets is one which bears the initials and date:

E. I. M 1693

I believe it must have been only a little later than this period when some of the goods exposed to view in these windows were added to stock.

[Illustration: INGRESS ABBEY.]

In the broad reach off Greenhithe and Northfleet are anchored the training-ships _Arethusa_, _Warspite_, and _Worcester_; and at the eastward end of this street, which leads to nowhere in particular, you come suddenly upon the handsome mansion of Ingress Abbey, built about 1834 by Alderman Harmer, then proprietor of the _Weekly Dispatch_. It was built from the stones of old London Bridge, which had been pulled down two years earlier. Sweetly pretty, almost noble, must the Alderman’s lordly mansion have looked, in its lovely waterside park, rich in noble trees. So, indeed, it does even yet, although the house has been long empty, and although it and the park are about to be abolished for the building of a huge wall-paper manufactory. The entire neighbourhood, in fact, is being thoroughly commercialised, and rendered a fuming, striving horror of machinery and belching factory-chimneys. Enterprising people have even plans for factory-building on that projecting spit of desolation between Greenhithe and Northfleet, known as Swanscombe marshes; while as for Northfleet, that old-time village has become a sprawling place of much squalor.

The chief feature of the long street is the rather striking group formed by the dwellings and the chapel of Huggens’s College, in grounds secluded behind a lofty wall. In the years 1844–7 the amiable John Huggens, a city merchant, founded and endowed this college, as almshouses for the benefit of gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances; and here forty of these collegians, with their wives and one woman relative, reside and enjoy an annuity of £52 apiece, and live, like all pensioners, to the most preposterous and incredible ages, much to the disgust of those in the waiting list. Over the archway leading into the grounds is a statue of the admirable Huggens, seated and habited in a tightly buttoned-up frock-coat. He seems to be seeking inspiration in the skies, and holds a roll of papers in his right hand, while the left appears to be groping in something that resembles a coal-scuttle. The street at this corner is quaintly named--in allusion to Huggens, no doubt--“Samaritan Grove.”

Here we are again on the DOVER ROAD, with modern developments of electric tramways leading on through Rosherville to Gravesend. Let us, as soon as may be, turn off to the left from the dust and the traffic, and seek the waterside at Rosherville Pier. The famous gardens created in the great chalk-pit by the enterprising Jeremiah Rosher, 1830–35, were for many years the scene of Cockney jollity and the wildest of high-jinks; all thought very daring by the early Victorians who indulged in them. “Rosherville, Where to Spend a Happy Day”: that was the legend. You made excursion by steamer from London and indulged in tea and shrimps--“s’rimps” in the Cockney tongue, you comprehend-- taken in earwiggy arbours in gardens decorated with plaster statues; and possibly took part in some dancing, later on, under the illuminated trees. These things, considered awfully wild then, we look back upon with disgust for their mingled slowness and vulgarity.

Of late years Rosherville Gardens have had but a precarious existence. Now you find them closed, and then they are reopened for a space, and again they are closed once more. The place that Rosher created outside his moribund gardens--this Rosherville--is a grim and grisly spot, with gaunt, would-be stately stucco-fronted mansions and a vast hotel, empty. A melancholy Parade or Terrace faces the river, and a broad road leads up from it to the Garden entrance, on whose gate-piers are great gilded sphinxes: the whole presenting, even its prime, an awful aspect of Egyptian mysticism, qualified, it is true, by plaster, but still not, you know, ever of a gay and gladsome kind. Children, involuntary partakers of those “Happy Days,” were appalled by these surroundings, and usually howled with dismay at sight of those gate-piers, refusing to be comforted at the explanation that the awful beasts on them were only “spinkses.” Many an unhappy child dreamt horribly afterwards of being pursued by spinks.

The mile-long walk along the shore from Rosherville to Gravesend affords much food for reflection. Here you notice for the first time that the water is salt; obviously sea-water, because the wooden piles are hung with sea-weed. At this time of writing the “Marine Baths” that once were well patronised are being demolished, after a long period of disuse and decay. They fronted upon this parade, in a forbidding, Pharaonic type of architecture that gave to bathing an aspect of partaking in the dread rites of the ancient Egyptian worship of Osiris and all that weird hierarchy of bird-and-beast-headed gods and goddesses. Sea-bathing at Gravesend is a thing of the past, and on the site of these baths the commercial spirit of the age is rearing vast factory-buildings. Thus ends Gravesend’s Early Victorian dream of being a seaside resort; but one would not declare that the place is the less interesting. It is, indeed, of a greater interest than ever, and the busy waterway presents a grand panorama of the might and majesty of modern shipping. For there, on the opposite shore, are Tilbury Docks, to and from whose capacious basins come and go the great liners and cargo boats. There, too, glimpsed across the half-mile of waterway, is Tilbury Fort, where modern and unhistorical batteries stand in company with that old historic blockhouse where Queen Elizabeth reviewed her troops before the threatened arrival of the Spanish Armada.

[Illustration: TILBURY FORT.]

The chief feature--ornament it can scarce be styled--of Gravesend’s river-front is the Royal Terrace Pier. It is a construction for use rather than display, and is in fact the headquarters of the sea and river pilots who, to the number of nearly 300, wait here and navigate vessels up and down river to and from London, or out to sea by the “North Channel,” as far as the Sunk Lightship, off Harwich; or by the “South Channel,” as far as Dungeness. At the head of these men is an official of “the Trinity House,” with the title of “Ruler.” The “Ruler of the Pilots” settles all official business and disputes that are not serious enough to be referred to the Trinity House headquarters on Tower Hill.

“Gravesend” is not a pleasant name, even though it may suggest to the imaginative the final triumph of the Christian: “O grave, where is thy sting? O Death, where is thy victory?” with visions of the shining Beyond. But the place-name has not, in fact, anything to do with these considerations or speculations; and refers to some prehistoric trench which in the dim past formed a boundary-line between neighbouring tribes.

Leaving Gravesend, you come down again to the shore by turning to the left out of the main road by the tramway terminus and through the unlovely region of “Coal Road,” past the “Canal Tavern,” and over the Thames and Medway Canal by a footbridge. Here, along the waterside, is the office of a person described on his sign-board as an “Explosive Lighterman.” The place where this alarming creature carries on business is Denton Wharf. Adjoining is the “Ship and Lobster” tavern. Out in front stretches the Thames estuary. It is the spot referred to by Dickens in “Great Expectations,”