Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  Treves had known Swanage when it was a ‘queer little town with a rambling High Street and a jumble of picturesque cottages of Purbeck stone’. He objected to what he termed ‘the feverish struggle’ between rival developers to turn it into something else and prophesied that in a few years it would become indistinguishable from any other seaside resort. He was wrong, as prophets of doom tend to be. The rows of redbrick villas that he disliked so much have mellowed into the townscape, and most of Swanage’s architectural oddities – which Treves viewed with a kindly puzzlement – have survived, as does a good deal of the charm of the place.

  These oddities were the gifts of two local lads made extremely good. John Mowlem began his working life lugging stone in a local quarry, before migrating to London and founding what would become a great building firm (the name of Mowlem Construction lives on). He recruited his very smart young nephew, George Burt, to work with him, and in time both men retired back to Swanage and set about exalting the town according to their idiosyncratic taste.

  Mowlem built a pier and a reading room known as the Mowlem Institute ‘for the benefit and mutual improvement of the working classes’. Much stirred by an account – entirely apocryphal – of a great naval victory won in Swanage Bay by Alfred the Great over the invading Danes, he installed a memorial column to the great English King on the seafront and had placed on top of it four cannonballs retrieved from ships recently returned from the Crimean War, which give it a whimsical air.

  His nephew was considerably more ambitious. George Burt was a great recycler of materials and features from elsewhere. He built himself a mansion in Swanage High Street in the Scottish baronial style, much of which – the Portland stone, the iron columns, the panelling and even the gilded weather vane – came from the recently demolished Billingsgate Market in London. The bizarre clock-less clock tower standing on the shore near the lifeboat station began life as part of a planned memorial to the Duke of Wellington at the southern end of London Bridge. It was declared surplus to requirements after the clock kept going wrong, so George Burt snapped it up and shipped it down to Swanage (although for some reason the clock did not make the trip).

  He decided the town should have a proper town hall, so he built one of plain red brick and grafted onto it the seventeenth-century frontage of the Mercers’ Hall from Cheapside, discarded by its owners because it was so blackened by soot. Having finished with Swanage itself, he then built an absurdly small castle above it at Durlston Head and installed on the steep slope below it his most outlandish fancy. Burt’s Great Globe is exactly that, a great globe ten feet wide and weighing forty-six tons, composed of fifteen sections of Portland stone held together by granite dowels, on which are carved the continents and oceans of the world.

  Charles Harper, whom we met previously singing the praises of St Margaret’s Bay in Kent, celebrated the legacy of George Burt in his companion volume about the Dorset coast. He hit the right note when he wrote of ‘the amazing Burt, in whose nature eccentricity and business capacity and the instincts of the pedagogue, the philanthropist and the money-maker seem to have been strangely mixed.’ It was all too much for a later resident of Swanage, the painter Paul Nash, who lived for a few years in the 1930s in a cottage overlooking the harbour and painted many scenes of Swanage Bay. Nash damned the clock tower as ‘repulsive Victorian Gothic’, the Mowlem Institute as ‘the most dismal building in Dorset’ and the Great Globe and Durlston Castle as ‘ludicrous . . . they have to be seen to be believed’. Nash alleged that the people of Swanage preferred to avert their eyes from ‘its extreme ugliness’ and look out to sea. But he also conceded that it had a ‘strange fascination, like all places which combine beauty, ugliness and the power to disquiet.’

  Purbeck stone was the mainstay of the Swanage economy before the trippers and holidaymakers started coming, and it is still quarried in various parts of the Isle. A hard and durable form of limestone, it was used for Salisbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and was shipped up the east coast to distant Durham for its cathedral. Until the arrival of the railway in Swanage in 1885, the stone was stacked in carts which were dragged by horses into the sea to be transferred to lighters which were then rowed to the waiting ketches for loading. The quarries were modest affairs, often just a single shaft dug by the holder of the quarrying rights, from which the slabs were lifted on trolleys by chains attached to a wooden capstan turned by a mule or donkey.

  The beasts were much valued. On a bridle path inland from Swanage is a stone inscribed thus:

  Beneath this stone lie our mule

  She was a faithful creature

  Drawing up the stone from this

  Quarry for 32 years. Died aged 34.

  Also

  Our little cat named Too-too

  Who followed her master from

  This quarry to his home and back for 20 years

  RIP.

  Old Harry and his missus rise from the sea where the whaleback hump of Ballard Down is cut off as if by a cleaver. You need to be at sea on a sunny day to grasp properly the abruptness of the drop and the resulting brilliant clash of white chalk and blue sea. Fortunately the next best thing to a boat trip is available on a wondrous website, the Geology of the Wessex Coast, created and maintained by Dr Ian West of Southampton University and various of his colleagues, students and friends.

  This amazing treasury of information and photographs covers pretty much every inch of the coastline between the Solent and Torquay. Its scale and attention to detail are extraordinary. I have never met or spoken to Dr West, but I feel I know him a little through the energy of his prose and through his appearance in many of the pictures; gangling, bespectacled, windblown, his face alight with his geological passion. He and his website have been great assets to me, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge here the debt I owe to him and his team and his university for their great gift to the rest of us.

  Despite the grandeur of the seascape, Swanage Bay is a gentle stretch of shore, protected by the mainland from the worst of the westerly storms and to the east by the bulwark of the Isle of Wight. But west of Durlston Head the character of the boundary between land and sea changes dramatically. Exposed to the storms from whatever direction they may come, this is a rugged, battered, savage stretch of coast. The rock faces, of Purbeck or Portland stone, are stern and lowering, fissured by the onslaught of seas and gales. The clifftops are pockmarked with the shafts dug by the quarrymen. The few bays are rough and rocky and inaccessible. Tidal races surge menacingly around and over halfhidden ledges. There are mighty boulders and beetling drops, rocks in twisted arches, caverns where the thunder of the waves echoes and moans.

  Over the centuries this has been a prodigious graveyard of ships. One celebrated victim was the Halsewell, an East Indiaman bound for Bengal on what was to be the last round trip for her captain, Richard Pierce, before his retirement. She was carrying 242 passengers and crew, among them two of Captain Pierce’s daughters and two of his nieces. The ship put out from Gravesend on 1 January 1786 into a bitter north-easterly gale. Snow and ice coated the sails and clogged the rigging and she began to take in water. Pierce ordered the mainmast to be cut away to avoid foundering in the heavy seas. She was driven down the Channel as far west as Lyme Bay, then the gale turned into the south-west, pushing her back east.

  Pierce’s intention was to make shelter at Portsmouth. He managed to avoid Portland Bill but the Halsewell – by now missing her mizenmast, mainmast and most of her sails – was helpless. On the night of the 5th of January the sky cleared without warning to reveal the black bulk of St Aldhelm’s Head a mile and a half to leeward. Pierce ordered the anchor to be released. The ship rode the storm for an hour before the anchor hold gave way. The wind was now in the south, thrusting her towards the cliffs. At 2 a.m. she struck the rocks between Winspit and Seacombe, was turned side on and immediately began to break in two against the mouth of a cavern.

  There was one hope of escape: to get from the stricken ship into the cave.
Crewmen began scrambling from the raised poop deck onto the rocks. Captain Pierce asked his second mate, Henry Meriton, if he thought there was any hope of saving the girls. Meriton replied that the ship was disintegrating. Pierce went to the roundhouse to comfort his daughters and nieces and the other female passengers. Meriton crawled along a broken spar towards the rocks, was swept from it by a wave, then picked up by another wave and deposited in the back of the cave, where he was helped onto a ledge out of reach of the sea. The roundhouse gave way under the pounding of the sea and Captain Pierce and the girls were seen no more.

  When dawn broke there was nothing left of the Halsewell but floating wreckage. Distress cannon had been fired before she struck, but the spot was remote and no one on land heard the sound. Eighty or so survivors were huddled in the cave, unseen from shore and unreachable from the sea. A group edged out and along the foot of the cliff and began to climb. Two managed to reach the top and made their way to the nearest house, where the steward of the several nearby quarries lived. Alerted by him, quarrymen made their way to the clifftop with ropes.

  All that day men were lifted to safety, or themselves scrambled up to the top. An unknown number, enfeebled by their ordeal, were either washed off the rocks at the bottom and drowned, or fell to their deaths from the ropes. Henry Meriton had almost reached the top by his own efforts when he lost his handhold on the rock. As he fell he seized a rope and was hauled up to the waiting arms of the quarrymen.

  In all seventy-four of the passengers and crew who had set sail from Gravesend four days earlier survived. The disaster – made more poignant than others by the deaths of the young women and the conduct of Captain Pierce – created a media sensation and prompted an outpouring of public horror and grief. Within fifteen days an account provided by Henry Meriton and the third mate, John Rogers, had been rushed into print and went into numerous editions. George III was taken to the scene, and his court composer, Augustus Kollman, put together a symphony lamenting the loss. Thomas Stothard painted an affecting scene showing Pierce with his face raised towards a swaying lamp, his daughters in their bonnets whimpering against his chest.

  Although the ship was smashed to pieces, objects from her have been yielded up by the sea over the years, and are still occasionally found by divers. There were three pieces from a chess set – a pawn, a bishop and a castle – carved from bone. A cupboard door came ashore, and a mirror wrapped in seaweed. A four-hour glass sand timer was also delivered intact, wrapped in weed. Most of the bodies were never found; those that were recovered were mangled and battered to the point of being unrecognisable.

  13

  BLACK OIL, WHITE NOTHE

  The clifftop between the site of the Halsewell disaster and St Aldhelm’s Head is riddled with shafts and galleries and holes and ledges left by the quarrymen of long ago. The last quarry along the cliff edge closed in the 1950s, leaving a legacy of fractured rock and ruined storehouses and sheds through which the walkers on the South-West Coast Path pick their way.

  The Head itself stands 350 feet above the sea. In Treves’ words: ‘There is a sense of defiance about this strong cape, a suggestion of a clenched fist outstretched in the tideway to challenge the elements.’ A fierce tidal race surges this way and that over a hidden ledge extending well out to sea from the base of the cliff, creating short, choppy seas which sailors are strongly advised to avoid. Even on the calmest days, the surface is stirred by tensions and stresses. There is a coastguard station at the top where volunteers watch out for vessels in trouble. Nearby is a tiny Norman chapel with a low doorway pitted by the excavated refuges of countless generations of bees.

  A track strikes inland through bare, windswept fields to an isolated farm, where the lane leading to the excellent pub in Worth Matravers can be picked up. A little to the west is the vale of Encombe with its long, low, stone mansion, the country retreat of John Scott, the first Earl of Eldon and a long-serving Lord Chancellor in successive administrations under George III. There was once a public road down to the sea through the estate, but it was closed by a later Earl. His action incensed Charles Harper but Frederick Treves applauded him and denounced ‘the atrocious conduct of the trippers’ who had abused his hospitality.

  Encombe, now owned by an airline tycoon of Gibraltarian origin, remains secluded and I only saw it from a distance. But I did have a glorious ride along the bridleway which runs inland from Encombe and behind Swyre Head to the village of Kimmeridge. Below me on one side was the vale enclosing Smedmore House, with green fields rising steeply on the far side towards the edge of the hidden sea. On the other side the chalk downs of the Purbeck Hills rolled away, dabbed with gorse and woodland, the fields sharply defined by hedgerows. Beyond the hills, gleaming like some great inland lake, was Poole Harbour, with the dark smudge of Brownsea Island at its mouth. As I pedalled slowly and happily west, Kimmeridge Bay revealed itself, and in the far distance the teardrop shape of Portland Bill.

  The cliffs around Kimmeridge Bay are a sombre dark grey, composed of clay and shale, the shale being imbued with black, sticky, viscous bitumen, a form of petroleum. As far back as the Neolithic period the bituminous shale was cut and polished into ornaments rather like jet. It was used in Roman times and for centuries after by local people as fuel; it burns hot, although giving off sulphurous fumes which stink to high heaven. In the sixteenth century the estate containing the bay and its surroundings came into the possession of an old Dorset family, the Clavells. In the reign of James I, Sir William Clavell embarked upon an ambitious project to turn Kimmeridge into an industrial centre, based on shale power.

  His first venture was the production of alum, a salt mined locally which, when heat treated, was used extensively in dyeing and tanning and as a medical treatment. But Sir William fell foul of a monopoly in alum granted by the Crown to someone else, so he switched to boiling sea water to make salt, only to encounter more opposition from patent holders. Finally he diversified into glass, and built a pier for small ships to transport his glassware. But the succession of setbacks had stretched his finances beyond breaking point; having served time in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison he abandoned his attempts to become an industrial magnate.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century a succession of enterprises tried to make money out of the Kimmeridge shale. One involved a group of French entrepreneurs who converted it into lamp oil. The problem was the same as had persuaded Sir William Clavell to build his home upwind of his factory, and caused distress to his downwind neighbours: the stink of hydrogen sulphide. In the 1870s the Kimmeridge Oil and Carbon Company dug new shafts and a mile of tunnels fitted with metal tracks for its waggons to run on. A series of remarkable photographs on Dr Ian West’s website shows rails dangling down the cliff face, and the rusted side of one of the waggons revealed by erosion.

  Mining petered out by 1900, and since then no one has bothered with the shale. However, since 1961 the associated deposits of petroleum below sea level have been extracted through what is the oldest oil well in Britain. It still produces sixty barrels or so a day, although on the day of my visit the nodding donkey in the ledge above the bay was refusing to incline its head, having been shut down for repairs.

  Kimmeridge Bay is far from picturesque in the conventional way, but is oddly fascinating. Because of the influence of Portland Bill – please don’t ask me to explain – it has extended low tides and abbreviated high tides. A big low tide reveals the ledges of shale extending from the shore; apparently it is then possible to walk across the mouth of the bay, although the rock is extremely slippery and the tide comes in fast.

  Overlooking the bay from the east is Hen Cliff, on the top of which is perched a comical colonnaded folly known as Clavell Tower. This was the fanciful notion of a later owner of the estate, the Reverend John Richards Clavell. Unfortunately he neglected to take due account of the effects of erosion, so it has had to be moved inland at enormous expense by the Landmark Trust, which has turned it into one of their dinky holiday
lets.

  There is a little row of coastguard cottages tucked into the lee of Hen Cliff, enclosed by trees and nicely protected from the gales. I found a retired GP at home in one of them who turned out to be a classic case of seaside recruitment. He had come to Kimmeridge for summer holidays with his parents for years; then many more years had passed, but the memories of rock-pooling and swimming and wandering the cliffs did not fade. One day he came with his mother, now elderly, just to revisit old scenes. He found one of the coastguard cottages was for sale, so he and his wife came to live there.

  So many south-coast villages are afflicted by the second-home curse, so that out of season they are reduced spiritually to ghost settlements. But according to the doctor, Kimmeridge is different. There are plenty of holiday lets but the Smedmore Estate – which owns most of the village and its surroundings – operates positive discrimination in favour of full-time residents. There are enough young families with children to require a school bus, which may not sound much but in a place like this is an important factor. There is no pub, but Clavell’s Café – which, with its associated farm shop, is run by a family who also farm in the area – makes a first-rate substitute.

  The doctor told me he felt utterly at home. The fascination exercised by the dark cliffs, the rock pools and ledges, the glorious sweep of countryside behind, had not dimmed. He was evidently a man of energy: morris dancer, accordionist, director of the local choir and now – with his wife – involved in a tremendous new enterprise for the village.

  The Kimmeridge Project seeks to provide a home worthy of one of the most important collections of fossils in the country. It has been assembled over decades of ferreting and fossicking around rocks by a central-heating engineer, Steve Etches, who lives in the village. Mr Etches’ speciality is uncovering the secrets hidden in the Jurassic Kimmeridge Clay – which is named after the Dorset village but is a major source of oil in various parts of Europe. His finds range in size from a minute barnacle to the jawbone of a gigantic pliosaur, and include lobsters, squid – one with its ink sac intact – parts of sharks and turtles, the wings of a ray and a host of ammonites and bivalves. The significance of the collection is internationally recognised but it has never been fully displayed to the public. A lottery fund has set the project on its way, and a new hall being built opposite the café will see it realised, providing the village with an attraction likely to guarantee its viability as a community into the foreseeable future.