XV
Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in ship-building. Here, too, were “Rosherville Gardens,” or shortly, “Rosherville.” A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has been sold to an oil company.
Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens. It was so far back as the 1830’s that he conceived the grand idea of building a new town between Northfleet and Gravesend, on an estate he owned here, beside the Thames. The idea remained an idea only, for although a pier was built and the Gardens formed, Rosher never lived to see his “ville,” in the sense of being a town. But his Gardens were a hugely-compensating success. It is not given to many to make a success of a hole (unless the hole is a mine), and the site of that celebrated Cockney resort was, and is, nothing else; being in fact one of the oldest and largest of the chalk-quarries, excavated to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet in some parts.
WATERCRESS
There a curious kind of rusticity was tempered with an equally curious urban flavour; there the succulent shrimp and the modest watercress (“Tea ninepence; srimps and watercreases, one shilling”), were supplemented romantically by the strains of husky bands. There art was represented by broken-nosed plaster statues of Ceres and a variety of other heathen goddesses, some supporting gas-lamps in sawdusty bars and restaurants; others gracing lawns and flower-beds. To those who delighted in plaster statues grown decrepit and minus a leg or an arm, like so many neo-classic Chelsea pensioners, Rosherville was ideal.
“Where to spend a happy day,” as the advertisements used to invite—“Rosherville.” The watercress consumed there, and at the other popular places near by, came from Springhead, which will be found in the country at the back of Gravesend. In 1907 died the last surviving daughter of the man who “invented” watercress as an article of food. It was about 1815 that William Bradbery, of Springhead, began to cultivate from a green weed that grew in the ditches this favourite addition to tea-tables.
He cultivated with care, and laid out extensive beds, then, when he had a marketable crop, sold it locally. It soon became a famous table dainty, and nothing would satisfy him but the patronage of London. He filled an old tea-chest with cress, and, with this on his back, trudged off to the metropolis, a score or more miles away. The sample was satisfactory, and he quickly developed a London trade.
Bradbery (it is said) when he was building up his London connection, paid a vocalist to go at night from one place of entertainment to another, singing a song in praise of the famous brown cress from the waters of Springhead.
Be that as it may, Bradbery made a fortune by cultivating his cress on the extended area. He seized an opportunity where another man would not have seen one.
Watercress is now cultivated largely, and in numerous districts. It is known, botanically, as nasturtium officinale.
Electric tramcars now rush and rattle through Northfleet and Rosherville, and no one contemplates journeying to these scenes with the object of spending a “happy day.” The great group of semi-ecclesiastical looking buildings on the left is “Huggens’ College.” Almshouses continue to be built, for the fountain of benevolence is not yet dried up. It was in 1847 that this foundation came into existence, pursuant to the will of John Huggens (born 1776), who was a barge-owner and corn-merchant of Sittingbourne. Looking upon a world rather astonishingly full of almshouses for people of humble birth, he conceived the somewhat original idea of founding what, with extreme delicacy, he termed a “College” for gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. The establishment, strictly secluded behind enclosing walls, in well-wooded grounds, houses fifty collegians. Huggens himself, in stony effigy, is seen over the gateway, seated in a frockcoat and an uncomfortable attitude, and displaying a scroll or the charter of his “College.” The bountiful gentleman is sadly weatherworn, for the factory fumes of this industrial district have wrought havoc with the Portland stone from which he is sculptured. Huggens was wise among the generation of benefactors: he founded his charity in his own lifetime, and personally supervised it. He died in 1865, and his body lies in Northfleet churchyard.
We will now proceed to Gravesend, noting that in 1787 the slip road between the “Leather Bottle” at Northfleet and the beginnings of Chalk, two miles in length, was made. It would, in the language of to-day, applied to incandescent gas-mantle burners and to avoiding roads alike, be called a “by-pass.”
GRAVESEND
Gravesend was at one time a place remarkable alike for its tilt-boats and its waterside taverns. The one involved the other, for the boats brought travellers here from London, and here, in the days of bad roads and worse conveyances, they judged it prudent to stay overnight, commencing their journey to Rochester the following morning. To the town of Gravesend belonged the monopoly of conveying passengers to and from London by water, and it was not until steamboats began to ply up and down the reaches of the Thames that this privilege became obsolete. Thus it will be seen that, besides being a place of call for ships, either outward bound or proceeding home, Gravesend was in receipt of much local traffic. The railway has, naturally, taken away a large proportion of this, but has brought it back, tenfold, in the shape of holiday trippers, and the continued growth of the town is sufficient evidence of its prosperity. One first hears of Gravesend in the pages of Domesday Book, where it is called “Gravesham”; but the difficulty of distinctly pronouncing the name led, centuries ago, to the corrupted termination of “end” being adopted, first in speech, and, by insensible degrees, in writing. It has an interesting history, commencing from the time when the compilers of Domesday Book found only a “hyhte,” or landing-place, here, and progressing through the centuries with records of growth, and burnings by the French; with tales of Cabot’s sailing hence in 1553, followed by Frobisher in 1576, to the incorporation of the town in 1568, and the flight of James the Second, a hundred and twenty years later.
Gravesend was not, in the sixteenth century, a model town. Its inhabitants paved, lighted, and cleansed their streets, accordingly as individual preferences, industry, or laziness dictated. Spouts, pipes, and projecting eaves poured dirty water on pedestrians who were rash enough to walk those streets in rainy weather, and people threw away out of window anything they wished to get rid of, quite regardless of who might be passing underneath; and so, whether fine or wet, those who picked their way carefully along the unpaved thoroughfares, stood an excellent chance of being drenched with something unpleasant. An open gutter ran down the middle of the street, full of rotting refuse; every tradesman hung out signs which sometimes fell down and killed people, and in the night, when the wind blew strong, a concert of squeaking music filled, with sounds not the most pleasant, the ears of people who wanted to go to sleep.
Things were but little less mediæval in the middle of the seventeenth century, although the trade and importance of Gravesend had greatly increased. Troubles arose then on account of the disorderly hackmen, “foreigners and strangers”—any one not a freeman or a burgess was a “foreigner”—who plied between Gravesend and Rochester, and took away the custom that belonged of right to members of Gravesend guilds. Two years later the Corporation of Gravesend was distinctly Roundhead in its sympathies, for in 1649 we find the town mace being altered, the Royal arms removed, and those of the Commonwealth substituted, at a cost of £23 10s. 0d. In 1660, things wore a very different complexion, for in that year the Gravesend people welcomed Charles the Second with every demonstration of joy. They had the mace restored to its former condition at a cost, this time, of £17 10s. 0d., and allowed the mayor and another £2 5s. 7d. for going up to London to see that the work was done properly. They paid £3 10s. 0d. for painting the king’s arms; 14s. to one John Phettiplace for “trumpeters and wigs”; and 5s. to Will Charley “for sounding about the country.” Having done this, they all got gloriously drunk at a total cost of £12 15s. 8d., of which sum £10 7s. 8d. was for wine, and £2 8s. 0d. for beer.
RIVERSIDE, GRAVESEND.
It was, indeed, during this latter half of the seventeenth century that Gravesend experienced one of its great periods of prosperity; and so the loyalty was well rewarded. Of this date are many of the fine old red-brick mansions in the older part of the town, together with the Admiralty House, official residence of the Duke of York when Lord High Admiral. To Gravesend he came as James the Second, a prisoner.
Embarking from Whitehall, on December 18, 1688, he reached here as late as nine o’clock at night. The next morning he was conducted hence to Rochester in the charge of a hundred of the Prince of Orange’s Dutch Guards, and a melancholy journey it must have been for him, if his memory took him back to the time when, twenty-eight years before, he came up the road with his brothers, Charles the Second and the Duke of Gloucester, happily returning from exile.
To Gravesend came Royal and distinguished travellers on their way from Dover to London, and hence they embarked for the City and Westminster, escorted, if they were sufficiently Royal or distinguished by the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and the City Guilds, and fitly conducted in a long procession of stately barges by this most impressive entrance to the capital of England. And even ordinary travellers preferred this route. For two reasons: the river-road was much more expeditious than the highway in those pre-MacAdamite days, and by taking it they escaped the too-pressing attentions that awaited them on Shooter’s Hill and Blackheath at the hands of Captains Gibbet and Pick-Purse.