Bembridge itself, linked to St Helens by a ferry boat, nestles very prettily on the wooded point opposite. The nucleus of nautically named inns and cottages is much overlaid by hotel and lodging-house accommodation, and by villas whose owners declare Bembridge to be the Island’s pleasantest spot. One of its chief attractions, after golf, is the view of shipping in the Solent mouth; but it has some pretty spots on land, such as the avenue running inland from the bathing beach. To the south it is sheltered by the Foreland, the most easterly point, over which we may hold by mounting lanes, or take a rough path round the shore, tide permitting, that has also to be considered in boating about the dangerous Bembridge Ledges roughening the sea at low water.
Thus we pass on to the curve of Whitecliff Bay, where the chalk of the Downs is broken by an expanse of Eocene beds, making for the geologist a foretaste
of that more glowing transformation scene shown in Alum Bay at the Island’s western end. The Culver Cliffs at this end are protected by a fort which has masked the Hermit’s Hole, a cave once used by smugglers. On the other side of Bembridge is a small fortress, now so far behind the times that it was lately advertised as suitable for a private residence or an hotel.
Beyond Whitecliff Bay, the cliffs curve into the block of Bembridge Down, crowned by a modern fort that has usurped the originally more conspicuous site of Lord Yarborough’s monument, now neighboured by a Marconi Telegraph Station. On the southern slope are the tiny Norman Church and decayed manor-house of Yaverland, which makes a scene in the Dairyman’s Daughter. Here we have come round to Sandown Bay, the largest and openest in the Island, reached byroad and rail from Brading through the gap at Yarbridge.
Sandown stands in a break of the cliffs, behind the centre of its bay, compared of course to the Bay of Naples by those who never saw Vesuvius. With its hotels, rows of smart lodging-houses, batteries of bathing-machines, esplanade, arcade, and other very modern features, this seems one of the most growing places in the Island; and I trust Sandown will not take it amiss to be described as perhaps the most commonplace resort here, or at least the most like the ordinary Saturday-to-Monday. Its strong point is wide, firm sands for children, and, on a common behind the town, excellent golf-links for their elders, about the height known as “Majuba Hill,” the views from which are complained of by votaries as interfering with strict attention to their game. The summer season of this bathing-place is so prosperous that some day its esplanade and Shanklin’s may stretch out to meet along the couple of miles of cliff walk separating them. As link between them springs up Lake, with its sumptuous “Home of Rest,” and its headquarters of Isle of Wight cricket, behind the cliff descent at Littlestairs.
Sandown Pier has met with rough handling from winter waves, to which, however, the enterprising town will not give in so easily as did King Canute, whose renowned object-lesson against pride, according to legend, had its scene not far off, across the Solent. The railway station, which stands some way back from the sea, is a junction of lines to Newport, Ventnor, and Ryde, so that Sandown visitors can easily reach more picturesque corners of the Island, or can soon gain the Downs framing the green valley of the Yar. Up this valley the first station is Alverston, near a knoll known as Queen’s Bower, from the tradition that upon it Isabella de Fortibus watched the chase in what was then Bordwood Forest. Near the next station, on an eminence beside the river, stands up the ancient fane of Newchurch, a parish that, in spite of its name, is old enough to have once included both Ryde and Ventnor in its ample bounds. Then by Harringford Station below Arreton Down, the line comes to Merston Junction, there forking north and south.
In old days Sandown, then known rather as Sandham, was distinguished by a “castle,” which has given place to less imposing but more formidable modern forts, serving as models for sand-engineering to the troops of children encamped here in summer. Its only other historical association seems to be as retreat of the notorious John Wilkes in his old age, cheered by more gentle pursuits than might be expected of a so unedifying demagogue. He was given to rearing pigeons, as well as to collecting books and china, at his Sandown “Villakin,” a sort of tawdry miniature of Horace Walpole’s show, to which the owner’s notoriety attracted many visitors. One describes him as walking about his grounds “in Arcadian costume,” raking up weeds with a hoe and destroying vipers. He complained that the pigeons he got from England, Ireland, and France always took the first chance of flying home, so that he had almost given up pigeon-keeping, “when I bethought myself to procure a cock and hen pouter from Scotland: I need not add that they never returned.” This cockney bitterness against North Britons, it will be remembered, made a common subject between Dr Johnson and the ex-Lord Mayor, when Boswell had his wish of bringing them together. Wilkes showed one visitor a pond in the garden stocked with carp, tench, perch, and eels, because, he said, fish could not be had by the seaside. Here he also employed himself in writing the memoirs which he had the decency to destroy. The toothless old rip, with one foot in the grave, bragged how his squinting eye had done great execution with the pretty farmers’ daughters at Newport market: well known is his boast, that, monster of ugliness as he was, he could “talk away his face,” so as to be only a quarter of an hour behind the handsomest man. Another story is that when, on his last crossing of the Solent, the vessel was becalmed, he jocularly affected to take this as a presage of death, since he had never been able to live in a calm; but his retreat at Sandown seems to have been quiet enough for Cowper or Hannah More.
If, to set off against that ribald sojourner of its neighbour’s, Shanklin wanted to boast a notorious character, it was a generation ago the headquarters, as perhaps rather it would prefer to forget, of one of the most audacious criminals of our time, whose life, so far as I know, has never been written, unless in criminal calendars. His real name, it appears, was Benson, which does not figure in the Dictionary of National Biography, though it deserves a place there beside Claude Duval’s and George Barrington’s; while I am mistaken if it were not qualified by nationality. On this side of the Channel he called himself a Frenchman; but he spoke French and English equally well, as would hardly have been the case, had he not passed his youth in England. He was certainly a Jew, of typically Jewish aspect. His adventurous career would make a theme for the pen that chronicled Jonathan Wild’s; and if I offer a sketch of it, faute de mieux, it is because I had the advantage of knowing him. He did me the honour of trying to make me one of his dupes, in which enterprise, I am glad to say, he succeeded less well than in other cases; and I did not care to cultivate an acquaintance which he pressed upon me. But with a little help from hearsay and surmise, I believe I can supply an outline of his history, wrapped as it was in clouds of deceit.