BRICKS AND TILES
For the making of bricks and tiles is the chief industry of Sittingbourne nowadays, and a very large and flourishing industry it is; so much so, indeed, that there will be presently nothing of Sittingbourne left at all; because, like maggots that live in cheeses—and on them—the Sittingbourne brickmakers find their sustenance in the ground on which they live, and have carted away nearly all the surrounding country. When they have worked down to the chalk and the bed-rock, I don’t know what they will do. Already all the hills have vanished and have been distributed over England in the shape of bricks, and when folks return who have known Sittingbourne in their youth, they don’t recognize the place, and go away wondering whether curses will fall upon it because its people have thus removed the old landmarks.
Changed, indeed, it is, not only from those days when the great ones of the earth sojourned here, but also from those comparatively recent times when the traveller’s only choice was the road. Then three parts of the population were engaged in hotel-keeping, licensed-victualling, or coach-building; innkeepers, job-masters, hostlers, post-boys, chamber-maids, and boots, were their styles and titles, and if you are curious enough to turn the pages of Sittingbourne registers you will find such entries as these to be the chiefest of their contents: “John Slater, innholder, of the White Hart, was buryed, 22nd Feby, 1708/9”; or “Joseph, ostler at the Crowne, buryed Oct. 23, 1708.”
When the railway came, ruin, swift and terrible, fell upon this busy community. Grass grew in the stable-yards; the old high-hung yellow chariots and the light post-chaises rotted to pieces that were used to be hired by travellers who did not care so much about the price as the pace they went; the price of horses fell; the vast interiors of the hotels with their numberless bedrooms, and one-time cosy coffee-rooms, echoed to the casual tread of some unfrequent guest, uncomfortable and half-frightened at the solitary state in which he sat; hostlers, grooms, and washers lounged miserably about the mouldy harness-rooms in company with dejected post-boys; chamber-maids departed to other scenes and occupations; and “boots” gradually lost the encyclopædic knowledge for which he was renowned, and forgot alike the number of miles to the next post-town and the proper way to clean a pair of Bluchers.
The last post-boy is dead now, and the chaises and the chariots are represented—like so many other obsolete things—at the South Kensington Museum; and the typical innkeeper of that day should be also, for his like is no more seen on earth. He was a burly man with a red, good-humoured, clean-shaven face. He wore, frequently, knee-breeches and sleeved yellow waistcoats with black stripes that made him look, to the youthful imagination, like a great wasp or bumble-bee. He wore short white aprons, too, and high collars encircling his thick red neck, so that one gazed upon him in constant dread of his falling down in an apoplectic fit; he wore—but enough! Let it be said, though, that he resembled a Blue-coat boy in one respect, for he was never known to wear a hat.
All this is changed. Sittingbourne had grown into importance because its situation was convenient for travellers to stay here to change horses at, and when the roads became deserted the place would have fallen back into its original obscurity had it not been for bricks, hops, and cherries. Bricks, and the surrounding fruit country have prospered it anew, and have made it what it is; a dusty, thickly populated, dirty town whose old aspect has been altered from a broad and roomy street to crowded lanes and a High Street filled with frowzy alleys, and many Dissenting conventicles of different degrees of ugliness.
PAPER
Of late years, paper has been added to the interests of Sittingbourne. Outside the town, on Milton Creek, leading muddily to the Swale, there you will find paper in its crude wood-pulp stage, as imported from the mills in Norway and Sweden. Closely viewed, it is not attractive. Slabs of wood-pulp, stacked forty or fifty feet high, with a narrow-gauge railway running between cliff-like accumulations of this merchandise, present a scene made squalid by the torn and bedraggled fragments of paper packing that the winds sport with. But, seen from the Swale, or indeed from a distance on land, these towering stocks of the raw material for newspapers have a peculiarly romantic appearance; looking indeed like a reminiscence of the temples of the East.
The village of Milton itself, properly “Milton Regis,” is full of queer old corners. The church stands aloof, dignified, on a remote country road. In its churchyard is a stone mentioning a woman who had six husbands:—
“Here lyeth interred the Body of Abraham Washiton (sic), late husband of Alise Washinton now liveing in Milton, whome had in all six Husbands: John Ailes, John Ricard, Thomas Gill, John Jeefrre, Alexander Flet. Anno 1601.”