The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

In the London Road approach to Dover, one mile from the centre of the town, there used to stand an old inn called “The Milestone.” A hatter’s shop now occupies the site; but two old milestones are yet there. One says “70 miles to London: 14 miles to Canterbury,” and the other proclaims it to be “1 mile to Dovor.”

This old spelling of “Dover” was common until the opening of the railway era; and the coach-bills of the great Dover Road coach-proprietors, Horne, Chaplin, and Gray, spelt the place-name “Dovor,” with two “o’s,” instead of an “o” and an “e.”

“DEAR” DOVER

It will be expected of me that I should say something of Dover, and I do not intend to disappoint so very reasonable an expectation, although the Dover Road having been traversed, the object of this book is accomplished; and, therefore, any remarks I may have to offer must be informed, not with the prolixity of the local history, nor with the stodgy statistics of the Guide Book, but with conciseness and something of the sympathy which shows that to which but few Guide Books ever attain—the true inwardness of the place. It is quite easy to be contemptuous of Dover, from the visitor’s point of view; from other vantage-grounds it is a great deal more easy to acquire a certain enthusiasm for the old Cinque Port, its streets, its piers, its Castle, and the more modern fortifications which cross the Western Heights.

Thy cliffs, dear Dover! harbour and hotel;
Thy custom-house, with all its delicate duties;
Thy waiters running mucks at every bell;
Thy packets, all whose passengers are booties
To those who upon land or water dwell;
And last, not least, to strangers uninstructed,
Thy long, long bills, whence nothing is deducted.

sang Byron.

Turning, however, to a consideration of the two other objects of Byron’s outburst in Don Juan, the hotel and the cliffs, whether Shakespeare’s Cliff or those that form so grand a rampart away towards the North Foreland, Byron, we find, was justified in his choice of Dovorian features for due commemoration. For the cliffs, all that is to be said of the white walls of old Albion has been long ago committed to print, and I do not propose to attempt the saying of anything new about them. As for the hotel of which the poet speaks, it was probably the “Ship.” The “Ship,” alas! is gone, retired, as many of its landlords were enabled to do, into private life, and the “long, long bills” by which they earned rather more than a modest competency are now produced elsewhere. The “Lord Warden,” which was not, unfortunately, built in Byron’s time, could probably have afforded him material for another stanza or two, for that huge and supremely hideous building was celebrated at one time for the monumental properties of the bills presented to affrighted guests. Magnificent as were the charges made by rapacious hosts elsewhere, they all paled their ineffectual items before the sublime heights attained by the account rendered to Louis Napoleon when he stayed here.

There are limits even to Princely-Presidential purses and patiences, and few people cared to incur liabilities at the “Lord Warden,” which would have brought the shadow of the Bankruptcy Court looming upon the horizon. As for that most doughty of Lord Wardens of the Cinque Ports, from whose historic office the hotel takes its title—I name here, of course, the one and only “Duke of Wellington”—he usually resorted to an unpretending hostelry, the “Royal Oak Commercial Hotel,” in Cannon Street, nearly opposite the old Church of St. Mary’s, whenever he was called to the town.

It is not enough to know that Dover is a town of hoary antiquity; that Cæsar landed here B.C. 55 (or that he did not land here, but at Deal, as the more scholarly antiquaries inform us). It is not sufficient to be floored with such heavy slabs of historical information as those by which we learn that the name of Dover has been arrived at through a long series of British, Roman, and Saxon forms, originating from the little stream called anciently the Dour, that flowed, once upon a time, through the chalk valley of Temple Ewell and Buckland, tinkling cheerfully through the old town and falling into the waves over the pebbles of Dover beach; now, alas! pouring a contaminating flood through sewer-pipes far out to sea. I say, it is not enough to know that the Romans latinized the name to Dubris, that it was variously Doroberniæ, Dofris, Dovere, and in the eighteenth century occasionally “Dovor,” finally to have the seal set on these changes by its present name. It is not even sufficient to know (although it is highly interesting) that Domesday Book opens with Dover, commencing as it does, “Dovere tempore regis Edwardi.” But this last slice of historical provand is more than usually welcome because it gives us a foothold whereon to begin the exploration of the old town. When one comes to reduce the tough and gnarled latinity of Domesday Book to English as we speak it, we find this first entry to recite that King Edward the Confessor held a lien on a portion of the town rents, and that Earl Godwin also partook of what the Radical politics of our own time term “unearned increment.” Edward the Confessor was a mild-mannered man and weak. It is, for instance, primarily owing to his unfortunate preference for the foreigner that we owe the Norman invasion and conquest of England; but for all his mildness, it is extremely unlikely that this saintly invertebrate would not have resented the talk of “unearned increment” in his day. He was sufficiently considerate, however, so it would seem, to reduce the rents in his town of Dover, seeing that, although a thriving place, it had had the misfortune to be burned. The entry in Domesday Book goes on to say that here was a Guildhall, and a mill at the entry of the port, much in the way of shipping; and here, at this mention of the port we find our most eloquent text.

DOVER HARBOUR