The Hardy Country: Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels

by Charles G. Harper

Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here are based upon the known fondness of royal personages for preserving that bird, once thought a table delicacy, and upon the existence from ancient times of the famous Abbotsbury swannery, along this same coast. But it is needless here to labour the point; and although the little stream, more and more pollutedly with every year of the extension of modern Swanage, still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook, the argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of the place-name shall be no further pursued.

But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past given a very different character to Swanage than that of a village with a marshy creek inhabited by swans. Few places ever proclaimed the industries by which they lived more prominently than did this little port, until well within recent recollection. A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes the circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage displayed evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of stone-working and stone-exporting.

The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of Swanage are among the most famous building and decorative stones in the world; for here we are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck, where, not only the oolitic limestone of the same nature as “Portland stone” is quarried, but that (to antiquaries at least) far more generally known material, “Purbeck marble,” as well. No ancient church or cathedral of any considerable size or elaboration was considered complete without shafts and font and other decorative features of Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other times left in its native state; and thus, from very early times until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly coloured and patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England, Swanage in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing prosperity.

Swanage in Mr. Hardy’s pages is “Knollsea,” and is described in The Hand of Ethelberta as a village:—“Knollsea,” we learn, “was a seaside village lying snug within two headlands, as between a finger and thumb.” A very true simile, as a glance on the map, upon the configuration of Swanage Bay, will satisfy those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary images. But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of what follows:—“Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier, unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half and had been to sea.”

“The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their pursuits. The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology, the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had a clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies than of any inland town in their own country. This, for them, consisted of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports, which they seldom thought of.”

This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained, very little blurred by change, until well on into the ’80’s of the nineteenth century, when it occurred to exploiting railway folk that the time was ripe for the construction of a branch railway from Wareham. With the opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equally primitive people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and complete as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their heads.

There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the Swanage people. They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all quarry folk, mining the great blocks of stone from mother earth, a strangely reserved and isolated race. A man who, felling timber, might conceivably remain all his life mentally detached from his occupation, following it only mechanically, could not long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of myriads of humble creatures living in the palæozoic age, remain unaffected by his surroundings. An imaginative man might, not inaptly, conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant working in some vast petrified graveyard among the petrifactions of a world infinitely little; and, as the dyer’s hand is subdued to the dye he works in, and—a less classic allusion—as the photographer acquires a permanent stain from his collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable mental twist resulting from the surroundings.

And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually peculiar, so collectively they retain their exclusiveness. Still, with every recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at Corfe, under the presidency of warden and steward; and even in these days it is not open for an outsider to become a Purbeck quarryman. It is an industry only to be followed by patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court with a penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and a sum of six shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid down.

With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows nowadays, save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were, locally “Swanage Turks”? When—outside Swanage, of course—you asked why so named, you were apt to be told “Tarks, we al’us carls ’em, ’cos they don’t know nawthen about anything.” The informant in this particular instance was a Poole man. None could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that ancient port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to believe the history books—which there is no reason we should not do—by ruffians who were by no means unspotted of the world, but had plumbed the depths of every wickedness. Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch railway and become a seaside resort, its “Turks” have acquired a very considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and chop logic with you, as well as the best.

To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has come with its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those who have not so known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast with Bournemouth, a place strangely undeveloped. The trouble with the first-named is that development has been all too rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its immemorial character as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was shipped. Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front of what used merely by courtesy to be called “the town,” but is now actually grown to that status. The “bankers”—rows upon rows of stacked slabs of Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the shore, and were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a moonlit night, to look so grisly, as though this were some close-packed seashore cemetery—the circumstance of facetious irony—the grown prosperity of Swanage has built banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily from the profits of their summer trading.