The juxtaposition of a place so new as Bournemouth with one so ancient as Poole is a piquant circumstance. When Bournemouth rose, not like Britannia, from the azure main, but from beside it, there was a considerable interval of open country between the hoary seaport and the mint-new pleasure-town. That interval has now shrunk to vanishing-point; for, what with Bournemouth’s expansion, growing Parkstone’s position midway, and Poole’s own attempt to sprout in an eastwardly direction, to meet those manifestations, the green country has been abolished beneath an irruption of bricks and mortar.
The piquancy of Poole’s ancient repose being neighboured by Bournemouth’s wide-awake life is italicised when that port—the “Havenpool” of To Please his Wife—is entered. It would not be correct to say that the days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in size of modern ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose recesses it is tucked rather obscurely away, prevents any but vessels of slight draught coming up to its quays. For that reason, large ocean-going steamers are strangers to Poole, more familiar with wooden barques and brigantines and their maze of masts and spars, than with the capacious steamships that, although of much greater speed and tonnage, carry very slight and insignificant sticks; and were it not for the china-clay shipments and for that coasting trade which seems almost indestructible, Poole would assuredly die.
But Poole, besides being ancient, has been a place to reckon with. Already, in 1220, when by a proclamation of Henry III. the ships of many ports were sealed up, Poole appeared among the number. In 1347 its contribution towards the siege of Calais was four ships and ninety-four men, and it was the base from which the English army in France was provisioned. Then in 1349 came that fourteenth century scourge, the Black Death, and Poole, among other towns, was almost depopulated, and lost the Parliamentary representation it had long enjoyed. But it made a good recovery, and in the time of Henry VI. regained its Parliamentary representation. Leland, writing of the place describes it, two hundred years later, as “a poore fisshar village, much encreasid with fair building and use of marchaundise of old tyme.” Poole, after that description was penned, continued to recover itself, and fully regained its lost prosperity. Fifty years later it is found carrying on a thriving trade with Spain, and how truly it was said that its merchants were men of wealth and consideration may be judged from their large, and architecturally and decoratively fine, mansions still remaining, although nowadays put to all kinds of mean uses and often occupied as tenements.
Poole, however, long enjoyed a very bad reputation, and the wealth of which these were some of the evidences, was not often come by in very reputable ways. When it is said that Poole “enjoyed” a bad reputation, it is said advisedly, for Poole was so lost to shame that it really did enjoy what should have been a source of some searchings of heart. It was a veritable nest of pirates and smugglers, and the home of strange and original sinfulnesses; so that at last an injurious rhyme that still survives was circulated about it:
“If Poole were a fish-pool, and the men of Poole fish,
There’d be a pool for the devil, and fish for his dish.”
So early as the close of the fourteenth century, the buccaneers of Poole were infamous, and at their head was the notorious Harry Page, known to the French and the Spaniards as Arripay, the nearest they could frame to pronounce his name. Arripay was a very full-blooded, enterprising, and unscrupulous fellow; if without irreverence we may call him a “fellow,” who was the admiral of his rascally profession. There can be little doubt but that tradition has added not a little to the tales of his exploits, and it is hardly credible that he and his fellow-pirates should, on one occasion, have brought home a hundred and twenty prizes from the coast of Brittany. His forays were made upon the shipping of the foreigner, and with such system that no ship, it was said, could successfully run the gauntlet of his lawless flotilla. His success and power were so great that they necessitated the sending of an expedition to sweep the seas of him. This was an allied French and Spanish force, commissioned in 1406, and sailing under the command of Perdo Nino, Count of Buelna. Adopting the tactics of raiders, they burnt and ravaged the coasts of Cornwall and Devon, and, coming to Dorset, swept into Arripay’s hornets’ nest of Poole Harbour, and landing at Poole itself, defeated the townsmen in a pitched battle. The brother of the redoubtable Arripay was among the slain.
A worthy successor of this bold spirit in the pike and cutlass way—although he was no pirate, but just an honest stalwart sailor—was that bonny fighter, Peter Jolliffe, of the hoy Sea Adventurer. Off Swanage in 1694, he fell in with a French privateer having a poor little captured Weymouth fishing-smack in tow, and attacked the Frenchman repeatedly, and at last with such success, that he not only released the smack, but drove the privateer ashore near Lulworth, its crew being made prisoners of war. For so signal an instance of bravery Jolliffe received a gold chain and medal from the hands of the king himself.
Jolliffe’s example fired enthusiasm, and the following year, William Thompson, skipper of a fishing-smack, aided only by his scanty crew of one man and a boy, attacked a Cherbourg privateer that had attempted to capture him, and actually succeeded in capturing it and its complement of sixteen hands, instead. He brought his prize into Poole, and he too, fully deserved that gold chain and medal awarded him.
In St. James’s church itself—disclosing an interior not unlike that of a stern cabin of an old man-o’-war, writ large—is a monument to the intrepid Jolliffe. From a reminiscence of it, no doubt, Mr. Hardy chose to name Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, that shipmaster engaged in the Newfoundland trade who is the ill-fated hero of To Please his Wife.
For the rest, Poole figures so largely in the Civil War, as a town ardently in favour of the Parliament, that it has a long and stirring story of its own, in the varying fortunes of Roundheads and Stuarts. It is too lengthy a story to be told with advantage here.