The mile-long walk along the shore from Rosherville to Gravesend affords much food for reflection. Here you notice for the first time that the water is salt; obviously sea-water, because the wooden piles are hung with sea-weed. At this time of writing the “Marine Baths” that once were well patronised are being demolished, after a long period of disuse and decay. They fronted upon this parade, in a forbidding, Pharaonic type of architecture that gave to bathing an aspect of partaking in the dread rites of the ancient Egyptian worship of Osiris and all that weird hierarchy of bird-and-beast-headed gods and goddesses. Sea-bathing at Gravesend is a thing of the past, and on the site of these baths the commercial spirit of the age is rearing vast factory-buildings. Thus ends Gravesend’s Early Victorian dream of being a seaside resort; but one would not declare that the place is the less interesting. It is, indeed, of a greater interest than ever, and the busy waterway presents a grand panorama of the might and majesty of modern shipping. For there, on the opposite shore, are Tilbury Docks, to and from whose capacious basins come and go the great liners and cargo boats. There, too, glimpsed across the half-mile of waterway, is Tilbury Fort, where modern and unhistorical batteries stand in company with that old historic blockhouse where Queen Elizabeth reviewed her troops before the threatened arrival of the Spanish Armada.
TILBURY FORT.
The chief feature—ornament it can scarce be styled—of Gravesend’s river-front is the Royal Terrace Pier. It is a construction for use rather than display, and is in fact the headquarters of the sea and river pilots who, to the number of nearly 300, wait here and navigate vessels up and down river to and from London, or out to sea by the “North Channel,” as far as the Sunk Lightship, off Harwich; or by the “South Channel,” as far as Dungeness. At the head of these men is an official of “the Trinity House,” with the title of “Ruler.” The “Ruler of the Pilots” settles all official business and disputes that are not serious enough to be referred to the Trinity House headquarters on Tower Hill.
“Gravesend” is not a pleasant name, even though it may suggest to the imaginative the final triumph of the Christian: “O grave, where is thy sting? O Death, where is thy victory?” with visions of the shining Beyond. But the place-name has not, in fact, anything to do with these considerations or speculations; and refers to some prehistoric trench which in the dim past formed a boundary-line between neighbouring tribes.
Leaving Gravesend, you come down again to the shore by turning to the left out of the main road by the tramway terminus and through the unlovely region of “Coal Road,” past the “Canal Tavern,” and over the Thames and Medway Canal by a footbridge. Here, along the waterside, is the office of a person described on his sign-board as an “Explosive Lighterman.” The place where this alarming creature carries on business is Denton Wharf. Adjoining is the “Ship and Lobster” tavern. Out in front stretches the Thames estuary. It is the spot referred to by Dickens in “Great Expectations,” Chapter LIV., in which Pip is engaged in smuggling the convict, Magwitch, out of the country. The building seen in the distance, by the waterside, is Shornemead Battery.
CURIOUS OLD BOAT-COTTAGE AT CHALK.
It is a curious region: the deserted Thames and Medway Canal on the right, the busy Thames on the left; and it is rendered yet more curious by the whimsical old cottage presently seen, standing in the narrow space between canal and river; an odd, amphibious building, the lower part brick, the upper portion made of an old man-o’-war’s barge, placed keel upwards. It is almost exactly such another as Peggotty’s boat-house on Yarmouth sands, imagined and described by Dickens in “David Copperfield.” The old Wellington man-o’-war’s boat was sold out of the service about 1822, and the cottage has been here since then; obviously, therefore, it must have been well known to Dickens, whose honeymoon days were passed at the neighbouring village of Chalk in 1836. “David Copperfield” was not written until 1850, so it is plain he must have had this queer old place in mind.
It is true that the Peggotty home is described as being in its natural position, keel downwards, and that this old boat of the Wellington man-o’-war is upside down, and forms both roof and upper floor of the cottage; but these are mere matter-of-fact details easily surmounted in a work of fiction.