“The wild mob’s million feet shall kick you from your place.”
It was mildness itself—that is to say, if we take the million kicks figuratively. The proper treatment in such an eventuality would be, not merely to remove those ineffectual persons from their place, but to hang them from the most prominent lamp-posts available; no adequate revenge, but as earnest of popular feeling.
In these later and more striving and hard-working times for the Navy, and in the new strategical dispositions necessitated by modern political developments, the new harbour of Dover is destined to play a prominent part. The old—but still quite recent—days of the Channel Fleet are done. The English Channel was never an ideal cruising-ground: it has its moods—some of them extremely vicious and surly—but the proximity of the kindly coastwise towns and their snug harbours, and the entertainings and courtesies and general social amenities of a sailor’s lot that were generally to be enjoyed ashore savoured life in that fleet with a pleasant flavour. Things are something more Spartan in the North Sea, or—horrid alternative—“German Ocean,” and although courtesies are given and received, they do not bulk so largely as in the days when the generous hospitality aboard sent many a guest ashore incoherent but voluble in praise of the way they had with them in the “Flannel Sheet.”
The Government works here are by no means the only great undertakings that have been in progress for some years past. The Dover Harbour Board, in conjunction with the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway Companies, has been engaged in providing a great new Commercial Harbour within the shelter of the Admiralty Pier. It was long before those bodies obtained parliamentary sanction for their proposal to widen the pier at its landward end, and to build wharves and a great new station, rather larger than Charing Cross, where for many years past weatherbeaten travellers have been landed in all the discomforts of what was at its best a makeshift arrangement. The railway and steamship companies had for long, by special permission, used the Admiralty Pier as a landing-stage; but the great increase of traffic, no less than the discontent of passengers put ashore in the open, on a narrow breakwater exposed to the full fury of sea and wind, led them to seek powers for very ambitious new works. The difficulties encountered in dealing with no fewer than seven Government Departments interested: the Treasury, Admiralty, War Office, Board of Trade, Home Office, Post Office, and the Board of Works—give a comic-opera touch to the negotiations; they were at last overcome, and now close upon £2,000,000 has been spent upon the works, a sum provided largely by the income derived from the proceeds of a poll-tax levied on all passengers embarking or landing at Dover. When first introduced, in 1891, it was a shilling a head; but in the way usual with most taxes not strenuously resisted, this proved only the modest beginning of things, and it was raised in 1900 to half a crown.
I have read somewhere a funny story, which really appears to be true as well as funny, of a witness in the local police-court, who, asked his occupation by the Bench, replied that he was a professional man.
“What profession?” inquired the magistrate.
“Well,” said the witness diffidently, “I walk on the pier of an afternoon, and see the boats in!” This sly humorist—if that is his proper description—narrowly escaped committal for contempt of court.
But the Admiralty Pier has ever been the resort of people, resident in Dover, whose chief interest in life has seemed just this same seeing in the boats; and now that the Admiralty Pier and the great new harbour-works have provided a much more extended promenade, the “profession” has become correspondingly enlarged.
Dover is an ambitious place, and intends to compete vigorously with Southampton, Plymouth, and Liverpool for overseas traffic. That is all very enterprising, but what it gains as a strategic base, as a place of arms, and as a great commercial port, it will inevitably lose in its capacity as a residential and seaside town. For the rest, it is rapidly becoming a place of monuments. Prominent among these is the bronze portrait-bust of Captain Webb, the first person to swim the Channel. It was unveiled early in 1910, and stands upon a red granite obelisk bearing an inscription recording his famous swim from Dover to Calais, 21 miles in 21 hours 55 minutes, August 24th, 1875.
Many attempts—much advertised and conducted with every aid to success—have since been made to rival Webb’s fine performance; but all proved failures until September 6th, 1911, when Thomas William Burgess, after numerous disappointments, swam from near the South Foreland, Dover, to Le Chatelet, near Calais, in 22 hours 35 minutes: 40 minutes longer than the time taken by Captain Webb. It was his sixteenth attempt. The occasion was made the very most of, in the hysterical manner of the age; from a congratulatory telegram from the King down to the excited comments of the halfpenny press. Webb’s finer performance of thirty-six years earlier was a comparatively obscure affair. It is a rather saddening instance of the decay of the national character, under the lead of advertisers and half-educated journalists, bent upon sensation-mongering.