The Channel crossing is no longer solely concerned with tunnelling, swimming, or steamboat travelling. The conquest of the air provides a newer way. So long ago as March 22nd, 1882, Colonel Burnaby crossed in a balloon from Dover. Starting at 10 a.m., he landed at Montigny, Normandy, at 2.15 p.m.
Burnaby knew Dover well. An out-of-the-way association with him will be found in the hill-top cemetery, where one epitaph at least has the rare quality of true sympathy. It was placed by him over the grave of his servant, George Radford, and runs: “True as steel. This stone is erected by the man he served so well.”
Nowadays, in flying matters—in aviation, as the new word has it—it is the aeroplane, the heavier-than-air machine with the petrol-engine, that attracts attention and performs most of the marvels. Already, at the present time of writing, there have been numerous successful attempts to fly the Channel by aeroplane. It was on Sunday, July 25th, 1909, that the pioneer, M. Blériot, voyaged by monoplane from Calais, landing on Dover cliffs in thirty-seven minutes. A monument, in the shape of a concrete model of his machine, has been let into the grass of the North Fall Meadow. On May 21st, 1910, the Comte de Lesseps, from the same starting-point, landed near St. Margaret’s Bay, in two minutes less. These exploits were followed on June 2nd, 1910, by the Honourable C. S. Rolls, flying from these Dover cliffs to the French coast near Sangatte and back again; and on August 17th by Mr. J. B. Moisant, an American, of Spanish extraction, who, in the course of an effort to fly from Paris to London, crossed the Channel from Calais with a passenger, and landed at the inland village of Tilmanstone, midway between Sandwich and Dover. With the flight of eleven airmen across the Channel, on July 3rd, 1911, on their way from Calais to London, the brief era in which such things were regarded as marvels may be said to have ended. Already the newspapers have ceased to decorate their accounts of these doings with the startling headlines first accorded them; and there now appears to be no reason why more astonishment should be exhibited at such sights than at the familiar one of a motor-car careering the road: itself a spectacle thousands of people assembled to see, not so many years ago. Wonderful! But some things—really, after all, the essential things—are as impossible as ever to combat. Age and pain, poverty, sorrow, and death, remain the lot of mankind, and none may make flight from them.
A fine bronze statue of Charles Stuart Rolls, “the first man to cross the Channel and return in a single flight,” stands on the Parade of Dover, looking seaward. It is a good likeness, in a characteristic pose, of that ill-fated airman, killed little more than a month later at Bournemouth, July 12th, 1910. He is represented standing, in his well-remembered stooping pose, hands behind his back, and gazing with a peculiar intensity out across the sea, towards the misty coast of France; with rather a fateful look, as though with prescience of his end. Something of the sculptor’s romantic imagination is in that, for Rolls was essentially of a joyous and forceful nature.
CHAPTER XXI
SHAKESPEARE’S CLIFF—SAMPHIRE—THE CHANNEL TUNNEL—COAL IN KENT—THE WARREN
“Dost thou know Dover?” asks Gloucester, in the pitiful tragedy of King Lear.
Aye; and knowing Dover, we cannot but be well acquainted with that—
“Cliff whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confinèd deep.”
It is Shakespeare’s Cliff. “Here’s the place,” says Edgar.