A large volume would be required to deal adequately with all the many interesting features of the dockyard and its life; but as one watches the men at work, the seamen getting stores aboard, or fitting out, one cannot but feel that in their tireless and swift activity there is still that spirit animating the men of all grades which from Armada times have served to make them the best seamen afloat. Each century, from the closing years of the sixteenth, has brought its wonderful record of work done within the dockyard walls, just as each age has done what was at the time required of it swiftly and well. In the eighteenth century the vast number of sixty-six huge line-of-battle and other war ships were launched from the slips, amongst them the St George, Prince of Wales, Princess Royal, and famous Ramillies, all of ninety-eight guns, with the leviathan Britannia of one hundred; and in the succeeding century this output was more than doubled.
From Portsmouth Dockyard, too, went afloat the first paddle boat, the Hermes, and out of it from Henry VIII’s reign onwards have gone galleons, line-of-battle ships, ironclads innumerable, flying “the meteor flag of England,” to earn immortality and the crown of glory which attaches to brave deeds done and daring acts accomplished.
Amid the modern bustle and life of Portsmouth town there yet, happily, remain for those who care for such things some memorials of the glorious past. The old Sally Port is one of these places. There, surely, if in any place in the town, ghosts must walk, where once so many famous men, and those destined to become famous, embarked for enterprises which but too often proved the truth of the Gray’s saying, “The path of glory leads but to the grave.” The tablet affixed to this old gateway tells its history better than any eloquence. It reads, “From this place naval heroes innumerable have embarked to fight their country’s battles.”
In the High Street stands not only St Thomas’ Church with its imposing memorial to the murdered Duke of Buckingham in the south chancel, and the house where the Duke was assassinated, but also the George Hotel at which Nelson spent his last hours before setting out on the cruise which ended in death and the victory of Trafalgar. Here he breakfasted on September 14, 1805.
At any rate, at this time, as a contemporary writer says, “He was physically of a frail and unheroic build, being slight, sickly-looking, and weak. Moreover, ere he set forth on his last glorious voyage, dysentery and fever had already shattered his frame so much that a far less wound than he was destined to suffer would as likely as not have proved fatal.... He had a hacking cough, but there was that in his eye—fire and the unquenchable glint of genius—which, with his high and noble courage, made him yet a hero and a born leader of men and deviser of great affairs.”
In Broad Street stands the Blue Posts Inn. Not, alas! the immortal hostelry of Marryat’s Peter Simple and of innumerable other sea stories since his day, but a bastard growth which sprang up after the old inn was destroyed by fire in 1870. The old rhyme, which was scratched on one of the window panes,
This is the Blue Postesses,
Where the midshipmen leave their chestesses,
Call for tea and toastesses,
And, alas! forget to pay for their breakfastesses.
must, we think, in its day have been one of the most quoted of all poetic efforts.
The famous Star and Garter inn is, fortunately, still standing hard by the Point or Floating Bridge. Here, in the cosy bar parlour, which seems redolent of other days, one can sit and smoke at the same table round which Nelson, Howe, Rodney, and other “old sea dogs,” used to foregather, gossiping, possibly discussing plans of campaign, and smoking old-time churchwardens, which had the great advantage of smoking cool and keeping the smoke out of their eyes. Among the many other famous visitors of the past were Louis Philippe on his flight into exile, Sir John Franklin and King William the Fourth, “the Sailor King,” who when Prince of Wales often occupied a bedroom which is still shown. In the coffee room is a curious survival, a huge cupboard, or secret chamber, measuring about 10 ft. by 6 ft. There is nowadays no door to this room, which tradition asserts was a hiding-place from the pressgang, or possibly (which seems even more likely) was a “hole” used by smugglers. The Star and Garter remains a fine relic of old Portsmouth, and one of the most interesting survivals of former days.
There are, however, not a few others which space will not allow our mentioning in detail, amongst them Lord Howe’s house in Highbury Street and the little shop of John Pounds, the originator of the Ragged Schools; but at least a little more than a passing mention is claimed by the birthplace of Charles Dickens in Commercial Road. The future novelist, however, did not live here long, as his father, a Pay Clerk in the Navy, was thrown out of employment at the time of a wholesale reduction of the staff. In consequence the family, fallen upon evil times, removed first to Chatham and then to London, where, as all the world knows, Charles earned a few shillings a week by pasting labels on blacking bottles.