Memorials of Old Dorset

by Unknown

POOLE

By W. K. Gill

OME, even of those who know a little of Poole, may wonder at the idea that a town so modern to all appearance should have anything of antiquity about it. To the motorist, bound westward from Bournemouth, Poole is a place with an irritating railway crossing at one end, and an equally provoking bridge at the other. And even to a visitor it will appear but as a commonplace business town—a town of tramcars and electric lights, with a big gasworks on the most approved principles, with wharves piled with timber and quays black with coal, where the colliers come in and out through a fleet of red-sailed barges and big white timber-ships; a town whose very Church and Guildhall are modern, and to whose past only a neglected and mutilated stone building on the Quay bears the slightest witness. But could we open the jealously-guarded charter-chest, and unroll one ancient document after another; could we summon the shadowy file of noble and royal benefactors, from the famous Crusader, the Gordon of his age, who granted the first charter, to that Queen of famous memory, who gave us the last—then, indeed, we should have a pageant fit to compare with that of any town in Dorset. But Poole’s true pageant would be on the water, where, too, the harbour would give her an antiquity not her own. Roman bireme and Saxon keel, Danish longship and Norman galley, quaint craft of Plantagenet and Tudor, strong-stemmed Newfoundlander, and raking privateer of the great French War—the shipping that has sailed in that harbour would bring us down from the Roman period to the long black destroyers of our own day which sometimes lie in main channel from Stakes to Saltern’s Pier. The memories of Poole are not in her ruins, but in her records; for the swift keel leaves no mark, and there is no more trace of the destroyers that lay there last year than of Knut’s long ships that lay there nine hundred years ago.

The Town Cellars, Poole.

But let us stroll slowly through the town from the railway station, not by the High Street, but by way of the Guildhall and the Church of St. James the Apostle, down to the Quay, noting, as we go, the signs and vestiges of past days. A few paces from the station is the old town boundary, denoted by a boundstone let into the wall, and this is all that remains to mark the position of the embattled gate erected by charter from Henry VI., and destroyed by order of Charles II.—the embattled gate recorded by Leland that turned back Prince Maurice in the great Civil War. It is amusing to note how Clarendon “veils his wrath in scornful word” as he tells how “in Dorsetshire the enemy had only two little fisher towns, Poole and Lyme.” Here was the main entrance from the north through the fortified gate that gave the name of Towngate Street. (The southern entrance was by ferry, and this way came Leland, the great Tudor antiquary.) There was a sharp fight at this point during the Civil War, mementos of which in the shape of three small cannon-balls were dug up last year, and are now in the local Museum. The story may be summarised thus: Poole as a seaport was of great importance, and the King’s party were most anxious to get hold of it. Attempts were made to corrupt a dashing young partisan leader, Captain Francis Sydenham, of Wynford Eagle (brother of the famous doctor, also a soldier then), who was constantly out on raiding expeditions. Sydenham pretended to yield, but arranged with the Governor, Captain John Bingham, of Bingham’s Melcombe, to have a little surprise for the cavaliers. Accordingly, when Lord Crawford with horse and foot came by night to the outworks that guarded the causeway over the fosse, he was admitted within the half-moon, but found the gates fast, while the cannon and musketry opened on him from the wall. The darkness favoured him, however, and he escaped, but with some loss of men, and more of horses. The small cannon-balls above mentioned were in all probability some of those fired at the Royalists from the wall. This wall, as has been said, was razed by order of Charles II., a retaliation, possibly, for the part Poole had played in the destruction of Corfe Castle. The fosse long remained, and, having been deepened in fear of Prince Charlie as late as 1745, some portion was traceable within the memory of living persons.

A few years after, the King had an opportunity of seeing how his order had been carried out—for, the Court being at Salisbury, to avoid the Plague in 1665, he and some of the courtiers went touring about East Dorset, and one day was spent at Poole. So on September 15th a brilliant company rode into the town by the old causeway. There was the King himself, harsh-featured indeed, but easy and gracious in bearing; Lauderdale, with his coarse features and lolling tongue; Ashley, with his hollow cheeks and keen eyes; Arlington, another of the afterwards infamous Cabal; and, among the rest, but the centre of all attraction, the handsome, boyish face of Monmouth. Ashley was well known in Poole, and many a grim Puritan soldier must have muttered Scriptural curses on his old commander, who had turned courtier for the nonce, but who could not foresee the day when the flags in the port should be half-mast for him, and when his body should be brought from his place of exile in Holland, and the hearse should pass along the very road he had just ridden so gallantly to the old church of Wimborne St. Giles. Still less could young Monmouth foresee the day when, twenty years later, turning and doubling like a hunted hare, he should cross that road in his desperate and vain effort to reach the shelter of the great Forest. And little did his father think that Antony Etricke, “learned in the laws of England,” whom he appointed Recorder of Poole, should be the man before whom his favourite son would be brought for identification. Down the street rode the gay cavalcade—plumed hats, curled wigs, velvets and laces, gallant horses and all—over the open ground that extended halfway down the town, till they came to the house of Peter Hiley, which then stood about opposite where now is the National and Provincial Bank. The house has long since gone, but there they were entertained by Peter Hall, the Mayor; and afterwards the King went on the water to Brownsea, “and took an exact view of the said island, castle, bay, and this harbour, to his great contentment.” For many a day this visit was remembered, and the cause of the hapless Monmouth was popular in Poole, so that before his final attempt to reach the Forest he had entertained the idea of escaping to Poole, and there taking ship for Holland. A ghastly little note from the Deputy-Mayor of Poole, instructing the tything-men of Higher Lytchett to take delivery of certain heads and quarters of rebels executed in Poole, and to set them up at the cross-roads, is still in existence, and testifies to the executions of the Bloody Assize.

Further down the street comes a cluster of houses that belong to a widely different period, both in the history of the town and of the country. The almshouses, dated 1812, with Nile and Trafalgar Rows on one side, and Wellington Row, 1814, a little way below on the other, recall the great French War, when the open ground at this end of Poole, still called The Parade, though now built over, was the place of exercise for the troops constantly quartered here. In 1796, the 33rd, then Colonel Wellesley’s, regiment was here, and the Colonel’s quarters were over the water at the old manor-house at Hamworthy. But the almshouses, built by a famous Newfoundland merchant, George Garland, bring back quite a different set of memories. Curiously enough, the well-known trade with Newfoundland was at its zenith during the later years of the great war. The English fleet had swept the foreign flag off the seas, and the trade had fallen to the Union Jack. But the trade dated from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and lasted till the middle of the Victorian age. At first the little ships went out year by year, in the season, and returned with their cargoes of oil and fish and skins, without making any stay on the island—little ships of forty to fifty tons, but manned by daring seamen, who faced the Atlantic storms and the Turkish pirates, as well as French or Spanish enemies, year in, year out, with no record save now and then an incidental mention, as when the Mayor of Poole complains to the Privy Council in 1625 of the danger that the fishing fleets ran from the Turkish pirates, Sallee rovers, and the like. In after years settlements were made, and the Poole merchants had their establishments on the island, from which they supplied the fishermen; but the truck system was the only one in vogue, and the oils and fish and seal-pelts were paid for in goods only, the value of which was fixed by the merchant, who thus got his cargoes at his own price, and, buying his supplies wholesale in England, made, naturally, very large profits.

For many years Poole and Newfoundland were intimately connected, but the trade gradually fell off as other countries entered into competition, and the carelessness, bred by monopoly, made the Poole merchants far too independent and unenterprising.