Kent and the Sea

KENT AND THE SEA¹

sarah palmer

For those who have written about Kent’s association with the sea, the starting point has generally been the county’s geography.² Kent can be seen almost as an island, certainly a peninsular, with 140 miles of its boundaries washed by tidal waters. Its northern limit is the Thames Estuary, while its eastern and southern frontiers are set by the open sea. The historic county of Kent extended from as close into London as Deptford and Greenwich and then out to the great promontory of the North Foreland, sweeping down to the cliffs of Dover and on to Dungeness and the Romney Marsh. Across the channel, so close that it can easily be seen on a fine day, is the Continent.

Looking at the county map, it is not surprising that Kent’s history has much of the sea in it. Now, in the twenty-first century, the maritime link is less pronounced than it was in the past; Kent would be unlikely to be categorised ‘an important maritime county in S.E. of England’ as it was in Bartholomew’s 1887, Gazetteer of the British Isle.³ Yet directly or indirectly the sea continues to exert its influence. In 2006, it remained a key element in the Kent economy, not least for tourism, with sightseers encouraged to ‘experience the nautical treasures of Kent’ by exploring so-called ‘Maritime Heritage’ trails in Thanet, Medway, Whitstable/Herne Bay and Dover.⁴

Even so it is worth reminding ourselves that economic activity is no respecter of political boundaries. The coastal settlements of southern Kent had, and have, more in common with their Sussex neighbours than they do with the Thames and Medway’s towns and villages, though in both cases the sea has been important in their history. The Channel itself can be seen, not so much as a barrier, but as an accessible space linking the maritime communities of Southern England and Northern France.⁵ It has sometimes been a source and theatre of conflict for these, but equally has been the basis for co-operation and mutual benefit.⁶

Two recent scholarly histories of the whole of Kent devote a separate chapter or two to ‘Kent and the Sea’, with other sections dealing with its agriculture, its industries, its transport systems, its towns and so forth.⁷ Other studies focus particularly on certain parts of the county. Often reflecting the conventional broad geographical division of Kent into three – the Chalk hills of the North Downs, the Weald, the sea and marshes – such regionally-based accounts signal the rather distinct local characteristics, and with these differing developmental paths over time, that can be discerned within this one political unit.⁸ Kentish London, too, has its own historian.⁹

Yet it is important to appreciate that there is rather more to Kent’s association with the sea than might be covered under the heading ‘Maritime Kent’. We may differentiate the evidently nautical from the rest, but in doing this must not lose sight of the ways in which Kent’s sea connections have influenced its interior. This is particularly the case when we consider the impact of its long shoreline and extensive river connections on the county’s fortunes. William Lambarde, writing in the late sixteenth century, along with many other later commentators, was struck by these:

Besides diverse pieres, jetties, and creekes that bee upon the costs of the Thamise and the Sea, Kent hath also sundrie fresh rivers and pleasaunt streames, especially Derent, Medway, and Stowre, of the which, Medway is more navigable than the rest, for which cause, and (for that it crosseth the shyre almost in the midst) it is the most beneficial also.¹⁰

From at least the seventeenth century onwards the oats, barley and hops produced in mid Kent reached its London customers by being transported in hoys or large sailing boats down the Medway from Maidstone, New Hythe or Aylesford towards Rochester and then onwards up the Thames. From Maidstone, too, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sent great quantities of timber destined for the Royal Dockyards at Chatham, with a number of Maidstone’s leading citizens acting as major suppliers to the Royal Navy.¹¹ River-borne timber was still a Kent export in the mid nineteenth century, while North Kent’s corn flowed out to the capital through Faversham and Sandwich. Other inland Kent industries, including ironworking, papermaking, brickmaking, cement production, clay digging, quarrying and the extraction of fullers earth, in various phases of their history similarly benefited from the existence of river links to the estuary or the sea.¹²

From medieval times vessels built on the Medway served such trades, providing employment for ‘mariners’ or ‘hoymen’, shipwrights and sailmakers living in places such as East Malling.¹³ Eventually railways, better roads or, in the case of the lower Medway, industrial decline made such transport from the interior in hoys and barges redundant, but this was only after many centuries in which such maritime connections helped to shape inland economic activity. Indeed it has been argued that the county owed the agricultural prosperity for which it was renowned not to any special fertility of its soils which were generally unexceptional, but rather to its outstanding river and sea communications with London.¹⁴ The ‘garden of England’, so to speak, had a sea view.

But let us now return to thinking about the coast. This itself has a history because Kent’s coastline has changed quite dramatically even over the last 1,000 years.¹⁵ Rising sea levels, erosion and flooding, such as that caused by a great storm in 1287, have all had an impact on coastal areas, as is illustrated by the case of Reculver, once inland, today perilously close to the shore.¹⁶ Elsewhere Kent inhabitants battled to take territory from the sea, although the successful efforts of one generation to gain and retain land might sometimes turn to failure and loss in the next. Romney Marsh was progressively reclaimed from the sea in medieval times and supported a number of active communities, including a line of ports, Romney, Lydd and nearby Hythe, which looked outwards across to the Continent. In the Middle Ages this marshy maritime region not only had agricultural activity, commerce, and a saltmaking industry, it also contained the shipyard on the Rother at Small Hythe which was large enough to build royal warships.¹⁷ Today so little remains to be seen that it is perhaps hard to believe that this was the place where in August 1416 Henry V inspected three vessels being built for him – including the 1,000 ton Jesus – or where almost a century later Henry VIII’s Great Bark and Lesser Bark were constructed. Late twentieth-century archaeological excavations established some of the dimensions of this site, confirming its significance.¹⁸

By the seventeenth century, however, this east Kent marshland region was depopulated and abandoned to sheep grazing; its ports silted up and marooned inland by the retreat of the sea. The maritime connection persisted nevertheless, though now in the form of a centre for smuggling. At first this was largely to evade seventeenth- and eighteenth-century taxes on local wool exports, but in due course, taking advantage of its remoteness, the marsh’s inhabitants became adept at handling and harbouring other types of contraband.¹⁹

The importance of New Romney and Hythe is indicated by the fact that they were among the five Anglo-Saxon ports – the Cinque Ports – which were initially linked informally for the purposes of national coastal defence and by the mid twelfth century seemingly formally confederated. The others were Sandwich, Dover and, outside Kent, Hastings.²⁰ Under their charters, they all received certain fiscal, trading and legal privileges in return, in principle, for providing for a fortnight each 57 ships, with crews of twenty-one men. It seems unlikely that the Cinque Ports ever contributed to national defence on this scale, though in the thirteenth century the majority of vessels involved in the Welsh wars came from them. Even so, their importance as trading and fishing centres is indicated by the fact that for the sovereign the Cinque Ports often served as a source of advice and expertise, as well as manpower.²¹ The discovery at Sandwich of the remains of a fourteenth-century locally built large merchant vessel, 20-30 metres long, was a reminder of the port’s heyday, when as many as 400 of the town’s 2,000 inhabitants were recorded as being mariners.²² Graffiti of medieval ships on the walls of St Margaret’s at Cliffe, near Dover, are another indication to us of the significance of shipping for these Kent coastal communities in the Middle Ages.²³

The strength of the Cinque Ports at the height of their influence between 1150 and 1350 was not an unmixed blessing. Their inhabitants were often piratical and capable of aggression against other English ports; in 1321 they destroyed seventeen ships on the strand at Southampton. At a time of conflict between Crown and barons, they were also fickle in their political loyalties. It was, then, perhaps the concern to secure the co-operation of these strategically-sited ports, as much as their naval contribution, that made medieval monarchs buy their support.²⁴ By 1500, however, adverse changes in the coastline affected the ability of the Cinque Ports to handle larger ships, leading to a decline in their foreign trade and eventual loss in economic status. While they retained many of the political trappings of their previous importance until the nineteenth century, the attention and support of government largely shifted elsewhere.

There was one exception to the state’s loss of interest in the Cinque Ports and that was Dover. The Romans had first established Dover (Dubris) as a major naval base (with a two-acre fort, quays and a lighthouse on each headland), to provide a crossing point to its harbour at Boulogne. Over the following centuries its closeness to the Continent ensured its strategic and commercial significance. As a government commission charged with surveying the South East’s harbours commented in 1840:

This harbour [Dover], from its proximity to the French coast, and as the principal port of communication between Great Britain and the Continent, has been regarded at all times as a place of the greatest importance.²⁵

Much buffeted by wind and sea, this key anchorage was in constant need of repairs, but fortunately throughout its history these factors guaranteed the town a large measure of government support and assistance. In the seventeenth century, for example, it benefited from the right to levy taxes on passing shipping, while other privileges made it virtually a free port, able to warehouse and re-ship Continental imports.²⁶

In 1629 Dover appears to have possessed the most shipping of any Kent port with 36 vessels totalling 2,063 tons. Although a surviving list of 1701 reproduced below (Table 1) tells a rather different story, Dover’s status was certainly not diminished in the longer term to the extreme and puzzling extent that this implies.²⁷ Indeed in 1786 137 vessels, totalling 7,419 tons, were officially registered as belonging to Dover.²⁸ The evidence of the Letters of Marque commissions over the eighteenth century, and the identification of no fewer than 68 privateers operating out of Dover towards its end, suggest that opportunities offered by war were in part the explanation for the considerable involvement of local shipbuilders, mariners and merchants in shipowning.²⁹ Dover, Deal and Folkestone all appear to have done well out of the French Wars, with Dover banking firms Minet & Fector and Latham, Price & Co among the indigenous investing interests which participated in the provision of transports.³⁰

But ultimately for Dover such opportunities were incidental compared with those provided by its strategic position, which ensured that sailing packets were replaced by steam vessels even when these were relatively novel, with railway connections eventually ensuring commercial succ-ess.³¹

The figures in Table 1 tell us something about local investment in shipowning rather than the numbers of vessels making use of a port and contributing to its prosperity. What is clear, however, from these and other sources is that by the eighteenth century the North Foreland ports, Ramsgate and Margate, were established maritime centres. In the case of Ramsgate, which seems to have had little foreign trade of its own, this was based on the ownership, commanding and crewing of vessels. Ramsgate vessels specialised in bringing hemp and timber from the Baltic destined for the Thames naval dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford. The extent of this Baltic business at the start of the century is indicated by the fact that in 1700 more vessels from Ramsgate passed through the Danish Sound than from any other English port other than London. This trade seems to have declined somewhat towards mid-century and subsequently Ramsgate vessels were more commonly employed in the passages between London and North America, or London and the Mediterranean. Some Margate owners similarly sought profits from distant trades but the town’s prime business was more local. It was the main passage port for Ostend and Margate-based corn hoys, together with some from Sandwich, transported the cereals produced on the Isle of Thanet to London’s corn market. Another local industry, fishing, provided the island’s major foreign export, though some of Thanet’s grain was also shipped overseas.³²

A survey of the Kentish Gazette, together with other contemporary publications, gives something of the flavour of Thanet’s shipping activ-ities in the last years of the eighteenth century. Just a few examples must suffice. Hennessy and Co., Ostend merchants whose agents were Hobb, Cobb and Hale, in 1781 ran ten passage boats between Margate and Ostend. In 1797, a 75 ton brigantine, Friends, said to be ‘British built and well found and well equipped for the coal trade’ was offered for sale at Ramsgate as ‘lately employed in the Iceland fishery for which she is now completely fitted’. We read of the 67 ton Margate yacht Robert and Jane, ‘fitted up in a very commodious manner’, which under the command of Captain Robert Kidd ‘sails during the Summer Season, with passengers and luggage from Margate every Monday, and from the Wool-Key near the Customs House, London, every Thursday’ and of the Rose in June which in 1790 ran a winter service to London on Saturdays, returning every Wednesday. It called at Ramsgate, Broadstairs and Westgate, with the Gun Tavern, Billingsgate, identified as the meeting point with Captain John Rowe Senior for would-be passengers.³³

But the impact of London was even greater than such connections suggest. These coastal communities also benefited from the business created by the shipping from the rest of the country and the wider world which passed their shores on the way to and from the capital. The entry of the Thames estuary was the point at which ships gathered before their onward passage and meeting the needs of such vessels was the livelihood for many skilled and hardy men along the Kent coast. Deal, through a corps of boatmen, provided vessels anchored in the Downs with pilotage, with agency services, with commercial intelligence, with food, water and supplies, with crew, and with joining passengers.³⁴ Lloyd’s agents were to be found here, as well as at Margate and Dover. Salvage, notably that offered by the Cobb family at Ramsgate, was also available.³⁵ The London-Kent connection was also the basis of the wealth of a number of eighteenth-century Kent-based maritime magnates. We know, for example, of the Larkins family of Dover who were part owners of three East Indiamen, all well over 1,000 tons each and among Britain’s largest vessels.³⁶ A Dover citizen, William Richards, supplied transport vessels to government, including those carrying the convicts in the First Fleet voyage to Australia in 1786.³⁷

Recent research has revealed a Kentish dimension in London’s substantial involvement in the slave trade between Africa and the America’s, though prominent Kent residents featured also in the abolitionist struggle; the ‘Teston circle’ around the Reverend James Ramsay achieved national recognition as campaigners. Vessels used as slavers or carrying slave produced goods were certainly built in Kent yards and manned by Kent seamen, but there were also more direct connections. In particular, two Deal families, the Bowles and the Boys, are known to have been actively engaged over several decades in both in the purchase and sale of slaves, while many other wealthy Kent citizens, among them landowners and politicians, had financial and commercial interests in slavery.³⁸

London necessarily also exerted an influence over the trade of other Kent ports. The majority of Kent-based vessels were occupied with plying up and down the Thames to and from London; in a single week in 1791 as many as 35 Kent vessels were advertised as leaving the capital’s City and South Bank wharves for the county. Faversham and Whitstable hoys, some owned in Canterbury, provided a regular service transporting grain, hops, wool, copperas and gunpowder to the populous capital and also offered space for passengers.³⁹ The kind of goods which came back to Kent in return are reflected in a 1778 announcement by William Baldock, owner of several hoys, that his newly opened corn chandlers in Canterbury had laid in a ‘fresh parcel of very fine Lemons, and Oranges, also Cake and Toy Gingerbread of every kind, also Spanish and Barcelona nuts’.⁴⁰

Despite such indications of the significance of Kent’s maritime trade in daily life, jurisdictional complexities and recording anomalies unfortunately make it impossible in many cases to untangle the details with any precision. The county’s sea and estuarial traffic in the eighteenth century was certainly greater than any official figures available suggest since the ‘volume and value of the maritime trade of Kent was invariably undercounted in the statistics of the period’. Certainly much commercial activity went unrecorded because it took place within the legal limits of the Port of London or escaped the attention of the Customs.⁴¹

By the mid nineteenth century the national system of recording and assembling statistics relating to trade and shipping was much advanced and a large amount of quantitative data is available thereafter relating to movements of shipping in and out of Kent’s ports. Even so, changes in the definition of what should be counted still create difficulties in comparing one period with another.⁴² Between 1873 and 1898, the statistics of shipping entering Kent’s ports conflated estuarial ‘intra-port’ traffic with inward coasting shipping, so the figures in Table 2 provide a broad indication of the balance of activity.

Dover and Folkestone, as one would expect, were primarily involved with providing cross-Channel links to the Continent by steamers making repeated voyages, while for the remaining Kent ports coasting and estuarial traffic predominated. In this respect little had changed for maritime Kent from a hundred years before. Indeed small craft making frequent repeated voyages on the Thames and Medway carrying mundane cargoes remained a taken-for-granted feature of estuary and river well into the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, over the nineteenth century the extent and pattern of Kent’s shipowning interests changed. Table 3 shows the numbers and total tonnage of vessels registered as belonging to Kent’s ports in 1850, 1870 and 1890. Dover’s low figures are explained by the fact that the company steam packets which, beginning in the 1820s, ousted sailing vessels on the cross channel routes were not locally registered or owned. As a result the diminishing number of vessels recorded on the Dover register, which also covered Folkestone – both very busy ports in terms of traffic as Table 2 above has shown – were mostly owned by fishermen.

Faversham’s registrations are also potentially misleading, though in a different way. The number of vessels here reflect the influence of shipowning at Whitstable, for which Faversham remained the official port of registry. For many of Kent’s ports in the previous century the most significant cargo coming in from outside the county had long been ‘sea coal’ from the North East. At Rochester, for example, in the twelve months starting Michaelmas 1739, this fuel accounted for 122 of 167 shipments unloaded in the port.⁴⁵ At Whitstable, however, coal developed a still greater significance as the basis for the ownership of what became by the mid nineteenth century a substantial fleet of colliers. Operating out of Whitstable, some of these vessels also engaged in more distant business than the Tyne to Thames: they were to be found sailing to the Canaries, Patras and Alicante, transporting ice from Norway in the summer and engaged in the Jamaican tobacco and sugar trade. An attempt to list all the ships in the Whitstable fleet over the nineteenth century identified 486 vessels. Almost a third of these colliers, some with owners from Canterbury and Herne Bay, had originally been constructed as timber-carrying vessels in the Canadian Maritime provinces and converted by their Kent purchasers to meet their needs.

Although certain other British ports also imported such tonnage, we have evidence here that Kent’s nineteenth-century maritime interests could be far reaching. At a local level at Whitstable, as also elsewhere, they created a sea-reliant community of owners, shipbuilders – and seafarers; in 1870, the Whitstable trade directory listed no fewer than one-hundred resident Master Mariners. Some of these interests joined together to form a joint stock, limited liability company, the Whitstable Shipping Co Ltd, which still owned a fleet of sixteen wooden sailing vessels in 1914.⁴⁶

The growth in the numbers of vessels associated with Rochester and Ramsgate similarly reflected wider economic influences. The impressive number of vessels registered at Rochester, virtually all sailing barges, resulted from the industrialisation of the lower Medway valley, particularly the boom in cement production. Barge numbers increased to meet the demand for river transport to bring in the coal and coke to fire the kilns and to carry away the cement itself. By no means all such vessels, which continued to be a significant means of industrial transport well into the twentieth century, confined themselves to the river and coastline. In the 1920s, for example, the barges owned by Everard’s of Greenhithe routinely operated across the channel.⁴⁷

But in many of the Kent’s coastal and waterfront communities it was not trade which dominated their lives: it was fishing. From the seventeenth century at the latest fishermen from the Thanet Ports, and Folkestone, caught mackerel and herring, mostly in home waters. Much of this fish was taken on to London. Oysters taken from the beds in the Swale and Medway estuaries, accounted for much of Faversham’s foreign trade in the seventeenth century – with Holland the prime destination – and oysters were still important for Whitstable and Faversham in the early twentieth century.⁴⁸

Growing demand for fish as the London population increased stimulated Kent investment in fishing vessels. Dover’s fishing prospects were damaged by conflict with the interests of the cross-Channel packets, but Ramsgate prospered. By the mid nineteenth century it had become the foremost Kent fishing port, with Ramsgate vessels fishing deep sea on the Dogger Bank.⁴⁹ Folkestone fishermen were also employed deep-sea, but in 1903 the annual value of their total catch was a third of that of Ramsgate, which then had 160 sailing trawlers, most of which were more than 45 feet long.⁵⁰ Although the Lanfear family of Ramsgate owned 43 smacks in 1914, most vessels in these Kent coast ports belonged to individual fishermen. The industry relied on apprentices, mostly recruited locally, to boost the workforce; in 1882 the Smack Boy’s Home at Ramsgate founded with the aid of subscriptions housed 41 apprentices. ⁵¹

Fishing is one way in which Kent’s inhabitants exploited the sea but another was to make the sea itself an attraction – by developing the seaside holiday. In some places fishing activities gave way to the new holiday resort, but mostly the new resort was grafted on to the old fishing port, with perhaps some mutual incomprehension. The fashion for seabathing and watering places took off in the mid eighteenth century – though the first known Kent example of an advertisement for a seawater bath and lodgings was for Margate in July 1736. By 1800 Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Deal, Dover, Whitstable, Herne Bay, Sandgate, Folkestone, Hythe and even Gravesend were all advertising accommodation for the purpose of leisure beside the sea. The sea itself was not, however, in itself a sufficient attraction, so investment in amenities, assembly rooms, libraries and amusing events followed. The sea resort was born.⁵² Among the factors underpinning this development, which completely transformed the size and appearance of places along the coast, was transportation to the coast offered at first by the hoys, artfully advertised as ‘packets’ or ‘yachts’, and after 1815 by steamboats from London downriver to Margate, making the day trip possible.⁵³ Later the South Eastern Railway and London, Chatham and Dover railway added to the ways in which you could reach the coast. By the later nineteenth century, Birchington, Westgate and Whitstable had joined the list of Kent seaside towns, but Gravesend and Deal were no longer seen as holiday places. Indeed by 1911 only Dover featured in the list of the ten largest English Seaside Resorts. Dover’s traditional role as the gateway to Europe was now enhanced in the interwar years by cheapening foreign travel. The traditional Kent resorts, with their boarding houses and hotels, which had been so successful in associating the county with the sea in the nineteenth century, struggled in the face of changing holiday preferences, plus competition with other seaside places and historic towns, to maintain their attraction in the century that followed.⁵⁴

The inflow of holidaymakers to Kent’s coast provides yet another example of the way in which Kent’s maritime activities were influenced from outside, but until the freeing of trade in the 1840s the Kent shoreline and cross channel connections also offered an illegal source of wealth – the smuggling of goods which if imported through official routes would attract a high customs duty. Tea, wines and spirits, tobacco were among a vast range of commodities which it was profitable to smuggle and large quantities of these entered the country. In the late eighteenth century, before tea duties were reduced, it was estimated that two-thirds of the tea drunk in Britain had been smuggled, with Kent and Sussex major entry points. Even allowing for exaggeration and the difficulty of putting a figure on illegal imports, we must certainly include this black market, and the efforts of the Customs officers and Royal Navy to combat it, in any assessment of Kent maritime activity.⁵⁵ There are many indications that Kent smuggling in its peak years between 1700 and 1840 was a well organised occupation, providing a living for many hundreds of seafarers in its ports. Specialist craft were developed to carry on the business, such as a lightly built oared galley which in calm weather could row to the French shore in just two hours. The business benefited from active support from certain landowners, bankers, and merchants – the shadowy ‘Mr Bigs’ of the age who provided capital and contacts – and it is also evident that this criminal activity enjoyed tacit support in the wider community, otherwise it could not have continued.⁵⁶

With the exception of fishing and tourism, so far the focus of this discussion has largely been on sea-based services, directly or indirectly involving the transport of cargoes. But Kent also has an economic history – possibly a much better known aspect – as the leading county for the building, maintaining and refitting of the Britain’s warships. Woolwich, Deptford, Chatham and Sheerness were all chosen as the sites for the establishment of naval dockyards, with Woolwich and Deptford on the Thames developing first in the reign of Henry VIII, followed, in the safe anchorage and mudflats of the Medway, by the yard at Chatham and its outpost at Sheerness. As a result of the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-7, when the Dutch famously attacked vessels at anchor in the Medway, exposing the weakness of south-eastern England to invasion, the fortification and development of Chatham became a priority and it became the leading yard, though it was soon overtaken by Portsmouth. Already by 1700 taken together the four Kent yards employed over 3,000 men, each exceptionally large enterprises by the standards of the day, and their premises were one of the sights of the South East. Something of their early impact is conveyed by a well known quotation from Defoe: ‘The building yards, docks, timber yard, mast yard, gun yard, rope walks, and all other yards and places set aside for the works belonging to the navy are like a well-ordered city’.⁵⁷

These were great national enterprises, which can rightly be dubbed ‘military-industrial centres’. Chatham, where Victory was built in 1759, was by the far the largest of the Kent yards.⁵⁸ Unlike Woolwich and Deptford which closed in 1869, Chatham more than survived the transition to steam warships, and by the late nineteenth century was the major naval yard for battleship construction. Later specialising in submarine construction, Chatham dockyard continued to have a major place in the national defence economy for much of the twentieth century, until its closure in 1984. This brought to an end almost four hundred years in which Chatham as a town had been entirely shaped by the naval connection.⁵⁹

Chatham and Sheerness grew up as industrial maritime towns, but Kent’s naval dockyards are not the only examples of the importance of shipbuilding for the county in the past. Into the twentieth century there were also a large number of privately-owned yards, on the lower Medway, on the Kent Thames shore and also on the coast.⁶⁰ While most built commercial vessels, the Navy Board also sometimes featured as a customer. In the Napoleonic Wars 1803-1815, for instance, merchant shipyards were responsible for the construction of 29 warships at Dover and 51 on the Medway.⁶¹

Many of these merchant shipyards built and repaired the sailing coasters, barges and smacks needed for Kent’s own trades, but by no means was everything small-scale or traditional. Until steam shipbuilding left the Thames for northern yards, marine engineering and iron shipbuilding, supported Kentish London firms based in Deptford and Greenwich, with John Penn & Co Ltd and J & G Rennie perhaps the most well-known companies.⁶³ Further down river, too, firms catered for the needs of the steam age. To take just one example, at Dartford the firm of APV Hall, founded in the eighteenth century, came in the later nineteenth century to specialise in maritime refrigeration. These developments were among those that shaped the distinctive character of Kent today, with its division between the industrial Thames and Medway towns and the rural West Kent interior. They provide yet another example of the maritime influence on the county.

Much of what has been said here – and the account is necessarily selective and incomplete – pays scant attention to Kent’s more recent maritime past. Yet, while undoubtedly the influence of the sea over Kent’s economy and society declined over the twentieth century, it certainly did not disappear. Much of Kent’s maritime history came to be identified in itself as a resource; marketable ‘heritage’, which contributed to Kent’s prosperity in a different way. The county benefited also from a growth in the popularity and affordability of sailing as a leisure activity. But in 2000 the sea still remained directly economically important to Kent. Although the Thames water route into London lost out to land routes, Kent’s links to the capital and beyond remain significant, with deep-water facilities at Thamesport and Sheerness handling container freight. The Dover Straits ferry trade proved rather more resilient in the face of competition from the Channel Tunnel (opened 1994) than had been anticipated, although Ramsgate and Folkestone both suffered when services became concentrated.⁶⁴ Marine pilots guided vessels into the Thames and Medway as they had done for centuries, and the servicing of shipping remained important; one of Britain’s largest manning agencies, providing crews worldwide, was based in Dover.

In conclusion, this discussion has come full circle. It ends, as it began, with geography. Wedged as Kent is between London and the Continent, the sea will continue to have relevance for the county, ensuring that ‘Kent and the Sea’ is not only an issue for those with a sense of history.

endnotes

¹ This is a revised version of the 2005 Gardiner Lecture given by the author to the Sevenoaks Historical Society.

² See, for example, Nigel Nicholson, Kent (London, 1988); Robin Craig and John Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’, in Alan Armstrong (ed.), The Economy of Kent 1640-1914 (Woodbridge, 1995); C.W. Chalklin, Seventeenth Century Kent. A Social and Economic History (London, 1965).

³ John Bartholomew, Gazetteer of the British Isles (London, 1887).

⁴ www.maritimeheritagetrail.co.uk/EN/trails.php. Accessed 20 October 2006.

⁵ This was the theme of a 2006 Anglo-French symposium organised in connection with the University of Greenwich Maritime Communities Project and supported by European Union INTERREG funding.

⁶ See Shirley Harrison, The Channel: Dividing Link Between Britain and France (London, 1986); Peter Unwin, The Narrow Sea: Barrier, Bridge and Gateway to the World – the History of the English Channel (London, 2003).

⁷ See Alan Armstrong (ed.), The Economy of Kent, 1640-1914 (Bury St Edmunds, 1995); Terence Lawson & David Killingray, An Historical Atlas of Kent (Chichester, 2004). With the exception of discussion of cross-channel transport, the fact that the maritime dimension is largely absent from Nigel Yates (ed.), Kent in the Twentieth Century (Woodbridge, 2001) reflects its diminished importance for the Kent economy in the last century.

⁸ For example, K. Witney, The Jutish Forest (London, 1976); J.M. Preston, Industrial Medway: an Historical Survey. The Industrial Development of the Lower Medway Valley with Special Reference to the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Rochester, 1977); Michael Zell, Industry in the County: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994); J. Eddison, M. Gardiner and A. Long (eds), Romney Marsh: Environmental Change and Human Occupation in a Coastal Lowland (Oxford, 1998); Howard Biggs, The River Medway (Lavenham, 1982).

⁹ Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London 1840-1880 (London, 1978).

¹⁰ William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent: Containing the Description, History and Customs of the Shire (1570, Reprinted London, 1826).

¹¹ Chalklin, Seventeenth Century Kent, 143. Between February 1664 and December 1667 out of 6,454 loads delivered to the Chatham yard, 2,176 came through a Maidstone timber merchant, John Mason.

¹² See John H. Andrews, ‘The Thanet Seaports, 1650-1750’, Archaeologia Cantiana, lxvi (1953), 37-44, ‘The Trade of the Port of Faversham, 1650-1750’, Archaeologia Cantiana, lxix (1955), 125-131; Chalklin, Seventeenth Century Kent; Peter Clark & Lyn Murfin, The History of Maidstone (Stroud, 1995); Craig & Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’ and Gordon Mingay, ‘Agriculture’, in Armstrong (ed.), Economy of Kent; Preston, Industrial Medway; Ronald Marsh, The Conservancy of the River Medway 1881-1969 (Rochester, 1971)

¹³ C.L. Sinclair Williams, ‘Maritime East Malling’, Archaeologia Cantiana, lxxxviii (1974), 51-55; J.H. Preston, Industrial Medway, 99-107.

¹⁴ A.M. Everitt, ‘The making of the agrarian landscape of Kent’, Archaeologia Cantiana, xcii (1976), 5; Chalklin, Seventeenth Century Kent, 2.

¹⁵ Chris Young, ‘The Physical Setting’, in Lawson & Killingray, Historical Atlas of Kent, 3-5.

¹⁶ See H. Muir Evans, ‘The Kentish Flats and Southern Channels’, Mariner’s Mirror (16, 1930), 319-342.

¹⁷ Eleanor Vollans, ‘Medieval Salt-making and the Inning of the Tidal Marshes at Belgar, Lydd’, in Eddison et. al., Romney Marsh, 118-126.

¹⁸ P.S. Bellamy and G. Milne, ‘An Archaeological Evaluation of the Medieval Shipyard Facilities at Small Hythe’, Archaeologia Cantiana, cxxiii (2003), 353-82; N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume I, 660-1649 (London, 1997), 230.

¹⁹ Gillian Draper, ‘Romney Marsh and its towns and villages c.800-c.1500’, in Lawson & Killingray, Historical Atlas of Kent, 56-57; Mary Waugh, Smuggling in Kent and Sussex 1700-1840 (Newbury, 1985), 63-83; Anne Roper, The Gift of the Sea – Romney Marsh (Ashford, 1984), 147-167.

²⁰ See F.W. Brooks, ‘The Cinque Ports’, Mariner’s Mirror (15, 1929), 142-190; Terence Lawson, ‘The Cinque Ports’, in Lawson & Killingray, Historical Atlas of Kent, 52; Duncan Forbes, Hythe Haven: the Story of the Town and Cinque Port of Hythe (Hythe, 1982).

²¹ Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 125-6.

²² Gustav Milne, ‘The Fourteenth-Century Merchant Ship from Sandwich: A Study in Medieval Maritime Archaeology’, Archaeologia Cantiana, cxxiv (2004), 227-263.

²³ A.B. Emden, ‘Graffiti of Medieval Ships from the Church of St. Margaret’s-at-Cliffe, Kent’, Mariner’s Mirror (8, 1922), 167-173.

²⁴ Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 126.

²⁵ Report of the Commission Appointed to Survey the Harbours of the South-Eastern Coast, Parliamentary Papers, 1840 (XXVIII), 387.

²⁶ Chalklin, Seventeenth Century Kent, 168.

²⁷ Ibid., 169; Andrews, ‘Thanet Seaports’, 121.

²⁸ Craig and Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 169.

²⁹ See D.J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990); M.A.N. Marshall, ‘The Armed Ships of Dover’, Mariner’s Mirror (42, 1956) 73-77.

³⁰ See Craig and Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 186-190.

³¹ ‘Road, Rail and Cross Channel Ferry’, Armstrong, Economy of Kent, 136-145.

³² Robin Craig, ‘The Deep Sea Shipping of Thanet in the Mid 19th Century’, in Michael Cates and Diane Chamberlain, The Maritime Heritage of Thanet (East Kent Maritime Trust, 1997), 94-99; Craig and Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 169-170.

³³ M.A.N. Marshall, ‘Isle of Thanet Shipping, 1778 to 1800’, Mariner’s Mirror (45, 1959), 67-72.

³⁴ See William Stanton, The Journal of William Stanton, Pilot, of Deal (London, 1929).

³⁵ See K.J. Lampard, Cobb & Son, Bankers of Margate c.1785-c.1840, unpubl. University of Kent Doctoral Thesis, 1986.

³⁶ See E.W. Bovill, ‘The Shipping Interests of the Honorable East India Company’, Mariner’s Mirror (36, 1950), 244-262; E.W. Bovill, ‘Some Chronicles of the Larkins Family’, Mariner’s Mirror (40, 1954), 120-7.

³⁷ R.Knight, ‘The First Fleet – its State and Preparation, 1786-1787’, in J. Hardy and A. Frost (eds), Studies from Terra Australis to Australia (Canberra, 1989), 256-62. See also, Craig and Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 165-167.

³⁸ David Killingray, ‘Kent and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: A County Study, 1760s-1807’, Archaeologia Cantiana, cxxvii (2007), 107-125.

³⁹ J.H. Andrews, ‘The Trade of the Port of Faversham, 1650-1750’, Archaeologia Cantiana, lxix (1955), 125-31. See Robert H. Goodsall, Whitstable, Seasalter and Swalecliffe: the History of Three Kent Parishes (Canterbury, 1938); Edward Jacob, The History of the Town and Port of Faversham (first published 1774, reprinted with an Introduction by John Whyman, Sheerness, 1974); Patricia Hyde, Faversham Ships and Seamen (Faversham, 1997).

⁴⁰ Quoted by M.A.N. Marshall, ‘Hoymen of Whitstable and Faversham. Late Eighteenth Century’, Mariner’s Mirror (46, 1969), 142.

⁴¹ Whyman and Craig, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 168.

⁴² See David J. Starkey (ed.), Shipping Movements in the Ports of the United Kingdom 1871-1913: A Statistical Profile (Exeter, 1999), xi-xxxi; Whyman and Craig, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 172.

⁴³ These statistics come from the Annual Statements of Navigation and Shipping collated in Starkey, Shipping Movements, 116-119; 124-125; 128-129; 202-205.

⁴⁴ Compiled from the Trade and Navigation Accounts, Annual Statement of Trade and Navigation, PP 1871 (LXIII - 2), 1; Annual Statement of Navigation and Shipping PP 1890-1 (LXXXII), 409.

⁴⁵ Marsh, Conservancy of the River Medway (1971), 9.

⁴⁶ See Harvey Wallace, Merchant Ships of Whitstable (Whitstable, 1993); Whyman and Craig, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 172-173.

⁴⁷ See Bob Childers, Rochester Sailing Barges of the Victorian Era (Rochester, 1993); Frank G. Willmott, Cement, Mud and ‘Muddies’ (Rainham, 1977); Tony Farnham, A Conversation with Dick, the Dagger: The Life and Times of Centenarian Bargemaster Captain Henry Miller, BEM (Braughing, 2001), 23-29.

48 See Allan Ovenden Collard, The Oyster Dredgers of Whitstable (London, 1902); Derek Coombe, Fishermen from the Kentish Shore (Rainham, 1983); Patricia Hyde and Duncan Harrington, Faversham Oyster Fishery Through Eleven Centuries (Folkestone, 2002); Derek Coombe, The Bargemen: Fishermen and Dredgermen of the River Medway (Rainham, 1979).

⁴⁹ See Clive Powell, Smacks to Steamers – A History of the Ramsgate Fishing Industry 1850-1920 (Ramsgate, 1987); E.J. March, Sailing Trawlers: the Story of Deep-Sea Fishing with Long Line and Trawl (Newton Abbot, 1970).

⁵⁰ Michael Winstanley, Life in Kent at the Turn of the Century (Chatham, 1978), 95-97.

⁵¹ Martin Wilcox, ‘Apprenticed Labour in the English Fishing Industry 1850-1914’, unpubl. University of Hull Doctoral Thesis, 2005.

⁵² See J.K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750-1914 (Leicester, 1983) ; J. Whyman, Kentish Sources: VIII The Early Kentish Seaside (1736-1840) (Gloucester, 1985); F.Stafford & N.Yates, Kentish Sources: IX The Later Kentish Seaside (1840-1974); Martin Easdown, Victoria’s Golden Pier: The Life and Times of Victoria Pier, Folkestone and other Seafront Attractions of ‘Fashionable Folkestone’ (Hythe, 1998).

⁵³ John Armstrong and David Williams, ‘The Thames and Recreation, 1815-1840’, The London Journal (30, 2005), 25-39.

⁵⁴ See F. Stafford & N. Yates, The Later Kentish Seaside (1840-1974), (Maidstone, 1985); Nigel Yates, ‘Culture and Leisure’, in Yates (ed.), Kent in the 20th Century, 347-349; C.H. Bishop, Folkestone: the Story of a Town (Folkestone, 1973).

⁵⁵ See E. Keble Chatterton, King’s Cutters and Smugglers, 1700-1855 (London, 1912); Roy Philp, The Coast Blockade. The Royal Navy’s War on Smuggling 1817-31 (Horsham, 1999); Janet Robyn Worthington, Coopers and Customs Cutters: Worthingtons of Dover and Related Families 1506-1906 (Avon, 1997).

⁵⁶ See Craig and Whyman, ‘Kent and the Sea’, 175 -181; Mary Waugh, Smuggling in Kent and Sussex, 1700-1840 (Newbury, 1985); Shirley Harrison, The Channel (London, 1986); Paul Hastings, ‘Crime and Public Order’ in Frederick Lansberry (ed.), Government and Politics in Kent (Woodbridge, 2001) 224-226; Harvey Wallace, The Seasalter Company: a Smuggling Fraternity (1740-1854) (Whitstable, 1983).

⁵⁷ Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724).

⁵⁸ On the Royal Dockyards generally see R.A. Morrriss, The Royal Dockyards during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Leicester, 1983); J.G. Coad, The Royal Dockyards, 1690-1850 (Aldershot, 1989); Kenneth Lunn & Ann Day (eds), History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards (London, 1999). On the Kent yards, see P. MacDougall, ‘The Kentish Royal Dockyards 1700-1900’, in Lawson & Killingray, Historical Atlas of Kent, 134-135. For Chatham, see P. MacDougall, The Chatham Dockyard Story (Rainham, 1987); Mavis Waters, ‘The Dockyardmen speak out: Petition and Tradition in Chatham Dockyard, 1860-1906’, in Lunn & Day, Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards and ‘Changes in the Chatham Dockyard Workforce, 1860-90, Part I From Wood to Iron: Change and Harmony, 1860-1887’ and ‘Part II From Iron to Steel: Change and Suspicion 1887-90’, Mariner’s Mirror (69, 1983) 55-63, 165-173. For Sheerness see J. Fellowes, ‘Shipbuilding at Sheerness: the Period 1750-1802, Mariner’s Mirror (60, 1974) 73-83; P. MacDougall, Sheerness Dockyard: a Brief History (Chichester, 2001). For Woolwich, see P. MacDougall, ‘The Woolwich Steamyard’, Mariner’s Mirror (87, 2001).

⁵⁹ For a detailed examination of the reasons for closure see Emma Haxhaj, ‘More Bang for a Bob: The Decision to ‘Go Nuclear’ and its Impact on Chatham Dockyard’, Mariner’s Mirror (91, 2005), 554-571.

⁶⁰ P. Banbury, Shipbuilders of the Thames and Medway (Newton Abbot, 1971).

⁶¹ Roger Knight, ‘Devil Bolts and Deception? Wartime Naval Shipbuilding in Private Yards’, Journal for Maritime Research, www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk (April 2003). See also Helen Doe, ‘Mrs Mary Ross of Rochester, Nineteenth-Century Businesswoman and Warship Builder’, Journal of Maritime Research (May 2006).

⁶² Sarah Palmer, ‘Shipbuilding in Southeast England, 1800-1913’, in Simon Ville (ed.), Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century: A Regional Approach (St John’s Newfoundland, 1993), 45-74.

⁶³ A.J. Arnold, Iron Shipbuilding on the Thames 1932-1915: An Economic and Business History (Aldershot, 2000).

⁶⁴ See Gerald Crompton, ‘Transport: the Channel Tunnel’, in Nigel Yates (ed.), Kent in the 20th Century (Woodbridge, 2001), 145-150: Alan Hay, Kate Meredith and Roger Vickerman, The Impact of the Channel Tunnel on Kent (Canterbury, 2004). Retrieved from ttp://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/research/SummaryReport.pdf.

TABLE 1. SHIPS BELONGING TO THE PORTS OF KENT, 1701.

Port	No. of Vessels	Tonnage
Ramsgate	44	4,100
Margate	37	2,909
Sandwich	21	1,146
Rochester	22	1,054
Faversham	32	888
Milton	34	807
Broadstairs	17	731
Whitstable	34	807
Dover	7	415
Deal	1	50

TABLE 2. ENTRIES OF SHIPPING (WITH CARGOES AND IN BALLAST)

INTO KENT PORTS 1880, 1890⁴³

	1880				1890
	Coastal Trade*		Foreign Trade		Coastal Trade*		Foreign Trade
	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons
Dover & Deal#	742	68,079	2,118	500,991	844	108,112	3,025	789,846
Folkestone	244	36,381	731	169,446	373	43,535	949	216,370
Faversham	6,532	317,537	81	6,403	8,894	412,144	119	9,400
Ramsgate	751	99,511	124	12,705	921	159,110	86	9,220
Rochester	3,835	431,613	628	340,602	8,814	635,575	260	50,533

* Includes estuarial movements of shipping. # Deal ceased to be a Customs Port in 1882.

TABLE 3. VESSELS REGISTERED IN KENT PORTS 1850, 1870, 1890⁴⁴

	1850		1870		1890
	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons
Dover & Deal	105	4,869	58	4,511	43	3,091
Folkestone	8	384	34	3,554	17	3,102
Faversham	290	12,008	354	31,651	236	16,865
Rochester	397	18,398	802	35,869	1,020	43,562
Ramsgate	170	6,683	195	7,536	139	1,652

TABLE 4. MERCHANT VESSELS BUILT AND REGISTERED

IN KENT PORTS 1800-1819, 1870-1909⁶²

	Rochester		Faversham		Ramsgate		Sandwich		Deal		Dover
	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons	No.	Tons
1800-09	86	4,358	13	619	0	0	53	3,492	49	1,383	175	8,758
1810-19	127	9,264	40	906	0	0	48	3,282	30	581	48	1,967
1870-79	157	6,996	155	8,032	12	502			79	4,905	5	182
1880-89	113	5,272	102	5,210	13	643					1	40
1890-99	126	6,364	148	7,971	11	434					8	466
1900-09	44	2,002	61	3,540	9	181					4	207