An Episode at Blackgang Chine

A purge of 'out-takes' from a recent post series - see Blackgang Chine, March 2015 - finds this rather static romance story in an 1878 Tinsleys' Magazine, and a slight bibliographic puzzle relating to the authorship of two obscure 1870s novels.

Blackgang: a whale of a chine

There aren't many roles for whale skeletons in literature, but one appears in Maxwell Gray's 1913 novel Something Afar (published in the USA as The Desire of the Moth), where the author gets in a reference to her native Isle of Wight and a description (fancifully embroidered by Blanche, the protagonist's wife) of the celebrated whale skeleton at Blackgang Chine.

Blackgang Chine, March 2015

Finally, after years of visiting the Isle of Wight, and many walks starting or finishing at the Blackgang Chine bus stop by the giant smuggler, we visited the Blackgang Chine theme park itself. And an interesting visit it turned out to be ...

Chine at dusk

We've been to Shanklin Chine several times over the past few years, but never in the evening. From 23rd May to 7th September, it's open until 10pm, and illuminated after dusk.

Harriet Parr in Shanklin

I've just been reading about another now-unsung Victorian female novelist, Harriet Parr (1828-1900), who wrote under the pseudonym Holme Lee. Although Yorkshire-born, she spent the latter half of her life in Shanklin, Isle of Wight, which appears in some of her works.

The Chines They Are a-Changin'

Another spinoff from the recent posts on 18th century Isle of Wight travelogues: the clues you can follow about landscape changes over two centuries, particularly in the chines of the 'Back of the Wight'.

Nooks and crannies - an ill-fated housing boom

click to enlarge

This is the cover of a pleasant booklet, Isle of Wight: Forty-one camera studies of the nooks & crannies, bays & chines of the garden isle, produced by the Photochrom Company of London and Tunbridge Wells. It's undated, but circa 1910. The cover has a cut-out revealing the first image, a location that's one of my obsessions, Blackgang Chine, a now-destroyed coastal ravine near the southern tip of the Island.

click to enlarge

The image, taken from the headland called Blackgang Bluff, looks across the chine to various clifftop villas in the near distance, part of the mid-Victorian development of Blackgang, and off into the distance over the 'Back of the Wight'. The row of houses at the right is called Cliff Terrace, which is presumably the "terrace of lodging-houses" described in Edmund Venables' 1867 A guide to the Undercliff of the Isle of Wight, Shanklin and Blackgang (page 67). There were further villas at Lowcliff, hidden by the cliffs at the right of the photo - compare the view I posted a while back:

Low-resolution image reproduced in accordance with dissemination statement: McInnes, R. 2008. Art as a tool in support of the understanding of coastal change. The Crown Estate, 106 pages, ISBN: 978-1-906410-08-7 First published 2008. Click to enlarge

click to enlarge

All of the cliffscape in the foreground has been destroyed by coastal erosion over the 20th century. Cliff Terrace itself has been truncated, and is one of the few remnants of a fairly ill-fated Victorian development boom.

Apart from finding the picture interesting, I returned to the topic because I hadn't fully realised the extent of the speculative developments and land dealings going on in the Isle of Wight in the 1830s-40s. I already mentioned the land turnover at Bonchurch in that period, associated with the breakup of the manorial estate - see Brannon on Bonchurch and ... in the Isle of Wight #1. Similar moves happened with the breakup of the "Buddle estate" near Niton; an advertisement in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle for September 11, 1847 offers the individual sale of a portfolio of plots "with an extensive frontage to the Coast, affording a grand sea view, and admirably adated for the erection of Marine Villas".

The Newport agent managing the sale, Mr Francis Pittis (later Sir Francis Pittis, mayor of Newport), must have done extremely well out of such deals, because the same issue shows him handling the sale of recently-built properties at or near Blackgang: the "Italian style" South View House (previously mentioned here); the "Gothic villa residence" Lowcliff Lodge (the large house at bottom right of the colour image above) and Lowcliff Cottage at its drive entrance. Around the same time (Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian, October 16, 1847) he handled the sale of the estate of James Barlow Hoy, whose 38 lots included pasture land and houses in the area of Blackgang and Chale; and in the Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian of May 19, 1849 he has further ads for the recently-built Southlands (with "15 acres of pasture land, part of which is composed in terrace walks, pleasure grounds, and gardens, and includes the most valuable and desirable building sites") as well as the Blackgang Hotel itself (now part of the offices of the Blackgang Chine amusement park), Blackgang Farm, and various nearby properties.

The whole development, looking in hindsight, seems wildly shortsighted. Even then, the land was known to be unstable, with a particular major slip in 1799 taking out 100 acres and Pitlands Farm at Blackgang. Only a few years before the boom, the author Robert Mudie, in his The Isle of Wight: its past and present condition, and future prospects (c. 1840) commented extensively on the 1799 slip, and the high probability of future ones - see page 100 onward - saying that

the fate of this [farm] however ought to give some warning to those who are erecting villas between the land-slip and the chine; for, though these may be founded immediately on the rock, and that rock may have the appearance of stability. appearances in such a place are not to be depended upon; and it is very possible that the leveling of a flat area for a villa and its patch of lawn, may tend to admit the water in the vertical fissures and cutters of the rock, and thus hasten some such catastrophe as that to which we are alluding.

Mudie was right, but it all took longer than he feared. As it happened, none of the affluent buyers ever fell off a cliff while in occupancy; the larger villas outlived the era of the gentleman mansion owner, and generally succumbed quietly to property blight and dereliction / demolition long before the cliff reached them. Southview, for instance, suffered minor damage from the 1978 landslip, and was destroyed by fire (how it started appears unknown) shortly after. There don't seem to be any easily findable records of what happened to Southlands or Lowcliff. But one notable villa from this era, Five Rocks, is still extant, and houses the goblin-haunted "Rumpus Mansion", one of the theme park features.

The Carisbrooke Castle HistoricImages site has some very impressive views of Blackgang in the early 1900s (you can see higher resolution if you select an image, right-click, and view it in Windows Photo Viewer; from the terms of use, this seems to be OK as long as you don't use them for anything). This one in particular - #1766 - also shows Cliff Terrace and Lowecliffe, with other buildings in positively scary locations at the foot of the chine.

Update, 1 Nov 2014
I've found a deal more about Lowcliffe and Southlands: see Lowcliffe and Southlands: from cradle to grave.

- Ray

The art of Shanklin Chine

Shanklin Chine is a coastal ravine on the south-east coast of the Isle of Wight, prettily-landscaped as a visitor attraction, and only a few hundred yards from the town of Shanklin. We visited it about four years ago, but we were in a little of a hurry then, and I fancied a more leisurely look when we were back on the Island at the end of September.

This is the "Longfellow Fountain" by the Crab Inn in Shanklin Old Village. The inscription ...

O Traveller, stay thy weary feet;
Drink of this fountain, pure & sweet;
It flows for rich & poor the same.
Then go thy way remembering still,
The wayside well beneath the hill,
The cup of water in his name.

Longfellow

... is a poem credited to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when he stayed at the Crab Inn in 1868 (below the poem is a little twin-flag logo, UK and USA). On investigation, this attribution appears a trifle shaky. The book The Poetical Works of Henry W. Longfellow (18??) carries this explanation:

INSCRIPTION ON THE SHANKLIN FOUNTAIN,
ISLE OF WIGHT.

The following quotation from a private letter, dated "Shanklin, Isle of Wight, 1st October 1879," is the authority for ascribing this inscription to the Poet:—

"just look at this group of thatched cottages! The one on the right is a library where we go for books. In the middle is the Crab Inn. Do you see what looks like a pile of stones to the right of it? That is a fountain for the use of the public. I read some verses painted there on a piece of tin, and said to myself: 'That must be from Longfellow.' I found afterward that they were written by him, by request, when he was here some years ago:

The author of this "private letter" is unidentified. The first citation to Longfellow appears in George Shaw's The tourist's picturesque guide to the Isle of Wight (1873). There doesn't seem to be any great reason to doubt it - nevertheless, there is no primary evidence from Longfellow himself that he wrote it.

The place has changed a deal since Longfellow was there. Shanklin Old Village is a characteristically commercialised English "olde village", a cluster of thatched houses of genuine antiquity adapted into a complex of pubs, tearooms and gift shops, all on a busy main road. But just a minute's walk takes you down a quiet pedestrianised lane to the top of the Chine, and you find you're in a different world.

Clare at Chine entrance

You can take a slight detour first to the adjacent park, Rylstone Gardens, where there's a good chance of seeing red squirrels. I saw one in the distance, and it wasn't the best day for views. But there was an interesting and unexpected feature in the now rather dented stainless steel commemorative Elvis plaque by the clifftop, installed by the Isle of Wight Rock and Roll Society in 1978.




It has short score quotations from four Elvis classics (below): 1 is "Hound Dog"; 3 is "Teddy Bear". Any thoughts on the others? Although I'm perfectly capable of reading the score, they're quite difficult to place without the rhythm backing.

click to enlarge

Back to the Chine. The rustic-styled entrance booth takes you instantly into the fresh and humid microclimate of this mini-ravine. It's virtually silent apart from birdsong and the sound of the stream.

After initial steps, the path levels out to a shallower descent with rustic bridges, benches and landscaped pools, with a choice of exits to beach level or via an aviary, tearoom and exhibition centre, up to the clifftop. It began to rain, but surprisingly little made it down to the chine floor level; we sat for a while in one of the little shelters, and just chilled out. It's very obviously a managed landscape, but I really don't care; Shanklin Chine is unique, a calm and lovely experience. "A very great Lion," as Keats put it. *

If you're visiting in the near future, the current Heritage Centre exhibition is Turner's Isle of Wight Landscapes and the Discovery of Shanklin Chine. I'm a great fan of historical Isle of Wight scenic artwork, and this exhibition follows JMW Turner’s journey around the island from his sketchbook of 1795. It also features scenes of the Chine and elsewhere in the Wight by other artists including Thomas Rowlandson, Richard Banks Harraden, Samuel Howitt, William Daniell, Charles Tomkins, and Lefevre James Cranstone. It's extremely well-selected and well-annotated, and thoroughly worth a visit.

Chine Cottage, and the Heritage Centre, from the seaward end of the Chine

A bonus to the visit: on the way out, going up the path back to Shanklin, Clare and I saw our first fully-fledged red squirrel. We've seen them before, but they were rather dark brown. This was the real thing, a brilliant marmalade-coloured squirrel. Unfortunately it zipped by and up into the treetops too fast to bring the camera to bear ... but it was there.

See the older post - Shanklin Chine - for more background on the Chine's history, as well as one of my favourite poems, Mimi Khalvati's The Chine, which means a lot to me as an uncannily accurate impression of how the chine powerfully evokes that 'double exposure' sensation of reconnecting with the landscape of remembered childhood.

See also the official website www.shanklinchine.co.uk.

- Ray

* Lions = an archaic expression for "Things of note, celebrity, or curiosity (in a town, etc.); sights worth seeing" (Oxford English Dictionary).

Sherbrook later

One Saturday afternoon I took myself off to Budleigh again. Last time - see Sherbook now (9th February 2013) - it was chilly, overcast and drizzling, and I was only just creeping out of the exhaustion of chemotherapy. How different now. Even as I walked up Rolle Road toward the esplanade - the air smelt of chips and sea - there was a promise to the afternoon; and it turned out completely up to expectations.

Sherbrook now

View Larger Map

Clare was off at a writers' meeting today, so I took myself off chine-spotting. (Chines, as I've mentioned previously, are the miniature coastal ravines typical of the soft sedimentary cliffs of southern England.

The one in question was Sherbrook Chine, which cuts through the cliffs a little to the west of Budleigh Salterton, and appears as a very distinctive coastal feature on a number of historical postcards of East Devon. Its existence is down to erosion by a stream, running at an angle to the shore. that since the 1800s has been intercepted as a water supply for Budleigh; it's now an overflow from a reservoir. As I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, it was called "Sherbrook Ravine" in the Devonshire Association's 1890 Notes on the parish of East Budleigh. The pamphlet Budleigh Salterton - as it used to be (Richard D Woodall, 1954) shows that it provided access to the beach then ("In Victorian times ... Access to the beach at Sherbrooke Chine was then much easier").

Ordnance Survey map, 1890. Screen shot from Old Maps
reproduced for small scale, non-profit use:
© and database right Crown copyright and Landmark
Information Group Ltd. (All rights reserved 2013).

Here are a few such images found on the Web - I'm assuming they're old enough to be out of copyright.

Sherbrook Chine 01/04/1908 showing railed path
British Geological Survey, National Archive of Geological Photographs
GeoScenic, Cat. No. P201109 - reproduced with permission

It's not so distinctive now. I took the scenic path up the cliff at the west end of Budleigh, which when the houses end turns into the South West Coast Path. After around half a mile, the path dips into an area of scrub and mature woodland, and you can see the top end of the chine, where the reservoir overflow stream goes under the path. Beyond the railings, it starts to descend coastward in shallow cascades:

From the path east of this, however, you can see that the stream bed rapidly becomes a deep (and inaccessible) wooded ravine. There's such a vegetation cover that it's hard to convey it in photographs, except for the general V shape of the treeline that shows it's there; but you can see the sheer pine-topped western wall, which appears as a promontory when you get further away. Even that is not all that easy to photograph, since the edge of the cliff is flanked by thorny ground cover, making it difficult to get to a location with a clear view.

After taking these photos, I walked back down to Budleigh and west along the pebble beach, under scarily carious cliffs, toward Littleham Cove. As you go on to this stretch, you pass a "Clothing Optional" sign, though on a drizzly chilly February afternoon, I didn't have to worry about running into nudists. It's pretty heavy walking - I don't recommend it, unless the tide's low enough to expose the sand at the base of the pebble beach.

a rare bit of path on a beach that's pebble hell

another proto-chine in the much-eroded cliffs

From beach level you can see the lower end of the chine, where the stream finally descends as a waterfall to beach level. The cliff profile has - naturally, given the long-ongoing erosion - radically changed since the old postcard photos were taken, and there certainly aren't any steps going up the chine. Land use on the clifftop has also altered, from open pasture (as you can see from the old map) to scrub, heath and tree cover. I don't know if this is just managed neglect, or intentional planting to stabilise the cliff..

See Sherbrook later for an update and further exploration, 26th May 2013.

On a purely personal note, this was a bit of a test run: my first proper walk (i.e. something with a climb, and more than about a mile) since finishing chemotherapy, and in fact the first of any serious kind since starting the treatment about four months ago. Our normal coastal walks have been impossible, due to the general exhaustion and 'heavy legs' from the chemo. Today was pretty hard work - especially the hill-climb up from Budleigh, and the bit along the pebble beach - but I was determined to do it, and suddenly I find I've crept over the dividing line between feeling ill-tired, and merely feeling out of condition from four months of slobbing-about. While I'd have to take it slowly, I feel I'd be OK for more ambitious walks. Not a bad result. (And actually, I'm wildly understating - I feel quite euphoric to be something like up to speed again, like this).

Phew!

- Ray

Addendum: Oh, damn - I've given myself an earworm. The post title was a deliberate allusion to song Barrett's Privateers (version by The Real McKenzies) which has the refrain "I wish I was in Sherbrooke now". Now it's stuck in my head.

A Bit of Blue Stone

Bournemouth, the Square and Gardens from Mount Dore
EM Haslehust, 1915. Wikimedia Commons

A bit of a milestone; further to the previous two posts, I just finished Maxwell Gray's final published work, the title story of her 1923 collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

The story A Bit of Blue Stone (dated 1922) is set largely in Bournemouth in the closing years of World War One, a romance between two people whose lives have been blighted by the war.

In a warm September, Lancelot Hughes, a young serviceman on leave from the front, largely recovered from a wound and shell-shock, is visiting Bournemouth to see his mother herself convalescent from overwork as a VAD nurse, and his more seriously traumatised brother George, permanently discharged after the loss of an eye and severe shell-shock. Lancelot and his mother's conversations turn to an idyllic time they remember, a family outing to Alum Bay, Isle of Wight, where Lancelot was attracted to a girl called Violet Kendal who they'd helped when she dislocated her ankle.

To Lancelot's surprise and pleasure, he encounters the now older Violet, who is staying with her Aunt Maria and cousin Rose. The two families become acquainted, and conversation turns to George, whose doctor considers to have a delusion of being jilted due to his disfigurement. Rose reacts strangely to this - evidently she did he a friendship with George - and the receipt of a letter reveals the truth: that George's jealous officer In France, a failed suitor of Rose, had withheld the correspondence between the two. Rose and George are reunited. Lancelot and Violet also find themselves in love; but Lancelot has to return to the front, and leaves with Violet his "mascot", a chunk of blue stone given him by another soldier whose life he saved, for safe keeping.

Lancelot eventually returns to Bournemouth a year after the end of the war, but after initial delight at being reunited, it appears increasingly that his feelings toward Violet have cooled. This turns out not to be the case; the problem is that Violet's father, Colonel Kendal, has forbidden their marriage due to Lancelot's circumstances. His medical history - shell-shock and "heart strain" - is limiting his job prospects, and coupled with a general decline in family fortunes (including the need to help George and Rose) his only option is a job overseas, which is bound to be detrimental to his health. Regretfully, he says marriage is not an option.

After Lancelot leaves, Violet becomes curious about the "mascot" Lancelot still has left with her. It's wrapped in a sheet of paper saying "Try Sparkes" (a London jeweller) and as she's in the process of helping Mrs Hughes sell some jewellery to bankroll Lancelot's travel overseas to his job, she suggests to him that it might be an asset worth selling. He agrees. Rose goes to the Charing Cross shop, and rapidly finds that the "bit of blue stone" is a large uncut diamond from the Kimberley mines, and an American customer at Sparkes, Josiah P Goldridge, is prepared to buy it for thousands of pounds.

This alters everything. Lancelot needn't go overseas. He can afford to complete his interrupted Oxford studies and have enough left over to provide a starting income; Colonel Kendal retracts his objections. Violet and Lancelot meet again in Bournemouth, and sail off into the sunset, presumably to the Isle of Wight. Mrs Hughes, watching them depart, says, "They are going to the Land of Heart's Desire."


View Larger Map - Bournemouth front as described by MG: pan left and zoom for the
Isle of Wight (in distance), pan right for Purbeck Hills.  

To some extent, A Bit of Blue Stone is predictable. The blue stone's titular presence makes it pretty certain to have some plot significance, which ultimately amounted to a deus ex machina that bailed the main characters out of all their problems. But it is a very nice evocation of the landscape of Bournemouth, with its chines and its views of Purbeck and the Isle of Wight, in a distinctive era when it was a significant centre for wartime convalescence: see, for instance, Bournemouth Town Hall (formerly the Mont Dore Hotel). It's also rather nice to see an upbeat ending to Maxwell Gray's works, which toward toward the end of her life had become at best wistful, and at worst embittered and reactionary.

Check out the 1915 Blackie guide Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch (Sidney Heath, illust. EM Haslehust, Internet Archive ID bournemouthpoole00heatrich) for a nice illustrated account of Bournemouth at the time of A Bit of Blue Stone.

I don't know if MG had visited Bournemouth at the time - as an invalid, she well could have. But it's well possible she could have consulted the Ward Locke guide A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch, Avon Valley, Salisbury, Winchester and The New Forest Covering the Years 1914/15. It's not online, but I was interested to recover a snippet suggesting it to be a popular location for authors at the time, many of the titles suggesting that (like pre-war Brighton in Brighton Rock) that it had a considerably seamy side:

... Tess of the D'Urbervilles contains one of the most picturesque and accurate descriptions of Bournemouth. It is perhaps most fully depicted in Adrian Savage by Lucas Malet, and is visited and described in Allward by E.S. Stevens, Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie, The Seamy Side by Besant and Rice, Jill-all-Alone by Rita, and in Tracked Down by Headon Hill. It is further seen in W. B. Maxwell's war-time romance A Man and his Lesson. Among other recent novels in which Bournemouth appears are: The Race Before Us, Guy Thorne; Zitta Sees Herself (Boscombe), E. M. Delafield; The Sins Ye Do, Emmeline Morrison; A Bit of Blue Stone, Maxwell Gray; Tyranny, Holloway Horn; Ring Up the Curtain, J.C. Nevill; Barbara Justice, Diana Patrick; Blinkers, H.A. Vachell; Mr. Justice Maxell, Edgar Wallace.

For me, it's not the end of the Maxwell Gray story. I've finished the planned task of reading her major book works chronologically. But she was not just a novelist; there are many more articles and poems in magazines and journals. The project continues...

Ray

Isle of Wight postcards

Some oddments I've been meaning to share. I forgot to mention that on our recent Beer Quarry Caves day out, Clare and I had a brief look in Sidmouth Antiques Centre on All Saint's Road, Sidmouth. If you're into postcards, it has a very good selection, and I found a few of the Isle of Wight that took my fancy. None of them are dated, but the general terrain puts them in the very early 20th century. Click to enlarge any image.

The first shows the now-eroded-away Blackgang Chine. The near distance is quite bizarre in modern terms; you can see late-Victorian villas built on a ledge that even at the time must have been known to be unstable from the previous century's history of erosion. The building craze of the era over-rode all sense in that respect. The ledge was gone within a few decades, and now, likewise, everything in the foreground. The current cliff line truncates the row of houses at the right of the postcard.

The second shows the old Blackgang-Niton Road looking east toward Windy Corner. It was a much-photographed location - see Isle of Wight Historic Postcards - but the cliff (centre) collapsed in July 1928, and this portion of the road no longer exists.

The third is some miles to the north-east, the still-extant Shanklin Chine, and looks up to the upper entrance booth. I took some photos in 2009: Shanklin Chine.

And on that theme, here are a few more photos of the Undercliff crags I took on our September Isle of Wight visit. Out of what I can only describe as sheer stupidity, I somehow managed to go through the whole visit not realising I'd got my camera switched into the lowest resolution mode (640x480); the images are fine, however, at web detail.

The path is one of several that run at the base of the cherty crags topping the cliffs: the rock wall on one side, and a sheer drop into dense woodland on the other. I guess it's not dangerous, but it's secluded and exhilarating. This is the Undercliff at its most evocative: what John Morgan Richards called "almost fairyland".

For once, I'd like to stay cryptic about the location - it's not the well-known Cripple Path at Niton, although the terrain and geology is identical - and offer it as a puzzle to Isle of Wight enthusiasts. It is a public right of way, and I was able to deduce its location for myself from similar photographs and the Isle of Wight County Council's excellent Rights of Way Maps. I've repeatedly found that solving a mystery adds to the pleasure of our visits, and I've had some great discussions with local explorers coming from a different perspective: mine is old maps and texts, and correlating these with ground exploration by others has produced some fascinating connections between past and present terrain.

- Ray