Mrs Harcourt Roe

Ryde, Shaw's Tourist's Picturesque Guide to the Isle of Wight, 1873

"Mrs Harcourt Roe" is another forgotten novelist with an Isle of Wight connection. She's described in an 1893 Isle of Wight Observer review of her novel A Man of Mystery as "a lady, well-known in the Island”, and she lived at Ryde in the 1890s. I just researched a bit (well, more than a bit) on her life and works.

A cryptic postcard unlocked

I had a minor Bletchley Park moment yesterday. John McConnell uploaded this postcard image (reproduced here by kind permission) to the Gosport Area Facebook group.

Victory

On 23rd September, we were passing through Portsmouth, and visited HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's flagship, which is preserved in dry dock in Portsmouth Dockyard. Clare had never been here before, and I hadn't been since around 1970, so it was a major experience for both of us.

As with the previously-mentioned Osborne House, the Victory is set up for self-guided tours that take you along a roped-off continuous route taking in all the decks, from poop deck (top stern 'bridge') to the hold. Unfortunately the uppermost levels were under renovation, but it was still a superb experience. It's not for the unfit or infirm, and it's bad enough if you're merely tall - there are steep steps, and the ceiling heights range from low to very low. We were a trifle worried about having our luggage with us, as this is a working dockyard with security issues. The Dockyard staff, however, were very helpful in recommending a couple of places where luggage can be left nearby, but there turned out to be no problems with our carrying it (we were travelling reasonably light).

When I was younger, I think I would probably have been chiefly interested in the naval aspects - the armaments, how the ship was steered, etc - but it proved oddly interesting to find the minutiae of infrastructure: how a large ship worked as a self-contained community. For instance, the toilets - the 'heads' - were far more sophisticated than I'd imagined; and the galley was a wonder. Brodie's Patent Galley was a surprisingly compact installation considering its capacity (with a suitably organised rota) to cook daily meals for hundreds of crew; there were 821 aboard the Victory. Its one central range is augmented with sub-stoves for individual cookery, and a large copper distiller for desalinating seawater for the surgeon's use.

Visiting is not cheap: it's £17 for an adult. But this covers a year's repeat visits, and - unlike the miserly Osborne House - there are no restrictions on photography. I can't recommend this visit too highly. Check out the official site hms-victory.com.

(Sincere thanks to Buddy for the loan of his tickets).

The head

Over the bows: a wonderful vista of historic and modern buildings

Brodie's Patent Galley

Brodie's Patent Galley

Out to modern Portsmouth: Number One Tower, Gunwharf Quays.
Clare and I call this the Death Star, because when we first saw it,
it was under construction, and rather recalled the half-constructed
new Death Star in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

- Ray

Larking about

Portsmouth Harbour: HMS Warriors, with Gosport's 1960s flats beyond

On Friday we were in Portsmouth, en route to the Isle of Wight, and despite it being a dismally overcast day, we had a brief look at The Hard (Portmouth's harbour frontage).


View Larger Map
Pan left/right to compare to 1925 image below.

click to enlarge

It's an area of strange contrasts: on one side, huge amounts of money have gone into the adjacent Gunwharf Quays; and on the other, the Dockyard has undergone a deal of development as a heritage site around the Mary Rose, HMS Victory, and HMS Warrior. But in between, The Hard remains distinctly downmarket: an anodyne paved harbour frontage adjacent to the Hard Interchange, opposite a rather shabby frontage with a few folksy traditional pubs set among businesses of an extremely mundane flavour, such as a betting shop, a Co-Op, a car rental, a Chinese restaurant, a chip shop, and (weirdly) a Creationist museum.

There are undoubtedly commercial and practical reasons why it's this way; particularly, piecemeal rebuilding in gaps created by World War 2 bombing damage. But I feel it could be redeveloped now in a way that melds upmarket and traditional - as has been done at the Gunwharf Quays - without killing the Hard's use as a working harbour and transport interchange. Portsmouth does have plans, but nothing very rapid seems to be happening.

I did spot one evocative and fairly new feature: Michael Peacock's bronze sculpture commemorating the Portsmouth Mudlarks, children and adults who traditionally foraged for coins thrown from the pier. I just about remember seeing the Portsmouth Mudlarks in the very early 1960s, when I used to go to Portsmouth with my grandmother (the same trips we went to Verrecchia's - see Lime milkshake and Kunzle cake). From the descriptive sign:

The nearby statue commemorates the generations of Portsea children who enjoyed mudlarking here - entertaining travellers by retrieving coins they threw into the mud below the bridge to the harbour station and Gosport Ferry. Boys and girls would scramble to find the money tossed down, sometimes diving into the mud, performing handstands or dipping their heads in it. Many Portsea families lived in poverty, so the small change was welcomed. Usually, what the children did not spend on sweets or pie and chips was given to mum to help out the family finances.

Most parents disapproved of their children's activities, while the police regarded mudlarking as begging and tried to stop it. Mudlarking supplemented other ways of earning a few shillings, such as carrying passengers' bags or finding drivers parking spaces. The building of the new bus terminus in 1976-7 put an end to mudlarking.

Michael Peacock's website has more pictures, and background on the commissioning and construction of the sculpture: Portsmouth Mudlarks.

Mudlarks, depicted less glamorously, from The Headington Magazine, 1871

"Mudlarking" does have a much darker story than its final 20th-century incarnation as a form of begging / street entertainment. The original mudlarks were general scavengers, particularly of muddy foreshores adjacent to busy commercial harbours. As the Wikipedia entry for "mudlark" mentions, Mayhew's 1851 London Labour and the London Poor features an interview with a young mudlark (see digitaldickens.com), and Richard Rowe's Episodes in an Obscure Life (volume 3) has a chapter on the subject, A Brood of Mudlarks, which interestingly opens with an allusion to the Victorian urban myth of Thames mud being converted to butter substitute (see previously Pure bosh: a media scare):

A factory, the newspapers say, has been started for the extraction of grease out of Thames mud — grease to be exported to Holland, and thence brought back as Dutch butter. Whether any poor Londoners do really get their butter from the river's slimy bed I cannot state, but there is a little army of poor Londoners who pick their bread out of those steaming mudbanks.
- Episodes in an Obscure Life

 There have also been a number of fictional accounts, such as Captain Marryat's 1840 Poor Jack (which goes into the illegal aspects of mudlarking, where mudlarks actively connived in fencing goods and materials thrown off ships by sailors).

State-of-the-art ships in Portsmouth Harbour:
left, a Type 45 destroyer; right, HMS Warrior

- Ray

The Silence of Dean Maitland: Volume 2

On with the reading of Maxwell Gray's 1886 novel The Silence of Dean Maitland.

Volume 1 had introduced us to the village of Malbourne, and left us with a cliffhanger. On the New Year's Day of 1863, the coachman's daughter Alma Lee has given birth to an illegitimate child, and Alma's father Ben has been found dead in a quarry. The former misfortune is known by the reader (though not Malbourne's inhabitants) to be down to the charismatic curate Cyril Maitland. The latter, circumstances are rapidly pinning on Maitland's best friend, the doctor Henry Everard.

As we get into Volume 2, things rapidly worsen for Everard. The police are called in, decide the death is foul play, and Everard is arrested. The case goes through the magistrates court in the nearest town, Oldport, then a few months later comes to trial in the Crown Court in the nearest city, Belminster. It doesn't go well for Everard: it's a tough judge; he creates a bad impression by being posh and confident; and his alibi witnesses are weak. And then Alma takes the stand as star witness, a poised and equally charismatic "ruined maid", and gives crucial evidence that a man in the woods offered her gold for the baby's upkeep, then got into an altercation with her father. But she won't say who, because "I promised that I would never betray him". On being pressed - reminded that it's a contempt of court issue - she perjures herself and falsely identifies Everard as the man. At this point Everard realises what's happened, and despairs.

Maitland, meanwhile, has spent the beginning of the year in a pious funk of denial, not helped by being required to baptise Alma's baby Benjamin, and worrying it'll look like him when it grows up. After wandering Belminster, he decides to do the decent thing and rushes to the court. "Stop !" he cries halfway through the pronouncement of sentence. "I have evidence — important evidence. The prisoner is innocent!" But it's too late. He's silenced, and Everard is sentenced to 20 years for manslaughter. Maitland faints as Everard is taken down. And he stays fainted, more or less, for some months, in a state of near-fatal mental and physical collapse.

The scene shifts to Malbourne in late summer, two years later, and life goes on. The now-recovered Maitland has returned from a continental Grand Tour with his new bride Marion (Everard's sister); he has not confessed to anything, having seemingly compartmentalised anything to do with Everard (though he gets distinctly jittery on seeing Alma). Alma is ostracised by the village for having been responsible for Everard's conviction, and gets engaged to a villager, George Judkins - they plan to start a new life in America. Lilian, Everard's fiancee, rejects an marriage proposal by the local aristocrat, Ingram Swaynstone: she intends to wait for Everard.

The scene shifts again to 1872 (as evidenced by Everard's comment "It is nine years since I touched any drink"), when Everard is working in Portsmouth as "No. 62" on a convict gang. In those nine years, he's built up a good steam of hatred toward "the traitor Maitland", and he comes to a particular low ebb when a chance encounter with a lady in the street brings news that his younger brother is dead. By coincidence, the lady is a distant relative, a Mrs Keppel Everard, who is intrigued by his interest and makes enquiries that lead to Lilian starting to write to him, greatly cheering him.

However, this mood improvement kicks him out of his mindset of dull acceptance. The further torment of family nearby - his father has been promoted to Port Admiral, and he has seen his sister Marion with Maitland visiting - proves the spur to action. On a labouring party, he uses the cover of a violent thunderstorm to jump a ditch and do a runner.

His escape is helped by a run of good fortune. He's halted by a sentry - who turns out to be an university acquaintance, Balfour, who has fallen on almost as hard times. Balfour gets him a change of clothes and helps him hide in a tree until he can get out of town over the bastions protecting it. He's horrified when a man recognises him - but it turns out to be a workman who he saved from drowning in the dock, who gives him money. And then he passes a house where a carriage is parked, and finds his sister Marian is one of the occupants: but she doesn't recognise him! She gets him an odd job mowing the lawn at the house, which he does before moving on, having picked up a religious tract that shows Maitland has now risen in ecclesiastical rank to Canon (well on the way to bishop). A lapse of three weeks finds him hiding, under the pseudonym "Stone", in the vicinity of a village called Hawkburne, where he writes to Lilian of his escape and to request money, and awaits a reply. It doesn't come, and eventually he's found collapsed under a tree and recaptured.

A fortnight later, Canon Maitland is in his drawing room with his wife Marion and sister Lilian. They're discussing Stone, the escaped convict from Portsmouth, when Lilian gets Everard's letter, which has been delayed. She faints!

Thoughts. This is a middling second volume. The psychology of Maitland's failure to confess on his recovery isn't much explored: I guess one interpretation is the that the tensions of the situation were so great that he has buried the memory as too traumatic to bring to the surface. The Portsmouth segment describing Everard's prison life is very good, both psychologically and in regional detail - until he escapes. Unless MG had Divine Providence in mind, the series of handy coincidences that provide him with aid out of the fortifications, clothing, money and food are outrageous, and the chance meeting with Marion even more so. This is lazy plotting. And not another fainter!

Belminster, out of interest, is Winchester. Although MG threw us a physical impossibility in Volume 1 - a direct train from there to Oldport (Newport, Isle of Wight) - the general description of its setting matches, and was noted by contemporary reviewers.

All who are fond of Winchester will enjoy the pretty descriptions of the old cathedral town of Belminster
- The Gentleman's Magazine, Part 2, Page 51, 1897

All lovers of modern English fiction will recall how, under the name of "Belminster," this cathedral is vividly and lovingly described in that powerful novel, The Silence of Dean Maitland.
- Our English cathedrals, James Sibree, 1911

If you're interested in Portsmouth's local history, there's a deal of interest in the descriptions of Portsmouth in this volume, which describes a period when convict labour was being used to demolish Portsmouth's city walls. As MG tells it:

Some few years since, the fiat went forth for the old familiar walls and heavy gates of Portsmouth town to be levelled to the ground, that the space which these now useless relics of the past occupied might be covered with buildings connected with the defences and adapted to the requirements of the present. Down went many a fine old elm beneath axe and rope, and bit by bit the ramparts disappeared, and the ditches were filled by the busy hands of sunburnt men, armed with barrow, pick-axe, and spade.

The Landport Gate page at Memorials & Monuments in Portsmouth has a small picture at its foot, circa 1870, showing the kind of fortification Everard would have had to escape over. The general extent of the walls and polygonal bastions being demolished can be seen in the final map (here) on the Portsmouth page of Fortified Places. The 1874 Ordnance Survey Map shows how, hitherto, the area of 'Old Portsmouth' had been isolated as a defensible citadel separate, and buffered by open space, from the general urbanisation of Portsea Island.

Low-resolution map for illustration. Historic map data is (© and
database right Crown copyright and Landmark Information
Group Ltd. (All rights reserved 2009).

Looking at the Times Digital Archive, a plausible date for Everard's escape is July 25th 1872. On that day, southern England, including Portsmouth, experienced an unusually fierce succession of thunderstorms with a record amount of rainfall.

The silence of Dean Maitland: a novel (1886) - Volume 2 (Internet Archive ID silenceofdeanmai02gray).

- Ray

A New Englander hates on the Sandrock

I always like historical travelogues, and just ran into an interesting one by the American author and literary critic John Neal (see pp 40-42, The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 2, Prose Writing 1820-1865). It's not a travelogue as such, but Neal paid an extended visit to England from 1824-1827, on a kind of evangelical tour for American literature and culture, and in 1830 he incorporated the visit into his novel Authorship: A Tale (Internet Archive ID authorshipatale01nealgoog).

Authorship is an extremely complex work: a metafictional novel in which a narrator called Holmes visits the Isle of Wight, though the character of Holmes is closely based on Neal, and the landscape detail on Neal's real visit to the Island.

Holmes's / Neal's trip starts out well:

I had long been wishing to see the Isle-of-Wight; and by the merest accident in the world I found myself there in the beautiful autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty—.

Such weather I had never seen before out of America. It was the very counterpart of our Indian-summer, that we brag so much of. I do not know what other men may feel, but I feel in the rich drowsy atmosphere of that particular season very much as if I could make love to any body or any thing that fell in my way. To breathe was a luxury. To tread the green turf, to walk under the great beech-trees that overshadowed my path, to look up at the sky and out upon the sea, from every side of "the Garden of England," as they call it there — a miniature picture of England, 1 should call it — was to be happy, to be charitable, and to be at peace with all the world — authors excepted.

Ryde Pier, looking across Solent

His description of the Solent view is heartfelt and appreciative. Having made the crossing several times under similar conditions - the view has changed little in the nearly two centuries since Neal saw it - I can fully understand the buzz he got from it. The water adjacent to Ryde is indeed a remarkable colour, and arriving is always a delight. (My photos are from September 2012).

Ryde, from Ryde Pier

So I set off on my pilgrimage from Ryde, after running down to the pier for the fourth time, to look at the Portsmouth shore as it lay glittering afar off through the thin haze and over the smooth beautifully-shadowed sea, like a sort of aerial panorama. — Stop, reader — I must try to give you a notion of Portsmouth as it appeared to me at the time I speak of, whether you have or have not stood upon the pier at Ryde, while the waters were spread before you like a sheet of changeable satin— changeable with shadow and light and with every hue between the deep yellow of the shore and the deep strange blue of the sea ...

Portsmouth Harbour entrance, from the Solent

... nothing that I saw then, though it was all that I have described it to be, could equal the view that I had now of the Portsmouth shore of Gosport, of the shipping, of the military works, and of the far blue sea with a fleet riding slowly over the dim barrier which hardly separated it from the far blue sky — launching away, ship after ship into the unfathomable air, as if they knew, like the huge birds of South-America when they float over the top of the Andes — into the sky — with all their mighty wings outspread, that there was no power in heaven or earth able to wreck them, or shatter them, or disturb them on their way. It was a picture to be remembered for life— 'to be carried away on the. heart, as if the colors were burnt there, and the moveable beauty of a camera obscura had been shut up for another day, or melted into the material and fixed there for ever and ever.

looking west froom Ryde Pier

The broad-striped waters were like a smooth satin, glossy with light, and rippling with a low soft air that stole over the green surface like a shadow. You could see it move. They were green too— of a beautiful positive green, such as I never saw any where else; no doubt owing to the mixture of a sober yellowish dye produced by the sands near the shore with the cold blue of the ocean— a blue that appeared as black as midnight, where the waters were very deep, On every side of me were happy faces — grown-up children wading about on the shore, and looking as if they had never heard the name of sorrow, as if to them life were but one long holyday; barges and wherries dipping to the swell ; great ships at anchor with their sides turned up to the air as if they had been cast away in the very middle of the great deep ; and others afar off towering into the sky like prodigies, or floating up and fading away, like so many superb creatures of the air, each abroad on some great particular errand of its own.

The Gosport shore, from the Solent

The night before there had been a gale, which prepared the way for what I saw now. I stood on the pier and saw it approach — the breeze sounding over the deep, the mist rolling toward me like a heavy white smoke, the tide moving with a steady roar, which grew louder and louder as it heaved and weltered underneath our feet; and the Portsmouth shore, while it seemed very high and very far off, breaking through the mist with an effect such as I never saw before, either in life or in poetry, either in pictures or in sleep. The sky was cloudy — it was even dark—there was nothing above able to produce what I saw, nothing of brightness in that part of the above which I could see ; and yet the high lands of the opposite shore, lands that were neither high nor picturesque when the wind was another way, were gleaming with a sort of mysterious beauty, such as you may conceive would be the character of a fine painting, if it were covered with a grey gauze and lighted up from within. It was what I should call, if I were not afraid of being charged with affectation, a sketch by the Deity, a shadow of the landscapes that we are to see hereafter; so faint, so ethereal was it, so unlike the landscapes of our earth.
- ibid, pp14-17

The view - now much overgrown and gentrified - from "the celebrated wall"

Holmes/Neal is equally blown away on visiting "Bow-Church" [sic] and seeing the view of what he calls "the celebrated wall" (the escarpment backing the Undercliff) from the vantage point of what's recognisable as Hadfield's Lookout.

The view was delightful, and rich, and various, and like nothing I had ever seen before. I remember thus much, and I remember too that whatever there was to see, I saw, and that before the day was well over, I (But for my life I cannot say now whether it was while I stood on that rock or after I had peeped over and crawled away) among a multitude of things, the memory of which had escaped me before my head was on the pillow that very night, I saw — a huge high wall— so huge as to appear like a part of the foundations of our earth, and so high that I mistook a white cloud sailing over the top, for smoke. It was like the vapor that follows the discharge of cannon that are too far off to be heard ; a wall stretching over leagues and leagues of territory ; cottages underneath my very feet (I could have jumped through the roofs) grouped here and there among the trees and the rocks and the gushing water and the wild shrubbery, as if they were copied from old pictures ; on every side of me the bulwarks of an empire, great square blocks which appeared as if they had been wrought by the hands, or piled up where they lay by the power of giants ; here a cottage or two garnered up in the holes of the rocks, and there half a dozen more literally folded among the ruins of what appeared like the overthrown barrier of a huge citadel — a barrier overthrown by flood, or by earthquake, or by fire from above — not by the wrath of mortal man ; here a heap of the greenest foliage I ever saw, overhanging a roof, the loveliest I ever saw (not seven feet high), and a little bit of smooth rich turf, yet greener than the foliage of the young trees, and as lively as the plumage of a parrot — ' Green to the very door ' — and hedged about with flowering shrubs and great rocks, much higher than the roof, and scattered clumps of blackberry — bushes, with never a bit of a pathway to be seen, so that you could not conceive how the people got there alive, nor how they got the children there that you saw laughing and rolling about, or hiding in the shadow of the rocks, or creeping half sideways over the smooth turf.

All this I did see, and I saw it either while I was on the top of that rock, holding by the flag-staff, afraid to move lest the rock should tip over among the houses, and afraid to let go, lest I should be blown away ; or I saw it, after I had escaped ...
- ibid, pp31-33

Sandrock Hotel roughly as it would have been when Neal visited
- image from Cooke's A New Picture of the Isle of Wight, 1812

After that it went downhill. Holmes/Neal stays at the now-defunct Sandrock Hotel, and gets off to a bad start.

The approach to the house delighted me. The roof was thatched, there was a green piazza running the whole length of the house, and there was a very pretty patch of green turf spreading out before the piazza far enough to allow a sort of a promenade. As I drove up to the door, I saw several faces at the window — but I could not see of what shape or form they were, much as I desired it; for there was a bit of thin white drapery between the faces and me. At the door too, several persons appeared, and others were walking about on the little patch of green; but nobody in the shape of a landlord or waiter, chamber-maid or hostler. I went up to the door, and was going in to look for the coffee-room, or the traveller's room, or a room where I could see somebody belonging to the house, when I perceived that I should get into the kitchen if I stirred either way, or into the room at the window of .which the faces appeared. A knocker was on the door — I believe — but I dare not be certain, for I have quite forgotten much that I saw there, and I hope to forget the rest before I die. But whether a knocker was on the door or not, I knocked ; and after a while — faith, it was a good while too, so long that I began to fear the guide had brought me to a private house, and that the people about me were the retired nobility of our age — a very good sort of a man appeared, with a face that I took the liberty to be pleased with. I asked for a room. He hesitated. For the coffee- room, — there was no coffee-room. For the travellers' room, — there was no such room to be had; he was very sorry. Could I have a private room? or a place to eat my dinner? —I was hungry as a tiger. He did not know, but would inquire. He left me standing at the door, and after a few minutes came back, and desiring me to follow him, took me round the house on the outside, and opening a door which led me up a narrow stair-case, entrapped me into a room so meagre, so desolate, and so like the rooms we see in the new public-houses of my country when they stand out of the general thoroughfare, that I felt rather inclined to be merry by occupying all the furniture I saw.
- ibid, pp37-38

The trip then turns into a whingefest, from the interminable account of the narrator's attempts to get an egg for breakfast at the Sandrock (pp51-55), via his disappointment with a sea cave at Freshwater, to his dealings with service staff, other Isle of Wight people, and other visitors (all portrayed by him as uniformly gormless) on various muddy and narrow paths. Bearing it mind that it's fictionalized, it's hard to believe it was that bad, and much of the account is very skimmable (the Wikipedia article rightly summarises Neal's work as "undisciplined and often rambling").

But it's still worth reading for a contemporary account of visiting the Isle of Wight when it was just becoming a visitor attraction, before its Victorian fashionability. The account of the western extremity of the island at The Needles is at a time when it must have been extremely scary; it was 30 years before the building of the Needles Old Battery, and there was a narrow public path right to the very tip of the eroded chalk promontory.


View Larger Map

There's a huge amount of metafiction in Authorship. In the first chapter, Holmes fancies a mysterious woman in Westminster Abbey. Later, on the clifftop near the Needles, he gets into an altercation with a man who first calls himself Colonel Peter Piper, then various names of Neal's own fictional characters, before revealing himself as Edwards, husband of the woman (called Mary, whose life story is then told). These are the couple from the Abbey, and the encounter leads to a general discussion of the nature of authorship. I rather lost track at that point; Neal does indeed ramble. There's a nice comment on the novel in the biography John Neal (Donald A Sears, Twayne Publishers, 1978):

Such playfulness, when coupled with private jokes and the public scandal of the love story, failed to find a sufficiently sophisticated audience and the novel was hardly a success. Popular judgment survives, for a contemporary hand has written in the copy of Authorship in the Princeton University Library, "John Neal in this work is completely at home, his surpassing genius occasionally bursts forth from the heaps of rubbish in which he is so fond of obscuring it".

But I think "rubbish" is too harsh. The complex allusions in Authorship to Neal's life and works are discussed in detail in the essay collection John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Edward Watts, David J. Carlson, Lexington Books, 2012). See, for instance, see the preview of the section from page 79 onward: "Bewildering alternations of fact and fiction". In this, Jorg Richter notes that Neal's scenery descriptions do bear terminological similarity to those in a contemporary guidebook, James Clarke's 1822 The delineator; or, A description of the Isle of Wight.

Relevant sections:
Chapter II: Isle-of-Wight— Portsmouth— English Inns: Wonders of the Isle
Chapter III: Tour of the Isle-— Home— Labor distinguished from Exercise— Grave-Yard
Chapter IV: The celebrated Wall— The Land-slip— Scenery — Comforts of Dining— Sand-Rock Hotel
Chapter V: English Inn for Tourists— English Beds— Waiters— English Breakfast— Household Philosophy— Alum Bay— The Needles— The Light-House
Chapter VI: Human Love put aside by the help of a fresh Egg— Black-Gang Chine — Tourists — The Land-slip — Cave at Freshwater
Chapter VIII: Adventure at the Needles— The Cliff— The Sea— Perplexity— The Drawing-Master turns out to be . . . what? mad ? perhaps a Player? 67

- Ray

Lime milkshake and Kunzle cake

I just had a Proustian moment, as in Proust's account of the vivid memories evoked by the taste of petites madeleines dipped in lime-flower tea (see the relevant section of À la recherche du temps perdu).

It arose from a conversation on Wednesday, when I was working at the bookshop. A lady came in to shelter from a torrential shower, and during a very pleasant chat - it turned out she was from Portsmouth, and had lived in the Isle of Wight - the name Verrecchia came to mind. In the very early 1960s, my grandmother sometimes took me on shopping trips to Portsmouth, and as a treat we'd go and look at the budgerigars in the aviary in Victoria Park, then go to Verrecchia's.

Invariably called by the misnomer "Vereeshee's", Verrecchia's was a long thin cafe by the Guildhall, adjacent to the bridge where Commercial Road, Porstmouth's main shopping street, went under the railway. It was all wood and glass, with a central aisle and marble-tabled snugs where you pressed a bell for service. The foyer had tea and coffee machines, and a row of optics containing prettily-coloured milk shake syrups. I just found a description:

VERRECCHIA'S CAFE
c. 1910
Guildhall Square, Portsmouth
Externally this is a shabby, two-storey building sited uneasily on the north side of the Guildhall. The interior of 1933 is a delight; within a complex section, entered through a shop at the east end, the sitting area is raised half a floor over the kitchen forming a tall space in which the extraordinary furnishings are intact. The tip-up seating and marble tables are in bays enclosed by tall timber screens with inset decorated glass panels. The walls are panelled to a height of eight feet, each bay having an elliptical mirror centrally placed. This produces an effect of continuous visual change, glimpsed through the ranges of screens and reflections from the mirrors.
- Portsmouth, Alan Balfour, City Buildings series, London : Studio Vista, 1970

The News, Portsmouth, as a nice external picture (here), whose caption explains that it was demolished for 1970s developments; see Google Maps for what the location looks like now. There are a couple of pictures of the glasses and internal decor, from Portsmouth Museum, at the foot of this post - Vintage Ice Cream - at the Come Step Back in Time weblog.

I'd invariably have a lime milkshake float, a beatiful pale green and white swirl drunk with a straw from a fluted glass, and it was made with real ice-cream, not the aerated palm-oil shaving foam that generally passed for ice-cream in those days. I'd also have a Kunzle cake, a now-defunct brand of cake: pre-wrapped in brown cellophane, it comprised a chocolate shell containing cake topped with some kind of fondant mousse and a further topping of candied fruit or chocolate decoration.

This recollection gave me a hankering to try lime milkshake again - I haven't tasted it for perhaps forty years - and pursuing the experience proved mildly difficult: no-one seemed to make the syrup. But Googling found that our local Waitrose stocked a "special edition Crusha Mixa Lime". The packaging is all very "yoof" and aggressive - a long-standing brand of milkshake syrup, Crusha has revamped its marketing image for the modern age. The taste, however, is just as I remembered it. I didn't have a Kunzle cake, but as I drank an ice-cold glass of lime milkshake, I shut my eyes and was back in Verrecchia's.

- Ray

Spinnaker Tower revisited

Spinnaker Tower, September 2010

On Sunday May 27th, Clare and I were at the Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth, on the way back from visiting my father on the Isle of Wight.  The haziness of the early weekend had cleared quite a bit, and I couldn't resist giving the Spinnaker Tower another visit. It has stunning views over Portsmouth Harbour, Portsmouth, Gosport, and across the Solent.

I highly recommend the Gunwharf Quays complex in general. While its general thrust is to cater for shopping, eating and entertainment, it offers a varied range (we always have lunch there on the way to the Isle of Wight) and is a stylish and sympathetic redevelopment of defunct admiralty dockland that nevertheless retains its use as a busy harbourside.

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Sorry if the colours are a trifle funny; the thick glass has an intense cyan cast, and I've had to do my best at correcting it.

Returning, May 2012

looking 100m (328ft) down through glass floor panel

View Deck with that glass floor

View Deck 2: 'Cafe in the Clouds'

View east over Gunwharf Quays, canal, East Side
Plaza Tower ("The Lipstick") and Southsea

View south over The Camber car ferry dock and Old Portsmouth (top right)

Old Portsmouth with Isle of Wight car ferry

View approx. S, Portsmouth Harbour entrance

Fort Blockhouse, Gosport side of harbour entrance

View approx. SW: Gosport Marina, Seaward Tower, Haslar Lake, Solent, and Isle of Wight on horizon

Gosport: ferry terminus, Ferry Gardens, town centre

Gosport, view approx. NW: Burrow Island, Royal Clarence Marine, Priddy's Hard

Gosport: Burrow Island, Priddy's Hard

View approx. N: Portsmouth Dockyard, with HMS Warrior (foreground) and HMS Victory (centre)

Detail: Portsmouth Dockyard with HMS Victory

- Ray

Tres Hombres

Pardon the break: I've been away. Clare and I spent a couple of days on the Isle of Wight visiting my dad and getting in a bit of walking - I've come back sunburnt and blistered. Quite a few relevant blog posts will follow over the next few days.

But one interesting sight en route, with a bit of Topsham relevance, was this ship moored off the Gunwharf Quays at Portsmouth Harbour on Thursday: the brigantine Tres Hombres, a sailing freighter operating as a venture to transport trans-Atlantic cargo on a Fair Trade carbon-neutral basis.

Tres Hombres was due to moor at Topsham Quay on October 14th 2011 (see the Exeter Express & Echo, Sailing ship to highlight Fair Trade message), but due to maritime-political complications it didn't happen. One local tale I heard was that the cost of pilotage was too high; Tres Hombres has no auxiliary engine, and would have to be towed to Topsham. The TOWT - TransOceanic Wind Transport - site indicates that it might have been feasible, but nobody was prepared to take the risk of towing the ship up the river in case it ran aground on the mud. See From Topsham to Brixham … or what future for the historical Port of Exeter?

Anyhow, after that missed opportunity, it was cool to see the Tres Hombres elsewhere.

Check out its official website: The sailing vessel and cargo ship Brigantine Tres Hombres.

- Ray

Click to enlarge all images.