Rob Illingworth
Local Studies Development Librarian
Flying Start
My job is make sure that the Local Studies collections in the library network are used to their full potential by both our staff and our customers.
I’ve had a look through some of our resources to see if there were episodes in the history of Sheppey that caught my imagination. I came across a couple of stories from the same sort of timeframe, i.e. 1815-1840. One features Sheerness & the other Queenborough
An advert in the Times Newspaper 11 June 1819: Foundation of the Great Docks at Sheerness. Probably paid for by the Navy Board to promote & justify this hugely expensive project. After a rather chequered history, Sheerness Fort & Dockyard was going to be made into a state of the art facility of European importance. Most of the impressive things that you can see on the map of Sheerness from 1864 were built between 1819 and 1830- All those bastions, walls, basins etc.
One of the things that had to make way during this phase of rebuilding was a theatre located in High St, Blue Town, right up against the dockyard wall. The theatre was established during the early 1800s. Because this was Napoleonic war period there were plenty of officers and sailors to make up an audience. The Jerrolds were the theatrical family that took on the lease of this theatre. Douglas Jerrold grew up to be a famous playwright and journalist. Dickens & Thackeray were pallbearers at his funeral in 1857.
Before the C19th the community around the Sheerness fort and dockyard was very marginal. Sheerness was run as an outpost of Chatham dockyard. Much of the labour came from there. Even drinking water was shipped in from Chatham.
The dockyard workers who did live in Sheerness were housed on old men-of-war beached by the dockyard. Incredibly, from about 1673 to the beginning of the C19 these beached hulks were a feature of everyday existence In Sheerness. That’s over 225 years of the most temporary of accommodation. It is no wonder that they had time to customise the hulks and there are descriptions of bridges between the ships, whole streets on board and brick chimneys rising from the decks. Like a sort of C18 Mad Max.
In 1802, when Commissioner of the dockyard tried to move the workers off the hulks into purpose-built garrison buildings, some didn’t want to leave! In fact, the move was so unpopular that there was an attempted murder on the commissioner.
But not all the dockyard workers were so attached to life in the hulks. Theft of materials from the dockyard had always been treated as an unofficial perk. Some of the most pilfered items were chips, not of the salt & vinegar variety, but off-cuts of timber that were left over from the repair and construction work carried out on the ships.
The workers used these to build DIY houses which they painted and preserved with blue grey paint and these became known as Blue Houses. A new residential and commercial area known as Blue Town developed. It was a very confined area, a dense triangle of houses and alleyways compressed between the dockyard wall and Well Marsh. Blue Town was moated in as part of the fortifications.
So it is no wonder that Blue Town needed to expand. But even that expansion was limited by a regulation that employees of the dockyard had to live no further than a mile from the dockyard gate. And that’s why we get the new area of Mile Town.
There were many economic migrants to Sheerness. Many came from Chatham and other dockyard towns across Britain. As early as the 1790s there was a minority Jewish community that came from Chatham. A Jewish Synagogue is marked on the map in Blue Town & a small disused Jewish cemetery still exists, hidden away in a corner off High Street and Hope Street.
The rise of population in these areas was very steep. By the 1830s there were 8,894 people in 1,617 houses in Blue Town & Mile Town. When you consider that there were only 700 people living in Queenborough during this period, you start to get the scale of the development of Sheerness.
The rapid and partially unregulated expansion of Sheerness did bring problems. Apart from the Methodist preacher John Wesley’s description of Blue Town at the end of the C18th, it is very hard to find contemporary accounts of the place that are sympathetic. Sheernasty became the nickname.
But by the C19th Sheerness wasn’t such a marginal place and it had a community that was starting to find an identity for itself.
In 1816 (before the beginning of the dockyard re-building scheme described in the Times) a group of men from the dockyard banded together and established Britain’s 1st co-operative society. I should stress that this would have been a very progressive move for any labouring community in Britain at that time.
The Society established this twenty first day of November in the Year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixteen, by the Officers and Workmen of His Majesty's Dock Yard, Ordnance and New Work, at Sheerness, in the Isle of Sheppey, in the County of Kent, for obtaining for themselves and families, a supply of Wheaten Bread and Flour, and Butcher's Meat, shall henceforth be denominated the Economical Society."
This being Sheerness, there were a few eccentricities associated with the Co-Op. I have come across descriptions of delivery carts pulled by a team of dogs. But from these modest beginnings the Co-Op movement came to have a dominant place in the community of Sheerness right into the C20th
So, that was Sheerness in the early C19th growing “vigorously if a trifle ungraciously” as one historian said.
During the same period, things were very different over in Queenborough. The community there was at war with itself.
An 1828 guidebook published by William Burrill, a printer from Chatham He called it “a history and topographical survey of the Isle of Shepy” A brief history of all the areas on the island written for amateur historians or visitors. Usually these guidebooks of this kind are factual and neutral in tone but this passage on Queenborough goes off on a tangent and covers current local politics in a very opinionated way.
You find the explanation for this digression in the dedication to the guidebook:
Dedicated to John Capel M.P.
I take the liberty to inscribe this trifling work to you as a token, however humble, of my feeling for your virtues…A portion of the work treats of those who have felt the influence of your benevolence.
John Capel was a rich London stockbroker who helped to finance the Queenborough oyster fishermen in their bitter and long running dispute with the Mayor and Corporation of Queenborough. According to the Corporation Assembly Book that we have in the Archives John Capel became the MP for Queenborough “at the instance and on the promotion” of the freemen of the town.
In Kent and elsewhere in Britain, local disputes over fishing rights were not uncommon but what is remarkable about the Queenborough dispute is that the oyster fishermen managed to make it national campaign supported by middle class Londoners and publicized in the national newspapers.
Here’s another extract from the Times – this one from Dec 26th 1827
Meeting Of The Inhabitants Of Queenborough
So, surprisingly, the Oyster Fishermen of this obscure and isolated town
had a great PR machine & the cruel and villainous image of, Thomas
Young Greet, the Mayor of Queenborough, which has been passed down to historians,
was undoubtedly influenced by this popular propaganda.
If you look in the Queenborough Borough Records, in contemporary newspapers and the accounts of historians there are many sensational incidents connected with the dispute.
In 1822 Mayor Greet throws two men in jail for daring to send him a challenge to a duel on Rushenden Hill. The unwise challenge was written when John Jones was “rather inebriated.”
When Mayor Greet died in 1829, during his burial the fishermen are supposed to have thrown a shower of halfpennies into his grave to pay his passage to hell.
There are riots, court cases, election wrangles, and parliamentary bills. But what there isn’t … is a happy ending.
Both the Corporation and the Freemen became too addicted to feuding and to legal cases. The Corporation got into huge debt and the Oyster Fishing grounds which did rely on careful regulation and cultivation went into terminal decline.
A local newspaper comment from the 1860s perhaps gives us the moral of the tale: After seven years continuous course of law proceedings between the dredgers and the governing body it may be easily supposed that the lawyers had prospered much better than the oyster beds.
SOURCES
W.H. Studt: A Chronology of the Isle of Sheppey [1991]
Sheila Judge: the Isle of Sheppey [1997]
English Heritage, Research Department
Queenborough, Isle of Sheppey, Kent, historic area appraisal, report by
Susie Barson...[et al.] [2006]
A History and Topographical Survey of the Island of Shepey. Publisher: W. Burrill, [1828]
Blanchard. Jerrold: The life and remains of Douglas Jerrold / by his son, Blanchard Jerrold. [1859.]
Philip MacDougall: Sheerness Dockyard, a brief history [2001]
Journals
Bygone Kent
Vol 3 No2 1982
Geoffrey Hufton: Queenborough and its oysters.
Vol14 No1 1993
Sheila Judge: The Mayor of Queenborough (Part One)
Vol 14 No2 1993
Sheila Judge: The Mayor of Queenborough (Part Two)
Archaeologia Cantiana
1965 Vol LXXX
Robert H Goodsall: Oyster Fisheries on the North Kent Coast
Archive Records
Centre for Kentish Studies: Queenborough Borough
Catalogue Ref. QB
including Assembly Books - ref. QB/AC, Petitions - ref. QB/AP,
Precedent books, etc.- ref. QB/AZp/2, Judicial Records, ref. QB/JB
Catalogue searchable via the Access to archives website:
http://www.a2a.org.uk/
Sheerness Library Subject Files
including Queenborough file & Sheerness Dockyard files
Websites
Times Digital Archives – (1785 – 1985)
Includes articles, reports and letters relating to the Queenborough Oyster
Fishery dispute
[Available via the Kent Libraries & Archives Website]
www.kent.gov.uk/libs
Dictionary of National Biography
Includes an entry for Douglas Jerrold
[Available via the Kent Libraries & Archives Website]
www.kent.gov.uk/libs
The Journal of John Wesley- (1703- 1791)
includes his descriptions of visits to the Isle of Sheppey
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/journal.html
Yvonne Jerrold’s personal page
http://www.yvonnejerrold.com/FamilyTree/L-SamuelJerrold-biog.html