Friday 27th April 2012
We have nominated a breakfast time of 8 am. We have both had
a pretty good night’s sleep and boy didn’t we need it. Morning conversation is
dominated by expressions of wonder at the immaculate presentation and
hospitality at Redcot House. We are met as we arrive down to breakfast by Mike
who assures us our hot meals ordered last night will be ready in about 10
minutes. Meanwhile there is the most tempting breakfast buffet yet. There are two little glasses of thick berry
smoothie richly inviting in blackberry tones; two glasses of what can only be
described as fruit art. I HAVE to have one of each of these they look
irresistible. They don’t disappoint. There are also two options for juice,
homemade muesli and other cereals in individual jars. Everything is immaculate.
I suspect that word is going to appear quite a lot in my descriptions of Redcot
House.
We can’t stop gushing about how spotless and beautiful the
breakfast room is, how pleasant the outlook, how thorough the attention to
detail. Look! They have even applied camouflage to the wheelie bin tucked over
to the side of the front garden. I
rather suspect that is English lavender in the garden. How appropriate. Mike delivers a couple of little home made
croissants and two thin slices of soda bread.
Love. Love is what Redcot House
oozes from every pore. You simply could not do a B&B this well unless you
either have OCD or you LOVE what you do. Love to excel. Love to get the
inevitable praise from visitors. Love to see your visitors have a great time.
In due course our hot meals arrive. Hubby has ordered the
Kentish breakfast which includes locally made pork and sage sausage, mushrooms,
tomatoes, chef’s potato, bacon, baked beans. He tucks in enthusiastically. Ah how we’ve
missed English breakfasts….not that there’s been anything wrong with th
breakfast buffets we’ve had on the continent.. but well, done this well in a
gorgeous English B&B…. it’s just very very hard to compete.
I opted for the breakfast tortilla which includes Spanish
omelet which is molded… is that a heart shape(?) and there is a lovingly
arranged little group of roast cherry tomatoes and an optional slice of bacon.
Normally the Spanish omelet would include mushrooms but on the ordering sheet
they ask if you have any requests about how your breakfast should be prepared.
I nominated to skip the mushies.. I really
don’t like mushies you see. Generally
the omelet is made ahead and I said that’s fine and really I wasn’t bothered at
all, but then Mike 2 insisted - insisted on making me one fresh.
On our table we have a little dish of finely cubed butter; a
couple of little pots of jam with cute little sticks telling what each variety
actually is; a couple of little dishes of sauce with cute antique spoons to
serve it with, salt and pepper of course and in case you’re forgetting just
what it is you ordered there’s a little copy of the breakfast menu in a little
frame. We’re in heaven sitting here by
the window being waited on hand and foot. I congratulate myself in the
selection of Redcot House for our first night back in England. Well done Snodge. Well done! … and thankyou
Tripadvisor. You hear a lot of
controversy about whether Tripadvisor’s ratings for properties are valid. The
proof of the pudding is in the eating. I have chosen our accommodation with
help from TA throughout the trip and we’ve not had a dud place yet. Indeed all
have been excellent. Redcot House has to
take the prize out of all of them so far. But then I think that at every new
B&B we stayed at in England don’t I? As I sit and type this while hubby
showers (The bathroom has a heated towel rack, an extra level of heating, a
shaving mirror and power points for the job, shampoo, conditioner, body wash
and skin conditioner.. it’s immaculate in there)… I hear the gulls cry over the
harbour and more latterly some children in the street. I fantasize about a longer stay here. I’m loving
being back in England.
We are late getting away and worse still we haven’t managed
to persuade the tomtom to work. Though I have to say Hubby’s efforts have been
a bit half hearted. I think he expects that she’ll just come good
spontaneously. English maps are the next
best thing to impossible to follow. I’m used to using maps where every road is marked.
English maps just seem to give you the major roads or this one we’ve acquired
to give us detailed coverage of townships has a ludicrously vague regional map
included. We wander about taking this
road and that. We think we’re on the right track and then roads indicated on
our map appear not to be open.. perhaps not even finished being constructed. Are we in the right place? Are we in the
place we think we are? We have turned getting lost into an art form. We head
towards Margate, we head towards Broadstairs.
The map looks less complicated up that way, surely the right road is
easier to find up there. Time is
slipping past. Stress levels are
increasing. Eventually we find our way
to the correct road and begin to make steady progress to our destination. We pass signs beckoning us to the historic
seaside town of Whitstable. I’d have taken that if the tomtom wasn’t on strike.
:o(
We transition to the M2 relieved that the navigation should
be a bit simpler for a while. I have
heard… make that read it said, with some chagrin on TripAdvisor that England
now has good signage though people still think it’s the war and signage has
been removed. I laugh.. (or is that a
pained grimace with convulsions) and think that the signage is of only minimal
assistance when you have hemisphere disorientation and no clue where the frig
you are. I’m beginning to appreciate the
English reports that a short time driving is more than enough and leaves you
frazzled. .. perhaps it’s the maps. If it keeps up like this the next week is
going to be hell on earth.
As we near our destination I spend a little time perusing
the little book of Kent township maps and figure we’d better take the
Gillingham exit. We indulge in only a
comparatively small amount of crazy tail chasing before we find our way to the
Historic Dockyard and park the car, carefully avoiding puddles of standing
water and with only a mild “discussion” about which is the best parking space. Oh Tomtom. We’re sorry we ignored you
yesterday. Please come back to work. Just have a cup of tea and a bex and a
good lie down and perhaps when we’re done here you will be feeling better. Please
God look after dearest Tomtom.
It’s a beautiful clear morning. Passing cloud, but certainly
an improvement from what we were suffering in France over the last several
days. It is altogether very pleasant weather to be at the dockyard. We wander into the ticket office come gift
shop and are greeted by someone who’s interested to know whether we’d like to
book a time for the tour of the historic ropery and what is the purpose for our
visit today. It’s a question that
doesn’t really pay off as I ask if they have any tours similar to the ropery
for sawyers. We wait while consultations
are held between colleagues. Ah… no
sorry nothing about sawyers. :o)
We are distracted leaving the area by a quick browse of the
shop. I note a couple of interesting
potential souvenirs and after a moment’s hesitation while we figure out how the
doors work, yeah seriously ;o) we’re out into a huge graveled area around which
are clustered a number of attractions and signposts pointing you to these and
others that are out of sight.
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| Rolling stock at Chatham. There's lots more at the dockyard to explore than we were able to in one day. |
Immediately next door is an attraction called “The Wooden
Walls of England”. In this exhibit you follow an apprentice shipwright around
the docks as HMS Valiant is being constructed.
It is here that I expect to find the information most relevant to my 3rd
great grandfather who was a sawyer at Chatham..and I presume that this means he
probably worked at the dockyard. We head
in and find we’ve just missed the start of the scheduled tour. We’ll need to
come back here after the Ropery tour. I make a note of the tour schedule and we
head off to amuse ourselves until 1:30.
Examining the map, we see that a new exhibition about the
history of the dockyard is located right by the ropery. Perhaps that will give us a clue about how
things worked back in the first half of the 19th Century. This
therefore slips into a high priority place on the mental list.
Before heading up to the appropriate end of the dockyard, we
decide to just do a bit of a reccie into the No 1 Smithery where we find an
exhibition of model ships. The exhibition explains what models were used for and
takes us through the visit of George III and the use of models to help nurture
and feed the King’s interest and commitment in the Navy. The models are interspersed
with some portraits of key players mentioned in the panels. Also in this
building we have the opportunity to see the pipe bending area and the anchor
forging area, but we decide we will need to defer those for now.
 |
| HMS Cavalier |
As we emerge from the No 1 Smithery, Hubby has spotted
something exciting over in the Three Historic Warships area. The historic ships
have the added interest of being in the docks.
HMS Gannet is a steam and sail vessel from the 1880s, she’s in
water. Across the way is HMS Cavalier, a
WWII destroyer, but there in the middle between the two is HMS Ocelot, the cold
war submarine, in dry dock.
 |
| WWII Memorial to the Destroyers |
Hubby stands a little taller. His eyes find an
extra twinkle and his pace picks up as he beckons across so we can get our
tickets to see the sub. From the side by
which we approach we head down some stairs and around the body of the submarine
sitting on big chocs of wood and held in position by long planks. The dock itself is made of stone. In our travels we have seen some impressive stonework,
huge palaces, somber memorials, atmospheric cobbles in quaint villages, but
here in Chatham is stonework as important as any in the land. The Chatham Dockyard is the working man’s
history of empire, the history of Naval domination over several centuries. We pause to consider the enormity of what
we’re seeing.
 |
| Memorial plaque at the dock where Nelson's famous ship Victory was built. There seems to be some level of dissatisfaction at Chatham that the Victory is on display in Southampton and not where she was built. |
The Ocelot looms above us as we follow the stairs down and
under the hull to begin the climb up the other side to the ticket office. I am swept along in a tide of husbandly
enthusiasm as we put together a program of tours for the day with the help of
the lady on ticket duty. As there’s a
limited number of people on each tour of the Ocelot it’s a good idea to have a plan
to work to. It is increasingly clear that we will be exploring the dockyard for
the rest of the day. Lunch will be taking a back seat and will have to slip
into a spare half hour, if that, between tours. We are handed a timed ticket for our place on
the tour of the Ocelot and this is carefully stowed away.
Now we’re off to the overview exhibition and our other
booked tours. In our wanderings around the dockyard we find an unusual building. It's balconies are attached at quite bizarre angles. It appears to have been sinking.. but there's a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that the odd construction has some sort of purpose.. I just have no idea what that might be and there is no signage about it that we can see.
Arriving at the history of the dockyard exhibition, again we are met by a friendly greeter who, in this case, delays
us to nicely explain the simple layout of the exhibition. :o) The exhibition is contrived mainly from
panels of high level information confirming that Chatham Dockyard on the River Medway was a crucial construction
and maintenance site for the Royal Navy for some 400 years. Again we find here that a prominent element
of the information is about the visit to the dockyard of George III which
resulted in the King making a significant investment in the Dockyard. This
historic investment produced many of the buildings that you see today. There is not a lot of information provided
about the workers unfortunately. Just that there were lots of them. Nothing about where they lived for example,
or how they were selected or paid etc. The lack of detail is a bit
disappointing at the time, though some of this information is provided in the more specific context of other tours. We do
know that the workers gave a warm welcome to the King. :o)
As we move along the displays there is a section devoted to
the docks in the world wars. There were bombing raids on the docks, but they
did little damage to the docks themselves, most damage being suffered by the
surrounding area. Finally in the 1980s came the Thatcher government decision to
close the dockyard. Reasons for the
closure are provided by a copy of a newspaper article. Hubby reads this quite
thoroughly and tells me that the reasons seem quite persuasive. Nearby on a continuously playing loop is some
television footage of a statement from an obviously upper crust Naval Officer
who says that the Navy was sad to end its association with Chatham after so
long. Construction of this exhibition
has not yet been completed and we are easily finished what is in place in the
half hour we had available. Back out
into sunlight we walk the short distance to the Ropery for our scheduled tour. We
join the rest of the assembled group inside to wait for the start.
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| There is a picnic ground and play area for the ankle biters |
In due course our guide arrives and introduces herself. She’s been tasked by the boss to show us the
ropes ( …groan)... There’s a good sized group and we are led through the
process of rope making, initially hearing about how it was done before the industrial
revolution. The back breaking labour
involved is emphasized. Then we move on to the marvelous innovations achieved
in the industrial revolution and how
they resulted in massive increases in efficiency, but of course, less need for
workers. The tour is presented as though
we were in 1875. Our guide is one of the
female workers in the factory and has a wry sense of humour and what seems to
us to be an appropriately working class accent.
Around the room various rope artifacts are displayed and
these are explained in turn. We marvel
at rope recovered from HMS Invincible which was wrecked in the solent in
1758. The tar dipped rope was made here
in the ropery and survived over 200 years in the water! They look to be in
remarkable condition.
We observe the raw material imported from Russia, and hear
about the process of hatchelling to comb and straighten the fibres. Whale oil
was used to soften the fibres and make them supple and workable. Hatchellers worked hard and long. It was
backbreaking work. Compare this to the
mechanical hatcheller which could complete the hatchelling in a fraction of the
time, impressive statistics are offered as evidence. The ropery was mechanized during
the industrial revolution. In some
areas, where previously the back breaking nature of the work excluded women,
now women could be employed to “mind” the machines for a small fraction of the
price of employing a man. Pay was so
low, that many women had to use their initiative to come up with additional
sources of income. Mostly these were
predictable. Nicking what rope they could, offering “entertainment” to sailors
in the town. They were obliged to keep themselves by whatever means was
available. Severe poverty offers no opportunity for maintaining the moral high
ground. At one point when efforts were made to improve conditions (clearly
without adequate consultation) they regularized the working hours across the
seasons, but had to change back when the women complained because it cut off
their ability to moonlight in additional employment.
 |
| The rope walk was built long enough to make anchor ropes for the royal navy. If you want to walk the length of it allow another 40 minutes down and back! |
As we exhaust the opportunities in one space and have an
understanding of the basic rope making process, our guide directs us to another
area where three of the group have a chance to work together to make a length
of rope. As is usual, volunteers are called for and when none are forthcoming,
a couple of kids are “volunteered” along with their dad. The resulting rope is tested to check that
it’s of sufficient quality, they can tell who made the rope because a coloured
strand is included to identify the ropery so you better make sure that you do it
properly.
 |
| In use since 1810 |
Next it’s into the ropewalk.
In the rope walk there is still a commercial concern that makes rope in
the historic building, using the historic equipment. One of the key pieces of equipment dates from
1810 and is still in use. The ropery is the longest brick building ever constructed
in Europe. Our guide explains that it
will take 20 minutes to walk down to the other end of the walk and then you
have to walk back because there is no exit down there. The length of the ropery was determined by the
standard length of an anchor rope and the length of material it took to make
the standard rope. In about 1906 the
building was electrified and windows were installed. Previously the workers
relied on natural light and there was limited protection from the elements, so
before starting work they would have to sweep the ropery floor clear of leaves
and debris that had blown into the building overnight. The whole tour is very
well done and very interesting.
Definitely a must do while at the Historic Dockyard.
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| Women and men working at the dockyards were prevented from fraternisation by having different shift times and entrances. This is the entrance the women used. |
From the ropery we make a brisk approach to the
Wheelwright’s café. Hubby opts for a
huge plate of fish and chips with peas, I stick with the quiche of the day..
hold the sides please. Apple juice and coke. Everything wolfed down. The last thing we want to do is miss the tour
of the Ocelot. I am a little concerned
at the slippage we’ve experienced today. Arrived two hours later than planned
we’ll have to skip some of the other things we would have done today which will
in turn lead to slippage tomorrow. Hubby offers to skip the sub. No deal. I saw
how excited he was about it earlier. No chance pretending to be blasé about it
now! We just have to go with it and see how it all turns out.
We join the assembled group and in due course an
appropriately business like lady comes over and introduces herself as our guide. She has an aura of authority about her.
Perhaps she has been in the Navy herself at some point. She’s knowledgeable;
clear in her delivery. She has a crisp no nonsense approach. I instinctively know that this lady can deal
with whatever she needs to, don’t push her.. not that I plan to! Whatever her background she’s well chosen for
leading this tour.
 |
| Cold war submarine, HMS Ocelot in dry dock, she was designed and built at Chatham. |
Firstly we stand outside while we are given a run down on
the anatomy of the sub. At the front is
the radar in that bulbous area on the bow.
Coming further back, and also at the rear of the sub are plates that are
raised and lowered when the sub dives to help provide stability in the
water. Large tanks are located on the
sides, these are filled with sea water to dive or with compressed air, which
drives out the sea water, to surface. On
the top of the sub is the keel. This has
the same purpose as in other vessels, but as the sub needs to be able to sit on
the bottom of the ocean the keel is on the top.
There are various periscopes. The
attack periscope. The observation periscope. A third was for communications,
and if memory serves the fourth was a snorkel.
Our anatomy lesson complete we head onto the sub itself, mind your heads
as you enter. The spaces oblige us to enter and move around in single file, to
small areas where we can assemble to hear the information about where we are
and what we’ll see as we walk to the next stopping point.
Our first assembly point is near the torpedo bay. The way we
have entered is where they would load the torpedos onto the sub. With a full load, only the centre strip you
see here would have been empty. Here and also at the other end of the sub is
the life support and evacuation system.
You assemble everyone together, you don one of the survival suits,
attach yourself to the oxygen supply seal the hatch to the other areas of the sub
and fill the space with water. Then you open the escape hatch and out you go
one by one. Captain goes last in a process that can take up to 4 hours for a
full crew. The full crew always stays
together.
 |
| The operations area in HMS Ocelot. |
We move through into the crew sleeping area. 22 crew share
this little space. All bunks are 6 ft long but headroom varies. Each person
gets a storage space 12 inches square, so there’s just one change of clothes
and a few small personal items allowed on board. Games are popular. Petty officers have slightly more privacy and
the captain has a small cabin. We check out the tiny, confined spaces in which
everyone lives. The captain has… drum
roll please… a small wash basin! Ah the
perks of seniority. Privacy is the biggest perk rather than the space. You would certainly get to know each other
well as submariners went to sea for 12 weeks at a time.
Ocelot is a diesel electric submarine, she has huge engines,
but these are not connected to the propulsion, they power the electric motors
and they then propel the sub silently. The
batteries are recharged at night. The sub has to sit about 12 feet under the
surface with the snorkel up to recharge the batteries. This process will take
between 4 and 8 hrs and is a time when the sub is very vulnerable as it can be
detected visually and by sound. We can’t
be told what the Ocelot did on operations as they are still classified as top
secret, but we learn about life on board and how the sub works, what some of
the dials and knobs do and of course we get to peer out the attack periscope;
marvel about the tiny spaces crew lived in. It feels like no time at all before
we are climbing back up. This has been
one of the top two experiences of the trip for hubby. He’s loved it. I’m beginning to sense a theme to the things
hubby really enjoys. Perhaps one of Bill’s Cold War tours should get penciled
into our long range planning.
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| Deeds not words - HMS Gannet |
We have half hour until the next wooden walls of England
tour. This is taken up with a quick look
at a model sub from the James Bond film The World is Not Enough followed by a
thorough exploration of HMS Gannet. Information panels are provided that cover
the vessels life which included different uses and different names reflecting
those changes. After she was retired
from active duty she became the drill ship HMS President and later still she
was converted for duty as TS (Training ship) Mercury where an interesting woman
named Beatrice Fry ruled the roost for some 40 years leaving many colourful
memories in the minds of boys resident on the ship during that period.
Time now for the tour of the Wooden Walls of England. This is pretty much a self guided tour except
that you are supervised and there is a young woman in period dress who seems to
be responsible for operating the controls in a couple of places. Essentially there are a lot of elaborate mock
ups of the various elements of the process of building a wooden warship and
recordings of re-enactments and commentary from characters in the story. All
the characters are based on real people and the construction of a real RN ship.
It is perhaps a little old fashioned in
terms of the technology employed but it is well done and the content is interesting. For our own purposes we enjoy seeing the saw
pit and hearing information about how the sawyers were remunerated.
 |
| Top Sawyer in the Wooden Walls of England |
It’s now getting fairly late in the afternoon and we are
weary. There is still a lot here at the dockyards we haven’t seen. Once again I
miss an opportunity to visit a museum about the lifeboats, I was sorry to have
missed the Henry Bloggs Museum in Norfolk too, but there are limits to one’s
stamina. As I wait for Hubby I take the
opportunity to have a quick look at some of the nearby exhibits, one of which
includes a lot of marine timbers that where recycled as flooring in one of the
buildings and which now are providing an invaluable source of material for
research.
We have enjoyed our day at the Historic Dockyard Chatham,
the world’s best preserved dockyard from the age of sail and in its heyday Britain’s
premier warship building and repair yard. Now we need to bite the bullet and see if
Tomtom is feeling better, delayed only by a few purchases in the gift shop
including a skipping rope made with rope from the historic ropery.
Bad News. Tomtom is still chucking a wobbly. We need to find our way to Tunbridge Wells on
our own. I will spare you the trauma of
a detailed description of our navigational woes, shall we simply say that the
conversation in the car was not light hearted and pleasant. We did however find our way around some
streets we would not otherwise have seen and as it turned out the situation
lent itself to my having a look at HM Prison Maidstone. By this time of course, we have, in
desperation, pulled into another service station and spent up big on a couple
of A4 sized road atlases. One on Kent and another the whole of Britain. Each
seems to provide a different level of detail.
To find your way around in the UK it seems you need a veritable library
of directories, but there is nothing else for it and we pay up… though I have
to say it was not the happiest purchase of my life. .. so… back to Maidstone.
Maidstone Prison is still in operation. The perimeter wall
is one of the only original elements remaining from 1838 (my period of interest, the prison is much older than that). The prison housed a court complex in 1838 and so it was presumably here that my great great grandfather Harry
Skinner was convicted of Burglary on 12 March 1838. On 10 April the Kentish Gazette reported that
on Friday 30th March Harry Skinner along with his partner in crime
Charles Frederick Gilbert, (who were 21 and 19 respectively at the time) were
removed along with a number of other convicted felons from Maidstone to the
convict hulk Fortitude at Chatham. By
the end of the year both young men had been shipped out to Sydney on the Earl
Grey. Gilbert seems to have settled down
nicely and his descendants are still resident in the Sydney area. Harry Skinner
must have played up as he ended up in Moreton Bay, but later
had at least gained enough respectability to be granted a publican’s
license. He must have done alright for
himself as it cost a fair bit to pay for such a license. I’ve no idea what a bystander would have
thought if they had observed us circling around the prison and pulling over to
take photos! It’s a bit late for an
attempt at jail break! Anyway, Harry was
better off in Moreton Bay than in Kent, so his conviction at a reasonably young
age was a bit of a lucky break for him as it was for so many. One of the factors in the discontinuation of
transportation was that it had lost its deterrent effect. Apparently those that could write were
sending word to their families at home with advice that they should “earn their
ticket” to the new land.
From Maidstone we make our way to Royal Tunbridge Wells. You may notice the distinct lack of
commentary on the trip along the way. Perhaps it’s the time that has elapsed
before recording my impressions, but I think that it is rather that my attention
was focused more on trying to navigate. Sigh.
Without too much bother we are successful in finding Swan Cottage in
Warwick Street where we promptly settle in.
Many of the B&B’s we’ve stayed in are really more like small private
hotels, but Swan Cottage really has a sense of staying in a room in the home of
someone. We are very comfortable and
made to feel very welcome, it’s just a noticeably different context. Dinner is not provided obviously so we don’t
waste time heading out to find a bite to eat.
Our host and his visitors enthusiastically make recommendations among
the eateries within walking distance.
We first of all take an ever so brief wander through the
Pantiles, doing a little half hearted window shopping and not doing the place
justice really. Everything is closed and
we don’t have time to spend on returning tomorrow. It’s not long before we decide to return to
the strip of restaurants closer to home among which, having perused the posted
menus, we find the Tunbridge Wells Bar and Grill to be the most tempting. It is very busy and we’re not too optimistic about
getting a table on the spur of the moment on a Friday night, but with a promise
that we’ll be out in time for the table to be ready for a later booking we head
inside and get busy peeling off our coats.
The Tunbridge Wells Bar and Grill is decorated in a very
modern style and they take a different approach to the bread course. Tiny little rolls are brought to us with a
dipping sauce. We’re already very happy
with our choice of dinner venue. If you can be bothered really thinking about
the bread course the rest should be of similar quality. We do quite well on the ordering competition.
Hubby’s crispy duck spring rolls followed by Char grilled half lobster w garlic
butter is well balanced by my own Tomato soup followed by fish and chips with
peas and tartare sauce, although I was a little disappointed in the peas. I was hoping more for the lovely fresh
approach to the peas like we had at Dion in London, but not to worry. If we’d
been having fish and chips in Australia we wouldn’t have got the peas at all,
so that’s no big deal. We have run out
of time so no dessert. This is also not
a problem, with so much over – indulgence there comes a time when you’re body
starts to rebel.
It’s a short and very pleasant walk back up the lane to Swan
Cottage where we do our best to get an early night, but not before Hubby is
reminded that his wife will not be a pleasant travel companion in coming days if
he does not apply his IT skills to persuading tomtom to get back on the
job! He fiddles with this and that and
logs onto the website and she starts working.
We still don’t know what he did precisely that made the difference, but she’s back on deck. Relieved? Relieved is not the word. Tomtom is
an absolutely essential piece of kit for a driving holiday in England.
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