A Passage to Swanage
By DEREK HUDSON t4A WEEK or two at Knollsea will see us right," says the heroine of one of Thomas Hardy's worst novels The Hand of Ethelberta, and the characters and action of this improbable story then move to the Isle of Purbeck, to Corvsgate Castle (which is Corfe) and to Knollsea (which is Swanage)L—" a , seaside village lying snug within two headlands as between a finger and thumb. Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier, unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half, and had been to sea." Hardy was writing of Swanage in the eighteen-seventies ; the place has changed greatly since then ; indeed it was changing when Hardy wrote, for a few chapters further on we find the following admission :— " Knollsea had recently begun to attract notice in the world.
It had this year undergone visitation from a score of profes- sional gentlemen and their wives, a minor canon, three marine painters, seven young ladies with books in their hands, and nine-and-thirty babies. Hence a few lodging-houses, of a dash and pretentiousness far beyond the mark of the old cottages • which formed the original substance of the village, had been erected to meet the wants of such as these."
On the whole Hardy wrote affectionately of the town. Hu: a little over thirty years later another novelist, Mr. E. M. Forster in Howard's End, showed signs of impatience with Swanage. He called it dull and talked of the "bourgeois little bay, which must have yearned all through the centuries for just such a watering-place as Swanage to be built on its margin." (The overworked word " bourgeois " is something of a literary nuisance. I suppose Mr Forster meant that the bay yearned to become "bourgeois," for it could hardly have been " bourgeois " at the time of the first formation of its geologically remarkable coast-line. Anyway this ,ris a grave libel on Swanage Bay, which supported the fishing and quarrying industries for so long and may even have been the scene of Alfred's naval victory over the Danes in 877—surely the least " bourge3is " of battles ?)
The Hand of Ethelberta and Howard's End are two novels that could hardly be more unlike in style and treatment, but they have this much in common—that the young heroines Ethelberta Petherwin and Margaret Schlegel both ruminate in Swanage on the advances made to them by elderly admirers, Lord Mountdere and Henry Wilcox, to whom they are eventually married. Unusual properties in the Swanage ozone may still await analysis in this connection. Moreover, both Ethelberta and Margaret, in the course of their strange courtships, go to the top of Nine Barrow Down and consider the wonderful panorama northward and southward ; Ethelberta rides on a donkey, while Margaret has the assistance of a pony-cart. It is an exhilarating expedition which might inspire youth to do almost anything, one would have thought, except embrace old age.
A few weeks ago I climbed Nine Barrow Down with a copy of the Penguin edition of Howard's End in my pocket, and as I sat at the top I enjoyed re-reading Mr. Forster's admirable description in Chapter XIX of the famous views. (Hardy's account is equally good, but I doubt if The Hand of Ethelberta can be bought, or is
ever likely to be bought, in a Penguin edition.) I looked northward over the valleys of the FrSine and the Stour, over the mud-flats of Poole Harbour and the red-brick villas of Bournemouth, and then —following the example of the characters in Howard's End— I crossed the ridge and looked southwards into the valley -in which Swanage stands, and over the final line of downs and out to sea. In the book Mrs. Munt quotes a local rhyme—" Bournemouth is, Poole was, and Swanage is to be the most important town of all and biggest of the three "—and Mr. Forster adopts and refines on this prophecy by referring to Swanage as "soon to be the most important town of all, and ugliest of the three." The forty years since Howard's End was published have falsified this prophecy, at least as regards size, for Poole now has about eight times and Bournemouth more than fifteen times the population of Swanage.
As! sat on the summit of Nine Barrow Down I felt much inclined to defend Swanage from its critics. 1 could not pretend that the little town lying below me looked particularly beautiful, but it had obviously retained more of the atmosphere that Hardy knew than some of its south-coast neighbours. I appreciated the main reason for this as I watched an old engine puffing clouds of cotton-wool smoke and pushing three carriages towards Swanage along the single line tforn Wareham. Simultaneously I could see the' veteran 'Bournemouth Queen' approaching the harbour over a very blue sea and I knew (though I could not hear them) that in a moment its signal bells would be tinkling and its paddles churning to a standstill as it made to tie up at the pier. Swanage owes its relative immunity from exploitation to its position at the end of the cul-de-sac of the hilly Purbeck peninsula. Happily, the ground is most unsuited to an aerodrome. So long as paddle-steamers and a single-line railway remain important links of communication, all the traffic on the two main roads—and there, is plenty of it—cannot entirely wreck Swanage's old-fashioned . charm.
Of course the "Knollsea " of the eighteen-seventies, with its inhabitants sharply divided into boatmen and quarriers, is a thing of the past. I doubt if anyone in Swanage now is making fishing his chief business, ,though, there is quite a brisk trade in lobsters and some demand for motor-boat trips in the summer. The decline of the stone trade has naturally upset a Swanage quarryman turned author, Mr. Eric Benfield, who feels that Purbeck stone has been sacrificed in the dubious cause of keeping Swanage "select." His interesting book Purbecf Shop includes a photograph of piles of stone in a yard on the bay—a sight that could be seen from the High Street until. about 1890—and Hardy writes of the "ponderous lighters" that came to take it away. A row of boarding-houses now covers the site of the -stone-yard. But this is only part of the story. I talked to Mr. George Hancock, a stalwart member of the quarrymen's guild, the Ancient Order of Purbeck Marblers (one of the oldest trade unions in the country), and he told me that the stone trade was looking up and that the chief obstacle to its expan- sion was the lack of apprentices to the craft. Since the First World War, he said, few of the local young men had been prepared to sacrifice their time for a year or so in order to reap later advantages, Most of the quarrying in Purbeck nowadays is done on the surface, which yields good stone for bird-baths and crazy-paving, but Mr. Hancock thought that underground working might be resumed if more men were available—and that this might happen if there was less demand for labour elsewhere.
The town shows scars of war damage, but the War Office depreda- tions at Tynham and Worbarrow, eight miles away, are no more than a mild annoyance to Swanage's visitors. At present not many are taking holidays there in the early part of the year, though in July and August the town is fairly full. It is a pity that the generosity of those successful Victorian contractors John Mowlem and George Burt—both natives of Swanage—did not run to a more substantial concert-hall-cum-public-library than the Mowlem Insti- tute (1863), which is badly out of date. Burt's chief energies went into the large fortress-like building at Durlston Head, where-visitors can get a good tea and admire his famous stone globe. He was a man with a keen eye for oddments that might adorn his native town, and thanks to him Swanage possesses the Wellington memorial bell tower that used to stand on the south side of London Bridge ; the tpwn hall enjoys the former facade of the Mercers' Hall, Cheapside;
granite chips discarded from the Albert Memorial are built into the wall of Purbeck House ; and lamp-posts are inscribed "St. George's, Hanover Square" (the sort of thing that tempts one subconsciously to steal the hotel spoons). Mr. Burt was ,clearly a most engaging Victorian.
It must be recorded regretfully that the descendants of Ethelberta Petherwin's donkey are today taking children for very short rides on the sands at exorbitant prices. Whether young heroines are still contemplating marriage to elderly widowers at Swanage, I .don't know. But at the church in which Ethelberta was married at the ungodly hour of 8.30 a.m. to Lord Mountclere I saw the Bishop of Salisbury arriving on foot on a tour of his diocese. You never quite know what is going to happen in the Isle of Purbeck.
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