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Mr Russell’s Weymouth Holiday – 1840

Dec 21st, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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In the summer of 1840 Mr T.P. Russell decided to spend a month at the seaside resort of Weymouth. He brought with him from Gloucester, where he was a banker, his wife, two daughters, brother-in-law and a maid. Mr Russell was 65 and suffered from rheumatism; his wife was 56 and his two daughters were in their early thirties. He kept a diary of their month-long holiday at the seaside resort made popular by George III.

They departed from Gloucester in their own carriage. Along the way a small repair to the carriage was necessary and they spent a night at Bath, after sending their maid on separately with luggage. In the morning the family was on the road again, stopping at Frome to change horses, then onto Bruton and Sherborne, passing through many cloth manufacturing villages on the way. Mr Russell thought Sherborne “large but ill-built.” By 5 o’clock the family group had arrived at Luce’s Hotel in Augusta Place, Weymouth, having passed through Dorchester, which Mr Russell decided was “better constructed” than Sherborne.

The family had dinner at the Hotel at a cost of one guinea, including tip. Then followed a stroll along the Esplanade to the Alexandra Gardens where they listened to a band of fourteen Fusiliers.

Lodgings for their stay were found at 6 York Buildings; “clean and sufficient Commodious but dear at fifty shillings a week” thought Mr Russell. The family spent the morning buying supplies with help from Mr Thomas, who kept a library on the Esplanade. He had been recommended to Mr Russell and “proved most helpful”. Mr Russell commented “We found the town larger than we expected, with very good shops and a good market, fish plentiful and at a low price. The baths, however, were a disappointment, being poor.”

The next day Mr Russell took his first warm sea bath. The rest of the family walked along the beach and watched the yachts in the bay. The weather was showery and blustery but this did not deter the family taking a trip in a rowing boat followed by a walk to Radipole Spa where they could smell the Sulphur Spring. The family made an expedition to Wyke, “a pretty rural village with a handsome church”. It was mid-August and corn was being cut.

The family expressed satisfaction with their lodgings and the “cheerful” situation but there was some disappointment as Mr Russell commented: “the place does not fill as much as we expected, the fashion of it has partly gone”.

Mr Russell was suffering from rheumatic pain and did not accompany the family to church on Sunday. The weather was stormy and Mr Russell chose instead to write letters and visit Mr Thomas’ library. The next day the family could have gone to the local races but decided to sail out to Portland, where they saw a large ship bound for Sydney and a brig en route for America.

A few days later they again set off for Portland and found that no work was being done in the quarries as the men were on strike for higher wages. Mr Russell thought the sheep on Portland were “poor”. He was very interested in the modern castle, probably Pennsylvannia, but he found the island generally desolate: “a few miserable villages, scattered on sterile land”, was how he summed up Portland.

Mr Russell continued to take warm sea baths but they did nothing to improve the rheumatic pain. One of his daughters swam in the sea and the family visited Osmington about which Mr Russell said: “a very beautiful retired village very neat, rural and clean, with roses in full bloom”. The church (which one of his daughters sketched) was “remarkably clean and neat”. The family saw the hillside chalk image of King George on his horse. On another trip to Osmington Mills, prawns and lobsters were sampled. At dinner one evening they tried a fish called “pipers, ugly with a large head”; it was eaten baked and stuffed.

The maid joined them on their next boat trip and they all watched men unloading stone for an extension to the pier. Other days passed with them taking walks but because of his rheumatism Mr Russell had to travel by bath chair, which cost him one shilling and sixpence a time; his baths cost three shillings.

The family returned home to Gloucester on the 8th of September by way of Sherborne, Castle Cary and Clifton. On the whole they had enjoyed their stay by the sea and left with some regret.

Mr Russell’s diary concludes with a breakdown of costs; after all he was a banker. The journey to Weymouth cost fourteen pounds, eight shillings and ten pence, the return journey seventeen pounds, one shilling and sixpence. The subscription to the rooms for the month was ten shillings; the boatmen charged four shillings a trip. Four weeks lodgings with linen came to twenty-two pounds and a piano was hired at a cost of thirteen shillings and nine shillings was spent on wine. The total cost for the month was almost eighty three pounds and the diary makes clear this includes the maid, although how much of a holiday the trip was for her, we can only speculate about.

Portland: its 18th Century Customs

Oct 23rd, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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During the 18th century Portland was truly an island. Its three thousand acres composed entirely of Jurassic rock assured a bleak existence for the inhabitants: a close-knit, hard-working community with their own ways and customs and, to the chagrin of the authorities at Weymouth, their own interpretation of the laws of salvage.

Gavelkind, a form of land tenure from Anglo-Saxon times, had been supplanted elsewhere in England but here it was still used. With the equal division of land at each generation the inevitable consequence for the social structure was to squeeze out anything like a middle-class and cause a general levelling down which ensured the resulting poverty was equally shared.

An unusual custom on the island concerning matrimonial arrangements almost guaranteed there would be no marriages without issue. On Portland, women selected their mates and entered into marriage only after pregnancy was confirmed.  John Smeaton (1724-1792), a civil engineer, tells us in his book published in 1791: Narrative of the Buildings and a Description of the Construction of the Eddystone Lighthouse with Stone how very proud his London born foreman was of the fact that illegitimacy was unheard of and assured his employer: “there was but one child on record that had been born a bastard in the compass of 150 years”. Failure to achieve pregnancy “after a competent time of courtship” meant “that they are not destined by Providence for each other” and the woman was “free to seek another suitor as if she had been left a widow or that nothing had happened”. A cursory glance through the baptism register confirms this claim.

It was in the 17th century that the export of fine building stone got under way but according to John Smeaton it was “shipped in the rough…to be sawn and fair wrought to the particular purpose where wanted”. Stone quarrying brought only unskilled lowly paid work for the Portland men, a situation further aggravated as spoil heaps of rock and sub-soil littered the island reducing the already limited areas available for growing crops and produce. Skilled stone masons came to the island after 1739.

The islanders had little contact with the rest of the country other than with the villagers of Wyke Regis from whom they would buy supplies, share fishing grounds and unite to thwart the Weymouth Custom Officers in matters of wrecking and salvage, an activity we will look at in greater detail in another article.

Access to the island was by a rope-drawn ferry boat, by all accounts a hazardous journey. The island was first joined to the mainland in 1839 by a toll bridge over the Fleet to Wyke Regis and Weymouth and by the railway in 1865. The present causeway was opened in 1985.

Lerrets and Fishing Off Chesil Beach

Nov 21st, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The Lerret is a traditional Dorset boat designed specifically for use off the Chesil Beach. They have been around for at least four centuries; David Carter found one mention of a Lerret in the minutes of Weymouth Council of 1615:  “…Mr Mayor J. Roy also furthered Harbour Works eg 2 Lerretts to save the towne boatt from castinge awaye £0.7s.4d…”

Alas, in the name of ‘progress’ and in common with many of the old ways, they are disappearing. In 2010 a new boat was built and launched at Lyme Regis but other than that David Carter, who has made a study of the boats, tells us he believes only four still exist: Pleasure, Blessing, Blessing Two and Silver Star. (David has sent us a photo of Silver Star which we have placed in the photo section).

Lerrets were used for fishing off the Cheseil Beach and are known to have been owned by fishermen from Portland, Wyke, Chickerell, Fleet, Langton Herring and Abbotsbury. Information from Weymouth Council suggests that in the early years of the 20th century over 50 Lerrets were in regular use by fishermen from the area. We have some of the names and the owners: Agnes (Before 1914); Bunger (Fred Sergent); Cauliflower (Sid Huddy); Dawn; Fearless; Girl Pat; Lark; Linnet; May Queen; Ping Pong (F & E Sergent); Queen Mary; Rescue (Jim Burlage); Scarisbrick (Henry Pitman); Speedwell and Twilight (George Morris); Bluebell and Comrades (both owned by the landlord of the Swan Inn, at Wyke, Tom Hatcher); Dauntless (George Randall); Ena (known to have been built in 1926); Lucky Liza (Robert Denman); Mackerell; Nellie and Silver Star (Fred and Toby Randall); Plum (John Randall); Vera( a 19th century boat).

At first glance a Lerret appears to be like any other large wooden rowing boat. But look again. Where is the stern and why is the bottom flatter than a conventional boat? Approximately sixteen feet in length with a beam of between five and six feet, there are three main thwarts across the boat, which would usually be rowed by four men seated on the middle and forward seats, although in some circumstances six oars would be used. Lerrets are double-ended with a high stern post to enable them to be launched off the steep Chesil beach and hauled up onto the beach. Their wide beam and unusually flat bottom makes them very buoyant and they will survive all but the most extreme seas.

The oarsmen will pull double-handed, but the rowers on one side pull stroke alternately with those on the other side. Each oar has a block of wood fixed to the loom by spikes and lashing, this block is known as the copse and it has a hole through it to receive the iron thowle pin, and it is fixed to the gunwale of the boat so standing about five inches above it.
 
The mackerel move to deeper water by the end of August and soon the weather and seas change from their benign summer ways and will become very ill tempered;  this is the signal for the Lerrets to be ‘beached in’ for the winter. The boats will be pulled to the top of the beach where it is flat, a hollow is made in the beach and the Lerret ‘sunk’ into it, secured with ropes and boxes of pebbles.

William Bilke will be remembered as one of the Wyke fishermen who one day netted 63,000 mackerel off the Chesil Beach. Despite his success on that trip, like most other fishermen in the area he would have had to find other employment as well as fishing to make a living – in William’s case labouring.

He was born in Wyke Regis in 1876; his father, also William, being a fisherman. His grandfather, another William, was a shoemaker but his grandmother, Mary, was the daughter of Joseph Summers, a fisherman. When her husband died in 1865 Mary Bilke went into business as a general carter and by 1871 her eldest son William (24) and Edward (15), his brother, were established fishermen. At that time boys as young as eight could be found helping the men on the beach.

In 1875 William Bilke married Eliza Hallett, they named their first child, who arrived in 1876, William John, and like his father and uncle he was fishing by the time he was 15. In 1898 William married Janetta Critchell and by 1911 the couple had three sons and two daughters. William John Bilke had a long life; he passed away in 1963 aged 87 years; he was buried at All Saints, Wyke Regis. William was also known for shrimping or prawning in the Fleet Lagoon. He would spend hours at a time raking along with a shrimp net in water up to his waist as he worked with the ebbing tide, but he will forever be remembered for his part in landing the big catch.
 
Eli Hatcher was born at Osmington in 1827 and came to Wyke Regis in the 1840’s to find a bride and employment. He married Elizabeth Roberts late in 1849 and became the landlord of the Swan Inn, where he and his sons would have come into contact with the fishermen of Wyke. Indeed his son Thomas who took over as landlord at the Swan in the 1890’s described himself as an innkeeper and fisherman and is known to have owned two Lerrets.

The Lerret has earned its place in Dorset’s maritime history. Primarily a fishing boat, their crews have often risked their own lives launching into challenging seas to rescue mariners in difficulty on the turbulent seas off our coast.

There are photos of Lerrets in the photo gallery.

The Trial of Augustine Elliott

Oct 3rd, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Two men appeared at the Summer Assizes in Dorchester on the 15th of July 1749 to answer for their part in the plundering of the Dutch vessel Hope when it ran ashore on the Chesil on the 16th of January 1748, and resulted in ten days of lawlessness on the Chesil.  One of those men was Augustine Elliott; we do not have the name of the other man.

Augustine Elliott was a Portland man. The son of John and Joan Elliott, he was baptised on the 25th of April 1696 and on the 4th of April 1716 he married Joan Mitchell. The couple had a daughter, Edith, baptised on the 15th of February 1717 but we haven’t found at Portland any other children from the marriage.
 
The charge against him was: “Feloniously stealing and carrying away ten ounces of gold and twenty ounces of silver from the ship called the Hope, the property of Hendrick Hogenbergh, merchant of Amsterdam, and others.”

Counsel for the prosecution said in his opening remarks: “My Lord and gentlemen of the jury, I am counsel for the Crown against the prisoner at the bar who stands indicted and charged with a crime of a very heinous nature. Considered in itself it is horrid and barbarous, contrary to the first principle of reason and impressions of humanity. Religion most severely threatens and condemns it. A crime it is which the laws of all civilised societies most strictly punish; a crime in its consequences highly prejudicial to the honour and commercial interest of the kingdom in general. And such in every respect as cries aloud to public justice to lift an avenging hand.”

Counsel went on to describe the conditions at sea and the lack of light from the Portland lighthouse that conspired to cause the Hope to run ashore and said of the people who went to the beach from Portland, Wyke and Weymouth “these people I’m sorry to say it, came not with dispositions of men, but with those of beasts of prey, They came for rapine and plunder.” Counsel said of Augustine Elliott he was “accustomed to prey and ravages of this kind”  and described him as one of two men  who led and organised the men on the beach into one “merciless battalion”  and then sub –divided them into groups of twenty. The prosecution claimed: “In vain did the captain and his company in faltering foreign accents as well as they could “No wreck. The goods ours. Bring it to we and we will pay for it” – meaning the salvage.”

The court was told: “it seems the pillaging parties threw all they could snatch into one heap, for the security of which the prisoner at the bar (Elliott) was posted – as commander of an armed select party. As soon as the reflux of the sea had made the ship accessible, the scattered bands were again united – in a hostile manner armed with cutlasses, clubs, hooks and such like. They marched down to the ship swearing it was a wreck and if not so, they could make it a wreck. Shocking to relate!…the injury of strangers in distress is adding barbarity to iniquity and committing an act exceedingly sinful in the sight of both God and man.”

We learn from the court hearing that the captain with some of his crew made their way off the beach and took the goods they had managed to save to Fleet House, where they had hoped the King’s officers would help them. It seems they were disappointed. Counsel claimed in court: “They came indeed, but basely deserted their duty. Their behaviour was despicably timorous and infamously negligent.”

The description of the events to the court reached the point where there were thousands of people on the beach engaged in plunder when the forces of law and order determined to step in. Three Justices of the Peace with a well-armed group of men finally halted the wreckers and proceeded to search from house to house through the hamlets, villages and towns making many people surrender their ill-gotten gains to the agents of the ship’s owners. About £25,000 worth of goods were retrieved.

Elliott, it was claimed, was the principal organiser and the court was told “He was the muster-master, the treasurer, and divider of the prey amongst his plundering regiment.”

Captain Corneliz came to give evidence but was shy of saying how much his cargo was worth, saying only that it was rich and worth over £30,000. His command of English was not very good.

Next up was Bartholomew Cooper, officer of Customs at Portland. He told the court: “Early Monday morning I heard a loud talking in Chesil parish in Portland that a ship was on shore. I got up, but the thing being doubtful, I went and fed my horse with oats at a stable which was at some distance.” Copper was not a very co-operative witness and Counsel for the prosecution had to question him hard to get him to answer any question directly; we might be excused from thinking Cooper was on Augustine Elliott’s side.

It appears that once Cooper had determined there was a ship wreck, he and two other officers of Customs rode along the beach. Under questioning Cooper eventually told the court that there were at least 2,000 people digging and turning over the beach, the ship was pretty much dashed to pieces and he added “My business of surveying would not let me stay long.”

Further evidence was provided to the court that plainly supported Elliott. Another officer of Customs, Benjamin Roper, an officer in Portland quarries, told how he was at Schollard’s public house at Chesiltown when a great number of people clamoured for a division of the loot. Elliott, said Roper, was for keeping the money together till the owners called for it: “But within doors they insisted on sharing the money, as I was told, or else they would burn the house.”

Another witness, John Comben, gave similar testimony. He said “when bags were found they were hoisted on his horse and taken to a boat on the shore of the Fleet…” He said he did not see Elliott in the boat “but saw a man at some distance who mid or mid not be the prisoner. The Captain, I mind, did ask me for a bag but then I had none, The Tuesday after there were a great many of Weymouth, Wyke and Portland at Chesiltown to have the money divided. I did not see the prisoner at first myself but after I did and he said he was for keeping the money together till called for by the owners. But many threatened him, if the money were not divided, and accordingly, it was the next morning – it was £7 a piece.”

Elliott’s defence Counsel took this argument further. “We have several sufficient witnesses to prove,” he said, “that the prisoner in the whole affair acted an open and public spirited part. What he assisted in carrying away home was with an intention to save and not destroy; to preserve for the owners and not to steal and keep from them. On this generous fixed principle he not only acted himself but to his utmost laboured to bring the company he was concerned with to behave in the same humane and honest manner.”

The defence produced a receipt for the money Elliott was charged with stealing, it had been handed to the ship’s agents. The prosecution suggested the money had been brought in as an afterthought by his friends four days after Elliott was committed to stand trial and this was a ruse to mitigate the charges against him.

John Hutchins’ report of the trial reveals the defence had a second strand: arguing the Dutch were pirates who had argued amongst themselves over the division of their bounty and then deliberately ran the ship on shore and deserted her for fear of being taken and punished. The two argued that the Dutch had taken the goods from the Spaniards, who had bought and paid for them; thus they maintained it was lawful to plunder pirates.

Elliott’s trial lasted six hours and thirty minutes and the jury brought in a verdict of “NOT GUILTY”

Afterwards, Judge Baron Heneage Legge, commented: “As the nature of this in itself, and the penalties of the law, have been fully and plainly open in the preceding trials, so I am strongly inclined to hope these proceedings might have their proper design and influence, in causing crimes of this sort to cease amongst us.”

An anonymous reporter at the time wrote a layman’s summing up, saying: “As at a moderate computation 10,000 from all parts of the county, of farmers, tradesmen, labourers with one Lord of the Manor, have been concerned either in carrying away part of the property of this ship themselves, or in purchasing the same off them that did so; it is therefore far from being any matter of wonder to find the jury under a strong disposition to favour such, as were tried for offences of this kind.”

January 1748 – Ten Days of Mayhem on the Chesil

Sep 22nd, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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On the 17th of April 1747 the ship Hope set sail from Amsterdam for Curacao, then belonging to the Dutch. She would sail on to the Spanish Main to sell her cargo to the Spaniards, who, because of the war with England, were in some distress in the American provinces. In command of the ship was Captain Boon Corneliz, who had at his disposal a crew of 73 men and 30 guns, although on the outward voyage only 21 guns were mounted ready for action against pirates or the English Navy, should they seek to engage. The ship was owned by the Dutch merchant firm Hendrick Hogenberg and Co, who had loaded the ship with cloth and bale goods.

Business done and nearing the end of her voyage home the Hope of Amsterdam was off Portland on the 16th of January 1748, having sailed through storms and tempestuous seas the previous fourteen days. All 30 of the ships guns were mounted, perhaps because the cargo of gold, jewels and other valuable commodities it was bringing home was, by the most conservative estimate, worth at least £50,000. Its guns would have been sufficient to fight off any attacks from pirates but against the elements they were no help and off Portland that night Captain Corneliz and his crew needed all the help they could get.
 
No light was visible from the Portland lighthouse, perhaps because of the mist or possibly due to the neglect of duty by those responsible. It was about one or two o’clock in the morning and very dark when the Hope ran ashore on the Chesil beach. When she struck land the mast fell with the force of impact, the ship shattered into three parts. The upper deck was thrown upon a ridge of pebbles and the cabin was buried in the sands; the hull was never found and was thought to have rolled back into the sea. Amazingly, all of the men aboard got safely to the shore.

Word of what had happened quickly spread. A mob soon flocked on to the Chesil from the adjacent villages and from all parts of Dorset and the neighbouring counties. The men of Portland, Wyke and Weymouth were first on the scene and seem to have had a well rehearsed drill for dealing with these events. They formed themselves into a body with colours to secure the goods that floated along the coast. They split into groups of 20, which united as necessary under a leader. A report written latter suggests there were between three and four thousand local men employed in this endeavour and as others arrived from farther afield the numbers on the beach swelled to several thousand.

For ten days the mob held the beach. One report described “a scene of unheard of riot, violence and barbarity.” Another report described the scene thus: “a crowd swarmed about the water’s edge grubbing for gold, tearing up the shingle with their bare nails, fighting over gleaming coins like starved wolves.”

On January 18th the crew set-off for Holland, except for the Captain, his First-mate and another officer. The Captain was forced to leave the beach; the officers of Customs and the Justice of the Peace officers were overawed by the mob that carried on digging and turning-up the beach. On January 20th several bags of money were found six feet under the pebbles.

After ten days three neighbouring Justices of the Peace with a body of armed men dispersed the mob. An inquiry was held and the authorities set about tracing the possessors of the plundered goods, who were compelled to hand over to the agent of the ship’s owners gold, jewellery and other goods with a value of between 25 and 30,000 pounds. They were allowed something for salvage rights.

Some men were committed to prison and two men appeared before Judge Baron Heneage Legge at the assizes in Dorchester on July 15th 1749, to answer for their actions but they were acquitted. The jury accepted their rather far fetched claim that the Dutch were pirates who had argued amongst themselves over the division of their bounty and then deliberately ran the ship on shore and deserted her for fear of being taken and punished. The two argued that the Dutch had taken the goods from the Spaniards, who had bought and paid for them; thus they maintained it was lawful to plunder pirates. The jury also took into account that only two men were before them when all manner of disorders were committed by many of the reported several thousand men who were on the beach for those ten lawless days and nights.

At the time there were stories of men with “bulging pockets” being robbed and strangled on the beach but there is nothing to confirm this. Men did die on the beach but from the affects of the extreme cold aggravated by high winds.

There are modern day examples of similar occurrences. In 2007 the Napoli, on a voyage from Belgium to Portugal, ran aground off the Devon coast. Several containers loaded with consumer goods floated ashore. Hundreds of people flocked to the scene to see what they could get, some leaving with BMW motorcycles worth thousands. The authorities had to point out that people removing goods and not properly declaring them risked fines of up to £2,500 but this did not deter many people intent on seeing what they could get their hands on.

The Battle for Weymouth

Apr 14th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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It was a cold and miserable day that greeted the people of Weymouth as theyawoke on the morning of March 3rd, 1645. They would have seen the Parliament Navy’s ship the ‘James’ anchored in the bay, dark clouds hanging low over it. Soon after daybreak Captain William Batten, Vice-Admiral of the Parliament Navy, came ashore and together with his officers marched straight to the Nothe; on the way he was joined by William Sydenham, the Parliamentary Governor and his garrison officers. Many of the battle fatigued half starved men of the town trailed along behind them through their ruined town.
 
The gallows loomed large in everyone’s view summoning John Mills , who had been the Town Constable and Captain John Cade a Royalist sea captain, and Walter Bond, a local tailor. All three were charged with treachery. Mills and Cade were hanged but the penitent tailor, described as being “full of confession and sorrow “, was reprieved and returned to Marshallsea, the prison within the Nothe fort.  Another man did not wait to be dragged through the streets to meet his end, choosing to hang himself. No-one knew his name but he was thought to be an “Irish rebel – a native Papist”. Fabian Hodder one of the instigators of the plot to secure the town for the king, was not hanged; he was in prison at Poole.  Hodder survived and following the Restoration became a member of the Corporation of Melcombe Regis.

By Christmas 1644 there were few men in Weymouth who supported the Royalist cause; indeed Weymouth had little to thank either the King or Cromwell for. Fabian Hodder was a prominent merchant in the town, and was plotting with Sir William Hastings, Royalist Governor of Portland, to take Weymouth for the king.

The plan was for Portlanders to attack along the beach road while cavalry under Sir Lewis Dyves, Commander in Dorset for the King, would attack the town’s inland defences. Hodder, Mills, Cade and other Royalists in Weymouth would rise-up when the attacks started at midnight on February 9th 1645, but Hodder found he had over-estimated the support for the king.  He went about the town offering men £5 if they would join him and those that took the money were made to swear an oath: “You shall swear by the Holy Trinity that you will conceal the intended plot”.  The password for the royalist conspirators within the town was Crabchurch and they were told to wear a white handkerchief on their arm.

It had been a hard winter but militarily a quiet one. Peter Ince, the Minister appointed by Parliament, wrote: “In the beginning of February we were in as sweet and quiet security as any garrison in the Kingdom. No enemy near us but one at Portland, and they not very considerable, being about 300 or 400 men”.

Fabian Hodder’s wife Anne wrote the letter that was sent to Sir Lewis Dyves at Sherborne and it was another woman, a widow, (Elizabeth Wall), who undertook the dangerous mission to deliver it to Sherborne, a distance of some nineteen miles.

Battles rarely proceed according to plan and this proved to be no exception. John Cade visited Fabian Hodder just four hours before midnight and was told Sir Lewis Dyves and his cavalry would attack at midnight. Earlier at a church service on Portland the islanders and the King’s troops were told to be at Portland Castle at five o’clock. This was going to be a two pronged attack: one along what was then a quiet country road and the second group were to move by boat to the pier under the Nothe guided in by Walter Bond. Marching along the beach road the Portlanders were met at ‘The Passage’ (there was no bridge) by John Dry, a Weymouth tanner, who led them to the Chapel Fort on the heights of Chapelhay.

Amongst the Parliamentarians within the fort, most of whom were asleep; there was more than one man who had taken Hodder’s money. The men of Portland attacked from the rear and from the harbour but within the hour the Roundheads counter attacked but failed to re-take the Chapel Fort. It was here that Major Francis Sydenham lost his life – he was the Governor’s brother.

Chapel Fort commanded the harbour, the town and much of the Bay. Nothe Fort and a smaller fort at Bincleaves were soon captured. Parliamentary troops still remained in Weymouth and suffered from the Royalist guns which fired upon them from the heights of Chapelhay.
 
The attack by the Portland men was the only attack that night. Dyves did not keep his promise to march on Sunday.  It was not until the following day that Dyves’ 1,500 horse and foot battled their way into Weymouth forcing the Roundheads to retreat to Melcombe, raising the drawbridge between the two towns as they left.

Two miles away at Radipole Meadow, Mr Wood, Curate of Sutton Poyntz and about thirty other men, most of them armed only with cudgels, had waited all night for the arrival of the King’s cavalry.  Brought before a Parliament Council of War, they pleaded “We waited and went home”. They were fortunate.

From the Chapel Fort the Royalist guns thundered down on around 900 Roundheads trapped in Melcombe surrounded by more than 4,000 Royalists. Thatched houses were set alight as fire balls, bolts and bars rained down on the town. It seems William Sydenham might have been close to surrendering when he said “Let us cease this useless burning”.  The King’s man, Dyves, replied “We scorn to parley with you.” After that exchange Sydenham sent out a patrol that burnt eight more houses and a Royalist ship in the harbour.

A jubilant Dyves arrogantly certain that this time the Royalists would hold Weymouth and confidently expected to capture all of Melcombe, but could the tide of events be about to turn? Vice Admiral Batten brought two Parliamentary ships into the bay and landed two hundred of the toughest fighting men in the Dorset campaign and Lieut. Colonel James Haymes arrived with one hundred men.

On his way from mid-Dorset was Lord Goring, the King’s Lieutenant in Hampshire; with him 3,000 horse, 1,500 foot and an artillery train. On February 23rd Goring unleashed this overwhelming force against the 900 Roundheads in Melcombe but Sydenham did not surrender.

William Sydenham’s men captured twenty-five Royalist cavalry on February 25th. The Cavalier Dyves watched from his vantage point high above the town at Chapelhay and ordered 100 Foot to rescue the prisoners. The hard pressed Sydenham countered by sending 150 musketeers to attack the Chapel Fort. These men were led by Major Wilson and Captain Langford and to the heights of Chapelhay they climbed, stormed the fort taking more than 100 officers, soldiers and “some perfidious townsmen”.

The Royalists had held Chapel Fort for 17 days. With their superior numbers it is surprising they were beaten but the facts of their defeat suggest a lack of enthusiasm amongst the troops, perhaps aggravated by an arrogant and cavalier style of leadership.  On February 27th Lord Goring unsuccessfully fought to regain the fort and suffered heavy losses.  The following day Dyves and Goring heard that Sir William Waller was marching towards Weymouth. Goring withdrew his men to Wyke where his they rested while his wounded were patched-up before marching off to Taunton. The Royalist troops holed-up in the smaller forts of Nothe and Bincleaves – which had not been attacked –appear to have left in a hurry leaving their colours and most of their guns.

At the end of all the fighting the people of Weymouth and Melcombe were left ragged, hungry and filthy. Their towns in ruins, the narrow streets lined with their demolished homes and burnt timbers were scattered all about the place.

“My soldiers, Horse and Foot, have all had very hard service of it day and night. I shall entreat you to write to the Parliament for something for their encouragement; they have neither money nor clothes, and yet unwearied in thisbusiness”, wrote William Sydenham.

A Natural Wonder Double Bill: the Chesil and the Fleet

Apr 5th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Even for a county teeming with many natural and historical wonders, Chesil Beach is in a class of its own and something of an enigma. All hypothesising about its origin has been unable to explain why similar offshore spits have not been deposited elsewhere, though tradition has it that the Chesil was laid down in toto during a very severe storm one night. But why should the sea only deposit its pebbles here? Though it is unlikely the legend could be true, the sea became impounded behind the shingle bar, forming the unique ribbon-like lagoon known as The Fleet.

It was the Saxons who gave us the word ‘Chesil’ meaning shingle. At Portland the end of the beach is well defined, but exactly where the western end should be placed has been a matter of dispute. Some authorities maintain that it ends as far westwards as West Bay (to include Burton Beach and Burton Bradstock); while others hold that it ends at Cogden Beach between Burton Bradstock and West Bexington. There is however, agreement that part of the beach is east of West Bexington, and that there the Fleet is at its most spectacular.

Certainly amazing, though less controversial, are the fascinating facts about this freak of nature. The Chesil is 18 miles long between West Bay and Portland, while from West Bexington to Portland it is 13 miles long. In reality the beach is not built up in one terrace but two, against which the waves break upon the lower and discharge their spray over the upper. At its highest the pebble ridge is 45 feet above mean sea level and 200 yards wide to the Fleet. It has been estimated that the beach contains 50 million tons of pebbles, and that if these were packed into the largest lorries permitted on British roads the convoy would stretch from Dorchester to Perth in Australia! Chesil pebbles were collected by the defenders of Maiden Castle, to use as sling-stones against the Roman army when it attacked that hill fort in 43 CE.

The shingle has a distinct gradation along the beach’s length from west to east, with fine creamy-white oolitic limestone pebbles at the west end, known as pea gravel, to large grey cobbles of Portland limestone at the east end. This indicates that the Chesil originated as an east-to-west deposition of long shore drift and could not therefore have been created as a spontaneous storm deposit as folklore implies. It is this gradation of size and texture that gives the shingle bar such a distinctive sound and feel to the soles of the feet. Many have been proud to be able to complete the end-to-end energy-sapping slog that deadens rhythm and makes ankle injury an ever-present risk. 

Fishermen and smugglers have long been able to tell upon which part of the beach they landed after nightfall by the size and feel of the pebbles in their hands. From early times Abbotsbury fishermen have trawled for mackerel off the beach, catching them in seine nets. Daniel Defore writes of these mackerel catches as being so abundant in his day that the fish could be sold onshore at one hundred for just a penny.

No less awesome than the Chesil’s curious facts is its history of notorious savagery towards ships and seamen. Immediately offshore for example, there exists an immensely powerful undertow that can drown even a strong swimmer in only three feet of water five feet from the waterline, and rough seas can throw up fresh shingle banks that can persist for years. During storms the undertow can generate a sucking noise that, it has been said, can be heard in Dorchester. Author Meade Falkner in Moonfleet described how this current caused two fictitious smugglers to fight for their lives in water only three feet deep.

During the age of sail the beach was especially feared. Eastbound ships were in serious difficulties if a storm blew them north-eastwards towards Portland, and there is a sharp shallow water reef that can rip the keels off deep-draughted ships. The combination of the beach’s steep seaward gradient and the underwater current often resulted in shipwrecked passengers and crew being drowned almost in reach of rescuers.

But in 1752 it was said that all of Abbotsbury – including the vicar – were ‘thieves, smugglers and plunderers of wrecks’. In 1822 a Swyre man, Richard Bishop, was jailed for “unlawfully making a light on the sea coast” suggesting that he was signalling to smugglers.

In 1795 seven ships of Admiral Christian’s fleet were lost with two hundred crewmen dead. Then in 1824, during a great storm known locally thereafter as “The Outrage” four ships were lost with all hands (but amazingly the sloop Ebenezer was thrown bodily onto the ridge by a wave, from where it could be re-floated on the Fleet and towed to Portland for a refit). This same gale blew the sea half a mile inland, destroying Fleet village and church before leaving in its wake a hundred bloated corpses on the Chesil shingle. Another storm in 1838 cast five ships onto the shingle bank where they were dashed to pieces, their crews drowned to the last man. A French trawler was wrecked on the shingle bar in 1963.

But the beach has also been the setting for two other non-tragic curiosities. There is a story that  in 1757 a mermaid was washed ashore. It is recorded that many people saw her remains, but they generated little excitement as she was supposed to have been no beauty. Then on May 21st, 1802 the crew of the trawler Greyhound landed a huge fish over 26 feet long, 15 feet in girth and weighing 15 tons; it required fourteen horses to drag it ashore. As this monster was positively not a basking shark, it was more likely a whale shark – as this is the largest fish in the sea – while the “mermaid” may have been a manatee or “sea cow” an animal which certainly could be mistaken for an ‘ugly mermaid’ by people who had never before seen one.

The Fleet is eight miles long, though only seven-and-a-half to fifteen feet deep. At its widest it is 900 yards and just 70 yards at its narrowest point and connected to the sea by a channel less that a hundred yards long known as Small Mouth. The lagoon can be walked beside on the seaward side by the fit and dedicated who can then return along the north side on the Dorset Coast Path. Plants typical of shingle beds grow along the margins such as sea holly, sea campion, yellow horned poppy and sea kale, together with beds of reeds and eelgrass. The Small Mouth has the effect of restricting the flow of seawater, making the Fleet brackish, though towards Abbotsbury the salinity is reduced still further by the input of fresh water from streams draining into the lagoon.

Ecologically the result has been the creation of a richly diverse habitat, making the lagoon a premier nature reserve and SSSI encompassed within the World Heritage Jurassic Coast. A hundred species of plants have so far been identified, and many of these, particularly the eelgrass, provide food for a hundred and fifty species of birds, particularly wildfowl, waders, ducks and geese. The water supports a population of twenty species of fish.

All in all it is not just the shingle that can impress the visitor to Chesil Beach, but the bombardment of the senses from stimuli ranging from the smell of seaweed to the cry of gulls.  And there is also that stark contrast between each side of the walker’s field of perception: to one side the open sea; to the other a marshland thicket. Truly, this must make Chesil Beach a very peculiar and special place.

Collision off Portland – 1877

Mar 3rd, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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This was a night when gale force winds lashed the Jurassic cliffs of Dorset’s coastline, a night when the sea thundered ashore on Dorset’s beaches, and a night when lifeboats saw action but still there were vessels lost and numerous casualties. Furthermore, this was a night when many seafarers sailed their last voyage. And it was a night when the decision to head for shelter or go bare masted into the storm would be critical – and a night when good Captains earned their rank.

Storms ushered in September of 1877 and for seafarers in the waters off the Dorset coast the nights of September 10th and 11th were very difficult.  A French fishing vessel crashed aground on Chesil Beach, all hands lost. Many local Chesil fishing boats were smashed up on the beach. But the biggest loss came as two large vessels both at the start of long deep sea voyages out of London collided off Portland. 

Ploughing down the Channel and in the charge of a pilot was the iron ship Avalanche, her Captain, E. Williams was well thought of by his ship’s owners, Shaw, Savill and Company. He was a seaman of great experience: he and his ship were much favoured by colonists who regularly visited or traded with England. The crew and officers numbered thirty four, to which could be added a steward and twelve foreign seamen along with emigrants and other passengers making a total of about one hundred souls on board the Avalanche, which was headed for New Zealand. Built three years earlier, the ship was rated A1 at Lloyds and was of some 1,000 tons.

The wooden ship Forest of Windsor bound for Sandy Hook near New York in ballast, had departed London at about the same time as the Avalanche. The ship, about 200 ft and nearly 1,500 tons, was built at Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1873; she was owned by Churchill and Sons and was also registered A1 at Lloyds. Her master was Captain Ephraim Lockheart.

On September 10th the wind backed, blowing strongly from the south-west causing huge seas in the Race off Portland. The following evening, with the tide under her, Avalanche sailed close in to Portland Bill in an attempt to steer clear of the tremendous seas churned up by the Race. Rain kept her from the view of the lighthouse-keepers and others watching the sea from the shore.

Captain Lockheart on the Forest of Windsor had been leading his hard stretched crew of just twenty-one men continuously through the turbulent seas encountered during the passage down the Channel. He caught only a glimpse of the cliffs off Portland through the rain. Both vessels hidden from each other by a wall of rain were racing through this turbulent vortex of water, their masters unknowingly heading directly towards each other. 

At half-past nine on the evening of Tuesday, September 11th with no warning, the Forest of Windsor suddenly tore into Avalanche. The ship foundered and all her crew and passengers were lost to the sea within minutes with the exception of the Third Officer, John Sherrington, and two seamen who against all the odds stacked against them managed to get on board the Forest of Windsor. Two emigrant families with ten children between them were amongst those lost.

The Forest of Windsor began to fill with water but remained upright long enough for attempts to be made to launch her boats. Violent squalls of wind and high seas swamped four of the boats but one, manned by Captain Lockheart, his chief mate and John Sherrington from the Avalanche, and nine others was able to get away before the Forest of Windsor capsized.

Peculiar to the Portland area is a fishing boat known as a lerret. Not only is it a good sea boat but has some characteristics of a surf boat which enable it to land through the surf onto Chesil Beach. It was to their lerrets that early on Wednesday morning, several brave Portland fishermen ran. J. Chaddick, John and Tom Way, Tom Pearce, Tom and Lew White and John Flann to one boat and to another went another Flann, another John Way, G. White, Bennett, and J and G Byatt. Later the bravery of all these men was recognised by the Agent General of New Zealand, who sent them all a payment of £5 matching an award made to them by the Board of Trade. A further £130 was collected and handed to the men later in the year.

For several days bodies of the drowned washed ashore on to Chesil Beach and at Portland, Chickerwell and Abbotsbury. The Jury at the Coroner’s Inquest held at Portland on September 15th expressed dismay at the “neglect to provide decently for the interment of the drowned.”

The upturned hull of the Forest of Windsor showed no inclination to sink; it was a hazard to shipping and the Royal Navy ordered H.M.S. Defence under the command of Captain Howard, aided by H.M.S. Black Prince and H.M.S. Galatea to sink the wreck. The Navy attempted to blow the wreck out of the water using torpedoes but these just ran through the wreck. Over the following three weeks it shrugged off gunpowder charges, mines and all sorts of means, stubbornly remaining unmoved. As if to mock its attackers after one assult the lid of a seaman’s chest floated to the surface decorated with a picture of the Forest of Windsor in full sail. The demolition of the wreck was finally accomplished three and a half weeks after the collision at a cost of about £1,000.

There is an illustration of the rescue in the photo gallery.

Purbeck – Into the Quarries

Feb 7th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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“Carved by time out of a single stone” was how Thomas Hardy described Portland. Yet all of Purbeck can be regarded as a geologist’s bonanza, a chronicle of millions of years of the earth’s history set in stone. Small wonder then, that this “county within a county” should have become one of the country’s major centres for the quarrying and mining of aggregate and building stone.

The stone industry of Purbeck has been the economic mainstay of the ‘Isle’ for over 500 years. For Britain, and for the Empire through export, it has been a font of supply for several kinds of rock belonging to the Portland and Purbeck Beds. All these are part of the two uppermost-and youngest-formations of the Jurassic period, deposited between about 150 and 135 million years ago, when Dorset was sub-equatorial. The Portlandian was laid down in shallow, warm sea, which then regressed to leave a lagoon environment in which the Purbeck beds were then formed.

Although prehistoric man probably carried out very local quarrying for the stone, it was the Romans, particularly favouring the use of the decorative Purbeck Marble for their villas and tomb slabs, who first began quarrying on any significant scale. In ‘modern’ times the industry really took off during the Middle Ages; in the 17th century, too, stone was shipped from Swanage to London, where Wren employed it in re-building the capital after the Great Fire in 1666.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the Purbeck quarries reached their peak in manpower and production. It was at this time when a variety of stone used to build many of Dorset’s older cottages and homes was extracted from small local quarries now long since abandoned and overgrown. Sine transporting the stone overland was difficult and costly, the major quarries and mines were concentrated upon the coastal outcrops, where the stone could be transported away by sea.

As a focus for quarrying, nowhere else in Purbeck was more central or important than Swanage. This town became a centre for the mediaeval trade in limestone, where serious quarrying began in about 1700 and continued until the mid 19th century. This was the heyday of great stone barons, the businessmen who made their fortunes from the industry, George Burt, and John Mowlem being probably the prime movers. Swanage was built from stone in more ways than one; exports from the quarries secured its location and the prosperity of the Burt and Mowlem families. It was during this period too, that the quarry platforms in the cliff outcrops at Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge, Winspit and Seacombe were cut.

Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge and Winspit are all coastal quarry sites for Purbeck stone which has been used in a number of Buildings including Durlston Castle, Lulworth Castle and Swanage Town Hall.  The Tilly Whim Caves at Anvil Point are the most easterly of the coastal quarries and are thought to have originally been open-cast working which later shifted towards adit or drift-mining from galleries cut into the cliffside. A capping rock was blasted away so that the high-grade building stone, the Under Freestone, could be quarried out using wedges called “gads.” Galleries of about 3 metres by 8 metres were cut into the hillside, sometimes as far as 60 metres. To support the roof, quarrymen left pillars in the in-situ limestone or else built pillars from stone wasters. Blocks were lowered from the caves using timber derricks (whims) that loaded the stone onto lighters or barges which then trans-shipped the stone to an offshore cargo vessel in calm weather.

Similarly at Dancing Ledge Quarry, the stone was lowered to a large sloping ledge, and carried to a shipment point at the very edge. Here the trammels or ruts made by the carts or wagons, which moved the stone, can still be seen. Quarrying at Dancing Ledge ceased in 1914. Winspit is an area just below Worth Matravers on the south coast where large cliffside quarries have been opened on both sides of the valley. Stone working at Winspit began in 1719. The west quarry has a very large underground gallery, which was worked until 1953; the east quarry has square cut holes for crane positions still to be seen on the cliff top.

Seacombe is a large quarry excavated where Seacombe Bottom meets the coast. This was worked from the 18th century until 1923-31, when much investment in mechanisation took place. Stone was shipped from below the west end, and the foundations of the steam-derrick remain. Other quarries were opened between Durlstone Head and St. Aldhelm’s Head, from where the stone for the harbour walling at Ramsgate was shipped. At Durlstone, deeper beds were worked from underground “quarrs,” the stone being brought to the surface by a horse drawn capstan. There are also shallow quarrs in the country-park. In 1897 197 men were working in 58 quarrs. The last timber derrick to survive anywhere in Dorset can be seen at St. Aldhelm’s Quarry.

Away from the coast there have been extensive quarries in other Purbeck Beds outcropping over the high ground between Swanage and Worth Matravers, though Lychett Matravers to Acton. Purbeck Limestone is worked for aggregate in Swanworth Quarry (due for imminent closure) and Purbeck stone is still quarried in the Acton area west of Swanage, where the rock was formerly mined from underground shafts. Today good decorative stone is being extracted at Acton from open cast pits down to 10 metres. Corfe was formerly the centre for the quarrying of Purbeck Marble (which is not true marble but shelly limestone able to take a hard polish), but the trade no longer exists today.

While the stone native to the mainland has been of considerable commercial value, Portland’s limestone has probably been even more so, and not wholly for its infra-structural applications. This oolithic limestone has encased the gargantuan shells of Titanities, the largest ammonite to have inhabited British Jurassic waters, and which today is to be seen displayed in many of Portland’s garden walls. For centuries, man and nature have contributed to the island’s landscape, and there are features marking where the original landscape once stood.

Wren used Portland stone in the re-building of London, notably the new St. Paul’s, but it has also been applied in the re-construction of the capital after the destruction left by the last war. The old quarry gangs and their methods have almost entirely disappeared. The piers and jetties of the old quarries, from where stone has been shipped around the world, also have largely vanished, and some of the excavations have been infield; no derrick or crane now remains in the Portland Quarry. In Jordan Quarry the succession in the Portland Beds can be traced up to the overlying Purbeck in a sequence which the geologist can read like a book, and which reveals the climatic changes in the region 150 million years ago.

But today some of the Portland quarries have been given a new lease of life. Through a 1983 initiative begun by the specially formed Portland Sculpture Quarry Trust (PSQT) artists and sculptors have been coming to Portland to work creatively in response to the quarry environment. The Trust aims to forge links between the artists and the lives of the masons working in stone, enabling them to share and exchange knowledge and skills, rather than undertaking public commissions for works. This project has fostered much working collaboration over the years, including the creation of Britain’s first Sculpture Quarry in the now regenerated Tout Quarry. Works produced here include Anthony Gormley’s ‘Still Falling.’ and ‘Falling Fossil’ by Stephen Marsden. PSQT is further extending access through workshops. Since 1983 the experience of the Trust has been as appreciation of the importance of the personal aspects of people’s lives and their relationship to the landscape.

Happily, after decades of decline in Portland and Purbeck, something of the old landscape is making a comeback. Abandoned quarries and older sites are being restored to their pre-extractive agricultural state, often with no trace of the former activity in evidence. While the industrial landscape on Portland is being revitalised, in Purbeck nature is re-claiming the traces of an industry, which ranged from prehistoric bell-pits, through opencast excavations and thence gallery mining, to mechanisation and decline.

Dorset – Smugglers Coast

Apr 24th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The south coast of England in particular has had a long tradition of smuggling, especially where there are many coves or inlets ideal for concealing contraband. Devon and Cornwall are particularly well endowed in this regard, but Dorset has hardly been less important as a focus for the trade. The life of Isaac Gulliver, the ‘smuggler’s king’ of Dorset, has been covered in a biographic feature on the site, here I am considering the more general look at smuggling and what motivated people to become involved in its illegal operations.

Usually thought of as a male preserve, what may at first surprise many people is the extent to which women were also involved. Some of these would have been smugglers wives, though this is not invariably the case. Dorset, in the heyday of smuggling, was of course a very rural and sparsely populated county, with much agrarian poverty. The business of importing goods, usually liquor, from cross-channel boats under the cover of darkness in order to flout excise regulations was a lucrative sideline that impoverished families living within a few miles of the coast would find too great a temptation to overlook.

The register for Dorchester Gaol 1782-1853 lists the names and occupations of no fewer than 64 women convicted of various smuggling related offences. Twenty one of these (32%) were from Portland alone, while just six resided in Weymouth, five in Bridport, three in Bere Regis and two in Lyme Regis. The parishes of another nine are not recorded. Wool and Woolbridge, Preston, Pulham, Sutton Poyntz, Langton Matravers, Marnhull, Morecombelake, Beaminster, Bradpole, Broadwindsor, Buckland Ripers, Charmouth, Chetnole, Chickerell, Corfe, Dorchester and Kington Magna account for the remaining sixteen.

Three notable examples are Charlotte Drake of Bridport and Ann Maidment, a Bridport buttoner, who both assaulted and obstructed excise officers, and Mary Applin of Langton, who committed an excise offence. Martha Lumb of Weymouth was sentenced to three months hard labour in 1822 for smuggling, while Catherine Winter, a Weymouth seamstress, served an 18-day sentence in 1844 for smuggling at the age of 70!

But regardless of the sex of the offender, for the populace as a whole, smuggling was generally considered an honourable trade. The customs officers or the “King’s Men” were responsible for ensuring that contraband was impounded and fines levied. At Poole the problem of smuggling was so rampant and the customs men so understaffed and overworked that Dragoons had to be deployed to assist them as early as 1723. Typically the customs officers were brave and resourceful with a strict code of conduct; so that names were never banded about and nothing ever put in writing.

Poole was especially ideal for smuggling operations because of the exceptional size and highly indented nature of its harbour, the second largest natural harbour in the world. Goods were disembarked into inlet hideaways at Hamworthy and then transported by waggoners to Bristol via Blandford. Furthermore, goods could be offloaded on the south Purbeck coast and hauled overland to be temporarily laid up in the deep inlets such as those at Arne or the Goathorn Peninsula for later distribution to Poole markets without the smugglers having to risk detection by passing through the harbour mouth. Longfleet and Parkstone farmers constructed secret tunnels down to the water’s edge for bringing goods ashore.

After 1759 the volume of smuggled goods passing through Poole significantly increased, though raised vigilance on the part of the Preventatives gradually brought this down. The Commissioners of Customs based in London frequently requested reports on the amount of smuggling going on in the Poole area.

Although landings and disembarkation operations took place from Lyme Regis to Christchurch, the coast from Portland westwards to Lyme attracted special attention. This was because most of the coast is occupied by the Chesil Bank, a shingle spit enclosing a lagoon (the Fleet) which was a convenient storage-sink to hold casks (“tubs”) for collection at a more appropriate time. One memorable incident took place in 1762 when a Cornish vessel was broken up on the Chesil in a winter storm and its cargo washed into the sea. There then followed a desperate attempt by Weymouth citizens to salvage what tubs of liquor they could before the customs house officers could reach them! In the end the citizens claimed 26 tubs to the revenue’s 10; another ten were cast out to sea but recovered the next day.

Probably the greatest hideout and smugglers haunt along this coast was Lulworth Castle, the seat of the Weld family, but which had a connection with smuggling throughout the 18th century from 1719 onwards. In 1719 revenue officers from Weymouth raided the castle and the entire Lulworth area. It has been said that maids working at the castle would routinely warn smugglers when the customs men were in the vicinity by showing a light at a window to indicate when it was safe to come in, but also act as a bearing. The gangs at Lulworth could comprise as many as 100 disguised and heavily armed men, who used Mupe Rocks as the disembarkation point, but the deep ravines and inlets along the coast west of Kimmeridge were also ideal for concealing kegs. A gap in the cliffs at Worbarrow Bay was a special favourite and tubs were raised to the top of Gad Cliff, and brought ashore at Arish Mell and for storage at Tyneham Church.

On a knoll near the coast between West Bexington and Puncknowle there still stands an unusual monument. This is The Lookout, a square building constructed as a signal-station for the Fensibles, but which may also have been used by Isaac Gulliver, who used the Bexingtons, Swyre and Burton Bradstock as landing sites after 1776.

Lyme Regis has had an especially long smuggling history extending back at least as far as the 16th century, when certain merchants were suspected of smuggling bullion out of the country by sea. In 1576 a revenue man called Ralph Lane was sent to Lyme with a deputy bearing a warrant to search ships alleged to be involved in the operations. His arrival however, provoked a riot during which the warrant was seized and Lane’s deputy was thrown into the sea. From Lyme contraband was traditionally floated up the Buddle River, often under the noses of the Preventives, who were frequently understaffed and restrained by bureaucratic regulations. Booty offloaded onto the Cobb could not be inspected until it had been carried half a mile to the Cobb Gate. Lyme is believed to be the birthplace of Warren Lisle, a customs officer who at 17 was appointed Patent Searcher at Poole and who made his first seizure of a cargo from a small vessel in Portland Harbour in 1724.

Weymouth was central to excise operations for the sea, but the town’s revenue officials had a long and shameful history of ineptitude and corruption. Enter George Whelplay, who in the 16th century failed to make any headway in countering popular local support for smuggling. Originally a London haberdasher, Whelplay came to Dorset to try his fortune as a public informer, and as such could claim a fifty per cent commission on each fine he imposed upon those he caught, but in 1538 he incurred the wrath of smugglers and fellow customs officers alike when he exceeded his remit. Whelplay twice stumbled on a cargo of horses being illegally shipped to France, but instead of coming to his assistance in rounding up the French boats the officials joined a gang of merchants and attacked him.

Around 1830 smuggling reached a climax in the Weymouth area, where, it is said; tunnels were constructed from the harbour to merchant’s houses and even to the residence of King George III. The leading figure in smuggling to be connected with Weymouth was Pierre Latour, otherwise known as French Peter, who functioned as a prominent gang-leader in the town. In Wyke Regis churchyard there is a grave of one William Lewis, a smuggler shot dead by a revenue officer on board the schooner Pigmy.

In conclusion, anyone who has anything to do with Dorset will know of Thomas Hardy, the well-known novelist-poet. Less well known is that Hardy was an authority on smuggling – and not without good reason. His birthplace cottage at Highter Bockhampton was actually a capacious safehouse for smuggled contraband that could accommodate up to 80 casks of brandy. “But this isn’tall.” When a child, Hardy was regaled with smuggling stories from his grandfather and his own father had a manservant who was actually involved in the trade. The Bockhampton cottage lay on the smugglers route between Osmington Mills and their markets in Sherborne and Yeovil.

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