<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></SPAN>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
<h3>SHOREHAM</h3>
<blockquote><p>Hove the impeccable—The Aldrington of the past—A digression on
seaports—Old Shoreham and history—Mr. Swinburne's poem—A baby
saint—Successful bribery—The Adur—Old Shoreham church and
bridge.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The cliffs that make the coast between Newhaven and Brighton so
attractive slope gradually to level ground at the Aquarium and never
reappear in Sussex on the Channel's edge again, although in the east
they rise whiter and higher, with a few long gaps, all the way to Dover.
It is partly for this reason that the walk from Brighton to Shoreham has
no beauty save of the sea. Hove, which used to be a disreputable little
smuggling village sufficiently far from Brighton for risks to be run
with safety, is now the well-ordered home of wealthy rectitude. Mrs.
Grundy's sea-side home is here. Hove is, perhaps, the genteelest town in
the world, although once, only a poor hundred years ago, there was no
service in the church on a certain Sunday, because, as the clerk
informed the complaisant vicar, "The pews is full of tubs and the pulpit
full of tea"—a pleasant fact to reflect upon during Church Parade amid
the gay yet discreet prosperity of the Brunswick Lawns.</p>
<p class="center"><SPAN name="page185.png" id="page185.png"></SPAN><ANTIMG src="images/page185.png" width-obs='700' height-obs='478' alt="New Shoreham Church" /></p>
<h4><i>New Shoreham Church.</i></h4>
<p>West of Hove, and between that town and Portslade-by-Sea, is Aldrington.
Aldrington is now new houses and brickfields. Thirty years ago it was
naught. But five hundred years ago it was the principal township in
these parts, and Brighthelmstone a mere insignificant cluster of hovels.
Centuries earlier<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></SPAN></span><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</SPAN></span> it was more important still, for, according to some
authorities, it was the Portus Adurni of the Romans. The river Adur,
which now enters the sea between Shoreham and Southwick, once flowed
along the line of the present canal and the Wish Pond, and so out into
the sea. I have seen it stated that the mouth of the river was even more
easterly still—somewhere opposite the Norfolk Hotel at Brighton; but
this may be fanciful and can now hardly be proven. The suggestion,
however, adds interest to a walk on the otherwise unromantic Brunswick
Lawns. In those days the Roman ships, entering the river here, would
sail up as far as Bramber. Between the river and the sea were then some
two miles—possibly more—of flat meadow land, on which Aldrington was
largely built. Over the ruins of that Aldrington the Channel now washes.</p>
<div class="sidenote">THE LIFE OF A HARBOUR</div>
<p>Beyond Aldrington is Portslade, with a pretty inland village on the
hill; beyond Portslade is Southwick, notable for its green; and beyond
Southwick is Shoreham. Southwick and Shoreham both have that interest
which can never be wanting to the seaport that has seen better days. The
life of a harbour, whatever its state of decay, is eternally absorbing;
and in Shoreham harbour one gets such life at its laziest. The smell of
tar; the sound of hammers; the laughter and whistling of the loafers;
the continuous changing of the tide; the opening of the lock gates; the
departure of the tug; its triumphant return, leading in custody a
timber-laden barque from the Baltic, a little self-conscious and
ashamed, as if caught red-handed in iniquity by this fussy little
officer; the independent sailing of a grimy steamer bound for Sunderland
and more coal; the elaborate wharfing of the barque:—all these things
on a hot still day can exercise an hypnotic influence more real and
strange than the open sea. The romance and mystery of the sea may indeed
be more intimately near one on a harbour wharf than on the deck of a
liner in mid-ocean.</p>
<p>Shoreham has its place in history. Thence as we have seen, sailed
Charles II. in Captain Tattersall's <i>Enterprise</i>. Four<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></SPAN></span> hundred and
fifty years earlier King John landed here with his army, when he came to
succeed to the English throne. In the reign of Edward III. Shoreham
supplied twenty-six ships to the Navy: but in the fifteenth century the
sea began an encroachment on the bar which disclassed the harbour. It is
now unimportant, most of the trade having passed to Newhaven; but in its
days of prosperity great cargoes of corn and wine were landed here from
the Continent.</p>
<p>When people now say Shoreham they mean New Shoreham, but Old Shoreham is
the parent. Old Shoreham, however, declined to village state when the
present harbour was made.</p>
<div class="sidenote">MR. SWINBURNE'S POEM</div>
<p>New Shoreham church, quite the noblest in the county, dates probably
from about 1100. It was originally the property of the Abbey of Saumur,
to whom it was presented, together with Old Shoreham church, by William
de Braose, the lord of Bramber Castle. It is New Shoreham Church which
Mr. Swinburne had in mind (or so I imagine) in his noble poem "On the
South Coast":—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<div>Strong as time, and as faith sublime,—clothed round with shadows of hopes and fears,</div>
<div>Nights and morrows, and joys and sorrows, alive with passion of prayers and tears,—</div>
<div>Stands the shrine that has seen decline eight hundred waxing and waning years.</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div>Tower set square to the storms of air and change of season that glooms and glows,</div>
<div>Wall and roof of it tempest-proof, and equal ever to suns and snows,</div>
<div>Bright with riches of radiant niches and pillars smooth as a straight stem grows.</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div> * * * * *
* * * * *</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div>Stately stands it, the work of hands unknown of: statelier, afar and near,</div>
<div>Rise around it the heights that bound our landward gaze from the seaboard here;</div>
<div>Downs that swerve and aspire, in curve and change of heights that the dawn holds dear.</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></SPAN></span>Dawn falls fair on the grey walls there confronting dawn, on the low green lea,</div>
<div>Lone and sweet as for fairies' feet held sacred, silent and strange and free,</div>
<div>Wild and wet with its rills; but yet more fair falls dawn on the fairer sea.</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div> * * * * *
* * * * *</div>
</div><div class="stanza">
<div>Rose-red eve on the seas that heave sinks fair as dawn when the first ray peers;</div>
<div>Winds are glancing from sunbright Lancing to Shoreham, crowned with the grace of years;</div>
<div>Shoreham, clad with the sunset, glad and grave with glory that death reveres.</div>
</div></div>
<p class="center"><SPAN name="page188.png" id="page188.png"></SPAN><ANTIMG src="images/page188.png" width-obs='700' height-obs='413' alt="Old Shoreham Bridge" /></p>
<h4><i>Old Shoreham Bridge.</i></h4>
<div class="sidenote">A SHOREHAM EPITAPH</div>
<p>In the churchyard there was once (and may be still, but I did not find
it) an epitaph on a child of eight months, in the form of a dialogue
between the deceased and its parents. It contained these lines:—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<div>"'I trust in Christ,' the blessed babe replied,</div>
<div>Then smil'd, then sigh'd, then clos'd its eyes and died."</div>
</div></div>
<p class="center"><SPAN name="page189.png" id="page189.png"></SPAN><ANTIMG src="images/page189.png" width-obs='700' height-obs='493' alt="Old Shoreham Church" /></p>
<h4><i>Old Shoreham Church.</i></h4>
<p>Shoreham's notoriety as a pocket borough—it returned two members to
Parliament, who were elected in the north transept of the church—came
to a head in 1701, when the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></SPAN></span><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</SPAN></span> naïve means by which Mr. Gould had proved
his fitness were revealed. It seemed that Mr. Gould, who had never been
to Shoreham before, directed the crier to give notice with his bell that
every voter who came to the King's Arms would receive a guinea in which
to drink Mr. Gould's good health. This fact being made public by the
defeated candidate, Mr. Gould was unseated. At the following election,
such was the enduring power of the original guinea, he was elected
again.</p>
<p>After the life of the harbour, the chief interest of Shoreham is its
river, the Adur, a yellow, sluggish, shallow stream, of great width near
the town, which at low tide dwindles into a streamlet trickling through
a desert of mud, but at the full has the beauty of a lake. Mr.
Swinburne, in the same poem from which I have been quoting, thus
describes the river at evening:—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<div>Skies fulfilled with the sundown, stilled and splendid, spread as a flower that spreads,</div>
<div>Pave with rarer device and fairer than heaven's the luminous oyster-beds,</div>
<div>Grass-embanked, and in square plots ranked, inlaid with gems that the sundown sheds.</div>
</div></div>
<div class="sidenote">MR. HENLEY'S POEM</div>
<p>To the Adur belongs also another lyric. It is printed in <i>Hawthorn and
Lavender</i>, to which I have already referred, and is one of Mr. Henley's
most characteristic and remarkable poems:—</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<div>In Shoreham River, hurrying down</div>
<div>To the live sea,</div>
<div>By working, marrying, breeding, Shoreham Town,</div>
<div>Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream,</div>
<div>An old, black rotter of a boat</div>
<div>Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote,</div>
<div>Lay stranded in mid-stream;</div>
<div>With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,</div>
<div>That made me think of legs and a broken spine;</div>
<div>Soon, all too soon,</div>
<div>Ungainly and forlorn to lie</div>
<div>Full in the eye</div>
<div>Of the cynical, discomfortable moon</div>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></SPAN></span>That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky,</div>
<div>A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by</div>
<div>The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned;</div>
<div>The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing;</div>
<div>The poor old hulk remained,</div>
<div>Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why—</div>
<div>Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying.</div>
<div>For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying—</div>
<div>Dying or dead;</div>
<div>And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:—</div>
<div>"<i>Dear God, it's I!</i>"</div>
</div></div>
<p>The Adur is no longer the home of birds that once it was, but in the
early morning one may still see there many of the less common water
fowl. The road to Portsmouth is carried across the Adur by the Norfolk
Suspension Bridge, to cross which one must pay a toll,—not an
unpleasant reminder of earlier days.</p>
<p>Old Shoreham, a mile up the river, is notable for its wooden bridge
across the Adur to the Old Sussex Pad, at one time a famous inn for
smugglers. Few Royal Academy exhibitions are without a picture of Old
Shoreham Bridge and the quiet cruciform church at its eastward end.</p>
<div class="sidenote">THE LOYAL CLERK</div>
<p>A pleasant story tells how, in some Sussex journey, William IV. and his
queen chanced to be passing through Shoreham, coming from Chichester to
Lewes, one Sunday morning. The clerk of Old Shoreham church caught sight
through the window of the approaching cavalcade, and leaping to his
feet, stopped the sermon by announcing: "It is my solemn duty to inform
you that their Majesties the King and Queen are just now crossing the
bridge." Thereupon the whole congregation jumped up and ran out to show their loyalty.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></SPAN></span></p>
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