A lifeboat hero and a skinny-dipping vicar

Richard James Crump was born in Hythe in 1844, the elder of the two children of Richard and Sarah Crump, though Sarah had four children from an earlier marriage. He was baptised in St Leonard’s church on 5 January 1845. The family lived in Stade Street, Hythe. Richard’s father was a shrimper or sailor, depending on the season, and Richard, too, became a fisherman and married, in 1876, Mary Ann Jessup, a farmer’s daughter from Sevenoaks.

Sometime in the 1880s he diversified. Mary Ann received an inheritance from her father, and the couple used it to hire the Hythe sea bathing establishment on Marine Parade. The lease ran for three years and made Richard the proprietor. This involved operating the hot and cold sea baths, guiding the bathing machines down to the sea and running the tea room and reading room. It was a good post for a couple and came complete with its own adjacent accommodation, ideal for the Crump’s family of five children. Richard added the further attraction of trips around Hythe bay in his boat.

Bathing machines had been perfected by a Margate Quaker, Benjamin Beale. They were horse-drawn caravans, screened at both ends. The would-be bather waited in the tea room or reading room for a machine to become available. When one was free, the bather, fully-dressed, climbed inside and undressed. Women, and sometimes men, changed into bathing costumes. Once the machine had been driven into the sea, the driver operated a pulley and the front screen which was rather like a hood, unfurled, so that the bather could descend into the sea in complete privacy in a bath about three-and-a-half metres long by two metres wide. Later, when swimming rather than taking a dip for health reasons, became popular, the modesty hood was dispensed with and the machine was just a means of getting into the sea without having to expose one’s person to public view in a bathing dress.

Hythe beach with bathing machines in the late nineteenth century. Note the fully-dressed non-swimmers.

The Hythe bathing establishment had opened in 1854, built by the corporation at a cost of £2500. It had been financed by selling a stretch of beach to the west of the town to the army for use as a rifle range.

Not everyone chose to use the bathing establishment and its machines. The military frequently bathed in the sea to the east of the town off Seabrook, and not all of the soldiers wore bathing dress. In the mid-1880s, passers-by were reported to have been grossly offended by the sight of the skinny-dippers. The corporation arranged for an eighty-foot – long canvas screen to be erected. Even worse was the sight of ‘a certain reverend gentleman’ who also refused to wear bathing clothes. The town clerk was obliged to write to him cautioning him against such behaviour and the corporation enacted bylaws to regulate suitable attire in 1886.

Richard outside his business premises    Ann Renton

Richard’s lease of the sea baths endured into the twentieth century. The bathing establishment had by now been converted into public baths for the people of Hythe. One Hythe resident, born in 1902 remembered that the Crumps had slipper baths, which you could used for 4d, including a towel and soap. Bathing machines were going out of fashion, and many visitors preferred now to put up their own tent on the beach, but the Crumps rented out deck chairs and Mary Ann served ice-creams from a little stall.  But by 1911, Richard was obliged to make most of his money from his old occupation, fishing.

The same beach with bathing tents and no machines visible. 

In the meantime, Richard had assisted in saving the crew of the Benvenue, which foundered off Sandgate early one November morning in 1891 during a terrific storm. The captain and four crew members were drowned, and the remaining crew clambered up the mizzen mast and clung on. A lifeboat was launched from Hythe, but capsized, killing a crewman. The Coastguard repeatedly fired rockets in an attempt to get a line to the vessel, to no avail. Only when the wind abated in the evening could the Sandgate lifeboat, with a scratch crew of fishermen, including Richard, and some coastguards, rescue the twenty-seven survivors, who had been in the rigging for sixteen hours.

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The rigging of the Benvenue, still visible after the storm.

The lifeboat crew who saved the Benvenue’s survivors.   Ann Renton

Richard and Mary Ann retired to Arthur Villas in South Road, not far from his erstwhile bathing establishment. Perhaps he missed the life. In December 1918, as soon as it was safe to go back on the water after the Armistice was declared, he was advertising to buy two or three small pleasure boats, probably with a view to offering trips round the bay once again. He died three years later, and Mary Ann, buried with him, thirteen years after that.

Richard’s name on the kerbstone of his grave. Mary Ann’s name, on the opposite side, is now underneath the turf. The churchyard lies on a steep hillside.

James Watts: Becoming Respectable

James Watts,  the third son of James Watts senior, acquired most of his father’s arable and grazing lands after the latter’s death. He did not, though,  inherit it. His father’s will was rigorously fair. All his children, male or female, were to inherit an equal share of the rest of his estate. If James wanted the land, he was to be given first option to buy it at a price agreed by the executors and the profits then divided between all the children. When James senior made his will, in 1826, he had two sons older than James, but presumably saw in this third son the potential to make the most of the land and the business acumen to acquire the money needed.

James was born in 1806 and baptised in St Leonard’s church, Hythe, on 11 May that year. He was not entirely a chip off the old block. His father and brother were both active members of the local Conservative Club and outspoken members of Hythe Town council. James however, did not become a councillor until 1842, though he was, of course, a Conservative. In fact it seems that he left Hythe after his marriage for a while and lived in London, where his first two children were born in September 1837 and 1838. He was back in Hythe for the birth of the third child in 1839.

James was undoubtedly respectable. He did not spend fourteen hours a day in the saddle, or throw extravagant banquets like his father; nor get himself violently ejected from the council chamber or become bankrupt like his brother Edward. He became a coal merchant and grazier, and did his civic duty. He was mayor of Hythe no fewer than eleven times, none of which excited much comment in the local press beyond the platitudes of conventional congratulations.  His obituaries are bland. He was ‘competent’; ‘clear and straightforward;’ ‘able and impartial’. He carried on as president of the Hythe Annual Benefit Society, founded by his father, which supported sick townsmen unable to work, and bailed out his brother when he was in dire financial straits. He seems to have been, in short, a ‘safe pair of hands’, the sort of man absolutely necessary to the smooth running of local government.

He had married Charlotte Mount, the daughter of an Aldington grazier, on 6 April 1835. They had seven children, all of whom grew to adulthood. The girls were educated at home by a governess and Charlotte had a nurse for the youngest.  The boys were sent away to school.  But in March 1869, tragedy struck the family.

Their eldest daughter Ellen was also the epitome of small town respectability. She visited the poor; she deputised at St Leonard’s church when the regular organist could not play; she accompanied vocalists at concerts and sometimes sang herself; and she taught in Sunday School. That March day, when she was twenty-nine years old, she went out at about 10am to visit the sick. Crossing the Green, she borrowed a pencil from a carter’s boy, wrote in her notebook then continued across the town to Green Lane, which runs parallel to the canal. She walked further along its banks for a while, then just beyond a bend, drowned herself in four feet of water.

 

                          The quiet stretch of the Royal Military Canal where Ellen Watts ended her life. 

Her body was found by a bargeman soon afterwards. Her family and friends were at a loss to explain why she had taken her own life. She had seemed happy the evening before, they said. The inquest jury brought in the inevitable verdict that she had committed suicide while of unsound mind. Her notebook was found on the canal bank, under a tree, together with her umbrella.  The note she had written with the borrowed pencil was her farewell to her family and was read in court:

Oh, forgive me dear Mama and Papa and all the dear ones. I have tried so hard to do my duty, but I cannot. I feel I am not like other people; everyone looks so good. But God will not leave you comfortless. Oh, how I have loved you all, dear ones.

James had a vault hastily constructed in St Leonard’s churchyard,  cut into the side of the hill, and after her funeral, which was attended by hundreds of people, Ellen’s coffin was placed in it. The vicar’s wife, Mrs Sangar, placed a wreath of white flowers on it, before the vault was sealed.

                           The badly weathered stone closure on the Watts vault in St Leonard’s Churchyard

Ellen had been the third child of Hannah and James Watts. Her oldest brother, another James, became a clerk to his uncle Edward Watts, but seems never to have qualified as a solicitor himself and later worked on the London Stock Exchange. He lived in Surrey but played first class cricket for Kent between 1855 and 1860 (as a Gentleman, of course).  As his mother’s executor, he undertook the disposal of the family property in Hythe. (1)

The next brother, born the year before Ellen, Edward,  became a clerk in the War Office and also lived in Surrey. After Ellen came Bertha, who married Dr John Hackney, a GP with a practice in Hythe High Street. Then came Georgiana, who rather less respectably married a man who was a travelling salesman for Burtons Ales. He died young and she returned as a widow to Hythe. The next sister, Mary Amelia married Commander Arthur Mansell RN: they are both buried in St Leonard’s churchyard. Finally, the youngest, Duncan, became a solicitor and went, like his brothers, to live in Surrey.

James died suddenly in 1872. He had undergone an operation in London for an undisclosed complaint but quickly – perhaps too quickly – returned to Hythe to attend a Town Council meeting which was discussing a controversy in which he was embroiled. It was too much for him and he died a few days later. He was buried in the vault he had built for Ellen. Charlotte outlived him by seventeen years and joined him there in 1889.

After her death, her surviving children gave to St Leonard’s Church a parcel of land at the end of Stade Street, where the family home had stood,  to provide for the building of St Michael’s Church, a so-called iron church.   At this time Hythe was developing fast; hundreds of houses were built on the south side of the Royal Military Canal near to Stade Street, to which working class families were attracted because of their modest rents. The Church wanted to provide for these people and, for a time, ‘mission type’ services were held in the nearby National School.  Once the Watts family had donated the site, a former vicar, the Reverend F.T. Scott, offered to pay for the building and an appeal for funds to furnish the church met with a good response.

                                              St Michael’s Church, Hythe, the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ 

The  flat pack church was ordered and erected within months and furnished with a wooden altar and pews, gas lighting and a coke stove for the winter months.  It was consecrated as St Michael’s church on 19 September 1893 and has since been sympathetically restored and is a real landmark in the town. Unlike their decaying gravestones, it is a living memorial to the presence of the Watts family in Hythe.

1. Kent Archives EK/2008/2/134D (5)

Edward Watts, True Blue

Edward Watts was the second son of James and Hannah Watts, born in 1804, and became a solicitor, in partnership with a Mr Brockman. They had offices in Great Conduit Street, Hythe. In 1829, he was appointed Master Extraordinary in the Court of Chancery (responsible for taking affidavits for the court). At home, he became a town councillor, and like his father before him, a staunch Conservative.  Like his father, too, he could expect to remain a councillor for the rest of his life. However, he was living in interesting political times and this was not to be his future.

The Whig government of Lord Grey, having carried out reform of parliamentary constituencies in 1832, turned its attention to local government. A Royal Commission was appointed to investigate municipal boroughs. The Commission comprised eighteen men, nearly all Radicals, members of a loose political grouping who wanted to reform the way in which Great Britain was governed.  They came also to be known as Liberals. They investigated 285 towns, most of which were found wanting. As a result, the Municipal Corporations Act became law in 1835, requiring 178 town councils to reform their practices. Hythe was one of them.

Edward was by this time Town Clerk as well as a councillor. The Act specifically forbade this combination of offices and Edward resigned the councillorship. In January 1836, an election was called, the first in Hythe in which voting was along party political lines, Conservatives versus Liberals.  178 men were allowed to vote, and they voted in a Liberal majority. The Liberals also fielded a candidate for the post of Town Clerk, one George Sedgwick, another solicitor. He won the post, but the council were now faced with the fact that according to Edward’s contract, they had to buy him an annuity for life, which would, reportedly, use up all their funds for the next four years.  Rates would therefore have to increase substantially.

In May that year, Edward presented his claim for compensation. It was for £3306. 15s. 2d., about a quarter of a million pounds today. Voting had been close in the election, and there were claims that some men had been excluded from the list of voters erroneously. Edward acted for those among them who were Conservatives, and although the case failed he announced his intention of seeking a mandamus from the Court of King’s Bench to force the issue.

At the next annual election of councillors, late in 1836, Edward was voted in again as a town councillor. The council, however, for reasons which remain obscure, refused to accept this election as legal, and when Edward arrived at the council chamber to take his oath of office, the Mayor refused to hear it and told him to leave. Edward refused. The Mayor then instructed his constable, who was also the town gaoler, to eject him by force, and Edward was manhandled from the chamber.

Whether or not Edward sought a mandamus, we do not know, but he would not give up on the question of the Conservative voters who were disenfranchised in January 1836.  He got the MP for East Kent (a new constituency created by the Reform Act of 1832) to petition the House of Commons stating his case. There was no point in asking the Hythe MP to do this. Sir Stewart Marjoribanks was a Liberal himself.

Sir Stewart Marjoribanks, MP for Hythe 1829-1837 and 1841-1847

Eventually, Edward won. Two Liberal councillors were charged with having ‘unlawfully, corruptly and designedly’ altered the borough’s rate book in no fewer that 300 cases to disenfranchise some men and give a vote to others (eligibility to vote was dependant among other things, on having paid all your rates). Their counsel’s only defence was that they were ‘ignorant and illiterate men’. They pleaded guilty and spent four months in Maidstone gaol.

Edward was reinstated as Town Clerk in May 1844 when George Sedgwick was removed from the post for failing to attend council meetings (1). He stayed in the post until his death over twenty years later.

On 30 September 1840, in Reigate, he had married Amelia Bunn, and the first of their nine children was born almost exactly a year later.

Legal matters aside, Edward was also very interested in the railways. He was one of the founder members of the Elham Valley Railway Company which wanted to run from Canterbury to Folkestone and worked tirelessly to bring the railway to Hythe, although he did not live to see the opening of either line.

The site of part of the Elham Valley Railway which operated from 1887 to 1947 and is now a pleasant footpath.

                    The opening of Hythe Station. The line from Sandling was open from 1874 to 1951

Edward steered clear of further controversy, and now seemed to be living the respectable life of a small town solicitor and family man. Except that in 1855, he was declared bankrupt, owing over £90,000. This he attributed in court to heavy losses in the building of his new house, described in the local press as ‘a mansion’, the depreciation of property and debts owing to him amounting to £27,000. The new family home was put on the market.  It had an acre of land, coach house and stabling, drawing room, dining room, library and eight bedrooms. Edward, rather than being sent to a debtor’s prison was given bail with sureties, presumably from his brother James,  and went to live in Islington though his family stayed in Hythe, in Marine Parade.

He seems to have been under enormous stress at this time. In November 1855, he was reported as having ‘suddenly left the council chamber’ during a meeting, taking with him all his papers and books. He was removed from his post, but would not let the council have their papers back until a formal legal notice was served on him. The council was in dire financial straits and needed a summary of all their land transactions over the previous ten years, which only Edward could provide, but he refused absolutely to do this (2).

He was reinstated as Town Clerk when he  was discharged as a bankrupt the following year. However, the bankruptcy would not go away. In 1855, Edward had arranged a mortgage for a Mr Green, in which the vicar of Hythe, the Rev’d Richard Formby,  advanced the money. Formby passed the cash to Edward, who delayed before passing it to Green and when he was declared bankrupt, the money was included in his assets. His brother, James, repaid Formby, but in 1858 the Reverend gentleman applied to the Court of Chancery to have Edward struck  off.

This had unfortunate consequences. Edward’s supporters orchestrated a well-publicised protest outside the vicarage, in which they burnt an effigy of the incumbent.  Not everyone thought this an appropriate response, especially as Mrs Formby and her children were in residence at the time.  An address to Formby, signed by over a hundred people said it was a ‘disgraceful act’, but the vicar himself forgave the perpetrators, only hoping that the ‘precious souls of the poor committed to my charge may not be endangered by so sinful and sad an example.’

The Lord Chancellor did not strike Edward off, but awarded costs against him.  On his return to Hythe, the horses were taken out of his carriage and it was pulled through the street by delighted townsmen while the town band played and cheering crowds lined the streets. The Rev’d Formby left Hythe the following year.

The rest of Edward’s life was, as far as we know, quiet, though not without sadness.  Two sons, Ernest Edward and William Benjamin, died young at eleven years and a few months respectively. Asthmatic all his life, an attack of bronchitis eventually proved fatal for Edward and he died on 1 June 1867 aged sixty-two.

His family erected an impressive obelisk over his grave, with space enough for all his family’s names. It is, however, badly weathered, and only Edward’s name and the names of the sons who died as children can, just, be deciphered.

Of his three daughters, Matilda remained single; Josephine married Horatio Case and Alice married firstly Sir Edward Hay Drummond-Hay, the former Governor of St Helena and secondly Henry John Maxwell. The second son Albert became a solicitor in Wimbledon; the third, Percy, went to Ceylon as a tea planter and died there at the age of thirty-six; and the two youngest, Montague and Herbert became clerks in the Metropolitan Water Company and lived in Surrey.

After his death his widow moved with her youngest children to Westminster. She lived latterly with Matilda in Putney where she died in 1897

1. Kent Archives Hy/AM/2/1
2.  Kent Archives Hy/AM/2/2

James Watts senior: a self-made man

 

An impressive obelisk and a vault set into the hillside, the last resting places of two brothers who dominated Hythe civic life in the mid years of the nineteenth century.  The passing visitor peering at the graves would be none the wiser, however, as the weather (or aggressive cleaning) has erased all but the merest trace of their names.

They were James and Edward Watts, the sons of another James Watts.

James Watts senior was born in 1778. He was the son of James Watts and Mary nee Goddard who came from New Romney. He was baptised in St Leonard’s church in Hythe on 12 July 1778. His parents were, according to his obituary, far from rich.  He had a younger brother, Edward.  Aged just twenty, he married Hannah Holmes, again in St Leonard’s church on 30 October 1798. By his early twenties was starting out on his business and political career. He first became licensee of the Red Lion public house, which was at the centre of the livestock market in Hythe and a good place for making contacts. He started to accrue land and livestock himself and set up a coal and seed business.

He handed over the licence of the Red Lion to his brother (who held it until his death in 1826) and before he was thirty, he had gone into  business with a John Dray, running a hoy service round the coast from Hythe to London (often quicker than travelling by the dreadful roads, and heavy goods could be carried, too).

The hoy was very soon joined by another, but disaster struck only weeks later when during a gale the ‘Swan’ was dismasted and the captain killed.  Despite this, the business thrived and in 1810, James was doing well enough to buy John Dray’s share of the business.

He capitalised on the increased military activity in the area resulting from the building of the Martello towers and the Military Canal and won contracts to supply the army with forage and provisions. Reportedly, in 1814 his transactions with these contracts alone exceeded £100,000 – about £3.5 million today. By the time he made his will in 1826, he was a wealthy man, with a house and grounds in Stade Street, Marrowbone Hall, and thousands of acres of grazing land on the Romney Marsh. Increasingly his name was linked with those of Finnis, Mackeson and Tritton, the families who formed Hythe’s plutocracy.

The coal in which James traded was landed by ship at Hythe beach. James owned his own collier ship, the Shepherd,  which plied between Newcastle and Hythe. He was required by law to employ a coal meter, a council employee who weighed the coal as it was off-loaded, but refused to do so. Hythe Corporation made a great deal of fuss about this, but he was able to produce a certificate issued at the port of embarkation (1). Presumably this made the landing process more efficient.

 

The Red Lion in Hythe, one of the first business ventures of James watt senior. It has changed little over the years.

                           Two of the Hythe Martello Towers. They were built in the early nineteenth century as part of the coastal fortifications designed to deal with a potential French invasion

He took a great interest in local affairs. For many years he was quarter-master of the Elham troop of Yeomanry Cavalry (which dovetailed nicely with his business interests); he became a Town Councillor and was a staunch Conservative  though that was a word he disliked, preferring the old-fashioned ‘Tory’; and eventually he became Mayor of Hythe in 1843, dying during his third consecutive year in office. The position of Mayor could only be held by the comparatively wealthy, as a great deal of hospitality was expected of the incumbent at his own expense, and James Watts was noted for the liberality of his entertainments. He was liberal with his charity, too. The Christmas before his death he gave ‘upwards of forty score pounds of beef and several tons of coals’ to the poor of Hythe,

He was an enthusiastic fox hunter and member of the East Kent meet, and would reportedly often spend fourteen hours a day in the saddle, either hunting or visiting his lands.

He and his wife had nine children born almost yearly after their marriage. The eldest son, John, died aged thirty-two in 1832. His younger sister Sarah, the eldest daughter, married the widowed Robert Tassell, a paper manufacturer and farmer of West Malling in 1835, but died just two years later. Her daughter, Frances, had died two months before that.

The next child, another daughter, died aged eight in 1811. James and Edward, followed. Then there was a daughter, Anne, who died in her twenties; another, Harriet, who married John Taylor of Sene (or Sceene or Scene) farm near Hythe and became eventually the mother-in-law of Arthur Randall Davis; and two sons called William, born in 1811 and 1812 who died aged only a few months.

Hannah Watts died on 1 July 1845 and James only four days later, apparently of an ulcerated stomach.

His funeral was a grand affair. The shops in Hythe closed, the pews in St Leonard’s Church were draped in black and the great and good of the town all attended. The MP, Sir William Deedes, sent his carriage. He was buried in the churchyard, but the stone which must surely have marked his last resting place has either disappeared or become wholly illegible.

(1) Kent Archives Hy/JP1