CHAPTER 13: PORTSMOUTH, CHICHESTER & BLACKBURN WITH A PIER OR TWO

Gosport lies on the western side of the inlet to Portsmouth harbour. It was here, in my university days, that I completed another long distance walk from my university hall of residence in Southampton. There is a ferry across the harbour to Portsmouth itself which I'd taken as a student and which we were intending to take later that day, having arrived at a B and B in nearby Tichfield the night before for our penultimate Telegraph Weekend. The lady of the house had recommended a local hostelry which had been regularly frequented by the cast and crew of a popular television series although none of us had ever watched it. Suitably star struck, however, we decamped to the pub and ordered our food. My crab salad was both fresh, tasty and far, far too big a portion. I so over-ate that I still find it hard to eat crab to this day. I'd woken the next morning feeling a little queasy and this wasn't helped by the smell of burning bacon that drifted into our bedroom along with what sounded like saucepans being bashed about. We met up with A and H and made our way to the dining area which was part of the kitchen. The helpful lady from the night before was nowhere to be seen but there were two other people slaving away at the cooker, attempting to make a fried breakfast with limited success. Sausages were spitting, eggs were sticking to the pan and the bacon had gone beyond crisp. If these were the B and B's chefs, they appeared very new and inexperienced because they kept opening and shutting drawers and cupboards as they searched for spatulas and tongs, and spoons to serve the beans that had now become hermetically sealed to the pan. We helped ourselves to cereals and fruit juice, expecting that one of the flustered cooks would come to take our order, but they ignored us whilst scooping out the remains of their culinary adventure, plating it up and then sitting down to eat it. 

At this point in the proceedings, the lady from the night before entered the kitchen. She wished us a good morning, promised to take our order in a moment and then went over to the cooks who were heroically trying to eat their fry-ups. As she apologised for leaving them to it, we realised that they were paying guests like us. They had been unfortunate enough to get to breakfast first and ended up cooking their own food whilst their hostess tried to cope with a crisis. The nature of this crisis became very clear when she came over to take the order. It turned out that whilst we were stuffing ourselves the night before, her husband had informed her that he was leaving her for another woman. Feeling incredibly uncomfortable, we sat there in silence as she crashed about the kitchen, smashing frying pans onto the hob and opening and slamming cupboards whilst delivering an expletive ridden tirade against not just her husband but men in general. "All men are b******s," she proclaimed loudly and frequently during the course of our breakfast. As this included A and me, it was an uncomfortable meal for us both. We declined extra slices of toast and additional cups of coffee so that we could escape the room as soon as possible. Pretty soon after that we set off for the ferry and the City of Portsmouth. 

On previous visits to this great naval city, we had taken a harbour boat trip to see the cruiserss, frigates and destroyers moored up in dock and also visited the remains of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's warship that sunk during the 1545 Battle of the Solent. We had understood that it had been Henry VIII's flagship and that it sank on its maiden voyage but both these 'facts' turned out to be untrue. The ship was special - along with its sister ship the Peter Pomegranate, they represented the new king and queen with the Tudor rose being Henry's emblem and the pomegranate that of his first wife Katherine of Aragon - but it had seen 34 years of service before its sinking and the king's flagship was the 'Great Harry' on which he dined the night before the battle. The engagement was in retaliation to Henry's short lived war against the French in which Boulogne had been captured but little else of note. There is no clear reason why the Mary Rose sank. One eye witness account say that it's sails were caught by a sudden gust of wind as it turned but it may also have been carrying too much weight in terms of additional guns and sailors, or it may have been human error, it's commander taking charge of the vessel for the first time. The French said they holed it below the waterline with a cannon ball. For whatever reason, down she went, the only ship lost in the battle, and she remained on the seabed until 1982. Although her sinking had been well documented, the exact location was unknown and in the intervening years, the timber frames had been covered up so she now lay beneath the seabed. Years of searching during the 1960s finally paid off when three of her port frames were discovered in 1971. I can remember watching on television as a crane slowly brought the Tudor warship's remains into the air once more after 437 years. 
In amongst the preserved timbers were the bones of some unfortunate sailors who went down with the ship and these were then buried in Portsmouth Cathedral, a building unlike any that we had visited so far. It was another church that had been upgraded, having been a much smaller chapel, established in 1180 as a chantry chapel and dedicated to St Thomas Becket who had been murdered in Canterbury Cathedral ten years before. The chapel had been a simple cross shape with a small tower at the centre that not only held the bells but also served as a lighthouse and as a lookout with fine views over the English Channel. When it became a cathedral, plans were drawn up to enlarge the building to more fully meet the needs of the diocese but World War II got in the way and for many years, temporary walls blocked off extensions that had not been completed. The truncated nave was never fully extended, giving the cathedral a strange foreshortened appearance inside. The completed cathedral had only been completed a mere twelve years before our visit, two towers having been added at the western end. The light coloured stone, the airy inside and the small rebuilt tower on top contrasted with the more ancient foundations we had visited. There were some features inside that we read about in our guides that we looked at as we ambled up and down the aisles but nothing particularly noteworthy. 

It was such a peaceful place that it was hard to imagine the violence that had occurred there at least three times in its history. The first instance was another murder, and that of a bishop no less. Before the Wars of the Roses erupted, King Henry VI had alienated  many of his subjects by his attitude to English possessions in France. During the reign of his illustrious father, Henry V, most of modern day northern France was in English hands, the Battle of Agincourt being a particularly glorious victory in the Hundred Years War, which of course didn't last for one hundred years. Henry VI's stewardship of these hard won lands was less effective. He loathed violence and made peace with France. Large areas were given away as part of the marriage settlement between Henry and Margaret of Anjou and this made the advisors who'd negotiated the deal, William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk, and his associate Adam Moleyns, the Bishop of Chichester somewhat unpopular with the returning English soldiers and settlers who'd been turned out of France. In 1450, the bishop was sent to Portsmouth by the king to pay some soldiers and sailors. "... and so it happened that with boisterous language, and also for curtailment of their wages, he fell at variance with them, and they fell on him, and cruelly killed him there." The Duke fared little better, criticised for his roles in military defeats, the peace treaty and the marriage settlement, he was exiled but, on reaching the south coast on his way out of the country, he was captured by an mob of sailors who subjected him to a mock trial and executed him. As a punishment for the murder of a bishop, St Thomas' Church was excommunicated for several years, meaning that the parishioners were unable to take communion there. Bishops back then were not only spiritual leaders, they were powerful political figures and as such, had an increased risk of coming to a bad end. Six months after this incident, the Bishop of Salisbury was dragged from a church where he was conducting mass and brutally murdered. The English Civil War also brought violence to the church when it came under gunfire from Parliamentarian troops based across the water in Gosport. The old tower, which the Royalists had been using as a lookout and much of the nave were destroyed and remained in a dilapidated condition until the restoration of Charles II who organised fundraising in order to repair and rebuild the damage. During the short reign of his brother, James II, Irish troops frequenting the Red Lion Inn that abutted the church and angered about problems with getting paid, burst out onto the high street in riotous mood and disrupted a service in the church, firing several shots. This led to a change in the way troops were housed with barracks being established to replace the system of lodging the men with local inhabitants. 

This was visit four out of five so far to Portsmouth' the first being my student walk when I also took a tour around Nelson's flagship HMS Victory for free after somehow finding myself in front of it without having passed anyone asking me for money. Trip two featured the harbour trip and Mary Rose whilst number three was the Leicester City game after visiting Winchester Cathedral. A and I returned a few years later once our cathedral visiting days had ended and we had embarked upon a new collection - piers. Apart from a few examples, the cathedrals had all been very fairly ancient buildings, modified, restored, reconstructed in many cases, but hundreds of years old. Piers, by contrast, were relatively new phenomena but, being subjected to the corrosive cocktail of salt water and frequent extreme weather conditions, they had fared a good deal worse. Because we'd enjoyed our various jollies to the cathedrals, we were keen to replace them with something equally as interesting, our first pier being the Queen's Pier at Ramsey on the Isle of Man after we'd concluded our cathedral collection with a visit to Peel Cathedral. The decrepit state of the pier and its lack of accessibility were to become a familiar occurrence as, to date, we have trotted up 47 with another 14 still to go. Whilst the initial idea seemed sound enough, an issue did arise: piers tend to be built almost exclusively in coastal areas and we lived about as far from the sea as you can get in England. That meant there could be no little jaunts to Leicester, Birmingham, Coventry or Derby: any visit would entail a major journey with the outlying examples on the Isle of Wight and Cornwall still on our 'to do' list. 

A detailed description of every one of our visits would not only be fairly tedious but also impossible because, unlike cathedrals, piers don't provide you with little A4 guides that you can religiously stick into a ring binder and so the dates and details of many of the pier visits have been lost in time. A and I did take photos of each other when we arrived at the furthest point of access: in some cases this was standing in front of it looking at the 'pier closed' signs. So, instead I will mention a few of our more notable visits in a brief excursion into this Victorian collection. Piers began life as elongated jetties that protruded into the sea allowing boats, particularly pleasure boats, to moor up there taking on and disgorging passengers. The entrepreneurial Victorians soon recognised their potential and began filling them with stalls, and amusements, building theatres and operating little trains. Around the start of the 20th century there were over 100 but today there are less than half that number, the sea, weather and frequently fires having reaped destruction on many. In 1979, under the auspices of John Betjemam, the National Pier Society was formed in an effort to save the remaining piers from imminent destruction. I believed their organisation provided us with a definitive list of piers we had to collect. A argued that there may be other piers that weren't members of the society that we should add to our list. We had our heated dispute in a small cafe in Harwich near to the Ha'penny Pier as our wives looked on despairingly, knowing these minor disagreements could go on for hours with both A and I refusing to abandon  our positions. Eventually we agree a 61 pier list out of which we have collected 47, the most recent being Teignmouth and Paignton on a two night stay in Devon. 

Whilst many of out pier visits have been one off occasions, the piers at Cromer and Weston-super-Mare have been regular destinations over many years. Cromer is in pretty good condition and a Grade II listed building. At the far end is a theatre, one of only five End of the Pier theatres on the country, and a lifeboat station with an impressive little museum charting all the missions Cromer lifeboats have been involved with along with lives saved. The current pier was built in 1902 and was the third on the site. With each new pier, the extension into the water grew longer, the 1822 cast iron version being 64 metres whilst the 1846 wooden pier measured 73 metres. It was this pier that became a favourite place for that Victorian pastime of the better off, promenading: walking slowly up and down in your finest clothes in order to take the air and be seen. The council appointed a pier keeper who ensured the rules, such as no smoking and no ladies after 9pm, were adhered to. Weston, A and H's seaside town of choice, had not one but two piers although Birkbeck Pier had been closed for several years when we paid it a visit. It is the only pier in the country that links the mainland to an island and is older of the two, the other being the Grand Pier. We'd been on the Grand Pier many times before its official entry into our records and have made regular visits since then with an interlude after 2008 between part of it burning down and its reconstruction. 

Another pier to suffer from fire was the world's longest pleasure pier at Southend, extending a mile and a third across the mudflats of the Thames estuary with an electric railway installed to convey visitors along its length to a grand pavilion. The pavilion burnt down in 1959 and was replaced with a bowling alley, itself damaged by a small fire in 1977, the year after a much larger fire had destroyed much of the pier head. In 1995 the bowling alley burnt down completely and, two years before our 2007 the pier was ravaged by fire again. We'd been in Southend to watch Leicester City play as we did in Brighton a few years later. The city also had two piers but the West Pier had all but disappeared when we visited, closing in 1970, and entering a period of decline that saw storm damage and the inevitable fires reduce the once popular attraction to a skeletal shell. We lunched on the still thriving Palace Pier, our arrival being marked by a seagull who decided to deposit a very large dollop of bird poo on my head and coat. 

A and I continued our Christmas Shopping Days post-cathedrals with piers becoming the focus for a few years. One particularly bitter cold December Saturday, we set off for the Kent piers at Herne Bay and Deal. On the way we made a fairly tortuous detour into Greenwich in order to visit the market there. We parked some way off and then battled against an icy headwind to reach the sanctuary of the indoor market. It was here, a year or so before, that Sue and I had purchased an oil burning lamp and I'd persuaded A to deviate away from our planned itinerary in order to buy some bottles of oil, having searched the Internet for more local suppliers in vain. When we eventually located the oil lamp stall, we explained about our tortuous journey through south London Christmas shopping traffic. The stall holder suggested we could actually avoid making this trip in the future if we bought direct from his supplier. He gave us the address which turned out to be a unit on an industrial estate precisely two miles from my house! Then it was onwards to the piers and the depressing sight of seaside towns out of season. By the time we forced ourselves out of the deserted cafe in Deal, which at least was marginally warmer than the sub zero temperatures outside, we were fairly fed up with the day but Deal pier held one further little pleasure for us: it was open, and that meant we had to walk out on its unprotected walkway in what must have been a force 9 gale that had come directly from Siberia. 

The stretch of coastline boasting the most piers must be around Blackpool, a destination for both families for a day out to pull in the illuminations. With Fleetwood pier to the north and St Anne's to the south, this was a five pier day and after taking our children along the seafront, playing the amusements and plying them with ice creams, we returned to our cars at the southern edge of the town. H and Sue opted to stay with the youngsters in the cars whilst A and I did a quick reconnoiter of the piers. It shouldn't have taken long: that was my calculation. Unfortunately, I'd not factored in a. the number of visitors who wanted to catch the trams, b. the paucity of the aforementioned trams, c. the speed of the trams and the interminable time taken at each of the myriad of stops - that and I'd misread the scale on the map. My parting cheery words of, " We'll see you in 40 minutes: have fun," came back to haunt me as we trudged back two and a half hours later. Then, with cars full of bored and grumpy children and wives, it took us another 30 minutes to get out of the car park and join the queue to begin the illumination drive. We gave up and went home.

Before leaving our pier collection, there are one or two that deserve a special mention. Our favourite pier was at Southwold on the Suffolk coast. Coming in at number two was Llandudno where we'd stayed on a short break. I'd been a little worried about our accommodation there, having booked the hotel before reading the damning reviews on TripAdvisor. However, all was fine with the exception of breakfast where, as the only guests in the dining room, our every move was watched by the lurking waitress who made up for her lack of inter-personal skills by displaying a ruthless efficiency. She pounced on our discarded bowls and cups with indecent haste, on one occasion removing Sue's empty plate as the bacon on her fork was still on its way to her mouth. We encountered another interesting hotel when we paid a visit to Worthing, primarily to add its pier to our growing list. The room Sue and I had been allocated was down a passageway to the side of the lift. As we cast off our shoes and collapsed onto the bed, we heard the lift making its descent from the upper floors. Then came a voice, speaking to us out of the ether: "Doors opening," it said. A few seconds later this was followed by, "Doors closing," and, with a grinding of gears and a whirl of pulleys, off went the lift, ascending to the next floor where the voice, now somewhat distant but clearly audible, repeated it's tedious messages once again. Down it came, but by the time it was informing its occupants that its doors were opening just in case they'd failed to notice, our bedroom door was already closing as I stomped off to arrange a different room for the night. The award for most impressive pier goes to Clevedon, a few miles north of Weston. Here, the decaying pier was dismantled, taken away, repaired and then rebuilt with the aid of lottery and heritage funding and the support of many backers who purchased small brass plaques that line the wooden planks and benches. Finally, our most peaceful pier was the one at Bangor, jutting out into the tranquil waters of the Menai Straights which, the day we visited was as calm as the proverbial millpond.