I am preparing an edition of Robert Dolling’s “Ten Years In A Portsmouth Slum” (1895), and thought the following introduction might be of interest to anyone with a fascination for the city of Portsmouth, its extremes and its privations.

Editor’s Introduction

The city of Portsmouth that stands on the island of Portsea at the beginning of the 21st Century is a very different entity to the collection of towns and settlements to which the Reverend Robert Dolling was appointed towards the end of the 19th.

The whole of Conway Street and its environs, where his crowning achievement, Saint Agatha’s church, was built was wrecked by a single bomb during World War II. Perhaps miraculously, the church of St Agatha’s still stands, surrounded by roads that lead elsewhere, a little island of the past not completely swept away by the brutality of German bombs or the modernity of traffic schemes.

Standing in the church today, it is fascinating to imagine the maze of narrow streets that surrounded the basilica, which was opened just a few short weeks before he departed after a stubborn dispute with his bishop. It is humbling to consider the thousands of lives Dolling’s particular energy touched, the battles to improve people’s lots that went on in this area. And it is peculiar today to think of the basilica now as devoid of a parish, with the crowding slums around it long departed.

The part of Landport that was Dolling’s area of influence was crammed under the high walls of Portsmouth dockyard and stretched out towards Commercial Road. It is the presence of the dockyard that perhaps accounts for the attitude to life of many of the people who lived on Portsea Island, and in Landport in particular.

In the dockyard, around 6,000 men, skilled and unskilled, made a living fitting out and repairing the ships that were the lifeblood of the British Empire. Their lives were hard and the skills the dockyard needed from them had little to do with being civilised or Christian.  They needed to be strong, to be able to strike a rivet accurately, to work hard and to turn up on time not too much the worse for wear after whatever excesses they had got up to in the pubs, alehouses, brothels, cockpits or other places of entertainment they had been in the night before.

Alongside the workers in the dockyard were the sailors. Men who had been often at sea for years on end, were battle-hardened, and were used to drinking to excess in the seedy backstreets of Imperial possessions the world over. Landport was one more such place.

Meanwhile, the town of Portsmouth itself lay off to the south and east.  Ostensibly genteel along its High Street, Portsmouth contained massive barracks buildings where soldiers were penned up, awaiting a mutiny, an insurrection or a war to be called on to do their duty.

With so many rootless men around, and with an extraordinarily high number of watering holes around the town, it is little surprise that thousands of prostitutes lived there, plying the streets for trade, or running their businesses from more discreet “bad houses” in the dark recesses and narrow lanes of Landport, Portsea and Portsmouth.

The back streets of Portsmouth were slums even in the 1880s. King’s Bench Alley, Portsea, was only 2 feet 7 inches wide at its narrowest point, and never broader than 4 feet. Squeeze Gut Alley, in Portsmouth had a name that told you all you needed to know about its size. The houses in Landport were similarly sardined together, huddled between the dockyard and Commercial Road. Often a toilet in a back yard was shared between several families, and running water was drawn from a communal pump. Families were stacked close by each other – and – as Dolling himself notes – were prone to a clannishness that meant people in one street wouldn’t speak with those from the next.

With little need for education, since the dockyard would supply the work for many Portsea Island families, existence had a harsh physical quality. There were honest workers of all sorts living in Landport, and (as Dolling notes) children everywhere playing on the streets. There were vagabonds and tramps and those seeking work but unable to get any – and all the mish-mash of the very bottom end of Victorian society. There were shopworkers too, glad to have gainful employment, but who were made to work exceptionally long hours by shop owners who thought nothing of imposing on them a fourteen or fifteen hour day. With this as the background to their lives, no surprise that what Dolling considered to be the elevating influence of religion, along with that of simple social interaction and more satisfying relationship-building were not easily discovered among the people of Landport.

It is into this setting that Dolling strode on his mission to spread The Word, and act as a beacon of light and civilisation.

His background, the son of a wealthy landowner in Northern Ireland, English educated, with a strong feeling for the presence of God-in-man made him a simplistic theologian and a natural champion of the common man.

He came to Portsmouth after running a mission in the East End of London, and eventually became the priest at Saint Agatha’s Church in Conway Street, Landport.

Dolling’s approach to the slums of Portsmouth suited his personality, and that of the town, too. He was extremely active, and realised that the children of these tough families would not want their religious lessons over-egged. It was more use to the people around him to give them the things that were missing from their lives – an opportunity for people from different streets to socialise under one roof, the chance for young men and women to dance together as an opportunity to bring some gentleness to their courtships, the closing of the brothels and the opening of a gymnasium, public baths, almshouses and a grand church.

The prejudice of the higher classes against a priest of the poor, the intransigence of those with vested interests and moneyed profiteers from “fallen” women were all hindrances he overcame. What’s more, the practicalities of teaching people to live a more social life were many, not least the complaints of mothers who noted that their children’s clothes were worn through by kneeling to pray.

All the while, Dolling was most definitely on their side, and actively so. His attitudes were against the intellectual, and in favour of the practical. His attitude to the poor and the uneducated is stated clearly in a few words, that reveal where his sympathies lay:

“For ten long years, day and night, there were lessons for me to learn, if I only had the grace and modesty to learn them. Even in that in which men might know more, knowledge, they are but as babes and sucklings in the presence of those whom they condescend to teach, that is, if knowledge means the knowing of things likely to be useful to the knower and to the community. In speech, too, how much we have to learn; how terse and in what few words do our dear people express themselves, while the man who wants to harangue them wraps round with innumerable words, which darken all counsels and prevent all understanding, the thought that the slum lad expresses in three or four words to the point. And as to manners, every single man in my home was a gentleman, that is, if thinking for others and treating them with forbearance and tenderness and love, and striving to make them feel at home and at ease, means being gentlemen. The roughest, rudest, most ignorant lad, after a month’s residence, has obtained these graces.”

This book is Dolling’s account of his time in Portsmouth. It is rich with the flavour of the Anglo-Catholic church in the 19th Century – and with something else besides. It gives an insight into the life of the town, into the characters who lived here and the different stratas of society. It reveals the prejudices of the classes, like the astonishment that Bishop Thorold pronounced when being told that the two charming chaps he had sat next to during a dinner in Landport were accomplished thieves, or the way in which Dolling took Landport people out for day visits to wealthy benefactors in the country in an effort to infuse them with the finer points of civilization. It shows the emotional satisfaction to be had from a society that isn’t only interested in getting the poor to work, but also to enjoy themselves in activities other than drinking and gambling – and how providing amenities to do that has a positive effect on people at last enabled to live fuller lives. It shows the benign effect of building a society with the ability to interact and rub along together and putting structures in place that bring out the better sides of people.

There are lessons here that we could learn again, at the start of the 21st Century.

It also reveals the humour of life as a priest in Portsmouth, the highs and the lows. The children who wrecked the gymnasium just because they could, the begging priest whom Dolling took by the nape of the neck and threw out of his house, the visiting Member of Parliament, the guardsman and clergymen staying with him over Christmas who he put on a ration of cheese and bread with the rest of the household as punishment for whoever wrecked Blind Willie’s hat.

In all, there is much to recommend the Reverend Robert Dolling’s book, and much to marvel at. Enjoy!

Matt Wingett, Southsea, Portsmouth, 2012.

Below is the first draft of the opening to a story provisionally entitled “The Snow Witch” I am writing.  Will let youknow how it goes!

The Snow Witch

The musician blows in one winter night, as the weather is at its most severe. That is why no-one sees her arrive.

She is a violinist with a distinctly exotic look. Beneath a shawl like an Eastern European gipsy, she walks in heavy furlined boots through the snow, the ermine edging of her skirt tumbling over the drifts like little winter creatures at play. Her face is a delta of narrowed chin and wideset eyes above a fine, straight nose and emotionless mouth – a line that forever promises to turn upwards but does so only rarely. The hair that pokes from beneath her white fur hat is long and straight – and dark as the winter night. Tall and lissom, she holds a violin in her right hand, and where she walks she leaves a trail of thawing snow behind her, as if she is so used to the cold that she keeps a fire stoked in her soul as its natural counterpoint.

The following day, she sets up outside an empty shop on Palmerston Road – and as people hurry by, huddled against the bitter air, she lets out from that tropical wood a stream of long, sinewy, sensual notes that flutter upwards into the winter light. She plays bewildering melodies with dips and turns and something quite alien and Eastern in them, melodies that make one or two of the locals wonder if she might perhaps be a refugee from a country with a deep, sorry history – an extreme terrain with snowclad mountains and hot dusty plains.

There is something in that music. When people hear it, it even seems that for a moment the sunshine breaks out from behind a snow cloud, and the trees shake off their white dusting in the sudden gust of warm wind that swirls around them. It is as if the sound holes in her violin are windows onto another island in another sea far warmer than that around Portsea – hot air rushing through.

As she plays, a child skips by to the noise, and an elderly lady recalling something in that melody of childhood, takes a slide on the ice with a deftness that speaks of childish delight long before the osteoporotic danger of broken hips and cracked bones and blueing bumps ever filled her mind.

At home later that day, the old lady will smile to her empty room, and with a kind of youngster’s joy in her heart, declare the house “open” – inviting neighbours and their children to come and play, and baking a cake to take it to her neighbours.

During that unusually cold winter in which the snow is piled up on the shore, and beachbound snowmen stand in pebbledashed ranks on the shingle beach like a frozen amphibious invasion force, it seems the thaw has started.

Still the musician plays – sending up into the air little notes from the chestnut box of her violin, and turning the notes, it seems, into a blizzard of sunshine.

It is a fluke of the weather that when she stops in the darkening afternoon, as the shadows gather, that the snow starts to fall again, piling up higher on that whiteness, and making a scrunch scrunch beneath her feet. Then she is gone, her fingers icy cold, her fiddle a block of icy granite in her hand.  She will start again the next day.

*

Nobody knows where the violinist goes to at nights. True, over the following evenings she appears in pubs, stepping in with her trademark graceful presence and inner calm, causing locals to stop a moment and drink her in. A fine line to her jaw and large dark eyes, she is framed with a border of hair as ebony as the neck of her violin, her light brown skin a kind of caramel to savour. But afterwards? Nobody knows.

In The Barleymow on Great Southsea Street, that funny 1930s utility pub with its high windows, a local asks her “if she plays that thing” and once again she raises it to her chin and begins to send magic into the air.

In The King Street Tavern, she joins the Irish Session and weaves in a sumptuous series of harmonies to the Irish jigs and reels.  A chorus of tweets flutters through the twittersphere pulling pale hordes of Uni students in, until the landlord is prompted to speak closely with her, urging her with his boyish smile to come back again.

In the RMA Tavern at the far end of the long beach that fronts the island of Portsea onto the south sea she meets Riley. Riley of the dark eyes, who looks her up and down, drinking in her skin and her notes, and feeling a sense of hunger in his body, a yearning to possess her that burns like a fire inside. When she leaves in the black night he follows her out, tracing her melted steps in the fresh snow – until they seem to vanish, suddenly into nothing – ending at a roadside and not appearing on the other side. He stands swaying on his feet, a lot drunk and a little angry and promises himself that he will have her. Yes. He will have her. He thinks it again, saying out loud to the snow in the air with a kind of frustrated ferocity. I will have her!

Then he turns, and heads back to the pub, where his guitar is waiting for him, next to a pint. As he walks, he notices the icy white powder tingling his nose as it settles on it, and remembers the little twist of cocaine in his pocket. It reminds him to pay a visit to the toilets. A little snort his solace at losing his quarry in the snow.