Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T14:13:09.904Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The resilience of sailortown culture in English naval ports, c. 1820–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2015

BRAD BEAVEN
BRAD BEAVEN*
Affiliation:
University of Portsmouth, Milldam, Burnaby Road, Portsmouth, PO1 3AS, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Those living in naval sailortowns were geographically and culturally marginalized from the centres of economic and political power and their relationship with the civic and naval authorities was one which varied between compromise and resistance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 72 - 95
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Smith, C. Fox, Sailor Town Days (London, 1923), 7Google Scholar.

2 Quoted in Marriott, J., Beyond the Tower: A History of East London (Yale, 2011), 84Google Scholar.

3 Riley, R., Portsmouth: Ships, Dockyard and Town (Stroud, 2002), 41Google Scholar.

4 Vale, L. and Campanella, T. (ed.), The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (Oxford, 2005), 341Google Scholar.

5 Busteed, M., ‘Resistance and respectability: dilemmas of Irish migrant politics in Victorian Britain’, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 27 (2009), 190CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Land, I., ‘The humours of sailortown: Atlantic history meets subculture theory’, in Clark, G., Owens, J. and Smith, G. (eds.), City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City (Montreal, 2010), 325Google Scholar.

7 Jackson, G., ‘Ports 1700–1840’, in Clark, P. (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. II: 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), 705–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Haggerty, S., Webster, A. and White, N.J. (eds.), Empire in One City? Liverpool's Inconvenient Imperial Past (Manchester, 2008)Google Scholar.

9 Hugill, S., Sailortown (London, 1967), xviiiGoogle Scholar.

10 Burton, V., ‘Boundaries and identities in the nineteenth-century English port: sailortown narratives and urban space’, in Gunn, S. and Morris, R.J. (eds.), Identities in Space. Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot, 2001), 137Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., 142.

12 Jackson, ‘Ports 1700–1840’, 721.

13 See Rodger, N.A.M., ‘Review of Isaac Land's War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850’, Victorian Studies, 53 (2011), 545CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rodger is critical of cultural theorists for their use of evidence and their propensity to analyse material through ‘the lenses of imperialism, race and gender theory’.

14 Rodger, N.A.M., The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986)Google Scholar; McKee, C., Sober Men and True: Sailor Lives in the Royal Navy, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Rediker, M., Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

15 Leggett, D., ‘Review essay: navy, nation and identity in the long nineteenth century’, Journal of Maritime Research, 13 (2011), 152Google Scholar; Rüger, J., The Great Naval Game. Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar; Conley, M.A., From Jack Tar to Union Jack. Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester, 2009)Google Scholar; Redford, D., The Submarine: A Cultural History from the Great War to Nuclear Combat (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

16 Land, ‘The humours of sailortown’, 334–5.

17 Ibid.

18 Land, I., War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 2009), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Land, I., ‘Tidal waves: the new coastal history’, Journal of Social History, 40 (2007), 736CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Burton, ‘Boundaries and identities’, 138.

20 Crone, R., Violent Victorians. Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester, 2012), 7–8Google Scholar; Olsaretti, A., ‘Urban culture, curiosity and the aesthetics of distance: the representation of picturesque carnivals in early Victorian travelogues to the Levant’, Social History, 32 (2007), 247–70Google Scholar; Walton, J.K., ‘Popular entertainment and public order: the Blackpool carnivals, 1923–4’, Northern History, 34 (1998), 170–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hennelly, M.M., ‘Victorian carnivalesque’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30 (2002), 365–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Bakhtin, M., Rabelais and his World (Indiana, 1984), 5, 7Google Scholar.

22 Quoted in Walton, ‘Popular entertainment’, 174.

23 Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 46.

24 Olsaretti, ‘Urban culture’, 249; Cunningham, H., ‘The metropolitan fairs: a case study in the social control of leisure’, in Donajgrodzki, A.P. (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), 163–84Google Scholar.

25 Whitfield, H.F., Plymouth and Devonport in Times of War and Peace (Devonport, 1900), 255Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 255.

27 Ibid., 255–6.

28 Jacket, A Blue, Saucy Jack and the Indiaman, vol. I (London, 1840), 159–60Google Scholar.

29 Whitfield, Plymouth and Devonport, 255–6.

30 Ibid., 234.

31 Land, ‘The humours of sailortown’, 329.

32 A Blue Jacket, Saucy Jack, 166.

33 Whitfield, Plymouth and Devonport, 256.

34 Ibid., 256.

35 For the libertine nature of Georgian London, see Haggerty, G.E., ‘Walpoliana’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 34 (2001), 227–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Norton, R., ‘Recovering gay history from the Old Bailey’, London Journal, 30 (2005), 39–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 For the sailors’ libertine lifestyle in this period see Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 45.

37 See Bell, K., ‘Civic spirits? Ghost lore and civic narratives in nineteenth-century Portsmouth’, Cultural and Social History, 11 (2014), 51–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Driessen, H., ‘Mediterranean port cities: cosmopolitanism reconsidered’, History and Anthropology, 16 (2005), 130–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Riley, Portsmouth Ships, 35–6; Biddle, R., ‘Ship building and the health of dockyard workers 1815–1871’, Family and Community History, 12 (2009), 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Gill, C., Plymouth, a New History. 1603 to the Present Day (London, 1979), 121Google Scholar.

41 Walton, O., ‘“A great improvement in the sailor's feelings towards the naval services”. Recruiting seamen for the Royal Navy 1815–53’, Journal of Maritime Research, 12 (2010), 46Google Scholar.

42 Filmer-Sankey, W. and Markham, L., Plymouth: Rapid Urban Character Study (Plymouth, 2005), 10Google Scholar.

43 Gill, Plymouth, a New History, 147.

44 Filmer-Sankey and Markham, Plymouth, 10.

45 Beaven, B., Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 (Manchester, 2012), 14Google Scholar.

46 Gates, W., City of Portsmouth Records of the Corporation 1835–1927 (Portsmouth, 1928), 61–2Google Scholar. My thanks for Tom Cottrell for finding this information.

47 Filmer-Sankey and Markham, Plymouth, 17; Gill, Plymouth, a New History, 77.

48 Luckin, B., ‘Revisiting the idea of degeneration in urban Britain, 1830–1900’, Urban History, 33 (2006), 241CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, for the provincial perspective, Doyle, B., ‘Mapping slums in a historic city: representing working-class communities in Edwardian Norwich’, Planning Perspectives, 16 (2001), 57–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 V. Fulda, ‘Space, civic pride, citizenship and identity in 1890s Portsmouth’, University of Portsmouth Ph.D. thesis, 2006, 58.

50 Burton, ‘Boundaries and identities’, 137–8. Functioning in a heterotopian-like environment, sailortown was increasingly at odds and free from the ‘beneficial’ influences of political economy of the nineteenth century.

51 Portsmouth News (PN), 30 Nov. 1903, col. 6c.

52 Gates, City of Portsmouth, 84.

53 Gunn, S., The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class. Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar.

54 General Board of Health enquiries often triggered local hostilities to central government interference. The much criticized General Board of Health was abolished in 1858. See Callcott, M., ‘The challenge of cholera: the last epidemic at Newcastle Upon Tyne’, Northern History, 20 (1984), 167–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Brayshaw, M. and Pointon, V., ‘Local politics and public health in mid-nineteenth-century Plymouth’, Medical History, 27 (1983), 169–70Google Scholar; Day, A., ‘A spirit of improvement: improvement commissioners, boards of health and central-local relations in Portsea’, in Morris, R.J. and Trainor, R.H. (eds.), Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000), 108Google Scholar.

56 Day, ‘A spirit of improvement’, 108.

57 Brayshaw and Pointon, ‘Local politics’, 102.

58 Rawlinson, R., Report of the General Board of Health on a Preliminary Inquiry into the Sewage, Drainage, and Supply of Water and the Sanitary Conditions of the Inhabitants of the Borough of Devonport in the County of Devon (London, 1854), 36Google Scholar.

59 Brayshaw and Pointon, ‘Local politics’, 162; Day, ‘A spirit of improvement’, 111.

60 Day, ‘A spirit of improvement’, 109.

61 Hampshire Telegraph (HT), 15 Jun. 1867, col. 6b.

62 Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack, ch. 2.

63 Whitfield, Plymouth and Devonport, 287

64 Quoted in Bell, ‘Civic spirits?’, 55.

65 Ibid., 55.

66 Western Times (WT), 18 Apr. 1876, col. 3e.

67 Bell, ‘Civic spirits?’ As Bell has noted, most of these superstitions were linked to the prevention of drowning.

68 Land, ‘The humours of sailortown’, 328, 334.

69 Whitfield, Plymouth and Devonport, 287.

70 Ibid., 291. Although the newspaper does not provide details of the size of the crowds, the reporter does note that the roads were temporarily blocked.

71 Quoted in Bell, ‘Civic spirits?’, 58.

72 While infamous soothsayers such as Mother Shipton were neither urban nor maritime, the denizens of Portsea seemed to have tapped into wider popular superstitious traditions. Workers Educational Asssociation (Portsmouth Branch Local History Group), Memories of Stamshaw (Portsmouth, n.d.), 8. My thanks to Dr Mel Bassett for providing me with this reference.

73 Hannay, J., Biscuits and Grog. Personal Reminiscences and Sketches (London, 1848), 21–2Google Scholar.

74 Plymouth Record Office (PLYRO), 2285/1, Devonport Town Mission, 1866–67.

75 PLYRO, 2285/1, Devonport Town Mission, 1868.

76 See Gaskill, M., Hellish Nell: The Last of Britain's Witches (London, 2001)Google Scholar.

77 Land, ‘The humours of sailortown’, 333.

78 Dolling, R.R., Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum (London, 1896; 1903 edn), 99Google Scholar.

79 Ibid., 18.

80 Ibid., 102–3.

81 Clayton, J., Father Dolling, a Memoir (London, 1902), 23Google Scholar.

82 Dolling, Ten Years, 106.

83 Roberts, R., The Classic Slum (London 1971; 1973 edn), 22Google Scholar; Davies, A., Leisure, Gender and Poverty. Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester 1900–1939 (Manchester, 1990), 63Google Scholar.

84 Hunt, M., ‘Women and the fiscal-imperial state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, in Wilson, K. (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), 31Google Scholar.

85 Dolling, Ten Years, 108.

86 Ibid., 108.

87 Imperial War Museum (IWM), cat. 728, interview with James George Cox, 1976.

88 Dolling, Ten Years, 108.

89 Quoted in V. Burton, ‘The work and home life of seafarers, with special reference to the port of Southampton, 1870–1921’, London School of Economics Ph.D. thesis, 1988, 285.

90 IWM, cat. 10882, interview with George Edward Miller, 1989.

91 PN, 27 Jun. 1881, col. 2a.

92 WT, 16 Nov. 1871, col. 4a.

93 PLYRO, 2682/1, annual reports of the Royal Albert Hospital, 1869–70.

94 HT, 26 Nov. 1870, col. 6c.

95 Ibid., col. 6c.

96 HT, 11 Sep. 1867, col. 3b.

97 Valerie Burton has recently noted similar behaviour in the much maligned ‘fishwife’ as she describes her unruly and vociferous image as a ‘visible resistance to economic marginalisation in the masculinised public sphere of commerce’: Burton, V., ‘Fish/wives: gender representation, and agency in coastal communities’, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 37 (2012), 532Google Scholar.

98 WT, 16 Nov. 1871, col. 4a.

99 Lee, C., ‘Prostitution and Victorian society revisited: the Contagious Diseases Acts in Kent’, Women's History Review, 21 (2012), 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 Burton, ‘Boundaries and identities’, 142.

101 HT, Mar. 1867, col. 2e.

102 Ibid., col. 2e. The Admiralty records do not reveal the fate of the sailors.

103 Northern Star and National Trades Journal (NSNTJ), 31 Aug. 1850, col. 1f. While the Hampshire Telegraph reported the incident, the most detailed accounts were carried elsewhere in the regional press.

104 HT, 31 Aug. 1850, col. 7f.

105 NSNTJ, 31 Aug. 1850, col. 1f.

106 IWM, cat. 661, interview with Reginald Claude Ashley, 1975.