600. CHATHAM HIGH STREET

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Rochester and Chatham are two distinct places, but contiguous except the interval of a very small marsh or vacancy between Rochester and Chatham.

There is little remarkable in Rochester except the ruins of a very old castle and an ancient but not extraordinary cathedral but the river and its appendices are the most considerable of the kind in the world.

This being the chief arsenal of the Royal Navy of Great Britain.

The buildings here are indeed like the ships themselves, surprisingly large, and in their several kinds they're beautiful.

The warehouses, or rather streets of warehouses and storehouses for laying up the naval treasure, are the largest in dimension and the most in number that are anywhere to be seen in the world.

The rope walk for making cables and the forges for anchors and other iron work bear a proportion to the rest, as also the wet dock for keeping masts and yards of the greatest size, where they lie sunk in the water to preserve them.

The boat yard, the anchor yard, all like the whole, monstrously great and extensive, and they're not easily described

so that Tom was Daniel Defoe who was a Londoner in the first volume of his tour through the whole island of Great Britain published in 1724.

It was a massive success with the exception of Robinson Crusoe.

It was by far his best-selling book but never before has it been read out on the top of Rochester Castle on a grey and slightly dreary day in howling wind

to an audience of bored-looking camera people.

So very exciting scenes.

Yeah, because this is the long-awaited episode on Chatham High Street, but not just Chatham High Street, intra-Catham, which is the stretch that leads us onto Rochester High Street.

And we are on the 100-foot summit of the keep of Rochester Castle.

So Daniel Defoe, just for people who don't know, Defoe was he wasn't just Britain's first novelist.

He was Britain's, one of Britain's greatest journalists, wasn't he?

And he did this tour of the whole island of Great Britain.

And he published it just a couple of decades after the Act of Union had created a United Kingdom out of England and Scotland.

So this is a moment in British history like no other.

It's a point in which Britain is poised on the brink of absolutely enormous political, economic, diplomatic change.

Absolutely.

And Defoe essentially loved change.

He loved the idea of progress.

Progress is very Whiggish, isn't it?

And although Defoe ended up working essentially as a kind of spy for a Tory government, I think in his instincts, he was all about the Whigs.

So as a young man, he had fought for the Duke of Monmouth against his uncle, the Catholic King James II.

And Monmouth's rebellion had gone disastrously badly.

But Defoe had managed to avoid being hanged, which is good news for fans of

Robinson Crusoe and 18th century travelogues around Britain.

He'd loved the Glorious Revolution when James II got kicked out and replaced by the Protestant William and Mary and he'd been a big enthusiast for the acts of union between England and Scotland and had actively worked to promote them actually.

And as you can probably tell from the accent which is exactly how he spoke his origins were in trade.

He's a mercantile man, isn't he?

So he'd worked as a wine merchant.

So that perhaps explains one that's one reason why he's so keen on the Royal Navy, the idea of commerce, of Britannia ruling the waves.

And of course, he loves a naval dockyard.

He absolutely does.

And just to say as well, that

he had sailed the seas.

He'd been a wine merchant.

Dominic, you love a...

a Portuguese wine depot in the 18th century, don't you?

And Defoe was kind of always hanging out there.

And so it's not surprising, really, that when he comes to Rochester, which he describes as having a castle and cathedral, he looks at it as being rather boring and old.

And Chatham, which is where the royal dockyards are, he is all over that.

He thinks it's incredible.

He thinks it's absolutely wonderful.

And I think that that's why that passage describing Rochester and Chatham is absolutely brilliant for pinpointing this idea of Britain as being on the kind of cusp of incredible change.

Yeah, so there's a world of kind of warehouses and dockyards and battleships and global trade and free trade and all that kind of stuff.

And this is the sort of, this is the central access.

This is the hub of that world, isn't it?

Rochester and Chatham, these kind of twin towns across the Medway.

So Tom, give us a little bit of a tour d'orison.

So the reason that we are here is obviously because I've bullied you into doing it.

You've put up a heroic three-year rearguard action, but at last we are here in Rochester, in Chatham.

Do you know what, ladies and gentlemen?

When I look at Tom's notes, and now that I'm here on site, I could not be more excited.

I'm absolutely agog with excitement because there are so many delights to come in this episode.

There's Dickens, there's naval stuff, there might be a mention of Horatio Nelson, there's people wrestling on the floor of a chapel or something.

It is probably the most exciting, the most action-packed, the most blood-soaked, and in many ways the most moving episode that we've ever done on the rest is history.

The reason that I wanted to do it is that I've been walking the Saxon Shore Way, which is a kind of national route that follows the coastline of Kent, which for those people not familiar with the geography of England is the bit in the southeast that sticks out into the sea.

And I realised coming here that Rochester High Street becomes Chatham High Street.

And I felt that the way in which you go from kind of, well, we've got an Iron Age hill fort, we've got a Roman bridge, we've got an Anglo-Saxon cathedral, we've got a Norman castle, and yet you end up with Chatham Docks, this kind of great nerve center of British imperial expansion.

I am making the pitch that

this is the most historic street in England.

Surely the world, Tom.

No?

Well, I think in Britain you can make a case for the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, which has Holyrood and Edinburgh Castle and the grave of Adam Smith and all kinds of things like that.

But

if you want a sense of the sweep and span and process of change that manifests itself through English history, Rochester High Street, Chatham High Street, if you think of it as a single road, I mean, is absolutely fantastic.

And you,

as Defoe says, Rochester is all about the kind of traditional England of tourist brochures.

Chatham is about energy and industry and transformation.

And you could say, I think, that in the 18th and 19th centuries, it's a kind of cross between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley.

And Chatham right now, I mean, it's retained that reputation, hasn't it, Tom, as a glittering cosmopolitan

on the front line of technological and social change, no?

I fear not.

So the Chatham dockyards shut in 1984.

And I think it would be fair to say that

if you're an enthusiast for vape shops or possibly to two parlours, Chatham High Street now is very much the place to go.

I actually love both of those things.

So it's great.

It's probably not at the cutting edge of naval technology now in the way that it used to be.

So I think it's fair to say that Chatham has seen happier days.

And in that, again, of course, it's an exemplar of British history because obviously Britain is not the great power that it was in the 18th and 19th centuries and so if Chatham exemplifies the rise to global greatness of Britain there's also a sense in which its current state tells you about Britain's relative decline.

But before we do some history, why don't we have a little excursion into geography?

We don't do enough geography on the rest of this history.

And Theo in particular is a passionate aficionado of geography.

So Tom, talk to Theo and indeed the listeners about geography.

Yeah, well geography, of course, so important to the study of history because so often geography is historical destiny and that is definitely the case with Rochester and Chatham.

So just to set the geographical scene for people who may not be au fait with North Kent.

So

we are just south of the Thames estuary, the stretch of water that extends from London outwards into the North Sea.

So we've got Essex to the north and wean in Kent on the south coast of

the Thames Estuary.

And we are standing beside the Medway, which is a river that rises in Kent and flows northwards out into the Thames Estuary.

And Rochester and Chatham both stand on the Medway and would not have come into existence without the Medway.

So to talk about Rochester first,

why is Rochester where it is?

Basically, because it is the lowest bridging point on

the River Medway.

So essentially, if you want to get across the Medway, Rochester is the place to come.

And in that, its relationship to the Medway is equivalent to London's relationship to the Thames.

And as with London,

it's the Romans who build London Bridge.

So here it's the Romans who build the first bridge over the Medway.

But even before the Romans come, there is a trackway here that that leads from Dover, the southeastern tip of Kent,

up towards the River Thames.

And this is the fording point.

So kind of very much kind of Iron Age highway.

And this is the highway that in due course will come to be called Watling Street, one of the great roads of England.

And so where is that, Tom?

Is that right here?

Yeah,

so that bridge that you can see there, if you're watching this on YouTube, and essentially Chatham High Street, Rochester High Street, that's all part of Watling Street.

So essentially, when the Romans under Julius Caesar land here in 55 and then 54 BC, in 54 BC, Caesar advances towards the Thames.

He would almost certainly have come this way.

And again, we can be pretty confident that in AD 43, when Claudius sends three legions here under Aulus Plautius,

again, they would have come here.

And in fact, we know that there is a great two-day battle on the Medway, perhaps here, more likely a little bit further south.

And Vespasian, who will go on to become the emperor, he crosses the river with his Batavian cavalry, who have this extraordinary ability to swim in full armor.

So, very exciting scene.

It's unbelievably exciting, and I cannot describe it.

It's such a shame that the listeners and even the people watching on YouTube can't actually be here

because the air is electric with excitement, isn't it?

To be here in this spot where it actually happened.

Unbelievable history.

Well, can I just crank up the excitement by revealing the name that the Romans give to the town that they build here?

It's Dura Brivae, which means almost certainly stronghold by the bridge.

I mean, couldn't be more exciting.

And both Watling Street and this bridge built by the Romans survive the Roman occupation, don't they?

Basically because they're just so well located.

So if you're going to Dover,

if you are coming from Dover, if you're going to London, you're going to go this way.

Yes.

So it's absolutely the kind of, it's essentially, it's the great road that links London and everything that lies beyond London to Dover and therefore to the continent.

But enough of Rochester.

There's been a lot of Rochester so far.

Where's Chatham?

Talk to me about Chatham.

Well, the view of Chatham is on the other side of the Keep where we're standing now.

I'm looking at it now.

It's gorgeous.

It's absolutely stunning.

I think, Dominic, we should get Harry to move the cameras and go over on the other side of the keep.

Do

so, as you can see if you are watching on Spotify or on YouTube, we have now moved to the other side of the castle.

And the sense of drama, tension and jeopardy is becoming more acute with every moment for two reasons.

Number one, the wind has now reached gale force levels.

And secondly, the staff of the castle are having to fight off a huge throng downstairs.

Two different groups.

One, a group of Restis History Club members who've just signed up at the RestishHistory.com and have heard that Tom Holland is here.

They're very excited.

And the other, a group of schoolchildren whom Tom has forbidden from coming to the top of the castle, ruining their outing, their day, and quite possibly their love of history forever.

But, Tom, tell us, tell everybody watching on Spotify and YouTube why you have barred these children from coming to the top of the castle so that you can talk about Chatham.

Well, I'll try to do it over the sound of the sobbing of distraught 12-year-old history fans.

But it's important for us to be on the summit of this 100-foot Norman keep

because we've come to the other side and now you can see the sweep of the Medway.

And we talked about how the Medway is key to to Rochester, it's also the key to Chatham.

So

Chatham is closer to the sea than Rochester, which means that it is much more convenient should you be sailing an enormous Tudor ship, which is what starts to happen in the 16th century because England is expanding its global interests, trade,

piracy,

ultimately conquest, and

the Elizabethan court starts to realize that it's ideally situated between London and the kind of the shipping lanes that lead to the world.

So in 1568 Elizabeth I formally institutes Chatham as a royal dockyard and from that point on it plays

a fundamental role in the growth of the Royal Navy and the emergence of first English and then British engagement with the broader world, which of course ultimately will result in the establishment of the British Empire.

And obviously that is a process that takes centuries and the emergence of Chatham as what it becomes in the 18th and into the 19th century, to the most futuristic place on the face of the planet, is a huge, huge long-term government-sponsored plan.

of the kind perhaps you might say that the British state has slightly forgotten how to engage in.

But born as much of failure as success, right?

Because

where we are now, the Medway is the location for one of the most disgraceful, perfidious, ultimately insignificant moments in world history, isn't it?

Which is the Dutch raid on the Medway.

They're bad people and they really let themselves down.

So that's in June 1667, and it's part of a series of wars that England and the Dutch Republic are waging against each other.

This is the second bout of war under the reign of Charles II, who's just come back after his exile in the Netherlands.

And we'll be hearing more about that in due course.

And the Dutch and Charles II aren't getting on well at all in the 1660s.

And as we say, in 1667, the Dutch sail up the Medway and they find that the defences in place to protect the dockyards and all the ships that are at anchor there just aren't up to scratch.

And they burn or capture 13 English ships.

And Dominic, in a shocking shocking display of thieving.

They haul away HMS Royal Charles, which is the flagship of the English Navy and disgracefully it's still on display in the Rijksmuseum to this day.

Do you want to know what Daniel Defoe said?

Yeah, tell me what he said.

I know you like about Daniel Defoe.

He had pungent views about this.

He said this alarm gave England such a sense of the consequence of the river Madway and of all the docks and yards.

This alarm, he changed his voice because he toured the countries.

I think he picked up the country.

It picked up different accents.

He said, this alarm gave England such a sense of the consequence of the River Medway and of all the docks and yards at Chatham and of the danger the Royal Navy lie exposed to there, that all these doors which were open then are locked up and sufficiently barred since that time.

And tis not now in the power of any nation under heaven, nation, I don't know what happened there, though they should be masters at sea, unless they were masters at land too at the same time to give us such another affront.

I don't actually know what that last bit means because I was just so distracted by the accent.

What does he mean?

What he means is that

the raid on the Medway was such a shock to the British state that absolutely impregnable defences were put in place all the way along the line of the Redway up to Chatham

and particularly at the mouth of the estuary going into the Medway.

And essentially he's saying that even if naval supremacy were to pass from Britain people still wouldn't be able to force their way in and the only conceivable way in which Chatham could be destroyed would be if there was a land land invasion.

And

Defoe is right, because Chatham stands impregnable throughout the Seven Years' War, throughout the Napoleonic Wars.

And we talked in our episodes on Nelson about how Napoleon's plan for England, if he could only get his troops across, was to march straight on Chatham and destroy it.

I mean, it would be the equivalent of knocking out, I don't know, a kind of nuclear defense system or something like that today.

And it survives the First World War, it survives the Second World War.

And

throughout those conflicts and also throughout the long decades of peace in the 19th century, Chatham, I guess, is both

the symbol and the fulcrum of Britain's role as a great global power.

So, before that, Tom, just quickly, because the school children are fighting their way up the stairs, Britain was, of course, herself part of a great empire, and it was a kind of node in the imperial network of the Roman Empire.

And actually, we've been looking down at Watling Street and the Great Bridge, haven't we?

Just say a little bit more about that bridge, because you love that bridge.

Yeah, so as you said, the first bridge over the Medway, probably a pontoon bridge, and then the Romans develop it with great stone piers and kind of wooden planks across it.

And that bridge endures well into well after the collapse of Roman power.

And it's there probably up until 8th or 9th centuries when it gets rebuilt again.

And

the reason that it's so important, as we said, it's the quickest way to get from Dover, which is the shortest crossing point from the continent, up to London.

And so it's not surprising that in the wake of the Roman withdrawal, Rome makes contact again with what's become Anglo-Saxon England, not with military means, but with spiritual means.

When at the end of the sixth century, Saint Augustine arrives with a band of monks to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons.

And his original plan is to get to London and establish an archbishopric there, but they don't because London is kind of hostile territory.

So famously, they stop in Canterbury, and that's why the head of the Church of England is in Canterbury to this day.

And that is where the first cathedral in Anglo-Saxon England is built.

But the second Anglo-Saxon cathedral,

which is founded in 604, is down there from where we are standing.

And it's founded in Rochester by a guy called Justus, who, like Augustine, is from Rome.

And

it's incredibly old.

I mean,

Defoe says it's it says it's not very interesting, but it, I mean, it is interesting in the sense that you know, this takes us right the way back to the earliest days of the Roman church in

England, back to the age of Gregory the Great.

And I, you know, I find it very moving in the sense of a living link.

Yeah, you love that, don't you?

I do.

It was given to Odo

by William the Conqueror, no?

Yeah, so

Anglo-Saxon England comes to an end with the Norman conquest and in our episode on that we talked about how William from Hastings goes to Dover and captures it and then goes to London and he comes via Rochester so he sees that it's an absolutely kind of crucial place to seize.

And so he, his

half-brother Odo, who is a bishop but very fond of fighting.

So famously, you know, as a bishop, you're not allowed to shed blood.

So he kills people with a with a club or a mace.

And William gives Rochester as a bishopric to Odo.

But Odo is

a very bad man.

He is very treacherous.

And he gets chucked out.

And so William gives it to this remarkable man who is called, it's not Gandalf, it's Gundalf, but quite similar.

And he has a slightly, you know,

Gandalf-esque role in William's career because he's a man who who achieves extraordinary things.

He's very, very smart, very proficient at creating things.

So he's a great architect, he's a great engineer.

And it's Gundulf who builds the White Tower in London, which becomes the kind of the basis for the Tower of London.

And in 1083, he starts work here in Rochester on renewing the Anglo-Saxon cathedral that had basically kind of fallen to pieces.

It was very decrepid.

Not much of what he actually built survives, except for a place called Gundulf's Tower, which annoyingly we can't actually see from here.

But anyway, I mean, people are interested in Guldulf, you can still see his tower.

So it's a world.

It really is.

And it gets remodeled

throughout the Middle Ages.

It has a particularly bad time in the 13th century when King John, England's worst king, loots it.

And then Simon de Montford, the self-styled father of the English Parliament, he loots it as well.

And I think there's always a sense that it's...

It's a little bit shabby.

That's how Pepys described it in the 16th century.

And we heard Defoe

saying it was ancient but not extraordinary.

And again, I mean, I think that's kind of fair.

Pick out some highlights.

So there's a nice crypt.

There's a crypt.

So that was built by Gundalf.

So Gundalf fans can see that as well as his tower.

You're excited about the Great West Door, aren't you?

You're very excited.

It's very, very price, and it's got Justice and someone else.

King Ethelbert, who welcomed Augustine and his missionaries to Kent.

And there's another lovely ceiling.

There's some green men.

You love a green man.

But most of all, the thing that you were telling me, which I found actually quite moving, you said one of the most something that had brought you closer to the dimension of the supernatural than ever before, was you went in 2019, you played mini golf

in the center of the cathedral.

So

in 2019, following in the footsteps of St.

Justice,

Bishop Gundalf, the cathedral authority set up a mini golf course in the nave of the cathedral.

Well, can I tell people what you so Tom texted me after he played golf in the cathedral and he said, Dominic, while playing adventure golf, I really felt that

I reflected on the bridges that need to be built in our own lives and in the world today.

And Dominic, do you know what's amazing about that reflection that I had?

Yeah, is that a few days later,

the Diocese of Rochester put out a message saying that we hope that while playing Adventure Golf, visitors will reflect on the bridges that need to be built in their own lives and in our world today.

So once again, yet again, the Diocese of Rochester has been been hacking our texts.

Unbelievable.

So, on that bombshell, Tom, let's just move on very quickly to talk about Rochester Castle before we descend and allow the school children up here.

Tell me about the history of Rochester Castle.

So, this is what, Norman originally?

Yeah, so Defoe, in that bit you read, I mean, he was very rude about the cathedral, perhaps not unfairly, but he said that the castle was just a ruin, which, I mean, we're standing up here, and you can see it's clearly not a ruin.

We've got a sign there saying it's unsafe for humans, 100-foot drop beneath.

Generally, I mean, this is very, very impressive structure.

And it's not surprising because where you have a very important river crossing, you want to have a very strong defensive system so that you can keep control of it.

And so it's not surprising that, as you say, yes, it is William who builds the first castle here because that's what the Normans are doing.

And again, he gives that, you know, he's given the cathedral to Odo.

He also tells Odo to build a castle, which Odo does.

It's made of wood.

But when Odo gets gets chucked out for behaving badly and treacherously towards his half-brother he hands the responsibility for the castle over to Bishop Gundulf and we've said how Gundulf is a tremendous architect a tremendous engineer he gets to work building a castle out of stone masonry probably one of the first stone castles to be built by the Normans after the conquest

and

It's because of that I was just reading up in the Bodlier before we came up here that Gundulf apparently is recognised by the core of royal engineering as the man who established them.

So they kind of trace a line of continuity all the way back

through the Middle Ages, back to Gundulf.

And that, I guess, in part is due to

the reputation of the Tower of London, but also due to this, because...

Although the keep where we're standing now was built in the 12th century, the walls

are Gundulf's.

And this keep is, I mean, is amazing.

When you come into Rochester on the train, you can see it kind of looming up.

I think it's the tallest keep in England, one of the tallest keeps in the whole

of Europe.

And again, it was built by not just a bishop, but by an archbishop.

So

Rochester got given to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in the 12th century.

We've had it in the show before.

It's been in the rest of his history.

It has.

So

it featured in our episode on the Peasants' Revolt, misnamed, but this great rebellion of of of people in um in Essex but also in Kent and when the the rebels want to march on London they have to seize the castle first because it's the great key to the road that leads to London and they manage to storm the castle and they capture the Castellan the guy in charge of it and they take him hostage and when they get to London and they want to negotiate with Richard II and his government the Castellan of Rochester Cathedral is the guy that they use to communicate between the rebels and the royal authorities.

And basically, through Rochester Castle's history, loads of big names have been here, haven't they?

So, King John of France, when he was captured by the Black Prince, he was

brought through Rochester, made a donation to the cathedral.

Yes.

That's nice.

Henry V, after returning in triumph from Agincourt, you know, he has to get to Calais, crosses to Calais, rides the great road up to London, and passes through Rochester.

And he is not the last king to make a memorable procession through Rochester because there is another one who has left a real mark on the city.

We can't see that mark that he left from up here.

So I think we should wind our way down the stairs, past the sobbing schoolchildren, and allow them to come up here to the top.

And we will go down and go to this site which commemorates the arrival in Rochester in 1660 of Charles II.

Tom, Restoration House, Rochester.

That's where we are right now.

An absolutely gorgeous example of 17th century architecture.

We've just been shown around by the owner, Jonathan Wilmot.

Amazing artworks, furniture and whatnot that you can see if you're watching on Spotify or on YouTube.

But why are we here?

Well, as you say, an amazing 17th century house, origins going back to late 15th century, 16th century, all kind of patched together.

So Pevsner rather rudely described it as being all highly peculiar and undisciplined.

But I think it's unbelievably atmospheric, very different vibe to being on top of a Norman castle.

But we are here because the most famous person who stayed here was Charles II, who had been in exile throughout the Restoration.

Cromwell dies.

people don't know what to do so they say well let's try and bring charles ii back so he lands in dover he's been staying in the the dutch republic now he's back in english soil and he's processing towards london and he spends the night of 28th of may 1660 here and the next morning he gets up it's his birthday and he goes off into uh london um and so hence hence the name restoration house but there's a brilliant literary connection isn't there and a connection with one of rochester's one of this area's favourite sons because am i not right in saying that charles dickens used this house where we're sitting right now as the inspiration for satisfy House, which is of course Miss Havisham's house in his novel Great Expectations.

I think for the purposes of this podcast, we can say 100%.

This was the inspiration.

It is said that.

No, no, Dickens was seen leaning on a kind of on a looking in at it.

while writing Great Expectations.

I think we can say 100%.

And actually, for those who are looking on YouTube or Spotify, if you imagine this setting covered in cobwebs and a mouldering wedding cake in the background, I think you can absolutely imagine Miss Havisham jilted at the altar in her decayed wedding dress, kind of gliding around like a ghoul.

Poor Pip, you know, the little blacksmith's boy feeling very coarse and sorry for himself.

Well, Great Expectations is very close to my heart, Tom, because I won the school public speaking and reading competition four years in a row with the opening of Great Expectations.

Four years in a row.

Four years in a row with the same reading.

God, joyless.

Were you allowed to do that?

Not really.

It was considered against the spirit, but not the letter of the law.

It really does seem like cheap.

By about the third or fourth time, the head of English said, you're really ruining this for everybody else with

this reading that is unbeatable because it's such a brilliant reading.

But you must be excited though to be here.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, but you know, you've come home.

That's the way I roll, Tom.

That's the way I operate.

If I can win and suck all the pleasure out of it for other people, so much the better.

Let's talk about Dickens.

The reason that he's kind of hanging out here gazing at the windows

is because

he actually had a house just outside Rochester, the other side of the Medway, which was called Gads Hill Place.

And he lived there for the last 14 years of his life.

And he absolutely loved Rochester.

Basically, everywhere you go in Rochester, you see Dickens illusions.

So restaurants, cafes, whatever.

We've just been to the cafe.

Jackson's cafe.

Yeah, and there are kind of little signs saying Dickens is, you know, this house was where so-and-so lived or whatever.

And Gads Hill, the house outside Rochester, where he lived, he got given a Swiss chalet by one of his friends, and it kind of arrived like an Ikea pack in various boxes.

And he wanted Dickens wanted to assemble it at a viewpoint where he could look out at the sea.

So the bottom of his garden, there was quite a busy road.

So he dug a tunnel under the road and then he assembled the Swiss chalet on the far side of the road so that in the second floor where he had his study, he could look out at the sea and be inspired by it.

And that chalet, apparently, is

still, you can still see it just off Rochester High Street.

So if you like Dickens, I mean, there's no end of Dickensian fun facts here.

And the other famous thing associated with Dickens here is that it's the setting for his last novel, which he never completed, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the opium addict and cathedral organist John Jasper, who almost certainly is the murderer of Edwin Drood, or is Edwin Drood dead?

Who knows?

He lived on one of the gates that's just below the castle where we've been.

And the Rochester in Edwin Drude is called Cloysterham.

And

Dickens' description of it is very similar to Defoe.

So he says, a city of another and a bygone time is cloister him.

All things in it are of the past.

So there's that sense of Rochester as a place where, you know, the history of England is vested.

The layers of history.

But as Dickens also knew,

the same cannot be said of Chatham.

And he knew Chatham very well because he had spent the formative years of his childhood there.

And that's because his father, John Dickens, had worked as a clerk there, hadn't he, in the Naval Pay Office.

Yes.

And so Dickens lived there from what, the age of five to the age of 11?

Yes.

And thought it was wonderful.

Yeah.

Had beauty, kind of incredible childhood memories of it, thought it was amazing.

And then years later, in 1860, when he was 48, he came back and, you know, it was his first visit to Chatham since he'd been a boy.

And he wrote up about it, expressing essentially his disappointment that it wasn't quite as amazing as he remembered it.

And he was so disappointed, and listeners to this podcast will be thrilled to know this, that he called Chatham Dullsborough.

So maybe we could use that as a title for this episode.

But then after a day touring Chatham, aka Dullsborough, he left in a slightly more benignant mood.

So he wrote, when I went alone to the railway to catch my train, I was in a more charitable mood with Dullborough than I had been all day.

And yet in my heart, I had loved it all day too.

Ah, who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back so changed to it?

All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser, and so much

the worse.

Oh, Tom, that's lovely.

That's a lovely reading.

And actually, that inspires me to go to Chatham.

So I think we should head off from Restoration House.

I have to say, what an amazing house this is and how royally we've been looked after.

I actually, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say I don't think I've ever been to a location with the Restus History that I have enjoyed more and that will live in my memory for longer than Restoration House.

Well, do you know, I'm sat here looking at you.

You're in a magnificent period armchair.

Behind you is a ticking grandfather clock.

I kind of think you should have this vibe for every recording of The Restus History.

I think I kind of do already.

No, I don't think you do quite.

Oh, disappointing.

But anyway,

talking of positive vibes, let's head off to Chatham High Street.

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This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

Now, Thomas, you know, in the Middle Ages, it could take you years if you're a monk to create a manuscript.

You'd have to copy copy it out word by word, and then after all that, the margins would be ready, and you'd put all kind of decorative elements and all kinds of guilt and stuff in the margins, and it would look fantastic.

So, it might take often years to finish, but the finished product would then last for centuries.

And that is pretty much what the Folio Society does today, only of course, with slightly less parchment and fewer quills.

Yes, the Folio Society takes some of the greatest works ever written.

Things like George Orwell's 1984 or the The Quests in J.R.R.

Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune and their team of editors and designers and artisans, they craft books that are so beautiful, they're like works of art in their own right.

So each one is carefully designed with slip cases, award-winning illustrations and covers that honour the stories inside.

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That is foliosociety.com.

Welcome back to the rest is history.

And very excitingly, we have now moved from Rochester to Chatham.

Tom, let's walk up this lovely little slope here and and discuss why you brought us here.

Well, Dominic, if you look here, it reads Gundulf Road.

So we are on Gundalf Road.

Gundalph,

very much a friend of the show, the founder of the Royal Engineers, William I's go-to bishop, the guy who designed Rochester Cathedral and the castle.

And he got his hands on Chatham as well, because although Chatham is very much a kind of 18th century, 19th century place, that's its heyday, there was a village here in the Middle Ages and Gundal founded a hospital for the poor and lepros.

And they would be brought along the river, which is just down there.

And then there would be kind of special passageways that would thread up from the river to bring them to the hospital because nobody wanted to come in touch with the leper and only the leprous were allowed to go up these.

The hospital is long gone, but there is one remainder of it, and it is this chapel that we're looking at here.

So the front of the chapel, clearly very Victorian.

This is by Sir Gilbert Scott who designed the Albert Memorial and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and these kind of great monuments of neo-Gothic Victoriana.

But if we go round the back we will find a bit of the original 12th century chapel and I like to think that

even though we are here in the heart of Chatham, the swirl of 21st century Britain.

Maybe inside this chapel, there is a little haven, a little reminder of

the age of faith.

And we will see what we find inside.

You can see this entrance.

The eastern section, there are still bits of the original 12th century chapel.

So if we go in through here, we can see, you know,

I imagine that there'll be a kind of a mood of cloistered peace, maybe amid the hurly burley of Chatham,

a reminder of the spirituality of the Middle Ages.

And I think it'll be very moving for people.

So let's go and see what's going on.

So this is maybe not quite what I was expecting.

So

we should maybe describe for people what we're seeing.

This, to me, very much speaks of medieval spirituality.

There are about four people writhing and grappling on the ground.

So if you can't if you're not watching on Spotify or YouTube, that's what I'm looking at.

Basically somebody's thighs and they're wrapped around another person's neck.

And

behind them are two signs reading granite gym.

And this ancient sanctuary, this repository of medieval spirituality, seems to have become a gym.

So I like to think that

this probably isn't what Bishop Gundolf wanted, but whatever.

It's progress.

I'm sure he did a bit of wrestling with Christ here.

But Dominic, just to say that is the.

So, Harry, behind you, that

is what remains of the 12th century chapel.

So, basically, for those people not watching, Tom is pointing at a bit of wall with a

lovely window.

I don't know what else to say, really, Tom.

Do you want to describe it to the listeners?

What I will say is that there aren't people kind of wrestling underneath the under that.

So,

he's showing you a bit of respect.

There There is a sofa, there is a broken till, so that's good.

There is.

So anyway, that's progress.

So we have crossed the street and we've come a little bit further forward in time.

So we're now standing, for those people who are not watching on YouTube or Spotify, we are standing in front of some lovely little brick arms houses.

And Tom, these were built in 1592

and they're associated with a very famous name in kind of Tudor seafaring history.

Yes, so this is the hospital of Sir John Hawkins in Chatham.

It is the single oldest Royal Navy charity, the oldest Royal Navy hospital, and it was founded by Sir John Hawkins, who was a cousin of Sir Francis Drake.

He was first the treasurer of Elizabeth's Navy, then its controller.

He played a key role in establishing not just Chatham, but the the English Navy as a force to be reckoned with.

And in his will, he set aside some property to endow a hospital,

which makes him sound one of history's good guys.

But there is a slight complication, which is hinted at on the website for the Hospital of Sir John Hawkins, where

it confesses that a lot of the money that Sir John Hawkins made, which enabled him to fund this hospital, was made in the slave trade.

And so this disavowal is made, although not out of step with the societal norms of his time, the governors fully acknowledged the abhorrent and brutal nature of this vile activity and regrets Sir John's involvement profoundly.

And then there's a kind of big, however, he was an outstanding seaman, navigator, naval administrator, and benefactor of naval veterans.

And both of those things are clearly true.

And so this is absolutely the kind of place that focuses some of the ambivalences and complexities of Britain's everybody loves focusing on ambivalence

and uh he's a great Spanish Armada man isn't he all of that he's I mean he's ruffs roughs beards yeah you know playing bowls all of that yes I mean he's you know he he is one of the great kind of

the Victorians loved him they loved the kind of idea that the sea dogs of under Elizabeth I had been the prototype for Britain's navy and this place had a tremendous history of sea doggery or sea dogging didn't it because there's a lot of sea dogging going on

they had two veterans of the Battle of Copenhagen who were here and a veteran of Trafalgar lived here.

Yes, right?

Yes,

a guy called Henry Dawkins was here.

Now, you said that this was built in the Tudor period.

These are not Tudor buildings.

So actually,

it got rebuilt in 1789.

Right.

And then it got refurbished again in the 1980s when it got opened by the Queen Mother.

Oh, lovely.

So you've got John Hawkins, you've got redevelopment in the period of the French Revolution, and you've got the Queen Mother.

And I think that, Dominic, you'd agree that this is one of the many jewels of Chatham High Street.

That's the rich tapestry of British history, right there.

But the exciting news is there are more jewels.

And I think we should go and look.

So let's go.

That was so weak.

So a really weak clap there from Theo to start this new segment.

Now, Tom, one of the things that we associate with Dockland areas, of course, is pubs.

and we are looking at two um splendid historic pubs so one of them is the north foreland and i just want to give people an impression of the forensic research that you've brought to this episode yeah so your notes say nelson reputedly drank here so that's great so that definitely happened so i read that it was rebuilt in 1912 and shut in 2012 so an amazing yeah so i bet you're glad you've seen that now Imagine if you've been stuck in the Coltswells all this time and you've never got to see that.

A really amazing but johnnick there's more isn't there yeah there's more

you you have not yet drunk your fill of the cup of historical delights that chatham high street has to offer so do you want to continue or are you laughing too much no i'm laughing too much but i will continue so opposite us uh is something called the ship inn and i read in tom's notes tom's written the

the words one of the oldest gay pubs in the country i think that's definitely true but then his

his citation comes from Kent Online.

I'm laughing so much I can't speak.

Kent Online is

a very reputable source,

very scholarly, peer-reviewed.

So, do you want to read that what it says?

Kent Online, yeah.

Apparently,

I felt like the word apparently is doing a lot of lifting.

It gets better, doesn't it?

Apparently,

the bartender's mate recently compiled a history of Rochester High Street and proudly informed me, this is the writer from Kent Online, that the pub is more than 500 years old and Medway's oldest gabe.

That's definitely true.

Not only this, but he confidently declared that the purple dance bar on the left, complete with its brick-look wallpaper, was the site of the first arrest and conviction for buggery way back in the days of Henry VIII.

So apparently that from

the Barman's Mate.

The Barman's Mate.

But actually, there's some serious history behind us, much as I'm laughing about your ludicrous research.

There's some serious history behind us that I'm hoping you've put

an equal amount of effort into.

Well,

actually, do you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to read from the foundation stone on this building.

Which reads, this foundation stone was laid by Simon Magnus for a memorial synagogue in affectionate remembrance of his much lamented and only son, Lazarus Simon Magnus Esquire.

So a synagogue on Chatham High Street is a reminder of the fact that, as well as pubs, what you expect to find in, you know, docklands and dockyards and all that kind of thing, is lots of people from overseas.

And when the Jews were allowed back into England in the mid-17th century by Oliver Cromwell.

By a friend of the show, Oliver Cromwell.

Although not officially, but effectively, one of the earliest communities outside London where Jews settled was in Chatham, because of course it was growing, it was provided links to all the other Jewish communities on the continent.

And the first synagogue on this site was built in 1750

and the people who were able to fund it could do it because they were helping people in the Royal Navy who had captured prizes to then kind of sell them, to convert it into money, and they would take a cut.

And that cut then enabled them to fund the first synagogue.

But this particular synagogue opened in 1869 and it was,

as the foundation said, it was built by the father of this guy, Simon Magnus, who had been a captain in the 4th Kent Artillery Volunteers, and he'd also been a business partner of Isanbard Kingdom Brunel, the great engineer.

So, you know, Gundulf, Brunel, all the great engineers are featuring in this story.

And

We mentioned earlier about the Leper Hospital and about how there are these paths that go from the river up to where the hospital was and there was one of them that went along the west side of the synagogue so it's a kind of freehold of a strip of ground um which uh

remains kind of you know you could they could they couldn't buy it and they have to this day they have to pay uh a rent uh to use it of five p per annum so again a kind of fascinating link taking us back to the the medieval origins

of the extraordinarily rich and vibrant history of this part of the world Yes, absolutely.

And this synagogue is still going strong.

And during both the wars, particularly in the Second World War, it provided a home for Jewish servicemen who passed through Chatham and were working here.

So we've talked about Nelson.

We've talked about the Second World War.

And the obvious place in Chatham where Nelson and...

the Second World War could join is the naval dockyards, the Royal Dockyards, the reason that all these incredible treasures, Dominic, are lining Chatham High Street.

So, I think that we should go there now.

Let's do that.

Right now, if you're watching this, you can see that we've moved location to somewhere very, very spectacular indeed.

So, Tom, we have moved to Chatham's Royal Dockyard, and we're in the bowels of the dockyard, and a place we'll reveal in a second.

But so, the dockyard is built in first opens in 1567 and lasts for what?

Just 414 years.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah, it closes in 1984.

So you love this place.

Now, the irony is that when we first did the rest of this history, you hated the Royal Navy.

You hated dockyards.

I hated run up.

Above all, you hated rope.

So it's fitting that to apologise and to abase yourself, you have come to the ropery of the Royal Dockyard.

But just talk to me about the Royal Dockyard before we get onto the Ropery.

I do love

the dockyard here in Chatham.

And the reason for that, it's a phrase that N.A.M.

Roger, the great historian of the Royal Navy, expressed that the dockyards, Portsmouth,

Chatham, places like that, are 19th century islands in an 18th century sea.

And you actually did

a TV show here on HG Wells.

And I guess you came here because that sense of, it has a science fiction quality.

It's this idea of technology being ahead of the historical context because these are amazing places.

These are where the most lethal killing machines on the face of the planet are developed, namely the ships of the Royal Navy, of which over the course of the 414 years

over 500 ships are built here, including the most famous of all HMS Victory.

Yeah, so Tom, our old friend Daniel Defoe, had strong views about this place, didn't he?

So I know you love a Daniel Defoe reading because you admire his accent so much.

He said the building yards, the docks, timber yard, the deal yard, the mast yard, the gun yard, the rope walks, and all the other yards and places places set apart for the works belonging to the Navy are like a well-ordered city.

And though you see the whole place as it were in the utmost hurry, yet you see no confusion.

Every man knows his own business.

Now, the thing is, he was talking about the rope walks.

And we are actually in the ropery, which, I mean, you talked about N.A.M.

Roger and this idea of this being the 19th century in the 18th century.

At its peak, this place, the Ropery, was probably the most futuristic, the most technologically and industrially advanced place on the planet now the sublime irony of this is that when we started the podcast you said there was nothing you hated more than naval rope and yet you have chosen this place to do this you know basically this entire episode in fact probably the whole of the podcast has been building to this moment yeah so what is it about tell me about the ropery i think it's i think it's one of the most amazing historic structures in britain um it's a great monument to the age of Nelson, to the rise of the Royal Navy, to global supremacy.

And as you say, it is a glimpse of the future.

Built in the 1780s, 1790s, it is 1,140 feet long.

When it's built, it was the longest brick building in Britain.

It is absolutely stupefying.

And some of the machinery here, where they still make rope to this day, you can buy it around the corner,

it dates back to 1806.

So

if you want a flavour of what it was that powered Chatham,

powered this stretch of the Medway, powered the Royal Navy, this is the place to come.

So in a way, Tom, this is where the Napoleonic Wars were won.

This is where the...

The Pax Britannica of the 19th century was established.

This is what's powering all that, the great dynamo, the Ropery, Chatham Dockyard, the Royal Navy, the infrastructure, the sinews of Britain's greatness.

And of course, that continues all the way through to the middle of the 20th century.

And I think we should fast forward to the Second World War and we should go out of here and we should go to an equally exciting historical site, which is a splendid ship.

Let's do that.

And we will be ending this podcast by treading the metal boards of a British battleship.

So, Tom, we've been on,

we've been on an epic journey, haven't we, through Rochester and Chatham.

And now we've reached an earth-shattering conclusion because we have come deep into the dockyard here at Chatham

and we are on a second World War battleship.

So, tell me a little

about this ship and why you've chosen this and tell me a little bit about its story.

Okay.

Well, you know that I love a Second World War battleship.

Yeah.

And to be more precise, I love a C-class destroyer, which is what this ship, HMS Cavalier, a name that I like to think Charles II would very much have approved of.

Yeah, Prince Rupert, Charles I, they'd all love that.

They would all have loved it.

That's what this is.

A C-class destroyer.

What's your favourite kind of destroyer?

What class is that?

Probably B.

Probably b class okay but a c class is quite good i like all destroyers and i but i'd probably rank top three c b

probably a okay in that order and also i think also very nice is the the colour so for those who can't see it's a kind of lovely turquoise and it blends in with the turquoise of the river midway which is behind us gosh that's well so uh anyway so um it's a painterly eye

it absolutely is so um this ship is uh it was launched in the second world war it fought in norway it fought it joined a convoy uh going to the soviet union and back

she uh and then she um sailed out to join in the final stages of the war in the pacific so um absolutely a reminder of chatham's role in the second world war but i think that um this ship is also a memorial to um the decline of chatham um because this this ship got uh decommissioned in the 1970s and chatham gets decommissioned in 1984 and really with the closing of the docks so much that had made Chatham Chatham for 400 odd years ends.

So

in a sense where we are now is a reminder both of Britain's glory days in the Second World War, but also of the geopolitical and economic decline that followed.

And in that sense, I think this is a perfect place to conclude the journey, the Odyssey that

you were talking about.

So we've gone from Iron Age Hill Fort, Roman Bridge, and now we are in the 1980s.

So in a very real sense, Tom, we've covered all English history, the story of, I was about to say one town, but really two towns, Rochester and Chatham.

Yeah.

But joined by a single high street.

Joined by a single high street.

And let's not end on a downbeat note.

No.

Because I feel what we've gained from this is a sense of the extraordinarily rich history of Chatham, but also I've learned.

What have you learned, Dominic?

I've learned that Chatham's not just a town, Tom, it's a community.

And I think that's lovely.

What about you?

Yeah, I can't argue with that.

We've been welcomed with such hospitality

on the streets.

I think we've learned a lot from the streets of Chatham.

The people of Chatham.

Probably

more than the people listening to this podcast have learned from us.

I hope that they've learned something, which is go to Rochester High Street, walk down it, get to Chatham High Street, then come to the docks, and you couldn't be happier.

All of English history is there.

On that shocking bombshell, we should probably say goodbye to Chatham.

Goodbye to Rochester, and goodbye to the listeners.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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