Sheppey – why?!

How appropriate that the cafe I am typing this entry in should be playing The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ [surely Eric Burdon’s finest moment – a perfect fusion of the Mississippi and the Tyne].  This was the repeated plea of my wife as we drove up to the mobile home holiday camp at Leysdown which once was home to the Aero – from 1910 Royal Aero – Club (“You can’t miss it – the road leads into the sea”).  There’s a modest exhibition in the bar but  Sunday lunchtime drinking at Muswell Manor ceases sharply at 2.30pm, and it was now after three.  Furthermore, what meterologists were predicting would be the harshest storm since 1987 was beginning to hit north Kent, with the main road bridge over the Swale to the Isle of Sheppey already shut – the old King’s Ferry bridge was still passable, but at the back of our minds was a genuine concern that we might not get off the island once the wind really got going.  I parked the car outside the Manor’s locked gates, but found a side entrance and duly took photographs of the house and the small memorial recording the presence of the RAeC.  By this time the rain was lashing down, and Mary was gesticulating furiously from inside the car, but I found time to photograph a statue of the three Short brothers, with Horace’s distorted head scarcely obvious (a generous gesture by the sculptor).  Was any statue ever located in a more incongruous setting?  The three men are joyously raising their arms to the skies, but against the backdrop of surely one of the bleakest coastscapes in England – acres of brown cropped marshland, rendered even more menacing by the black clouds and 45 degree rain.  We drove back, past the pitch and portakabin of Leysdown FC, surely the most isolated football ground in the south of England, and duly passed through the sad, bedraggled, plain desperate ‘seaside resort’ of Leysdown itself.  There are around seven mobile home holiday camps, and the cheap beer bars, fast food shops and dingy bingo halls were open if empty, all eager to cater for anyone venturing so far from home for half term.  Clearly some mobile homes are rented out but most appear to be owned, and in many cases all the year round.  No wonder Ray Pahl’s groundbreaking sociological inquires were focused upon Sheppey, as there are so many questions to ask – not least who lives in Leysdown, and who comes here on holiday?  When I taught on Sheppey in the 1970s the shorthand answer was East Enders, with diamond geezers boasting shady pasts or dodgy presents having boltholes in the more remote eastern parts of the island – West Ham shirts were highly visible by way of confirmation (of the East Enders, not necessarily the criminals!).  With Mary rightly eager to recross the Swale and seek shelter we drove into Eastchurch to admire and photograph the memorial to all the great pre-war aviation pioneers who first flew on the marshes at Leysdown and then moved inland to the fields provided by Sir Frank Maclean, which later became an RNAS and then an RAF station before acquiring the prison complex that is surely the island’s second biggest employer after the NHS (each section, from high security to open, appeared run by HM Prison Service and not contracted out, thank God).  In Eastchurch we drank tea in the Shurland Hotel, speculating on whether Fairey had supped there, and whether we were unique in asking for a pot of tea (if I had ordered a drink then I fear that I would still be there, drowning my sorrows  – “What am I doing here, and why did I embark on this project?”).  We raised our cups to CRF and lamented his absence from the lengthy lists of, for me now familiar, names on the grand, elaborate memorial across the road from the hotel.  Elaborate CTC duly recorded our driving around HMP Eastchurch, and it was only as we drove back to the village and surveyed a few surviving acres of rolling grassland that we gained some understanding as to why so much flying took place here.  While I was eager to show Mary where I taught (today’s Isle of Sheppey Academy, but in the 1970s The Sheppey School – for me another time, another planet) and to rediscover Sheerness and Queenborough, common sense dictated that we returned speedily to our friends’ house in Wye before the full force of the storm hit the south-east.  At least we weren’t back home in Lymington, directly opposite the Isle of Wight where a wind of 99mph was recorded on Sunday night.  The isolation of east Sheppey had been confirmed for me.  No wonder that in 1914-15 F.H.C. Rees, ‘Gentleman’, and Fairey’s money man in setting up their company, constantly lamented CRF’s failure to get up to ‘Town’ for crucial meetings – notwithstanding the presence of a rail connection in Sheerness from the 1860s, in Edwardian England a journey from Leysdown and Eastchurch to London remained a tiring and time-consuming expedition.  The puzzling question is why CRF supposedly resented the Shorts brother’s relocation to Rochester – what evidence is there of this, when surely he would have welcomed being closer to London and living in an urban environment akin to his home in Hendon?  Some historians have suggested that security considerations were in J.W. Dunne’s mind when he attempted to fly his ostensibly stable early prototypes at Blair Atholl, on the Marquis of Argyll’s estate, and it would be tempting to say the same consideration was in his mind when  conducting later experiments on the far end of the Isle of Sheppey.  The presence of Dunne, Shorts and then a critical mass of aviators (Roe, Sopwith et al) is more attributable to circumstance, in that the land was made available, and then the process was accumulative – flying at Eastchurch was surprisingly high profile, witness the presence of the Battenberg family in July 1911.  Nevertheless, as I stood in the gloom soaking wet and staring out across the Thames estuary (“Is that Essex or Thanet?”), I couldn’t help asking again, “Sheppey – why?!”.