ST PETER AND ST PAUL. A true village church, in a village street, surprising between the Becontree Estate and the Ford Motor Works. Early C13 chancel with lancet windows. A group of three stepped lancets at the E end. Late C15 N chancel chapel with two-bay arcade on pier with four attached shafts and four hollows in the diagonals. The rest of the church is of 1800 but probably built with old materials. Nave without aisles, chancel arch of fancy detail. This prepares for the W tower of the most ignorant and entertaining Gothick. The curly battlements are specially noteworthy. Semi-circular W porch with Gothick quatrefoil shafts with shaft-rings. Restored 1878. - FONT. Bowl on baluster stem. - HELMS. Two, of the C17. - PLATE. Egg-shaped Cup of 1589 (York-made), nicely decorated; large Cup and Paten on foot 1678; Almsdish 1727; Flagon 1755. - MONUMENTS. Brass to Sir Thomas Urswyck d. 1479, chief Baron of the Exchequer and Recorder of London, and wife and children. The figures on a tomb-chest. They are c. 27 ins long. Also group of kneeling children. - Sir Richard Alibon d. 1688. Standing figures in niche with urn on tall pedestal between them. Ascribed by Mrs Esdaile to Nost.
DAGENHAM. Here is one of the oldest and one of the newest wonders the Thames has seen. Below the marshes lies a submerged forest, and above them has arisen in our time one of the most remarkable industrial spectacles in England, the Ford Works.
This place on the banks of the Thames is one of the miracles of our 20th century, an example of what planning will do. In ten years its population has increased about ten times, the Becontree Estate alone covering four square miles of what was once green fields and has now about 30,000 houses.
Yet there must have been old people here not long ago who remembered seeing widows in this tiny village exercising their immemorial right by fetching a cartload of wood from the royal forest of Hainault, across Chadwell Heath, to their cottages by the church. A rural hamlet it was then; now a great estate stretches river-ward from Becontree, and an ancient gulf formed by a Thames flood 500 years ago has been transformed into a dock. Twenty thousand piles have been driven into the marshes and 100 acres of marshland have been turned into a workshop, resting on concrete foundations 80 feet thick. About 20 feet below these is a forest of yews whose branches were waving in the breeze a hundred centuries ago.
It was in 1929 that Mr Ford turned the first sod on his area of 500 acres, bounded on its Thames bank by a concrete jetty 600 yards long, at which ships of 8000 tons can berth. It is remarkable to look back and realise that an English engineer made all this possible long before a motor car was thought of, before any man had seen a railway train. For centuries the Thames had defied man and flooded its banks at every tide. The Abbess of Barking impoverished her abbey by striving to beat back the flood, and even as late as 1707 Parliament passed a bill taxing all ships using the river, in order to raise a fund to keep the waters back. In 1716 they found their man, Captain John Perry, who had been building waterways for Peter the Great in Russia. They gave him £25,000 to mend the wall, and he spent £40,000 and succeeded.
So it was that it became possible to set up here the first blast furnace in the south of England and the marvellous works that turn out motor cars by the hundred thousand. The factory took three or four years to build and has 32 acres under one roof, with a concrete floor covered by nine million wood blocks. There are two electric unloaders which are perhaps the biggest in Europe, discharging 300 tons of ore an hour, and the storage yard can hold 130,000 tons of ore and coal. At the long jetty by the Thames raw materials are unloaded at one end while the finished product is being loaded at the other, for delivery to the ends of the earth. The main factory has nearly 27 acres of glass in the roof and the windows (which open and shut electrically), a thousand ventilators, and five miles of rain gutters. There is a power station with a 30,000 kilowatt generator, and a blast furnace with stoves 100 feet high and 20 feet wide. There are 45 coke ovens producing 900 tons of coke in a day and a night, and altogether there are 6000 machines driven by 10,000 motors, with ten miles of conveyors for transporting parts. Over fifty cranes will lift any weight from one to 125 tons. One machine drills 92 holes in an engine crank-case in less than half a minute. The instruments for making measurements are checked to a millionth of an inch. There are 6000 electric light points, and the power-house generates electricity enough to supply a town of 180,000 people with light, heat, and power. Even the name of this vast place has its own statistics - the letters are 60 feet high and 140 feet long, and a flying man can see them 20 miles off.
A very different place this was when Elizabeth Fry came to live in a cottage here. She lived by the great gulf which is now the dock, and a kinswoman wrote of her singular retirement “living out-of-doors on the rich bank overflowing with grass and flowers, and watching the fine ships which seemed to float among the fields.” Often looking at these ships must she have remembered the sad farewells she had made on Thames ships to women doomed by harsh laws to exile far away. Here she spent her last days, dying in 1845, and she lies a little way off in the Friends burial ground at Barking.
Dagenham’s village church was built 700 years ago, and its chancel still remains, its old altar stone marked with two consecration crosses. In the chancel lies the man who helped to set Edward the Fourth on the throne, Sir Thomas Urswyk, Baron of the Exchequer in 1479; he lies in an altar tomb with a brass portrait of him in his judge’s robes, his wife in a butterfly headdress, their nine daughters below them, one in the habit of a nun. Sir Thomas’s feet are on a lion and he has a rosary.
On an elaborate monument of the 17th century stands one of the most contemptible men who ever rose to be a judge, Richard Allibon. He was born here in 1621, became a judge under James the Second, the last king of the dynasty whose tyrannical rule he stoutly supported. On his first circuit as a judge he complained that only three of the gentry had come to meet the judges, a fact which marked the public dissatisfaction at the appointment to the bench of a man entirely ignorant of law. He did his best to convict the Seven Bishops and bitterly complained of their acquittal at his next appearance on circuit. His death soon afterwards probably saved his life from outlawry. He was buried here near his grandfather, who had become a Roman Catholic, the grandson being the first Roman Catholic judge for 150 years.
By the church stands a medieval inn with a central hall and two modernised wings, and the vicarage with 1665 on the gable of the porch. The old home of the Earls of Pembroke, built in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, is now the home of the local council, still with its dormers and gables and its panelled room.
Dagenham has had its martyr, Christopher Lyster, burned alive at Colchester with five others in Mary Tudor’s Reign of Terror; and it has had two benefactors named Ford - Henry Ford whose millions have made it what it is, and an unknown Ford of long ago who left a thousand pounds for blankets and clothes for Dagenham’s aged poor.
The Mighty Forest Buried in the Marshes
THE rivers of Essex are today mere streams compared with the rivers of 500 centuries ago; as they approach their wide estuaries they flow through marshland formed from soil brought down by their mighty forerunners. Along both banks of the Thames the marshes, little higher than the level of the sea, stretch far and wide, except fora few hundred yards at Purfleet and Grays, where the chalk breaks through their monotony.
The spring tides would often submerge them, and for centuries man has fought a battle with the waters blown upstream from the North Sea. The cost of embankments almost ruined the rich nuns of Barking, and it was not until the Dutch engineers came along in the 17th century that the Essex marshes could be profitably used by the farmer.
Since that time the marshes nearer London have become the sites of docks and industries, and another century or two will see London’s great Port actually within sight of the open sea.
Romantic as is this victory of man over Nature, there is a great romance of Nature herself beneath the river and the ancient marshlands through which it winds its way to sea. Here beneath the waters, with the ships sailing above them to the ends of the earth, are the fallen giants of our ancient forests. Here and there on our coasts we come upon a fossil forest, as at Lulworth, with trees turned to stone, but beneath the marshes of the Thames are submerged forests with trees that are still wood, as when, perhaps fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, men dressed in skins would hide among them hunting hyenas and bears.
From one of these lost forests has come down to us a dramatic piece of news. We know that one day a wild pig, seeking food in a forest where Carmarthen Bay is now, was killed by a great tree falling. The pig lay dead beneath the trunk for ages, buried deep in leaves and moss each year until the mould piled up through centuries of time, while empires rose and fell, and the forest sank slowly in the sea. One day they found in the marsh, among the trees embedded in the peat, the tree which fell and killed the pig at Lydstep Haven near Tenby.
It is a forest such as this that lies today beneath the marshes of the Thames, both in Essex and in Kent. If we sail down to Margate from London Bridge we sail where birds once nested in the tops of trees. The trees are gone, and our most ancient river has piled mud and sand high above the verdant glades, so that all we see are mud flats and a waste of waters.
This estuary of the Thames, with the country round it, was once eighty feet higher than it is. Southend and Sheerness were then far from the sea, up-river places, and where their busy streets are now were wooded hillsides, over which the stag and the wild boar roamed and men sent flint-headed arrows after them. Then the Thames wended its way through green vegetation where now is sea as far as the eye can reach. After passing the Nore, the comparatively narrow channel of the ancient river took a north-easterly course through either Black Deep or Barrow Deep, submarine depressions believed to be the sunken watercourse of the Thames, and entered the North Sea several miles east of Clacton. The Medway was then a tributary of the Thames, rather like the Darent now, while a range of hills extended north-east from Sheppey and far out to sea.
Beneath the marshy tracts bordering the great river from London to the sea these trees can be recovered by anyone prepared to dig a dozen feet. For over 250 years this vast submerged surface of ancient Britain, with its fossil treasures, has been opened up at one place and another. It was so in the days of Pepys in 1665, when he wrote in his diary:
At Blackwall, in digging the late docke, they did, twelve feet underground, find perfect trees covered with earth, nut trees with branches and the very nuts upon them; some of whose nuts Johnson showed us; their shells black with age, and their kernell upon opening decayed, but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And a yew tree (upon which the very ivy was taken up whole about it) which upon cutting, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is.
From Woolwich to Crossness Point, under the entire area of Plumstead and Erith Marshes, are oak and alder trees, branches and roots in great quantities. Furniture has been made out of the oak. On each side of the Thames beyond Purfleet and the Darent the stumps of the trees may often be seen. Beneath the marshes of Rainham and Dagenham, are vast numbers of trees with roots, boughs, and bark covered with mould and clay to a depth of from seven to twelve feet; the latest older than the Romans, the lowest as old as the Stone Age. From Greenwich to Greenhithe on the Kent side of the river an old forest bed of yew, oak, and pine lies twenty feet below, and beneath this bed two of our ancient ancestors have been found, one a hundred thousand years old and one thousands of centuries older.
This place on the banks of the Thames is one of the miracles of our 20th century, an example of what planning will do. In ten years its population has increased about ten times, the Becontree Estate alone covering four square miles of what was once green fields and has now about 30,000 houses.
Yet there must have been old people here not long ago who remembered seeing widows in this tiny village exercising their immemorial right by fetching a cartload of wood from the royal forest of Hainault, across Chadwell Heath, to their cottages by the church. A rural hamlet it was then; now a great estate stretches river-ward from Becontree, and an ancient gulf formed by a Thames flood 500 years ago has been transformed into a dock. Twenty thousand piles have been driven into the marshes and 100 acres of marshland have been turned into a workshop, resting on concrete foundations 80 feet thick. About 20 feet below these is a forest of yews whose branches were waving in the breeze a hundred centuries ago.
It was in 1929 that Mr Ford turned the first sod on his area of 500 acres, bounded on its Thames bank by a concrete jetty 600 yards long, at which ships of 8000 tons can berth. It is remarkable to look back and realise that an English engineer made all this possible long before a motor car was thought of, before any man had seen a railway train. For centuries the Thames had defied man and flooded its banks at every tide. The Abbess of Barking impoverished her abbey by striving to beat back the flood, and even as late as 1707 Parliament passed a bill taxing all ships using the river, in order to raise a fund to keep the waters back. In 1716 they found their man, Captain John Perry, who had been building waterways for Peter the Great in Russia. They gave him £25,000 to mend the wall, and he spent £40,000 and succeeded.
So it was that it became possible to set up here the first blast furnace in the south of England and the marvellous works that turn out motor cars by the hundred thousand. The factory took three or four years to build and has 32 acres under one roof, with a concrete floor covered by nine million wood blocks. There are two electric unloaders which are perhaps the biggest in Europe, discharging 300 tons of ore an hour, and the storage yard can hold 130,000 tons of ore and coal. At the long jetty by the Thames raw materials are unloaded at one end while the finished product is being loaded at the other, for delivery to the ends of the earth. The main factory has nearly 27 acres of glass in the roof and the windows (which open and shut electrically), a thousand ventilators, and five miles of rain gutters. There is a power station with a 30,000 kilowatt generator, and a blast furnace with stoves 100 feet high and 20 feet wide. There are 45 coke ovens producing 900 tons of coke in a day and a night, and altogether there are 6000 machines driven by 10,000 motors, with ten miles of conveyors for transporting parts. Over fifty cranes will lift any weight from one to 125 tons. One machine drills 92 holes in an engine crank-case in less than half a minute. The instruments for making measurements are checked to a millionth of an inch. There are 6000 electric light points, and the power-house generates electricity enough to supply a town of 180,000 people with light, heat, and power. Even the name of this vast place has its own statistics - the letters are 60 feet high and 140 feet long, and a flying man can see them 20 miles off.
A very different place this was when Elizabeth Fry came to live in a cottage here. She lived by the great gulf which is now the dock, and a kinswoman wrote of her singular retirement “living out-of-doors on the rich bank overflowing with grass and flowers, and watching the fine ships which seemed to float among the fields.” Often looking at these ships must she have remembered the sad farewells she had made on Thames ships to women doomed by harsh laws to exile far away. Here she spent her last days, dying in 1845, and she lies a little way off in the Friends burial ground at Barking.
Dagenham’s village church was built 700 years ago, and its chancel still remains, its old altar stone marked with two consecration crosses. In the chancel lies the man who helped to set Edward the Fourth on the throne, Sir Thomas Urswyk, Baron of the Exchequer in 1479; he lies in an altar tomb with a brass portrait of him in his judge’s robes, his wife in a butterfly headdress, their nine daughters below them, one in the habit of a nun. Sir Thomas’s feet are on a lion and he has a rosary.
On an elaborate monument of the 17th century stands one of the most contemptible men who ever rose to be a judge, Richard Allibon. He was born here in 1621, became a judge under James the Second, the last king of the dynasty whose tyrannical rule he stoutly supported. On his first circuit as a judge he complained that only three of the gentry had come to meet the judges, a fact which marked the public dissatisfaction at the appointment to the bench of a man entirely ignorant of law. He did his best to convict the Seven Bishops and bitterly complained of their acquittal at his next appearance on circuit. His death soon afterwards probably saved his life from outlawry. He was buried here near his grandfather, who had become a Roman Catholic, the grandson being the first Roman Catholic judge for 150 years.
By the church stands a medieval inn with a central hall and two modernised wings, and the vicarage with 1665 on the gable of the porch. The old home of the Earls of Pembroke, built in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, is now the home of the local council, still with its dormers and gables and its panelled room.
Dagenham has had its martyr, Christopher Lyster, burned alive at Colchester with five others in Mary Tudor’s Reign of Terror; and it has had two benefactors named Ford - Henry Ford whose millions have made it what it is, and an unknown Ford of long ago who left a thousand pounds for blankets and clothes for Dagenham’s aged poor.
The Mighty Forest Buried in the Marshes
THE rivers of Essex are today mere streams compared with the rivers of 500 centuries ago; as they approach their wide estuaries they flow through marshland formed from soil brought down by their mighty forerunners. Along both banks of the Thames the marshes, little higher than the level of the sea, stretch far and wide, except fora few hundred yards at Purfleet and Grays, where the chalk breaks through their monotony.
The spring tides would often submerge them, and for centuries man has fought a battle with the waters blown upstream from the North Sea. The cost of embankments almost ruined the rich nuns of Barking, and it was not until the Dutch engineers came along in the 17th century that the Essex marshes could be profitably used by the farmer.
Since that time the marshes nearer London have become the sites of docks and industries, and another century or two will see London’s great Port actually within sight of the open sea.
Romantic as is this victory of man over Nature, there is a great romance of Nature herself beneath the river and the ancient marshlands through which it winds its way to sea. Here beneath the waters, with the ships sailing above them to the ends of the earth, are the fallen giants of our ancient forests. Here and there on our coasts we come upon a fossil forest, as at Lulworth, with trees turned to stone, but beneath the marshes of the Thames are submerged forests with trees that are still wood, as when, perhaps fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, men dressed in skins would hide among them hunting hyenas and bears.
From one of these lost forests has come down to us a dramatic piece of news. We know that one day a wild pig, seeking food in a forest where Carmarthen Bay is now, was killed by a great tree falling. The pig lay dead beneath the trunk for ages, buried deep in leaves and moss each year until the mould piled up through centuries of time, while empires rose and fell, and the forest sank slowly in the sea. One day they found in the marsh, among the trees embedded in the peat, the tree which fell and killed the pig at Lydstep Haven near Tenby.
It is a forest such as this that lies today beneath the marshes of the Thames, both in Essex and in Kent. If we sail down to Margate from London Bridge we sail where birds once nested in the tops of trees. The trees are gone, and our most ancient river has piled mud and sand high above the verdant glades, so that all we see are mud flats and a waste of waters.
This estuary of the Thames, with the country round it, was once eighty feet higher than it is. Southend and Sheerness were then far from the sea, up-river places, and where their busy streets are now were wooded hillsides, over which the stag and the wild boar roamed and men sent flint-headed arrows after them. Then the Thames wended its way through green vegetation where now is sea as far as the eye can reach. After passing the Nore, the comparatively narrow channel of the ancient river took a north-easterly course through either Black Deep or Barrow Deep, submarine depressions believed to be the sunken watercourse of the Thames, and entered the North Sea several miles east of Clacton. The Medway was then a tributary of the Thames, rather like the Darent now, while a range of hills extended north-east from Sheppey and far out to sea.
Beneath the marshy tracts bordering the great river from London to the sea these trees can be recovered by anyone prepared to dig a dozen feet. For over 250 years this vast submerged surface of ancient Britain, with its fossil treasures, has been opened up at one place and another. It was so in the days of Pepys in 1665, when he wrote in his diary:
At Blackwall, in digging the late docke, they did, twelve feet underground, find perfect trees covered with earth, nut trees with branches and the very nuts upon them; some of whose nuts Johnson showed us; their shells black with age, and their kernell upon opening decayed, but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And a yew tree (upon which the very ivy was taken up whole about it) which upon cutting, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is.
From Woolwich to Crossness Point, under the entire area of Plumstead and Erith Marshes, are oak and alder trees, branches and roots in great quantities. Furniture has been made out of the oak. On each side of the Thames beyond Purfleet and the Darent the stumps of the trees may often be seen. Beneath the marshes of Rainham and Dagenham, are vast numbers of trees with roots, boughs, and bark covered with mould and clay to a depth of from seven to twelve feet; the latest older than the Romans, the lowest as old as the Stone Age. From Greenwich to Greenhithe on the Kent side of the river an old forest bed of yew, oak, and pine lies twenty feet below, and beneath this bed two of our ancient ancestors have been found, one a hundred thousand years old and one thousands of centuries older.
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