Introduction
The journalist who reported on the Gunpowder Plot anniversary in Ashford in November 1877 relished the spectacle on a number of levels. He began with an approving description of the torchlight procession, the ‘long array of masqueraders in all sorts of fancy costumes’ and not one but two bands. Such features were common, in Kent and elsewhere, on ‘The Fifth’ by that time. But he also felt it important to highlight the ‘full-size representation of the celebrated Ashford urinal, now closed, with the words “Lost to sight, to memory dear”, [which] caused much laughter, as did a waggon or car containing seven individuals got up to represent the newly-elected school board. The recent weight and measure prosecutions and other local matters were also the subject of caricatures.’Footnote 1
At one level, his news item simply echoes David Cannadine's diagnosis of the same event in Lewes, Sussex, which combined ‘civic pride and civic disobedience in a particularly resonant combination’.Footnote 2 Putting the Fifth in its proper context, it was yet another fixture in the long-running contest, waged in many small and medium-sized towns across England in this period, between on the one hand those keen to participate in disorder or, when that was prevented by the authorities, to mock the pretensions of the leading lights of the town instead. These displays of various forms of ‘social energy’ were on the other hand stoutly resisted by those desperate to prevent it from happening in the first place, or neutering it if it did.Footnote 3
But order had been imposed in almost every town by the end of the nineteenth century, Tunbridge Wells providing a good example of this transformation. In 1870, ‘a riot on a small scale ensued’ after the police took possession of tar barrels being set alight in Royal Parade and the officers involved ended up being stoned. But all had changed a decade later, when ‘The proceedings here were of a very orderly character’ such that ‘Not a single complaint was made by the police of disorderly conduct.’Footnote 4
This article is about a changing civic culture that becomes visible as the nineteenth century progresses, mainly, but not exclusively, in three typical, very ordinary, towns in West Kent – Sevenoaks, Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells. That culture is examined in two key areas: first, how and why Bonfire Night celebrations evolved in the mid-nineteenth century and, secondly, how the three towns coped with the late Victorian and Edwardian trend towards what is termed ‘civic boosterism’ or ‘place promotion’. It then considers what this changing civic culture reveals, more broadly, about local identities (and mentalités) in West Kent in this period.
Small towns, commerce, respectability and identity
Robert Storch ascribes the diminution of violence that was seen in Exeter, Lewes, Guildford and elsewhere to a succession of changing patterns of class alliance, so the withdrawal of gentry and town elite patronage in the early nineteenth century left them to be run by ‘plebeian elements’, so that celebrations ‘frequently became riotous, prolonged struggles between magistrates, police, bonfire societies and crowds’. Later on, local elites recognized that if (as was often the case) they were unable to suppress the Fifth by force they had to become involved again, but this time sanitizing the events and making them respectable, either by ‘penetrating the societies; or by swamping them through a massive infusion of patronage’. An essential precondition, however, of elite takeover was that the ‘crucial section of tradesmen and shopkeepers which had once made bonfire nights such an old-fashioned plebeian occasion [had] noticeably pulled back’ by the 1870s.Footnote 5
These themes have been taken up by historians writing more recently. The 400th anniversary of the Plot, in 2005, was the occasion for the publication of two very different analyses of its significance. In Gunpowder Plots, David Cressy's somewhat derivative (from Storch) chapter shows how the Fifth, the demise of which was regularly predicted in the first half of the nineteenth century, gained new vitality as a ‘vehicle for dramatizing current political concerns’ after the ‘political’ Church of England thanksgiving service for it was abolished in 1859.Footnote 6
James Sharpe also examines Bonfire Night through the ages, especially in terms of how ‘the meaning of past events changes when cultures change’. Specifically, he shows how, in a variety of towns where Guy Fawkes was commemorated in remarkably elaborate, violent or disruptive ways (including Lewes, Guildford, Exeter and Oxford), serious public order issues emerged before they were, eventually, quashed. He too adopts Storch's basic schema, whereby eighteenth-century middle-class involvement was followed by their abandonment of Plot celebrations to the plebeian orders and concomitant occasions of disorder in the first half of the nineteenth century, before urban elites re-imposed ‘new ideas of order and respectability on those they governed’ after about 1860. That process was undoubtedly bolstered by the trend whereby, in later Victorian Britain ‘very large numbers of the employed population increasingly enjoyed approved leisure time’.Footnote 7
It may on one level be entirely valid to consider unusual historic cases, for, as Natalie Zemon Davis says, ‘a remarkable dispute can sometimes uncover motivations and values that are lost in the welter of the everyday’.Footnote 8 But the concomitant danger is that seeking out the unusual at the expense of the ordinary risks giving a false picture, in two respects. First, as we have seen, historians of the Fifth have been very keen to concentrate on those places where the celebrations were at their most elaborate, were most prone to get out of hand and where – perhaps atypically – many of their residents seem to have revelled in their reputations for rowdiness and disorder. It reflects, secondly, another very noticeable trend in nineteenth-century historiography, which is to focus mainly on the major conurbations and large towns, which is understandable insofar as the corpus of source material is often larger and the conclusions they lead to appear more significant. Small market towns are, by contrast, the poor relations here. This is a pity since, even as late as 1871, almost 10 million people, or over 40 per cent of the population of England, lived outside the main urban districts – which includes market towns.Footnote 9 This article will seek to start to right that balance by concentrating on Gunpowder Plot celebrations in some smaller towns, mainly in West Kent.
Furthermore, the determination to focus almost entirely on law and order issues and local political concerns ignores two other significant factors. The first is the sometimes fraught economic or business relationship tradesmen and shopkeepers had with those taking part in the demonstrations and their spectators. Since crowds, even in small towns, often ran to many thousands, the Fifth was an excellent potential sales opportunity just waiting to be exploited – assuming conditions were peaceable and safe enough for trade to flourish. This must in turn be viewed within the changing context of the retail business during this period, including within smaller towns, which has led to some differing historiographical emphases. For whilst Barry Doyle rightly points to ‘the growing prominence of retailers [in general] within the urban elite’, as far as West Kent is concerned Geoffrey Crossick is probably more accurate in stressing the profound insecurity of the very smaller shopkeepers as ‘men and women of tiny ambitions and infinitely greater fears’. Those fears must have been especially prevalent during Fifth celebrations.Footnote 10
Secondly, another important reason why the nature of these celebrations changed so dramatically was that the class and other vertical conflicts (or the outworking of social energy) that took place within these towns around 1850 had, by the 1880s, been superseded by one that also stressed the centrality of ongoing horizontal rivalries without, as each competed far harder to present itself as more respectable, orderly and genteel than its near neighbours and a much pleasanter place in which to live. This is an important additional facet of boosterism; it too will be explored, in two other important contested areas: competing environmental and cultural capital investments. The apparently very different activities of Bonfire Night celebrations and expenditure on civic culture were, however, two sides of the same coin, for the broader trend described here is how a negative civic culture, part of which involved suppressing (disreputable) disorder, evolved during this period into a more respectable, positive civic culture, where the focus was much more on promoting and celebrating new or improved public buildings or local amenities.
Respectability, which was ‘at once a select status and a universal motive’, has long been considered a major badge of identity and driver of behaviour across both the middle and lower classes of Victorian England.Footnote 11 However, this somewhat ambiguous term could encompass great social fluidity: working men could, if they behaved themselves, be invited to enjoy its blessings, whilst for the middle classes ‘it was precarious and easily damaged’, so much so that ‘many felt a genuine anxiety they might be affected’ by economic disaster or sexual scandal, for example.Footnote 12
It is important to stress also that for residents of West Kent market towns and elsewhere to feel themselves and/or to be perceived by their society as respectable instantly created a powerful dichotomy with the indigenous non-respectable, or rougher, elements.Footnote 13 This relationship with an essential ‘other’ was how many of them constructed and contested their respective identities in the nineteenth century. However, this other was significantly changing, or rather expanding, in the latter part of the period, to include not merely the roughs of their own towns but those in others, too, always bearing in mind that a town's image and reputation could depend heavily on how those elements, in particular, were perceived elsewhere.Footnote 14
There are two main sources for this investigation: first, the Kent police records of disturbances and how they were handled and, secondly, a variety of local newspapers of the period, in particular the recently digitized South Eastern Gazette and Sevenoaks Chronicle. Newspapers have long been an invaluable historical source, although they have not always been appreciated as such, since the ‘solidity and seriousness’ of the reporting they contain produced, over time, a ‘body of solid and coherent information’ many millions of words long.Footnote 15 It is essential to realize, too, that newspapers could themselves become active and influential players in local events, or ‘political actors in their own right’, as we shall discover.Footnote 16 The increasing digitization of newspapers displays their greatest virtue, their ‘wealth and diversity of content’, which in this case allows, perhaps for the first time, the straightforward comparison of Bonfire Night celebrations across a particular region. However, Adrian Bingham is right to remind us of some of the methodological problems inherent in using all digital archives, including newspapers. Two are especially important: that research may be distorted if one selects only those titles available on-line and dismisses the rest; and that although remarkably powerful and revealing key word searches may now be carried out quite simply online, they can be ‘a rather blunt instrument’ if their wider context is ignored. They were, for example, always written by the journalists and received by their original audiences as print culture, not as discrete digitized text. Overlooking this similarly risks warping the broader historical picture.Footnote 17
The road to civic respectability
There is no question that Gunpowder Plot celebrations became much quieter and better ordered in West Kent as the nineteenth century progressed, as they did in Guildford and other places across the south of England. This was another example of the ‘progress’ that was ‘closely associated in the Victorian public mind with the societal and cultural shift’ in mentalité towards greater respectability.Footnote 18 But the advantage of examining events across a wide area, so not just in the more renowned hotspots of disturbance but also in more quiescent towns, is that a much more nuanced picture emerges than the current historiography allows. In places such as Cranbrook and especially Tonbridge, even in the supposedly unruly 1850s and 1860s, disorder was practically unknown at the events themselves, although Fifth-related petty crime might flourish locally. For example, Cranbrook saw a plethora of prosecutions in November 1863, including for assembling tar barrels and for throwing lighted squibs (bangers) in the streets, while Tonbridge experienced a major riot during the 1880 General Election.Footnote 19
Similarly, Bonfire Nights in Tonbridge were celebrated with ‘spirit’ and ‘zest’, but the evenings were always ‘most agreeable’.Footnote 20 One reason why ‘the greatest order and decorum was observed throughout’ was, perhaps, their unusually militaristic nature. In 1861, the focus of the evening was on the ‘100 gentlemen who have entered the military service direct from Tonbridge Castle’, on the prominent south side of which ‘the word “Army” was conspicuously placed in large letters’. In 1877, the martial theme continued, for the procession was then described as a ‘grand march round’ and one prominent banner depicted the Crimean battle of Inkerman, which had been fought on 5 November 1854. By 1888, the procession was headed by the Tunbridge Wells Military Band itself.Footnote 21
Bearsted, near Maidstone (where no disturbances were reported, either, although the county town itself witnessed a prolonged ‘Fifth’ riot in 1876), went one better in 1878, hosting an elaborate contemporary military re-enactment, whereby ‘Bearsted artillery commenced a bombardment of some imaginary fortifications in Afghanistan.’Footnote 22 The military element was lacking in Sevenoaks but it, too, prided itself on the respectability of its Plot celebrations, it being reported in 1880, for example, that ‘The whole of the proceedings were very orderly.’Footnote 23 As at Cranbrook, that did not, however, prevent Guy Fawkes-related petty crime, for example the deliberate setting fire to a birch stack belonging to Lord Mortimer Sackville (a most unpopular local aristocrat, as will become apparent) that year, which was ‘damaged to the amount of £14’.Footnote 24
Other Kent towns, by contrast, experienced serious riots, often long after they had been quelled in other places which were, supposedly, much more prone to violent disorder; Guildford saw its last significant Fifth-related incident as early as 1863, for example. By contrast, tempers ran very high in Ashford and Folkestone until at least 1882.Footnote 25 In Tunbridge Wells in 1863, ‘the riot in the streets. . .renders [the town] intolerable’ and as late as 1873, the superintendent of police gave evidence to the magistrates that ‘there was a great deal of violence shown by the mob. One policeman was struck with a stone upon the back, and another officer had his head cut open.’ Five years later, however, ‘The evening of the fifth passed off very quietly and successfully, thanks to the committee of the Bonfire Boys.’Footnote 26 The Boys had, admittedly by default, become especially significant in the town by then, since the calls on manpower in early November across the county made successful police operations very difficult. The optimum route to preserving law and order on the night was a strong police presence in the town centre to oversee a procession, coupled with a committee of the great and the good to organize it, as well as a bonfire and impressive (that is, expensive) firework display to entertain the local populace, both located far enough from the town centre for them not to be fire hazards, all paid for by public subscription. This was how it worked at Tonbridge in 1869 when ‘Subscriptions to the amount of about £14 were raised for the celebration here, and fireworks. . .were displayed in the Angel meadow, and afterwards the bonfire, consisting of two thousand faggots, six barrels of tar. . .was lighted up. . .The torchlight procession was very good.’Footnote 27
A committee was in place in Tunbridge Wells as early as 1861 but the town still experienced serious disorder a few years later. The West Kent Journal was so disgusted at the ineffectiveness of the police during the 1863 riot that it wanted them withdrawn from the town altogether and replaced by ‘a properly organised Bonfire Society. . .to take possession of the streets’.Footnote 28 And the concerns of local residents would not have been much assuaged by the sanguine, if not downright pusillanimous, response of Kent Chief Constable Ruxton to the prospect of future destruction. He wrote to a Mr Melville of Langton House, Langton Green (a village a couple of miles west of Tunbridge Wells), the following year to inform him that his force would ‘only interfere if a Bonfire is attempted to be made within the limits assigned by the Turnpike Road and Highway Act’. Anywhere else was fair game, it seemed, although his officers were ordered to place themselves so they could ‘give evidence in support of any prosecution that may follow any acts committed at Langton Green’. The prevailing mentalité, even in the highest echelons of the Force, was something like – these things happen on the Fifth, so do your best to steer clear. His problem was, as he was still candidly observing to a Thomas Buss of New Romney in 1880, ‘the difficulty of finding constables for any particular place’.Footnote 29 The situation had barely improved by the following year (although there was some police presence in the town by then), as Buss may have discovered to his cost:
They stole the property of the inhabitants wherever they could lay hands on it, and burnt it with impunity in the main street, and at last they got two barrels of tar from the gas works. . .and set them on fire under Mr Buss's windows. Being disturbed by the police they left one of them alight in the gutter, and this nearly set fire to the house. The authorities appeared to have made no preparations for the day, and the mob did just as it pleased.Footnote 30
A brief detour: semi-respectability
By 1881, however, violent destruction had become very much the exception and law and order was imposed on the Fifth almost everywhere in West Kent. It was not, however, simply a case of tar barrel disorder suddenly being replaced by social sweetness and light, in the form of the pomp and circumstance of carnivals, processions and organized displays. It instead involved a more subtle and gradual progress to respectability, one that seems to have escaped historians. In West Kent (and perhaps elsewhere) in the late 1870s to mid-1880s, there was a fairly short-lived, intermediate stage, too, of semi-respectability. Here, satire became the instrument of rebellion, the Ashford urinal in 1877 providing a particularly fine example of the genre. If the mob was prevented from violent mayhem, then, another effective way in which it could vent its displeasure at the town's elite was to mock it, the processions and carnivals which became such marked features of the ‘new’ Gunpowder Plot celebrations being ideal vehicles for this subversive purpose. It was, moreover, one of the few ways in which many men could articulate their political displeasure, since so few had the vote before the franchise was reformed in 1884.Footnote 31 But the authorities’ willingness to tolerate this method of letting off steam had a rather limited shelf life, as we shall discover.
Semi-respectability also represents another, plebeian, expression of what might be called the ‘politics of ridicule’. A successful contemporary middle-class exponent of this tactic, to give one example, was local tenant farmer Albert Bath. A leader of the pressure group the Anti-Tithe Association, he sought to achieve the abolition of the Extraordinary tithe by staging dramatic events in which his (often aristocratic) adversaries were discomfited and ridiculed, both within their local communities and, especially, in the local and national press.Footnote 32
Parading effigies of contemporary hate figures through the streets was a long-standing Plot tradition and there was remarkable unanimity across the nation (including Kent) about who should be represented. In addition to the stock figures of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, they included the Tsar of Russia (Tunbridge Wells, 1877); the Ameer of Kabul (both Bearsted and Tunbridge Wells, 1878) and Irish politician Charles Parnell (Tunbridge Wells 1880; Dartford, 1881).Footnote 33 The Bonfire Boys of Sevenoaks seemed rather more imaginative in whom they chose to portray than those of surrounding towns. Their targets ranged from the most unusual character of Cetewayo, the Zulu king who had defeated the British at Isandlwana in January 1879 (1879); 1886 featured both Queen Victoria (played by a young man) and Charles Wood, champion jockey that year. Jack the Ripper ran for two years (1888 and 1889).Footnote 34
What is really significant, however, is how from the late 1870s, local as well as national and international characters – and their generic equivalents – began to be pilloried on Bonfire nights in Kent, although the individuals concerned were never named in the newspaper reports. The trend is first seen when it overlapped with disturbances at the Maidstone riot in 1876; not only did the mob launch a violent assault on the police station, but it showed ‘its contempt for the police’ when ‘Early in the evening a large Guy, representing a policeman was carried through the town’ after which, in an iconoclastic confusion, ‘the bifurcated figure was placed astride the Russian gun and set fire to’. In Deal that year, too, ‘a large effigy of a policeman was carried round the town’.Footnote 35
Satire was not reserved for the more disobedient towns, however, for Tonbridge in 1877 featured caricatures, ‘some of our local officers not being omitted’. By 1880, the humour had become somewhat sharper since a Punch and Judy show bore ‘some very pointed and by no means delicate satires having a strong local flavouring’, as the Tonbridge Free Press disapprovingly put it.Footnote 36 The Salvation Army, which had been founded in 1878, often met stiff opposition in West Kent for its ‘direct form of evangelism and social action’. The most famous occasion in Sevenoaks was in 1887, when Salvationists were pelted with stones when they left a meeting, but they were the butt of satirical humour at Bonfire night processions long before that.Footnote 37 A few years earlier, it had been ‘most appropriately represented by two donkeys arrayed in their uniform’ and in 1886, it was depicted on a Tonbridge banner (we are not told how, exactly) such that the South Eastern Gazette reflected that the Corps ‘is far from popular in the town’.Footnote 38
The episode that traces the rise and fall of semi-respectability most precisely took place in Sevenoaks, when the Knole Park access dispute, a local cause célèbre, was prominently represented in the Plot processions of 1883 and 1884. Knole's owner, the much-reviled Lord Sackville, had barricaded non-pedestrian access to the bridleway across the (hitherto entirely public) Park in 1883. His action excited widespread (vertical) opposition from across the town's social spectrum, Albert Bath being heavily involved throughout, which resulted in a large crowd forcibly removing the barriers in June 1884. Sackville eventually backed down. The Fifth was the perfect opportunity to ridicule such out-of-touch aristocratic behaviour before a town-wide audience (and beyond), so a representation of ‘Knole House, surmounted by a pig’ was in 1883 deemed by the Chronicle to be the procession's ‘most attractive feature. . .to the more sober-minded sightseers’. The following year, the town was ‘thronged with visitors’ when the ‘chief feature in the procession’ was a headstone inscribed ‘In memory of the Knole Park Obstructions removed June 18th 1884, taken to Knole House and there left to be for ever with the Lords’; one of the procession banners was emblazoned ‘Success to the Knole Park Obstruction Committee’.Footnote 39
Although that procession was ‘a most orderly one’, two years later the organizers were congratulated by the Chronicle on their decision ‘not to carry round any local effigies this year, which hitherto had caused a great deal of ill feeling’; three years later, national political figures were omitted, too, the Bonfire Boys being commended this time for ‘not bringing any personal feelings into the procession’.Footnote 40 It would appear that the move away from satirical representations was, by the end of the 1880s, complete in Sevenoaks at least, and resulted from two powerful, longer-term, simultaneous trends, although the short-term consequences of the 1884 Reform Act, which gave a national political voice to many artisanal voters for the first time in that winter's General Election, may have been significant too. The first was respectability, which had implications that were both individual and corporate, for this key aspect of Victorian society and culture could evoke a civic mentalité that stretched across whole towns, although different social classes generally had very different conceptions of what to be respectable really meant. The decline of mockery was, therefore, yet another outworking of that negative civic culture, or those ‘social controls. . .which worked through notions of what was acceptable and what was unacceptable’. It was the same process which, in 1874, led to the abolition of the annual fair in Sevenoaks, those local working people who wanted it to continue being defeated by shopkeepers and ‘respectable’ citizens who urged its end. The latter petitioned to do so under the new Fairs Act of 1871, the preamble to which asserted that many fairs were ‘unnecessary, are the cause of grievous immorality and are very injurious to the inhabitants’.Footnote 41
Sevenoaks was, moreover, increasingly priding itself (or constructing its identity, in other words) on the respectable image it presented, both to residents and outsiders: its positive civic culture was starting to emerge, in other words. A respectable image was both cause and effect of another very significant and devoutly wished economic impact, too, since ‘it is an accepted fact that the town is to a large extent dependant for its prosperity on the number of the gentry which can be induced to take up residence in the locality’.Footnote 42 For those reasons, it was hardly surprising that Bonfire Night organizers should suppress anything, especially the mockery of social superiors, which might compromise its respectability and thus hinder the arrival of the well-to-do in Sevenoaks.
Respectability also comprised an important element in how English society as a whole became ‘more orderly and well defined in 1900 than it had been in the 1830s and 1840s’, which ineluctably led, secondly, to an enhanced awareness by the authorities that Fifth celebrations, especially in the quieter towns, were by the 1880s unlikely to get out of hand.Footnote 43 Their growing confidence in their ability to maintain law and order meant that it was increasingly unnecessary to permit even a limited amount of satire as a release valve on the now swiftly cooling pressure cooker of riot. This growing self-assurance may graphically be seen in West Kent by comparing how, at Tunbridge Wells in 1868, ‘it was thought desirable that a sort of compromise should be made with the boisterous element’ with the position in Tonbridge in 1888, where Guy Fawkes night itself was postponed partly ‘to meet the convenience of the tradesmen’, with no concerns whatsoever raised about whether any townspeople would object to the decision.Footnote 44
The commercial imperative
The role of tradesmen, and in particular the complex economic relationship they had with the crowds who thronged Bonfire Night celebrations, is another area which has not thus far been discussed in the historiography. Shopkeepers and owners of other businesses across England had an interesting commercial calculation to make on the Fifth, at least before about 1880. Crowd numbers could be very large, so there were ‘upwards of five thousand persons present’, even in a small town like Cranbrook in 1876.Footnote 45 Since most would have arrived with money in their pockets, it represented a good potential sales opportunity and re-emphasizes John Walton's general point that many consumers came into towns from surrounding areas, so ‘we must not regard town and country as binary opposites’.Footnote 46 But the very real prospect of widespread disorder tempered that desire with a – similarly well-founded – fear of conflagration and destruction of property, as Buss so nearly discovered in New Romney. The decision by shopkeepers whether or not to remain open during the festivities would, to a large extent, depend on an individual town's reputation for violence; those where such a calculation was needed implied, at a deeper level, a serious lack of respectability. Their concerns were no doubt compounded by the uncertainties surrounding state compensation for riot damage in this period, certainly before the Riot (Damages) Act, 1886, conferred strict liability for loss on the local police force. Before then, traders had to rely on the Remedies against the Hundred Act, 1827, under which such liability ‘to yield full compensation’ fell entirely on ‘the inhabitants of the Hundred. . .or other District’. However, little or no research appears to have been done yet on how effective those remedies were, in practice, during the mid- to late nineteenth century.Footnote 47
It was not surprising therefore that, in Tunbridge Wells in 1865, ‘In anticipation of the character of the evening's amusements, the shops. . .were closed at an early hour’ and as late as 1887, in another unquiet town, Ashford, ‘At seven o'clock nearly all the tradesmen closed their shops’, their proprietors no doubt fearing a repeat of ‘the tumultuous scenes witnessed on former Guy Fawkes nights.Footnote 48 The dilemma was neatly captured, in microcosm, in a press report of a Tunbridge Wells local board meeting in November 1868. A letter to it from a tradesman in the Royal Parade hoped the authorities would this year act to prevent his premises being damaged by fireworks, as had happened 12 months earlier. This led one member to remind his fellows that ‘the Magistrates had in the next room licensed persons to sell fireworks, and he did not well see how they could. . .say they should not be let off after they were sold’.Footnote 49 The interests of local retailers had to be balanced, therefore, with those of the firework manufacturers, which tended to pull in the opposite direction.
The way to square this particular circle – as respectable residents, shopkeepers, local authorities and police knew only too well – was to make sure that a town's Plot celebrations were well ordered and peaceful. This allowed shops to remain open and so cater for the large crowds attending; when the events were purged of satire, too, they (and, by implication, the towns hosting them) became more respectable still. Such a state of affairs, or mutually beneficial relationship between town, crowd and retailers, had blossomed in Sevenoaks by 1889 to the extent that one of only two banners carried in the procession read, with great accuracy and perspicacity, ‘Success to the Trade of Sevenoaks’.Footnote 50
Evolving forms of social energy
The growing progress towards order, respectability and even gentility on the Fifth in West Kent by the 1880s begs the important question of what happened to the social energy that was so evident at the earlier disturbances in Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone and elsewhere. Social energy might be defined, in these circumstances (and notwithstanding Greenblatt's more general description), as the well-known propensity of (preponderantly but not entirely) single, artisanal young men, fuelled with drink and/or testosterone, to avail themselves of various short-term opportunities to confront each other, or the representatives of law and order, in a disorderly and disorganized manner. But social energy is much more than that, for it might also arise out of more deep-rooted grievances felt across a broader social spectrum of age, class and gender, which manifested itself in much better organized, longer term and sometimes more effective forms of protest. These could, very occasionally, be violent, but as the nineteenth century progressed they were much more likely to be peaceful and to seek to make use of existing political and other institutions in order to effect change. The Knole Park access dispute was an excellent example of this, since it channelled local opinion against Sackville institutionally, in particular through the Sevenoaks local board and an influential national pressure group, the Commons Preservation Society.
The evidence from the three West Kent towns between about 1860 and 1890 demonstrates that the social energy that could so easily express itself in outbreaks of disorder around the Fifth and on other occasions at the start of this period did not vanish completely by its end, as some historians seem to assume. Some of it was undoubtedly funnelled into more socially acceptable, or respectable, forms of celebration. Thus, the dangerous rolling of lit tar barrels down and letting off squibs in the main streets was replaced by organized carnivals and unthreatening processions, such as the ‘Illuminated Carnival’ and – most significantly and symbolically – the ‘Battle of Confetti’, for that had become the weapon of choice by then, that wound its way through the small village of Riverhead, just north of Sevenoaks, in 1896. No disruption of the event was reported, so it is reasonable to conclude that either the rough young men had turned respectable or that they had found other outlets for their energy.Footnote 51 But – and this point underscores the dramatic shift in mentalité that had taken place across West Kent since Ruxton's day – the confident tone of the press report indicates the widespread prevailing assumption that, by the end of the century, violent disruption on the Fifth had become as unthinkable then as it would be today on the Centre Court at Wimbledon. Their ‘visions of the world’, as Robert Mandrou defines mentalité, had changed completely.Footnote 52
To re-emphasize the point, this evidence also suggests that the social energy that was apparent in class and other vertical conflicts that took place within these towns at the start of this period had, by its end, been substantially replaced by something very different. This instead stressed the centrality of ongoing horizontal rivalries without, as each town competed to construct the most ideal identity for itself, one that succeeded in presenting itself as both a more orderly and more genteel place than its neighbouring towns and a far pleasanter place in which to live.
Civic boosterism in the small market town
Although nineteenth-century newspapers were never keen to indulge in knocking copy, their accounts of local Gunpowder Plot celebrations do lift the lid on this changing aspect of life in those towns. In 1873, the South Eastern Gazette’s Tonbridge reporter stated, with an element of civic pride or one-upmanship, ‘A large number of people were present from Tunbridge Wells, where no demonstration had been arranged.’Footnote 53 Eight years later, however, civic pride gave way to the casting of sarcastic aspersions on the respectability of some visitors from the neighbouring town and, by extension, on the respectability of the rival town itself, since the Tonbridge display ‘was somewhat marred by a party of Tunbridge Wells “lambs”, who came over. . .purposely to create a disturbance, although they were not very successful’.Footnote 54 Quite clearly, Tonbridge's essential other by then included their rivals from Tunbridge Wells. They were deemed inferior, either for not being able to arrange their own celebration or for being disrespectable enough to seek to disrupt those taking place elsewhere. No wonder that, by 1888, the gloves had come off completely. The local Bonfire Boys (which had only been formed in 1869) had by then become a proud civic symbol of the relative status and reputation of Tonbridge as a town punching well above its weight, since ‘Although smaller in number, the Bonfire Society compares very favourably with the Society of the sister town – Tunbridge Wells.’Footnote 55
This nascent or burgeoning civic pride, or boosterism, was expressed across a wide variety of other platforms, too. Boosterism involved ‘towns becoming more competitive in the pursuit of a civilising agenda’ through the provision of town halls and public libraries, for example, always bearing in mind that such prestige projects also sought to manifest the corporate respectability of a town and its elite.Footnote 56 This was itself part of a broader competitive instinct that was growing apace in the later Victorian period and which has generated an extensive historiography of its own. Jon Stobart has looked at how civic culture, such as building town halls, ‘was central to identity and image, both of the town and its elite’. Andrew Jackson has shown how correspondents in local and regional newspapers might themselves become local political actors as they ‘articulated local senses of place identity’ and Louise Miskell has sketched how cities across Britain held ‘bidding contests for the annual parliaments of science [that] should be viewed as a part of a culture of inter-town competition and rivalry in urban Britain’.Footnote 57
This process did not stop at the level of cultural improvement, for many market towns across southern England (and elsewhere) sought to promote themselves as increasingly pleasant living environments by the later nineteenth century – although this was becoming both a much more complex task and one much more difficult to achieve. Laying out the wide boulevards of new residential estates was one thing; taking away the sewage they generated, cheaply and efficiently, was another altogether. Whilst the private sector was adept at property development, ensuring that the waste they generated did not poison the town's other residents (as it did in Sevenoaks until the early 1880s) was a job that fell upon the public sector in the shape of the new local board (which was created in 1871) and to local politicians such as Major James German and, later, Albert Bath, who had to make those new institutions function effectively. It is not entirely coincidental that Sevenoaks was connected to mains drainage in 1882, eight years behind Tonbridge and just a few years before the last vestiges of semi-respectable mockery faded from the town's Gunpowder Plot celebrations. This is because both these seemingly disparate, even random, events all formed part of the town's broader civic culture – or its comprehensive, continuous, identity-driven effort to present itself in the best possible light against its rivals. This competition, in which the ultimate prize was profitable respectability, was waged in many different arenas, and failure in just one risked damaging the reputation of the whole town across the board.
To illustrate this, one need only look at an area of great cultural significance, regionally, where Sevenoaks did, for a number of years, fall well short of a nearby rival. This was its library facilities, and the enthusiasm with which the respective town elites pursued this particular prize adds to the historiography of the so-called decline of urban governance in Britain in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 58
Kate Hill says civic culture should be read in two ways: first, in terms of a ‘discourse on the meaning of the city’, whereby classical motifs might give it a legitimizing ‘spiritual legacy from the ancient world’, from which future progress might naturally spring. Secondly, it was an instrument of social control, creating model citizens by imbuing the lower orders with middle-class values and enfolding them within the social construct and ideal of the city. To these, Stobart has added a third aspect, that of its boosterist role ‘in the construction and projection of place identities’, whereby civic culture had a vital role in the spatial differentiation of the town as well as in demarcating ‘social division by bolstering the power and status of the elite’.Footnote 59 However, this schema, persuasive though it is, reflects the position on the ground in larger urban centres such as the Potteries. The intention now is to conclude by testing its relevance for small market towns in West Kent.
Although, by the 1890s, the town had a ‘few private and subscription libraries’, Sevenoaks lacked the free institution that Tonbridge had boasted about since 1882.Footnote 60 Edward Cazalet, a prominent member of the district gentry, opened that institution not only boasting of its abilities but also, by implication, giving a clear put-down to the cultural claims of its competitive others elsewhere: ‘The establishment of a free library in a large town was a matter not of so much difficulty, but in a town like Tunbridge, where the resources were not large, he thought it was highly creditable to the town.’Footnote 61
In 1900, it moved to new premises, nearer the railway station so ‘convenient for those travelling from the rural parts of the district’ – and further afield, too, potentially, since Sevenoaks was only 10 minutes or so away by train. It cost the princely sum of over £7,000 and was opened by none other than Lord Avebury, the ‘parliamentary champion of public libraries’ who had sponsored the Public Libraries Act of 1892. The council re-emphasized its coup, permanently and very publicly, by promptly naming a new road off the High Street Avebury Avenue.Footnote 62 Responding to Avebury, the chairman of the urban district council not only reiterated how forward-thinking Tonbridge was in being one of the first small towns in England to boast a free library but, echoing Cazalet, he too saw it as a beacon to attract library users from competitor towns further afield since: ‘the larger buildings would increase the sphere of usefulness, and he hoped the young people of Tonbridge and neighbourhood would make all the use of the premises that they could’.Footnote 63
This was a red rag to Sevenoaks. The deficiency in cultural status was keenly felt by its elite, including one local board member who drew attention to
the success of the Tonbridge Free Library, to maintain which the total amount charged to the general district rate was £147 17s. 5s. . . .The expense of the Sevenoaks Town and District Library. . .was about £60 a year—it was only a lending library and had no reading room. The Tonbridge Free Library was doing ten times as much good with its gross expenditure of £166 that the Sevenoaks Town Library was doing with its £60.Footnote 64
It took until 1905 and a £3,000 gift from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie before Sevenoaks had its own free public lending library. Lord Avebury presided at its official opening, too, in a clear attempt to achieve par civic status with Tonbridge. He dwelt upon its cultural significance, having ‘no doubt you will find it a “great addition” to Sevenoaks’.Footnote 65 Responding, Chairman Alfred Laurie similarly sought to boost the town's cultural credentials, saying that now ‘Sevenoaks has everything that it requires’ – except a public baths. This was itself another call for one-upmanship which, on this occasion, the town rose to and where it would eventually go one better than its great challenger. For whilst Tonbridge's ‘open air swimming-bath’ opened in July 1910, Sevenoaks trumped it with a purpose-built indoor public baths, which was completed in 1914 at a cost of £6,000.Footnote 66
Henry Swaffield (who had donated the land for the new library building) also spoke at the unveiling. He too was keen to highlight the free library's importance in advancing the town's competitive position against Tonbridge and elsewhere, saying not only that it ‘would be a great boon to the inhabitants’, but that it would ‘considerably add to the attractiveness of Sevenoaks as a pleasure and health resort’ as well. Most intriguingly, he then went on to draw a direct parallel between the new library and the town's sewage system constructed 30 years previously, since the large loans the local board raised then ‘have been attended with such excellent results’. The new investment in the civic culture of the library, he was saying, was as important as the earlier, heavier capital cost of the environmental improvements brought about by better drainage, because both provided clear benefits to the town's image, status and civic identity as it sought to keep up with its rivals.Footnote 67
On one level, this narrative provides further evidence, from these market towns, of how local elites sought to order civic society to their liking, bearing in mind that they faced both internal (vertical) and external (horizontal) challenges to their hegemony – potentially – as they did so. Internally, as Richard Trainor says, later Victorian elites ‘had to bargain with a broader cross-section of society than six decades earlier’, a trend very visible in Sevenoaks for, in 1894, Swaffield found himself serving on the newly formed, 12-member urban district council and sharing power with Arthur Hickmott, a prominent local socialist politician.Footnote 68 And externally, as we have seen, they had to keep a careful eye on what was happening in other towns in order not to fall behind them.
On another level it represents a conclusion, of sorts, of almost six decades of less altruistic, elite-inspired effort to create an identity, or image, of these towns that was accepted, even embraced, by other classes internally and was, similarly, respected by competitor towns externally. This lengthy process involved initially removing negative impulses such as rowdy Fifth celebrations (and comparing one's own town favourably with others that could not do so) and then creating a positive environment, cultural and otherwise, within which all classes could thrive. Clearly, one welcome concomitant financial benefit to substantial property owners of this approach was enhanced land and property values. The sources are, however, far too coy to admit this directly, as such a naked show of greed might have compromised their claims to gentility and respectability, so they express it instead in a commonly understood code. Moreover, I would argue that this factor provides a direct link between the negative suppression of disorderly Fifth celebrations and positive investment in local cultural capital.
One therefore has to decode the newspaper reports and in this respect two articles, published 25 years apart, are very telling. In March 1878, under the significant headline ‘Sevenoaks New Town’, the Gazette broadly welcomed the ‘vast change [that] is coming over our local district’ with the development of a large, new and very prestigious housing estate including ‘some fine roads’, too. Sanitizing or suppressing opportunities for local plebeian disorder, such as Fifth celebrations and fairs, were but two factors that had made Sevenoaks safe for gentle elite and middle-class living, which was swiftly exploited by property developers keen to cash in on rapidly rising land values.Footnote 69
A quarter of a century later, a Chronicle editorial, in October 1903, was similarly revealing. It drew attention both to a minor local sanitary breakdown and the debate over the location of the new library (this was before Swaffield gifted the town its site). The two seemingly separate stories are linked, both with each other and with that of 1878, by the overwhelming concern of the editor to maintain the town's reputation as a ‘salubrious spot’ enjoying a ‘picturesque character’. Again, this appears to be an accepted cypher for constantly being alert to maintain or enhance the town's living environment in order to ensure no diminution in house prices, nor the loss of respectability and social status that implied.Footnote 70
Conclusion
Sevenoaks was one of many towns in West Kent that altered very rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century. This was most readily apparent in the changing townscape, for the arrival of the fast rail connection to London in 1868 provided further impetus to private property development (as the same line did in Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, too); growing affluence called for better public facilities, in addition, which ranged from firmer policing to efficient sewage systems to free public libraries and many other examples. A positive civic culture had joined or had even overshadowed its negative counterpart, in other words, and this was, possibly, a common theme extending across much of late Victorian England.
In some significant respects, this process looked rather different in the three West Kent market towns than it did in the six towns of the Potteries, or in other large conurbations. This is due mainly to the horizontal/vertical, internal/external distinctions outlined above. In Stoke, according to Stobart, civic culture was central to place identity and, most significantly – ‘at the same time’ – emphasized social divisions.Footnote 71 And Sevenoaks, for example, had witnessed similar concurrent social and spatial separation in mid-century, most notably in the creation of a then discrete artisanal district, Hartslands, in the far less salubrious northern part of the town from the 1840s.Footnote 72 But by the later nineteenth century, the process in West Kent appears rather less seamless and simultaneous. For, having solved possible vertical conflicts within, such as Bonfire Nights and fairs, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells very swiftly realized the looming horizontal threats to their prosperity and respectability from the potential civic aggrandizement of their neighbouring competitive others.
It required a town-wide effort to emulate or, if possible, overtake them. Whilst the middle-class elite always made it clear that it was they who ran them and it also clearly sought to project its ‘image of the town onto the working classes’, rarely was any serious effort made to ‘control access’ to local cultural assets, as took place in the Potteries.Footnote 73 Indeed, the evidence suggests the precise opposite was the case. At the opening of Tonbridge's first public library in 1882, Cazalet insisted that ‘All classes, all denominations, and all shades of politics were met together to carry forward and’ – most importantly – ‘promote’ the undertaking, since the world, or at least West Kent, had to know how good the new facility was and they must all unite to publicize its appeal. By the time the larger building was unveiled in 1900, the town had an even clearer-eyed view of its clientele and the benefits it offered them, since ‘They expected all classes. They did not mind who the student was, they wanted him to attend after his day's work in the evening to benefit his mind.’Footnote 74
The same was true of Sevenoaks. Much as its residents from across the class divide joined forces to confront the vertical threat represented by Mortimer Sackville, so did many feel the need to pull together to ensure they were not being eclipsed horizontally by their rival towns either. This almost, but not quite, democratic mindset is visible in how the elite were keen to open participation in the new facilities to the entire (respectable) population of the town. Lord Sudeley, when laying the foundation stone for the new public baths in July 1914, said that it should ‘be of practical benefit to everyone in Sevenoaks’, especially the young.Footnote 75 Social and spatial distinctions might not coincide or even cohere in West Kent, therefore, and for very good reason.
In Burslem, the bourgeoisie feared being taken over by Hanley so it emphasized its social and spatial difference with a new town hall, which was how it defined and symbolized its control of the urban space vis-à-vis both other social classes within and rival towns without. In Tonbridge and Sevenoaks, by contrast, the elites feared being left behind, so they emphasized their spatial difference from other towns, not via social distinction but by social cohesion – or at least a believable image of it. The small market town, in other words, staked out at least a part of its identity in its claim to be completely united in how it presented itself to the outside world.
This has, however, two potentially very significant implications for the history of the three West Kent towns, and perhaps Victorian market towns generally. First, it suggests that their elites may have been relatively powerless, compared to those in larger urban centres, to enforce their social control over other residents (assuming, of course, that they wished to do so in the first place). Secondly, perhaps related to it, such unity posits a major reduction in contemporary class conflict, in such towns at least, by the start of the twentieth century. Since this is a radical departure from much of the historiography of late Victorian and Edwardian England, which from George Dangerfield onwards has largely stressed the centrality of societal divisions, especially in the cities, much new research will be required to test its accuracy.Footnote 76
We have seen that the three market towns witnessed a dramatic shift in civic culture as the nineteenth century ended, from a negative desire to combat disreputable behaviour by individuals or social classes within them to a more positive mentalité, whereby harmful social energy was channelled towards more constructive pastimes and each town could focus more on matching or surpassing the amenities offered by their local rivals. Other towns, rather than classes, within the same town had therefore become the more important essential other. And a successful civic culture meant keeping watch over almost every activity that took place in, or was absent from, the town and assessing them in terms of the contribution they made, or were not making, to its overall image, within which respectability played a very large part. Much of the identity of Sevenoaks, especially, revolved around completing a particular virtuous circle. It sought to position itself such that it would attract in the respectable gentry (and wealthy middle-class) residents who – the town so fervently believed – had become so essential to its future prosperity and who would, hopefully, return the favour by conferring further respectability back upon the town.
