Essay: How Painters and Photographers Saw the Changes in East Kent.

How Painters and Photographers Saw the Changes in East Kent.

The county of Kent with its orchards, vineyards and hop gardens is traditionally viewed  as The Garden of England,  a link to the Continent via the Dover Ferry Port  and the Channel Tunnel, or a pleasant place in which to retire after a life in London.  What it isn't viewed as is as an industrial centre and coal mining area.

In this essay I wish to investigate how over a span of about 100 years East Kent changed from a rural to an industrial area, and how those changes have been recorded in paintings and photographs.

Until the 1890s the only industries in East Kent were farming, fishing, docks at Ramsgate, Dover and Folkstone and the railways that served them.   The artists working in East Kent reflected this idealised vision with their images of the area. 

Among those artists are:

William Dyce, 1807-1883.

Illustration 1. William Dyce, 1807-1883.

Pegwell Bay, Kent- A Recollection of October 5th. 1858. Tate Gallery.

The Legend appended at The Tate describes it thus:

“Dyce’s painting was the product of a trip he made in the autumn of 1858 to the popular holiday resort of Pegwell Bay near Ramsgate, on the east coast of Kent."

Fossil hunting was a past-time popularised by Mary Anning whose work at Lyme Regis changed the way that scientists looked at the history of the earth and led to Geology becoming a science of it's own.  The image depicts a well dressed group partaking in their own pursuit of fossils.  There is a hint of more mundane activity with the inclusion of the carter under the far cliff.

According to Hugh Torrens of the Dept. of Geology at Keele University the theologian and geologist William Buckland said Mary Anning was  'the greatest fossilist the world ever knew,'  Mary Anning born Lyme(1799-1847)

  

This site is very close to the site that later became the English end of a cross Channel hovercraft link that ran from 1966 to 1982.  The service was killed off by the impending of the Channel Tunnel and ageing hovercraft that were too expensive to replace.  The old hovercraft terminal still exists as a bleak concrete apron.
James' Hovercraft Page.  Pegwell Bay Hoverport, Ramsgate (1969-1987)

I have found not one painting of this site.  I include a recent image.

Illustration 2. Barney Case.  2015.  Current scene at old Hover Port.

Illustration 3. Simplon Postcard. Appears early 20c. Dover Harbour, showing Dover Castle in Kent.  

In image 3 we see a commercial postcard featuring a painting of Dover Docks as they would have looked in the early 20th. century.  It shows a quiet and calm dockyard with ships against an almost empty quay with Dover Castle forming an imperious backdrop.  This is a scene of safe tranquillity without any of the clutter or bustle that must have been present.  The presence of the Castle hints at this being a safe refuge from the dangers of war and revolution on the Continent.

On Thursday 6th. February 2015 I visited Dover to try and take a photograph the scene as it is now.  Before I got to the point I wanted I was intercepted by dock security and asked to leave.  It was made quite clear that this area was off limits.  It did, however, find a picture taken from a cruise ship moored on a similar spot to where the original was taken.

Illustration 4. 

Simplon Postcard.  Celebrity Constellation Baltic Cruise - August 2007

The Western Docks are now little used except as the entrance to Dover Marina and a few cruise ships, with most of the action taking part in the Eastern Docks which house the ferry terminal. 

J. M. W. Turner, c1775-1851, is probably the most famous artist who featured this area.  Director of Turner Gallery, Victoria Pomery commenting on both Turner and the light at Margate,  said, “All of Turner's practice was about light, and the quality of the light we get here is superb, because Margate is north facing. It’s less aggressive; steadier.”

The North Kent coast is still a popular destination for painters and photographers alike.  The sunsets  can be quite stunning.  The air pollution from London to the East can redden the sky spectacularly.  The  East Kent coast, where I live, provides great dawn light; sometimes crisp and clear and sometimes misty and mysterious, quite different from the view only 20 miles away.   

Illustration. 5.  J.M.W Turner.  Margate Harbour. c1845.  Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 

According to Malcolm Andrews, the respected Kent based Professor of Victorian and visual studies,  Turner said of his sea landscape Snow Storm.

“I did not paint to be understood, but I wished to show what the scene was like: I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to observe it.  But no one had any business to like the picture.”

Andrews, Malcolm. (1999). Landscape and Western Art. Oxford University Press, p 177.

Turner’s work is so impressionistic there is no way I could reconstruct any of his images.   He was not attempting was an accurate record of what was in front of him but was capturing the essence of the scene.

What I have reproduced below is the scene as it is today from a similar spot.  The image shows of the red sky of a typical North Kent sunset.

Image 6. Craig Prentis. Margate Harbour at Sunset

Image 7.  Cuthbert Hamilton-Ellis.1909-1987. South Eastern Railway Train in Kent Countryside Hauled by 4–2–0 Locomotives Nos.85 and 136. 1945-1965.  National Railway Museum.

Locomotive No.136 was built in 1851 and appeared at the Great Exhibition of that year.  Locomotive No.85 was built in 1850.  (The Percy Whitlock Trust.) This is no contemporary image of Kent but one rooted in nostalgia.  It is an idealised view of East Kent.  Verdant fields with neat hedges, two oast houses and fluffy clouds in an azure sky.  The two engines are clean and shiny giving off no smoke and little vapour; the drivers pristine in their khaki overalls.  Even the track bed is clean and unsullied, despite the passing trains.  The period couple by the stile complete the gentile image with his top hat and her bonnet.

Illustration 8. Claude-Marie Ferrier.  Crampton's Locomotive Engine, displayed at The Great Exhibition 1851.  The Royal Collection.

Here the contrast is plain, with the contemporary photograph recording the cold fact of the engine appearing at The Great Exhibition and the much more recent depiction of an imagined event.  

Illustration 9. Maurice Shepperd. 1947-     The Great Wall – Dymchurch; Romney Marsh; Kent. 15th September 1978.

The journalist Christopher Middleton writing in The Daily Telegraph on 20th. May 2010 about the nature reserve at Dungeness called it, "Britain's only desert".   Whether or not this claim is true,  Dungeness is Europe's largest coastal shingle bank and a very dry place.  The wild nature of the area has long been an attraction for artists who, in the main, have concentrated on the beach, the dunes, the fishing boats and the quaint wooden houses.  Only a few have featured the one structure that dominates the area; Dungeness Nuclear Power Station.  The Shepperd painting above is typical of the images showing, as it does, the sea, the raised shingle bank and a  group of single storey houses.
Both charming and truthful in its depiction of this truly wild place but only as the view to the east.  Visit the scene and look west and one is confronted by the necessary eyesore of the Power Station and the bigger eyesores that are the Romney Marsh Wind Farm, and the HT pylons that march across the landscape.   With very few exceptions this brutal side to Dungeness has been left to photographers.  Where it has been painted the image of the Power Station is softened, as in the Mike Smith Sketch below.   Illustration 11 is a far more brutal image and shows Dungeness for the dry barren place it truly is.


Illustration 10. Mike Smith. Nuclear Power Station. 2011.  dungeness- blogshank-mikesmith

Illustration 11. Peter Siddell.  Britain's only desert 2013.  Petersiddell.co.uk/2013/12/30/dungeness-britain's-only-desert/

Illustration 12.  George Rowlett 1941-  Sunlit Walmer Beach towards Deal Pier, Bathers and Crab Boat. 1997-1998. University of St. Andrews.

The scene of Walmer Beach is one that is timeless and is painted and photographed almost daily.    The painting depicts a steeply sloping sandy beach with colour splashes hinting at people.  There is a fishing boat just off the beach.  Deal Pier is represented by a black line with a light at its end.  There is a freedom about the scene that no photograph can capture.  
Note 21st May 2015.  I recently had the pleasure of meeting George Rowlett.  Spent about 30 minutes discussing art, photography and orchids.  

Illustration 13. Barney Case. Photograph from similar position.

The scene as it actually appears is far less dramatic.  Gone is the bright yellow sand, now replaced by the more sombre tones of the gravel.  The slope of the beach is shallower and the sea has turned from blue to brown.  The fishing boats are still present, as are the pier and the building on the left.  The painted image is a very impressionistic version of the true view, which, while recognisable is not faithful to the truth.  My only wish in taking my image was to find where the artist sat and to replicate the image.   I will admit it is nowhere near as colourful but it does show what is really there.The two images clearly depict the same place, one evokes the spirit and the records the truth.

Illustration 14. John Abbott.  No Dates. Train passing Coldred on the EKR. c1912-1920.

A train picture but with a hay wain and four horses as the main subject.  Guilford Colliery, the destination for the train, is represented by a lone smoking chimney on the horizon.  A charming picture with its van Gogh sky and ripening corn fields but almost ignoring the nearby colliery.

The dates shown for these pictures span the period from the East Kent Railway being connected to and the subsequent closing of the colliery.

Illustration 15. Photographer unknown.  Guilford Colliery.  Subterranea Brittanica.co,uk.

The image is dated 1910 but must be post 1912 as that is when the rail link was built.  This is no romantic image of Kent but one showing the messy business of mining.  The images are of the same place and record the same industry but there the similarity ends.

Note: Guilford Colliery was started in 1907 but was unable to produce commercial quantities of coal until 1912 when a branch of the East Kent and Chatham railway brought a reliable means of transport.   The Colliery closed in 1920 following a severe underground flood in 1919.
 Nick Catford. Subterranea Brittanica .co.uk.

All the paintings have been  concerned with the scene and not the seen.  The photographers constrained by their medium record scenes as they are seen.  Photography is a better medium for accuracy and has been used to good effect to record the rise and particularly the fall of the mining industry in East Kent.  Britain did not have the benefit of photographers with skill or interest of Bernd and Hilla Becker who recorded in such fine detail the passing of heavy industry in Europe.  In Britain it was left to many individuals to make such records.  There is certainly no central archive like the one left by the Bechers.  What we do have are undated images taken by the men working within their industry showing where, and with whom they worked.

Illustrations 16 and 17. Contemporary pictures of Shakespeare Colliery and a group of miners.

In the 1890s an attempt was made to build a tunnel from Dover to Calais. The tunnel attempt was abandoned in 1882.   The redundant drilling gear was used to test for coal.  The mineral rights were bought up by a colourful character named Arthur Barr, who opened the first East Kent colliery on the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff.  The only non-photographic image of Shakespeare Colliery is an near copy of Illustration 16.  What has been left are industrial photographs that feature both the surface equipment and the men themselves.
Note: From dovermuseum.co.uk. Shakespeare Colliery.

Illustration 17. doverhistorian.com  Shakespeare Colliery, owned by Kent Collieries, 24.04.1912 

Paintings from other mining areas exist, and I reproduce one as Illustration 18,  but I can find none from the East Kent area.  There is, as yet, no mining museum in the area.

Illustration 18. Norman Cornish 1919-2014. Miners on the pit road.  Northumbria University Gallery.

Cornish was a miner for 33 years before he started to paint in earnest.  His feel for the industry is reflected in his work.  This painting, although depicting men walking to the pit, gives a romantic gloss on what was harsh and dangerous work.
The Guardian. Norman Cornish obituary 13.08.2014.


According to an article in Bygone Kent the miners were not local men but came to the area from established mining areas such as Wales and the North of England.   The miners were not made welcome and there was no romantic notion regarding the industry.
Bygone Kent. Edition July/August 2011.  Life at the coalface.


Of Shakespeare Colliery there is no trace.  It is now a nature reserve built from the waste brought up from The Chunnel.  A sweet irony that site of the first tunnel attempt should end up as the waste dump for the next.  

Many mines were opened and then abandoned because of the cost of extracting coal from such depths and the wet conditions.  Typical was Guilford Colliery which was opened by Burr in 1906.  Three shafts were sunk but at 1346 ft. found water.  The colliery was finally abandoned on 1921.  The other failed collieries were Maydensole Colliery at West Langdon, Stonewall Colliery, Wingham Colliery,Woodnesborough Colliery and Hammill Colliery at Ham.The only surviving pictures of these collieries are grainy black and white images that appear to show the last days of Wingham.
Dover Museum. The Failed Collieries.

 Four collieries survived and were situated at Bettshanger, Chislet, Snowdown, and Tilmanstone.  Chislet Colliery struggled to make money from the time it was opened in 1913 to its closure in 1969.  Until the 1960s its main market was British Rail but BR’s conversion to diesel and electric trains caused it to close.  The 1,550 miners were given work at the remaining three pits.
Dover Museum.  The End of Coal.

Due to the availability of cheap coal and the presence of The East Kent Light Railway the Hammill brick works opened in 1926 and brought further employment to the area.  When coal was no longer available it covered to gas but eventually closed in 2008.  Dover planning reports that work is currently taking place to build 19 houses and 26 industrial units on this site.  The two remaining brick buildings, the railway engine sheds, are to be preserved.  The only records of this enterprise are photographs; there do not appear to by any paintings of the works.

The Great Britain Department of Energy and Climate Change show that the deep mine industry shut as a result of Harold Wilson overseeing the closure of 290 pits and Margaret Thatcher overseeing the closer of another 160. 

  

What was painted and what was photographed was a repeat of the experience of what happened when the West was opened in the pioneering days of the USA.  Artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole,  and Andrew Pinkham Ryder painted with the freedom and imagination that their medium allows.  The photographer Timothy H Sullivan was employed by the companies who were opening up The West and recorded their work and progress.  He and other photographers like John Grabill, H. H. Bennett and Andrew J. Russell recorded impressions no less grand but more truthful.
Landscape and Power W.J.T.Mitchell (ed) Landscape and Power, Chicago.p191.  

Rosalind Krauss comments that Sullivan's work is essentially scientific and and that he made scientific views and not landscapes which, unlike the works of contemporary painters like Courbet and Monet, should not be considered art and be placed in galleries.
W.J.T.Mitchell. Landscape and Power. Chicago. p191. 

With the exception of cartographers and technical artists, who seek images as true as possible, painters and photographers will record scenes differently, in fact different artists can produce very different images of the same scene.   The landscape paintings of East Kent were produced for sale or profit and as seen here were not always true.  The photographs may lack the same aestheticism but focus more on accuracy and record.  

Conclusion.

The photographs of the area and its industry were taken for very different reasons and by very different people.  The owners of mines are not interested in the beauty of the image, they wanted only  to record the enterprise and its progress.  The workers at such places wished to record where and with whom they worked.  As soon as an industrial site closes, security lapses, decay takes over, and access can be more easily gained.   This is the time for the amateur photographer to move in and record what is left; to record for posterity what was.   Every day painters and photographers can be seen recording images of sunsets, the pier, the fishing boats and the wildlife but only photographers are recording the crumbling remnants of the mining industry.  

East Kent’s industrial interlude has left an industrial legacy with ex-mining communities with little work, a mix of renewable power generators at the site of the old Richborough Power Station, a two mile long heritage railway that is the only surviving part of the East Kent Light Railway, acres of polluted land, a closed port at Folkestone and an airport at Manston with an uncertain future. 

Bibliography.

Andrews, Malcolm. 1999.  Landscape and Western Art. Oxford University Press, p 177.

Catford, Nick. 2011. Subterranea Brittanica .co.uk.  Sites: Guilford Colliery. [Online] Available:
 www.subbrit.org.uk/site/557/guilford-colliery


Dover District Council planning application. [Online] Available:
http:// planning.dover.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=

summary&keyVal=DCAPR_219646


Dover Museum. The end of coal. [Online] Available: www.dovermuseum.co.uk/Exhibitions/Coal-Mining-in-Kent/History/Shakespeare-Colliery.aspx

Dover Museum. The failed collieries. [Online] Available: 
www.dovermuseum.co.uk/Exhibitions/Coal-Mining-in-Kent/History/The-Failed-Collieries.aspx

McNey, Michael. 2014.  Norman Cornish obituary 13.08.2014. The Guardian. [Online]. Available: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/04/norman-cornish

Mitchell. W.J.T. (ed) 2002 second edition Landscape and Power  Landscape and Power, Chicago. p. 191

Pomery, Victoria. 2012. Director of Turner Gallery, Margate.                         

Torrens, Hugh.  1995.  Presidential Address: Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme; 'the greatest fossilist the world knew. The British Journal for the History of Science. Cambridge University Press.vol28,pp. 257-284.


Great Britain Department of Energy and Climate Change.  Latest update 31/07/1914. [Online] Available: www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption-1853-to2011 

Word count. 2,973.

Additional.       205.

Total.              3,178.

A pfd copy of this essay can be found on a DVD included in my submission box.