Pilgrimage to Hartlake Bridge:
Troubled Waters
For the last six years, a folk-song has been bouncing round my brain, though not really tripping off my tongue. The song was taught to me in a pub by Sam Lee, and it’s about a disaster that happened at Hartlake Bridge in Kent.
On October 20th 1853, thirty-seven hop-pickers were crossing Hartlake bridge, heading back to their lodgings on the famer’s cart. But the River Medway was flooded, and while crossing Hartlake Bridge the horses got scared, and kicked out at the railings, which broke, and the cart toppled into the river Medway. Whole families were instantly lost. Witnesses could only poke at the eddying flood-waters with long poles, hoping to feel the thud of bodies. One man lost 14 members of his family, and a little girl lost her father, mother and infant brother. It was a notoriously bleak scene, and swiftly the national press dubbed this: “The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy”.
The Song
The song was written contemporaneously, in memory of the lost hoppers, and it tells the story best:
Now seven and thirty strangers, a-hopping they had been. They were employed by Mr Cox’s, that’s near old Golden Green. Twas in the parish of Hadlow, that’s near old Tonbridge town. You should have heard the screams of all those poor souls, as they were going down.
Now some were men and women, and others girls and boys. They kept in contract with the bridge, but the horses they took shy. They kept in contract with the bridge, but the horses they took fright. You still can hear the screams of all those poor souls, as they are going down.
Now some were men and women, and others girls and boys. They were employed by Mr Cox’s, that’s near old Golden Green. Twas in the Parish of Hadlow, that’s near old Tonbridge town. That’s where the laid all those poor souls, after they were drowned.
Hopping
For seven seasons I’ve picked hops near Faversham, every morning travelling to the fields on a rickety trailer pulled by a pre-war tractor. Things have not changed so much since 1853. The same East End families have worked on this farm for nearly a century, three generations in the hop-garden at any one time. So this song, about lost hop-pickers, grabbed me with the wolfish grip of a hop-bine (humulus lupus).
But it was not until the winter of 2014 that I realised Hartlake Bridge is only about 100 kilometres away from my home – a mere five days walk. In an instant, the song landed, thickened, and took new context. Its story transformed from vague legend into a very real tragedy, with accessible need for witness and memorial. At last, I began to really sing it.
A plan emerged, and I determined to make a pilgrimage to Hartlake Bridge, to carry this song back to its source. I was accompanied by a man called Guy, who had never walked for more than a day before, and had just left school after 25 years of education. He didn’t know how to zip up a sleeping bag or walk through long grass. But we got there...
Pilgrimage
Calling our walk ‘pilgrimage’ was immediately troublesome, as the word is obscure to modern ears, conjuring confused images of Chaucerian Pardoners, or heavy barefoot penance. But medieval English pilgrimage was a high holiday, full of song. And pilgrimage routes are ever being re-invented, from Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena discovering the ‘real’ Cross of Jesus (known as the ‘Invention’ of the Cross), to Becket’s cult of miracles at Canterbury, all the way on to Belloc’s twentieth century re-discovery of ‘The Pilgrims’ Way’. So why, we asked, can I not invent a pilgrimage route today?
I can, and did. From Elham in Kent, we roamed toward Hartlake bridge near Tonbridge. All I knew was the song and the route I had plotted. Guy and I had never sung together before. The nightly camp-fire was our school, and the blending of vox our harmonic goal. The rest we left to the whim of the journey.
Gypsy Singers
Hartlake Bridge borrows its melody from an older song. Its tune is incongruously jaunty at times, but if the mode feels alien to ideas of proper mournfulness, we must remember we are the outsiders to its musical background, as the song is Romany in origin. The majority of the hop-pickers were travellers, and their memory was kept alive for 161 years mostly within these close-knit musical communities.
Many folk songs of Britain follow similar patterns, surviving only through being cherished by Gypsy and Traveller communities. While we Gorgias (non-Travellers) forgot our ancestral songs in exchange for national hymnals and music-hall ditties, the Travellers kept singing the good old songs.
British national culture often underestimates the debt we owe to Romany people. Many words, songs and dreams have joined the mainstream from these often misunderstood traveller cultures. Words like ‘wonga’ means ‘money’ in Romany, ‘cooshti’ means good, ‘chav’ means children, and ‘gavva’ (gavengro) means policeman. Further debt is owed in dance and music, as in flamenco, Lizst and Django Rheinhart.
Hartlake Bridge, when compared to the whirling rhythms of Gypsy Jazz, seems like a relatively simple memorial song. But walking toward the under-bridge pilgrimage destination, I learned that its apparent simplicity conceals many unsaid truths.
A Bridge Too Far
In 1853, Hartlake Bridge was half-submerged by heavy flooding. In 2014, only two days before us, Prince Charles had visited Yalding village five miles from Hartlake to commiserate families and businesses who suffered flood damage in the recent inundations. This was a historic echo I had not previously realised, despite tramping through many a soaked field.
Another discovery made while researching along the way was that Hartlake Bridge was notoriously unsafe at the time of the disaster. The hop-pickers fate was no true accident. Yes, the horses kicked at the wooden railings, but they broke only because they were rotten. Local farmers knew the bridge was unsafe, and many deliberately avoided it. So who was to blame?
Responsibility lay squarely with the Medway Navigation Company, a profitable organisation established by Parliament in 1740 to oversee the transport of goods on the Medway river. Contemporary Kent and Sussex road-networks were notoriously under-developed, and waterways were the fastest and most reliable routes for commerce and trade.
But the Medway Navigation Company, though it improved the waterway for big business, had a reputation for neglecting the needs of the poor. Rather than building a tow-path for barges, which would enable them to be pulled by horses, the MNC was happy for this work to be done by people known as ‘Huffers’. Apparently, these boat draggers had to climb over hedges and ditches for twelve hour stretches, dragging forty ton barges laden with cargo. They worked in teams of three, and their payment was share of a single pound.
Bridge safety was the job of the MNC, but because they neglected their responsibilities at Hartlake Bridge, thirty-seven lives were lost. A public inquest was held at the Bell Inn of Golden Green, which doubled as table-top morgue for the corpses. Here, the Company was quickly absolved of all liability for the bridge’s unsafe condition, and the hoppers’ deaths were deemed ‘accidental’.
If this seems shocking in our litigious age, we must remember that Victorian itinerant workers were close to slave-labour, and there was no apparent shortage of members of this agricultural working class. It was inevitable that the Medway Navigation Company, formed by the Mayor of Tonbridge, wealthy with its coal monopoly, was never going to pay compensation to Gypsies - or contribute towards their memorial. That’s just how things went back then.
Money for the funeral was raised by public subscription, and a small memorial built in a shady corner behind Hadlow Church. This memorial is about 3 foot high, and ambitiously described as resembling an Oast house.
In rich contrast, barely fifty metres away stands the Hadlow tower, the tallest folly in the UK, which was recently restored as a holiday-home at a cost of some four million pounds. This tower was built, locals still whisper, so that the divorced landowner Walter May could see into his ex-wife’s bedroom window at Goldhill. His ostentatious tower, known as ‘May’s Folly’, was paid for by the highly speculative but extremely profitable business of growing hops.
The Medway Navigation Company folded in 1910, when the lock at East Farleigh collapsed and the river became impassable. Four years later, another bridge collapsed at Barming, when a tractor crashed through it. The MNC’s legacy of bridge-care is clear. But by then, railways were the kings of transport, and the rise of the motor-car with its metalled roadways was well underway.
Today, only white plastic leisure boats, like floating K-Swiss trainers, cruise the River Medway. The half-reclining young ladies aboard look vaguely ill-at-ease, as though at least partly aware how ridiculous it is to emulate Biarritz lifestyles in muddy old Kent. But that’s another story.
Springtime
Meanwhile, I set out on this pilgrimage innocent of such nebulous histories. My baggage was just the song and intention for its source as destination. I ambled through a Kentish Spring rich in beauty and delight, grazing on young hawthorn leaves, gorse flowers, wild garlic, nettles and ground Elder. Water was filtered from ancient springs and streams. I cut a hazel walking staff as journey prop to keep my back upright, to propel me uphill, and to gauge the depth of slow-draining floodwaters.
Guy, my guest on this journey, learned everything tremendously quickly, and I could measure the days by the increased brightness of his eyes. So swift was the transmission of information, that by the end I wondered how I had taken so long to learn it in the first place...
The Kentish footpaths were easy-going by almost any standard. The greatest trial was winter-soft feet wanting to blister, which I prevented by stuffing my socks with young dock and greater plantain leaves. Sadly for Guy, his newly bought boots were half a size too small, so his feet began to bubble in the first mile.
It hardly rained, so sleep was directly under the sky, beneath beautiful oak trees and hazel groves. Tarpaulins were rarely needed. The pleasure of watching moonrise, of hearing skylarks accompany our plodding footsteps, and of calls of nature being cleansed by soft moss from forest floors, cannot be told in words. Walking remains the best way to travel.
But this pilgrimage’s main aim was commemoration, and so I told the tale of Hartlake Bridge to everyone met. I was surprised how few people had heard of it, but I hoped to leave a wash of historical awareness in the journey’s wake. We sang the song to over twenty groups over five days, and in exchange, we learned a lullaby from an ex-Methodist minister in Wye and Medway shanties from a bargeman in Maidstone.
The journey support network revolved around the good old church and pub combo, where electricity, water, rest, culture and friendship can easily be found. My favourite church was Ulcombe, whose Yew tree predates Jesus, and whose parishioners are especially friendly. At a church-warden’s house, we met the chairperson of the Kent Churches Trust, and scored a dip in an icy swimming pool. We met Justin Bieber/Morrissey lookalikes, a Burmese cat breeder and honey-seller, a cider-slumped man in a riverside tent, a bearded tramp who tried to give us money, a pretty young railway crossing attendant, and various other interesting folk. We even met Barry from Eastenders walking beside the Medway, who from a distance appeared to be the most dangerous character of our journey. Even Holly dog got spooked and growly, but he turned into a friendly fellow, and told us had made a documentary on Kent’s last traditional working hop-farm, at Rolveden, but the BBC shelved it. It felt right to sing him the Hartlake Bridge song, though we were sketchy with lyrics, and his pledge to get us on the evening news never came through.
Almost everyone met responded incredibly strongly to our arrival, as though the mantle of pilgrim, by its rarity, has become enhanced even beyond its traditionally strong valuation. I suppose very few people have the time/space/inclination in their busy lives to go slowly through Britain. Everyone was movingly grateful that we had time to chat, tell stories, and sing.
Fascinating meetings were strong and frequent, but Kent rarely felt crowded. Far from it, the intensity of urban conurbations and roadways betray the emptiness of the surrounding countryside. Moving through such places, between the roads, is like rediscovering an un-mapped England. On foot, the world expands. Ancient rhythms reconnect us to the essential wideness and mystery of the world, and we become immersed in the wonder of the world that our ancestors knew intimately. At the speed of man or slower, we were often lost, but always with good results. Our great rivers to ford were the M20 and the train-line, which haunted our sleep until we finally stepped south of these rushing steely torrents. At one point I was nearly run over by a huge Scania lorry transporting Bernard Matthews turkey produce, which is no way to go. But in the countryside, a few steps from the road, the hectic modern dream of instant travel became quickly spectral and pointless.
En route, the vision of a greater flow of foot-bound travellers along these ancient pathways grew ever stronger. Where were our wandering companions? One man we met was preparing to walk Camino to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and I advised him on water filters and roll-mats. But why, I wondered, is pilgrimage in England so stagnant? What is needed to fill our footpaths with earnest wanderers? On this, there is much to be said and done...
Culmination
Even with slowness, miles soon disappear, and our destination approached.
In Hadlow churchyard, the vicar pointed us to the memorial for the Hartlake hop-pickers. Our timing and purpose was perfectly confirmed:
A lady stood with her husband beside the hop-pickers’ memorial. She explained that she is a direct descendent of the Taylor family, who lost three in the tragedy. The Taylors came from Acton, at a place called Gypsy Corner. This lady spoke of her own days hop-picking as a child, when her mother stopped calling herself ‘Gypsy’ in exchange for the moniker ‘Traveller’, because a wall of distrust greeted the yearly migration of hop-pickers. Shops bound their window-goods behind mesh-wire to prevent theft, and pubs bore the sign “No Hawkers or Hikers welcome”. Her mum used their hop-picking money to pay for Christmas every year.
She recalls how in her youth flooding had threatened the family again:
“We were on the roof of the hopping-huts, and the water was above the bus-stops. But the army came and rescued us with amphibious vehicles. I remember thinking how my relatives got drowned at Hartlake, but we got saved.”
Meeting this lady and her husband was an intense moment for me, because they had never heard the Hartlake Song before. I had believed the bridge was our goal, but singing to this pair felt like truly returning the song home to its bloodline.
Six years previous, this couple had tried to look for the hoppers’ memorial, but failed to find it. From here, their route onward was identical to ours - to the Bell Inn, and then to Hartlake Bridge. I realised I am far from the inventor of this pilgrimage path, and instead just another listener to its prompts.
We walked to Golden Green algow with this meeting’s synchronicity. But on the quiet lane, we were suddenly forced to jump into the verge, as an MG sports car roared up behind us. It then skidded in the dust, nearly losing control, before powering round the corner. We stood in shock, as around the bend slowly squeaking toward us came the scared face of a young boy on his tiny bicycle, wearing a high-visibility vest and tuff-top helmet. His father rode close behind him, with an even smaller child cramped in a trailer. The father’s face was white with impotent fury at the danger with which his children had just been needlessly threatened. As they passed us, the enormity of the Hartlake tragedy suddenly and truly hit home, with its dreadful and meaningless loss of life.
Walking more solemnly to Golden Green, we sang the song outside the Bell Inn, and moved on.
A man weeding the verge on the final stretch of road to Hartlake Bridge offered one final titbit of gossip:
“The new Hartlake bridge was rebuilt 6 years ago, but no-one knows where the money came from. They spent 6 months constructing it, and when they had finished, the council removed the 7.5 tonne limit. Locals reckon it was funded by the local quarry, who want to use the road for huge lorry-loads of stone.”
Even today, Hartlake Bridge remains a source of controversy.
Sticky End
Finally reaching the bridge, we walk beneath it to the flowing Medway. A plan emerged in my mind to cast my hazel walking staff into the waters, as gift to placate the hungry river.
The bridge was cold and eerie, even on a sunny day. Strange graffiti decked the walls, and an ugly placard on a concrete bollard described the tragedy in empty words.
An oddly vacant lady suddenly appeared from the bushes with her tiny dog. We sang her the Hartlake song, but halfway through her dog began eating other dogs’ poo through its muzzle, an astonishingly horrible sight.
The same lady returned soon after, asking where she had met us before? I kick dust over the remnants of the dog poo, so the terrier can snack no more. The little dog wanders growlingly over to Guy, and the lady presses him intensely to “Go on, just give him a stroke.” But Guy resists, and the lady disappears again. I start to imagine this was a spirit of River Medway, but cannot work out if Guy passed its test or failed?
We try to make a recording here, putting my phone on a mini tripod. But it isn’t very good, so we try again, and again. By now, our motivation is entirely self-image. Added to this, I have somehow persuaded myself to keep my walking stick after all.
I soon learn better. Setting up the tripod for another go at our vanity recording, a leg pings from it, somehow sheared clean off. I stare amazed at such a symbol, and at that very instant, Guy bangs his head on a steel girder, although he was stood still and knew exactly where it was.
I know when it’s time to go.
Stepping out from the bridge’s shadow into the sunshine, I cast my walking staff into the slow waters. River Medway claims the body, and we climb back to the bridge to cross it safely.
Blue Window
The final miles of this journey are walked to the destination those hop-pickers never reached, the village of Tudeley. In 1967 here, Marc Chagall created some of South England’s finest stained glass windows.
The main East window depicts a scene of drowning, a body cast adrift in blue waters, with a lamenting figure in the corner. I learn that these epic windows were commissioned in memory of yet another victim of drowning. Under this image of wet death and resurrection, we sing the song of Hartlake Bridge one final time, and so complete our pilgrimage.
In memory of the hop-pickers of Hartlake Bridge.
