600. Chatham High Street

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0:40So, Tom, we have some incredibly exciting news for our listeners in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, don't we? We absolutely do, Dominic, because we are going to be in Belfast, in Dublin and in Cork next year in April. And we will be talking about the tragic story of Titanic. We will be on stage in Belfast at the Waterfront Hall on Friday, the 17th of April. We'll be in Dublin at the Convention Centre on Saturday the 18th of April and in Cork at the Opera House on Monday the 20th of April. Tickets will go on sale at the RestIsHistory.com exclusively for members of the Rest Is History Club from next Monday the 22nd of September 2025 at 9am.

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2:11Rochester and Chatham are two distinct places, but contiguous, except the interval of a very small marsh or vacancy between Rochester and Chatham. There is little remarkable in Rochester, except the ruins of a very old castle and an ancient, but not extraordinary, cathedral, but the river and its appendices are the most considerable of the kind in the world, this being the chief arsenal of the Royal Navy of Great Britain. The buildings here are indeed like the ships themselves, surprisingly large, and in their several kinds they're beautiful. The warehouses, or rather streets are warehouses and storehouses for laying up the naval treasure, are the largest in dimension and the most in number that are anywhere to be seen in the world.

3:05The rope walk for making cables and the forges for anchors and other ironwork bear a proportion to the rest, as also the wet dock for keeping masts and yards of the greatest size, where they lie sunk in the water to preserve them. The boat yard, the anchor yard, all like the whole, monstrously great and extensive, but they're not easily described. So that, Tom, was Daniel Defoe, who was a Londoner in the first volume of his tour through the whole island of Great Britain, published in 1724. It was a massive success, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe. It was by far his best-selling book, but never before has it been read out on the top of rochester castle on a gray and slightly dreary day in howling wind uh to an audience of bored looking camera people so very exciting scenes yeah because this is the long awaited episode on chatham high street but not just chatham high street intra chatham which is the stretch that leads us on to rochester high street and we are on the 100 foot summit of the keep of Rochester Castle.

4:23So Daniel Defoe, just for people who don't know, Defoe was, he wasn't just Britain's first novelist. He was Britain's, one of Britain's greatest journalists, wasn't he? And he did this tour of the whole island of Great Britain. And he published it just a couple of decades after the Act of Union had created a united kingdom out of England and Scotland. So this is a moment in British history like no other. It's a point in which Britain is poised on the brink of absolutely enormous political, economic, diplomatic change. Absolutely. And Defoe essentially loved change. He loved the idea of progress.

5:03Progress is very Whiggish, isn't it? And although Defoe ended up working essentially as a kind of spy for a Tory government, I think in his instincts, he was all about the Whigs. So as a young man, he had fought for the Duke of Monmouth against his uncle, the Catholic King James II. And Monmouth's rebellion had gone disastrously badly, but Defoe had managed to avoid being hanged, which is good news for fans of Robertson Crusoe and 18th century travelogues around Britain. He'd loved the Glorious Revolution when James II got kicked out and replaced by the Protestant William and Mary. And he'd been a big enthusiast for the acts of union between England and Scotland and had actively worked to promote them, actually.

5:47And as you can probably tell from that accent, which is exactly how he spoke, his origins were in trade. He's a mercantile man, isn't he? So he'd worked as a wine merchant. So that perhaps explains one, that's one reason why he's so keen on the Royal Navy. The idea of commerce, of Britannia ruling the waves. And of course, he loves a naval dockyard. He absolutely does. And just to say as well that, you know, he had sailed the sea. He'd been a wine merchant. Dominic, you love a Portuguese wine depot in the 18th century, don't you? And Defoe was kind of always hanging out there. And so it's not surprising, really, that when he comes to Rochester, which he describes as having a castle and cathedral, he looks at it as being rather boring and old.

6:31And Chatham, which is where the royal dockyards are, he is all over that. He thinks it's incredible. He thinks it's absolutely wonderful. and I think that that's why that passage describing Rochester and Chatham is absolutely brilliant for pinpointing this idea of Britain as being on the kind of cusp of incredible change. Yeah so there's a world of kind of warehouses and dockyards and battleships and global trade and free trade and all that kind of stuff and this is the sort of this is the the central axis This is the hub of that world, isn't it? Rochester and Chatham, these kind of twin towns across the Medway.

7:10So, Tom, give us a little bit of a tour d 'horizon. So, the reason that we're here is obviously because I've bullied you into doing it. You've put up a heroic three-year rearguard action. But at last, we're here in Rochester, in Chatham. Do you know what, ladies and gentlemen? When I look at Tom's notes, and now that I'm here on site, I could not be more excited. I'm absolutely a dog with excitement because there are so many delights to come in this episode. There's Dickens, there's naval stuff. There might be a mention of Horatio Nelson. There's people wrestling on the floor of a chapel or something.

7:42It is probably the most exciting, the most action-packed, the most blood-soaked, and in many ways, the most moving episode that we've ever done on The Rest is History. The reason that I wanted to do it is that I've been walking the Saxonshore Way, which is a kind of national route that follows the coastline of Kent, which for those people not familiar with the geography of England is the bit in the southeast that sticks out into the sea um and I realized coming here that Rochester High Street becomes Chatham High Street and I felt that the the way in which you go from kind of um well we've got an Iron Age hill fort we've got a Roman bridge we've got an Anglo-Saxon cathedral we've got a Norman castle and yet you end up with Chatham docks this kind of great nerve center of British imperial expansion.

8:28I am making the pitch that this is the most historic street in England. Surely the world, Tom. No? Well, I think in Britain you could make a case for the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, which has Holyrood and Edinburgh Castle and the grave of Adam Smith and all kinds of things like that. But if you want a sense of the sweep and span and process of change that manifests itself through English history, Rochester High Street, chatham high street if you think of it as a single road i mean is is absolutely fantastic uh and you as defoe says rochester is all about the kind of traditional england of tourist brochures yeah chatham is about energy and industry and transformation and you could say i think that in the 18th and 19th centuries it's a kind of cross between the pentagon and silicon valley and chatham right now i mean it's it's retains that reputation hasn't it tom as a glittering cosmopolitan um on the front line of technological and social change no i fear not so that the chatham dockyards shut in um 1984 and i think it would be fair to say that um if you're an enthusiast for vape shops or possibly to two parlors uh chatham high street now is very much the place to go i actually love both of those things so it's great it's probably not at the cutting edge of naval technology now in the way that it used to be.

9:55So I think it's fair to say that Chatham has seen happier days. And in that, again, of course, it's an exemplar of British history because obviously Britain is not the great power that it was in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so if Chatham exemplifies the rise to global greatness of Britain, there's also a sense in which its current state tells you about Britain's relative decline. But before we do some history, why don't we have a little excursion into geography? We don't do enough geography on the rest of this history, and Theo in particular is a passionate aficionado of geography. So, Tom, talk to Theo and indeed the listeners about geography.

10:33Yeah, well, geography, of course, is so important to the study of history because so often geography is historical destiny. And that is definitely the case with Rochester and Chatham. So just to set the geographical scene for people who may not be au fait with North Kent. So we are just south of the Thames Estuary, the stretch of water that extends from London outwards into the North Sea. So we've got Essex to the north and we are in Kent on the south coast of the Thames Estuary. And we are standing beside the Medway, which is a river that rises in Kent and flows northwards out into the Thames Estuary.

11:18And Rochester and Chatham both stand on the Medway and would not have come into existence without the Medway. So to talk about Rochester first, why is Rochester where it is? basically because it is the lowest bridging point on the river Medway. So essentially, if you want to get across the Medway, Rochester is the place to come. And in that, its relationship to the Medway is equivalent to London's relationship to the Thames. And as with London, it's the Romans who build London Bridge. So here, it's the Romans who build the first bridge over the Medway. But even before the Romans come, there is a trackway here that leads from Dover, the southeastern tip of Kent, up towards the River Thames.

12:08And this is the fording point. So kind of very much kind of Iron Age highway. And this is the highway that in due course will come to be called Watling Street, one of the great roads of England. And so where is that, Tom? Is that right here? Yeah. So that bridge that you can see there, if you're watching this on YouTube, and essentially Chatham High Street, Rochester High Street, it's all part of Watling Street. So essentially, when the Romans under Julius Caesar land here in 55 and then 54 BC, in 54 BC, Caesar advances towards the Thames, he would almost certainly have come this way. And again, we can be pretty confident that in AD 43, when Claudius sends three legions here under Aulus Plautius, again, they would have come here.

12:52And in fact, we know that there is a great two-day battle on the Medway, perhaps here more likely a little bit further south. And Vespasian, who will go on to become the emperor, he crosses the river with his Batavian cavalry, who have this extraordinary ability to swim in full armour. So very exciting scene. It's unbelievably exciting. and I cannot describe. It's such a shame that the listeners and even the people watching on YouTube can't actually be here because the air is electric with excitement, isn't it? To be here in this spot where it actually happened. Unbelievable history. Well, can I just crank up the excitement by revealing the name that the Romans give to the town that they built here?

13:29It's Dura Brevi, which means almost certainly stronghold by the bridge. I mean, couldn't be more exciting. And both Watling Street and this bridge built by the Romans survive the Roman occupation, don't they? Basically because they're just so well located. So if you're going to Dover, if you are coming from Dover, if you're going to London, you're going to go this way. Yes. So it's absolutely the, it's essentially, it's the great road that links London and everything that lies beyond London to Dover and therefore to the continent. But enough of Rochester. There's been a lot of Rochester so far.

14:04Where's Chatham? Talk The view of Chatham is on the other side of the keep where we're standing now. I'm looking at it now. It's gorgeous. It's absolutely stunning. I think, Dominic, we should get Harry to move the cameras and go over on the other side of the keep. Do.

14:23So as you can see, if you are watching on Spotify or on YouTube, we have now moved to the other side of the castle. And the sense of drama, tension and jeopardy is becoming more acute with every moment for two reasons. Number one, the wind has now reached gale force levels. And secondly, the staff of the castle are having to fight off a huge throng downstairs. Two different groups. One, a group of Rest is History club members who've just signed up at therestishistory.com and have heard that Tom Holland is here. They're very excited. And the other, a group of schoolchildren whom Tom has forbidden from coming to the top of the castle, ruining their outing, their day, and quite possibly their love of history forever.

15:03But Tom, tell us, tell everybody watching on Spotify and YouTube why you have barred these children from coming to the top of the castle so that you can talk about Chatham. Well, I'll try to do it over the sound of the sobbing of distraught 12-year-old history fans. But it's important for us to be on the summit of this 100-foot Norman Keep because we've come to the other side and now you can see the sweep of the Medway. And we talked about how the Medway is key to Rochester. It's also the key to Chatham. So Chatham is closer to the sea than Rochester, which means that it is much more convenient should you be sailing an enormous Tudor ship, which is what starts to happen in the 16th century.

15:51because England is expanding its global interests, trade, piracy, ultimately conquest. And the Elizabethan court starts to realise that it's ideally situated between London and the kind of the shipping lanes that lead to the world. So in 1568, Elizabeth I formally institutes Chatham as a royal dockyard. And from that point on, it plays a fundamental role in the growth of the Royal Navy and the emergence of first English and then British engagement with the broader world, which, of course, ultimately will result in the establishment of the British Empire. And obviously that is a process that takes centuries.

16:41And the emergence of Chatham as what it becomes in the 18th and into the 19th century, to the most futuristic place on the face of the planet, is a huge, huge long-term government-sponsored plan, of the kind perhaps you might say that the British state has slightly forgotten how to engage in. But born as much of failure as success, right? because where we are now, the Medway, is the location for one of the most disgraceful, perfidious, ultimately insignificant moments in world history, isn't it? Which is the Dutch raid on the Medway. They're bad people and they really let themselves down. So that's in June 1667 and it's part of a series of wars that England and the Dutch Republic are waiting against each other.

17:26This is the second bout of war under the reign of Charles II who's just come back after his exile in the Netherlands And we'll be hearing more about that in due course. And the Dutch and Charles II aren't getting on well at all in the 1660s. And as we say, in 1667, the Dutch sail up the Medway and they find that the defences in place to protect the dockyards and all the ships that are at anchor there just aren't up to scratch. and they burn or capture 13 English ships and Dominic in a shocking display of thieving. They haul away HMS Royal Charles, which is the flagship of the English Navy and disgracefully, it's still on display in the Rijksmuseum to this day.

18:13Do you want to know what Daniel Defoe said? Yeah. Tell me what he said. I know you like a bit Daniel Defoe. He had pungent views about this. He said, This alarm gave England such a sense of the consequence of the River Madway and of all the docks and yards. from Birmingham, Dominic. This alarm, he changed his voice because he tore the country. Yeah, he picked up. He tore the country. It picked up different accents. He said, this alarm gave England such a sense of the consequence of the River Medway and of all the docks and yards at Chatham and of the danger of the Royal Navy I exposed to there that all these doors which were open then are locked up and sufficiently barred since that time and tis not now in the power of any nation under heaven nation, I don't know what happened there though they should be masters at sea unless they were masters at land too at the same time to give us such another affront i don't actually know what that last bit means because i was just so distracted by the accent what does he mean what he means is that um the raid on the medway was such a shock to the british state that absolutely impregnable defenses were put in place all the way along the line of the redway up to chatham um and particularly at the mouth of the estuary going into the medway and essentially he's saying that even if um naval supremacy were to pass from britain people still wouldn't be able to force their way in.

19:26And the only conceivable way in which Chatham could be destroyed would be if there was a land invasion. And Defoe is right, because Chatham stands impregnable throughout the Seven Years' War, throughout the Napoleonic Wars. And we talked in our episodes on Nelson about how Napoleon's plan for England, if he could only get his troops across, was to march straight on Chatham and destroy it. I mean, it would be the equivalent of knocking out, I don't know, a kind of nuclear defence system or something like that today. and it survives the First World War, it survives the Second World War and throughout those conflicts and also throughout the long decades of peace in the 19th century, Chatham, I guess, is both the symbol and the fulcrum of Britain's role as a great global power.

20:14So before that, Tom, just quickly because the school children are fighting their way up the stairs, Britain was, of course, herself part of a great empire and it was a kind of node in the imperial network of the Roman Empire. And actually, we've been looking down at Watling Street and the Great Bridge, haven't we? Just say a little bit more about that bridge because you love that bridge. Yeah, so as you said, the first bridge over the Medway, probably a pontoon bridge and then the Romans develop it with great stone piers and kind of wooden planks across it. And that bridge endures well after the collapse of Roman power.

20:45And it's there probably up until 8th or 9th centuries when it gets rebuilt again. and the reason that it's so important as we said it's the quickest way to get from from Dover which is the shortest crossing point from the continent up to London and so it's not surprising that in the wake of the Roman withdrawal Rome makes contact again with what's become Anglo-Saxon England not with military means but with spiritual means when at the end of the 6th century, St. Augustine arrives with a band of monks to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons. And his original plan is to get to London and establish an archbishopric there, but they don't because London is kind of hostile territory.

21:29So famously, they stop in Canterbury, and that's why the head of the Church of England is in Canterbury to this day. And that is where the first cathedral in Anglo-Saxon England is built. But the second Anglo-Saxon cathedral, which is founded in 604, is down there from where we are standing. And it's founded in Rochester by a guy called Justice, who, like Augustine, is from Rome. And it's incredibly old. I mean, Defoe says it's not very interesting. But it is interesting in the sense that this takes us right the way back to the earliest days of the Roman church in England, back to the age of Gregory the Great.

22:19And I find it very moving. You love it. It's got a sense of a living link. Yeah, you love that, don't you? I do. It was given to Odo by William the Conqueror, no? Yeah. So Anglo-Saxon England comes to an end with the Norman Conquest And in our episode on that, we talked about how William from Hastings goes to Dover and captures it and then goes to London. And he comes via Rochester. So he sees that it's an absolutely kind of crucial place to seize. And so his half brother, Odo, who is a bishop, but very fond of fighting. So famously, you know, as a bishop, you're not allowed to shed blood. So he kills people with a club or a mace.

22:57and William gives Rochester as a bishopric to Odo but Odo is um he's a very bad man he he um is very treacherous and he gets chucked out and so William gives it to this remarkable man who is called he's not Gandalf it's Gundolf but quite similar and he has a slightly you know Gandalf-esque role in in William's career because he's a man who who achieves extraordinary things He's very, very smart, very proficient at creating things. So he's a great architect. He's a great engineer. And it's Gandalf who builds the White Tower in London, which becomes the kind of the basis for the Tower of London.

23:42And in 1083, he starts work here in Rochester on renewing the Anglo-Saxon Cathedral that had basically kind of fallen to pieces. It was very decrepit. Not much of what he actually built survives, except for a place called Gundolf's Tower which annoyingly we can't actually see from here but anyway I mean people are interested in Gundelf you can still see his tower so this is great podcasting it really is and it gets remodeled throughout the throughout the Middle Ages it has a particularly bad time in the 13th century when King John England's worst king loots it and then Simon de Montfort the self-styled father of the English Parliament he loots it as well and I think there's always a sense that it's It's a little bit shabby.

24:26That's how Pepys described it in the 16th century. We heard Defoe saying it was ancient, but not extraordinary. And again, I mean, I think that's kind of fair. But pick out some highlights. So there's a nice crypt. There's a crypt. So that was built by Gandalf. So Gandalf fans can see that as well as his tower. You're excited about the Great West Door, aren't you? Very excited. It's got Christ and it's got Justice and someone else. King Ethelbert, who welcomed Augustine and his missionaries to Kent. And there's another lovely ceiling with some green men. You love a green man. But most of all, the thing you were telling me, which I found actually quite moving, you said something that had brought you closer to the dimension of the supernatural than ever before was you went in 2019.

25:09You played mini golf in the center of the cathedral. In 2019, following in the footsteps of St. Justice and Bishop Gundolf, the Cathedral Authority set up a mini golf course in the nave of the cathedral. Can I tell people what you... So Tom texted me after he played golf in the cathedral. He said, Dominic, while playing adventure golf, I really felt that I reflected on the bridges that need to be built in our own lives and in the world today. And Dominic, do you know what's amazing about that reflection that I had? Yeah. Is that a few days later, the Diocese of Rochester put out a message saying that we hope that while playing adventure golf, visitors will reflect on the bridges that need to be built in their own lives and in our world today so once again yet again the diocese of rochester has been hacking our texts unbelievable so on that bombshell tom let's just move on very quickly to talk about rochester castle before we descend and allow the school children up here tell me about the history of rochester castle so this is what norman originally yeah so um defoe in that bit you read i mean he's very rude about the cathedral perhaps not unfairly but he said that the the castle was just a ruin which i mean we're standing up here and you can see it's clearly not a ruin um it we've got a a sign there saying it's unsafe for humans 100 foot drop beneath generally this i mean this is very very impressive structure um and it's not surprising because where you have um a very important river crossing you want to have a very strong defensive system so that you can keep control of it and so it's not surprising that as you say yes it is william who builds the first castle here because that's what the normans are doing.

26:51And again, he gives that, you know, he's given the cathedral to Odo. He also tells Odo to build a castle, which Odo does. It's made of wood. But when Odo gets chucked out for behaving badly and treacherously towards his half-brother, he hands the responsibility for the castle over to Bishop Gandalf. And we've said how Gandalf is a tremendous architect, a tremendous engineer. he gets to work building a castle out of stone masonry probably one of the first stone castles to be built by the normans after the conquest um and it's because of that i was just reading up in the bodleian before we came up here that gundolf apparently is recognized by the core of royal engineering as the man who established them so they kind of trace a line of continuity all the way back to through the middle ages back to gundolf um and that i guess in part is is due to the the reputation of of the tower of london but also due to this because although the keep where we're standing now was built in the 12th century the walls are gundolfs and this keep is i mean is amazing when you come into rochester on the train you can see it kind of looming up i think it's the the tallest keep in england one of the tallest keeps in the whole of of um of europe and again it was built by not just a bishop but by an archbishop so um rochester got given to the archbishop rick of canterbury in the 12th century we've had it in the show before it's been in the rest is history it has so it it um it featured in our episode on the on the peasants revolt misnamed but you know this great rebellion of of of people in um in essex but also in kent and when the um the rebels want to march on london they have to seize the castle first because it's the great key to the road that leads to london and they manage to storm the castle and they capture the castellan the guy in charge of it and they take him hostage and when they get to london and they want to negotiate with richard the second and his government the castellan of rochester Cathedral is the guy that they use to communicate between the rebels and the royal authorities.

29:03And basically, through Rochester Castle's history, loads of big names have been here, haven't they? So King John of France, when he was captured by the Black Prince, he was brought through Rochester, made a donation to the cathedral. Yes. That's nice. Henry V, after returning in triumph from Agincourt, he crosses to Calais, rides the great road up to London and passes through Rochester. And he is not the last king to make a memorable procession through Rochester because there is another one who has left a real mark on the city. We can't see that mark that he left from up here. So I think we should wind our way down the stairs, past the sobbing schoolchildren and allow them to come up here to the top and we will go down and go to this site which commemorates the arrival in rochester in 1660 of charles ii

30:04tom restoration house rochester that's where we are right now an absolutely gorgeous example of um 17th century architecture uh we've just been shown around by the um owner jonathan wilmot amazing artworks, furniture and whatnot that you can see if you're watching on Spotify or on YouTube. But why are we here? Well, as you say, an amazing 17th century house, origins going back to late 15th century, 16th century, all kind of patched together. So Pevsner rather rudely described it as being all highly peculiar and undisciplined. But I think it's unbelievably atmospheric, very different vibe to being on top of a Norman castle.

30:45But we are here because the most famous person who stayed here was Charles II, who had been in exile throughout the Restoration. Cromwell dies. People don't know what to do. So they say, well, let's try and bring Charles II back. So he lands in Dover. He's been staying in the Dutch Republic. Now he's back in English soil and he's processing towards London. And he spends the night of 28th of May, 1660 here. And the next morning he gets up, it's his birthday, and he goes off into London. And so hence the name, Restoration House. But there's a brilliant literary connection, isn't there? And a connection with one of Rochester's, one of this area's favourite sons.

31:24Because am I not right in saying that Charles Dickens used this house, where we're sitting right now, as the inspiration for Satis House, which is, of course, Miss Havisham's house in his novel, Great Expectations? I think for the purposes of this podcast, we can say 100 % this was the inspiration. It is said that. No, no. Dickens was seen leaning on a kind of looking in at it while writing Great Expectations. I think we can say 100%. And actually, for those who are looking on YouTube or Spotify, if you imagine this setting covered in cobwebs and a mouldering wedding cake in the background, I think you can absolutely imagine Miss Havisham jilted at the altar in her decade wedding dress, kind of gliding around like a ghoul.

32:09poor Pip you know the little blacksmith's boy feeling very coarse and sorry for himself well Great Expectations is very close to my heart Tom because I won the school public speaking and reading competition four years in a row with the opening of Great Expectations four years in a row four years in a row the same reading god joyless were you allowed to do that not really it was considered against the spirit but not the letter of the law that really does seem like cheating and by about the third or fourth time the head of English said you're really ruining this for everybody else with this reading that is unbeatable because it's such a brilliant reading.