Ford Madox Ford (he was born with the surname Hueffer, but due to the First World War, changed this to sound less German!) was born in 1873. He is largely remembered now for at least one novel, `The Good Soldier’, published in 1915. Grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, after who he was named, Ford himself was as much a supporter of figures like Joseph Conrad, and H G Wells, whom he was a neighbour of during his years living in the area of East Kent adjacent the Romney Marsh, as a writer in his own right. Like Wells, but unlike the more austere Conrad, Ford’s personal life was complex, with at least three long term partners, after the break-up of his marriage to Elise in the late 1900s.
Bonnington, a small village near Ashford, was the location of his first home after marriage in 1894 – Bloomfields – an `unappetising house with an air of “damp cold”’ according to Iain Finlayson in `Writers on Romney Marsh’ (Severn House, London, 1986, 100). Left £3000 by an uncle in 1897, Ford and his wife then rented Pent Farm. `In the ten years from 1894 to 1903 I was hardly in London,’ he wrote, `I had buried myself in the country, and for three or four years hardly saw anyone but fieldworkers’ (Ibid, 100-101). By September 1898, however they moved to a labourers cottage at Aldington, called Stocks Hill. Remarkably, their former residence was then rented out to Joseph Conrad (see entry for him) and served as his home during the period in which he wrote `The Heart of Darkness.’ This simple and unassuming farmhouse is therefore one of the most important literary places in Kent, despite being so secluded and only having a small plaque by its front door recognising Conrad’s period there.
In April 1901, the Fords then moved to Winchelsea, over the border in East Sussex. Ford maintained a link with Kent, however, as he continued to be the owner of Hurst Cottage in Aldington, a place he had bought in 1896. With the deterioration of his marriage, by 1905 he was living back with his mother in London – something precipitated by the fact that his wife had found out about his affair with her sister! He was to spend the rest of his life in France, the US, and in London. Over this period he established a reputation not just as a writer but as an editor, and critic. Like Jocelyn Brooke, he probably deserves to be better appreciated today than he is. He died just before the Second World War in 1939.
These restless years during the turn of the century were ones in which Ford established his reputation after producing a life of his famous grandfather. One of his earliest books directly relates to the geography he was living in: `The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record’, (William Blackwood and Sons, London and Edinburgh 1900). This is a curious mixture of history and travelogue, covering the coastal area from Hastings to Sandwich, but with asides ranging as far as Faversham, Reculver and the villages around Canterbury.
Like Wells, Conrad, and others, Ford was impressed by the remnants of Roman influence on the Kent landscape, particularly by the sea, and the areas where the early invasions by Caesar and Claudius two thousand years before were speculated to have occurred. Ford related to these ghostly presences on the landscape in an almost personal manner:
`They [the Romans] did a number of things – they fought, they loved, they sang, they reaped their harvest. One sees a few grass grown mounds, reads of marvellously made earthworks. To know more of them, one must remember how one felt when one oneself fought, loved, sang, reaped – built marvellously made sandworks on the sea-shore, wrote one’s name on water’ (`Cinque Ports’, 186)
It is a tremendous thing that a writer as good as Ford, at this stage in his life, had the time and inclination to give such a detailed account of this small, and at that time slightly forgotten, area. His description of the great Roman remnants at Richbourough just outside Sandwich typifies this – its walls standing `like a gigantic tooth-stump, up out of the broad cornfields’ (Ibid, 356). Ford is never mealy mouthed in the ways he approaches understanding of documented and physical evidence of history. St Eanswith, the seventh century saint whose tomb has only recently been re-examined in the main church in Folkestone, is described as a `rather less sympathetic lady.’ To the claims that a large bed in Sandgate had been the one in which Elizabeth the First had slept during her fleeting visit to the town in 1573, he notes that `history asserts that Elizabeth passed the night following her visit… at Dover. She may, however, as it asserted by a loyal upholder of the little town, have had an afternoon nap in its recesses’ (206-7).
For someone as energetic as Ford, it is unsurprising that he found the area too quiet for his liking. Hythe is `sleepy, so comfortable’ (213) with the `pervading charm of the town itself [being] that of sleep…. In the little grey, sheltered streets one at once falls into a blessed half doze’ (215). The countryside around Paddlesworth near Canterbury is `a forgotten country of forgotten peace’ where `all the villages of this part suggest the story of Rip van Winkle – they sleep for ever, each with its “little patch of sky and little lot of starts” forgotten, and content to be forgotten’ (237). While Dover gets accorded the somewhat more excited statement that its history `has been even more than a national one – it has been universal, has affected the history of races as of individual nations’ (242) and the area around Sibertswold near Canterbury validated with an intriguing `fascinating and rather mysterious’ (299), for Sandwich, regarded as Britain’s best preserved Medieval town, Ford labels it `the silent town among the sand-dunes’ (305). Here, he is deeply impressed by the way in which not just the sea water, but it seems the whole of history, has left this place behind, marooned temporally as well as geographically. Reculver, with the ancient Saxon remains with their later two towers atop them looking out to the Estuary has:
`the hardness of poverty, the pessimism of a place confronted for ever and ever with an inevitable fact, for ever confronted with, for ever recoiling from, a repulsive sea – a sea whose very foam is muddy, sordid’ (362).
What is striking, and impressive, about this very idiosyncratic book is the ways in which Ford balances historic overview, in which he demonstrates detailed knowledge of the archaeology and written history of the area, with equally granular understanding of its geography. Much of the former is now superseded. But one has to have deep respect for a writer who can turn up a prosecution record from 1530 of a Hythe resident, William Chaumberlyn, who, according to the document Ford quotes, `was a common hasedoure [gambler] …. Keeping a house suspected for men and women, sitting up late at night, and for keeping one ferret for hunting, against the statute.’ This is the sort of approach to history and place that shows a profound engagement and interest in the human.