Rambling Rose: Tourist in My Own Town Blog
Painted Propaganda & Naughty Seamen - Tales from the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
One of the amazing things about London is that you can live with undiscovered treasures under your nose, until someone gives you a tip off….or digs up your backyard. Especially if your backyard was formerly a Palace.
Tudor treasures have been re-emerging from the river and the earth at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. In 2009, some mysterious stumps of water-worn wood turned out to be remnants of the dockyard of Greenwich Palace, birthplace of Henry VIII and his daughters - Queens Mary I and Elizabeth I. When the Pepys Building, originally built in 1874 as a sports centre for naval officers, was transformed into Visitors Centre in 2017, two underground rooms were identified as cellars of the Friary where Henry wed the first of seven unlucky wives, Catherine of Aragon. It’s possible to peer down at the ‘bee holes’ made to store the Friary’s hives during winter hibernation.
So, after a good friend received a tip-off about the spectacle of The Painted Hall, we find ourselves standing on the multi-layered historical ground of Old Royal Naval College on a hot September afternoon. Intrigued by the stories uncovered by our tour guides, I dug a bit further into this complex excavation of tangled royal dynasties, religious rivalries, nationalistic naval pomp and naughty seamen.
View of the Old Royal Naval College from Greenwich Park in May 2023
The first mention of Gronewic / Greenwich pops up in an Anglo-Saxon Charter in 918. Bronze Age barrows, Roman coins and centuries of royal hoof-prints have been ploughed into the soil of Greenwich Park. The grounds served as a juicy gift to keep royal family members sweet. On receiving 200 acres to ‘empark’ in 1433, Humphrey of Gloucester, Henry V’s brother and Henry VI’s regent, embarked on building a riverside Palace and Greenwich Castle aka Duke Humphrey’s Tower, now Greenwich Observatory. He enclosed his park in the wall which still lines the Roman road across Blackheath.
Thanks to a giant hike in taxes, Henry VII gave the Palace of Placentia a makeover in 1498. His son, Henry VIII would blow some of his parsimonious Dad’s inheritance fund on blinging up the Palace to the size and scale of Hampton Court, hosting jousting ceremonies where knights embarked on the Tudor equivalent of speed dating, rescuing damsels play-acting distress. His son Edward died there and it was a favourite haunt of Queen Mary I. After her father founded the first Royal Navy and built dockyards upriver in Deptford and Woolwich, Elizabeth I strategised the Spanish Armada campaign from the Palace’s riverside vantage point in 1588.
Looking across the monumental courtyards towards the Queen’s House at the foot of Greenwich Park, we hear how James I, unifier of England and Scotland, and great-nephew of Henry VIII, resolved a spat with his wife Anne of Denmark, whom he’d offended by throwing a public wobbly when she mistakenly shot one of his hunting hounds, by offering her Greenwich Park and commissioning Inigo Jones to build the Queen’s House. Lively Anne with her fine European-style court and patronage of the arts was not well matched to her dour Scots husband with his roving eye. They lived increasingly separate lives and her death in 1619 derailed the building project. Inigo later completed it for her son Charles I’s wife Queen Henrietta.
Father Time rules long beyond the rulership of Kings. During the Civil War (1642-51), monarchs went out of fashion, Charles I lost his head and the Tudor Palace descended into disrepair, serving as a biscuit factory and a prison of war camp. Charles II decided to pull the whole thing down and build himself a fashionable Versailles-style pad, but ran out of cash and enthusiasm after one wing. Grandma Henrietta, emerging from Civil War exile, did however finally get to enjoy living at the Queen’s ‘House of Delight.’
It's all a matter of perspective in Wren's architecture
View of the Grand Square and the faceless statue of George II
Charles II’s brother James II had a brief go at restoring Catholicism - or at least tolerance of it - and reestablishing the divine right of monarchs, but Parliament were having none of it and arranged a coup that ensured the throne passed to his Protestant daughter Mary and her hubby, his Dutch nephew William of Orange. James II fled to France and unsuccessfully attempted to reinstate his leadership with the support of the Irish and the Jacobites, ending his days in exile. The couple were crowned William III and Mary II in 1689 and it was decreed that only Protestant monarchs could rule Britannia henceforth, with significantly reduced powers.
With an interest in maritime matters, Mary II, moved by the plight of wounded naval veterans, decided to build a Royal Hospital for Seamen. Venerated architect Sir Christopher Wren was so moved by the cause that he took on the grand design for free in 1696. In a financially prudent act of architectural recycling, he preserved and built a mirror image of Charles II’s wing and created courtyards which perfectly framed the view of the Queen’s House. Intended not just as a charitable institution but an epic British naval status symbol, the Royal Hospital took 50 years to complete, so Mary did not live to see it as she died of smallpox aged 32 in 1694.
William, who spent most of his time in fisticuffs with French King Louis XIV, died from pneumonia soon after Mary in 1702. They left no heirs, and to ensure a Protestant monarch, the death of their successor, Mary's sister Anne in 1714 resulted in the choice of a Hanoverian relative, George I. The fact the new monarch alighted with his son at Greenwich without speaking a word of English and had a more distant heritage than nearer Catholic relatives caused more than a few raised eyebrows and rebellions. Nonetheless, a new dynasty was born and a statue of George II stands in the Grand Square, now faceless as the result of weather, over-enthusiastic cleaning and naval shooting practice.
Enter Baroque Painter James Thornhill, commissioned in 1707 to create an extraordinary piece of political propaganda depicting the Protestant monarchs William and Mary and their Hanoverian ‘heirs’ as a through line of English global supremacy. Whereas today’s headlines flash across screens in seconds, Thornhill took 19 years to create the 40,000 sq feet of painted walls and ceilings known as The Painted Hall. He received the princely sum of £6,685 – about £1.4 million in today’s money, going on to paint the domes of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1715 and receive a knighthood in 1720.
The Painted Hall was originally created as a dining hall for naval pensioners, but instead became a visitor attraction and stage for state ceremony such as Nelson’s laying in of state before his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1806. When the Naval College in Portsmouth acquired the buildings in 1873 the hall became a banqueting suite for officers, whose smoking and general shenanigans were not great for the paintings. After being taken over by Greenwich Foundation in 1997, a restoration project was undertaken and completed in 2019.
Ceiling of The Painted Hall
Today, tourists flock to walk - and lie - awestruck by panoramas of the royal family surrounded by a glitterati of 200 mythological and famed personages. English scientists peer through telescopes at the nude Greek moon Goddess Diana, whilst Neptune, God of the Sea, lends a hand alongside St George to bring the Hanoverian Georges safely to Britain. Symbols of naval might, pomp and power abound - the zodiac and the four known continents circle the English royal centre of the universe and Louis XIV is crushed under William’s foot. George II’s children are personified as the arts, looking to an ongoing dynasty. A watery blue toga wends its way old Father Thames, protecting his modesty as he consorts with the younger River Isis, whilst Father Winter’s face is modelled on the oldest resident of The Royal Hospital, John Worley - a troublesome drunk, whose punishment was to sit still whilst his portrait was painted.
Viewing the Ceiling!
Until 1869, The Royal Hospital accommodated up to 2,700 ‘Greenwich Geese,’ a characterful cast of seamen, many of whom, despite the savage surgeons whose knife-sharpening grooves are embedded on the window ledges of Skittle Alley, lived to a ripe old age as a result of being well fed and watered and enjoying their pick of 88 pubs around the site. Aged 12-99, they were an international crew which included black and mixed heritage sailors from Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas during the time of the slave trade, such as Briton Hammon, author of one of the first published accounts of slavery and his time in the Navy, The Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760). John Simmonds, a Jamaican veteran, was treated at the hospital for yellow fever in 1824 and awarded the Trafalgar Medal for serving during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1846. He went on to forge a new life, marrying and working as a hawker with his English wife Anne in Mansfield. Much of the wealth of Greenwich was built on the backs of slavery, and many black people were enslaved at affluent houses including Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780) who having been born on a slave-ship in the Atlantic, escaped enslavement in Greenwich to become a shopkeeper, writer, playwright, abolitionist and the first person of African descent to vote in a British election.
Many stories and, some say, ghosts stalk the halls and grounds of the Old Royal Naval College, with many stories yet to emerge. As our guide comments, ‘old meets new’ across the river as Wren’s domes face the glassy tiara of Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers shimmering atop the trees of Island Gardens on the Isle of Dogs, called so because Edward III kept his greyhounds there. The dazzling reflections of The Painted Hall in modern-day mirrors affirm that what we see in history reflects our own story back to us.
More Information
Access and tours of the Old Royal Naval College and Painted Hall costs £15 from the Visitors Centre - which includes annual membership.
Read more and go on an online Virtual Tour of the Painted Hall at https://ornc.org/
So here I am trying to pick out the path in a field full of cowpats, having jumped off the bus at the Abbotsbury Hill stop. There are no signposts so I head off in the direction of a brick outpost and a beacon, apparently last used by the Tudors to send warnings of the impending Spanish Armada. Soon I’m channelling my inner Braveheart, striding the blustery ridgeway that crowns this extraordinary landscape. The entire coastline unfurls in all directions, dappled with variegated sunlight as the clouds roam over the rolling hills.
St Catherine’s Chapel perched lonely on a hill, acts as a drishti, drawing and focussing the eye as I descend from the ridgeway through bright neon-green fields bristling with the night’s rain into the traditional stone village of Abbotsbury. According to a Survey of Dorsetshire written by Thomas Gerard (1592–1634), shortly after Christianity arrived in Britain in 597 AD, St Peter appeared to a ‘holie Priest’ Bertufus and consecrated a Church named Abodesbury, on the site of a former Roman water mill. 
Catherine’s body was said to have been flown by angels to the heights of Mount Sinai, where Emperor Justinian I established St Catherine’s Monastery in 548-565, believed to house her relics which includes St Helena’s Chapel, at the site of the burning bush determined by his Empress-Mother Helena and the Well of Moses where Moses met his wife. It houses one of the oldest known libraries and one of the longest-serving monasteries. One part was converted into a mosque and it remains a pilgrimage site for Jews, Christians and Muslims.
St Catherine has inspired numerous buildings, miracle plays, biographies and paintings worldwide. As a skilled orator, she was the patron saint of lawyers, scholars, intellectuals and philosophers and St Catherine’s College in Cambridge bears her name. Her Catherine’s Wheel, immortalised in fireworks, made her the chosen guardian of potters, spinners and wheelmakers. She was also the patron saint of virgins, particularly those in search of husbands, and women came to pray at the Abbotsbury Chapel placing their hands and knees in niches. A traditional prayer being:
Another turn of the wheel and we find St Catherine appearing in visions to two feisty females - St Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) and Joan d’Arc (1412-1431) whom she guided to find a sword hidden in the chapel Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierboi. Born Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa, this second St Catherine fasted and cut her hair off to resist arranged marriage, entered the Dominican mantellates of unmarried women and experienced a mystical marriage with Christ aged 21. She dedicated herself to helping the poor and assisting at the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, rising to influence Pope Gregory XI’s move from Avignon to Rome, and negotiating peace with Florence in 1378. She died whilst on hunger strike protesting the Great Schism of the West, leaving her prayers and a treatise.
A further historical layer was added when the day also became associated with a legend that Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife, whilst imprisoned in Ampthill 1531-33, introduced lacemaking to Bedfordshire. So St Catherine also became the patron saint of lacemakers and a figure of Queen Catherine was paraded at Catherine's Day fairs which continued until the turn of the 20th century. It was also called Candle-Day as the darker winter season meant that lacemaking had to be done by candlelight. A song from a 1905 event shows how the Saint and Queen had become merged.
So there we have it, a tale of not just one but three Catherines, with mystical roots to threefold Hecate. Interestingly, due to the ‘fantastical elements’ of her story, the Papacy removed St Catherine’s Saints Day from the official calendar in 1967 - (as if other Christian myths were not also fantastical!?) - but it seems unlikely that this will deny this feisty saint her festivities - I feel inspired to hold my own singing Catherine Party in her honour this year.
The outline of Weymouth Bay will remain visible throughout my journey, but it’s already shrinking as I follow the coastal path up and over the cliffs, tracking the edges of campsites, passing under leafy archways and dipping into woody dells. There’s a relaxed, friendly atmosphere amongst walkers and stone posts that pop up every quarter of a mile with encouraging progress markers.
The first stretch is the longest in time and distance before reaching Osmington Mills and The Smugglers Inn, a thatched traditional pub, dating to the thirteenth century, renowned for smuggling by the seventeenth century. As I arrive, suitably raucous pirate-like laughter wafts up over the garden sound system. 
The final stage of the walk becomes an exhilarating ride along the spines of dinosaurs. White Nothe (nothe means nose in Old English) is the first chalk cliff I’ve reached - a steep ascent, but the best is yet to come. It's topped by a WWII outpost and a row of lifeguard cottages, at one time inhabited by 44 people including captain, crew and families, still functioning off-grid today. It’s possible to zig-zag down from White Nothe to Ringstead along the Smugglers Path thrillingly described by 
I’m searching for some treasure to take back to my fossil-loving nephew, aged 9 and it is not long before I am covered in the soft clay from the cliffs that yield me a handful of belemnite and ammonite remnants. There is a friendly atmosphere amongst hunters of all ages - a proud grandad shows me a perfect pyrite ammonite he has found with his grandson. There are people who are well-prepared, carrying chisels and hammers and others just doing their best with their hands like me and lots of excited chat about who’s found what.
After a snack break next to a beady-eyed seagull, I roam on and over the lion's back to catch the bus home from Burton Bradstock, a traditional thatched village decked in summer flowers marking the start of Chesil Beach, an 18-mile rugged stretch of shingle beach, backed by Fleet Lagoon. As sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age, storms whirled piles of eroded shingle into a formation ranging from large shingle at Portland to fine shingle at West Bay. Apparently, smugglers used the size of the stones to navigate by. It seems to go on forever as the bus wends its way back to Weymouth.
Looking out across the cliffs she mined for fossil treasures, Mary Anning’s statue marks the summit of a 222-year quest for recognition. Having read Tracey Chevalier’s novel Extraordinary Creatures earlier this year, my understanding of her story is now far deeper than the sketch I understood as a child.
The Lyme Regis Museum, commissioned in 1902 by Thomas Philpot, a relative of Mary’s friend and fossil hunter Elizabeth Philpot now stands on the site of her former home and fossil shop. The Lyme Fossil Shop stands just opposite, with a literally jaw-dropping array of international and local treasures - this model 45ft Carcharodon Megalodon shark’s jaw is full of real teeth that gnashed 25 million years ago.
dnesday I jump aboard a Jurassic Coaster to pick up the trail of my literary ancestor Thomas Hardy. It feels only right to pick up a copy of Tess of the d’Urbevilles (published 1890) to accompany my rides around Hardy country. 
Presumed dead at birth, delicate health set Hardy on a different path from his stonemason forefathers. With a gift for drawing, he trained and worked as an architect from 1856-72, working in London from 1862 and returning to Dorset in 1867 to pursue his first love of writing. His first novel The Poor Man and the Lady was considered inappropriate for hierarchal Victorian society but his publisher encouraged him to continue writing and Desperate Remedies was published in 1871. He went on to write fourteen novels, dedicating himself to his first love of poetry after the scandal caused by Jude the Obscure in 1895. His challenge to Victorian society and his sympathy for his female characters such as Tess marked him as a man out of step with his times.
The music of love captivated Hardy when he met Emma Gifford in 1870 after being sent to help restore her brother’s church. He described himself returning from Cornwall ‘with magic in my eye’ and she was the muse for his third novel A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) Their families disapproved but after four years of courtship and the success of his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, ensured his financial security, the couple married, living in various places, including a time just up the road in Tooting (1878-1881). But the landscape of Dorset was Hardy’s first and enduring love and he built his home on land bought from the Duchy of Cornwall, the site of a Roman-British cemetery and a Celtic stone circle, whose stones are still in the garden. Set back from the hum of the main road, to catch sight of it through green branches, is to find it as Hardy intended, nestled in a tree-clad world of its own.
Hardy had an attuned empathy and often a preference for the company of animals - his Pet Cemetery sits amidst a crop of beautiful trees to the side of Max Gate. In Tess, he condemns the human destruction of nature and seeks to restore it by placing his characters within a sentient singing, sounding, natural world. On one of her long walks in search of work, Tess finds a group of wounded pheasants left to die by a shooting party of men who are ‘quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when..they ran amuck and made it their purpose to destroy life - in this case harmless feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these propensities - at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker fellows in Nature’s teeming family.’ 
In 1789 Weymouth snagged a big celebrity catch - when King George III (1738-1820) chose the town as his seaside spa to recuperate, the whole town turned out and his fiddlers accompanied him into the sea to play God Save the King. Overnight, Weymouth became the go-to seaside resort. Georgians and Victorians adorned the beautiful circle of the bay with a jewelled necklace of seaside residences. George III’s love of Weymouth was chalked into Osmington Hill in 1808 - he rides his White Horse there forevermore and his Royal Hotel and Gloucester Lodge (built for his brother the Duke of Gloucester) still preside over the Esplanade.
Weymouth is still serving up a traditional English seaside menu of pubs, arcades, plastic seaside kitsch and carbs - sandwiches with crisps, sticky buns, cream teas, pasties, fish n chips - but at the higher prices demanded by the cost of living crisis. This could make for an expensive coronary. Whilst diversity of people and cuisine is limited, rainbow signs state that everyone is welcome and, I come across a little veggie/vegan gem, The Secret Garden tucked in a nook of the narrow, quaint streets. I feel like a fish out of cosmopolitan water, whilst strangely connected by a shared history of family holidays decades ago.
The Magic of Wandering…
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, about 252 million years ago, (Ma) the great mothership continent Pangaea, surrounded by one ocean Panthalassa, started a vast process of breaking into what would become the continents we know today. Scientists call this period between 250-66Ma the Mesozoic (Middle) Era, formed of three phases - the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous (TJ&C).
During the Jurassic Era, rising sea levels transformed deserts into tropical seas, lagoons and swamps. The sea was full of great marine reptiles, including the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus first found by Lyme Regis fossil hunter Mary Anning (1799-1847) and the skies were full of great flying birds and pterosaurs. Land-dwelling dinosaurs roamed further inland. As Pangea cracked, the Wessex Basin deepened, filling with marine clays, sandstone and limestone. As sea levels dropped in the Late Jurassic a forest rose, sank and was submerged in watery landscapes. The resulting soft grey cliffs of the beaches around Charmouth and Lyme Regis are filled with Jurassic fossils - ammonites, belemnites (an early squid ancestor). These soft rocks are also prone to landslides - Mary narrowly escaped one alive.
During the Late Cretaceous, the African and European tectonic plates collided creating a massive folding and buckling of rock which we now know as the Alps and sending shockwaves across the planet. Lulworth Cove was sculpted by a river of glacial meltwater loosened by the collision, which cut a gap in the strong Portland limestone, allowing the sea to rush in and hollow the bay out of the softer stone behind it. Looking over the bay, you can see the outer formations of Portland Rock, followed by layers of Purbeck Beds, Wealdon Beds and Greensand rocks. The sea is constantly eroding the chalk cliffs, causing rock falls.
