History
White Cliffs Country has history and heritage in abundance.
Impressive historic sites like Richborough Fort lauched the Roman
Invasion of Britain in AD54; the Western Heights is one of the
strongest Napoleonic fortresses in the country' and South Foreland
Lighthouse was the world's first to display an electrically powered
signal.
Take a whistle stop tour of our timeline...
55 BC It was about 9am on 26th August when
Julius Caesar arrived off Dover where the cliffs were lined with a
vast number of fully armed natives. He decided to find a more
suitable landing place and at about 3.30pm with a favourable tide
and wind, proceeded along the coast for 7 miles and came to a stop
off an open and level shore.
1050: The five ports of
Dover, Sandwich, Hastings, Romney and Hythe joined together to
provide ships and men for the King, Edward the Confessor. They
became known as the Cinque Ports
1190: the massive stone
keep of Dover Castle and inner walls or bailey surrounding it were
complete.
1216: Prince Louis of
France landed at Sandwich in support of the baron's war against
King John.
1255: The Port of Sandwich
is no stranger to odd events in English history, the first captive
Elephant was landed in England, delivered as a gift to the English
monarch Henry III, from the French king, and was then taken on foot
to the king's zoo at the Tower of London.
1278: Deal was named as a
'limb port' of the Cinque Ports.
1457: The French sent a
raiding party to Kent, burning much of Sandwich to the ground. A
force of 4,000 men from Honfleur, under the command of Marshal de
Breze came ashore to pillage the town, in the process murdering the
mayor, John Drury. It became an established tradition, surviving to
this day, that the Mayor of Sandwich wears a black robe in mourning
for this ignoble deed.
1500’s: King Henry VIII had
a long connection with Dover, holding the offices of Lord Warden of
the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle before he became
king. When Henry visited Dover he stayed in the Royal Apartments in
the keep and inner bailey of the Castle.
1539-1542: Deal and Walmer
castles built along coast in White Cliffs Country by Henry VIII
because of the threat of invasion by France and Spain.
Deal Castle, was designed and built in the
shape of the Tudor rose.
Anne of Cleves is reported to have stayed at
Deal following her long voyage from Europe. From Deal, Anne left
for London and her fateful meeting with King Henry where she would
be forever labelled the Flanders Mare.
1560: Sandwich was later to
gain significantly from the skills brought to the town by many
Dutch settlers, who were granted the right to settle by Queen
Elizabeth I. The settlers, included market gardening in their
skills, and were responsible for growing the first English
celery.
1573: Queen Elizabeth I
visited Dover on 14 July 1573 on her progress through Kent. On the
procession to Dover The Queen was accompanied by the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, each with their
own entourage. The procession was so long that as the tail of it
was going up Folkestone Hill, leaving Folkestone, the head was
descending the Western Heights down through Cowgate into Queen
Street.
1660: During the reign of
Charles I, Dover declared against the King in the Civil War but
enthusiastically welcomed the return of his son Charles II to
England via Dover beach.
1784: Dickens came to Deal.
Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (who was staying at nearby
Walmer Castle, and was later to be appointed Lord Warden of the
Cinque Ports in 1792), ordered Deal boats to be set alight as he
suspected some of the Deal luggers of being engaged in
smuggling.
1804, with invasion
expected at any time, a massive programme of defensive building in
stone and brick began on the Western Heights creating two forts and
deep brick-lined ditches.
1842: On 14 November, 1842,
Prince Albert and Queen Victoria visited Dover while staying as
guests of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, The Duke of
Wellington, at Walmer Castle.
1875: Captain Matthew
Webb's first successful Channel swim. Covered in porpoise oil, he
dived into the Channel from the Admiralty Pier at Dover. Although
he was stung by jellyfish, and strong currents kept him off the
French coast for five hours, he finally landed at Calais, recording
a time of 21 hours 45 minutes.
1909:The first person to
fly the English Channel in an aeroplane was a Frenchman called
Louis Bleriot. The flight took place on 25 July winning Bleriot a
prize of £1,000 from the Daily Mail. An earlier attempt five days
earlier, by Englishman Herbert Latham, had ended when he had
ditched in the sea.
1914-1918: World War 1 –
The first bomb to be dropped on England fell near Dover Castle on
Christmas Eve 1914.
1939 - 1945: World War 2 –
In May 1940, over 200,000 of the 338,000 men evacuated from Dunkirk
passed through Dover filling the town and railway station with
soldiers, sailors and airmen. Vice Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay
controlled the evacuation from his headquarters in tunnels beneath
the castle. Dover became a symbol for Britain's wartime bravery,
the centre of East Kent's 'Hellfire Corner'.
1940: At St. Margaret's
Bay, close to Deal, the Royal Marines Siege Regiment came into
being and manned cross-channel guns for most of the remainder of
the war.
1991: The remains of a Bronze Age Boat were
discovered during excavations for the building of a new road. The
3,500 year old Bronze Age Boat is now on show in a special gallery
in Dover Museum.
Visit Dover Museum's website
and find out more...
