- The Quays, the Tide, and What Can Be Worked
- The Port-Reeve, and an Authority Made of Being Right
- What Comes Through, and What It Is Worth
- The Quaymen, the Gangs, and Who Works the Port
- The Victuallers, the Lodgings, and What Dover Charges
- The Bell at the Head of the Eastern Quay
- The Counting Houses, the Western Yard, and Who Owns the Water
“The tide does not care whose warrant it is. A man who is late here has not been discourteous, he has lost a day, and the quay will remember which of the two it was for a good deal longer than he will.”
The Quays, the Tide, and What Can Be Worked
“Two tides a day and about five hours of each that is any use to a laden hull. Everything this port is, and everything it quarrels about, comes out of that sentence.”
The port works to the water and not to the clock, and a stranger who has not understood that will misread every arrangement in it. There are two tides in a day. Of each, something near five hours will take a laden hull alongside, and the five hours move by about three quarters of an hour every day, so that the working day of this town walks slowly round the calendar and comes back to where it started in a fortnight. What that looks like from a lodging window is a water front that is loud at three in the morning in one week and silent at three in the morning a fortnight later. The silence is the thing visitors remark on, and it is the same quays.
Everything else follows. Wages are paid by the tide and not by the day. The victuallers open when the quays open, which in a bad week is at two in the morning. The inns keep a board with the next four tides chalked on it and will be told sharply if it is wrong. And a carter who has come down from Canterbury on the assumption that a port keeps ordinary hours will sit on the hill for six hours with a cargo that was wanted at four, which happens often enough that the carters of two counties have a word for it.
The quays themselves are fewer than the traffic wants and this has been true for two hundred years. The deep berths take the packets and the larger foreign hulls and are held by right of custom rather than by any grant anybody can produce. The tidal berths take everything else and dry twice a day, so that a master who misjudges is not merely inconvenienced but is sitting on his own keel in front of an audience. Camber Quay is the innermost of them, holds the hoys and the small coasters, and is mud for four hours in every twelve. The landings beyond the town take what the quays cannot, which in a busy season is a great deal. Archcliffe is the exception on the town side: it is the newest work in the port, lies under the western cliff, and takes the timber.
Above the western works, set back from the water, stand the guarded Crown receiving masts. Sky vessels bring dispatches, diplomats, inspectors and high-value cargo, but almost none of the freight by which Kent or the realm lives; timber, salt, wine, grain, coal and ordinary packet traffic still move by hull. An aerial arrival nevertheless tightens Dover for an hour, because garrison, customs and harbour clerks must all decide who owns the people and paper coming down. The masts are therefore conspicuous and economically secondary: skyships reconnect offices; the quays feed the realm.
Dover should therefore not be mistaken for the whole maritime gate. It is the fastest and most politically sensitive eastern mouth of a wider southern harbour system: packets, Near Coast traffic, customs intelligence, pilots, people, and valuable cargo pass through it in extraordinary concentration, while deeper or less hurried freight may enter at other southern harbours and move inland from there. Taken together those harbours receive almost all Britannian seaborne trade by ordinary tonnage. Kent's particular advantage is open harbour entry: any vessel may come in, with customs, quarantine, detention, and permission to discharge decided after arrival. The Thames is different; only specially licensed ships may proceed upriver toward London. The licence is expensive but not hereditary or impossible to obtain. Great merchant houses, charter companies, banks, noble patrons, and other people with enough money routinely buy or maintain one when the traffic justifies it. For that reason the richest cargo does not necessarily touch Kent at all: specie, fine cloth, delicate instruments, rare medicines, diplomatic baggage, compact luxury goods, and other consignments whose value makes double handling foolish are disproportionately carried straight to London in licensed ships. Grain, timber, salt, common cloth, preserved food, heavy stores, and the ordinary material life of trade are far more likely to enter through Kent or the wider southern belt. Dover's national importance lies less in being the largest quay by tonnage than in being the place where the Narrow Sea, foreign paper, weather, people, and urgent cargo meet first and visibly.
The rule has created a second maritime trade inside the first. Thames-licensed carriers wait on the southern ports for consignments that have already entered Britannia in ordinary ocean-going hulls but are worth sending onward by water rather than road. Some are hoys and coasters owned by London firms; others belong to great-house agents, banks, insurers, or charter companies and spend much of the year shuttling between Kent and the lower river. Their licence is an asset in its own right, bought, renewed, insured, and sometimes chartered with the vessel. A merchant deciding where to land therefore asks two different questions: what is the cargo worth, and who owns the right ship? The most expensive goods can bear the cost of sailing straight to London. Mundane produce usually cannot, and Kent prospers on the difference.
The practical lesson of the arrangement is that Dover is a place where being late is not a matter of courtesy. A man who misses a tide has not missed an appointment; he has lost a day, and everybody who was waiting on him has lost one too, and the town will remember which party it was. More agreements in this port are broken by the water than by bad faith, and the town has grown a whole vocabulary for distinguishing the two that an outsider cannot hear at all.
The vocabulary is worth learning because a company will be described in it. A man the water kept is said to have been held, which carries no blame at all, and the phrase is used of a party stuck on the Near Coast as readily as of a hull. A man who could have come is said to have been wanted, which is the worst thing said about anybody on these quays, is never said to his face, is said once to somebody else, after which it is simply known. Between the two there is a third expression for the party whose reason was true but whose arrangements were careless, which is that he was held by his own tide. That one is said to a man directly, usually by the reeve, usually once. A company that hears it about itself in the first season has been corrected rather than condemned, which is the distinction the port is actually drawing, and which nobody at Dover will ever explain to a stranger who has not heard it.
The Port-Reeve, and an Authority Made of Being Right
“I shut the quays. I do not ask anybody and nobody has ever asked me by what warrant, and if one of them did I should have to think about the answer for rather longer than I would like.”
The port-reeve of Dover is the man who shuts the quays before a gale, and that single act is the whole of how newcomers to this realm first learn what authority looks like when it is working. What a stranger sees is a man walking out along a cold wet quay into a rising wind, saying four words to a gang master, and the clatter of the winches stopping one after another down the length of the water front. He is not a Crown officer. The office is older than the Quay Office and was never constituted by anybody; it is held by election among the men with a standing interest in the water, confirmed by the borough because the borough has always confirmed it, and it carries no stipend worth the name.
What it carries instead is the decision. When the reeve shuts the quays, work stops, hulls are moved or made fast, and a considerable amount of money stops moving for as long as he says. Nobody has ever tested whether he may lawfully do it. The reason nobody has tested it is the reason the office survives: in twenty years Eustace Marr has shut the quays nineteen times and has been wrong twice, and both times he said so in the same week, in public, without being asked.
That is an authority made entirely of a record, and it is the clearest instance in the realm of the thing a company is always being asked to acquire. The reeve has no charter, no indemnity, no force at his disposal and no superior who would back him. He has a list of occasions on which he was right, kept by other people, and it is worth more in this town than any warrant Westminster could issue, because a warrant tells a master he must make fast and the record tells him he had better.
How he knows is asked constantly and he answers it the same way every time, which is that he reads the water, the birds and the glass as any man on this coast does, and that he has been doing it since he was nine. He has never claimed anything else and is short with people who suggest it. What the town does anyway is worth setting beside that. A bell is rung at the head of the eastern quay before a closure, has been rung before every closure anybody can remember, and appears in the pilots’ copy as an instruction without a reason. Marr rings it because the quaymen expect it. Asked what it is for he says that he does not know, that he was told to do it by the man before him, and that it costs nothing.
The weakness is obvious and the town lives with it. An authority made of being right ends the first time somebody is expensively wrong, and every man on the quays knows the count. Marr is in his sixties. There is no procedure for succession, no candidate the water has agreed on, and a general and unspoken understanding that when he goes the office will either pass to somebody nobody trusts yet or be quietly replaced by a Quay Office rule, which is the outcome the older men dread and cannot argue against.
The reeve is the first door in Kent and should be treated as one. He will see anybody, will answer a direct question directly, and will decline to be drawn on anything he has not seen himself. He is also the only person in the port who can get a band onto a quay at an hour when the quay is shut, and he has done it, and what it costs is that he will afterwards know exactly what was carried.
The reeve keeps two books and the second is the one worth knowing about. The first is the quay account, which is public, is audited by the borough, and records berthing, lighterage, oil, labour hired in the reeve’s name. The second has no title on it and is kept in the same hand. It records occasions: what was found, who found it, what hour, what was done, who was paid to sit with it. It is not a record of crime, the reeve having no jurisdiction over crime. Most of the entries concern a thing on a beach, a household in a bad fortnight, a piece of ground behind the quays that had to be walked. Marr has kept it for nineteen years because the man before him kept one, and the man before that, in a hand nobody at the borough can now read. It has never been asked for by any authority in the county. He would give it to anybody who asked properly, and in nineteen years one person has.
What Comes Through, and What It Is Worth
“A shipping clerk who has never left this town will tell you which harbours add a fortnight to a policy and which add a name to the crew list that will not be coming home. He has never seen any of them. He is not often wrong.”
The traffic is less exotic than the town’s reputation suggests and more valuable. Cloth and worked metal outward. Wine, oil, dyestuffs inward. Foreign paper with foreign people in both directions, and under all of it the steady unglamorous freight that a realm which does not make everything must move: timber, salt, hides, glass, with the particular southern goods that arrive as flavour and leave as status. A quay on a warm morning smells of every one of them at once, and it is the hides a stranger remembers a week later.
The interesting cargo is the paper. A great deal of what crosses here is an instruction rather than a thing, and Dover is where an instruction stops being enforceable and becomes a request. A contract good in this town may mean nothing in a port where no crown stands behind it, and the merchants learn this before anybody else because their insurers ask them about it before the season opens.
The trade’s real commodity is therefore judgement. Dover clerks know which seals are challenged, which masters lose crew, which syndics invent delay, and which cargoes attract a premium before an insurer has formally altered the table. None of this is a secret and almost none of it is printed. Twenty years of manifests, claims and crew lists make an experienced clerk valuable because he can turn accumulated paper into a prediction.
The colonial compounds are the far end of the same business. Dover money, alongside London’s and Yarmouth’s, sits in compounds wherever fisheries, dyes, hardwoods, nitrates or machine-useful salts could be got by contract, and the returns come back through these quays. A town that watches the water also owns a piece of what lies across it, and is correspondingly less romantic about the Near Coast than the capital is.
The Quaymen, the Gangs, and Who Works the Port
“Nine gangs on the eastern quay and every one of them a family before it is a gang. You do not join. You are somebody’s cousin, or you are on the beach with the casuals, and there is no third arrangement anybody has ever devised.”
The port is worked by gangs, which is to say by standing parties of men and women who hire themselves as a unit and are paid as a unit. There are nine on the eastern quay, seven on the western, and a shifting number at the landings beyond the town. A gang holds between eleven and twenty hands, keeps its own reckoning, divides its own money, and answers for its own work to the master or the agent who hired it. A gang at work is audible across the harbour and is not shouting: it is the grind of a winch, a hand calling two words, and a rhythm on the boards that the men keep without noticing they are keeping it.
What a gang actually is, underneath the arrangement, is a family or two intermarried. Places in it pass to sons, to daughters, and to the men daughters marry, and a stranger does not get in except by that route or by being so useful that a gang short of hands takes the risk. Dorcas Buckland is exact about this and unapologetic. The system produces a labour force that trains itself, disciplines itself, and cannot be broken by an employer, which is the whole of its purpose.
Beneath the gangs are casual hands taken on when a gang is short or a hull is in a hurry. A slack winter puts dozens of them at the head of Camber Quay before the tide; September employs almost everybody. Their wages, family connections and the hard line between casual and gang hand matter later, when the book turns from how the port works to what the port costs.
The pay is by the tide and not by the day, which follows from everything else about this port. A gang hand takes something over two shillings a tide in ordinary work and rather more for a difficult cargo, and a man who works both tides in a twenty-four hour period has earned well and will not do it twice in a week. The reckoning is settled at the quay head in coin, in public, by the gang’s own reckoner, who is very often a woman and is always somebody who can be watched doing it. The gangs at Archcliffe are paid a penny a tide above the rest, the timber being what it is.
Disputes go to the port-reeve and almost never go further, which is the second pillar of his standing after the shutting of the quays. A gang that believes it has been short-paid, a master who believes a gang has been slow, a quarrel between two gangs over which had the berth: all of it comes to Marr, is heard on the quay within the day, and is decided. No appeal exists and none has been sought in twenty years.
A company will meet the gangs as the people who actually know what came off a hull, and should understand that they will not say. A gang that talks about a cargo does not get the next one, the masters being perfectly clear about that, so the knowledge in this port is comprehensive and is locked behind a commercial interest rather than behind secrecy. What opens it is not money. It is having been seen to deal honestly with somebody the quay already knows.
There is one thing a gang will not do and no gang will explain it. Between the turn of the year and the first of March, nothing is carried up the eastern quay past the bell after the light has gone, whatever the tide is doing and whatever it costs. Work stops, the cargo stays on the deck, and it goes up in the morning. Masters who have been coming here twenty years budget for it. Masters who have not are told it is a custom of the port, which is true, and are not told anything else, because the gangs do not know anything else: every hand on that quay learned it from a parent and none of them has ever heard a reason given.
What the borough books do have about the eastern quay is not an explanation, and is the nearest thing to one anybody possesses. There are payments for oil at the head of that quay in every decade the accounts survive for, running from the turn of the year to the first week of March, in no other season, in a town that lights the whole of its water front all year. The sum has moved with the price of oil and never with anything else. In four years of the last century it is doubled, and the four years are the four in which the coroner sat oftener than twice on a body from that quarter. The borough has never connected the two entries, because they are kept by different clerks in different books, one at the quay office and one at the guildhall, and the only person now alive who has read both of them is the man who keeps the first.
The Victuallers, the Lodgings, and What Dover Charges
“I open when the quays open and I close when the quays close, and if that is two in the morning then it is two in the morning. Every complaint I have ever had about my prices has come from somebody who slept through the reason for them.”
Dover feeds and beds a population that changes with the tide and the season. The trades that do it are organised around that instability rather than around comfort. The victuallers open with the quays, which in a bad week means two in the morning, and they are the reason a port that works at impossible hours can be worked at all. There are perhaps thirty of them of any size, the oldest licensed in 4396 and still kept by the same family, and they are as tightly held as the gangs. What a man off a hull at two in the morning walks into is a warm room, a fire that has not been out since October, and a smell of tar and wet wool off forty coats drying at once.
The lodging trade is the town’s standing scandal and its standing defence. A bed in Dover costs between sixpence and one shilling and threepence in the quiet months, and between one shilling and sixpence and three shillings in the season, which is the highest ordinary charge in the southern counties outside the capital. Every traveller who has written about the town has complained about it. Every Dover man will explain that a house which is full for four months and half empty for eight has to price the four.
The corporation regulates neither and has tried twice. The first attempt, on lodging, was abandoned when the houses simply declined to take anybody at the fixed rate and the town filled its yards with people sleeping in carts. The second, on victualling, survives as a set of by-laws about weights and measures which are enforced seriously and which have nothing to do with price.
What is genuinely well done here is the feeding of a party at short notice, and a company should know it. A band that arrives off a coach at four in the morning with six people and a cart can be fed within the hour at any of a dozen houses near the quay, at a price it will resent and will pay. Nowhere else in the county can do this. It is the direct consequence of a town that has organised its whole life around not knowing when work will start.
The other Dover institution worth naming is the standing account. A house, an agent or a company that works the port regularly keeps an account with a victualler and a lodging house, settles it monthly, and is charged perhaps a fifth less than a stranger. It is not a discount so much as a recognition, and the houses that place bands in this county all hold two or three, which is one of the practical advantages of working through an agent rather than alone.
The town’s reputation for sharpness is therefore about half deserved and is worth putting in its place. Dover charges a great deal, says so, and does not cheat. The complaints in the record are about prices and almost never about short weight, bad meat or a bill that did not match the agreement, which for a port town with a transient population is a genuinely remarkable record and is not accidental.
What happens to a lodger’s account when the lodger does not come back is the part of the trade that shows what kind of town this is. A victualler in this port carries a drowned man’s bill and does not present it to anybody. There is no custom obliging him, no fund, no article in the licence. What there is instead is a quarterly practice in every house near the water of writing the sum off into a standing entry that the trade calls the water account, and of paying something toward the burial when the parish asks. Ten or eleven houses do it. The sums are small, the trade is not sentimental about them, and the same landlord who forgives four pounds in January will argue over the price of a candle in February. Asked about it, they say that a man who died owing is not a debtor, which is offered as though it settled the matter, and which in this town it does.
The Bell at the Head of the Eastern Quay
“I ring it before a closure. I was told to ring it by the man before me and he was told by the man before him. It is in the pilots’ copy as an instruction and there is no reason written against it, and I have looked, because people ask me every year.”
A bell hangs at the head of the eastern quay and is rung before the quays are shut. It is not a large bell and it is not a good one. It is flat, it carries badly in a cold wind, and in the quarter behind the water front it is heard as a thud and then another rather than as a note. It has been rung before every closure anybody in this town can remember. It appears in the pilots’ copy of the weather windows as an instruction without a reason attached, which is the only entry in that book of which this is true, and the pilots have never removed it because the pilots do not remove entries.
The port-reeve rings it, or has it rung, and is candid about not knowing why. Marr says that the quaymen expect it, that he was told to do it by the man before him, and that it costs nothing. Asked directly whether he believes it does anything he says that he does not know what it would be doing, which is not the same answer and is the answer he gives.
What the town says, when it says anything, divides in the usual way. The practical account is that a bell before a closure is a signal, that the quays are long and noisy and a shout does not carry, and that the custom is simply how the order was given before anybody thought to write it down. That account is almost certainly true and it does not explain why the instruction is in the pilots’ book, which is a book about water and not about quays.
The other account is not offered to strangers and is not exactly a belief. Three of the nine gangs on the eastern quay will not begin work again after a closure until the bell has been rung a second time. They do not say why, are not embarrassed about it, and have never asked the reeve to make the second ringing part of his practice, so that in fact it is rung twice on most occasions by whoever is nearest and by nobody’s instruction at all.
The bell itself is older than the quay it hangs on, which is the one hard fact in the whole matter. It came off a building the town does not now possess, the corporation’s records of its acquisition are among those lost, and it carries an inscription which has been copied out four times by four different antiquaries with four different readings. None of the four is quoted here, because none of the four can be preferred.
A company should file this where Kent files everything of the kind, which is under practices that are kept and not explained. The port of Dover is the most instrumented place in the realm, measures everything, writes it down, posts it. At the head of its principal quay it rings a bell for a reason nobody has been able to state in four hundred years, and the men who ring it are not fools and will not stop.
What the bell is rung for, in the only description anybody at this port will give, is the ground. Not the quay, which is stone laid within living memory, nor the water, which is nobody in particular. The ground under the eastern quay was foreshore before the quay was built over it, and the borough knows perfectly well that this town put its drowned there for three centuries before it had a burial club or a second parish. Foreshore cannot be consecrated. Nothing was ever said over that earth beyond whatever rite the beach men used, which was no blessing a bishop would have owned, and no consecration has been sought for it since. The borough minutes of the year the quay was extended carry one line recording that the work was done without disturbance, a phrase that appears nowhere else in four hundred years of those minutes. Every manual in the realm agrees on what unconsecrated ground holding that many drowned becomes in the end, and the word all of them use is unquiet.
The Counting Houses, the Western Yard, and Who Owns the Water
“Everybody sees the master because he stands on deck. Nobody sees the people who own the sixty-fourths, the woman who insured them, or the house whose paper bought the cargo. They are all here. They are simply indoors.”
Dover’s richest people do not look like its governing people, which is why a visitor can spend a week on the quays and never understand where the money sits. The corporation owns civic property, the Crown owns magazines and guarded ground, the packet owners jointly fill certain offices, and Eustace Marr can stop all of them for weather. None of those arrangements identifies the men and women who actually own the hulls, warehouse paper, cargo advances and foreign claims from which the town’s private fortunes are made.
The commercial upper tier is small enough to know itself and large enough to disagree. Six or seven houses can keep their own factor on the Near Coast throughout the year; perhaps twice that number hold enough shares in packets, hoys, bonded stores or colonial undertakings to be treated as principals rather than customers. Below them lies a much wider class of agents, chandlers, warehouse owners, fruit and fish factors, victuallers, masters with a part-share in their own hull, and attorneys who have become rich by making everybody else’s risk legible. Dover has no merchant guild capable of speaking for the whole. When the trade wants something, a room is filled until the people whose absence would make the decision useless have arrived.
The Alkham family is the clearest example of how a Dover house spreads itself without becoming a corporation. Mary Alkham keeps the crossing ledger and acts for several Kentish principals on this side. Peter Alkham works the Blanchefleur factory and knows which syndic clerk will still answer after the harbour bell. Jacob Alkham, their cousin, is an interpreter in the customs house and is careful enough about the separation that everybody jokes about it and nobody has ever proved a favour. The Alkhams do not own the most tonnage. They own relationships in both directions, which at Dover is often the dearer property.
Larger realm-wide bodies appear here by room, clerk and account rather than by skyline. The Company of Soundings and Scales maintains copies of tide-books, depth amendments and pilot material because a bad Dover entry can poison a chart used much farther away. The White Salt Exchange takes contracts for curing salt, sulphur and preservation stock moving through the southern belt. The Blue Ledger Company writes or reinsures the risks too large for the local room to carry alone. The Guild of the Long Censer is a smaller presence but an expensive one, taking imported gums, oils and compounds whose paperwork attracts both church and customs attention. None governs the port. All can make a local merchant wait.
The Dover room remains its own institution notwithstanding the Blue Ledger’s presence. Rachel Folkestone and the other local underwriters price the Narrow Sea out of a loss book no London office possesses in equal detail. A London company can put more money behind a risk; it cannot tell Folkestone what Blanchefleur in November costs. Consequently the larger houses buy the Dover opinion rather than replacing it, and a merchant who boasts that his London insurer has waived a local loading is usually boasting that he has paid somebody else to carry the same fear.
Packet ownership is even less visible because a packet is ordinarily divided into sixty-fourths. A captain may own four, the master’s family another two, a Dover house eight, a London bank six, a noble agent four, and the remaining shares be scattered among people who never step aboard. The packet owners as a body fill the Keeper’s office because no single owner is large enough to do it alone. This produces a class of wealthy people whose maritime standing cannot be read from the door of their house. A widow with three packet shares and two warehouse mortgages may be richer in water than a man who owns a whole coaster, and Dover society knows the difference exactly.
The western side of the port is where ownership becomes material. Archcliffe is spoken of loosely as the yard, but it is not one dockyard under one master. It is a cluster of private works laid against Crown ground: one stone graving dock that dries on the lower tide, three hauling slips for smaller hulls, a mast and spar yard, two sail lofts, pump and smith shops, timber sheds, pitch houses, chandlers, and the long cordage work whose ropewalk reaches back from the water because no quay has room to waste on a straight quarter-mile of rope. The Crown keeps its magazines and receiving masts separately fenced. A man may work all day within fifty yards of royal stores and never be in Crown employ.
The yard exists because the traffic cannot exist without repair. A packet works hard, touches foreign quays, and is expected to sail when the calendar says; every winter a proportion must be hauled, opened, caulked, re-rigged or have damaged spars replaced. Foreign masters use Archcliffe because the alternative may be to cross home in a hull the Dover room will not insure. The harbour therefore supports a repair economy almost invisible in the public descriptions of the port: shipwrights, caulkers, sawyers, mast-makers, sailmakers, block-makers, rope hands, smiths, pump men and the surveyors whose signature decides whether an underwriter will put the vessel back on the water.
Master Shipwright Elias Redd is the best-known name at Archcliffe and the first genuinely new kind of authority a company meets there. He holds no office, commands no gang and owns only a minority interest in the largest shed. What he possesses is the right sort of refusal. If Redd says a packet needs her lower strake opened before he will sign her, the master may curse, the owner may write, and the sailing may be lost; the hull does not go out insured until somebody of equal standing disagrees, and at Dover there are only two people who can. His family belongs to the wider maritime Redd interest known in consular service, but the yard treats him as a shipwright before it treats him as anything else.
The merchant houses and the yard meet most sharply after damage. A master wants the cheapest repair that gets his hull back into the calendar. The shipwright wants enough opened to know what happened. The underwriter wants a repair he can price. The owner wants the sailing preserved. The cargo principal wants his goods moved before any of them finish arguing. A company is often hired into that quarrel as witness, guard or neutral carrier of papers, and should decide before accepting which interest is paying it. At Dover, “the owner” is frequently six people and a bank.
Dover therefore has a prosperous class unlike the county gentry. Its better houses stand behind the western quay and on rising streets, not behind park walls. Daughters marry attorneys, packet masters, factors or younger branches of maritime houses; sons go as readily to Blanchefleur as London. They dine with consuls and underwriters more readily than country squires and regard oak prices, insurance and foreign paper as education. Maidstone calls them sharp. Wye calls them useful. London calls them provincial until it needs a cargo moved in a week.