W.H. Clements - Towers of Strength: The Story of the Martello Towers

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TOWERS OF STRENGTH

- Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said,
when the French were on the sea.

James Joyce, Ulysses (Telemachus)

To Liz

TOWERS OF STRENGTH

Martello Towers Worldwide

W H CLEMENTS

First published in 1999 by
LEO COOPER
an imprint of
Pen Sword Books Limited
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Copyright

ISBN 0 85052 679 5

A CIP catalogue of this book is available
from the British Library

Printed by Redwood Books Limited
Trowbridge, Wiltshire

For up-to-date information on other titles produced under the Leo Cooper imprint, please
telephone or write to:
Pen & Sword Books Ltd, FREEPOST, 47 Church Street
Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS
Telephone 01226 734222

Contents

M y interest in Martello towers really stems from 1966 when I was stationed at the School of Infantry at Hythe in Kent. With towers on the rifle ranges, and in Shorncliffe Camp, and with the Dymchurch Redoubt still used by the Army I was intrigued to learn more about these handsome structures. The opportunity to research and write about them came only with my retirement from the Army in 1992; since then I have been able to visit all the towers in England, Wales, Ireland and Jersey. Abroad I have travelled to see the towers in Key West in Florida and in India I found the one remaining tower of those built as part of the fortifications of Old Delhi.

However, without the help of many friends, acquaintances and even total strangers the research for this book could never have been completed, nor many of the photographs acquired. Indeed, I have been so amazed at the help and encouragement I have received from so many people that it would be difficult, if not wellnigh impossible, to mention all of them by name without these acknowledgements becoming a book in themselves.

Of those whom I must acknowledge the closest to home, so to speak, is my brother-in-law Campbell Morrison, for his advice and help with word-processing and for his help in enhancing a number of the photographs, and my nephews Sebastian and Yatelyn McBride. Sebastian obtained photographs of the Leith tower while Yatelyn obtained copies of articles for me from the Library of Trinity College Dublin. Michael Pugh, an Australian professional photographer, prepared the maps and the comparative plans and sections of the English, Irish and Channel Islands towers and took photographs of Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour. An old friend from my time in Peking, John Maclennan, photographed the Guernsey towers for me, walking round the islands coastline in wintery weather to obtain the pictures.

As my research developed it soon became apparent that Martello towers were much more widespread than I had at first realized. They were not limited to the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and Ireland. It was at this point that I received willing assistance from organizations and individuals all over the world. Dr Monique Koenig and Phillipe Lahausse de Lalouvriere of the Mauritius Friends of the Environment provided information and pictures of towers on Mauritius, while Pauline Lafford of the Halifax Defence Complex, Marie Cantin of the National Battlefields Commission in Quebec, and Professor J.G.Pike of the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, provided virtually all my information on and pictures of the Canadian towers.

I am particularly grateful to another old friend and colleague Colonel Jeremy Dumas who, while Defence Adviser at the British High Commission in Kingston, Jamaica, found time to photograph the towers at Fort Nugent in Jamaica and Fort Picton in Trinidad. Other military officers to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude are Commandant Peter Young of the Military Archives in Dublin, Colonel Francisco Fornalls Villalonga, Director of the Military Museum in Mahon, Minorca, and Lieutenant-Colonel Tim ODonnell, Defence Adviser at the British High Commission, Colombo.

I also wish to thank Dr Edward Harris of the Bermuda Maritime Museum for providing a copy of his article on the tower at Ferry Point published in the Mariners Mirror and photographs of the tower. Desmond Nicholson of the Antigua and Barbuda Museum provided plans of River Fort on Barbuda, and Mr C.T.Henry, Assistant Curator at the Royal Armouries, Fort Nelson, was particularly patient and painstaking in providing answers to my questions about eighteenth-and nineteenth-century smooth-bore artillery. My thanks also go to Ruth Mateer for her help in translating material on the towers in Sicily from the original Italian, and to Greg Cox for the drawings of the Gando tower and River Fort, Barbuda.

I have corresponded with Brian Pegden for almost two years and I have to thank him for the suggested title of this book and also for reading the first draft and suggesting a number of corrections and amendments. I found his introduction to the published material on Martello towers invaluable in pointing me in the direction of a number of them which previously I had not known to exist, including that at Fort Beaufort in South Africa. Further details concerning this tower and a photograph came from Brian Jackson of the Grahamstown office of the National Monuments Council for South Africa. My thanks also go to Peter Hibbs who has compiled a most instructive database on the Kent and Sussex towers; to Crown and Company of Cardiff for providing me with the sales particulars of Stack Rock Fort from their records; and to Sue Hardy of the National Trust for Jersey for details of the Victoria Tower.

A special debt of gratitude is owed by me to Professor Hiro Bulchand of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. He provided a translation of a booklet on the Gando Tower and, thanks to his dogged perseverence and by making use of his friends and acquaintances in Las Palmas, he obtained photographs of the tower despite its being sited inside a restricted military area. Others to whom my thanks must go for their help are Nigel Hankin for introducing me to the tower in Delhi; John Goodwin for the details of the towers on the Scilly Isles (which were not, after all, Martello towers); to Phil Brooks of the Ascension Heritage Society; to Mary Billot, Librarian of the Socit Jersiaise; to Margaret Pinsent of the Fortress Study Group; and to Charlotte Haslam, lately Architectural Adviser to the Landmark Trust, who died suddenly and tragically in early 1997.

These acknowledgements would not be complete without reference and thanks to the staff of the Public Record Office at Kew, the Royal Engineers Library at Chatham, the Kent County Council Centre for Kentish Studies, the British Library, the National Army Museum, the Biblioteca Centrale della Regione Siciliana, and the Austrian State Archives for their unstinting help and advice. Without the records which these bodies maintain so professionally this book could never have been written.

My final thanks go to my wife Liz. For thirty years or more all over the world, from the Channel Islands to China, America to Australia, she has clambered over fortifications in all weathers with me. The fact that this book has been successfully completed is entirely due to her support, encouragement and skill with the computer, and it is for these reasons that it is dedicated to her.

W hen I started to write this book I was faced with the task of setting its parameters. What is a Martello tower? Which of the many towers built by the British Army should be included and which excluded? Sheila Sutcliffe in her own book on them believed that the essential characteristics of these towers should include a massive wall, a flat roof and a door and an entrance passage raised above the ground, usually at first-floor level. To some people only the towers on the southern and the eastern coast of England can properly be termed Martello towers; but even here there is a problem of definition since there are two distinct designs, one in use in Kent and Sussex and the other in Essex and Suffolk. Indeed, the design of the early nineteenth-century towers does seem to reflect the training, experience and even individual whims of each Royal Engineer officer in charge of their construction.

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