SENSIBLE EDITORS ARE RELUCTANT to accept any form of verse on their pages. One poem in print brings an avalanche of the most ghastly doggerel.

But these are a bit different — early 19th-century rhymes about three of our towns that might amuse you. And to think that people are rude about the Medway towns now ...

STROOD

The people of Stroud¹,

Talk long and talk loud,

And herd in a croud,

Traducing their innocent neighbours;

While envy by fits

Mid the congress sits,

Gives a whet to their wits,

And smiles on their scandalous labours.

This place, like an eel,

Where the publicans steal,

Is dirty, base, long, foul, and slippery;

And the belles flirt about,

With their persons deck’d out,

With run muslin, and second-hand frippery.

ROCHESTER

Rochester’s a town²

Of specious renown,

Full of tinkers and taylors,

And slopmen and sailors,

And magistrates who often blundered;

Coquettes without beauty,

Old maids past their duty,

And Venus’ gay nymphs by the hundred.

Vile inns without beds,

And men without heads,

By which poor Britannia’s undone;

Extortionate bills,

Anti-venery pills,

And port manufactured in London.

Honest Dick Watts³ of yore,

Their good name to restore,

Decreed (such enormities scorning)

Each travelling wight,

A warm couch for the night,

And fourpence in cash in the morning.

CHATHAM

Old Chatham’s a place,

That’s the nation’s disgrace,

Where the club and the fist prove the law, sir;

And presumption is seen

To direct the marine,

Who know not a spike from a hawser.

Here the dolts show with pride

How the men-of-war ride,

Who Gallia’s proud first-rates can shiver,

And a fortified hill

All the Frenchmen to kill

That land on the banks of the river!

Such towns and such men,

We shall ne’er see again,

Where smuggling’s a laudable function;

In some high windy day,

May the devil fly away

With the whole of the dirty conjunction!

1 Strood was spelled Stroud until the late 1800s, so this isn’t poetic licence.

2 But this is poetic licence: Rochester was a city then, as it is now — despite some council bureaucrat’s best efforts to the contrary.

3 Richard Watts, city benefactor.

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