CINQUE PORTS VOLUNTEERS 3rd Batn. 11/12th Companies

• What are the Cinque Ports?
• The Volunteer Movement
• The Cinque Ports Volunteers, 1794-1802
• The Cinque Ports Volunteers, 1803-9
• How was Kent to be defended?
• Conclusion

What are the Cinque Ports?

The Cinque Ports consist of Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich, along with the two Antient Towns of Winchelsea and Rye. Additionally Deal, Faversham, Folkestone, Lydd, Margate, Ramsgate and Tenterden make up the Cinque Ports Confederation. The Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, head of the Confederation, resides at Walmer Castle.

Traditionally the Cinque Ports enjoyed particular commercial liberties and priviliges, and were the first line of defence against invasion from Europe. They were fortified accordingly with castles such as those at Dover, Deal, Walmer and Sandown. The Cinque Ports were also expected to harbour and man the ships that provided the country's primary defence. In later years the Cinque Ports lost their commercial importance but retained their important role in Britain's defence, as the Kent and Sussex coast is at times as little as twenty miles away from French soil. 

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The Volunteer Movement

Between 1793 and 1815 Britain was at war with France. The proximity of the two countries made invasion attempts a distinct possibility, and in 1797 the French actually managed to land a small and ultimately unsuccessful force in Fishguard Bay, Pembrokeshire. At a time when regular troops were urgently needed abroad, the government turned to two sources to defend Britain's coasts against future encroachments by the French. One source of manpower was the Militia, which was conscripted in each county by ballot and served compulsorily for five years. The Militia had been embodied in December 1792 at the outset of the war with France. The other source of manpower was the Volunteer Movement, which did not rely on conscription, focused on the local recruitment area, and guaranteed exemption from the Army and the Militia (which increased its popularity). The Volunteer Movement began in 1794, sponsored by the government, but did not reach its peak until 1803-5 when Napoleon made ostentatious invasion preparations at Boulogne. By 1804, 400,000 men had joined Volunteer regiments around the country to fend off any French attack.

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The Cinque Ports Volunteers, 1794-1802

The Cinque Ports were not slow in responding to the new threat. In June 1794 the Cinque Ports raised several regiments of Volunteers, Yeomanry (Cavalry) and Fencibles (short for "Defencibles" and comprising both cavalry and infantry). These were the Cinque Ports Fencible Cavalry and the New Romney Fencible Cavalry. The Cinque Ports Fencible Cavalry was commanded by the Hon. Robert Bankes-Jenkinson (later Lord Hawkesbury and, as the Second Earl of Liverpool, Prime Minister 1812-27). By October 1795 the Cavalry consisted of six troops of eighty men, including Non-Commissioned Officers.

Among the leading officers of the Volunteers, Yeomanry and Fencibles were prominent members of Rye's most important family, the Lambs: Thomas Davis Lamb headed the Rye troop of Fencible Cavalry, James Lamb captained the Volunteer Infantry Company of Rye, and Thomas Philip Lamb captained Rye's short-lived Gentlemen and Yeomanry corps. Other Volunteer units were to be found in Hastings, Hythe, Romney, Seaford, Sandwich, Folkestone, Margate, Tenterden, Deal and Walmer. Hastings, Lydd and Thanet also had troops of Gentlemen and Yeomanry. Artillery units were also formed at Deal and Sandown.

In March 1802, the Peace of Amiens was signed with France, and the war temporarily came to an end. As a result the Volunteer regiments around the country were disbanded, among them the Cinque Ports Volunteers. The peace, however, proved little more than a truce, and in May 1803 war was declared again on France. 

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The Cinque Ports Volunteers, 1803-9

Napoleon Bonaparte, who was soon to make himself Emperor of France, made it clear early on that he intended to attempt a fresh invasion of Britain and prepared a large army at Boulogne apparently for that very purpose. 110,000 soldiers under Marshals Soult, Davoust and Ney, as well as 7000 Guards, four divisions of cavalry, 2300 guns and 3000 flat-bottomed transports threatened Britain's coast. Once more the British government turned to the nation for help, and the Volunteer Movement began anew.

Pitt was particularly proud of his Volunteers, whom he referred to as "the advanced guard of the nation". Until his return to office in May 1804 he drilled them in person in his capacity as Colonel Commandant, and frequently instanced his regiments as an example of the possible success of Volunteering to Parliament. His championing of the Volunteers over alternatives such as the Militia led to his appearance in contemporary satirical poetry, such as this example from Peter Pindar: 

"Come the Consul whenever he will,

And he means it when Neptune is calmer,

Pitt will send him a damn'd bitter pill

From his fortress the castle of Walmer."

The story goes that on one occasion while comparing notes with General Sir John Moore, who commanded the 4th King's Own, the 43rd, 52nd, 59th, 78th, and 95th Rifles at the Shorncliffe Camp , Pitt said, "On the very first alarm of the enemy's coming I shall march to aid you with my Cinque Ports Regiments. You have not told me where you will place us."

Moore's response was to point at the heights behind him: "Do you see that hill? You and yours shall be drawn up on it, where you will make a most formidable appearance to the enemy, while I with my soldiers shall be fighting on the beach."

Apparently Pitt found the response very amusing.

In July 1804 Kent was divided into three Volunteer Brigades, and the Cinque Ports Volunteers were incorporated into the Cinque Ports Infantry Brigade along with the Deal Infantry and the Ramsgate and Margate Marksmen under the overall command of Brigadier General Charles Hope.

The Volunteers were required to help man the new system of defence which was being constructed along the Kent and Sussex coast. Along with several regiments of Militia from around the country, the Volunteers were expected to garrison forts, redoubts, batteries and other defences. They later also helped man the martello towers which were built along the coast between 1805 and 1809, and acted as signallers on the semaphore posts. Other duties included "aid[ing] and assist[ing] the Revenue officers in the exertion of their duty", particularly in the fight against smuggling, which was of course rife along the Kent and Sussex coasts. The duty of quelling civil unrest also remained an important raison-d'être for the Volunteer force.

The Staff Officers and Companies of each battalion were as follows in 1803: 

The rates of pay were:

The Volunteers varied in social status from members of the gentry and aristocracy to poorer labourers, although most of the rank and file appear to have been skilled labourers and artisans who could afford to leave their business for long stretches at a time to defend their homes.

The immediacy of the invasion threat faded following the British naval victory at Trafalgar in October 1805, which deprived the French of a fleet with which an invasion would have to be supported. Despite this the threat did not entirely vanish as the French had almost entirely reconstructed their fleet by 1807. The Volunteers remained in strength as the Martello Towers continued to be built and the Royal Military Canal continued to be dug. 

The political tide was, however, turning against the Volunteer Movement. Pitt, the champion of the Volunteers, died in January 1806. The first two battalions of Cinque Ports Volunteers attended the public funeral in Westminster Abbey in London, acting as an escort to the procession.  Pitt's successors had little interest in keeping the Volunteer Movement alive. The Secretary of State for War, William Windham, introduced his Training Act in May 1806 which reduced the Volunteer corps to little more than an irrelevance: the required annual hours of training Volunteers were reduced from 85 to 26. The Training Act proved the death of the Cinque Ports' Third Battalion, which issued its last pay on 24 June 1806 and was disbanded. An Independent Company continued in Rye however until 1809. In 1808, Windham's successor Lord Castlereagh introduced the Local Militia Act which aimed at replacing most Volunteer regiments with Militia regiments (which were considered easier to control because of the Militia's centralisation). Following April 1809, the two remaining Cinque Ports battalions lapsed into neglect, and when the Local Militia Act was enforced in the Cinque Ports in 1810 most former Volunteers joined the new Cinque Ports Local Militia.

The Cinque Ports Volunteers were resurrected in the 1850s, when Napoleon III again threatened a French invasion.

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How was Kent to be defended?

Kent was particularly vulnerable to a Napoleonic invasion. In 1805 the movements of the Boulogne camp could be clearly seen on a good day through a telescope. The Volunteers provided the manpower to resist invasion, along with the help of Militia units such as the 15th Light Dragoons, and the Northampton and Berkshire Militia, as well as Moore's regiments at Shorncliffe training to be light infantrymen. They thus reduced the need for regular soldiers, and took over much of the Militia's own duties. More fortifications were, however, required to guarantee defence against French invaders.

The most likely landing areas for an invading army were considered to be Dungeness, Hythe Bay, and the Downs near Deal, which allowed protection for ships and transports as well as convenient disembarkation points since they were not protected by chalk cliffs. Moreover, the nearby harbours of Folkestone, Dover, Ramsgate and Broadstairs were vulnerable to attack. Several forts already existed on the coast, for example those at Dungeness, Hythe, and Dover and Deal, as well as batteries on the Sussex coast from Rye to Selsey. In order to make the Kent coast inviolable, however, more defences had to be built.

During the 1790s a new network of forts and batteries was constructed on the basis of already-existing defences, a legacy from the war against America, France and Spain in the 1780s. Two batteries, the North Cliff and Chandos batteries, were built at Broadstairs; two more batteries were constructed at Deal, and Sandown Castle was made into an artillery base, while barracks and a naval hospital were built; a fort and battery were built at Folkestone; barracks were built at Hythe to garrison the batteries there and Forts Twiss, Sutherland and Moncrieff; and Dungeness was protected by four batteries, as well as a redoubt and further battery on Dungeness Point. The Grand Redoubt at Eastbourne and the impressive Western Heights near Dover also went under construction (though the Western Heights were still unfinished in 1819), and required extra manpower. Volunteers could be found on any of these fortifications, and were later called in to help man the completely new defence system epitomised by the Royal Military Canal and the Martello Towers.

The Royal Military Canal was built between October 1804 and spring 1809, the brain child of Lieutenant Colonel John Brown, a commander of the Royal Staff Corps, and Sir David Dundas, military commander of Kent and Sussex. The canal is twenty-eight miles long and stretches from Shorncliffe to Cliff End (in Sussex), zig-zagging in even sections 650 metres long so that artillery and muskets could be fired both along and across it to deter invaders. It is nine feet deep and 62 feet across at the top, with a military road 52 feet away from it raised three feet to allow easy movement of troops. The final cost of the canal was £234,310, which was criticised as very costly for what was seen to be a pretty useless experiment, since no self-respecting invading army would be stopped for long by a 62-foot wide stretch of water. However the primary purpose of the canal was to stall rather than stop invaders, and it was initially sold to locals as serving a dual purpose as opening up trade between the Cinque Ports and inland. The canal was indeed mostly used for civilian purposes after it was opened in 1809.

The Martello Towers were similarly criticised as expensive follies. They were sturdy round tapering towers which were named after a tower on Mortella Point, Corsica, which had held out against a British naval attack manned by only forty soldiers, two 18-pounder guns, and one 6-pounder in 1793-4. The idea for building similar towers in Britain originated with Captain W. H. Ford, a Dover engineer, who received the official sanction of Brigadier General Twiss to go ahead with the plan. Work started in spring 1805, and 74 towers were eventually constructed between Folkestone and Romney Marsh, and between Bexhill and Seaford. The towers were generally thirty-three feet high, with an entrance door ten feet above the ground reached by ladder or removable bridge. The walls of the tower were not uniform and were thickest on the seaward side to withstand attacks. The middle floor formed the garrison area where an officer and twenty-four soldiers manning the tower would have lived and slept; the basement was taken up by stores and the magazine; and the top of the tower was fortified with artillery. They had the advantage of not needing a large number of men to man them, but as they were not completed till 1812 many felt all the money and effort might have been better saved. Nevertheless, the Cinque Ports Volunteers would probably have helped man the Towers which had been completed by 1808.

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Conclusion

Napoleon did not make any direct attempt to invade Britain, but if he had done the country felt it was ready to do itself justice in repelling him. At a Volunteer dinner, Colonel William Pitt proposed a toast to "A speedy meeting with our enemy on our own shores", a brash sentiment which nevertheless reflected his confidence in the bravery and abilities of his own Cinque Ports Volunteers. As he reportedly said in November 1803 on the occasion of the Volunteers being called out upon Permanent Duty, "Now let the enemy come, and I have nothing to fear-- I now see I can confide in my men." Whether his confidence in his men was well placed or not was never put to the test, but for eight years between 1794 and 1802, and a further six years between 1803 and 1809, the sight of the Cinque Ports Volunteers would have been a familiar one, whether patrolling the coastal defences on the lookout for French activity, attempting to defeat smugglers, or acting as policemen in the suppressing of public disorder. They took part in an important period in the history of Britain, and were the precursors of the "Dad's Army" of the 1940s which is so fondly remembered today. 

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