When reading of outfall pipes and yachting at Swalecliffe, one also reads of Slavery Bay.
If that is what was known as Swalecliffe or Swakeley Bay, then I can claim to have been one of the slaves, but of course it was the Whitstable native oyster that was the taskmaster.
It was at Easter 1907 that I joined my father, to work in his 40-foot cutter-rigged oyster dredger, “Quicksilver.”
That sea area east of the Street at Tankerton is known as the Kentish Flats where most of Whitstable native oysters are born. It suffered severely in 1895 when the shore, for some considerably distance out, was covered by a large icefield that had broken away from an area near the Artic.
The flatsmen could not leave the shore for six weeks and when the ice had gone they found all but some of the very young oysters, called brood, were dead and also most of their enemies.
By 1900, owing to the oysters companies restocking their beds from Falmouth and Brittany, brood began to increase and that year the flatsmen poached the Faversham Oyster Company’s beds at east end of the Swale where the spawn or spat had settled in millions.
Loading their decks in the dark with all the soil their dredges could pick up, they went into the shelter of Swalecliffe Bay to cull from it the brood and to push the stones and shells overboard.
They evidently pushed thousands of the small brood, about the size of a 1p (coin) over with it and by 1906 brood lay all over the flats.
The oyster companies, who were buying it at four shillings for a measure of five gallons and needed to keep it on their beds for three or four years before they could sell it, made it known that they would give five shillings per hundred for mature oysters.
My father and his crew accepted the challenge to dredge in Swalecliffe Bay, despite the heaviness of the soil. On the first day with the dredges filled with petrified mud stones, some four times the size of a brick, there was a reward of several oysters in each dredge, but the work sapped our strength.
Before the day was over, and I stumbled home to dinner and bed until the next tide, my hands were so sore I could not pull up the sails next day until I had wet them in sea-water with the fingers splitting at the sides. I was stronger the following day.
R. D. Dale
80 Nelson Road
Whitstable
