‘All through the night a terrific bombardment had been maintained, and even when the first grey line of dawn began to creep across the downs the insistent fury of the guns increased rather than diminished’ (The Raid of Dover 14)

Described as a ‘forecast in fiction’, Douglas Morey Ford’s The Raid of Dover: a romance in the reign of woman: AD 1940 was published in March 1910. A work of speculative fiction, The Raid of Dover, played on popular fears of women’s suffrage and invasion. Following on from his earlier novel, A Time of Terror, which was dismissed as ‘an amazing farrago of nonsense’,1 Ford imagines a future where Dover is invaded by an alliance of 300 US and German troops who have mysteriously arrived on a liner and infiltrated the town. The Americans who have lost confidence in the British government are ‘quite persuaded that the old folk at home [are] too feeble to retain the management of the Old Estate’2 and have joined in a pact with the German government. A new women’s regiment which has been stationed at ‘Fort Warden’, on the advice of the country’s Vice-President, Lady Catherine Kellick, is overpowered instantly. Pale, trembling ‘girl-soldiers’ relay the shocking news to the townsfolk that the fort has been taken, and a fierce battle begins to rage over the town as the British military try to retake control.

In the ensuing melee, the town is obliterated:

‘Shells falling into the town of Dover had already reduced it to heaps of tumbled masonry. Here and there great volumes of smoke rose from the wreckage of shops and houses. The town hall – the ancient Maison Dieu, founded by Hugh de Burgh, Constable of Dover, in the reign of John – having escaped destruction during the night, caught fire about daybreak, the flames rushing upwards in the morning air, watched by thousands from the western heights, to which the terrified inhabitants had fled for safety’.3

Whilst Dover falls, seismic disturbances rocks the spa towns of Britain.

With the failure of the women’s army, thousands of women ‘ruefully admitted that they had gained power and lost love; and in their inmost hearts they knew that love was worth the world’ and ‘with the gradual abandonment of man’s protective affection had gone the true ingredient of her happiness’.4 Although Ford claims that he does not identify with the views of any of his characters on the views of women’s suffrage, the misogynistic overtones of the book are unmistakable. His description of the women’s army recruits reinforces this:
‘Recruits flocked in from every quarter. The idea of military service or a military picnic for a few months in the Amazonian militia appealed to all sorts and conditions of girls and young women. Those who had reached the age where the resources or pleasures of home life had begun to pall, those who saw no chance of getting married, those who had met with disappointments in love and were stirred with the restless spirit of the times, those who rebelled against parental rule, domestic employments, or the monotony of days spent in warehouse or office, one and all caught eagerly at the idea of a course of military training in smart uniforms’5 In reality, the first women’s regiment in the British Army was the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) which was formed in 1917 to provide administrative support during world war one, so Ford’s prediction that the regiment would be formed in 1940 was incorrect. However, women did not serve in ground combat roles until much later.

As the battle drags on, ‘urgent advice’ is ‘given officially and through the newspapers to call the air-ships into play’.6 There was a growing sense within the Edwardian period that although ‘the problem of the application of airships to ordinary purposes of travelling, can scarcely be said to have been solved, … it seems to have come already within the prospect of belief’7 .The British Army had built their first air-ship, the Nulli Secundus, in 1907, shortly followed by the navy’s Mayfly (His Majesty’s Airship No 1) in 1908. Ford imagines a world of private airships, which disturbs the social order: ‘Who wants an air-ship calling for his parlour-maid at the attic window? Who wants thieves sailing up to his balcony?’8 and he predicts that in 1940 ‘everyone will want to be at liberty to ‘aviate’’.9 Although this part of his prediction does not come true, his estimate for the speeds that the air-ships will achieve is almost spot on. In the 1910s they could achieve 16 miles an hour, but by 1929 they had reached 63 mph and in Ford’s imagined world they reach 70 mph.10

Eventually, Major Edgar Wardlaw who has bemoaned the ‘reign of woman’ earlier in the book, heroically saves the town. The return of Wilson Renshaw ‘the most brilliant member of the House of Commons’ who had gone missing on a holiday to Egypt where he had been held captive, restores equilibrium to the nation.11 However, Ford is not content to finish the book here, rather he imposes an apocalyptic ending on his reader. Bath suffers an earthquake and the pinnacles of the Abbey church fall as the book ends dramatically with darkness ‘settl[ing] on the scene’12.
Ford’s futuristic imagining of Dover under attack is prescient. Just over four years after the book was published, a bomb dropped by a German plane landed on the rectory of St James.13 Two months before Ford died in May 1916, a dozen more bombs were dropped on St Mary’s Orphanage during a hostile air raid.14 By A.D. 1940, Dover was under attack again with shelling and bombing destroying parts of the town.15 However the Maison Dieu did not burn and the castle did not fall. A fragment of shrapnel which lodged in the table in the Mayor’s parlour after the fire station was hit in June 1945 serves as a reminder of Dover’s wartime history.

Banner image credit: The Night Patrol - Canadian Motor Torpedo Boats Entering Dover Harbour (CWM 19710261-0538), Albert Julius Olsson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

References

  1. ‘A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge, A.D. 1910’ Graphic, 31 March 1906. ↩︎

  2. Ford, Douglas Morey. The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman: A.D.1940 King, Sell and Olding Limited, 1910, p. 107. ↩︎

  3. Ford, p.115. ↩︎

  4. Ford, p.136. ↩︎

  5. Ford, p.82. ↩︎

  6. Ford, p.140. ↩︎

  7. “Air-ships” Alfreton Journal 21 January 1910. ↩︎

  8. Ford, 14. ↩︎

  9. Ford, 19. ↩︎

  10. Ford, 17. ↩︎

  11. Ford, p.i. ↩︎

  12. Ford, p.188. ↩︎

  13. ‘The Bomb at Dover.’ Gloucestershire Echo, 24 December 1914. ↩︎

  14. ‘Bomb on Dover Orphanage.’ Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion, 24 March 1916. ↩︎

  15. ‘Dover area shelled and bombed.’ Newcastle Journal, 12 September 1940. ↩︎