Ships in the Downs, guns on the shore: how Deal grew

Deal's history starts offshore. Between the beach and the Goodwin Sands lies a stretch of water called the Downs, sheltered by the sandbank from the worst of the open sea. For as long as ships have sailed between London and the Channel, this natural anchorage has been a place to wait for a fair wind, take on supplies or ride out a gale, and the town grew up to serve them.

The shore was in the record books early. Tradition holds that Julius Caesar's fleet came ashore on this beach in 55 BC, and a memorial on the Walmer seafront marks a landing place proposed in 1907. Excavations since 2015 have pointed to a site further north, so the honour is now disputed. Less doubtful is the Domesday Book of 1086, which lists a village called Addelam, and the year 1278, when Deal became a limb of the Cinque Ports, the alliance of south-east ports whose rights had been written into a royal charter in 1155.

In 1539, under threat of invasion, Henry VIII issued an order known as the 'device' for the defence of the realm. Its most striking result on this coast was a chain of three artillery forts guarding the anchorage: Sandown to the north, Deal in the middle and Walmer to the south, built in 1539–40 and linked by earthwork forts and a ditch and bank about two and a half miles long. Together they were known as the castles of the Downs.

Deal Castle, now cared for by English Heritage, has a squat, round keep wrapped in six inner and six outer bastions, giving 66 firing positions for artillery on four tiers, plus gunloops for handguns in the basement. The chalk and lime for its building came from a pit at Great Mongeham, a village now on the edge of town.

By 1570 the castle had only 17 guns, most of them unserviceable. On 21 October 1639 the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp attacked a Spanish fleet that had taken refuge in the Downs, sending in fireships; several large Spanish ships ran themselves aground to escape capture, and crowds who had gathered on the shore to watch plundered them. Nine years later, in the Second Civil War, Royalist insurgents seized Deal Castle. Deal was besieged from July 1648 and surrendered on 20 August, once news arrived of the Royalist defeat at Preston.

Supplying the ships anchored offshore was the town's great trade, and it lasted until steam replaced sail. The Deal boatmen, famous for their seamanship and courage, used luggers to take passengers out to the ships in the Downs and to land and board pilots. A naval storehouse for the anchored fleet was built in 1672 and remained until 1864. In 1699 William III granted a charter incorporating the town as the 'mayor, jurats and commonalty of Deal'.

The same anchorage could turn deadly. In the Great Storm of 26 November 1703, as the calendar then counted, more than a thousand seamen died on the Goodwin Sands alone. HMS Stirling Castle was wrecked there with the loss of 206 men; the Restoration, the Northumberland and the Mary went down with almost everyone on board. Daniel Defoe gathered eyewitness accounts of that night in The Storm, published the following year.

Deal's boatmen also had a less respectable trade. Smuggling peaked around 1737, and in 1784 a government expedition of soldiers smashed or burned the smugglers' boats.

The wars with France filled the Downs with the Royal Navy. Nelson is said to have stayed in 1801 at the Three Kings on Beach Street, now the Royal Hotel, and a letter of 17 September that year addressed to Lady Hamilton at the Three Kings survives in the National Maritime Museum. The hotel is the only building left of the many that once stood on the seaward side of Beach Street.

Down the coast, Walmer Castle had become the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports in 1728. William Pitt the Younger held the office from 1792 to 1806, much of that time as prime minister. The Duke of Wellington, Lord Warden from 1829, died at Walmer in 1852, and in 1842 he had lent the castle to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

On the seafront, a tower first used for a naval semaphore and then as the headquarters of the anti-smuggling coast blockade was converted in 1855 into the Timeball Tower. A ball on its roof dropped to give Greenwich time to the ships in the Downs, and it went on doing so until 1927.

The railway reached Deal on 1 July 1847, at the end of a branch line built by the South Eastern Railway. The line south to Dover had to wait until 15 June 1881, delayed by the rivalry between two railway companies until they agreed to build it together. In 1861 a Royal Marine Depot was established in the town, the start of well over a century of Marines in Deal.

Piers came and went. A first pier was begun in 1838 to plans by J. Rennie, but the money ran out after about 250 feet and a storm in 1857 threw the remains onto the beach. Eugenius Birch's iron pier, 1,100 feet long and built partly with stone from the ruined Sandown Castle, opened on 8 November 1864 and became a favourite for concerts and angling. Deal Town Council bought it in 1920.

The new century brought golf and coal. The Royal Cinque Ports links north of the town, laid out in the 1890s, hosted the Open in 1909 and 1920. Inland at Betteshanger, the first shaft of a new colliery was cut on 19 May 1924; about 1,500 miners and their families moved to Deal, and it became the biggest pit in Kent. In 1942 its men struck in the middle of the war, and three union officials were jailed before the government released them. Betteshanger was the last colliery in Kent to close, in 1989.

In 1930 the Royal Marines School of Music moved to Deal. Ten years later war came to the beach itself: in January 1940 the Dutch ship Nora, holed by a drifting mine, was towed ashore south of the pier, and the rising tide drove her through it. The army demolished what was left to clear a line of fire for coastal guns, and German bombs wrecked much of the captain's quarters at Deal Castle that November.

The town rebuilt. Its third pier, designed by Sir W. Halcrow and Partners in reinforced concrete and 1,026 feet long, was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on 19 November 1957, the first seaside pleasure pier of any size to be built since 1910. In 1968 Middle Street became Kent's first conservation area.

On 22 September 1989 an IRA bomb exploded at the Royal Marines School of Music in Walmer, killing 11 bandsmen. The Deal Memorial Bandstand on Walmer Green was built in their memory, and every July the Band of HM Royal Marines returns to play there to crowds of thousands. The school itself left for Portsmouth in 1996.