Fort Clonque

An important base in the early days of steam ships

The advent of steam ships in the 1840s made the Channel Islands more strategically important for refuelling and therefore equally desirable to the French as the British. Fort Clonque is the most remarkable of Alderney’s great harbour defences, begun in 1847 and designed for ten 64-pounder guns in four open batteries, manned by two officers and 50 men. However, the rapid increase in range of steam ships made Clonque redundant in purpose almost as soon as it was completed and it was left disarmed but intact. The Germans, briefly, again sought to exploit the Fort’s strategic possibilities in the 1940s.

Marine views second to none

At high tide the Fort is cut off from the rest of the island. The accommodation is spread across several different buildings. On calm days the sea can be heard all around the Fort, which sleeps up to 13 people. There are spectacular views of the other islands, rocks and stacks and two great colonies of gannets, which fish round the fort. Most forts are often large and grim but Clonque, ingeniously contrived on many levels, is small, open and picturesque, interspersed with stretches of grass and samphire. Any cold or damp, characteristic of such a fort, will be more than compensated for by the delight of its spectacular setting.  The rest of Alderney is also extremely pleasant, just small enough to be explored entirely on foot or very easily by bicycle. All the Victorian and German defence works are interesting, the beaches at the north end are exceptional and in the centre is St Anne, a very pretty little town, English with a hint of France.

The design of all these works was placed in the hands of a rising young star of the Royal Engineers, Captain William Jervois. A man of great physical energy and considerable resourcefulness (he went on to a distinguished career as Governor-General successively of the Straits Settlements, South Australia and New Zealand), he was able to work on a massive scale, using vast quantities of the local granite, and at the same time devoted great attention to detail. Fort Clonque, when complete, housed 55 men with two officers, in charge of a battery of ten guns.

Within a few years of its completion, however, the island fortifications were made collectively obsolete by the coming of the steam-powered ‘ironclads’. The superior speed and range of these warships meant that they could in an emergency reach the ports on the south coast of England, and no longer needed the shelter and defence offered by Alderney. Only a little more than twenty years after their completion the army lost all interest in the island. The harbour was never finished, and the forts were disarmed. By the turn of the century Fort Clonque had become a private residence, and began quietly to deteriorate.

For most of World War II, the German forces occupied Alderney, and naturally took over the forts. Fort Clonque was equipped with machine-gun posts and a massive bunker, though it does not seem to have been engaged in military activity. At the end of the war the buildings were left derelict and ruinous, and their owners (Mr. and Mrs. Duplain) laboured over the herculean task of repairing them. But the task was more than they could cope with. In 1966 the Landmark Trust purchased the fort, and the years of restoration began.

The bunker was full of rubbish, only one original window had survived in ‘Officers’, roofs were sagging, and cast iron girders were rusting away. The old bricks had been made in the local brickworks from island clay and were of poor quality. All the stone and wood used in the repairs was salvaged: the oak floorboards in the living room of ‘Soldiers’ came from Fort Tourgis, for example, while the ‘Officers’ fireplaces came from Fort Albert. New doors were made, with handles produced specially by a Guernsey blacksmith.

The main task that faced the Trust, and its architect Philip Jebb, was the undoing of the extensive damage done to the fort by the Germans, in their indiscriminate use of concrete, asphalt and barbed wire. In addition to this, the aim was to reinstate the exterior of the fort to its original Victorian appearance – except for the bunker, which was anyway pretty well indestructible, and which now serves as a bedroom. The light and pleasant rooms inside the two barrack buildings were also to be restored, but modernised as necessary.

The difficulties of managing such a project, on what is virtually an island off an island, were formidable. All materials and equipment had to be specially transported to the fort by sea. Moreover, what could be done on any given day depended entirely on the weather, and especially on the wind which in Alderney can rise in an hour or two to a force to which it is impossible to stand up. Even the provision of basic services presented quite a problem. For many years water came from a spring on the shore, to be stored in a large tank. And only in 1990 was the fort connected to the island’s electricity supply, candles and gas having previously supplied all light and heat.

Some of the work had to be done by a regular contractor, but much else could be done – and would best be done – in a more gradual way. For instance, it was essential that all concrete be removed without causing damage to the blocks of granite that had been set carelessly in it, so that they could be reused. By the greatest good fortune, just at the point in 1967 when Landmark was considering how to achieve this, Arthur Markell retired from his post as supervisor of the Admiralty Breakwater.

Arthur Markell – ‘a man who really knows what life means, and who shows it in the work he is doing’ – had exactly the experience and skills the Trust needed, and he was employed at once. In 1984, after having worked for the Trust for some sixteen years or more, he was described as ‘an incredible good 79 years .. and having been a civil engineer can turn his hand to most things... his woodwork is of cabinet-maker standard.’ (He was nothing if not versatile: he also taught piano and had played in good hotels in London as part of dinnertime entertainment, as well as in the local cinema.) He was also said ‘always to have a smile on his face’ and to be ‘a perfectionist in everything that he did – the material for every job was carefully chosen and nothing but the right material would do, and the position of every screw and nail was precisely measured before insertion’, ‘you couldn’t imagine a better man for the job’. Throughout the restoration of the Fort he kept a diary in which he recorded every day the weather, the comings and goings of visitors and the maintenance and restoration tasks he had carried out on the Fort that day. With the help of an assistant, Mr. Markell was largely responsible for all the long and arduous work of clearing up the fort, rebuilding parapets and repointing walls, renewing windows and doors, fitting new bathrooms and kitchens, and painting walls. A team of builders, a maximum of five at any one time, was brought in only when it was necessary: to clear the unwanted concrete with pneumatic hammers, to renew the drawbridge, the ramp and the roofs of the barrack buildings (for which the original formula of lime cement poured over brick vaults to form a flat surface was reproduced) or to repair some of the vertiginous outer walls. Unfortunately, after Mr. Markell had carried out substantial repairs to the walls of Battery no. 3, the natural bridge that connected it to the rest of the rock collapsed during a storm in 1967, and that battery is no longer accessible. The collapse came as a shock to Mr. Duplain and caused him considerable anxiety, as he was afraid that the Trust might have suspected him of knowing the weakness of the arch, and concealing his knowledge.

Working with Victorian buildings of any sort teaches two main lessons: first, not to be afraid, indeed to be sure, of using a large scale, because they loved to – and in military buildings more than most; and, secondly, to be thorough about detail, because theirs was perhaps the supreme age of detailing, and a repair will look right only if done correspondingly well. This has been true at each of the buildings of this type that Landmark has restored – Crownhill Fort at Plymouth, the West Blockhouse at Dale in Dyfed, and especially here, at Fort Clonque.