Jezreel’s tower, Gillingham, 1907

The postcard above is from Tom Phillips’ book, The Postcard Century and shows Jezreel’s tower which was a landmark of the north Kent coast until the early 60s. I was struck first of all by the distinctly modern looking architecture — and then startled in completely the opposite direction, on reading the caption:

February 18th [1907]. Lottie to Miss Hollands in Higham, Kent from Rochester. “Hope you will like this one of course dear you know the history of this place. The Jezreelites’ temple had no rooms but formed a huge ladder from which on the Latter Day they would be drawn up to heaven by their hair (which like their nails they never cut)”

So, it’s a Rapture thing. I’d never heard of the Jezreelites, as far as I can recall, but amongst millennial sects, they were apparently quite a tasty one.

Jezreel himself was born James White, around 1851, and became interested in the teachings of an earlier apocalyptic nutter, Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), while he was in the army. He joined and then took over a Southcottian sect in Chatham called the New House of Israel, and instructed his followers (who apparently numbered about 1,400 at one point) to build a temple according to specifications laid down in the book of Revelations: an immense cuboid structure, and it seems nothing went quite right with the project from beginning to end. He was persuaded to reduce the scale of the thing from 144 feet cubed to 124 feet square by 120 feet tall. Then he died (probably of alcohol related illness, although he forbade his sect from drinking) in 1885, before the foundations were even completed. The Jezreelites it seems, didn’t make a big deal of his passing: they expected resurrection within a fairly short time, and he was buried in an unmarked grave in Gilingham. HIs wife then took over the sect, and the project, and seems to be have been every bit as sane and well-balanced as her late spouse — she renamed herself Queen Esther at this point — but she too died a mere three years later, the sect crumbled, and the tower was left unfinished.

Even the company which first tried to demolish it went out of business before that got anywhere. It was finally demolished in 1962. The site of the tower is now taken up with a factory that makes Jubilee clips, or hose clamps. I’m not sure why I find this poignant, exactly, but I do.

There’s a photograph of the tower taken in about 1910 at Wikipedia; there’s a couple more pictures here.