It is the delight of thousands every summer, a popular seaside town of the Isle of Wight, with seven miles of beach, an esplanade with trees and lawns and lovely gardens, a lake where young and old love to sail their model boats, and Puckpool Park reached by a little walk along the front past the Appley watch-tower. Puckpool Park was once a military fort, but today, instead of the tramp of soldiers, we hear the laughter of the holiday maker, and round about the ramparts, bastions, and gun-emplacements are tennis lawns and bowling greens and delightful woodlands. It over- looks Spithead, river and sea together, so that here has been witnessed the pageantry of naval history, the great ships coming to and going from Portsmouth and Southampton.

HMS SIRIUS
On 13 May, 1787, the first fleet sailed to Australia from the Motherbank, just off this shore. HMS Sirius was the principal naval consort for the first fleet which arrived in Sydney, Australia, on 26 January 1788. On a voyage to obtain provisions from Cape Town in South Africa to save the fledgling colony of New South Wales from starvation, HMS Sirius circumnavigated the globe. When she returned to Sydney she was in dire need of repair and so on 19 June 1789 she was taken to what is now known as Mosman Bay, Mosman, to be careened, repaired and refitted. She remained in Mosman Bay until 12 November 1789. HMS Sirius then sailed from Sydney to Norfolk Island with personnel and provisions. There she ran aground and was wrecked on 19 March 1790. Mosman Council New South Wales, Australia, commissioned three identical bas-reliefs of Hms Sirius from the sculptor, Alex Kolozsy, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the coming of Europeans to Mosman. The Mosman Community presented this bas-relief to the residents of the Borough of Medina. The other bas reliefs are sited at Mosman Bay and Norfolk Island. The Mayor of Mosman, Alderman P. C. Clive, together with Aldermen B. S. J. O'Keefe, A.M., Q.C and D. C. Brockhoff and the town clerk, Mr V. H. R. May, travelled from Australia for the unveiling ceremony

Ryde was one of the first places in England to have a pier, and now it has one of the most remarkable of all piers, three in one, running out for half a mile for trains, for trams, and for those who walk. All its churches are new. All Saints has a pulpit with saints and martyrs carved in alabaster, and a tall pinnacled tower tempting climbers with its magnificent view from the top; it is one of Sir Gilbert Scott's best works. The Roman Catholic St Mary's was designed by the designer of the hansom cab. Its pillars are painted; its blue chancel roof is picked out with golden stars; it has a tablet to Lady Hamilton, for 55 years a worshipper here; and a brass portrait of a lady kneeling near the pew in which she died kneeling in 1861. Over the altar is an excellent copy of the Crucifixion that hangs in the Sistine Chapel at Rome.

The theatre at Ryde is interesting because it stands on the site of an old theatre in which the famous Mrs Jordan appeared for the last time in England and Ellen Terry for the first time on the stage. Fielding the novelist stayed here to gain strength for that famous voyage to Lisbon in 1754 which he described in the last work he wrote.

In one of the climbing streets is a charming white house (now a hotel) which entertained an empress unawares. In the small hours of a September morning in 1870 a yacht stole up and anchored off the pier, and Mr Sadler of the York Hotel was awakened by urgent knocking at his door. He found two ladies and two gentlemen there, asking for the best suite of rooms he had. They left that night, and not till then did Mr Sadler know that he had sheltered the Empress Eugenie, who had escaped from France in Sir John Burgoyne's yacht.

That exciting journey had begun on the night the news of the catastrophe of Sedan reached Paris. The mob was crying for a Republic outside the Tuileries, and the empress was alone except for two foreign ambassadors, her attendant Madame le Breton, and the famous M. de Lesseps. There was only one hope of escape, by
way of the Louvre, with which there was continuous communication. Even so there was half a mile of corridors and picture galleries to pass; and on reaching the door to the Louvre the empress found it locked, and the key gone. The mob was hurling itself against the Tuilerics and all seemed lost till, with a stroke of genius, de Lesseps flung open the main doors and let the crowd stream in and through the building, and so out into the Place du Carrousel beyond.

In the meantime the missing key had been found and Eugenie and Madame le Breton reached the street and called a cab. As they did so an urchin cried, "Look, the Empress!" but his cry passed unnoticed and the cab drove off. Before they had gone far the ladies found that they had only half-a-crown between them, so, not daring to risk an altercation with their driver, they got out, gave him all their money, and continued on foot through the raging city.

Not one of the many doors at which they knocked was opened to them until they reached the house of Dr Evans, an American dentist. He sheltered them for the night and afterwards drove them, disguised, to Deauville, Eugenie pretending to be insane and on her way to an asylum. At Deauville they went aboard the yacht of Sir John Burgoyne and crossed in a terrible storm to the Isle of Wight. Arriving at Ryde in the middle of the night, the poor storm-tossed women looked so sadly disreputable that the proprietor of the York Hotel, called from his bed, hesitated about receiving them. Their stay was not long, for after a brief rest they passed on to Hastings to meet the Prince Imperial, just arrived after his own sensational escape

Text courtesy of: Southern Life (UK)