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10 THE king's yard
and puts on the airs of a post captain. Who the
devil is he?"
Queen Street, Prince George's Street, Chapel Row
and Havant Street were at this period the principal
streets on Portsmouth Common, still containing
much unoccupied land, and not grown into enough
importance to call itself the town of Portsea, though
no longer a common, for the houses erected by the
workmen belonging to the Yard had already made an
of it.
important place
Some seventy years before this time, in the reign
of good Queen Anne, when Sir John Gibson
was Governor of Portsmouth, the Dockyard men
had asserted their right to build upon this ground,
the Common
erecting for themselves houses upon
field so close to the line of fortifications as to mask
the guns, and so Sir John Gibson ordered the artisans
to stop their building.
"
No, no," replied the Dockyard men to the
Governor's demand, " we will build houses near to
our work, and if
need be, we will go to the extremest
lengths to assert our right to do so."
Now Governor Gibson was not the man to stand
talk of this sort— he was the Governor who, for
punishment, rode soldiers upon a wooden horse
in front of his own house in High Street, and who
kept his prisoners in that horrible dungeon that a