HOUNSLOW
Image unavailable: THE ‘BELL,’ HOUNSLOW.
THE ‘BELL,’ HOUNSLOW.
Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated, like all the other places between this and Hyde Park Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as on the road to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the book on that highway. Coming to the place again, there seems no reason to alter or add much to what was said in those pages. The long, long uninteresting street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few houses of any note facing it are fewer. There remains, it is true, that old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ modernised with discretion, and at the parting of the ways the gallows-like sign of the ‘Bell’ still keeps its place on the footpath, with the old original bell still depending from it, although, at the moment of writing, the house itself is being pulled down. But the angle where the roads divide is under revision, and the hoardings that now hide from sight the old shops and the red-brick house, with high-pitched roof and dormer windows, that has stood here so long, will give place shortly to some modern building with plate-glass shop-fronts and a general air of aggressive modernity which will be another link gone with the Hounslow of the past. Thus it is that an illustration is shown here of the ‘parting of the ways’ before the transformation is complete; for although the fork of the roads leading to places so distant from this point, and from one another, as Bath and Exeter must needs always lend something to the imagination, yet a commonplace modern street building cannot, for another hundred years, command respect or be worth sketching, even for the sake of the significant spot on which it stands.
The would-be decorative gas-lamp that stands here in the centre of the road bears two tin tablets inscribed respectively, ‘To Slough’ and ‘To Staines,’ in a somewhat parochial fashion. They had no souls, those people who inscribed these legends. Did they not know that we stand here upon highways famed in song and story; not merely the flat and uninteresting seven and ten miles respectively to Staines and Slough, but the hundred and fifty-five miles to Exeter and the ninety-five miles to Bath?
Here, then, we see the Bath Road going off to the
AN OLD COACHMAN
Image unavailable: HOUNSLOW: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
HOUNSLOW: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
right and the Exeter Road to the left in semi-suburban fashion. Had it not been for the winter fogs this level stretch would have invariably been the delight of the old coachmen; but when the roads were wrapped in obscurity they were hard put to it to keep on the highway. Sometimes they did not even succeed in doing so, but drove instead into the noisome ditches, filled with evil-smelling black mud, which at that time divided the road from Hounslow Heath.
Charles Ward, whom the coaching critics of his age united to honour as an artist with ‘the ribbons,’ drove the famous Exeter ‘Telegraph’ the thirty miles to Bagshot, reaching that village usually at 11 P.M., and taking the up coach from thence to London at four o’clock in the morning. He tells how in the winter the mails had often to be escorted out of London with flaring torches, seven or eight mails following one another, the guard of the foremost lighting the one following, and so on, travelling at a slow pace, like a funeral procession. ‘Many times,’ he says, ‘I have been three hours going from London to Hounslow. I remember one very foggy night, instead of arriving at Bagshot at eleven o’clock, I did not get there till one in the morning. On my way back to town, when the fog was very bad, I was coming over Hounslow Heath, when I reached the spot where the old powder-mills used to stand. I saw several lights in the road and heard voices which induced me to stop. The old Exeter mail, which left Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had met with a singular accident. It was driven by a man named Gambier; his leaders had come in contact with a hay-cart on its way to London, which caused them to suddenly turn round, break the pole, and blunder down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which was a narrow deep ditch, filled with water and mud. The mail coach pitched on the stump of a willow tree that overhung the ditch; the coachman and the outside passengers were thrown over into the meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch. The unfortunate wheelers were drowned or smothered in the mud. There were two inside passengers, who were extricated with some difficulty, but fortunately no one was injured. I managed to take the passengers with the guard and mail bags on to London, leaving the coachman to wait for daylight before he could make an attempt to get the mail up the embankment. They endeavoured to accomplish this with cart horses and chains, and they had nearly reached the top of the bank when something gave way, and the poor old mail went back into the ditch again. I shall never forget the scene. There were about a dozen men from the powder-mills trying to render assistance, and with their black faces, each bearing a torch in his hand, they presented a curious spectacle. This happened about 1840. Posts and rails were erected at the spot after the accident. I passed the place in 1870, and they were there still, as well as the old pollard willow stump.’
HIGHWAYMEN
The old-time associations of Hounslow Heath are almost forgotten now, for, where Claude du Vall and Dick Turpin waited patiently for travellers, there are nowadays long rows of suburban villas which have long since changed the dreary scene. Nothing so romantic as the meeting of the lawyer with the redoubtable Dick is likely to befall the traveller in these times:—
As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,
A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,
Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraid
Of Turpin, that mischievous blade?’
‘Oh! no, sir,’ says Turpin, ‘I’ve been more acute,
I’ve hidden my money all in my boot.’
‘And mine,’ says the lawyer, ‘the villain can’t find,
For I have sewed it into my cape behind.’
They rode till they came to the Powder Mill,
When Turpin bid the lawyer for to stand still.
‘Good sir,’ quoth he, ‘that cape must come off,
For my horse stands in need of a saddle-cloth.’
‘Ah, well,’ says the lawyer, ‘I’m very compliant,
I’ll put it all right with my next coming client.’
‘Then,’ says Turpin, ‘we’re both of a trade, never doubt it,
Only you rob by law, and I rob without it.’
The last vestige is gone of the bleak and barren aspect of the road, and even the singular memorial of a murder, which, according to the writer of a road-book published in 1802, stood near by, has vanished: ‘Upon a spot of Hounslow Heath, about a stone’s throw from the road, on leaving that village, a small wood monument is shockingly marked with a bloody hand and knife, and the following inscription: “Buried with a stake through his body here, the wicked murderer, John Pretor, who cut the throat of his wife and child, and poisoned himself, July 6, 1765.”
It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence to Staines, and the fact is sufficiently well known for it to be crowded on Saturday afternoons and Sundays with cyclists of the ‘scorcher’ variety, members of cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their pleasure at sixteen miles an hour, Indian file, hanging on to one another’s back wheel, with shoulders humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but the road surface.
Image unavailable: THE ‘GREEN MAN,’ HATTON.
THE ‘GREEN MAN,’ HATTON.
HATTON
But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these highway crowds never come. Just such a lane is that which leads off here, by the river Crane and the Bedfont Powder Mills, to the right, and makes for Hatton—‘Hatton-in-the-Hinterland,’ one might well call it.
Have you ever been to Hatton? Have you, indeed, ever even heard of it? I suppose not, for Hatton is a remote hamlet, tucked away in that triangular corner of Middlesex situated between the branching Bath and Exeter Roads which is practically unexplored. Yet the place, after the uninteresting, unrelieved flatness of the market gardens that stretch for miles around, is almost pretty. It boasts a few isolated houses, and has (what is more to the point in this connection) a neat and cheerful-looking old inn, fronted by a large horse-pond.
The ‘Green Man’ at Hatton looks nowadays a guileless place, with no secrets, and yet it possesses behind that innocent exterior a veritable highwayman’s hiding-place. This retiring-place of modest worth, eager to escape from the embarrassing attentions of the outer world, may be seen by the curious traveller in the little bar-parlour on the left hand as you enter the front door.
It is a narrow, low-ceiled room, with an old-fashioned fire-grate in it, filling what was once a huge chimney-corner. At the back of this grate is a hole leading to a passage which gives access to a cavernous nook in the thickness of the wall. Through this hole, decently covered at most times with an innocent-looking fire-back, crawled those exquisite knights of the road, what time the Bow Street runners were questing almost at their heels.
And here, it is related, one of these fine fellows nearly revealed his presence while the officers of the law were refreshing themselves with a dram in that room. What with a cold in the head, and the accumulated soot and dust of his hiding-place, he could not help sneezing, although his very life depended on the question ‘To sneeze or not to sneeze.’
Image unavailable: THE HIGHWAYMAN’S RETREAT, THE ‘GREEN MAN.’
THE HIGHWAYMAN’S RETREAT, THE ‘GREEN MAN.’
The minions of the law were not so far gone in liquor but that they heard the muffled sound of that sneeze, and it took all the landlord’s eloquence to persuade them that it was the cat!
MARKET GARDENS
Where footpads and highwaymen lurked on the scrubby heath, and the troopers of King James the Second, sent here to overawe London, lay encamped, there stretch nowadays the broad market gardens, where in spring-time the yellow daffodils, and in early summer the wallflowers, are grown by the acre for Covent Garden and the delight of Londoners. Orchards and vast fields of vegetables take up almost all the rest of the reclaimed waste, and if the country for many miles be indeed as flat as, or flatter than, your hand, and with never a tree but the scraggy hedgerow elms that grow here in such fantastic shapes, why amends are made in the scent of the blossoms, the bounteous promise of nature, and in the free and open air that resounds with the gladsome shrilling of the lark.
These market gardens that surround London have an interest all their own. Such scenes as that of Millet’s ‘Angelus’—the rough toil, that is to say, without the devotion—are the commonplaces of these wide fields, stretching away, level, to the horizon. All day long the men, women, and children are working, according to the season, in the damp, heavy clay, or in the sun-baked rows of growing produce, digging, hoeing, sowing, weeding, or gathering the cabbages, potatoes, peas, lettuces, and beans that go to furnish the myriad tables of the ‘Wen of wens,’ as Cobbett savagely calls London. He thought very little of Hounslow Heath, which he describes as ‘a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look. Yet,’ he says, writing in 1825, ‘all this is now enclosed, and what they call “cultivated.”’
What they call cultivated! That is indeed excellent. It would be well if Cobbett could take a ‘Rural Ride’ over the Heath to-day and see this cultivation, not merely so called, which raises some of the finest market-garden produce ever seen, and supplies London with the most beautiful spring blossoms. If it would not suffice to see the growing crops, it would perhaps be better to watch the loading of the clumsy market waggons with the gathered wealth of the soil. Tier upon tier of cabbages, neatly packed to an alarming height; bundles of the finest lettuces; bushels of peas; in short, a bounteous quantity of every domestic vegetable you care to name, being packed for the lumbering, rumbling, three-miles-an-hour journey overnight from the market gardens to the early morning babel of Covent Garden.
The market waggons, going to London, or returning about eight o’clock in the morning, form, in short, one of the most characteristic features of the first fifteen miles of this road. The waggoners, more often than not asleep, are jogged up to town by the philosophic horses who know the way just as well as the blinking fellows who are supposed to drive them. Drive them? One can just imagine the horse-laughs of those particularly knowing animals, who move along quite independently of the reclining figure above, stretched full length, face downwards, on the mountainous pile of smelly cabbages, if the idea could be conveyed to them.
A REFORMATORY
There is an exquisite touch of appropriateness in the fact that on converted Hounslow Heath, where these terrors of the peaceful traveller formerly practised their unlicensed trade, reformatories should be nowadays established. One of them, called by the prettier name of the ‘Feltham Industrial School,’ is placed just to the south of the road, near East Bedfont. It houses and educates for honest careers the young criminals and the waifs and strays brought before the Middlesex magistrates. The neighbourhood of this huge institution is made evident to the traveller across these wide-spreading levels by the strange sight of a full-sized, fully-rigged ship on the horizon. The stranger who journeys this way and has always supposed Hounslow Heath to be anything rather than the neighbour to a seaport, feels in some doubt as to the evidence of his senses or the accuracy of his geographical recollections. Strange, he thinks, that he should have forgotten the sea estuary on which the Heath borders, or the ship canal that traverses these wilds. But if he inquires of any one with local knowledge whom he may meet, he will learn that this is the model training-ship built in the grounds of the Industrial School. The ‘Endeavour,’ as she is called, if not registered A1 at Lloyd’s, or not at all a seaworthy craft, is at any rate well found in the technical details of masts and spars, and the rigging appropriate to a schooner-rigged Blackwall liner. Those among the seven hundred or so of the young vagabonds who are being educated here in the way they should go—those among them who think they would like a life on the bounding main, are here taught to climb the rigging with the agility of cats; to furl the sails or shake them free, or to keep a sharp look-out for the iron reefs that lurk on the inhospitable coasts of Hounslow Heath, lest all on board should be cast away and utterly undone. It is an odd experience to walk around the great hull, half submerged—half buried, that is to say—in the asphalt paths of the parade ground, but the oddest experiences must be those of the boys who, when they get aboard a floating ship, come to it thoroughly trained in everything save ‘sea-legs’ and the keeping of an easy stomach when the breezes blow and the surges rock the vessel.
The village of East Bedfont, three miles from Hounslow, is a picturesque surprise, after the long flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out here, and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond, and real ducks! and an even more real village church whose wooden extinguisher spire peeps out from a surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a couple of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard gate.
THE BEDFONT PEACOCKS
The ‘Bedfont Peacocks,’ as they are called, are not so perfect as they were when first cut in 1704, for the trimming of them was long neglected, and these curiously clipped evergreens require constant attention. The date on one side, and the churchwardens’ initials of the period on the other, once standing out boldly, are now only to be discerned by the Eye of Faith. The story of the Peacocks is that they were cut at the costs and charges of a former inhabitant of the village, who, proposing in turn to two sisters also living here, was scornfully refused by them. They were, says the legend, ‘as proud as peacocks,’ and the mortified suitor chose this spiteful method of typifying the fact. Of course, the story was retailed to travellers on passing through Bedfont by every coachman and guard; nor, indeed, would it be at all surprising to learn that they, in fact, really invented it, for they were masters in the art of romancing. So the Fame of the Peacocks grew. An old writer at once celebrates them, and the then landlord of the ‘Black Dog,’ in the rather neat verse:—
Harvey, whose inn commands a view
Of Bedfont’s church and churchyard too,
Where yew-trees into peacock’s shorn,
In vegetable torture mourn.
Image unavailable: EAST BEDFONT.
EAST BEDFONT.
At length they were immortalised by Hood, the elder, in a quite serious poem:—
Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvet wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod;
There, gentle stranger, thou may’st only see
Two sombre peacocks. Age, with sapient nod,
Marking the spot, still tarries to declare
How once they lived, and wherefore they are there.
Alas! that breathing vanity should go
Where pride is buried; like its very ghost,
Unrisen from the naked bones below,
In novel flesh, clad in the silent boast
Of gaudy silk that flutters to and fro,
Shedding its chilling superstition most
On young and ignorant natures as is wont
To haunt the peaceful churchyard of Bedfont!
If any one can unravel the sense from the tangled lines of the second verse,—as obscure as some of Browning’s poetry—let him account himself clever.
The ‘Black Dog,’ once the halting-place of the long extinct ‘Driving Club,’ of which the late Duke of Beaufort was a member, has recently been demolished. A large villa stands on the site of it, at the corner of the Green, as the village is left behind.
STAINES
The flattest of flat, and among the straightest of straight, roads is this which runs from East Bedfont into Staines. That loyal bard, John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet,’ was along this route on his way to the Isle of Wight in 1647. He started from the ‘Rose,’ in Holborn, on Thursday, 19th October, in the Southampton coach:—
We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses,
We wheel’d the top of the heavy hill call’d Holborn
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne),
And so along we jolted to St. Giles’s,
Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is,
To Staines that night at five o’clock we coasted,
Where, at the Bush, we had bak’d, boil’d, and roasted.
Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London, is, in fact, of that nondescript—‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red-herring’—character that belongs to places situated in the marches of town and country. Almost everything of interest has vanished, and although the railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with it the life and bustle that are generally conferred by railways on places near London. But, of course, Staines is on the London and South-Western Railway, which explains everything.
Staines disputes with Colnbrook, on the Bath Road, the honour of having been the Roman station of Ad Pontes, and has the best of it, according to the views of the foremost authorities. ‘At the Bridges’ would doubtless have been an excellently descriptive name for either place, in view of the number of streams at both, and the bridges necessary to cross them; but the very name of Staines should of itself be almost sufficient to prove the Roman origin of the place, even if the Roman remains found in and about it were not considered conclusive evidence. There are those who derive ‘Staines’ from the ancient stone still standing on the north bank of the Thames, above the bridge, marking the historic boundary up-stream of the jurisdiction exercised over the river by the City of London; but there can be no doubt of its real origin in the paved Roman highway, a branch of the Akeman Street, on which this former military station of Ad Pontes stood. The stones of the old road yet remained when the Saxons overran the country, and it was named ‘the Stones’ by that people, from the fact of being on a paved highway. The very many places in this county with the prefixes, Stain, Stone, Stan, Street, Streat, and Stret, all, or nearly all, originate in the paved Roman roads (or ‘streets’) and fords; and there is little to support another theory, that the name of Staines came from a Roman milliarium, or milestone, which may or may not have stood somewhere here on the road.
STAINES STONE
The stone column, very like a Roman altar, standing on three steps and a square panelled plinth, and placed in a meadow on the north bank of the river, is known variously as ‘Staines Stone,’ and ‘London Stone.’ It marks the place where the upper and lower Thames meet; is the boundary line of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire; and is also the boundary mark of the Metropolitan Police District. Besides these manifold and important offices, it also delimits the western boundary of the area comprised within the old London Coal and Wine Duties Acts, by which a tax, similar to the octroi still in force at the outskirts of many Continental towns, was levied on all coals, coke, and cinders, and all wines, entering London. Renewed from time to time, the imposts were finally abolished in 1889, but the old posts with cast-iron inscriptions detailing the number and date of the several Acts of Parliament under which these dues were levied, are still to be found beside the roads, rivers, and canals around London.
Much weather-worn and dilapidated, ‘London Stone’ still retains long inscriptions giving the names of the Lord Mayors who have officially visited the spot as ex-officio chairmen of the Thames Conservancy;—
Conservators of Thames from mead to mead,
Great guardians of small sprites that swim the flood,
Warders of London Stone,
as Tom Hood mock-heroically sings.
Above all is the deeply cut aspiration, ‘God Preserve the City of London, A.D. 1280.’ The pious prayer has been answered, and six hundred and twenty years later the City has been, like David, delivered out of the hands of the spoiler and from the enemies that compassed it round about; by which Royal Commissions and the London County Council may be understood.
Image unavailable: THE STAINES STONE.
THE STAINES STONE.
AD PONTES
If the Roman legionaries could return to Ad Pontes and see Staines Bridge and the hideous iron girder bridge by which the London and South-Western Railway crosses the Thames they would be genuinely astonished. The first-named, which is the stone bridge built by Rennie in 1832, carries the Exeter Road over the river, and is of a severe classic aspect which might find favour with the resurrected Romans; but what could they think of the other?
We may see an additional importance in this situation of Ad Pontes in the fact that between Staines Bridge and London Bridge there was anciently no other passage across the river, save by the hazardous expedient of fording it at certain points. The only way to the West of England in medi?val times, it was then of wood, and zealously kept in repair by the grant of trees from the Royal Forest of Windsor and by the pontage, or bridge toll levied from passengers. Still, it was often broken down by floods. The poet Gay, in his Journey to Exeter, says, passing Hounslow:—
Thence, o’er wide shrubby heaths, and furrowed lanes,
We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines.
We ferried o’er; for late the Winter’s flood
Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood.
That would probably have been about the year 1720. In 1791 an Act of Parliament authorised the building of a new bridge, and accordingly a stone structure was begun, and eventually opened in 1797. This had to be demolished, almost immediately, owing to a failure of one of its piers, and an iron bridge was built in its stead, presently to meet with much the same fate. This, then, gave place to the existing bridge.
The ‘Vine Inn,’ which once stood by the bridge and was a welcome sight to travellers, has disappeared, together with most of the old hostelries that once rendered Staines a town of inns. Gone, too, is the ‘Bush,’ and others, although not demolished, have either retired into private life, or are disguised as commonplace shops. The ‘Angel’ still remains, but not the ‘Blue Boar,’ kept, according to Dean Swift, by the quarrelsome couple, Phyllis and John. Phyllis had run away from home on her wedding morn with John, who was her father’s groom, and a good-for-naught. At the inn they were installed at last, John as the drunken landlord, Phyllis as the kind landlady:—
They keep at Staines the Old Blue Boar,
Are cat and dog—
and other things unfitted for ears polite.
The church is without interest, but there lies in its churchyard, among the other saints and sinners, Lady Letitia Lade, the foul-mouthed cast-off chère amie of the Prince Regent, who married her off to John Lade, his coachman, whom he knighted for his complaisance.
RUNEMEDE
Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb—dusty, uninteresting. The old church has been modernised, and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in its old form—the ‘Catherine Wheel’—has recently lost all its old roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.
Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great Park, and a road turning off to the right hand leads beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past Cooper’s Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta island, where the ‘Palladium of our English liberties’ was wrung from the unwilling King John. A public reference to the ‘Palladium’ used unfailingly to ‘bring down the house,’ but it has been left to the present generation to view the very spot where it was granted, not only without a quickening of the pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You cannot expect reverence from people who possibly saw King John as the central and farcical figure of last year’s pantomime, with a low-comedy nose and an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna Charta to baronial supers armoured with polished metal dish-covers for breastplates and saucepans for helmets. ‘Nothing is sacred to a sapper,’ is a saying that arose in Napoleon’s campaigns. Let us, in these piping times of peace, change the figure, and say, ‘Nothing is sacred to a librettist.’
Long years before Egham ever became a coaching village, in the dark ages of road travel, when inns were scarce and travellers few, the ‘Bells of Ouseley,’ the old-fashioned riverside inn along this bye-road, was a place of greater note than it is now. Although forgotten by the crowds who keep the high-road, it is an inn happier in its situation than most, for it stands on the banks of the Thames at one of its most picturesque points, just below Old Windsor.
Image unavailable: THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY.’
THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY.’
The sign, showing five bells on a blue ground, derives its name from the once-famed bells of the long-demolished Oseney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated, before the Reformation swept them away, for their silvery tones, which are said to have surpassed even those
Bells of Shandon
Which sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lea,
THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY’
of which ‘Father Prout’ sang some forty-five years ago. The abbey, however, possessed six bells. They were named Douce, Clement, Austin, Hauctetor, Gabriel, and John.
The ‘Bells of Ouseley’ had at one time a reputation for a very much less innocent thing than picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago, or thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class of footpads, who were used to waylay travellers by the shore, or on the old Bath and Exeter Roads, and, robbing them, were not content, but, practically applying the axiom that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ gave their victims a knock over the head, and, tying them in sacks, heaved them into the river. These be legends, and legends are not always truthful, but it is a fact that, some years ago, when the Thames Conservancy authorities were dredging the bed of the river just here, they found the remains of a sack and the perfect skeleton of a human being.
Regarding the country through which the road passes, between Kensington, Egham, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith and Egham it is ‘as flat as a pancake,’ and the soil ‘a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of gravel.’ Sunninghill and Sunningdale, ‘all made into “grounds” and gardens by tax-eaters,’ are at the end of a ‘blackguard heath,’ and are ‘not far distant from the Stock-jobbing crew. The roads are level, and they are smooth. The wretches can go from the “‘Change” without any danger to their worthless necks.’
There are now, sad to say, after the lapse of nearly eighty years, a great many more of the ‘crew’ here, and they journey to and from Capel Court with even less danger to their necks, bad luck to them!
Egham Hill surmounted, the Holloway College for Women is a prominent object on the left-hand side of the road, the fad of Thomas Holloway, whose thumping big fortune was derived from the advertising enterprise which lasted wellnigh two generations, and during the most of that period rendered the advertisement columns of London and provincial papers hideous with beastly illustrations of suppurating limbs, and the horrid big type inquiry, ‘Have you a Bad Leg?’ Pills and ointments, what sovereign specifics you are—towards the accumulation of wealth! All-powerful unguents, how beneficent—towards the higher education of woman!
VIRGINIA WATER
No less a sum than ￡600,000 was expended on the building and equipment of this enormous range of buildings, opened in 1887, and provided royally with everything a college requires except students, whose number yet falls far short of the three hundred and fifty the place is calculated to house and teach. A fine collection of the works of modern English painters is to be seen here, where study is made easy for the ‘girl graduates’ by the provision of luxuriously appointed class-rooms and shady nooks where ‘every pretty domina can study the phenomena’ of integral calculus and other domestic sciences. It seems a waste of good money that, although a sum equal to ￡500 a year for each student is expended on the higher education of women here, no prophetess has yet issued from Egham with a message for the world; and that, consequently, Mr. Thomas Holloway and his medicated grease have as yet missed that posthumous fame for which so big a bid was made.
In two miles Virginia Water is reached, passing on the right hand the plantations of Windsor Great Park. To this spot runs every day in summer-time the ‘Old Times’ coach, which, first put on this road in the spring of 1879, kept running every season until 1886, when it was transferred to the Brighton Road, there to become famous through Selby’s historic ‘record’ drive. Another coach, called the ‘Express,’ was put on the Virginia Water trip in 1886 and 1887; but, following upon Selby’s death in the November of the latter year, the ‘Old Times’ was reinstated on this route, and has been running ever since, leaving the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, every week-day morning for the ‘Wheatsheaf,’ and returning in the evening.
This same ‘Wheatsheaf’ is probably one of the very ugliest houses that ever bedevilled a country road, and looks like a great public-house wrenched bodily from London streets and dropped down here at a venture. But it is for all that a very popular place with the holiday-makers who come here to explore the beauties and the curiosities of Virginia Water.
There are artificial lakes here, just within the Park of Windsor—lakes which give the place its name, and made so long ago that Nature in her kindly way has obliterated all traces of their artificiality. It is a hundred years since this pleasance of Virginia Water was formed by imprisoning the rivulets that run into this hollow, and banking up the end of it; nearly a hundred years since the Ruined Temple was built as a ready-made ruin; and there is no more, nor indeed any other such, delightful spot near London. It is quite a pity to come by the knowledge that the ruins were imported from Greece and Carthage, because without that knowledge who knows what romance could not be weaved around those graceful columns, amid the waters and the wilderness? Beyond Virginia Water we come to Sunningdale.
ROMAN ROADS
From Turnham Green to Staines, and thence to Shrub’s Hill we are on the old Roman Road to that famous town which has been known at different periods of its existence as Aquae Solis, Akemanceaster, and Bath. The Saxons called the road Akeman Street. Commencing at a junction with the Roman Watling Street at the point where the Marble Arch now stands, it proceeded along the Bayswater Road, and so by Notting Hill, past Shepherd’s Bush, and along the Goldhawk Road, where, instead of turning sharply to the left like the existing road that leads to Young’s Corner, it continued its straight course through the district now occupied by the modern artistic colony of Bedford Park, falling into the present Chiswick High Road somewhere between Turnham Green and Gunnersbury. Through Brentford, Hounslow, and Staines the last vestiges of the actual Roman Road were lost in the alterations carried out for the improvement of the highway under the provisions of the Hounslow and Basingstoke Road Improvement Act of 1728, but there can be little doubt that the road traffic of to-day from Hounslow to Shrub’s Hill follows in the tracks of the pioneers who built the original road in A.D. 43; while as for old-world Brentford, it would surprise no one if the veritable Roman paving were found deep down below its High Street, long buried in the silt and mud that have raised the level of the highway at the ford from which the place-name derives.
The present West of England road turns off from the Akeman Street at the bend in the highway at Shrub’s Hill, leaving the Roman way to continue in an unfaltering straight line across the scrubby wastes and solitudes of Broadmoor, to Finchampstead, Stratfieldsaye, and Silchester. It is there known to the country folk as the ‘Nine Mile Ride’ and the ‘Devil’s Highway.’ The prefix of the place-name ‘Stratfieldsaye,’ as a matter of fact, derives from its situation on this ‘street.’ Silchester is the site of the Roman city Calleva Atrebatum, and the excavated ruins of this British Pompeii prove how important a place this was, standing as it did at the fork of the roads leading respectively to Aquae Solis, and to Isca Damnoniorum, the Exeter of a later age. Branching off here to Isca, the Roman road was for the rest of the way to the West known as the Via Iceniana, the Icen Way, and was perhaps regarded as a continuation of what is now called the Icknield Street, the road which runs diagonally to Norfolk and Suffolk, the country of the Iceni.
Very little of this old Roman road on its way to the West is identical with any of the three existing routes to Exeter. There is that length just named, from Gunnersbury to Shrub’s Hill; another piece, a mile or so from Andover onward, by the Weyhill route; the crossing of the modern highway between ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Thorney Down; and from Dorchester to Bridport, where, as Gay says of his cavaliers’ journey to Exeter:—
Now on true Roman way our horses sound,
Graevius would kneel and kiss the sacred ground.
Onwards to Exeter the measurements of Antoninus and his fellows—those literally ‘classic’ forerunners of Ogilby, Cary, Paterson, and Mogg—are hazy in the extreme, and it is difficult to say how the Roman road entered into the Queen City of the West.
Oh! for one hour with the author of the Antonine Itinerary, to settle the vexed questions of routes and stations along this road to the country of the Damnonii. ‘Here,’ one would say to him, ‘is your starting-point, Londinium, which we call London. Very good; now kindly tell us whether we are correct in giving Staines as the place you call Ad Pontes; and is Egham the site of Bibracte? Calleva we have identified with Silchester, but where was your next station, Vindomis? Was it St. Mary Bourne?’
THE HEATHS
In the meanwhile, until spiritualism becomes more of an exact science, we must be content with our own deductions, and, with the aid of the Ordnance map, trace the Roman Via Iceniana by Quarley Hill and Grateley to the hill of Old Sarum, which is readily identified as the station of Sorbiodunum. Thence it goes by Stratford Toney to ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Gussage Cow Down, where the utterly vanished Vindogladia is supposed to have stood. Between this and Dorchester there was another post whose name and position are alike unknown, although the course of the road may yet be faintly traced past the fortified hill of Badbury Rings, the Mons Badonicus of King Arthur’s defeat, to Tincleton and Stinsford, and so into Dorchester, the Durnovaria of the Romans, through what was the Eastgate of that city. The names and sites of two more stations westward are lost, and the situation of Moridunum, the next-named post, is so uncertain that such widely sundered places as Seaton, on the Dorset coast, and Honiton, in Devon, eighteen miles farther, are given for it. Morecomblake, a mile from Seaton, is, however, the most likely site. Thence, on to Exeter, this Roman military way is lost.
From Virginia Water up to the crest of Shrub’s Hill, Sunningdale, is a distance of a mile and a quarter, and beyond, all the way into Bagshot, is a region of sand and fir-trees and attempts at cultivation, varied by newly-built villas, where considerable colonies of Cobbett’s detested stock-jobbers and other business men from the ‘Wen of wens’ have set up country quarters. And away to right and left, for miles upon miles, stretches that wild country known variously as Bagshot and Ascot Heaths and Chobham Ridges.
The extensive and dreary-looking tract of land, still wild and barren for the most part, called Bagshot Heath, has during the last century been the scene of many attempts made to bring it under cultivation. These populous times are ill-disposed to the continued existence of waste and unproductive lands, which, when near London, are especially valuable, if they can be made to grow anything at all. One thing which, above all others, has led to the beginning of the end of these old-time wildernesses, formerly the haunts of highwaymen, is the modern discovery of the country and of the benefits of fresh air. When the nineteenth century was yet young the townsman still retained the old habits of thought which regarded the heaths and the hills with aversion. He pigged away his existence over his shop or warehouse in the City, and thought the country fit only for the semi-savages who grew the fruit and vegetables that helped to supply his table, or cultivated the wheat of which his daily bread was compounded. It has been left to us, his descendants, to love the wilds, and thus it is that villa homes are springing up amid the heaths and the pines of this region, away from Woking on the south to Ascot in the north.
BAGSHOT
One comes downhill into the large village or small (very small) town of Bagshot, which gives a name to these surrounding wastes of scrubby grass, gorse, and fir-trees. The now quiet street faces the road in the hollow, across which runs the Bourne brook that perhaps originated the place-name, ‘Beck-shot’ being the downhill rush of the stream or beck. The many ‘shotts’ that terminate the names of places in Hants and Surrey have this common origin, and are similarly situated in the little hollows watered by descending brooks.
Bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching days in the growing importance of its military surroundings, and most of its once celebrated inns have retired into private life, all except the ‘King’s Arms.’
Image unavailable: BAGSHOT.
BAGSHOT.
The ground to the north of the Exeter Road, on the west of Bagshot village, was once a peat moor. Hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up there. Then began the usual illegal encroachments on what was really common land, and stealthily the moor was enclosed and subsequently converted into a nursery-ground for rhododendrons, which flourish amazingly on this soil when it has once been trenched. Beneath the black sand which usually covers this ground there frequently occurs a very hard iron rust, or thin stratum of oxide of iron, which prevents drainage of the soil, with a blue sandy clay underlying. This stratum of iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue clay subsoil raised to the surface and mixed with the black sand, before anything will grow here.
There is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill that leads out of Bagshot an old inn called the ‘Jolly Farmer.’ This is the successor of a still older house which stood at the side of the road, and was famous in the annals of highway robbery, having been once the residence of William Davis, the notorious ‘Golden Farmer,’ who lived here in the century before last.
The agriculturist with this auriferous name was a man greatly respected in the neighbourhood, and acquired the nickname from his invariable practice of paying his bills in gold. He was never known to tender cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was considered so extraordinary that it excited much comment, while at the same time increasing the respect due to so substantial a man. But respect at last fell from Mr. William Davis like a cloak; for one night when a coach was robbed (as every coach was robbed then) on Bagshot Heath by a peculiar highwayman who had earned a great reputation from his invariable practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and keeping only the coin, the masked robber, departing with his plunder, was shot in the back by a traveller who had managed to secrete a pistol.
THE ‘GOLDEN FARMER’
Bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman was hauled into the lighted space before the entrance to the ‘King’s Arms,’ when the gossips of the place recognised in him the well-known features of the ‘Golden Farmer.’ A ferocious Government, which had no sympathy with highway robbery, caused the ‘Golden Farmer’ to be hanged and afterwards gibbeted at his own threshold.
The present inn, an ugly building facing down the road, does not occupy the site of the old house, which stood on the right hand, going westwards. A table, much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour of the ‘Jolly Farmer,’ came from the highwayman’s vanished home. A tall obelisk that stood on the triangular green at the fork of the roads here—where the signpost is standing nowadays—has long since disappeared. It was a prominent landmark in the old coaching days, and was inscribed with the distances of many towns from this spot. A still existing link with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called ‘Claude du Vail’s Cottage,’ which stands in the heathy solitudes at some distance along Lightwater Lane, to the right-hand of the road. The cottage, of which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-place for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and is now covered with commonplace slates.
Almost immediately after leaving the ‘Jolly Farmer’ behind, the road grows hateful, passing in succession the modern townships of Cambridge Town Camberley, and York Town. The exact point where one of these modern squatting-places of those who hang on to the skirts of Tommy Atkins joins another may be left to local experts; to the traveller they present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.
Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby line of military settlements little. Coming up to ‘the Wen’ in 1821, and passing Blackwater, he reached York Town, and thus he holds forth: ‘After pleasure comes pain’, says Solomon, and after the sight of Lady Mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at Hartley Row) came that of the clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘Royal Military College of Sandhurst!’ Here, close by the roadside, is the drying ground. Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines covering perhaps an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to ‘York Place’ on ‘Osnaburg Hill.’ And is there never to be an end of these things? Away to the left we see that immense building which contains children breeding up to be military commanders! Has this place cost so little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself this question, ‘Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing, created by money raised by loan; will this thing be upheld by means of taxes while the interest of the Debt is reduced, on the ground that the nation is unable to pay the interest in full?’
It is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet simplicity of the Three per Cents’ has given place to very much reduced interest. But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture. If Cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new feature of the road, the lady cyclist.
BLACKWATER
There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town, Camberley, and York Town now than when Cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more ‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more Tommies, more drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with relief that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon the country and descends into Blackwater, where the river of that name, so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the entrance to the pretty village. Over this bridge we enter Hampshire, that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk is reached yet, until coming upon the little stream in the level between Hartley Row and Hook, called the Whitewater from the milky tinge it has gained on coming down from the chalky heights of Alton and Odiham. This tinge is, however, more imaginary than real, and the characteristically chalky scenery of Hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the Great Western Road until Basingstoke and its chalk downs are reached.
Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the ‘White Hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever, a village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street we come to a wild and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats.
To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but the old coachmen simply revelled in it, for here was the best stretch of galloping ground in England, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it for all they were worth, through Hartley Row and Hook, and well on towards Basingstoke.
The famous (or infamous let us rather call them) Hartford Bridge Flats are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be overtaken by bad weather. Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black, open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. The road runs, a straight and sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. The cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable.
Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country, is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and rabbits uncountable. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because its development was suddenly arrested when the Exeter Road became deserted for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more eloquent of old times is the long, long street of
Image unavailable: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON)
ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON)
HARTLEY ROW
Hartley Row which adjoins. Hartley Row was absolutely called into existence by the demand in the old days of road travel for stabling, inns, and refreshments, and is one of the most thoroughly representative of such roadside settlements. Half a mile to the south of the great highway is the parent village of Hartley Wintney, unknown to and undreamt of by travellers in those times, and probably much the same as it was in the Middle Ages. The well-named ‘Row,’ on the other hand, sprang lip, grew lengthy, and flourished exceedingly during the sixty years of coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was ruined. What Brayley, the historian of Surrey, wrote of Bagshot in 1841, applies even more eloquently to Hartley Row: ‘Its trade has been entirely ruined by the opening of the Southampton and Great Western Railroads, and its numerous inns and public-houses, which had long been profitably occupied, are now almost destitute of business. Formerly thirty stage coaches passed through the village, now every coach has been taken off the road.’ The ‘Southampton Railroad,’ referred to here, is of course the London and South-Western Railway, which has drained this part of the road of its traffic, and whose Winchfield station lies two miles away.
Image unavailable: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
Before the crash of the ’40’s Hartley Row possessed a thriving industry in the manufacture of coaches, carried on by one Fagg, who was also landlord of the ‘Bell Inn,’ Holborn, and in addition horsed several stages out of London.
Some day the coming historian of the nineteenth century will, in his chapter on travel, cite Hartley Row as the typical coaching village, which was called into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and with the death of coaching was stranded high and dry in this dried-up channel of life. All the houses
Image unavailable: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
OLD TRAVELLERS
of a village like this, which lived on the needs of travellers, faced the road in one long street, and almost every fourth or fifth house was an inn, or ministered in some way to the requirements of those who travelled. It is remarkable to find so many of these old inns still in existence at Hartley Row. Here they still stand, ruddy-faced, substantial but plain buildings, with, notwithstanding their plainness, a certain air of distinction. The wayfarer, well read in the habits of the times when they were bustling with business, can imagine untold comforts behind those frontages; can reconstruct the scenes in the public waiting-rooms, where travellers, passing the interval between their being set down here by the ‘Defiance’ or the ‘Regulator’ Exeter coach and the arrival of the Odiham and Alton bye-stage, could warm themselves by the roaring fire; can sniff in imagination the coffee of the breakfasts and the roast beef of the dinners; or perceive through the old-fashioned window-frames the lordly posting parties, detained here by stress of weather, making the best of it by drinking of the old port or brown sherry which the cellars of every self-respecting coaching inn could then produce. Not that these were the only travellers familiar to the roadside village in those days. Not every one who fared from London to Exeter could afford the luxuries of the mail or stage coach, or of the good cheer and the lavender-scented beds just glimpsed. For the poor traveller there were the lumbering so-called ‘Fly-vans’ of Russell and Co., which jogged along at the average pace of three miles an hour—the pace decreed by Scotland Yard for the modern policeman. The poor folk who travelled thus might perhaps have walked with greater advantage, ‘save for the dignity of the thing,’ as the Irishman said when the floor of his cab fell out and he was obliged to run along with the bottomless vehicle. Certainly they paid more for the misery of being conveyed thus than the railway traveller does nowadays for comfort at thirty to fifty miles an hour. Numbers did walk, including the soldiers and the sailors going to rejoin their regiments or their ships, who appear frequently in the roadside sketches of that period by Rowlandson and others. The poor travellers probably rode because of their—luggage I was about to write, let us more correctly say bundles.
PICTURESQUE OLD DAYS
When they arrived at a village at nightfall, they camped under the ample shelter of the great waggon; or, perhaps, if they had anything to squander on mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a supper of cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed by a shake-down on straw or hay in the stable-lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use among the second- and third-rate inns of the old times.
Image unavailable: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
Those were the days of the picturesque; if, indeed, Rowlandson and Morland and the other delightfully romantic artists of the period did not invent those roadside scenes. Here, for instance, is Rowlandson’s charming group of three old topers boozing outside the ‘Half Moon.’ I cannot tell you where this ‘Half Moon’ was. Probably the artist imagined it; but at anyrate the kind of place, and scenes of this description, must have existed in his time. Here, you will observe, the landlord has come out with a mug of ‘humming ale’ or ‘nut-brown October’ for the thirsty driver of the curricle, who is apparently going to market, if we may judge by the basket of fowls tied on to the back of the conveyance.
Scenes so picturesque as this are not to be observed in our own time, nor are the tramps who yet infest the road, singly or in families, of the engaging appearance of this family party. The human form divine was wondrously gnarled and twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years ago, according to Rowlandson and Gillray. Legs like the trunks of contorted apple-trees, stomachs like terrestrial globes, mouths resembling the mouths of horses, and noses like geographical features on a large scale were the commonplaces of their practice, and this example forms no exception to the general rule.
TREE-PLANTING
The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees. These oak glades do not look particularly old; but, as it happens, we can ascertain their exact age and at the same time note how slow-growing is the oak tree by a reference to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, where, in 1821, he notes their being planted: ‘I perceive that they are planting oaks on the “wastes,” as the Agriculturasses call them, about Hartley Row; which is very good, because the herbage, after the first year, is rather increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and the real wealth, of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of the planter who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because he plants for his children’s children. The planter here is Lady Mildmay, who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here.’
This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily, the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own. All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that is to say, the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’—whoever they may have been. If technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it.
Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the ‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles, either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the downs, like Winterslow Hut.
Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the Anglo-Saxon scora, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook, with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.
Image unavailable: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.
THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.
OLD BASING
It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church, which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman bishop, Saint Swithun.
Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the ‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the town of Basingstoke.
The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the delights that await explorers in the byeways, misses a great deal here by keeping strictly to the highroad. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke, this turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one in half a mile to the pretty village of Old Basing, celebrated for one of the most stubborn and protracted defences recorded in history. It was here that the equally crafty and courteous Sir William Paulet, first Marquis of Winchester, and Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an immense palace on the site of Basing Castle. There can be little doubt that this magnificent person, who possessed no principles, and so kept place and power through the troublous times that these reigns comprised, must have had his hands in the Royal coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position for the sale of preferments. ‘No oak, but an osier,’ as his contemporaries said, he bowed before the tempests of religious persecution and the whirlwinds of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by and left him still peculating. He had become a hoary-headed sinner by the time Elizabeth reigned, or there is no knowing but that he might have become a Prince Consort; for when he entertained Her Majesty here in 1560: ‘By my troth,’ said she, ‘if my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in England.’ But she had said this kind of thing of many another.
BASING HOUSE
The successors of this gorgeous nobleman—not being Lords Treasurers—could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place, fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road, and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John, fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘Aimez Loyaulté,’ he wrote with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and, provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of the arts; reposing after the warlike fatigues of the day in a bed whose gorgeous trappings made it worth ￡1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and were slain to the number of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes this varied garrison was hard pressed for food, when relief would come in whimsical fashion, as when Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared with sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of provisions with the other; a fitting contrast with the typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left hand and a pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the words of Carlyle, ‘long infested the Parliament in these quarters, and was an especial eye-sorrow to the trade of London with the Western parts. It stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor Colonel This and then poor Colonel That, till the jubilant Royalists had given it the name of Basting House.’
But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced the garrisons in the West and the Parliamentary troops could be spared from other places. Cromwell himself was charged with the business of taking ‘Loyalty.’ It was in September that he came to Basingstoke with horse and foot, and established a post of observation on the summit of Winklebury, a hill crowned with prehistoric earthworks that overlooks Worting and the Exeter Road, two miles on the other side of the town.
Little over a fortnight later Cromwell wrote that ‘Thank God he was able to give a good account of Basing.’ The house was taken by storm on the 14th October, ‘while the garrison was card-playing,’ as the persistent Hampshire legend would have us believe. ‘Clubs are trumps, as when Basing House was taken,’ is still an expression often heard at Hampshire card-parties, and some colour is lent to this story by the poor defence with which the furious onrush of Cromwell’s troops was met. The attacking force lost few men, but a hundred of the defenders were killed, and three hundred more taken prisoners. Then the place caught fire and was utterly burnt, many perishing miserably in the great brick vaults of the house, where they were when the fire reached them. Fuller, that quaint seventeenth-century historian, who had been staying here, had, fortunately, left before the arrival of Cromwell’s expedition. The continual fighting and the booming of the guns had distracted his attention from his work! There were others not so fortunate. Thomas Johnson, a peaceful botanist, was killed, and one Robinson, an actor and unarmed, was slaughtered by Harrison, the fanatic. ‘Cursed is he that doeth the Lord’s work negligently,’ exclaimed the Puritan, as he cut him down. Other soldiers slew the daughter of Dr. Griffith who was charging them with being violent to her father.
Fanaticism and cupidity were fully satisfied on this occasion, save that there were those who grumbled because the lives of the Marquis of Winchester and his lieutenant were spared. The sack of Basing House yielded ￡200,000 worth of plunder, in objects
THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE
Image unavailable: THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.
THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.
of art, gold and silver plate, coin, and provisions; and all partook of it, from Cromwell to the rank and file. ‘One soldier had a hundred and twenty pieces of gold for his share, others plate, others jewels.’ No wonder they had, with this dazzling prospect before them, rushed to the assault ‘like a fire-flood.’
They made a rare business of this pillage, taking away the valuables, and selling the provisions to the country folks, who ‘loaded many carts.’ The bricks and building materials were given away, probably because they could not wait for the long business of selling them. ‘Whoever will come for brick or stone shall freely have the same for his pains,’ ran the proclamation, and, considering this, it is quite remarkable that even the existing scanty ruins of Basing House are left.
The area comprised within the defences measures fourteen and a half acres, now a tumbled and tangled stretch of ground, a mass of grassy mounds and hollows, overgrown in places with thickets. These ruins are entered from the road by an old brick gateway, still bearing the ‘three swords in pile’ on a shield, the arms of the Paulets, with ivy overhanging and tall trees behind. A tall curtain wall of brick, with a quaintly peaked-roofed tower at either end, now looks down upon the Basingstoke Canal, which many strangers think is the moat, but though a picturesque addition to the scene, it cannot claim any such historic associations, for it was only constructed close upon a hundred years ago.
Near by is Old Basing church, with square tower built of red brick, similar to that seen in the ruins of the House. It is said to be of foreign make. Bullets have up to recent years been extracted from the south door of the church, the original oak door in use two hundred and sixty years ago; and the flint and stone south walls and buttresses bear vivid witness, in their patching of brick, to the ruin that befell this part of the building in those troubled times. Strange to say, a beautiful group of the Virgin and Child still occupies a tabernacle over the west window, uninjured, although it can scarce have escaped the notice of the fanatical soldiery. Within the church are memorials of the loyal Paulets, Marquises of Winchester, and for a period Dukes of Bolton. Their glory has departed with their great House, and although a smaller residence was built in the meadows, close at hand, that has vanished too.
THE ‘GREY LADY’
When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis of Winchester retired to his hunting lodge of Hawk Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and, enlarging it, made the place his residence. His son, created Duke of Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new house on the site of the lodge, and this is the present Hackwood Park. The existing house stands in the midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although imposing, is a somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost story. That bitter lawyer, Richard Bethell, of whom it was said that he ‘dismissed Hell, with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting damnation,’ when he became Lord Chancellor and was created Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it was to one of his friends that the ‘Grey Lady’ of the mansion presented herself. Lord Westbury and a party of his friends had arrived from town soon after the purchase, and at a late hour they retired to rest, saying good-night to one another in the corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle of the night and found his room strangely illuminated, with the indistinct outlines of a human figure visible in the midst of the uncanny glow. Thinking this some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he turned round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a later hour and see the figure of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress. With more courage than most people would probably have shown under the circumstances, he, instead of putting his head under the bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon the lady modestly retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down and wrote an account of the occurrence; but when at breakfast Lord Westbury and his other friends kept continually asking him how he had slept, his suspicions as to a practical joke having been played upon him were renewed. He accordingly parried all these queries and said he had slept excellently, until Lord Westbury said, ‘Now, look here, we saw that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room last night, you know!’ Explanations followed, but the story of the ‘Grey Lady’ remains mysterious to this day.
The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in 1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons, modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the melancholy wolds that hem in Basingstoke to the north and west, or listen to them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the undulating farm-lands of the south.
HOLY GHOST CHAPEL
We have seen how Old Basing became of prime military importance from its situation at the point where many roads from the south and west of England converged and fell into one great highway to London; and from the same cause is due the commercial prosperity of Basingstoke. Basingstoke, with a record as a town going back to the time when the Domesday Book was compiled, is yet a mere modern settlement compared with the mother-parish of Old Basing; but it was an important place in the sixteenth century, when silks and woollens were manufactured here. At later periods this junction of the roads brought a great coaching trade, and has finally made Basingstoke a railway junction. Silks and woollens have given place to engineering works and machine-shops, and the town, with its modern reputation for the manufacture of agricultural machinery, bids fair at no distant date to become to Hampshire what Colchester and Ipswich are to Essex and Suffolk.
When the Parliamentary Generals were engaged in the long business of besieging Basing House, it may well be supposed that the town suffered greatly at the hands of their soldiery. They, who were experts at wrecking churches and cathedrals in a few hours, had ample opportunities for destruction in the four years that business was about. Their handiwork may be seen to this day—together with that of modern Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, who have not the excuse of being fanatics—in the ruined walls of Holy Ghost Chapel on the northern outskirts of the town. Within the roofless walls of the chapel, unroofed by those Roundheads for the sake of their leaden covering, are two recumbent effigies, sadly mutilated. Perhaps Sergeant Humility-before-the-Lord Mawworm slashed them with his pike in his hatred of worldly pomp; but his zeal did not do the damage wrought on the marble by the recording penknives of the past fifty years. A stained-glass window, pieced together from the fragments of those destroyed here, is still to be seen in Basingstoke Parish Church.
The Exeter Road leaves Basingstoke at its southwestern end, where a fork of the highway gives a choice to the traveller of continuing to Andover on the right, or making on the left to Winchester. The first village on the way to Exeter is Worting, below the shoulder of Battle Down, a village—nay, a hamlet, let us call it—of a Sundayfied stillness. Yet Worting has had its bustling times, for here was one of the most famous coaching inns on the road, the ‘White Hart.’ Another ‘White Hart,’ at Whitchurch, is scarcely less celebrated in the annals of the road. In fact, the ‘White Harts’ are so many and so notable on this road that the historian of the highways becomes almost as ashamed of mentioning them as of recounting the places which Cromwell stormed, or where Charles the Second hid; the houses in which Queen Elizabeth slept, or the inns where Pepys made merry.
OVERTON
Worting is followed in quick succession by the outskirts of Oakley, Clerken Green, Deane, Ashe, and Overton. Except Overton, which is a picturesque village lining the road, of the old coaching, or ‘thoroughfare’ type, these places are all shy and retiring, tucked away up bye-lanes, with great parks on their borders, in whose midst are very vast, very hideous country mansions where dwell the local J.P.’s, like so many Rogers de Coverley in miniature, with churches rebuilt or restored to their glory and the glory of God, and a general air of patronage bestowed upon the villagers and wayfarers from the outside world by those august partners. These parks, with their mile after mile of palings bordering the road, and their dense foliage overhanging it, are given over to solitude. An occasional gamekeeper, or a much more than occasional rabbit or hare, are the only signs of life, with perhaps the hoarse ‘crock’ of a pheasant’s call from the neighbouring coverts. The air beneath the overarching trees along the road is stale and stagnant, and typical of the life here, like the green damp on the entrance lodges of Hall Place, where heraldic lions, sitting on their rumps and holding what at a distance look like quart-pots from the country inn opposite, scowl at one another across the gravelled drive.
It is a relief to emerge from this stifling atmosphere upon the open road where Overton stands. We are fully entered here into the valley of the Test, or Anton, a sparkling little stream whose course we follow henceforward as far as Hurstbourne Priors. Fishermen love Overton and this valley well, for there is royal sport here among the trout and grayling, and in the village a choice of those old inns which the angler appreciates as much as any one. Picturesque Overton is a doubly ruined village, for it has lost its silk industry, together with the coaching interest; but like the splendid bankrupts of modern high finance who fail for millions and continue to live like princes, it continues cheerful. Perhaps every one in the place made a competency before the crash, and put it away where no one could touch it!
The valley broadens out delightfully beyond Overton, and the road, reaching Laverstoke, commands beautiful views over the water-meadows, and the open park in whose midst stands Laverstoke House, clearly seen in passing. In this village, in the neat and clean paper-mill by the road, is made the paper for Bank of England notes. It was so far back as 1719 that this industry was established here by the Portal family, French Protestants emigrating from their country for conscience’ sake. Cobbett, who hated paper-money as much as he did the ‘Wen’ in which it is chiefly current, passed this spot in a fury. He says, with a sad lack of the prophetic faculty, ‘We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank paper is made! Thank God! this mill is likely soon to want employment. Hard by is a pretty park and house, belonging to “’Squire” Portal, the paper-maker. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic shrewdness, call it “Rag Hall!”’ And again, ‘I hope the time will come when a monument will be erected where that mill stands, and when on that monument will be inscribed “the Curse of England.” This spot ought to be held accursed in all time henceforth and for evermore. It has been the spot from which have sprung more and greater mischief than ever plagued mankind before.’
Unhappily for Cobbett’s wishes and predictions, the mill is still in existence and is busier than it was when he wrote in 1821. There are as many as two hundred and fifty people now employed here in the making of the ‘accursed’ paper.
Now comes Freefolk village, with a wayside drinking-fountain and a tall cross, with stone seat, furnished with some pious inscription; the whole erected by a Portal in 1870, and intended to further the honour and glory of that family. There is plenty water everywhere around, in the river and its many runlets amid the water-meadows, but the fountain is dry. Passing tramps are properly sarcastic, and the dry fountain and its texts, so far from leading in the paths of temperance and godliness, are the occasion of much blasphemy. But the pious Portals have their advertisement.
NEWMAN AT WHITCHURCH
Whitchurch, two miles down the road, is approached past the much-quarried hills that rise on the right hand and shelter that decayed little town from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If there be those who are curious to learn what a decayed old coaching town is like, let them journey to Whitchurch. After much tiresome railway travelling, and changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness of time at Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus of the ‘White Hart’ will drive them, rumbling over the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door of that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future Cardinal Newman wrote the beginning of the Lyra Apostolica:—
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth. He had come from Oxford that morning by the Oxford-Southampton coach.
‘Here I am,’ he says, writing to his mother, ‘from one till eleven,’ waiting for the down Exeter mail. Think, modern railway traveller, what would you say were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Templecombe Junction, for a connection! Moreover, a bore claiming to be the brother of an acquaintance claimed to share his room and his society at the ‘White Hart,’ and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. The future Cardinal did not like this. He writes: ‘I am practising for the first time the duty of a traveller, which is sorely against the grain, and have been talkative and agreeable without end,’ adding (one can almost imagine the sigh of the retiring scholar!), ‘Now that I have set up for a man of the world, it is my vocation.’
The latter part of his journey was accomplished at night. Travelling thus through Devonshire and Cornwall is, he remarks, ‘very striking for its mysteriousness.’ It was a beautiful night, ‘clear, frosty, and bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of vegetation is lost by night, but bold features remain. As I came along, I had the whole train of pictures so vividly upon my mind that I could have written a most interesting account of it in the most approved picturesque style of modern composition, but it has all gone from me now, like a dream.’
‘The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls a “night engagement” with a man, called by courtesy a gentleman, on the box. The first act ended by his calling me a d——d fool. The second by his insisting on two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the protest that he certainly did think me very injudicious and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maidservant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain of his giving me the retort uncourteous.’
There are corridors in the ‘White Hart’ with up and down twilight passages, in which the guests of another day lost themselves with promptitude and despatch. There is also a barbarically coloured coffee-room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though Washington Irving could have written an eloquent essay around it; and, more essential than anything else in days of old, a capacious yard with huge yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross
BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION
Image unavailable: WHITCHURCH.
WHITCHURCH.
roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter mails, while at right angles goes the road between Southampton, Winchester, Newbury, Didcot, and Oxford, little used now, but once an important route. Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had votes but every voter had his price, used to send two members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and Bribery Acts which, together with the extension of the franchise and the adoption of secret voting, have brought about the disfranchising of rotten boroughs and the decay of such home industries as electoral corruption, personation, and the like, have taken away much of the prosperity of the town, which, like Andover, used to live royally from one election to another on the venality of the ‘free and independent.’ But the last visit of the ‘Man in the Moon’ was paid to Whitchurch very many years ago, and not even the oldest inhabitant can recollect the days when cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously and incapably drunk, were herded together to plump for the candidate with the longest purse.
When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of very steep, narrow, and crooked streets, that it still boasts some vestiges of its old silk industry, and that it is a ‘Borough by prescription,’ all its salient points have been exhausted. Reform has not only reformed away the Parliamentary representation of the town, but has also swept away the municipal authority. Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but the offices carry no power nowadays.
Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to the village of Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in a hollow on the Bourne, an affluent of the Anton, and on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the banks of the stream and the edge of the woods, but it also derives the first of its two names from these circumstances, ‘Hurstbourne’ being obviously descriptive of woodlands and brooklet, while the ‘Priors’ is a relic of its old lords of the manor, the abbots of Saint Swithun’s at Winchester. These historic and geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the local corruption of the place-name, and that of Hurstbourne Tarrant, a few miles higher up the stream; for they are, according to Hampshire speech, respectively ‘Up Husband’ and ‘Down Husband.’
ANDOVER
The road between this point and Andover, ascending the high ground between the Ann and the Test, is utterly without interest, and brings the traveller down into the town at the south side of the market square without any inducement to linger on the way. Except on the Saturday market-day, Andover is given over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers’ dogs lie blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs, and regard with a pained surprise, rather than with any active resentment, the intrusive passage of a stray customer. Tradesmen’s assistants leisurely open casual crates of goods on the pavements, with long intervals for gossip between the drawing of each nail, and no one objects to the blocking of the footpath. A chance cyclist man?uvres in the empty void of the road in the midst of the square, and collides with no one, for the simple reason that there is nobody to collide with, and one acquaintance talks to another across the wide space and is distinctly heard. Formal but not unpleasing houses front on to this square, together with the usual Town Hall, and a great modern, highly uninteresting Gothic church, erected after the model of Salisbury Cathedral, on the site of the old building.
For fifty-one weeks of the fifty-two that comprise the year, this is the weekly six-days aspect of the place, varied occasionally by the advent of a travelling circus, or the arrival of a route-marching detachment of the Royal Artillery, who park their guns in the square, and may be seen in the stable-yards of the inns on which they are billeted, in various stages of dishevelment, in shirt-sleeves rolled up to elbows, and braces dangling at waists, littering down their horses, or smoking very short and very foul pipes.
All this idyllic quiet is blown to the winds during the week of Weyhill Fair, the October pandemonium held three and a half miles away. Then hordes of cattle-and horse-jobbers, hop growers and buyers, cheese-factors, and the travellers of firms dealing in machinery, seeds, oil-cake, tarpaulins, and half a hundred other everyday agricultural requisites, descend upon the town. Then are dragged out from mysterious receptacles the most antiquated of ‘flys,’ and waggonettes, and nondescript vehicles, to be pressed into the service of conveying visitors to the Fair, some three and a half miles from the town. Whence they come, and where they are hidden away afterwards, is more than the stranger can tell, but it is quite certain that their retreat is in some corner where spiders dwell, and earwigs and other weird insects have a home. Add to these facts the all-important one that it is generally possible to walk the distance in a shorter time, and you have a full portraiture of the average Weyhill conveyance.
This sleepy old place, older by many more centuries than the oldest house remaining here can give any hint of, was not always so quiet. There were alarums and excursions (ending, however, with not so much as a cut finger) when James the Second, falling back from Salisbury before the advance of his son-in-law, William of Orange, halted here. There might have been a battle in Andover’s streets, or under the shadow of Bury Hill, had James put a bolder front on the business; but instead of cutting up William’s Dutchmen, he just dined overnight, and hearing in the morning that his other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, had slunk off with Lords Ormond and Drumlanrig, went off himself, strategically to the rear. He was an obstinate and ridiculous bigot, and a quite unlovable monarch, but he had a power of sarcasm. ‘What,’ said he, hearing of the Prince’s desertion, and bitterly mimicking the absurd intonation of that recreant’s French catch-phrase, ‘is “Est-il possible?” gone too? Truly, a good trooper would have been a greater loss.’
OLD ELECTIONS
After these events, that era of bribery and corruption set in, which is mistakenly supposed to have been brought to an end through the agency of the several Reform Acts, passed by well-meaning Legislatures to secure the purity of Parliamentary elections. As if treating, and the crossing of horny hands with gold were the only ways of corrupting a constituency that the wit of man, or the address of a candidate, could discover! The palm no longer receives the coin; but who has not heard of the modern art of ‘nursing a constituency,’ by which the candidate, eager for Parliamentary honours, sits down before a town, or a county division, subscribes liberally to hospitals and horticultural societies, cricket and football clubs, opens bazaars, and presides at Young Men’s Christian Associations, thereby winning the votes which would in other days have been acquired by palming the men and kissing all the babies? This tea-fight business gives us no picturesque situations like that in which Charles James Fox figured. Fox was canvassing personally, and called upon one of the bluff and blunt order of voters, who listened to his eloquence, and remarked, ‘Sir, I admire your abilities, but damn your principles!’ To which Fox supplied the obvious retort, ‘Sir, I admire your sincerity, but damn your manners!’
Andover no longer sends a representative to Parliament, but in the brave old days it elected two. With a knowledge of the wholesale purchasing of votes that then went on, it will readily be perceived that Andover, with two members to elect, must have been a place flowing with milk and honey; or, less metaphorically, a happy hunting-ground for guineas and free drinks. It was somewhere about a hundred and fifty years ago that Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a prominent rake and practical humorist of the period, was canvassing Andover. One voter amid the venal herd was, to all appearance, proof against all temptations. Money, wine, place, flattery had no seductions for this stoic. The baffled candidate was beside himself in his endeavours to discover the man’s weak point; for of course it was an age in which votes were so openly bought and sold that the saying ‘Every man has his price’ was implicitly believed. Only what was this particular voter’s figure? Strange to say, he had no weakness for money, but was possessed with an inordinate desire to see a fire-eater, and doubted if there existed people endowed with that remarkable power. ‘Off went Delaval to London, and returned with Angelo in a post-chaise. Angelo exerted all his genius. Fire poured from his mouth and nostrils—fire which melted that iron nature, and sent it off cheerfully to poll for Delaval!’
This was that same Delaval whose attorney sent him the following bill of costs after one of his contests:—
To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my leg being thereby broken; to surgeon’s bill, and loss of time and business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval, ￡500.
And cheap too.
PRACTICAL JOKING
They kept this sort of thing up for many years; not always, however, throwing solicitors out of hotel windows; although rival political factions often expressed their determination to throw one another’s candidate in the Anton, after the fashion of the bills posted in the town during a contest in the ’40’s, which announced in displayed type—
LORD HUNTINGTOWER FOR EVER!
SIR JOHN POLLEN IN THE RIVER!!
CATCHING FISH FOR HIS LORDSHIP’S DINNER!!!
History does not satisfy us on the point whether or not those furious partisans carried out their threat; or whether, if they did, their victim afforded good bait.
This Lord Huntingtower was the eldest son of the late Earl of Dysart, and a well-matched companion of the late Marquis of Waterford. Roaming the country-side on dark nights, mounted on stilts, with sheets over their clothes and hollowed turnips on their heads with scooped-out holes for eyes and mouth, and lit with candles, they frightened many a timid rustic out of his dull wits. In daytime they played practical jokes on the tradesfolk of Andover. For example, entering a little general shop in the town, Lord Huntingtower asked for a pound of treacle. ‘Where shall I put it?’ asked the old woman who kept the shop, seeing that the usual basin was not forthcoming.
‘P-pup-pup-put it in my hat,’ said my Lord, who stuttered in yard-lengths, holding out his ‘topper.’ The pound of treacle was accordingly poured into the Lincoln and Bennett, and the next instant it was on the shopkeeper’s head.
This was the manner in which Lord Huntingtower endeared himself to the people—those, that is to say, who were not the victims of his pleasantries.
That kind of person is quite extinct now. They should have (but unfortunately they have not) a stuffed specimen in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington; because he is numbered with the Dodo, the Plesiosaurus, and the Mastodon. The Marquis of Winchester who flourished at the same period as my Lords Huntingtower and Waterford was of the same stamp. He had the fiery Port Countenance which was the sign of the three-bottle man, and his life and the deeds that he did are still fondly remembered at Andover, for his country-house was at Amport, in the immediate neighbourhood. He was the Premier Marquis of England, and although up to his neck in mortgages and writs, an extremely Great Personage. Let us, therefore, take our hats off as humbly as we know how to do.
When he was at his country-place he worshipped at the little village church of Amport. Sometimes he did not worship, but slept, lulled off to the Land of Nod by the roaring fire he kept in his room-like pew. On one occasion it chanced that he was wide awake, and, like the illustrious Sir Roger de Coverley, leant upon the door of that pew, and gazed around to satisfy himself that all his tenantry were present. Then an awful thing happened, the hinges of the door broke, and it fell with a great clatter to the ground, and the Marquis with it. He said ‘Damn!’ with great fervour and unction, and everybody laughed. No one thought it—as they should have done—shocking, which shows the depravity of the age.
THE MARQUIS AND THE SQUIRE
There is no doubt whatever about that depravity, which, like the worm in the bud, has wrought ruin among our manners since then. How sad it is that we are not now content to call upon Providence to
Bless the squire and his relations
And keep us in our proper stations;
but are all too intent upon ‘getting on,’ to defer to rank, or take a spell at the delightful occupations of tuft-hunting and boot-licking! Even in those days this horrid decadence had begun to manifest itself, as you will see by the story of this same Marquis and Mr. Assheton Smith of Tedworth Park. Mr. Smith could (as the saying goes) have ‘bought up’ the impoverished Marquis of Winchester several times over, and not have felt any strain upon his resources. Moreover, he was a Squire of great consideration in these parts, and as Master of the Tedworth Hunt, something of a rival in importance. For which things, and more, the Marquis hated him, and on one occasion took an opportunity of reproving him publicly before the whole field, in the fine florid language of which he had so ready a command. Possibly Mr. Smith had committed the unpardonable indignity of showing my lord the way over a particularly stiff fence he was hesitating at. At any rate the language of the Premier Marquis was violent, and contained some reference to the disparity between their respective ranks. But the Squire was ready with his retort. He said, ‘Anyhow, I’d sooner be a rich Squire than a poor Marquis!’ The field smiled, because the reduced circumstances of the Marquis of Winchester had been notorious ever since his father had been secretly buried at midnight in the family vault at Amport, for fear the bailiffs should seize the body for debt.
There are, for good or ill, no such sportsmen nowadays as there were in the times before railways came and brought more competition into existence, making life a business and a struggle, instead of the light-hearted and irresponsible game that the sporting squires at least found it. Noble sportsmen do not nowadays, when detained by stress of weather in a country inn, while away the tedium of the afternoon by backing the raindrops racing down the window-panes and betting fortunes on the result. No, that very real bogey, ‘agricultural depression,’ has stopped that kind of full-blooded prank, and the titled in these progressive times find their account on the ‘front page’ of company-promoters’ swindles instead. They barter good names for gold, and lick the boots of wealthy rogues, instead of kicking their bodies. Where their fathers scorned to go the sons delight to be. Would the fathers have done the like had ‘agricultural depression’ come earlier?
The noblemen and the sporting squires of old lived in one mad whirl of excitement. They gambled on every incident in their lives, and sometimes even on their death-beds; like the old gamester who, when the doctor told him he would be dead the next morning, offered to bet him that he would not! We are not told whether or not the medical man backed his professional opinion.
OLD SPORTSMEN
One of the most illuminating side-lights on these truly Corinthian folk is the story which tells how Lord Albert Conyngham and that classic sportsman, Mr. George Payne, were travelling from London to Poole by post-chaise in the last decade of the coaching days—that is to say, between 1830 and 1840. They found the journey tedious, and so played écarté, in which they grew so interested that they continued playing all day and into the night, the chaise being lit with the aid of a patent lamp which Mr. Payne always took with him on a long journey. The play was high; ￡100 a game, with bets on knaves and sequences, and had been continued with varying success, until when they were passing in the darkness of night through the New Forest, Mr. Payne, who had been a heavy loser for some time, had a run of luck. In midst of this exciting play the post-boy, who, in the secluded glades of the Forest, had managed to lose the road, stopped the chaise and, dismounting, tapped at the window. But so engrossed were the two travellers in the cards that they had not noticed that the conveyance was standing still, and the post-boy stood tapping there for a long while before he was heard.
‘What on earth do you want?’ angrily asked the winning gambler, indignant at this interruption.
‘Please, sir,’ replied the post-boy, ‘I’ve lost my way.’
‘Then,’ rejoined Mr. Payne, pulling up the window with a bang, ‘come and tell us when you’ve found it, and be damned to you!’