THACKERAY’S HOUSE, YOUNG STREET.
JOHN LEECH
THE “WHITE HORSE.”TRADITIONAL RETREATOF ADDISON.
There still stands, off High Street, the grimy double-bayed house, now numbered 16, Young Street, but formerly No. 13, in which Thackeray wrote “Vanity Fair;” but most others of the old literary and artistic haunts of the “Old Court Suburb” have been demolished. “The Terrace”—that long row of old-fashioned houses extending from Wright’s Lane westward—was pulled down but six years ago. Those houses were not beautiful, but they were at least pleasingly old-fashioned, and in No. 6 lived and died John Leech, an early victim of that peculiarly modern malady, “nerves.” Some amazingly up-to-date shops now occupy the spot.
Long ago, the other old-fashioned houses on this side of the road lost their forecourt gardens, over which other shops were built; and beyond the memory of any one now living there stood a little country inn at the corner of what is now the Earl’s Court Road; a rural retreat called the “White Horse,” to which Addison withdrew from the cold splendours of Holland House opposite. He had contracted an unhappy marriage with theCountess of Warwick, the mistress of that splendid mansion, which happily yet remains; but stole away to this more congenial haunt, and drank his intellect away.
Beyond this, all was country road, in the coaching days, until Hammersmith was reached. The first outpost of that now unsavoury place was a rural inn called the “Red Cow,” opposite Brook Green.
THE “RED COW”
The “Red Cow,” pulled down December, 1897, rejoiced once upon a time in the reputation of being a house of call for the peculiar gentry who infested the suburban reaches of the great western highways out of London. It was not by any means the resort of the aristocracy of the profession of highway robbery; but a place where the cly-fakers, the footpads, and the lower strata of thievery foregathered to learn the movements of travellers and retail them to the fine gentlemen who, mounted on the best of horses, and clad in gorgeous raiment, occupied the higher walks of the art at a safer distance down the road. The house was built in the sixteenth century, and was a quaint, though unpretending roadside tavern with a high-pitched, red-tiled roof. It possessed vast stables, for it was situated, in early coaching days, at the end of the first stage out of London. It may well be imagined, then, that the stable-yard was a scene of constant excitement in the good old days, for here were kept a goodly supply ofstrong roadsters for the coaches running to Bath, Bristol, Wells, Bridgewater, and Exeter, and here the elegant samples of horseflesh which had brought the coaches at a spanking pace from the “Belle Sauvage,” on Ludgate Hill, were changed for animals who could do the rough work of the country roads. They were not particularly fine to look at—especially those used on the night coaches—and it was often a matter of surprise that they were able to keep up the pace required, and that the greasy old harness stood the strain. It has been said that in one of the old-fashioned rooms of the “Red Cow” E. L. Blanchardwrote his “Memoirs of a Malacca Cane.” In the last thirty years or so of its existence the “Red Cow” was a favourite pull-up for the waggoners from the market gardens, who in the small hours of the morning rumbled past with piled-up loads of fruit, vegetables, and flowers for Covent Garden, and halted on their return for a refresher of bread and cheese and beer. Then, too, the hay-carts used to halt here, and the sight of them, with the horses drinking from the old wooden water-trough beside the kerb-stone, underneath the swinging sign, was like a picture of Morland’s come to life, and agreeably leavened that general air of fried-fish, drink, and dissipation which lingers in the memory as the most characteristic features of modern Hammersmith.
THE “RED COW,” HAMMERSMITH. DEMOLISHED 1897.
The travellers who were whirled through this place in the Augustan age of coaching were soon in the country again, on the way to Turnham Green, along the Chiswick High Road. That fine broad thoroughfare is now bordered by an almost continuous row of modern shops, erected, many of them, where barns and ricks stood less than ten years ago. Such was the appearance of “Young’s Corner,” indeed, until quite recently. That corner, let it be said for the information of those not well acquainted with the topography of the western suburbs, is the spot where the road from Shepherd’s Bush joins the highway. Let it further be placed on record, before “historic doubts” have had time to gather about the origin of the name, that it derives from a little grocer’s shop kept at the north-east angle of that junction of the roads within the recollection of the present writer, by one Young, whohas probably been long since gathered to his fathers, for his Corner knows him no more, and a house-agent’s shop, a brand-new building (like all its neighbours), stands where the now historic Young sold tea and sugar, and (let us hope) waxed prosperous in days gone by.
TURNHAM GREEN
Turnham Green lies ahead: a place historic by reason of a preliminary skirmish in the Civil War between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and the residence in the early part of the century of a peculiarly heartless murderer. The passengers by the two-horsed “short-stages” which in the first half of this century travelled from London to the outlying villages and halted at the “Pack Horse and Talbot,” doubtless were curious regarding Linden House, near by, notorious from association with Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, author and poisoner. He was born at Chiswick in 1794, and was a grandson of Dr. Ralph Griffiths of Turnham Green. He began life by serving in the army, but presently took to literature as a profession, and wrote voluminously in the magazines of that day. As an author, although possessed of a sprightly wit, he would long since have been forgotten had it not been for the sensational career of crime upon which he entered in 1824. In that year he forged the signatures of his trustees, in order to obtain possession of a sum of £2259. He induced his uncle, Mr. G. E. Griffiths, of Linden House, to receive him there as an inmate. Within a few months his relative died, poisoned with nux vomica, and Wainewright came into possession of his property. In 1830 he persuaded a Mrs. Abercromby, a widow lady, to take up herabode with him and his wife at Linden House. She came with her two daughters and was promptly poisoned with strychnine. After this he removed from the neighbourhood, and embarked upon a further series of murders in London. Eventually detected, he was convicted and transported for life to the Australian colonies, where he is credibly said to have poisoned others. Murder by poison was, in fact, an obsession with this man, although he was sufficiently sane and sordid to select victims whose deaths would bring him pecuniary advantage. Wainewright’smétierin literature was chiefly art criticism, and his style narrowly resembles that of a revolting person, now ostracised from Society, who also dabbled in Art and actually wrote and published an “appreciation” of the poisoner some few years since.
Linden House was pulled down some fifteen years ago, and its site is marked by the modern villas of Linden Gardens. The recollection of it brings a train of reminiscences.
SUBURBAN CHANGES
Reminiscences are soon accumulated in these times. It needs not for the Londoner to be in the sere and yellow leaf for him to have known many and sweeping changes in the pleasant suburbs which used to bring the country to his doors, and the scent of the hawthorn through his open window with every recurring spring. For myself, I am not a lean and slippered pantaloon, on whose head the snows ofmany winters have fallen. The crow’s-feet have not yet gathered around the corners of my eyes; and yet I have known many rural, or semi-rural, villages around the ever-spreading circle of the Great City which in my time have been for ever engulfed in the on-rolling waves of bricks and mortar. It is no effort of memory for me, or for many another, to recall the market gardens, the orchards, the open meadows, and the fine old seventeenth and eighteenth century red-brick mansions, each one enclosed within its high garden walls, with the jealous seclusion of a monastery, which occupied the sites where the streets of Brompton, Earl’s Court, Fulham, Walham Green, and Putney now stretch their interminable ramifications, and are accounted, justly enough, as London. Tell me, if you can, what are the bounds of London, north, south, east, or west. Does from Forest Gate on the east, to Richmond on the west, span its limits in one direction? and from Wood Green on the northern heights, to Croydon on the south, encompass it on the other? They may in this year of grace, but where will the boundary of continuous brick and mortar be set ten years hence? and where will then be the pleasant resorts of the present-day wheelman? They will all be ruined, and not, mark you, ruined from the commercial point of view, for the coming of the builder spells riches for the suburban freeholder, whose land, in the slang of the surveying fraternity, has become “ripe.” These rustic places are, nevertheless, ruined from the point of view of the lover of the picturesque, and when he sees the old mansions going, the meadows trenched for foundations, and thelanes widened and paved by the newly constituted vestry, he groans in spirit. I am, for instance, especially aggrieved at the workings of modernity with Turnham Green.
I went to school there in the days when London was remote. We used to talk of “going up to London” then. Do any of the present-day inhabitants of Turnham Green, I wonder, speak thus? I imagine not. Turnham Green was then as rural as its name sounds now. The name, alas! is all that remains of its rurality, save, indeed, the two commons, the “Front” and “Back,” as they are called. No one now remembers, I suppose, that the so-called “Back Common” is really Turnham Bec, even as the open space at Tooting remains Tooting Bec to this day. It is so, however, and it is only through this corruption that what is really and truly the original green of Turnham Green is dubbed the “Front Common.” You see the humour of it?
THE NEW SUBURB
Turnham Green remained countrified until the railway came and took a slice off the so-called “Back Common,” and built a station, and thus established the first outpost of Suburbia. Then another railway came, and took another slice, and a School Board filched another piece; and then great black boards, with white letters, began to be planted in the surrounding orchards, setting forth how “this eligible land” was to be let on building lease. Presently men who wore corduroys and waistcoats with sleeves to them, and leather straps round their trousers below the knees came along, and, with much elaborate profanity, built what were, with much humour, termed“villas” there. Streets of them, and all alike! After this, a tramway was made along the high-road, starting at Hammersmith, and ending at Kew Bridge. That tramway was amusing to us schoolboys, so long as the novelty of it lasted. Our school—it had the imposing name of Belmont House—faced the high-road, and it was our greatest delight of summer evenings to throw pieces of soap at the outside passengers of the trams from the bedroom windows. The expenditure of soap was tremendous, and sometimes those “outsiders” were hit, whereupon there was trouble! There was a gloomy old mansion opposite our school, called “Bleak House,” and we used to think it was the veritable “Bleak House” of Dickens’s story. We know better now. It still stands, but a furniture warehousing firm have built warehouses on to it, and it is no longer romantically gloomy.
ROBIN HOOD AND LITTLE JOHN.
The school has gone, too, where I learnt, and promptly forgot, Latin and Greek; and a row of shops, with big plate-glass windows and great gas lamps, have taken its place; and where we construed those dead (and deadly) languages, the linen-draper’s assistant measures out muslins and calicoes. I have walked along these pavements during the last few days, and have noted more changes. There used to stand, beside the road, on the right hand as you go towards Gunnersbury, a little wayside “pub,” with bow windows, and a bent and hunch-backed red-tiled roof. It was called the “Robin Hood,” and an old-fashioned wooden post, supporting the swinging sign, stood on the kerb-stone, beside a horse-trough. I remember the sign well, for it had quite an elaboratepicture painted upon it, representing Robin Hood and Little John. I can see quite clearly now that the artist of this affair obtained his ideas from the pictorial diplomas of the Ancient Order of Foresters; but, at the time, I thought it a very fine painting. The feathered hats impressed me very much indeed, although I always used to wonder why those two magnificent fellows hadn’t pulled up their socks. It was some time before I discovered that they were not socks, but the big bucket boots of romance. They have pulled this old house down, and have built a glaring, flaring, gin-palace on the site of it, just as they did some five years ago to the old “Roebuck,” not far off. The sign is gone, too, and wayfarers are no longer invited, if Robin Hood is not at home, to take a glass with Little John. What would happen, I often speculated, if both those heroes were away?Would, one take a glass, in that case, with Friar Tuck or Maid Marian?
THE “OLD WINDMILL.”
OLD SUBURBAN INNS
There is an old inn still standing in this same high-road—most appropriately, by the way, situated next door to the Police Station, which, in its time, has extended hospitality to many a bold “road agent” who found his living on the Bath and Exeter Roads. The “Old Windmill” is a shy, retiring house which lies modestly some way back from the line of houses fronting the road. It has an open gravelled space in front, and a swinging sign on a post, which, together with an immense sundial on the front of the house, proclaims that the “Old Windmill” dates back to 1717. These are vestiges of the time when the Chiswick High Road was bordered by hedges instead of houses. The house, although it wears a certainold-world air, can scarce be called picturesque. The huge sundial just mentioned, with its mis-spelled legend, “So Fly’s Life Away,” gives it an interest, and so does the record of how one Henry Colam was arrested here one night toward the close of last century, on the charge, “For that he did molest and threaten certain of His Majesty’s liege subjects upon the highway, in company with divers others, still at large.” Henry had, as a matter of fact, “with divers others,” attempted to rob the Bath Mail near this spot. He failed in his enterprise, but Bow Street had him all the same, and it does not require a very vivid imagination to conjure up a picture of his end.
Another old inn, which still stands at Turnham Green, although greatly altered, has a history not to be forgotten.
TREASON AND TREACHERY
At the “Old Pack Horse” (not by any means to be confounded with the “Pack Horse and Talbot,” a quarter of a mile nearer on the road to London) assembled parties of the conspirators who, headed by their two principals, named, oddly enough, Barclay and Perkins,[1]plotted the assassination of King William the Third, on February 15, 1696. They were authorized by the exiled James the Second to do the deed, and had planned for forty of their band to surround the King’s carriage as he returned from one of his weekly hunting expeditions from Kensington Palace to Richmond Park. His coach, they knew, would pass along a narrow, morass-like lane from the waterside on to Turnham Green, near where the church now stands, and they were wellaware that, as it could at this point proceed only at a walking pace, William would fall an easy victim. It chanced, however, that there were traitors among their number, who informed the King’s friends, so that on two succeeding Saturdays, while they were expecting him, he remained at Kensington. Many of the band were arrested, and six suffered the penalty of high treason.
The spot where the proposed assassination was to have been consummated is now known as Sutton Lane. At the corner of this suburban thoroughfare, where Fromow’s Nursery stands, the fate of England was to have been decided.
THE “OLD PACK HORSE.”
The “Old Pack Horse” has been somewhat modernized of late years by additions built out on the ground floor, but it remains substantially the same building at which Jack Rann, the famous“Sixteen-string Jack” of highway romance, may have taken a last drink with which to screw up his courage just before setting out to rob Dr. Bell, the chaplain to the Princess Amelia, in Gunnersbury Lane, near by. “Sixteen-string Jack” was hanged for that job in 1774.
He was peculiarly unfortunate, for Turnham Green and Gunnersbury were veritable Alsatias then, and those who travelled here should not have mentioned so ordinary a happening as having their purses taken. Indeed, it was so usual an occurrence that Horace Walpole tells us of a certain Lady Brown who, visiting here, always went provided with a purse full of brass tokens for the highwaymen. Imagination, conjuring up a picture of a Turpin or a Claude du Vall riding away with a pocketful of guineas which, on arriving home, he discovers to be counterfeits, provokes a smile.
There are changes impending not far from here. Who that knows Kew Bridge has not an affection for that hump-backed old structure, although it presents many difficulties to the rider? Kew Bridge is doomed, and the powers that be are going to pull it down and build another in its stead—and one, it is almost unnecessary to add, not at all picturesque. Farewell, then, to the suburban delights of Kew. They are going to “improve” the river at Kew also—that riverwhere, in summer time, the steamers get hung up on the sandbanks for lack of water. Alas, then, for the picturesque foreshore of Strand-on-the-Green!
KEW BRIDGE, LOW WATER.
HIGHWAYMEN
The passengers by the Bath Flying Machine grew at this point a shade paler. They generally expected to be robbed on Hounslow Heath, and their expectations were almost invariably realized by the gentlemen in cocked hats and crape masks, who were by no means backward in coming forward. The fine flower of the highwaymen practised on the Heath, and they did their spiriting gently and with so much courtesy that it was almost (not quite) a pleasure to hand over those rings and guineas of which so plenteous a store was collected every night.
Before, however, we come to Hounslow Heath, we have to cast a glance round Brentford, a town which holds the proud position of the county town of Middlesex. Foreigners might, in the innocence of their hearts, suppose that London would hold that honour; but to Brentford, known from time immemorial, and with the utmost justice, as “dirty Brentford,” it has fallen. Has Brentford risen to the occasion? It must sorrowfully be admitted that it has not, and is a very marvel of dirt and dilapidation, and—But no matter! Until quite recently it also possessed, in the church of Old Brentford, the very ugliest church in England, which was so very ugly that it used to be credibly reported that people came long distances to see such a marvel of the unlovely. Alas! the church has been rebuilt, and so Brentford has lost a claim to distinction.
But Brentford has the honour of being mentioned in Shakespeare, in a passage whose allusions not all the efforts of antiquaries have been able to explain, and distinguished itself in a peculiar way during the reign of King William the Fourth, whom people used to call, for no very good reason, Silly Billy. The King and Queen were expected to drive through the town, on their way from Windsor to London, and the streets were decorated. But the inhabitants spiced their loyalty with sarcasm, for hanging on a line, stretched prominently across the road, was an old coat, turned inside out, in allusion to His Majesty’s uncertain policy. Not satisfied, however, with this delicate way of calling him a turncoat, Brentford had another insult ready a little way down the street.The King was generally supposed to be very much under the influence of Queen Adelaide, and this was more or less gracefully alluded to by a pair of trousers fluttering in the wind like a banner suspended across the road. Their Majesties testified their recognition and appreciation of Brentford wit by never passing through the town again.
SORDID HOUNSLOW
A little further afield takes us to Hounslow, where John Jerry is busy putting up those long streets of “villas,” whose deadly sameness vexes the soul of the artist. He has torn down the old houses, in one of which, or rather, in several of which—for they had intercommunicating passages—Dick Turpin was wont to hide when he was in refuge from the Bow Street runners.
“Bold Turpin vunce, on Hounslow Heath,His mare, Black Bess, bestrod—er;Ven there he see’d the bishop’s coachComing along the road—er.”
Thus sang Sam Weller; but “Bold Turpin” would be hard put to it to identify his suburban haunts now, and we, before our hair is grey, will find those places strange which were so familiar the matter of a few years ago.
COTTAGES, SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN THE HAUNTS OF DICK TURPIN.
The town of Hounslow is as unprepossessing as its name, which is saying a great deal. Its mile-long street, unlivened by any interesting features, is dull without descending to the positively interesting unloveliness of Brentford. Just as collectors prize old china whose shape and colouring are frankly hideous to those who are not of the elect in those matters, so the grotesquely dirty and ugly streets of Brentfordhave an interest for the tourist who does not often come upon their like. Hounslow’s is just a commonplace ugliness. The curtailed remains of its once numerous and extensive coaching inns are become, as a rule, low pot-houses, in which labourers in the market-gardens that practically surround the town, sit and drink themselves stupid in the evening; and the business premises and private houses which alternate along the highway are either shabby old places, not old enough to claim any interest on the score of antiquity; or of a pretentious bad taste rather more difficult to bear with than the dirty hovels and tumbledown cottages they have displaced. Here, indeed, is the debateable ground between town and country. Rurality is (appropriately enough) in its last ditch, while civilization has established a precarious outpost beside it. Flashy “villas” jostle the market-gardeners’ cottages; and respectability sits self-satisfied in its prim Early Victorian drawing-rooms,amid its chairs upholstered in green rep, its horse-hair sofas and cut-glass lustres; while on either side the vulgar herd sits at open windows in its shirt-sleeves, and smokes black and exceedingly foul pipes, and gazes complacently upon the clothes hanging out to dry in the garden.
HOUNSLOW’S COACHING DAYS
Hounslow presented a different picture before the opening of the railways to the West. Two thousand post-horses were then kept in the town, and coaches and private carriages went dashing through at all hours of the day and night, so closely upon one another that they almost resembled a procession. As the poet says, the pedestrian then forced his way—
“Through coaches, drays, choked turnpikes, and a whirlOf wheels, and roar of voices, and confusion;Here taverns wooing to a pint of ‘purl,’There mails fast flying off, like a delusion.”
And, indeed, they have, like delusions, vanished utterly. So early as April, 1842, a daily paper is found saying: “At the formerly flourishing village of Hounslow, so great is the general depreciation of property, on account of the transfer of traffic to the railway, that at one of the inns is an inscription, ‘New milk and cream sold here;’ while another announces the profession of the landlord as ‘mending boots and shoes.’” The turnpike tolls at the same time, between London and Maidenhead, had decreased from £18 to £4 a week.
Yet Hounslow very narrowly missed becoming a great railway junction. That, indeed, was its proper destiny when the coaching era was done and the place decaying. Hounslow became the busy placeit was in the days of road-travel, because it commanded the great roads to the West. The Bath and Exeter Roads, which were one from Hyde Park Corner as far as this town, branched at its western end, and it was also on the route to Windsor. It should thus have become an important station on the Great Western Railway, and might have been, had not other interests prevailed. It was the original intention of the Great Western directors, when the line was planned by Brunel in 1833, to keep close to the old high-road to Bath; but landed interests, both private and corporate, brought about numerous deviations, and so Hounslow was left to its fate, and the Great Western main line passes through Southall, two and a half miles distant, instead.
We will now press on to the Heath, for our friends the highwaymen are anxiously awaiting us. Right away from the seventeenth century this spot bore a bad repute, when one of the most daring exploits was performed on its gloomy expanse. This was no less a feat than the plundering of that warlike general, Fairfax, by Moll Cutpurse. The most capable soldier of the age robbed by a woman highwayman, if you will be pleased to excuse the Irishry of the expression! But, indeed, the Roaring Girl, as her contemporaries called her, was the best man among the whole of that daring crew, and to her courage, her cunning, and her ready wit she owed the successful career that was hers.She wore the breeches in no metaphorical sense, but through all her career habited herself in man’s garments. Only when she had amassed a fortune and had retired from “the road” did she don the skirt.
CLAUDE DU VALL
It is sad to think that the greatest of all the brotherhood who made Hounslow Heath and highway robbery synonymous terms was cut off in the full tide of his success. At least, it seems so to us, although the travellers of the period doubtless felt a certain satisfaction when Du Vall was executed, on January 21, 1670. He was but twenty-seven years of age, and already had become a star of the first magnitude. He was, in fact, a master of the whole art and mystery of robbing upon the road, and to this he brought the most perfect courtesy. Violence had no part in the methods of this artist, and he would have scorned, we may be sure, the ruffianly and even murderous acts of a later generation of the craft, which not only despoiled travellers of their goods, but rendered the Heath dangerous to life and limb. His chief exploit is classic, and is set forth so eloquently, and with such an engaging profusion of capital letters, in a contemporary pamphlet, that one cannot do better than quote it:—
“He, with his Squadron, overtakes a Coach which they had set over Night, having Intelligence of a Booty of four hundred Pounds in it. In the Coach was a Knight, his Lady, and only one Serving-maid, who, perceiving five Horsemen making up to them, presently imagined that they were beset; and they were confirmed in this Apprehension by seeing themwhisper to one another, and ride backwards and forwards. The Lady, to shew that she was not afraid, takes a Flageolet out of her pocket and plays. Du Vall takes the Hint, plays also, and excellently well, upon a Flageolet of his own, and in this Posture he rides up to the Coachside. ‘Sir,’ says he to the Person in the Coach, ‘your Lady plays excellently, and I doubt not but that she dances as well. Will you please to walk out of the Coach and let me have the Honour to dance one Currant with her upon the Heath?’ ‘Sir,’ said the Person in the Coach, ‘I dare not deny anything to one of your Quality and good Mind. You seem a Gentleman, and your Request is very reasonable.’ Which said, the Lacquey opens the Boot, out comes the knight, Du Vall leaps lightly off his horse and hands the Lady out of the Coach. They danced, and here it was that Du Vall performed Marvels; the best Masters in London, except those that are French, not being able to shew such footing as he did in his great French Riding Boots. The Dancing being over (there being no violins, Du Vall sung the Currant himself) he waits on the Lady to her coach. As the knight was going in, says Du Vall to him, ‘Sir, you have forgot to pay the Musick.’ ‘No, I have not,’ replies the knight, and, putting his Hand under the Seat of the Coach, pulls out a hundred Pounds in a Bag, and delivers it to him, which Du Vall took with a very good grace, and courteously answered, ‘Sir, you are liberal, and shall have no cause to repent your being so; this Liberality of yours shall excuse you the other Three Hundred Pounds,’ and giving the Word, that if he met withany more of the Crew he might pass undisturbed, he civilly takes his leave of him. He manifested his agility of body by lightly dismounting off his horse, and with Ease and Freedom getting up again when he took his Leave; his excellent Deportment by his incomparable Dancing and his graceful manner of taking the hundred Pounds.”
When this hero had gone the inevitable way of his fellows, he was buried with great pomp and circumstance in the church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, with a set of eulogistic verses for his epitaph. Unfortunately, the old church was destroyed by fire and the epitaph with it.
HIGHWAY MURDERS
Mr. Nuthall, the Earl of Chatham’s solicitor, too, who had been to Bath to confer with his gouty and irascible client, was stopped in his carriage as it was going towards London across this dreaded wilderness. The highwaymen fired at him, and he died of fright. Two other notable murders by highwaymen took place here—in 1798 and 1802—and bear witness to the degeneracy of the craft. The first was Mr. Mellish, who was fired upon and killed as he was returning from a run with the King’s hounds. A Mr. Steele was the other victim, and his assailants, Haggarty and Holloway, who had planned the crime at the “Turk’s Head,” Dyot Street, Holborn, it is satisfactory to be able to add, were hanged. The execution took place at the Old Bailey, when twenty-eight persons among the crowds who had come to see the sight were crushed to death. Up to the year 1800, the Heath was a most famous place for gibbets. “The road,” as a writer of the period says, “was literallylined with gibbets on which the carcases of malefactors hung in irons, blackening in the sun.” Du Vall had a successor in Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe, collecting tithes in rather a promiscuous way, by turning highwayman in 1752. His career was a short one, for one of the first travellers he bade “Stand!” on the Heath shot him through the body, from which he died a few days later, at the house of a friend, from “inflammation of the bowels,” as the contemporary report, jealous for the reputation of the dignified clergy, put it.
Shall I weary you by recounting more of these highway crimes? There was Dr. Shelton, a surgeon, who flourished in the early thirties of last century, and, deserting lancet and scalpel, took to the road and that not more lethal weapon, the horse-pistol; though, to be sure, it was more for show than use, for not Du Vall himself could have been more courteous.
That the poet who wrote of Bagshot Heath as a place “where ruined gamblers oft repay their loss” might with perfect propriety have substituted “Hounslow” will be readily seen when we mention Parsons, nearly contemporary with Shelton, who robbed at Hounslow that he might gamble in London. Parsons was the son of a “Bart. of the B.K.,” as the Tichborne Claimant would have phrased it; an Eton boy, at one time an officer both in the Army and Navy, and the husband of a beautiful heiress. He made an edifying end at Tyburn.
Then there was Barkwith, a mere novice, whose first sally led to a like exit. He was the son ofa Cambridgeshire squire, and manager to a Lincoln’s Inn solicitor. He had “borrowed” trust moneys wherewith to satisfy some debts of honour; and so the hour of four o’clock in the afternoon of a November day found him on the Heath, with a pistol in his hand and his heart in his mouth, “holding up” a coach. The booty was but a miserable handful of silver; but, being captured, he died for it, all the same. Let us trust he did “the young gentlemen who belong to Inns of Court” an injustice when, in his dying speech and confession, he warned his hearers against them as “the most wicked of any.”
“DARE-DEVIL SIMMS”
Then there was Dare-devil Simms—“Gentleman Harry,” as his friends called him—a midshipman who came up from deserting his ship in the West Country. First borrowing a saddle and bridle, and then stealing a horse, he commenced his career by robbing a post-chaise and the Bristol Mail, and coming to London, soon became a noted figure on this stage. One night he relieved a Mr. Sleep of his purse. The despoiled traveller bewailed his loss bitterly, but Harry comforted him with the assurance that he would have been robbed in any case; if not by himself, certainly by one or other of the two who were waiting for him down the road. “But if you meet them,” said he, “sing out ‘Thomas!’ and they will let you pass.” The unfortunate man went on his way calling “Thomas!” to every one he met, and narrowly escaped being severely handled by some gentlemen who conceived themselves insulted.
Presently Tyburn claimed Gentleman Harry also, and a career which had been begun by transportation,and continued through such stirring adventures as being sold for a slave, becoming a sailor and a privateersman, was finally extinguished by the halter. A short life and a merry.
Strawkins, Simpson, and Wilson, too, helped to keep up the stirring story of the road. They intercepted the Bristol Mail and left the postboy, bound with ropes, at the bottom of a ditch on the outskirts of Colnbrook. They were tracked down by the Post Office, and, Wilson turning King’s evidence, the first two were hanged. The Mail was then given an escort of Dragoons, but highway robbery had too strong a spice of adventure for one of these fine fellows to resist it. He accordingly pillaged the Bath Stage, and suffered the appointed end in due course.
This catalogue of mine does not close until 1820, in which year four confederates plundered the Bristol Mail. They had booked the inside seats, and during their journey through the night forced open the strong boxes placed under the seats, decamped with their contents, and were never heard of again.
A STORY OF THE ROAD
One of the most diverting stories of Hounslow Heath, which serves to relieve its sombre repute, is that which the late Mr. James Payn tells, in one of his reminiscences. “The story goes,” he says, “that early in the century the landlord of Skindle’s, at Maidenhead, was a strong Radical, and couldcommand a dozen votes; but his prosperity had a sad drawback in the person of his son, a good-for-naught. During a certain Berkshire election, a Tory solicitor was staying at this inn, and had occasion to go to London for the sinews of war. His gig was stopped on his way back, on Hounslow Heath, by a gentleman of the road.
“I have no money,” said the lawyer, with professional readiness, “but there is my watch and chain.”
“You have a thousand pounds in gold in a box under the seat,” was the unexpected reply; “throw back the apron!”
The lawyer obeyed, but as the horseman stooped to take the box, the lawyer knocked the pistol out of his hand and drove off at full gallop. He had a very quick-going mare, and before the highwayman could find his weapon, which had fallen into some furze, was beyond pursuit.
The next morning the lawyer sent for the landlord. “Yesterday,” he said, “I was stopped on Hounslow Heath. The man had a mask on, but I recognized him by his voice, which I can swear to. I knew him as well as he knew me. You had better speak to your son about it, and then we will resume our conversation.”
The landlord was quite innocent of his son’s intended crime, but he had reason to believe him capable of it. He went out with a heavy heart, and when he came back his face showed it. “Well,” he said, with a sort of calm despair, “what steps do you intend to take, sir, in the matter?”
“None to hurt an old friend, you may be sure,” answered the lawyer; “only those twelve votes you boasted about must be given to our side instead of yours;” which was accordingly arranged.
In those days, as will already have been seen, Hounslow Heath was a very real place indeed. There was (as the journalistic slang of to-day has it) “actuality” about that then solitary and barren waste, which is not a little difficult to realize nowadays. The cyclist who speeds over the level roads and past the smiling orchards and market gardens, finds it difficult to believe that this was the sinister place of eighty years ago; and, since there is no Heath to-day, is apt to come to the conclusion that it must have been the very “Mrs. Harris” of heaths; a figment, that is to say, of romantic writers’ imaginations. Such, however, was by no means the case. Where cultivated lands are now, and where suburban villas stand, there stretched, less than eighty years since, a veritable scene of desolation. Furze-bushes, swampy gravel-pits in which tall grasses and bulrushes grew, and grassy hillocks, the homes of snipe and frogs, and the haunts of the peewit, were the features of the scene by day; while, when night was come, the whole place swarmed with footpads and highwaymen.
LORD BERKELEY’S ADVENTURES
At that time Lord Berkeley used frequently to stay at his country house at Cranford, close by, from Saturdays to Mondays, and had twice been stopped and robbed on his way before a third and last encounter, in which he shot his assailant dead. On the second occasion, the door of his travelling carriagewas opened, and a footpad, dressed as a sailor, pointed a fully-cocked pistol at him. The man’s hand trembled violently, and while my lord was producing what money he had about him, the trigger was pulled, more, it would seem, from accident than intention. Happily, the pistol missed fire. The man then exclaimed, “I beg your pardon, my lord,” and, recocking his pistol, retreated with his plunder.
After this escape, Lord Berkeley swore he would never be robbed again, and always travelled at night with a short carriage-gun and a brace of pistols. Thus armed, it was on a November night in 1774 that he was attacked for the last time. He was going to dine with Mr. Justice Bulstrode, who lived in an old house surrounded by a brick wall, near where Hounslow’s modern church now stands, and as the carriage was nearing the town, a voice called to the postboy to halt, and a man rode up to the carriage window on the left-hand side, thrusting in a pistol, as the glass was let down. With his left hand Lord Berkeley seized the weapon and turned it away, while with his right he pushed the short double-barrelled gun he had with him against the robber’s body, and fired once. The man was severely wounded, and his clothes were set on fire, but he managed to ride away some fifty yards, and then fell dead. Two accomplices then appeared, but Lord Berkeley, and a servant on horseback who rode behind the carriage, made for them, and they fled. It was then discovered that the gang were all amateur highwaymen, and youths from eighteen to twenty years of age, in good positions in London.
The Earl of Berkeley seems to have been somewhat unduly twitted about this encounter. Society was quite resigned to seeing highwaymen hanged, although it made heroes of them while they were waiting in the “stone jug” at Newgate for that fatal morning at Tyburn; but it appears to have considered the shooting of one of them an unsportsmanlike act.
Lord Chesterfield, however, should have been quite the last man to sneer at the Earl on this score, for he himself was under a very well-deserved public censure for having prosecuted Dr. Dodd, his son’s tutor, for forgery, with the result that the Doctor was hanged. Accordingly, when he sarcastically asked Lord Berkeley “how many highwaymen he had shot lately,” it is pleasing to record that he was readily reduced to silence by the retort, “As many as you have hanged tutors; but with much better reason for doing so.”