THE ‘GOOSE AND GRIDIRON’
Image unavailable: THE WEST COUNTRY MAILS STARTING FROM THE GLOUCESTER COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).THE WEST COUNTRY MAILS STARTING FROM THE GLOUCESTER COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).
their artisan brethren, who did not in those times aspire to one-and-twopence per hour, preferred to walk. For the same reason, they were only the comparatively affluent who could afford the eighteenpenny fare, or the two-hours journey, to Brentford by the ‘stage.’
Let us suppose ourselves to be of that fortunate company, and, paying our one-and-sixpence, set out from the ‘Goose and Gridiron.’
That old-fashioned hostelry, which stood modestly back from the roadway on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard, was, unhappily, demolished in 1894, after a good deal more than two centuries’ record for good cheer. It was originally the ‘Swan and Harp,’ but some irreverent wag, probably as far back as the building of the house in Wren’s time, found the other name for it, and the effigies of the goose and the gridiron remained even to our own time.
This year of our imaginary journey affords a strange contrast with the appearance the streets will possess some sixty years later. Ludgate Hill, in 1837 an exceedingly narrow thoroughfare, paved with rough granite setts, will in the last decade of the century present a very different aspect. Instead of the dingy brick warehouses there will be handsome premises of some architectural pretensions, and the Hill will be considerably widened. The setts will have disappeared, to be replaced by wood pavement, and the traffic will have increased tenfold; until, in fact, it has become a continuous stream. There will be strange vehicles, too, unknown in 1837,—omnibuses,hansom-cabs, and motor cars, and where Ludgate Hill joins Fleet Street there will be a Circus and an obstructive railway-bridge.
Image unavailable: ‘AN OLD GENTLEMAN, A COBBETT-LIKE PERSON.’‘AN OLD GENTLEMAN, A COBBETT-LIKE PERSON.’
We proceed in leisurely fashion down Ludgate Hill, and halt for passengers and parcels at the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street, which is now a railway receiving office. Thence by slow degrees, calling at the ‘Red Lion,’ ‘Spotted Dog,’ and the ‘White Hart,’ we eventually reach the ‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly, re-built many years ago, and now the ‘Berkeley Hotel.’ Beyond this point, progress is fortunately speedier, and we reach Hyde Park Corner in, comparatively speaking, the twinkling of an eye. Hyde Park Corner in 1837, this year of the Queen’s accession, has begun to feel the great changes that are presently to alter London so marvellously. We have among our fellow-travellers by the stage an old gentleman, a Cobbett-like person, who wears a rustic, semi-farmer kind of appearance, and recollects many improvements here; who can ‘mind the time, look you,’ when the turnpike-gate (which was removed in 1825) stood at the corner; when St. George’s Hospital was a private mansion, the residence of Lord Lanesborough; and when the road leading past it to Pimlico was quite wild country, as in the picture on page 43, where sportsmen shot snipe in those marshes that were in future years
Image unavailable: THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S STATUE.THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S STATUE.
to become the site of Belgrave Square and other aristocratic quarters.
At this spot Mr. Decimus Burton had already built the great Triumphal Arch forming the entrance to Constitution Hill, together with the Classic Screen at Hyde Park Corner. The Screen was built in 1828, and the Arch, which is a copy of the Arch of Titus at Rome, in 1832. Already, in 1820, Apsley House had become the residence of the Iron Duke, but it was not until 1846 that what Thackeray justly names ‘the hideous equestrian monster’ was placed on the summit of that Arch, opposite the Duke’s windows. Here is an illustration of it, before it was hoisted up to that height. Beside it you see the Duke himself, in his characteristic white trousers, in company with several weirdly dressed persons. Again, over page, may be seen the Arch, with the statue on it, and the neighbourhood vastly changed from the appearance it wears in the picture of the ‘North-East Prospect of St. George’s Hospital.’ Instead of the great hooded waggons starting for the West Country, the road is occupied with very crowded traffic, and among the vehicles may be noticed two omnibuses, one going to Chelsea, the other (for this is the year 1851) to the Exhibition,—the first exhibition that ever was. If, ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased to look at those omnibuses, you will see that they have neither knifeboards nor seats on the roof, and that passengers are squatting up there in the most supremely uncomfortable, not to say dangerous, positions. Also, in those dark ages of London locomotion, the ascent to that uncomfortable roof was of itself perilous, for no
Image unavailable: THE WELLINGTON ARCH AND HYDE PARK CORNER, 1851.THE WELLINGTON ARCH AND HYDE PARK CORNER, 1851.
Image unavailable: ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL, AND THE ROAD TO PIMLICO, 1780.ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL, AND THE ROAD TO PIMLICO, 1780.
one had as yet dreamed of the staircase. Other curious points will be noticed by the observant, and among them the fact that ’buses then had doors. The present historian vividly recollects a door being part of the equipment of every ’bus, and of the full-flavoured odour of what Mr. W. S. Gilbert calls ‘damp straw and squalid hay’ which assailed the nostrils of the ‘insides’ when that door was shut; but in what particular year did the door vanish altogether? Alas! the straw, with the door, is gone for evermore, and passengers no longer lose their small change in it to the great gain of the conductor, who, by the way, used to be called ‘the cad,’ even although he commonly wore a ‘top hat’ and a frock coat, as per the picture. The word ‘cad’ has since then acquired a much more offensive meaning, and if you addressed a conductor by that name nowadays, he would probably express a desire to punch your head.
The hideous statue of the Duke and his charger ‘Copenhagen,’ which the French said ‘avenged Waterloo,’ was removed to Aldershot in 1884, when the alterations were made at Hyde Park Corner.
Andnow we come to the first toll-gate, which, removed to this spot in 1825, opposite where the Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until 1854.
There were many troublesome survivals in 1837 which have long since been swept away. Toll-gates,
THE PIKEMEN
Image unavailable: KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854.KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854.
for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty, fifty, forty years ago was a very real grievance, both on country roads and in London itself, or in those districts which we now call London. Many people objected to pay toll then, and a favourite amusement of the young bloods was fighting the pikeman for his halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as the case might be. Sometimes the pikeman won, sometimes those gay young sparks; and the pikeman always took those terrific encounters as part of the day’s work, and never summoned those sportsmen for assault and battery. In fact, they were such sporting times that, whether the pikeman or the Corinthian youth won, the latter would probably chuck his antagonist a substantial coin of the realm, whereupon the pikeman would say that ‘his honour was a gemman,’ and exeunt severally to purchase beef-steaks for the reduction of black eyes.
Image unavailable: THE PIKEMAN.THE PIKEMAN.
The present generation has, of course, never seen a pikeman. He wore a tall black glazed hat and corduroy breaches, with white stockings. But the most distinctive part of his costume was his white linen apron. No one knows why he wore an apron; neither did he, and the reason of it must now needs be lost inthe mists of history, because the last pikeman, whom otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to Hades, where he probably is still going through a series of shadowy encounters beside the shores of the Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of long ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his ferry across the stream.
But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837 as quiet a spot as you could find round London, with scattered cottages of the rustic, rose-embowered kind. Knightsbridge Greenwasa green in those days, and not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and for many years afterwards, the soldiers from the neighbouring barracks would walk with the nursemaids in the country lanes, and take tea in the tea-gardens which stood away behind the highroad and were a feature of Brompton. Where are those tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred the road by the barracks? Gone, my friends; swept away like the gossamer threads of the spiders that spun webs in the arbours of those gardens and dropped in the nursemaids’ tea and the soldiers’ beer. Those soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else it would be a pleasing, a curious, and an instructive thing to take them, tottering in their old age, by the hand and say: ‘Here, my gallant warrior of eighty years or so,’ and ‘Here, my pretty maiden of four-score, is Knightsbridge, the self-same Knightsbridge you knew, but with some new, and somewhat larger, buildings.’ They would be as strangers in a strange land, and, dazed by the din of the thronging traffic amid the sky-scraping buildings, beg to be taken
THE ‘NEW POLICE’
Image unavailable: KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE.KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE.
away. But to bring back the policeman of that era, if that were possible, and set him to control this traffic, would be more instructive still. When the last years of the coaching age along this road were still running their course, ‘Robert,’ the ‘Peeler,’ or the ‘New Police,’ as he was variously named, had an easy time of it here. Not so his successors, who have to deal with an almost continual block, all day long and every day.
Image unavailable: THE ‘NEW POLICE.’THE ‘NEW POLICE.’
The ‘New Police’ were a novel body of men in the early years of the reign, having been introduced in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel. Hence the brilliant appropriateness of those nicknames. There still, however, lingered in various parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution, the Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and announced the hours in a curious sing-song voice with remarks upon the state of the weather added. Those who sat up late were familiar with the chant: ‘Twelve o’clock, and a stormy night!’ and found comfort in the companionship of that voice.
The watchmen, although scarce anyone now living can have seen one of those many-caped, tottering old fellows, seem strangely familiar to us. That is because we have read so much about them in the exploits of Tom and Jerry, the Corinthian youth of the glorious days of George the Fourth, when the most popular forms of sport were knocker-wrenching, bilking a pikeman, and thrashing a Charley. A‘Charley’ was, of course, a watchman. The thrashing of a ‘Charley’ was not an heroic pursuit, but (or, rather, therefore) it was extremely popular. They were generally old men, and not capable of very serious reprisals upon the gangs of muscular youths who thumped, whacked, larrupped, and beat them unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to them, so that those poor old men were imprisoned until some Samaritan came by and released them. No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the ‘New Police,’ who were not old and decrepit men, but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows. Perhaps that was why the ‘New Police’ were so violently objected to, although the ostensible grounds of objection were founded on the supposition that the continental system of a semi-militarygendarmeriewas intended. The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep the police a strictly citizen force, and although a uniform was, of course, necessary, one as nearly as possible like civilian dress was chosen. The present uniform of the police, and the police themselves, if they had then worn a helmet, would have been howled out of existence by the violent Radicals and Chartists who troubled the early years of the Queen’s reign. They did not, therefore, wear a helmet at all, but a tall glazed hat of the chimney-pot kind. A swallow-tailed coat, tightly buttoned up, with a belt round the waist, a stiff stock under the chin, and trousers of white duck gave him, altogether, a very respectable and citizen-like aspect. It has been left to later years to alter this uniform.
KENSINGTON
But we must not forget that we are travelling to Brentford sixty-two years ago. Let us, therefore, whip up the horses, and, passing the first milestone at the corner of the lane which a future generation to that of 1837 is to know by the name of the Exhibition Road, hurry on to Kensington.
Image unavailable: TOMMY ATKINS, 1838.TOMMY ATKINS, 1838.
Kensington in this year of the accession of Her Majesty Queen Victoria is having an unusual amount of attention paid to it. Every one is bursting with loyalty towards the girl of eighteen suddenly called upon to rule over the nation, and crowds throng the old-fashioned High Street of Kensington at the end by Palace Green, eager to see Her Majesty drive forth from Kensington Palace. They are kept at a respectful distance by a sentry in a dress which succeeding generations will think absurd. White trousers, coatee, stiff stock, rigid cross-belts, and a shako like the upper part of the funnel of a penny steamer were whimsical things to go a-soldiering in, but the Tommy Atkins of that time had no other or easier kind of uniform, and it will be left for the Crimean War, seventeen years later, to prove the folly of it.
The palace is well guarded, for the Government, for their part, have not yet learned to trust thepeople; nor, indeed, are the people at this time altogether to be trusted. The long era of the Georges did not breed loyalty, and for William the Fourth, just dead, the people had an amused contempt. They called him ‘Silly Billy.’ At this time, also, aristocracy drew its skirts daintily from any possible contact with the lower herd. Alas! poor lower herd, and still more, alas! for aristocracy.
Image unavailable: OLD KENSINGTON CHURCH.OLD KENSINGTON CHURCH.
REMINISCENCES
Our fellow-traveller in the Brentford stage has a friend with him, and, as we jolt from Kensington Gore into the High Street, points out the palace, and tells how William the Third and Queen Mary lived and died there, amid William’s stolid Hollanders. He tells a story which he heard from his grandfather, of how Dr. Radcliffe, called in to look at the King’s dropsical ankles, said, when asked what he thought of them, ‘Why, truly, I would nothave your Majesty’s two legs for your three kingdoms.’ He tells the friend that the King procured a more courtly and less blunt medical adviser; and we can well believe it. More stories beguile the way: how Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark ended here in the fulness of time; how their successor, George the First, furious with Sir Robert Walpole, with his queen, with the servants, and anything and everything, used to tear off his wig and jump on it, in transports of rage. How he would gaze up at the vane on the clock-tower entrance to the palace (which we can just glimpse as we pass), anxious for favouring winds to waft his ships to England with despatches from his beloved Hanover, and how he died suddenly at breakfast one morning after being disappointed in those breezes.
These are hearsay stories. Our friend, however, has reminiscences of his own, and can recollect the Princess Caroline, the eccentric wife of the Prince Regent, living at the palace between the years 1810 and 1814—‘a red-faced huzzy, sir, with yellow towzled hair, all spangles and scarlet cloak, like a play-actress, making Haroun-al-Raschid visits among the people, and bothering the house-agents in the neighbourhood for houses to let.’ The old gentleman who says this is a Radical, and, like all of that political creed, likes to see Royalty ‘behaving as sich, and not like common people such as you an’ me.’ Whereupon another passenger in the stage, on whom the speaker’s eye has fallen, audibly objects to being called, or thought, or included among common persons; so that relationsamong the ‘insides’ are strained, and so continue, past Kensington Church, a very decrepit and nondescript kind of building; past the Charity School, the Vestry Hall, where a gorgeous beadle in plush breeches, white stockings, scarlet cloak trimmed with gold bullion, a wonderful hat, and a wand of office, is standing, and so into the country. Presently we come to the village of Hammersmith, innocent as yet of whelk-stalls and fried-fish shops, and so at last, past Turnham Green, to Brentford.
Image unavailable: THE BEADLE.THE BEADLE.
Brentfordwas dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of theBath Road, for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex. Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for what says Gay?—
Brentford, tedious town,For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.
Brentford, tedious town,For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.
Brentford, tedious town,For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.
Image unavailable: BRENTFORD.BRENTFORD.
‘BRENTFORD, TEDIOUS TOWN’
Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant, inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas, each ‘villa’ as like its neighbour as one new sixpence is to another; or the Cromwell Road at any time or under any conditions. Then you will have known tedium. At Brentford, however, all is life, movement, dirt, and balmy odours from a quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. The bargees and lightermen of this riverside town are swearing picturesquely at one another all day, while the gasmen, the hands at the waterworks, and the railwaymen join in occasionally. Sometimes the profanity so cheerfully bandied about leads to a fight, but not often, because when a bargee addresses his dearest friend by a string of epithets that might make a typical old-time stage-manager blush, it is all taken as a token of friendship. These are the shibboleths of the place.
When, however, Gay alludes to the ‘white-legged chickens,’ for which, he says, Brentford was known, we are at a loss to identify the breed. That kind of chicken must long since have given up the attempt to be white-legged, and have changed, by process of evolution, into some less easily soiled variety. For the dirt of Brentford is always there. It only varies in kind. In times of drought it makes itself obvious in clouds of black dust, composed of powdered coals and clinkers; and when a day of rain has laid this plague, it is forthwith re-incarnated in the shape ofseas of oily black mud. The poet Thomson might have written yesterday—
E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;
E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;
E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;
while Dr. Johnson adds his weighty testimony, for when a contemporary, a native of Glasgow, was praising Glasgow to him, the Doctor cut his eloquence with the query: ‘Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?’ Here was sarcasm indeed! Happily, however, the Glaswegian hadnotseen Brentford, and so was not in a position to appreciate the retort. But Boswell, who, ubiquitous man, was of course present, knew, and told the Doctor this was shocking. ‘Why, then, sir,’ rejoined Johnson, ‘youhave never seen Brentford!’
Then, when we have all this delightful testimony as to Brentford’s dirt, comes Shenstone, the melancholy poet who ‘found his warmest welcome at an inn,’ to testify as to the character of its inhabitants. ‘No persons,’ says he, ‘more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humours of a country christening; and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as “the quality” of Brentford.’
ODD STREET-NAMES
Despite these criticisms, it must be acknowledged that Brentford is a town of high interest. Its filthy gasworks, its waterworks, its docks have not sufficed to sweep away the old-fashioned appearance of the place. It may, in fact, be safely said that no other such truly picturesque town as Brentford exists near London. This will not long remain true of it, for, even now, new buildings are here and there takingthe place of the old. For one thing, Brentford has a quite remarkable number of old inns, and the great stableyards and courtyards of other old coaching hostelries which themselves have disappeared. This was, in fact, the end of the first stage out of London in the coaching era, and the beginning of the last stage in; and in consequence, as befitted a town on the great highway to the West, had ample accommodation, both for man and beast. One of these old yards, indeed,—Red Lion Inn Yard—is historic, for it is traditionally the spot where Edmund Ironside, the king, was murdered by the Danes in 1016, after he had defeated them here. The most famous, however, of all the Brentford inns, theThree Pigeons, was brutally demolished many years ago, although it had associations with Shakespeare and ‘rare’ Ben Jonson. The ‘Tumbledown Dick,’ another vanished hostelry, whose sign was a satire on the nerveless rule and swift overthrow of the Protector’s son, Richard Cromwell, was a well-known house; while the names of some of the old yards—Green Dragon Yard and Catherine Wheel Yard—are reminiscent of once-popular signs.
Then Brentford has the queerest of street names. What think you of ‘Half Acre’ for the style and title of a thoroughfare? or ‘Town Meadow,’ which is less a meadow than a slum? Then there are ‘The Butts,’ with some fine, dignified Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick houses, situated in a quiet spot behind the High Street; and ‘The Hollows,’ a thoroughfare hollow no longer, if ever it was.
Fronting on to the High Street is the broad andmassive old stone tower of St. Lawrence’s Church, the parish church of the so-called ‘New’ Brentford, itself old beyond compute. The tower dates back four hundred years or so, but the body of the church was rebuilt in Georgian days and is very like, and only a little less hideous than, the gasworks up the street.
SION
An extraordinary story is told by Cyrus Redding, in hisFifty Years’ Recollections, of a countryman’s adventures in London just before the introduction of railways. The adventures began at Brentford: ‘I had a relative,’ he says, ‘who, on stating his intention to come up to town, was solicited to accept as his fellow-traveller a man of property, a neighbour, who had never been thirty miles from home in his life. They travelled by coach. All went well till they reached Brentford, where the countryman supposed he was nearly come to his journey’s end. On seeing the lamps mile after mile, he expressed more and more impatience, exclaiming, “Are we not yet in London, and so many miles of lamps?” At length, on reaching Hyde Park Corner, he was told they had arrived. His impatience increased from thence to Lad Lane. He became overwhelmed with astonishment, They entered the “Swan with Two Necks,” and my relative bade his companion remain in the coffee-room until he returned. On returning, he found the bird flown, and for six long weeks there were no tidings of him. At length it was discovered that he was in the custody of the constables at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, his mind alienated. He was conveyed home, came partially to his reason for ashort time, and died. It was gathered from him that he had become more and more confused at the lights and the long distances he was carried among them; it seemed as if they could have no end. The idea that he could never be extricated from such a labyrinth superseded every other. He could not bear the thought. He went into the street, inquired his way westward, and seemed to have got into Hyde Park, and then out again into the Great Western Road, walking until he could walk no longer. He could relate nothing more that occurred until he was secured. Neither his watch nor money had been taken from him.’
The country-folks who now journey up to town do not behave in this extraordinary fashion on coming to the infinitely greater and more distracting London of to-day.
At the western end of Brentford, just removed from its muddy streets, is Sion, the Duke of Northumberland’s suburban residence. The great square embattled stone house stands in the midst of the park, screened from observation from the road by great clusters of forest trees. Through the ornamental classic stone screen and iron gateway, erected in the well-known ‘Adam style’ by John Adam about 1780, the green sward may be glimpsed; the fresher and more beautiful by contrast with the dusty highroad. Above the arched stone entrance stands the Percy Lion,statant, as heralds would say, with tail extended.
Sion is well named, for no fairer scene can be imagined than this in the long days of summer, when the lovely gardens are at their best and the Thamesflows by the park with glittering golden ripples. The Daughters of Sion, whose religious retreat this was, belonged to the Order of St. Bridget. Their abbey, with its lands and great revenues, was suppressed and confiscated by Henry the Eighth in 1532. Nine years later his Queen, Katherine Howard, was imprisoned within the desecrated walls before being handed over to the headsman, and in another seven years the body of the King himself lay here a night on its journey to Windsor. There is a horrid story that tells how the unwieldy corpse of the bloated royal monster burst, and how the dogs drank his blood.
In the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, Sion enjoyed a few years’ restitution of its rights and property, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne, the ‘Daughters’ were finally dispossessed. They wandered to Flanders, and thence, by devious ways, and with many hardships, eventually to Lisbon. The Abbey of Sion yet exists there, and the sisters are still solely Englishwomen. It is on record that they still cherish the hope of returning to their lost home by the banks of the Thames, and have to this day the keys of that abbey. Seventy years or so since, the then Duke of Northumberland, travelling in Portugal, called upon them, and was told of this fond belief. They even showed him the keys. But he was equal to the occasion, and cynically remarked that the locks had been altered since those days!
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 theways 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 11P.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 mannamed 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 havelong 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 afraidOf 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.’
As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraidOf 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.’
As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraidOf 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.”’
Itis 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 makesfor 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 thelaw 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 thescrubby 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 theycallcultivated! That is indeedexcellent. 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.