The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York
by Charles G. Harper · English · Gutenberg #46716 · 422,348 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York
Author: Charles G. Harper
Release date: August 28, 2014 [eBook #46716]
Most recently updated: October 8, 2014
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46716
Credits: This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, THE OLD MAIL ROAD TO SCOTLAND: LONDON TO YORK ***
This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Starting from G.P.O. in Lombard Street]
_The_
GREAT NORTH ROAD
The Old Mail Road to Scotland
_By_ CHARLES G. HARPER
* * * * *
LONDON TO YORK
* * * * *
_Illustrated by the Author_, _and from old-time_
_Prints and Pictures_
[Picture: Title Figure (man on bicycle)]
LONDON:
CECIL PALMER
OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, W.C. 1
* * * * *
_First published in_ 1901
_Second and Revised edition_, 1922
* * * * *
Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & Co., LTD.,
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool
and 187, Fleet Street, London.
* * * * *
IN LOVING MEMORY
OF
HERMAN MORONEY
“_I expect to pass through this world but once_. _Any good_,
_therefore_, _I can do_, _or any kindness that I can show to any
fellow-creature_, _let me do it now_. _Let me not defer or neglect
it_, _for I shall not pass this way again_.”
_Attributed to_ WILLIAM PENN.
PREFACE.
[Picture: Preface heading]
_WHEN the original edition of the_ “GREAT NORTH ROAD” _was published—in_
1901—_the motorcar was yet a new thing_. _It had_, _in November_, 1896,
_been given by Act of Parliament the freedom of the roads_; _but_, _so
far_, _the character of the nation’s traffic had been comparatively
little changed_. _People would still turn and gaze_, _interested_, _at a
mechanically-propelled vehicle_; _and few were those folk who had
journeyed the entire distance between London and Edinburgh in one of
them_. _For motor-cars were still_, _really_, _in more or less of an
experimental stage_; _and on any long journey you were never sure of
finishing by car what you had begun_. _Also_, _the speed possible was
not great enough to render such a long __journey exhilarating to modern
ideas_. _It is true that_, _the year before_, _the_ “_Automobile Club of
Great Britain and Ireland_,” _not yet become the_ “_Royal Automobile
Club_,” _had in its now forgotten role of a_ “_Society of Encouragement_”
_planned and carried out a_ “_Thousand Miles Tour_,” _which had Edinburgh
as its most northern point_; _but it was a very special effort_. _Those
who took part in it are not likely to forget the occasion_.
* * * * *
_To-day_, _all that is changed_. _Every summer_, _every autumn_, _sees
large numbers of touring automobiles on the way to Scotland and the
moors_, _filled with those who prefer the road_, _on such terms_, _to the
railway_. _From being something in the nature of a lonely highway_, _the
Great North Road has thus become a very much travelled one_. _In this
way_, _some of its circumstances have changed remarkably_, _and old-time
comfortable wayside inns that seemed to have been ruined for all time
with the coming of railways and the passing of the coaches have wakened
to a newer life_. _Chief among these is the_ “_Bell_” _on Barnby Moor_,
_just north of Retford_. _The story of its revival is a romance_.
_Closed about_ 1845, _and converted into a farm-house_, _no one would
have cared to predict its revival as an inn_. _But as such it was
reopened_, _chiefly for the use of motorists_, _in_ 1906, _and there it
is to-day_.
_But_, _apart from the tarred and asphalted condition of the actual
roadway in these times_, _the route_, _all the way between London_, _York
and Edinburgh_, _looks much the same as it did_. _Only_, _where perhaps
one person might then know it thoroughly_, _from end to end_, _a hundred
are well acquainted with the way and its features_. _It is for those
many who now know the Great North Road that this new edition is
prepared_, _giving the story of the long highway between the two
capitals_.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
_April_, 1922.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
LONDON TO YORK
MILES
Islington (the “Angel”) 1¼
Highgate Archway 4¼
East End, Finchley 5¾
Brown’s Wells, Finchley Common (“Green Man”) 7
Whetstone 9¼
Greenhill Cross 10¼
Barnet 11¼
Hadley Green 12
Ganwick Corner (“Duke of York”) 13
Potter’s Bar 14¼
Little Heath Lane 15¼
Bell Bar (“Swan”) 17¼
Hatfield 19¾
Stanborough 21½
Lemsford Mills (cross River Lea) 22¼
Digswell Hill (cross River Mimram) 23¼
Welwyn 25¼
Woolmer Green 27¼
Broadwater 29½
Stevenage 31½
Graveley 33½
Baldock 37½
Biggleswade (cross River Ivel) 45¼
Lower Codicote 46¾
Beeston Cross (cross River Ivel) 48¼
Girlford 49¼
Tempsford (cross River Ouse) 51
Wyboston 54
Eaton Socon 55¼
Cross Hall 56¾
Diddington 60
Buckden 61¼
Brampton Hut 63¾
Alconbury 66¼
Alconbury Weston 67
Alconbury Hill (“Wheatsheaf”) 68
Sawtry St. Andrews 71½
Stilton 75½
Norman Cross 76
Kate’s Cabin 79½
Water Newton 81¼
Sibson 82
Stibbington (cross River Nene) 83¾
Wansford 84
Stamford Baron (cross River Welland) 89
Stamford 89½
Great Casterton 91½
Stretton 96
Greetham (“New Inn”) 97½
North Witham (“Black Bull”) 100½
Colsterworth 102½
Great Ponton 106¾
Spitalgate Hill 109¾
Grantham 110¼
Great Gonerby 112
Foston 116
Long Bennington 118¼
Shire Bridge (cross Shire Dyke) 120½
Balderton (cross River Devon) 122¼
Newark (cross River Trent) 124½
South Muskham 127
North Muskham 128
Cromwell 130
Carlton-on-Trent 131½
Sutton-on-Trent 133
Weston 134¾
Scarthing Moor 135½
Tuxford 137¾
West Markham 139½
Markham Moor 140½
Gamston (cross Chesterfield Canal) 141½
Retford (cross River Idle) 145
Barnby Moor 148
Torworth 149½
Ranskill 150¼
Scrooby 152
Bawtry 153½
Rossington Bridge (cross River Tome) 157¾
Tophall 158¾
Doncaster (cross River Don) 162¼
Bentley 164
Owston 167¾
Askerne (cross River Went) 169¼
Whitley (cross Knottingley and Goole Canal) 174
Whitley Bridge 175
Chapel Haddlesey (cross River Aire) 175½
Burn (cross Selby Canal) 179¼
Brayton 180¾
Selby (cross River Ouse) 182¼
Barlby 183¾
Riccall 186
Escrick 189¼
Deighton 190½
Gate Fulford 195
York 196¾
CONTENTS.
I Various Notes On Roads In General. 1
II Road Construction And Makers. 10
III Makers Of Coaches: G.P.O. Mails. 13
IV Post Office History. 26
V Stage Coach Timings. 33
VI Travel Expenses And Difficulties. 39
VII Journey Stages: Islington: Holloway. 49
VIII Highgate: Dick Whittington. 53
IX Highgate: Archway. 57
X Highgate: Footpads. 61
XI Finchley: Tally-Ho Corner And Common. 65
XII Whetstone: Building Of New Road. 72
XIII Barnet: Prize-Fighting. 75
XIV Hadley Green: Potter’s Bar: Hatfield. 80
XV Digswell Hill: Welwyn: Knebworth. 87
XVI Stevenage: Posting Charges. 96
XVII Baldock: Biggleswade: Tempsford. 101
XVIII Some Cycling Records. Eaton Socon. 109
XIX Buckden: Brampton: Matcham’s Bridge. 113
XX Alconbury Hill: Stilton. 121
XXI Norman Cross: Wansford: Burghley. 129
XXII Stamford: Daniel Lambert. 145
XXIII Stretton: Bloody Oaks: Ram-Jam Inn. 154
XXIV Travellers. Some Road History. 164
XXV Coming Of The Railways. 171
XXVI Witham Common: Great Ponton. 175
XXVII Grantham. 180
XXVIII Oliver Cromwell: Gonerby Hill. 188
XXIX Newark: Ringing For Gofer. 193
XXX North And South Muskham. 203
XXXI Retford. 210
XXXII Barnby Moor: Scrooby. 213
XXXIII Bawtry: Rossington Bridge. 222
XXXIV Tophall: Doncaster: St. Leger. 226
XXXV Askerne: Brayton: Selby. 235
XXXVI Riccall: Invaders: York. 242
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
To the North in the Days of Old: Mails starting Frontispiece
from the General Post Office, Lombard Street
Old and New Swan Nicks: Vintners’ Company 16
Modern Sign of the “Swan with Two Necks” 17
The “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street 19
The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill 23
The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 27
1832
The “Louth Mail” stopped by the snow 43
Entrance to London from Islington, 1809 47
Islington Green, 1820 50
Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897 63
The Great Common of Finchley: A Parlous Place 67
Turpin’s Oak 70
“The Whetstone” 72
High Street, Barnet 77
Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet 81
Old Toll House, Potter’s Bar 82
Ganwick Corner 83
Bell Bar 84
Welwyn 89
The “Six Hills,” Stevenage 95
Trigg’s Coffin 102
At the 39th Mile 106
Biggleswade 108
Buckden 115
Matcham’s Bridge 119
Alconbury Hill: Junction of the Great North Road 123
and the North Road
The “Bell,” Stilton 127
Norman Cross 129
French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross 132
Sculptured Figure, Water Newton Church 133
Water Newton Church 134
Edmund Boulter’s Milestone 135
The “Haycock,” Wansford 137
Sign of the “Haycock” 138
Wansford Bridge 139
Burghley House, by Stamford Town 143
Entrance to Stamford 147
Stamford 151
Daniel Lambert 152
The “Highflyer,” 1840 155
Bloody Oaks 157
Interior of a Village Inn 159
House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common 163
Foster Powell 168
Great Ponton 177
Great Ponton Church 179
The “Angel,” Grantham 182
The “Wondrous Sign” 187
Newark Castle 195
Market Place, Newark 199
Newark Castle 201
Jockey House 210
An Old Postboy: John Blagg 212
Scrooby Church 216
Scrooby Manor House 217
The Stables, Scrooby Manor House 220
The “Crown,” Bawtry 224
Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse 229
Brayton Church 237
Market Place, Selby 239
Micklegate Bar 245
Micklegate Bar: Present Day 246
[Picture: Old steam train]
I.
THERE was once an American who, with cheap wit, expressed a fear of
travelling in the little island of Great Britain, lest he should
accidentally fall over the edge of so small a place. It is quite evident
that he never travelled the road from London to York and Edinburgh.
You have to perform that journey to realise that this is, after all, not
so very small an island. It is not enough to have been wafted between
London and Edinburgh by express train—even although the wafting itself
takes seven hours and a half—for one to gain a good idea of the distance.
We will not take into consideration the total mileage between Dover and
Cape Wrath, which tots up to the formidable figure of eight hundred miles
or so, but will confine ourselves in these pages to the great road
between London and Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which
measures, by way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles.
There are a North Road and a Great North Road. Like different forms of
religious belief, by which their several adherents all devoutly hope to
win to that one place where we all would be, these two roads eventually
lead to one goal, although they approach it by independent ways. The
North Road is the oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine
Way which led to Lincoln. It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and
goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham Cross to
Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the Great North Road
after passing through Caxton and climbing Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight
miles from London.
The Great North Road takes a very different route out of London. It was
measured from Hicks’s Hall, Smithfield, and, passing the “Angel” at
Islington, pursued a straight and continually ascending course for
Holloway and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn,
Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just
remarked, the North Road merged into it. From London to Hadley Green,
just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road are
identical.
In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road;
starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done,
from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which,
or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and
went.
We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings,
leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them. In the
comparatively settled times of from a hundred to two hundred years ago,
they duly returned, after many days: in earlier periods the home-coming
was not so sure a thing.
These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the cyclist, who
travel for the love of change and the desire for beautiful scenery, why
no one in the Middle Ages travelled from choice. From the highest to the
lowest, from the king in his palace to the peasant in his wattled hut,
every one who could do so stayed at home, and only faced the roads from
sheer necessity. No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor are our
ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this respect, for
outside every man’s door lurked some danger or another, and when a man’s
own fireside is the only safe place he knows of, it is apt to appear to
him the most beautiful and the most desirable of spots.
We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery. If a love of the
wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the safety of those who
behold it, and upon the ease with which those scenes are visited, perhaps
only the later generations of Roman colonists could have possessed this
sense. The earlier Romans who made their splendid system of roads were,
doubtless, only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found
nothing beautiful in mountain ranges. Their successors, however, during
four hundred years had leisure and plentiful opportunities of cultivating
taste, and travel was highly organised among them. A milliare, or
milestone, was placed at every Roman mile—4854 English feet—and
“mansiones,” or posting-stations, at distances varying from seven to
twenty miles.
Roman roads were scientifically constructed. The following was the
formula:—
I. Pavimentum, or foundation. Fine earth, hard beaten in.
II. Statumen, or bed of the road. Composed of large stones,
sometimes mixed with mortar.
III. Ruderatio. Small stones, well mixed with mortar.
IV. Nucleus. Formed by mixing lime, chalk, pounded brick, or
tile; or gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay.
V. Summum Dorsum. Surface of the paved road.
So thoroughly well was the work done that remains of these roads are even
now discovered, in a perfect condition, although buried from six to
fifteen feet, or even deeper, beneath the present surface of the land,
owing to the hundreds of years of neglect which followed the abandonment
of Britain, and the decay of Roman civilisation; a neglect which allowed
storms and the gradual effects of the weather to accumulate deposits of
earth upon these paved ways until they were made to disappear as
effectually as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the hail of ashes and lava
that hid those cities from view for eighteen hundred years.
When that great people, the Romans, perished off the face of the earth,
and none succeeded them, their roads began to decay, their bridges and
paved fords were broken down or carried away by floods, and the rulers of
the nation were for over five hundred years too busily engaged in
subduing rebellions at home or in prosecuting wars abroad to attend to
the keeping of communications in proper repair. Social disorder, too,
destroyed roads and bridges that had survived natural decay and the
stress of the elements. Even those roads which existed in otherwise good
condition were only fair-weather highways. They were innocent of
culverts, and consequently the storm-water, which nowadays is carried off
beneath them, swept across the surface, and either carried it away or
remained in vast lakes on whose shores wayfarers shivered until the
floods had abated. Thieves and murderers were the commonplaces of the
roads, and signposts were not; so that guides—who at the best were
expensive, and at the worst were the accomplices of cutthroats, and lured
the traveller to their haunts—were absolutely necessary.
To the relief of travellers in those times came the Church, for the civil
and secular power had not begun even to dream of road-making. The Church
did some very important things for travellers, praying for them, and
adjuring the devout to include them in their prayers for prisoners and
captives, the sick, and others in any way distressed. The very word
“travel” derives from _travail_, meaning labour or hardship. This alone
shows how much to be pitied were those whose business took them from
their own firesides.
But to pray for them alone would not perhaps have been so very admirable,
and so the Church took the care of the roads on itself in a very special
sense. It granted indulgences to those who by their gifts or their
bodily labour helped to repair the highways, and licensed hermits to
receive tolls and alms from travellers over roads and bridges constructed
by the brethren, those revenues going towards the upkeep of the ways.
Benefactors to the Church frequently left lands and houses, whose
proceeds were to be applied for the same purpose; and for many years this
trust was respected, and all the road and bridge building and repairing
was done by the religious. By degrees, however, this trust was, if not
betrayed, allowed to gradually fall into neglect. False hermits set up
in remote places, away from the eyes of the bishops, and living idle and
dissolute lives on the alms they received, allowed roads and bridges
alike to fall into decay. These vicious, unlicensed hermits were great
stumbling-blocks to the godly in those times. They were often peasants
or workmen, who had observed how fat and idle a living was that gained by
those among the licensed who had betrayed their trust and fared
sumptuously on alms unearned, and so went and set up in the eremitical
profession for themselves. They fared well on bacon, had “fat chekus,”
toasted themselves before roaring fires in their too comfortable cells,
and lived “in ydelnesse and ese,” frequenting ale-houses and even worse
places. Accordingly many of them were eventually removed, or suffered
various punishments, and the neighbouring monasteries placed others in
their stead.
By this time, however, the bishops and abbots, whose broad acres had
often come to them in trust for the welfare of the traveller, began to
forget their obligations. It was, of course, a natural process: the
possessions of the religious houses had grown enormously, but so also had
their hospitality to all and sundry. Travellers had increased, and as it
was a rule of conduct with the great abbeys to not only relieve the poor,
but also to entertain the great in those days before the rise of the
roadside hostelry, their resources must have been well exercised.
Meanwhile the statutes of the country had gradually been imposing the
care of the roads upon the laity, and at the time when the greater and
lesser monasteries were dissolved, in the reign of Henry the Eighth,
parishes and landowners were chiefly concerned in endeavouring to comply
with their new and strange obligations in keeping their ways passable.
Of course they did not succeed, and equally of course, because it was
impossible that they could, the pains and penalties threatened for foul
and dangerous roads were not enforced.
A curious pamphlet on the condition of the roads in the seventeenth
century is that written by Thomas Mace, one of the “clerks” of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and published in 1675. Mace, there is no doubt, was
a man born out of his time. Had circumstances been propitious, he might
have become another and an earlier Macadam. His pamphlet, written both
in prose and verse, and addressed to the king, is styled _The Profit_,
_Conveniency_, _and Pleasure for the Whole Nation_, and is “a Discourse
lately presented to His Majesty concerning the Highways of England; their
badness, the causes thereof, the reasons of these causes, the
impossibility of ever having them well mended according to the old way of
mending; but may most certainly be done, and for ever so maintained
(according to this New Way) substantially, and with very much ease.”
We find here, as in other publications until the mid-eighteenth century
was well past, that the country was for the most part unenclosed, so that
when the traffic had worn the old tracks into deep ruts, or when mud had
rendered them impassable, the wagons, carts, and laden horses were taken
round by the nearest firm spots. “Much ground,” says our author, “is now
spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where coaches and carts take
liberty to pick and chuse for their best advantages; besides, such
sprawling and straggling of coaches and carts utterly confound the road
in all wide places, so that it is not only unpleasurable, but extremely
perplexing and cumbersome both to themselves and to all horse
travellers.”
These pickings and choosings were the original cause of the still
existing twists and turns in many of our roads. When we see an old road
winding snake-like through a flat country, with no hills or other obvious
reasons for its circuitous course, we may, in most cases, safely
attribute this apparent indecision and infirmity of purpose to these
ancient difficulties, thus perpetuated.
This ancient state of things occasioned many disputes and even fatal
affrays between the packhorse men, who carried goods slung across their
horses’ backs from one part of the country to the other, and between the
market-folk and those who travelled on horseback and coaches. Mace would
himself seem to have experienced some of these contentions as to who
should take the clean and who the muddy part of the road, for he writes
with great bitterness about “these disturbances, daily committed by
uncivil, refractory, and rude, Russianlike rake-shames, in contesting for
the way.”
“Hundreds of pack-horses,” he continues, “panniers, whifflers, coaches,
wagons, wains, carts, or whatsoever others,” fought and schemed for
precedence; and a horseman, his horse already exhausted by a long and
tedious journey, might, at the entrance to a town, especially on market
day, be compelled to go out of his way twenty times in one mile, owing to
the peevishness of these whifflers and market-folk. “I have often known
many travellers,” he continues, “and myself very often, to have been
necessitated to stand stock still behind a standing cart or wagon, on
most beastly and unsufferable wet wayes, to the great endangering of our
horses and neglect of public business: nor durst we adventure to stirr
(for most imminent danger of those deep rutts and unreasonable ridges)
till it has pleased Mr. Carter to jog on, which we have taken very
kindly.”
His plan was to once get the roads in good repair, and then, he says,
with the employment of “day men” to every five miles or so, they could be
easily kept in order. The prospect induces him to rise to poetry:
“First, let the ways be regularly brought
To artificial form, and truly wrought;
So that we can suppose them firmly mended,
And in all needful points, the work well ended,
That not a stone’s amiss; but all complete,
All lying smooth, round, firm, and wondrous neat.”
So far good. But then comes the heavy traffic to destroy the good work:
“Then comes a gang of heavy-laden wains
Of carts and wagons, spoiling all our pains.”
But he is ready for this. His proposed “day men” by at once filling up
the ruts would make the damage good. All these things he commends to the
notice of his Majesty with the concluding lines:
“There’s only one thing yet worth thinking on,
Which is, to put this work in execution.”
That it was _not_ “put into execution” is a matter of history.
We have seen that Mace calls the road to Scotland a “highway,” and the
terms “highroad” or “highway” are common enough; but what really is a
highroad? or rather, how did the term originate? Such a road is usually
understood to be a main artery of traffic between important towns, but
that was not precisely the original meaning, which indicated the physical
character of the road rather than its geographical status. “High roads”
were originally in fact, causeways constructed across, and above the
level of, marshes and low-lying lands, and the term was therefore
excellently descriptive. The changed meaning no doubt arose from the
fact that, as it would scarcely ever have been worth while to build
embanked roads for the purpose of connecting obscure villages out of the
way of trade, consequently the “high ways” and the “high roads” only came
into existence between important centres. But this highly specialised
meaning was destroyed when Turnpike Acts and Highway Acts began to be
passed. The first Turnpike Act, one relating to the road to the North,
referred to the Shoreditch, Stamford Hill, Ware, and Royston route, which
joined the Great North Road at Alconbury Hill. It was passed in 1663,
and authorised a toll-gate at Stilton, among other places. In the
preamble to this Act we find the road spoken of as “the ancient highway
and post-road leading from London to York and so into Scotland.” Later
Acts providing for the collection of tolls on the main roads and for the
formation of Turnpike Trusts, whose business it was to collect those
tolls and with them keep the “turnpike” roads in repair, named them
“turnpike roads”; while other legislation, culminating in the General
Highway Act of William the Fourth, perpetrated a delightful paradox by
especially designating by-roads “highways.” The cardinal difference, in
the eyes of the law, was that a turnpike road was a main line of
communication, to be maintained in proper order throughout its length by
taxes collected from the users of the road; while highways were only
local roads for local use and to be maintained by the respective parishes
in which they were situated. The ways in which these parish roads were
kept in repair were sufficiently curious. “Statute labour” preceded
highway rates, and was so called from a statute of Philip and Mary
providing for parish road-surveyors, and for men, horses, carts, and
materials to be supplied by the farmers at their orders, for repairs.
“Statute labour” survived in a fashion until the passing of the General
Highway Act of 1835, when it was wholly superseded by rates. In later
days parishes united and formed Highway Boards, just as they formed Poor
Law Unions; and choosing a surveyor, levied a common highway rate. These
surveyors were not always, nor often, competent men. They were, in fact,
generally elected by the Boards or the Vestries from some necessitous
inhabitants little above the status of the broken-down old men who were
paid a trifle to break or spread stones in order to keep them from being
burdens to the parish in the workhouse. These surveyors were appointed
and work done in fear of the parishes being indicted and heavily fined
for the dangerous condition of their roads, but it is obvious that they
must have been very badly repaired in those times. Nowadays the roads
are all highways, since the turnpikes have been abolished, and their
repair, outside the boroughs, is the business of the County Councils.
II
BEFORE Macadam and Telford appeared upon the scene, the office of
road-surveyor was very generally looked down upon. No self-respecting
engineer, before the time of these great men, condescended to have
anything to do with roads. It is true that a forerunner of Macadam and
Telford had appeared in Yorkshire in 1765, when “Blind Jack of
Knaresborough” began the construction of the Boroughbridge and Harrogate
road, the first of the long series for which he contracted; but he was
not an official road-surveyor, nor by profession an engineer. He was, in
fact, an engineer born and wholly untaught.
John Metcalf, the famous blind roadmaker, was born in 1717, and lost his
eyesight at six years of age. A native of Knaresborough, he filled in
his time many parts; being fiddler, huckster, soldier, carrier,
proprietor of the first stage-wagon between York and Knaresborough, and
road and bridge maker and contractor by turns. The marvellous instinct
which served him instead of sight is scarce credible, but is well
authenticated. He joined Thornton’s company of Yorkshire volunteers
raised at Boroughbridge to meet the Scots rebels in the ’45, and marched
with them and played them into action at Falkirk. His marvellous
adventures have no place here, but his solitary walk from London to
Harrogate in 1741 concerns the Great North Road. Being in London, and
returning at the same time, Colonel Liddell of Harrogate offered Blind
Jack a seat behind his carriage, which Metcalf declined, saying that he
could easily walk as far in a day as the colonel could go in his carriage
with post-horses. This incidentally shows us how utterly vile the roads
were at the time. Metcalf, although blind and unused to the road, having
travelled up to London by sea, walked back, and easily reached Harrogate
before the colonel, who posted all the way.
Liddell, who had an escort of sixteen mounted servants, started an hour
later than Metcalf. It had been arranged that they should meet that
night at Welwyn, but, a little beyond Barnet, on Hadley Green, where the
roads divide, Metcalf took the left hand, or Holyhead, road by mistake
and went a long distance before he discovered his mistake. Still he
arrived at Welwyn first. The next day he was balked at Biggleswade by
the river, which was in flood, and with no bridge to cross by.
Fortunately, after wandering some distance along the banks, he met a
stranger who led the way across a plank bridge. When they had crossed,
Metcalf offered him some pence for a glass of beer, which his guide
declined, saying he was welcome. Metcalf, however, pressed it upon him.
“Pray, can you see very well?” asked the stranger.
“Not very well,” replied Blind Jack.
“God forbid I should tithe you,” said his guide. “I am the rector of
this parish; so God bless you, and I wish you a good journey.”
In the end, Metcalf reached Harrogate two days before the colonel.
Metcalf made many roads around Knaresborough and in different parts of
Yorkshire, but none actually on the Great North Road. He died, aged
ninety-three, in 1810, five years before Macadam and Telford began their
work upon the roads. Like them, he rather preferred boggy ground for
road-making, and forestalled both them and Stephenson in adopting fagots
as foundations over mires. At that time the ignorant surveyors of roads
repaired them with dirt scraped from ditches and water-courses, in which
they embedded the first cartloads of stones which came to hand; stone of
all kinds and all sizes. This done, their “repairs” were completed, with
the result that the roads were frequently as bad as ever and constantly
in the most rugged condition. Roads—it may be news to the
uninstructed—cannot be made with dirt. In fact, a good road through
anything but rock is generally excavated, and the native earth being
removed, its place is taken by coarse-broken granite or rock; this in its
turn receiving a layer of “macadam,” or smaller broken granite or
whinstone, which is finally bound together by a sprinkling of red gravel,
of the kind known by builders as “hoggin,” whose binding qualities are
caused by a slight natural admixture of clay. In his insistence upon
broken stones, Macadam proved a power of observation not possessed by the
generality of road-makers, whose method was the haphazard one of strewing
any kind upon the road and trusting in the traffic to pack them. With
rounded pebbles or gravel stones thus chafing against one another, they
never packed into a solid mass, but remained for all time as unstable as
a shingly beach. Generations of road-making had not taught wisdom, but
Macadam perceived the readiness of the angularities in broken stones to
unite and form a homogeneous mass, and in introducing his system proved
himself unwittingly a man of science, for science has in these later days
discovered that ice is compacted by the action of ice-crystals uniting in
exactly this manner.
A great scheme for laying out the whole of the Great North Road between
London and Edinburgh on a scientific basis was in progress when the
successful trial of the competing locomotives at Rainhill, near
Liverpool, cast a warning shadow over the arrangements, and finally led
to the project being entirely abandoned. Had the work been done, it is
quite possible that the railways to the north would have taken another
direction; that, in fact, instead of land having to be surveyed and
purchased for them, the new, straight, and level road would have been
given up to and largely used by the railways. Telford was the engineer
chosen by the Government to execute this work, of which the portion
between Morpeth and Edinburgh was actually constructed. The survey of
the road between London, York, and Morpeth was begun as early as 1825,
and had been not only completed, but the works on the eve of being
started, when the Rainhill trials in 1829 stopped them short, and caused
the utter waste of the public money spent in the surveying.
III
IT were vain, nowadays, to seek any of the old starting-points from
London. The late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson asked in 1896, “Are ‘The
Bull and Mouth,’ ‘The Spread Eagle,’ The Swan with Two Necks,’ and ‘The
Green Man and Still,’ yet in existence?” With some little research he
would have discovered that—with the sole exception of the last-named—they
are not. The “Bull and Mouth” in later years became the “Queen’s Hotel,”
and was demolished only when the site was required for an extension of
the General Post Office in 1887. At the same time as the “Queen’s”
disappeared, the street at the side of it, called from the old inn “Bull
and Mouth Street,” was stopped up. In this street was the entrance to
the famous old coaching-stables which were in the last years of their
existence used as a railway receiving-office for goods. On their being
pulled down, the grotesque plaster sign, representing a giant face with
yawning mouth in which stood a bull, was removed to the Guildhall Museum,
where it may still be seen, together with the yet larger and more
elaborate sign which decorated the frontage of the “Queen’s.” This also
included a mouth and a bull, set amidst a frame of plaster fruits and
flowers, with the inscription:—
“Milo the Cretonian,
An ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal,
Ye gods! what a glorious twist.”
The origin, however, of the curious sign had nothing to do with this
hungry person. Precisely what was that origin is never likely to be
known; for although the legend that it derived from the capture of
“Boulogne Mouth”—_i.e._ Boulogne Harbour—in the reign of Henry the Eighth
is in general acceptation, it has been shrewdly suspected that this was a
tale wickedly invented by George Steevens, a literary practical joker,
who palmed off many similar stories upon unsuspecting antiquaries at the
end of last century. A perhaps more likely story is that the sign was
originally the “Bowl and Mouth.”
Under Sherman’s rule the “Bull and Mouth” became a mighty resort of
coaches to and from all parts, but more especially the north, and his
underground stables formed one of the sights of London.
Edward Sherman was a man of many parts, and had a varied career.
Originally a stockbroker, he followed Willans at the “Bull and Mouth” in
1823, and rebuilt it as the “Queen’s” in 1830, continuing the stables
under the old name, and eventually reconstructing them. The money for
these enterprises came from three old and wealthy ladies whom he married
in succession. If the stranger, unversed in the build and colour of
coaches, could not pick out the somewhat old-fashioned, bright-yellow
vehicles as Sherman’s, he was helped in identifying them by the pictorial
sign of the inn painted on the panels—rather a startling one, by the way,
to the rustics. Sherman, however, had not the prescience of Chaplin or
of Horne, who clearly foresaw the success of railways, and he kept his
coaches on the roads for some time after they were opened to their
destinations. He was sufficiently ill-advised not to come to terms with
the railway companies, and actually attempted, with the “Red Rover,” to
run the Manchester trains off. Of course this could not last very long,
and Sherman withdrew after having lost seven thousand pounds in a
gallant, but futile, competition with steam.
In its prime the “Bull and Mouth” sent forth the Edinburgh and Aberdeen
Royal Mail by York; the Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen coach by
Ferry-bridge to Newcastle, where the Glasgow passengers changed; the
Glasgow and Carlisle Royal Mail; the Newcastle “Wellington”; Shrewsbury
and Holyhead “Union” and “Oxonian”; Birmingham “Old Post Coach” and
“Aurora”; Leeds Royal Mail and “Express”; and Leicester “Union Post
Coach.”
The site of the “Swan with Two Necks” is now occupied by the London and
North-Western and South-Western Joint Goods Depot, in Gresham Street.
Modern sculptured keystones may be seen over the entrances, bearing the
effigy of a double-headed swan. This sign, like that of the “Bull and
Mouth,” is a corruption of a widely different term; originally, indeed,
the “Swan with Two Nicks,” from the particular “nicks” with which the
bills of the swans belonging to the Vintners’ Company on the Thames were
marked. The City Companies each had their swans on the river, and even
nowadays they are maintained on the upper reaches. The young cygnets
were marked at the annual festival of “swan-upping,” at which the City
magnates used hugely to enjoy themselves. The old and the new “nicks” of
the Vintners’ Company are pictured here.
[Picture: Old And New Swan Nicks] So far back as 1556, the “Swane with ij
Nekes at Mylke Street End” was known, and was then the property of the
Vintners. In the coaching era it is best remembered as the headquarters
of the great William Chaplin’s huge coaching business. Chaplin succeeded
William Waterhouse, who had established himself here in 1792, issuing a
curious token bearing the representation of a mail-coach on one side and
that of the Double-Necked Swan on the other, with the legend, “Speed,
Regularity, and Security. Payable at the Mail Coach Office, Lad Lane,
London, W.W.”
Lad Lane was until recent years the name by which this part of Gresham
Street was known, while the inn itself was generally called by the
coaching fraternity the “Wonderful Bird.”
Chaplin had in early days been a coachman himself. His career would have
delighted that sturdy moralist, Hogarth, painter of the successful career
of the Industrious Apprentice, for from that useful but humble position
he rose to be the largest coach-proprietor in England, Deputy-Chairman of
the London and Southampton (now London and South-Western) Railway, and
Member of Parliament for Salisbury. He is said to have accumulated half
a million of money. Twenty-seven mails left London every night, and of
these Chaplin horsed fourteen for various distances. Very many
stage-coaches were in his hands, and at the height of the coaching era he
is said to have owned nearly two thousand horses. He was an entirely
level-headed man, and, seeing at an early stage that railways must
succeed, threw in his lot with them. Railway directors were exceedingly
anxious to win over the coaching proprietors, and to induce them to
withdraw from the road, so that with no coaches running the public should
of necessity, whether they liked it or not, be compelled to travel by
rail. Chaplin sold off his stock before the oncoming railways
depreciated it, and, joining Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden
Cross,” Charing Cross, founded the great carrying firm of Chaplin and
Horne, which enjoyed the exclusive agency for the London and Birmingham
Railway. There can be little doubt, although it was denied by the early
officials of that line, that Chaplin and Horne were really bought off the
road, and the sum of £10,000 has been mentioned as the price of their
withdrawal. Before that time had come, coaches issued from Chaplin’s
yard for many places on the north-western roads: the Carlisle Royal Mail;
the Birmingham Royal Mail, “Courier,” and “Balloon Post Coach”; the
Chester “New Coach”; Coventry “Light Post Coach”; Liverpool Royal Mail;
Holyhead “New Mail” and a stage-coach without any particular name; and
the Manchester Royal Mail, “Defiance,” “Regulator,” and “Prince
Saxe-Cobourg.” The “Spread Eagle” in Gracechurch Street has also
disappeared. It was at one time a house of Chaplin’s, and was afterwards
owned in succession, together with the “Cross Keys” next door, by Mrs.
Nelson and Mrs. Mountain.
[Picture: Modern sign of the “Swan with Two Necks”]
The “Green Man and Still,” the last of the quartet of inns inquired after
by Mr. Locker-Lampson, is the only one now standing, and may be seen at
the corner of Oxford and Argyll Streets, close by Oxford Circus. It was
not a coaching hostelry in the fullest sense, being only a place of call
for the Oxford “Age,” and for the Harrow and other north-westerly “short
stages,” running between London and the suburbs. It is now a railway
receiving-office. This curious sign probably alludes to the old
profession of the “herb-doctors,” who distilled medicines from wild or
cultivated herbs. There were other inns whence Great North Road coaches
set out, but they have all vanished. The “George and Blue Boar,”
Holborn, whence the famous “Stamford Regent” started, has long since been
pulled down, and the “Inns of Court Hotel” stood on its site. The hotel
building remains, but about 1912 it ceased to be a hotel, and has since
been converted into offices for an Insurance Company. The “Regent”
originally left London at six o’clock in the evening, but in 1822 the
hour was altered to six in the morning, an unearthly time for those who
had to go some distance to reach Holborn, and necessitating, perhaps,
getting up at three o’clock. The announcement by the proprietors that
this alteration was for the “more perfect convenience” of their patrons
seems ironical:—
SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
From London.
* * * * *
THE PROPRIETORS OF
THE REGENT COACH
Respectfully inform the public and their friends in particular, that,
for their more perfect convenience, and to keep pace with the daily
improvements in travelling, the hour of its leaving London will be
altered on Monday, the 13th of May (and continued during the summer
months),
TO SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING,
_Instead of Night_.
The arrangements that are forming in furtherance of this long-desired
alteration will ensure a steady and punctual conveyance of Passengers
to Stamford by a Quarter before Six o’clock, and to Melton by a
Quarter before Nine o’clock in the Evening.
The hours of leaving Melton and Stamford will NOT be altered.
The proprietors take this opportunity to acknowledge their sense of
the decided patronage shown to the REGENT COACH under their several
regulations, and to repeat their promise that no exertion shall be
wanting to make it one of the most desirable conveyances to and from
London.
Passengers and Parcels booked at Mr. Weldon’s, and the Bull and Swan
Inn, Stamford; and at Mr. Sharp’s, Bell Inn, Melton.—_Stamford_,
_May_ 1, 1822.
[Picture: The “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street]
The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, which must not he confounded with the
other and equally celebrated “Saracen’s Head” in Aldgate High Street, was
another very notable coaching establishment, and a galleried inn of
picturesqueness and antiquity. Alas! that it has long since disappeared.
Its history went back beyond the fifteenth century, and a reference made
to it in 1522, when the suite of the Emperor Charles the Fifth lay here,
speaks of the house as of some importance:—“The signe of the Sersyns hed:
xxx beddes, a stable for xl horses.”
The sign, of course deriving from the Crusades, itself gives the inn a
very high antiquity. It was a sign of a gruesome and savage aspect, and
had its origin in the pictures the returning Crusaders drew of their
adversaries. As Selden says:—“Our countrymen pictured them with huge,
big, terrible faces, when in truth they were like other men. But this,”
he adds slyly, “they did for their own credits.” The inn owed its later
celebrity to Dickens, who made it the London inn of Mr. Squeers. Thus he
describes it:—“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield,
on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward
seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney
cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident, is the
coachyard of the Saracen’s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two Saracens’
heads and shoulders frowning upon you from each side of the gateway. The
inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s head, frowns upon you from
the top of the yard. When you walk up this yard you will see the
booking-office on your left and the tower of St. Sepulchre’s Church
darting abruptly up into the sky on your right, and a gallery of bedrooms
upon both sides.”
There is a “Saracen’s Head” on Snow Hill to this day, but it is a modern
building. From the old house went the “Lord Nelson,” York, Newcastle,
and Edinburgh coach; the “Post,” despite its name, a slow-coach, for
Carlisle and Penrith, by Doncaster, Ferrybridge, and Greta Bridge,
doubtless the one by which Mr. Wackford Squeers took his “dear pupils” to
Dotheboys Hall; and coaches to Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham,
and Shrewsbury, besides others for the western roads. The “Saracen’s
Head” was kept by Mrs. Mountain, in succession to her husband and her
husband’s father. Her son, Peter, managed the business for her, but it
must not be supposed that she took no active part in it. To the
contrary, Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, like her contemporary, Mrs. Nelson, of
the “Bull,” Aldgate, possessed the most brilliant business capacity. She
built coaches, as well as horsing them, and earned a profit by charging
her partners down the road the mileage which in the usual course of
business would have been paid over to a coach-builder. There was no more
expressive sight in the London of the beginning of the nineteenth century
than the simultaneous starting of the mails every evening from the
General Post Office. Londoners and country-cousins alike were never
weary of the spectacle of the smart coaches, the business-like coachmen,
and the resplendent, scarlet-coated guards preparing to travel through
the night, north, south, east, or west, with his Majesty’s mails. Even
the passengers shone with a reflected glory, and felt important as, one
after the other, the twenty-seven mails began at the stroke of eight
o’clock to move off from the double file that lined the street.
[Picture: The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill]
That street was not the broad thoroughfare of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but
the narrow one of Lombard Street, in which the General Post Office was
situated for many years, until 1829, when what is now called the “old”
General Post Office, but was then the newly completed building of
Smirke’s, was occupied. The old headquarters can still be seen, in the
Lombard Street Post Office of to-day. It is from here that the picture
of the mails starting, forming the frontispiece of this volume, was
taken. To our eyes, accustomed to the crowded thoroughfare of modern
times, the street appears supremely dull and desolate, but that is only a
retrospective way of looking at it.
Here is a testimony to the beauty of the scene. It is eloquent
testimony, for it is De Quincey’s:—“On any night the spectacle was
beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the
carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness,
their beautiful simplicity—but, more than all, the royal magnificence of
the horses—were what might first have fixed the attention. Every
carriage, on every morning of the year, was taken down to an official
inspector for examination—wheels, axles, linchpins, poles, glasses,
lamps, were all critically probed and tested. Every part of every
carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much
rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the
spectacle offered itself always. . . . Every moment are shouted aloud by
the post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral
names of cities known to history through a thousand years—Lincoln,
Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York,
Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen—expressing the
grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of
the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate
missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the
mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing
off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then came
the horses into play. Horses! Can these be horses that bound off with
the action and gestures of leopards? What stir! what sea-like ferment!
what a thundering of wheels! what a trampling of hoofs! what a sounding
of trumpets!”
IV
NOW for Post Office history. Much has been made at the “old” General
Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand; and although the building was not
in existence until 1829, it has sent forth and received many
mail-coaches. Its disappearance in 1912, we say, therefore severs the
last link by which this busy quarter was connected with the old days.
[Picture: The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 1832]
The story of the Post Office goes back long before the G.P.O. was
situated either here or at Lombard Street. The original Post Office was
off Eastcheap. When it was there, the course of post between London and
Edinburgh took three days. The first regular service was established in
1635, when Charles the First, to end the inefficiency of the
communications between the two capitals, inaugurated “a running post or
two, to run night and day, between Edinburgh and London, to go thither
and come back again in six days.” We may suppose that this did not work
very well, for in 1649 we find the city of London establishing a post of
its own with a regular staff of runners and postmasters between London
and the North.
But with the Restoration came the establishment of the General Post
Office and an instantaneous decline in the efficiency of the post, six
days instead of three being taken for the single journey to or from
Edinburgh. This roused the towns on the way to indignant protests, and
the post was accelerated to “three and a half or four days,” the
acceleration being slower than the original time.
But however keenly the intermediate towns may have felt this, it could
not have mattered much to Edinburgh, whose mail-bag was very scanty. One
day in 1745, we are told, the mail brought only one letter, for the
British Linen Company; and on another day in the same year only one was
despatched to London, for Sir William Pulteney, the banker.
In 1750 things were no better, but eight years later an Edinburgh
merchant, George Chalmers, procured an improvement. Before 1758 the
Great North Mail set out three times a week and took eighty-seven hours
in going north, and not fewer than one hundred and thirty-one from
Edinburgh to London. This last itinerary was lengthened so greatly in
time on account of stoppages made at Berwick and at Newcastle, ranging
from three hours at one to twenty-four at the other. These delays
Chalmers, in corresponding with the officials, proved to be quite
needless. He also induced them to avoid the old and longer route through
Thorne and York and to take the alternative road by Boroughbridge, thus
shortening the journey by twelve miles. The times were then fixed at
eighty-two hours for the northward-bound mail, and eighty-five for the
south. For his services the Government made Chalmers a grant of £600.
Some years afterwards he induced the Post Office to run the mails six
days a week.
But a greater than Chalmers was at hand in Palmer, the organiser of the
mail-coach service. Palmer accomplished, according to De Quincey, “two
things very hard to do on our little planet, the earth, however cheap
they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented
mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was
therefore just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent
(or, which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those
very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of
speed and keeping time; but, on the other hand, who did not marry the
daughter of a duke.” Palmer married, in point of fact, Lady Madeline
Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, but De Quincey does not lay the
stress he should have done on his having fought his postal scheme to
success against the obstinacy and red-tapeism of the Post Office
officials, itself an enterprise sufficient to daunt any but the stoutest
heart. Government officials have a wonderful power of passive resistance
and an insensibility to argument and proof which might be envied by a
lamp-post. It was thought a brilliant rejoinder when one of these Post
Office dunderheads replied to Palmer’s scheme for supplanting the slow
and uncertain post-boys by fast coaches with the observation that there
was no reason why the post should be the swiftest conveyance in England!
No doubt this witty gentleman resigned in an access of mortification when
Palmer actually succeeded in being appointed Controller-General of the
Post Office, with a salary of £1,500 a year and a two and a-half per
cent. commission on a rise of the income above the £240,000 at which it
stood when he was placed at the head of affairs. The first mail-coach
was put upon the Bath Road on the 8th of August 1784, and its success was
so great and immediate that the chief towns of the kingdom presently
began to petition for similar facilities to be accorded them. York was
the first successful applicant, and a mail was put on the road between
London, York, and Edinburgh in October of the same year, taking three
nights and two days to perform the journey. This was not a very
remarkable rate of speed, to be sure, but the times were not so hurried
then. A greater speed was attained when the roads began to be
reorganised by Telford and Macadam. Macadam’s method of metalling the
existing roads and Telford’s reconstruction of steep and winding highways
produced great results. To Macadam was due the greater speeds attained
at last on the mail route between London and Edinburgh; for, although
Telford’s improved road was begun in 1824, it was never completed owing
to the introduction of railways. Government had, in fact, by this time
recognised the necessity of good roads, and, fresh from the
reorganisation of the mail route between London and Holyhead, had
determined on an improved communication between England and Scotland.
This road, already referred to, was to be straight and as flat as
engineering science could contrive it, and a portion—that between
Edinburgh and Morpeth—was constructed about 1824, going by way of Soutra
Hill, Lauderdale, Coldstream, and Wooler. The route between London and
Morpeth was also surveyed and authorised, and portions between London and
York actually begun, when the opening of the Stockton and Darlington
Railway in 1825 convinced the authorities that the days of the road were
numbered.
But although it was long apparent that a change was impending, coaches
were not entirely run off the Great North Road for another twenty years,
and Post Office surveyors were still busy expediting the mails over short
cuts and roads of more favourable gradients. Thus in 1832 we find the
Scotch mail going by way of Selby. Here is the official time-bill for
that year:—
MILES
LONDON dep. 8.00 P.M.
12½ Waltham Cross arr. 9.25 ,,
22 Ware ,, 10.26 ,,
35½ Buckland ,, 11.52 ,,
45½ Arrington ,, 12.57 A.M.
60 Huntingdon ,, 2.30 ,,
65¼ Alconbury Hill ,, 3.03 ,,
72¼ Stilton ,, 3.45 ,,
87 Stamford ,, 5.15 ,,
95 Stretton ,, 6.03 ,,
108½ GRANTHAM arr. 7.23 ,,
dep. 8.03 ,,
115½ Long Bennington arr. 8.53 ,,
122¼ Newark ,, 9.30 ,,
132¾ Scarthing Moor ,, 10.34 ,,
145½ Barnby Moor ,, 11.49 ,,
155¼ Rossington Bridge ,, 12.47 P.M.
159½ Doncaster ,, 1.12 ,,
166¼ Askerne ,, 1.55 ,,
179¾ Selby ,, 3.21 ,,
194 YORK arr. 4.54 ,,
dep. 5.34 ,,
207¼ Easingwold arr. 6.54 ,,
218 Thirsk ,, 7.58 ,,
227 Northallerton ,, 8.52 ,,
243 Darlington ,, 10.28 ,,
261½ Durham ,, 12.23 ,,
276 NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE arr. 1.50 ,,
dep. 1.53 ,,
290½ Morpeth arr. 3.22 ,,
300½ Felton ,, 4.23 ,,
309¾ Alnwick ,, 5.17 ,,
324½ BELFORD arr. 6.47 ,,
dep. 7.17 ,,
329¾ Berwick-on-Tweed arr. 8.47 ,,
353½ Houndswood ,, 10.09 ,,
369¼ Dunbar ,, 11.41 ,,
380¼ Haddington ,, 12.45 P.M.
397¼ EDINBURGH ,, 2.23 ,,
_Time_—42 hours 23 minutes
The “up” mail was timed considerably slower, 45 hours 39 minutes.
The punctuality of the mails was so great that the Glasgow and the
Edinburgh mails, which went by Shoreditch and Islington respectively, and
took different routes as far as Alconbury Hill, where their roads met,
could always be depended upon to keep the official interval of four
minutes which divided them at that point. Their route was identical
between Alconbury Hill and Doncaster, where the Glasgow mail branched off
to the left to Ferrybridge and Greta Bridge.
This was the _ne plus ultra_ of Post Office enterprise on the Great North
Road, and closes an era.
V
WE have seen with what extraordinary speed letters were carried in the
time of Charles the First between London and Edinburgh; but how did folk
travel? They rode horseback, from kings, to nobles, and down to
merchants; princesses, madam, or my lady riding pillion. Private
carriages—“coaches,” they were called—had been introduced in 1553, when
Queen Mary rode in one, as a novelty, from London to Westminster, drawn
by six horses. In 1556 Sir Thomas Hoby had one of these strange
machines, and just because the fact is expressly mentioned we see how
rare they were. In fact, they went out of use altogether for a time, and
were reintroduced by William Boonen, Queen Elizabeth’s Dutch coachman, in
1564. On this occasion they came into better favour, and their numbers
must have greatly increased, for a Bill “to restrain their excessive use”
was introduced to Parliament, and rejected, in 1601. But both their make
and the fearful condition of the roads forbade them being used in the
country. Moreover, they had only shutters in place of windows, the first
“glass coach” being that used by the Duke of York in 1661.
It was in 1658 that the first stage-coach between London and Edinburgh
was put on the road. It set out once a fortnight, but the length of the
whole journey and just what kind of vehicle it was are unknown. Four
days, however, and two pounds were consumed in travelling between London
and York. The cost of the whole journey was four pounds.
In 1734 things do not seem to have been much better, John Dale
advertising in the May of that year that a coach would take the road from
Edinburgh for London “towards the end of each week, to be performed in
nine days, or three days sooner than any coach that travels that road.”
After this matters went from bad to worse, and speed was slower twenty
years later than it had been for a long time.
The _Edinburgh Courant_ of 1754 contained the following advertisement:—
THE EDINBURGH STAGE COACH,
for the better accommodation of passengers, will be altered to a new
genteel, two-end, glass coach machine, being on steel springs,
exceeding light, and easy to go in ten days in summer and twelve in
winter; to set out the
FIRST TUESDAY IN MARCH,
and continue it from HOSEA EASTGATE’S, the COACH AND HORSES in DEAN
STREET, SOHO, LONDON, and from JOHN SOMERVILLE’S in the CANONGATE,
EDINBURGH, every other Tuesday, and meet at BURROW BRIDGE on Saturday
night and set out from thence on Monday morning, and get to LONDON
and EDINBURGH on Friday. In winter to set out from LONDON to
EDINBURGH every other (alternate) Monday morning, and to go to BURROW
BRIDGE on Saturday night. Passengers to pay as usual.
Performed, if God permits, by
Your dutiful servant,
HOSEA EASTGATE.
Even Hosea Eastgate’s conveyance stands forth as a miracle of swiftness
and frequency when compared with the coach of 1763, which set out once a
month and took a _fortnight_, _if the weather was favourable_! Probably
this degeneracy of coaches was due to the practice of travellers clubbing
together to hire a post-chaise for the journey. This was a plan
eminently characteristic of the Scottish mind. It both secured quicker
travelling and saved expense. The Edinburgh papers of that time often
contained advertisements inquiring for a fellow-passenger to share these
costs and charges.
Edinburgh, as a matter of fact, even now a far cry, was beyond the ken of
most Londoners in those times, and London was to Edinburgh folks a place
dimly heard of, and never to be visited, save perhaps once in a lifetime.
York, half-way, was better known, and was well supplied with coaches.
The “Black Swan” in Coney Street, York, received and sent forth a
coach—in after years known as the “York Old Coach”—so early as 1698.
This appears to have always laid up for the winter and come out again in
April, like the cuckoo, as a harbinger of spring. One of these spring
announcements was discovered, some years since, in an old drawer at the
“Black Swan.” It runs:—
YORK Four Days
Stage-Coach.
_Begins on Friday the_ 12_th_ _of April_ 1706.
ALL that are defirous to pafs from _London_ to _York_, or from York
to London, or any other Place on that Road; Let them Repair to the
_Black Swan_ in _Holbourn_ in _London_, and to the _Black Swan_ in
_Coney Street_ in _York_.
At both which Places they may be received in a Stage Coach every
_Monday_, _Wednefday_, and _Friday_, which performs the whole Journey
in Four Days (_if God permits_). And fets forth at Five in the
Morning.
And returns from _York_ to _Stamford_ in two days, and from
_Stamford_ by _Huntingdon_ to _London_ in two days more. And the
like Stages on their return.
Allowing each Paffenger 14lb. weight, and all above 3d. a Pound.
Performed By
_Benjamin Kingman_.
_Henry Harrifon_.
_Walter Bayne’s_.
Alfo this gives Notice that Newcaftle Stage Coach fets out from York
every Monday and Friday, and from Newcaftle every Monday and Friday.
It is singular that this coach should have had a “Black Swan” at either
end of its journey. The London house was in later years the well-known
“Black Swan Distillery” in Holborn.
To display the many coaches, their names and times of arrival and
departure in these pages would afford but dull reading. Besides,
Paterson and Cary, those encyclopædic old road-books, contain lists of
them in interminable array: the “Highflyers,” “Rockinghams,” “Unions,”
“Amitys,” “Defiances,” “Wellingtons,” “Bluchers,” “Nelsons,” “Rodneys,”
and what not. There was so extraordinary a run upon these popular names
that they are often triplicated—and sometimes occur six times—on the
local and byroad coaches; with the result that if the traveller desired
to travel by the “Highflyer,” let us say, to Edinburgh, he had to
carefully sort it out from other “Highflyers” which flew not only to
Leeds but to all kinds of obscure places.
The early stage-coaches must have been terribly trying. They were, as
Byron says of the “kibitka,” “a cursed kind of carriage without springs.”
As time went on they were not only provided with glass windows, but—as
duly set forth in the advertisements—were furnished with springs and
cushions. The resources of civilisation were not exhausted at this
point, for it was gravely announced that the guards were armed, and the
coaches were bullet-proof!
The life of a coach-proprietor was all hard work, with no little anxiety
attached. Up early and to bed late—for on however large a scale his
business might be, it was one peculiarly dependent upon the master’s
eye—he knew the inner meaning of the primeval curse, and earned his
living by the sweat of his brow. And, lest that was not sufficient, the
Government sweated him in a financial sense. The coaching business was
the especial prey of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and yielded huge
returns. If it be argued that coach-proprietors, unlike railway
companies, had no parliamentary powers to obtain, and no enormous
expenses for purchase of land and construction of lines, this can be met
by setting forth the heavy duties and taxes, the great outlay on turnpike
tolls, and the relatively high cost of haulage by horses. The initial
expenses of a railway are immense, the upkeep of lines and buildings
large; but the actual cost of steam-power as against horse-traction is
absurdly little. Railways, of course, pay passenger duty, and immense
sums in the aggregate for rates and taxes; but they are not burdened as
the coaches were. If it cost from £3 10s. to £6 15s. to travel “outside”
or “inside” by ordinary stage-coach between London and Edinburgh, those
high figures were the necessary results of Government exactions and
turnpike imposts. Duties and taxes varied from time to time, but a
stage-coach licensed, about 1830, to carry fifteen passengers paid a duty
of threepence a mile, whether the coach carried a full load or not.
Thus, for every single journey, a coach licensed to that extent paid £4
19s. 3d. A coach could be licensed to carry a smaller number, when the
duties would be proportionately lighter, and coaches licensed for fifteen
or so during the summer would take out a licence for perhaps six or eight
in winter, when travellers were few and far between.
Suppose, now, that we roughly add up the working expenses of a
stage-coach to Edinburgh. We start with the passenger-duty of £4 19s.
3d. To this we add, say, £4 for hire of coach at the rate of 2½d. a
mile; £4 19s. 3d. for horsing, at 3d. a mile; and £6 12s., turnpikes, at
4d. This gives a total of £20 10s. 6d. But we have not yet done with
expenses, including wages for coachmen, guards, ostlers, and helpers;
advertising, rent, oil for lamps, greasing, washing, etc.
There would be six, or perhaps seven, coachmen, one driving about sixty
miles, when he would be relieved by another; and perhaps four guards,
because guards, not having the physical exertion of driving, could go
longer journeys. The proportion of their week’s wages must be added to
the debit account for the one journey, together with the proportion of
the £5 yearly tax payable for every coachman and guard employed, and a
similar annual sum for the coach itself. Any more items? Oh yes!
Office expenses, clerks, etc., and incidentals. If we lump all these
items together, they will mean an additional £12 cost on every journey to
or from Edinburgh, bringing the cost to the proprietors to over £32.
Now for the other side of the account. Our coach is licensed for
fifteen, and if we carry our four insides and eleven outsides all the
way, it holds £65 10s. at the fares named above—about 4d. and 2d. a mile
respectively. But how often were those fifteen “through” passengers?
Not more, perhaps, than half would be bound for Edinburgh. Others might
alight at York, or even at Grantham or Stamford. Others, again, might go
to Newcastle. For fares thus lost, the proprietors looked to chance
passengers; but the shillings and perhaps the two shillings taken on the
way for short distances went, by common consent, into the coachmen’s and
guards’ pockets, and were never entered on the way-bill. In this manner,
and by their “tips,” the men added to their somewhat meagre wages, which,
rightly considered, were retaining-fees rather than full payment. This
practice was generally known as “shouldering.” Some proprietors,
however, were stricter than others, and did not allow it. Of course it
went on all the same, and the standing toast which they were compelled to
give at annual coaching dinners, “Success to shouldering,” with the
proviso, “but don’t let me find you at it,” was a tacit acknowledgment of
the custom. In later days, when proprietors paid slightly higher wages
and tried to forbid tips, the coachmen were loth to give up these odd
sums, for the diminution of tips was greater than the increase of wages.
They then pocketed larger fares, and called the practice “swallowing.” A
tale is told of a coach approaching town, and the coachman asking his
box-seat passenger if he had any luggage. “No,” said the passenger.
“Then,” rejoined the coachman, “do you mind getting down here, sir,
because I mean to swallow you.” The passenger got down, and was
“swallowed” accordingly.
The average takings of the coach would certainly never, at the best of
it, come to more than £50 a journey, leaving a balance of £15 10s.
profit. Now, taking a year of three hundred and thirteen days, and
coaches “up” and “down,” this gives a profit of £9,702—not, be it borne
in mind, going to one man. The “end men” had the greatest share, as they
had also the heaviest expenses, and the “middle-ground men” got little
beyond the mileage on which they horsed the coaches; but with twenty-five
stages or so, and twenty-five participants in the profits, it will be
seen that the individual earnings on one coach could not be classed very
high.
VI
IT was a costly as well as a lengthy business to travel from London to
Edinburgh. Not so lengthy, of course, by mail as by stage-coach, but
much more expensive. If you wished to take it comfortably during the
forty-two hours and a-half or so of travelling, you went inside,
especially if it happened to be in winter; but an inside place cost
eleven guineas and a-half, which was thought a much larger sum in 1830
than it would be nowadays. Accordingly, the stalwart and the not
particularly well-to-do, who at the same time wanted to travel quickly,
went outside, whereby they saved no less than four guineas.
But let not the reader think that these respective sums of eleven and
a-half and seven and a-half guineas comprised the whole of the
traveller’s expenses in the old days. There were numerous people to tip,
such as porters, waiters, and last, but certainly not the least of them,
the coachmen and guards, who at the end of their respective journeys,
when they left their seats to a new guard or a new Jehu, “kicked” the
passengers, as the expressive phrase went, for their respective two
shillings or so. To be kicked at intervals in this figurative manner,
all the way between London and Edinburgh, was not physically painful, but
it came expensive; and what with the necessary meals and refreshments
during those forty-two hours or so, it could scarce have cost an “inside”
less than fifteen guineas, or an “outside” less than eleven.
Now let us take the mazy “Bradshaw” or the simpler “A B C” railway
guides, and see what it will cost us in time and pocket to reach the
capital of Scotland. A vast difference, you may be sure. It is possible
to go by three different routes, but the distance is much the same, and
the times vary little, whether you go by Midland, London and
North-Western, or by the Great Northern Railway. The last-named has, on
the whole, the best of it, with a mileage of 395 miles, and a fast train
performing the journey in seven hours and twenty-five minutes. It costs
by any of these routes for first-class travelling, which answers to the
“inside” of old times, fifty-seven shillings and sixpence, and thirty-two
shillings and eightpence by third-class, equivalent to the “outside.”
{40} You need not tip unless you like, and even then but once or twice,
and assuredly no one will ask you for one. Whether you travel “first” or
“third,” a dining-saloon and an excellent dinner are at your service for
a moderate sum, and the sun scarce rises or sets with greater certainty
than that the Scotch express or its London equivalent will set out or
reach its destination at its appointed minute.
Accidents—when they happen—are beyond comparison more fearful on the
railway than ever they were on the coaches; but they are rare indeed when
it is considered how many trains are run. Coaching accidents were
frequent, but just because they seldom ended fatally they do not figure
so largely in coaching annals as might be expected. A dreadful accident,
however, happened in 1805 to the Leeds “Union” coach, owing to the reins
breaking and the horses dashing the vehicle against a tree. This
occurred at a point about half a mile from Ferrybridge. William Hope,
the coachman, and an outside passenger were killed, and many others
seriously injured. The jury imposed a deodand of £5 on the coach and £10
on the horses.
In later years, an almost equally serious disaster happened to another
Leeds coach, the “Express.” It was racing with the opposition “Courier,”
which had been stopped at the bottom of the hill for the purpose of
taking off the drag, and in the effort to pass was upset, with the result
that a woman was killed on the spot, another was laid up for a year with
a broken leg, and other passengers were more or less injured. Probably
because of the evident recklessness displayed by the coachman, a deodand
of £1,400 was laid on the coach. The mail-coaches were not so often
involved in disasters as the stages. They had not the incentive to race,
and smashes arising from this form of competition were infrequent. But
other forms of accident threatened them and the stage-coaches alike.
There were, for instance, fogs, and they were exceedingly dangerous.
Penny, an old driver of the Edinburgh mail, was killed from this cause.
Starting one foggy night, he grew nervous, and asked the guard, a younger
and stronger man, to take the reins. He did so, and drove up a bank.
The mail was upset, and Penny was killed.
Snow and frost were the especial foes of the mails on the northern
stretches of the Great North Road, just as widespread floods were in the
Huntingdonshire and Nottinghamshire levels, by Ouse and Trent; so that no
mail-coach was completely equipped which did not in the winter months
carry a snow-shovel.
But it was not always the north-country coaches that felt the fury of the
snowstorms. The famous storm of December 1836 blocked all roads
impartially. The Louth mail, which left the Great North Road at Norman
Cross, had to be abandoned and the mails transferred to the lighter
agency of a post-chaise, while numerous others were buried in the snow as
far south as St. Albans.
The earlier and later periods of coaching were productive of accidents in
equal degrees. Stage-coaches may be said to date, roughly, from 1698,
and continued as lumbering, uncomfortable conveyances until competition
with the mails began to smarten them up, soon after 1784, when their
second period dawned. Stage-coachmen of the first period were well
matched with their machines, and not often fit to be trusted with any
other cattle than a team of tired plough-horses. Their want of skill
generally caused the accidents in those days, and the efficiency of
others was affected by the conditions of their employment. The “classic”
age had not arrived, and bad roads, ill-made coaches, and poor horses,
combined with long hours of driving to render travelling quite dangerous
enough, without the highwaymen’s aid. Coachmen drove long distances in
those days, and sometimes fell asleep from sheer weariness—a failing
which did not conduce to the safety of the passengers. But the old
coach-proprietors did not do the obvious thing—make the stages shorter
and change the coachman more frequently. No; they contrived a hard,
uncomfortable seat for him which rested on the bed of the axletree in
such a manner as to shake every bone in his body, and to render repose
quite out of the question.
[Picture: The Louth Mail stopped by the snow]
To these clumsy or worn-out fellows succeeded the dashing charioteers of
the palmy age of coaching, which we may say came into full being with the
year 1800, and lasted for full thirty years. Many broken heads and
limbs, and bruises and contusions innumerable, can be laid to the account
of these gay sportsmen. Washington Irving has left us a portrait of the
typical stage-coachman of this time, in this delightful literary jewel:—
“He cannot be mistaken for one of any other craft. He has commonly a
broad full face, curiously mottled with red, as if the blood had been
forced by hard feeding into every vessel of the skin; he is swelled
into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquors, and his
bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats in which
he is buried like a cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels.
He wears a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, a huge roll of coloured
handkerchief about his neck, knowingly knotted and tucked in at the
bosom, and has in summer-time a large bouquet of flowers in his
buttonhole—the present, most probably, of some enamoured country
lass. His waistcoat is commonly of some bright colour, striped; and
his small-clothes extend far below the knees, to meet a pair of
jockey-boots which reach about half-way up his legs.
“All this costume is maintained with much precision; he has a pride
in having his clothes of excellent materials, and, notwithstanding
the seeming grossness of his appearance, there is still discernible
that neatness and propriety of person which is almost inherent in an
Englishman. He enjoys great confidence and consideration along the
road; has frequent conferences with the village housewives, who look
upon him as a man of great trust and dependence, and he seems to have
a good understanding with every bright-eyed country lass. The moment
he arrives where the horses are to be changed, he throws down the
reins with something of an air, and abandons the cattle to the care
of the ostler; his duty being merely to drive from one stage to
another. When off the box, his hands are thrust into the pockets of
his great-coat, and he rolls about the inn-yard with an air of the
most absolute lordliness. Here he is generally surrounded by an
admiring throng of ostlers, stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and those
nameless hangers-on that infest inns and taverns, and run errands,
and do all kinds of odd jobs for the privilege of battening on the
drippings of the kitchen and the leakings of the tap-room. These all
look up to him as an oracle, treasure up his cant phrases, echo his
opinions about horses and other topics of jockey-lore, and, above
all, endeavour to imitate his air and carriage. Every ragamuffin
that has a coat to his back thrusts his hands in the pockets, rolls
in his gait, talks slang, and is an embryo coachey.”
But how different the last years of this gorgeous figure! When railways
were projected, the coachman laughed at the idea. He thought himself
secure on his box-seat, and witnessed the preparations for laying the
iron rails with an amused confidence that his horses could run the
“tin-kettles” off the road with little trouble. He kept this frame of
mind even until the opening of the line that competed with him; and even
when it was proved to demonstration that railways could convey passengers
at least three times as swiftly as coaches, and at about a quarter of the
cost, he generally professed to believe that “it couldn’t last long.”
His was the faith that should have moved mountains—to say nothing of
blighting locomotives; but it was no use. His old passengers deserted
him. They were not proof against the opportunities of saving time and
money. Who is? Nor did they come back to him, as he fondly thought they
would, half-choked with cinders and smoke. He was speedily run off the
road. There were those who liked him well, and, unwilling to see him
brought low, made interest with railway companies to secure him a post;
but he indignantly refused it when obtained; and, finding a cross-country
route to which the railway had not yet penetrated, drove the coachman’s
horror—a pair-horse coach—along the by-ways. Gone by now was his lordly
importance. He had not even a guard, and frequently was reduced to
putting in the horses himself. He grew slovenly, and was maudlin in his
drink. “Tips” were seldom bestowed upon him, and when he received an
infrequent sixpenny-piece, he was known to burst into tears. The
familiar figure of Belisarius begging an obolus is scarce more painful.
The last of him was generally in the driving of the omnibus between the
railway station and the hotel; a misanthropic figure, consistently
disregarded by his passengers, lingering, resolutely old-fashioned in
dress, and none too civil, superfluous on the stage.
[Picture: Entrance to London from Islington, 1809]
VII
THESE long preliminaries over, we may duly start for the North from the
General Post Office, coming to Islington by way of Goswell Road. Here,
at the “Peacock” or the “Angel,” travellers of a century and a-half ago
were one mile from London, or from Hicks’s Hall, which was the same
thing. A milestone proclaimed the fact, and its successor, with a
different legend, stood until quite recently opposite the Grand Theatre,
on Islington Green. Here stood the first toll-gate as you went out of
London. Here also was the village pound for strayed horses and cattle.
Here again, according to those who do not know anything at all about it,
the bailiff’s daughter of Islington might have met her lover; only,
unhappily for this Islington, the old ballad refers to quite another
Islington, away in Norfolk.
The usual suburban perils awaited wayfarers to Islington at any time
during the eighteenth century, and those bound for it from the city were
accustomed to wait at the Smithfield end of St. John Street until a
number had collected, when they were convoyed outwards by the armed
patrol stationed there for that purpose. But the footpads were quite
equal to the occasion, and simply waited until those parties dispersed
for their several homes, and then, like skilful generals, attacked them
in detail. The Islington Vestry were obliged to make a standing offer of
£10 to any one who should arrest a robber; but that this failed seems
certain, for at a later period we find the inhabitants subscribing a fund
for rewards to those who arrested evildoers.
Time has wrought sad havoc with Islington’s once rural aspect, and with
its old coaching inns. That grand coaching centre, the “Peacock,” has
utterly vanished, and so has the picturesque “Queen’s Head,”—gabled,
Elizabethan—wantonly destroyed in 1829; while the “Angel,” pulled down in
1819 and rebuilt, and again rebuilt in 1900, has since retired from
business as a public-house, and is now a tea and lunch place, in the
hands of a popular firm of caterers. In early days, and well on into the
nineteenth century, the Green was really a pleasant spot, with tall elms
shading the footpaths, and a very rustic-looking pound for strayed
cattle. Near by stood for many years a little hatter’s shop, bearing the
legend in large characters, “Old Hats Beavered,” and it is curious to
note how, in a long succession of old prints, this shop and its now
curiously sounding notice kept their place while all else was changing.
[Picture: Islington Green, 1820]
Islington was once a Cockney paradise, and to it retired, as into the
country, the good citizens and shopkeepers of London, setting up
miniature parks and pleasances of their own. So favourite a practice was
this that the witlings of that period, a hundred and fifty years ago,
used to publish absurd notices supposed to have been found displayed at
the entrances of these haunts. “The New Paradise,” ran one of them,
“Gentlemen with Nails in their Boots not Admitted.” Perhaps also
“Serpents Warned Off.” At that time, and long before, Islington was
resorted to on account of some alleged mineral waters existing here.
“Islington,” according to M. Henri Misson, who travelled in England, and
wrote a book about us and our country in 1718, “is a large village, half
a league from London, where you drink waters that do you neither good nor
harm, provided you don’t take too much of them.” This is decidedly a
“palpable hit,” and may be commended to those who take medicinal waters
in our own time.
“It is not much flock’d to by People of Quality,” he goes on to observe.
Here, at least, he is not out of date. People of Quality do not flock to
Islington. The medicinal waters are all gone; and that Islington is,
even now, not in any great degree a resort of fashion is an
incontrovertible fact.
Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets call the
“true and tender North” is by no means happy. Any other of the classic
highways of England begins better, and however delightful the Holloway
Road may have been in the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a
very commonplace thoroughfare indeed. The long reaches of mean streets
and sordid bye-roads combine with the unutterably bad road surface to
render the exit from London anything but pleasurable.
Sir Walter Scott, on his way down to Abbotsford in 1826, calls the Great
North Road “the dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,”
and the description, minus the convenience, might well stand for its
suburban portion to-day. In Sir Walter’s time, however, these first few
miles were only just emerging from a condition in which dulness could
have had no part. In fact, it may well be supposed that the travellers,
who up to that time went by coach to York, well armed, found the journey
a thought too lively. Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came,
from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the ante-chamber
into that direful territory of highwaymen and footpads, the veritable
Alsatias of Finchley Common and Whetstone. In fact, a few years earlier
still, when there were no houses at Holloway at all, and no district
known by that name, what is now called the Holloway Road was a lonely
track, full of mud and water, through which the coach route ran, infested
all the while by the most villainous characters, compared with whom the
gay highwayman in ruffles and lace, and mounted on a mettlesome horse,
was a knight indeed—a chevalier without fear or reproach. This stretch
of road lay then between high banks, and considerably below the level of
the surrounding fields. It was a “hollow” road, as such roads are called
wherever they exist in the country—the actual, original Hollow Way from
which, in the course of time, a whole residential district has obtained
its name. Such roads, worn down through the earth by constant traffic,
are always very ancient, and though the story of the Holloway Road at a
period from a hundred and fifty to eighty years ago was a disgraceful
one, the inhabitants of that part can console themselves by the soothing
thought that, although it cannot claim the Roman ancestry of the route by
Shoreditch, Waltham Cross and Cheshunt, which was the Ermine Way, the
road in question probably dates back to the respectable antiquity of
mediæval times.
VIII
THE road has been ascending ever since the General Post Office was left
behind, and now we come to the beginning of Highgate Hill, where the old
way over the hill-top, and the more recent one, dating from 1813, divide
left and right. Here, at the junction of Salisbury Road with Highgate
Hill, stands the Whittington Stone, marking the traditional spot where
Dick rested on his flight, and heard the bells inviting him to
“Turn again, Whittington,
Thrice Lord Mayor of London.”
It is a pretty story, and one which, let us hope, will never be forgotten
or popularly discredited; how the boy, running away from ill-treatment at
his master’s house in the city, halted here in his four-miles’ flight,
and resting on the slope of Highgate Hill, saw the clustered spires of
London and the silvery Thames—it _was_ silvery then—down below, and heard
the prophetic message of Bow Bells inviting him to return. If we can
believe that he had his favourite cat with him, let us believe with joy,
because it goes far to complete the tender story which has always held
captive the hearts of the children; and God forbid we should grow the
less tender towards the beautiful legends of our forbears as we grow
older.
Bow Bells fulfilled their prophecy in full measure and running over, for
Dick Whittington was chosen to complete the year of Mayor—Adam Bamme—who
died in 1397, and was Mayor on three separate occasions as well; in 1397,
1406, and 1420. He was knighted, of course, and, moreover, he became one
of the richest men of his time. Perhaps the most dramatic thing recorded
of his prosperous career as Mayor and a member of the Mercers’ Company,
is that splendid entertainment which he gave to Henry the Fifth and his
Queen at Guildhall in his last year of office, when he threw into the
fire bonds equal to £60,000 of our money, due to him from the king—a
generous, nay, a princely gift.
But he was not “Lord” Mayor. The tradition is wrong in that respect.
There were “Mayors,” but no “Lord Mayor” until 1486.
Who was Richard Whittington? We know him well in his later career as a
Mercer, and as a pious and patriotic citizen; but whence came he? Was he
the poor and friendless lad of legend? Well, not quite that. Poor,
perhaps, because he was the youngest of three brothers; but not
friendless, for his family was of no mean descent. His father, Sir
William Whittington, had an estate on which he lived, at Pauntley, in
Gloucestershire, and other possessions of the family were at Sollers
Hope, Herefordshire. Misfortunes fell upon Sir William, who seems to
have died not long after Dick was born; but the family had friends in the
FitzWarrens, of whom one, Sir John, was a prominent Mercer in London.
Dick’s brothers had, as elder brothers have nowadays, the best chances,
as it seemed, and remained in the country, enjoying the family property,
or following rural employments. Dick we may readily picture as being
sent to FitzWarren, to learn a trade. The great man probably took him
for old acquaintance’ sake, and, having received the lad of thirteen, and
turned him over to one of his many underlings, promptly forgot him. It
is a way with the great, not yet obsolete. We may with a good conscience
reject that part of the legend which tells how Dick was found, an obscure
waif and stray, on FitzWarren’s doorstep, and taken, in compassion, to
serve as a scullion. The pantomimes always insist on this, and on the
ferocious cook’s ill-treatment of him; but pantomime librettists have
many sins to answer for.
No; Dick was an apprentice, a poor one, and doubtless taken without a
premium; but not scullion. There can be little doubt that the country
lad, thus thrown into the midst of many other apprentices in FitzWarren’s
house, must have been an object of sport. They would taunt him with his
country ways, and, superior in their clothes of London cut, ridicule,
with the cruel satire of boys, his homely duds. Possibly his flight had
some such origin as this.
But it is chiefly on the legend of the cat that more or less learned
antiquaries have so savagely fallen, with intent to explain it away. The
cat, they assure us, was a fable, and they go on to say that it was from
coal vessels called “cats,” in which Whittington embarked his money, that
the story grew. Another school of commentators, eager to reduce the
pretty tale to commonplace, tell us that it originated in the old French
word for a purchase, _achat_. To what shifts will they not proceed in
this hunt for an ignoble realism! Whittington is not known to have
engaged in the ownership of colliers, or in the carrying of coal. A
Mercer has no commerce with such things. Then, that derivation from the
French _does_ smell of the lamp, does it not?
Now for the truth of his embarking his favourite cat as a venture, to be
sold at a profit in some foreign port. The story, regarded with a
knowledge of those times, is by no means an improbable one. Indeed, to
go further, it is quite likely. Cats were in that era comparatively
rare. They had a high value at home; were even more valuable in Europe,
and in the darkly-known countries on the confines of the known world—a
small world, too, before the discovery of America—they were almost
priceless.
Many childish searchings of heart have arisen over Dick’s parting with
his cat for love of gain. Did Dick, like the Arab who sold his steed,
repent with tears? Perhaps Dick was the happy possessor of two cats, and
his favourite was a “tom.” If the other was a she-cat, and as prolific
as are our own, no doubt Dick would have been glad to have got rid of
her; except that the progeny themselves were marketable. To this, then,
we are reduced: that Dick Whittington as a boy bred cats for exportation,
and that his black-and-white Tom, as the progenitor of them all, was the
founder of his fortunes. The legend tells us of only one cat, which,
when the vessel was driven out of her course to the coast of Barbary, was
sold for immense riches of gold and precious stones to the Sultan, whose
palace was infested with mice. That may do for the pantomimes; but,
unhappily, the ships that were so unfortunate in those times as to be
driven on those shores were plundered and their crews slain. It was
cheaper than buying.
But whatever the details, it is certain that Whittington owed his first
successes to his cat. Several things, despite all destructive criticism,
point to the essential truth of the popular story. Firstly, original
portraits, painted from the life, testify to it by showing Whittington’s
hand laid caressingly on a black and white cat. Then, Whittington was
the rebuilder of the old New Gate, and his effigy, with a cat at his
feet, stood in one of its niches until the building was pulled down
hundreds of years afterwards. Finally, a very remarkable confirmation of
the story came from Gloucester in 1862, when, on a house occupied by the
Whittington family until 1460 being repaired, the fragment of a carved
chimney-piece of that century was discovered, bearing the sculpture of a
boy carrying a cat in his arms. It may reasonably be claimed that these
evidences, together with the popular belief in the story, which can be
traced back almost to Whittington’s own day, confound unbelievers.
The present Whittington Stone is the degenerate and highly unornamental
descendant of quite a number of vanished memorials to the great Lord
Mayor which have occupied this spot since his day. It is not by any
means a romantic spot to the sight nowadays, but for those who can bring
romance with them in their own minds, it matters little that the heights
just here are crowned with suburban villa roads, that a public-house—the
“Whittington Stone Tavern”—stands by, or that the whole neighbourhood
reeks vulgarity. The present stone is dated 1821, and succeeded one
which had disappeared shortly before, itself the successor in 1795 of a
cross. The existing inscription was recut, and railings enclosing the
stone put up in 1869; a public-house gas-lamp now crowning and
desecrating the whole.
IX
IT is a far cry from the London County Council, the present highway
authority at Highgate, to the first roadmaker here, in 1364. A hermit,
William Phelippe by name, at that time lived in a little cell on the
lower slope of Highgate Hill, looking down upon London. From that remote
eyrie, had he been a man of imagination, he might have beheld prophetic
visions of London’s future sprawling greatness, when the tide of life
should rise to the crest of his hill and bring with it bricks and mortar,
wood-pavements, cable-tramways, and other things of equal use and beauty.
He foresaw none of these things, possibly because he did not sufficiently
mortify the flesh. Certainly he was a hermit not without wealth, and
perhaps therefore not one of your sad-eyed ascetics. He had a goodly
balance in some old earthenware crock under the floor, or at the bank—the
road bank of the Hollow Way, very old-established—and he had ample
leisure, unencroached upon by toilette requirements, for which hermits
had no use. Lazing in his cell commanding the road—it stood near where
the Whittington Stone stands now—he had often noticed how wet, miry, and
full of sloughs was the Hollow Way, and with what difficulty travellers
ascended by it. Accordingly he devised a scheme by which he conferred
benefits alike upon the travellers along the road and the farmers of
Highgate. He directed and paid for the digging of gravel and the laying
of it along the road, and in the work presently expended all his money.
But in so doing he had made an excellent investment; much better than
leaving it on deposit at the bank mentioned above, where, in the nature
of things, it accrued no interest; for he procured a decree from Edward
the Third, authorising “our well-beloved William Phelippe, the hermit,”
to set up a toll-bar, and licensing him to levy tolls and keep the road
in repair for “our people passing between Heghgate and Smethfelde.” Thus
were the first toll-bar and the first turnpike-keeper established, and we
may judge that the undertaking was profitable from the records that show
how very largely the roadside hermits throughout the country went into
the business of road and bridge making or mending shortly afterwards.
There were hermits of sorts: some authorised, and some not; some who did
good work in this wise and some who did nothing at all, and yet continued
to live substantially on the mistaken gifts of wayfarers. The profession
of the eremite was not without its jealousies. An industrious road-maker
might have a cell placed in a position outside a town favourable for the
collection of dues, when another would set up business, say a quarter of
a mile further out, and so intercept the money; so that travellers having
paid once, had nothing for the real Simon Pure. Having satisfied Codlin,
they disregarded Short; whereupon it not infrequently happened that if
Short were the more muscular of the two he would go and have it out with
his rival, while the world went by, scandalised at the apostolic blows
and knocks these holy men were dealing one another.
William Phelippe’s licence was renewed every year. His tariff of tolls
is still extant, and we read that for every cart carrying merchandise,
its wheels shod with iron, twopence per week was paid; if not shod with
iron, one penny. Every horse carrying merchandise was charged one
farthing per week. Pedestrians and horsemen without goods went free.
These charges seem absurdly small until we multiply them by twenty, which
gives results representing the present value of money, and then it will
be found that those ancient tolls were on much the same scale as those
which existed until July 1st, 1864, when all turnpikes on public highways
within fifty miles of London were abolished by Act of Parliament.
A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making hermit and that
of Telford—a gap of four hundred and fifty years. Yet, although Highway
Acts were from time to time devised for the betterment of the roads,
their condition remained bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest
of Highgate Hill to surmount.
Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not have seen
Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that the old Gatehouse
Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward and visible connection with
the days of yore. The tavern marked the site of the old turnpike-gate
that stood here, the lineal successor of the hermit’s original pitch
lower down, when the old route to Barnet by Tallingdon Lane, Crouch End,
Hornsey Great Park, Muswell Hill, Friern Barnet, and Whetstone was
superseded by the new one through the Bishop of London’s estate, by
Finchley and Whetstone, in 1386. It is in the existence at that time of
the Bishop’s park that we may perhaps seek with success the origin of the
name of “Highgate,” which does not necessarily allude to the very
obviously “high” gate situated here—more than 350 feet above sea-level.
No; it was the “haigh” gate, the portal which gave access through the
enclosure (_haia_) with which my Lord Bishop’s domain was presumably
surrounded. Through his land all traffic passed until it emerged on the
other side of Whetstone, where, commanding the entrance to Barnet, stood
another gate in receipt of tolls, swelling the income of that very
business-like ecclesiastic and his successors for hundreds of years.
At the Highgate end dues were collected on horned cattle, among other
things, and here originated the practice of being initiated into the
freedom of Highgate, a mock ceremonial founded upon Roman Catholic rites
at the time of the Reformation. For three hundred years this farcical
observance was continued at the tavern by the gate, and only fell into
disuse with the decay of coaching. Those who had not previously passed
this way were “sworn in on the horns,” a practice traced to the
unwillingness of the cattle drovers who frequented the tavern to allow
strangers to mix with them. This exclusiveness no doubt originated in
the fear of trade secrets being divulged, a feeling which may still be
met with among commercial travellers of the older school, who resent the
appearance of the mere tourist in their midst. The stranger who in olden
times happened upon these drovers at Highgate was discouraged from taking
bite or sup here, and only permitted to join them after having kissed the
horns of one of their beasts. This speedily became elevated (or
degraded, shall we say?) into a sort of blasphemous ritual parodying the
admission of a novice into the Church, and this again, with the lapse of
time and the dying of religious hatreds, developed into the merely
good-natured farce played during the last hundred years of the existence
of the custom.
When the coaches pulled up here, it was soon discovered, by judicious
questioning, who were the strangers who had not been made “free.” They
were made to alight, and, having removed their hats and kissed a pair of
horns mounted on a pole, “the oath” was administered by the landlord in
this wise:—“Upstanding and uncovered: silence. Take notice what I now
say to you, for _that_ is the first word of the oath; mind _that_. You
must acknowledge me to be your adopted father. I must acknowledge you to
be my adopted son. If you do not call me father you forfeit a bottle of
wine; if I do not call you son I forfeit the same. And now, my good son,
if you are travelling through this village of Highgate, and you have no
money in your pocket, go call for a bottle of wine at any house you may
think proper to enter and book it to your father’s score,” and so forth.
An initiate had to swear never to drink small beer when he could get
strong (unless he preferred small); never to eat brown bread when he
could get white (unless he preferred brown); never to kiss the maid when
he could kiss the mistress (unless he preferred the maid, and in case of
doubt he might kiss both); after which he had to kiss the horns or the
woman in the company who appeared the fairest, as seemed good to him, the
ceremony concluding with the declaration of his privileges as a freeman
of Highgate. Among the well-known privileges were—that if he felt tired
when passing through Highgate and saw a pig lying in a ditch, he might
kick the pig away and take its place, but if he saw three lying together
he must only kick away the middle one and lie between the other two!
X
IT was on Highgate Hill that the great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some
believe to have written Shakespeare’s dramas, fell a martyr to his
scientific enthusiasm. Driving up this chilly eminence one winter’s day
when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred to him that, from its
chemical constituents, snow must possess admirable preservative
properties, and he accordingly resolved immediately to put this theory to
the proof. Stopping his carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he
purchased a fowl and stuffed it carefully with snow. Being in weak
health at the time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home,
became so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord
Arundel’s house at Highgate. There a damp bed aggravated his seizure, so
that in a few days he died, in 1626.
Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new roads and
streets of shops being more general. With the end of the eighteenth
century, Highgate became a populous little town, but its outskirts did
not altogether lose their terrors for travellers. Suburban villas had
begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of
the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and
so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads,
who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked
the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth,
reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at
leisure. It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of
all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads. They spared him
the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one else about, and so it
did not matter in the least how loudly he might shout for help. Among
minor articles of spoil, they secured a remarkable watch which had been
given him two years before as a testimonial by his many admirers. The
dial represented his face in character when singing his popular comic
song, “Me and my Neddy.” The robbers, seeing this, immediately
recognised him. Looking at one another, they could not make up their
minds to rob him of his treasure, and so they gave it back, Grimaldi
goggling and grinning at them the while, as on the stage. So, with a
vivid recollection of Sadler’s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they
left him.
It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their
aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names
beginning with the letters “A” and “H.” Cockneys have ever—or ’ave
hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are
overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey,
’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.” The
classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who
lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a
Mayoral banquet.
[Picture: Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897]
“Don’t you think ’Iget pretty?” he asked.
“Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you
long enough to say.”
“I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the
’Ill.”
Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the Hill,
through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into East End,
Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until quite recently so
greatly cut off from London by these comparatively Alpine heights and the
lack of suburban railways, that it was, for all practical purposes, as
distant as many other places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on
more level roads or on direct railway routes. To remedy this the Archway
Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East End, saving half
a mile in the distance to be travelled and a hundred feet in the height
to be climbed.
The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following
upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the
hill-top. The Hill is a great outstanding knob of London clay, a
substance both difficult and dangerous to pierce; but it was not until
the work was nearly completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily
before the labours of the day had been begun. The present open cutting
of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place of the
projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the purpose of
carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap. If an unlovely, it was in its way
an impressive, structure, even though the impression was, rather of the
nightmare sort. It was scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at
no time a place of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been
diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to cross the
Archway Road by a circuitous route. Highgate Archway has now
disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure, spanning the road
without the support of the cumbrous old piers which, until the summer of
1900, continued to block three-fourths of the way. It has gone because
the road-traffic has grown with the suburbs and the way was not wide
enough; but its disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town
and country met.
The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but
the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very
large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high.
Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had
to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill. Sixpence was levied
on every laden or draught horse.
It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls
had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this
direction. In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of
London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no
less than £13,000. The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving
£9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the
road was to be declared free. It was accordingly opened free of toll in
1876. And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it
was demolished and the roadway widened. The present Archway was opened
in 1900.
XI
EAST End, Finchley, to which we now come, is one of the many straggling
settlements built upon Finchley Common. Stretches of fields alternate
with rows of new shops and tiny old-world cottages. Here stands the
“Bald-Faced Stag,” with the effigy of a stag surmounting the
appropriately bald elevation of that huge and ugly public-house. The
yards of monumental masons jostle it on either hand; a grim and
unpleasing conjunction, and a prelude to those vast townships of London’s
dead, the St. Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras Cemeteries, which
with other properties of the Cemetery Companies render the road dismal
and people these northern heights with a vast population of departed
citizens. The merry market-gardener has betaken himself and his cabbages
to other parts, and the builder builds but sparely.
Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the road at
East End stands the “Old White Lion,” in a pretty wooded dip of the road.
The house was once known, and marked on the maps as the “Dirt House,”
from its having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to
London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and manure.
The wood was also known as “Dirt House Wood.” It was here also that
Horne the coachmaster’s stables were situated.
To this succeeds North Finchley, beginning at the junction of a road from
Child’s Hill with the Great North Road, known as Tally Ho Corner. North
Finchley, called by the genteel “Torrington Park,” is yet another
settlement, filched, like the cemeteries, from Finchley Common by
successive iniquitous Acts of Parliament at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Could the gay highwaymen who, a hundred years ago,
were gathered to their fathers at the end of a rope down Tyburn way
revisit Finchley, the poor fellows would sadly need a guide. Where,
alas! is Finchley Common, that wide-spreading expanse of evil omen on
which these jovial spirits were so thoroughly at home? Finchley Common,
once second only to the far-famed Hounslow Heath, has long since been
divided up between the many who, more than a hundred years ago, conspired
to cheat the people of their birthright in this once broad expanse of
open space. The representatives of the people at Westminster allowed it,
and my Lord Bishop of London profited by it, together with lesser folk,
each in their several degrees. The Common then extended to considerably
over two thousand acres. Of this vast tract only a few acres are left,
beyond North Finchley. The rest was sold quietly, and by degrees, for
absurdly small sums.
[Picture: The Great Common of Finchley: a parlous place]
Between 1700 and 1800 the great Common of Finchley was a parlous place,
and not one of the better-known highwaymen but had tried his hand at
“touching the mails” as they went across this waste; or patrolled the
darkest side of the road, ready to spring upon the solitary traveller.
Indeed, the childlike simplicity of the lonely travellers of those days
is absolutely contemptible, considering the well-known dangers of the
roads. For instance, on the night of the 28th August, 1720, a horseman
might have been observed in the act of crossing Finchley Common. He had
fifteen guineas in his pocket, and ambled along as though he had been in
Pall Mall instead of on perhaps the most dangerous road in England. At a
respectful distance behind him came his servant, and just in front of
him, midway of this howling wilderness, stood three figures. “There is
an eye that notes our coming,” says the poet, and three pairs of eyes had
perceived this wayfarer. They belonged to an enterprising individual
named Spiggott and to two other ruffians, whose names have not been
handed down to posterity. The weirdly named Spiggott was apparently
above disguising himself; his companions, however, might have stood for
stage brigands, for one of them had the cape of his coat buttoned over
his chin, and the other wore a slouched hat over his eyes. In addition
to this, he kept the ends of his long wig in his mouth—which seems rather
a comic opera touch. It is to be hoped, rather than expected, that the
traveller with the guineas saw the humour of it. In the twinkling of an
eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while the
others covered him with their pistols. The servant also was secured, the
guineas transferred with the dexterity of a practised conjurer, the
horses turned loose, and then the three rode away, leaving the traveller
and his servant to get on as best they could. Spiggott eventually paid
the penalty of his rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with
the canons of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career,
he was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon at
Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller. The end of him was
the appointed end of all his kind. The moral of this story seems to be
“Wear a mask when engaged in crime.”
In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped
here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of
his watch, in the most easy way. Some of these highwaymen were, indeed,
persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner,
and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite
unfitted to be in business for himself. Thoroughly business-like men
were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and
properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they
should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the
profits of their labours into equal shares. Their industry prospered,
and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000.
But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount,
Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law
against him, in 1725. A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and
appealed against by the defendant. The court then very properly found
the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors
engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this
discreditable affair. One partner was executed, two years later, at
Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.
There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place called Brown’s
Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly opposite the “Green Man,” and in
the trunk of this last survival of the “good old days” there have been
found, from time to time, quite a number of pistol bullets, said to have
been fired by passing travellers at the trunk to frighten the highwaymen
who might chance to be hiding behind it, under cover of the night. The
tree itself has long borne the name of Turpin’s Oak, no less celebrated a
person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented it.
History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom the Wells were
named. I suggest they should be, and were in the first place “Brent
Wells”; a source of the river Brent. Nor are those Wells—whatever they
may have been—now in existence, while the name itself is only perpetuated
by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the road.
[Picture: Turpin’s Oak] Turpin, of course, is the greatest of all the
rascals who made the name of the Great North Road a name of dread.
Before him, however, the redoubtable Jack Sheppard figured here, but not,
it is sad to relate, in an heroic manner. In fact that nimble-fingered
youth, after escaping from the Stone Jug (by which piece of classic slang
you are to understand Newgate to be meant) had the humiliation to be
apprehended on Finchley Common, disguised in drink and a butcher’s blue
smock. That was the worst of those roystering blades. The drink was the
undoing of them all. If only they had been Good Templars, and had
sported the blue ribbon, it is quite certain that they had not been cut
off untimely; and might, with reasonable luck, even have retired with a
modest competence in early years. It was in 1724 that Jack Sheppard was
arrested by Bow Street runners on the Common, and the fact somewhat
staggers one’s belief in the wild lawlessness of that place. To capture
a highwayman in his own peculiar territory! One might just as soon
expect to hear of the Chief Commissioner of Police being kidnapped from
Scotland Yard. And yet it is quite certain that Finchley was no safe
place for a good young man with five pounds in his pocket and a mere
walking-stick in his hand, whether he proposed to cross it by night or
day. Even sixty-six years later this evil reputation existed; for, in
1790, the Earl of Minto, travelling to London, wrote to his wife that
instead of pushing on to town at night, he would defer his entry until
morning, “for I shall not trust my throat on Finchley Common in the
dark.” Think of it! And Dick Turpin had been duly executed fifty years
before!
Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who
figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not
possible to say much. There was the courageous and resourceful Captain
Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks,
and Claud Duval. Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.
The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of Pitt’s Act
for Restricting Cash Payments. Before then, travellers carried nothing
but gold, and as they required plenty of that commodity on their long and
tedious journeys, the booty seized by these gentry was often
considerable. Bank notes then came into favour, and were issued for as
low a denomination as one pound. These would have been a perilous kind
of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the certainty of
a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish, until panics came,
banks failed, and paper money became for a time a discredited form of
currency. By that time the roads were better patrolled, and coin was to
be conjured from the pockets of the lieges with less safety than before.
From these causes, and from the new law which made it penal to receive
stolen goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a
great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads.
XII
[Picture: “The Whetstone”] WHETSTONE, coming next after the Finchleys, is
held in local legends to have acquired its name from the battered old
stone still to be seen embedded in the ground by the signpost of the
“Griffin” inn. On it the men-at-arms are said to have whetted their
swords and spears before the battle of Barnet. The sceptical smile at
this antiquity, and for their benefit there is a rival legend which gives
the date as that of 1745, when King George’s army marched down to meet
Prince Charles and his Highlanders. Antiquaries have often demolished
this derivation of the place-name; but the hoary (and quite unveracious)
tale survives, and is doubtless immortal. You may explain it away, but
the stone is there, and your local patriot is ever a materialist in such
a resort.
It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the
originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon
the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that,
many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a
coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while
they might. Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered
barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long
street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested
development.
Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first
stage out of London on the northern roads. They were placed here, rather
than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated
down the road, near Greenhill Cross. Whetstone Gate gave travellers
going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed
Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society
of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.
The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these
gentry. When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now
forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and
digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long
struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had
been a fairly good roadway. Progress was difficult, even in the best
circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the
highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.
The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of
the nineteenth century. This was partly owing to the mistaken local
patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the
rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point
of the pitchfork. Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the
new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the
Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as
good as any in the kingdom. It then became possible, for the first time
in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its
destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea. The
Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received
with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of
road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the
highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town.
They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to
others, but to no purpose. The Government admitted the excellence of the
surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically
insisted on its being reduced.
The Trustees were dismayed. Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans,
and both foreshadowed heavy expense. Telford’s idea was to slice off the
top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep
cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the
houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a
cliff. Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed.
It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between
Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an
entrance even now by no means easily graded. What it must originally
have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked
road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the
old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the
site of the inn where Pepys stayed. The end one of a row of ten or
twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.
The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not completed until
four years later, at a cost of £17,000. A large portion of this heavy
sum went in compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land
taken. The cost of these improvements came eventually, of course, out of
the pockets of travellers along the road. On this Trust they were
mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding the existing tolls to be
utterly inadequate to their expenses, obtained powers in 1830 to increase
them. They considered themselves hardly treated in being obliged to
undertake such costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham
Railway being constructed—a railway which would have the effect of
withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the
toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was not yet,
and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the tolls by auction for
one year at the handsome sum of £7,530. Accordingly they commenced to
pay off their debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by
the beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of tolls
in 1835 and 1841.
It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act,
and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the
railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching
and posting trade. The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell
to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.
It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the
figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at
this gate were let in the old days. Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time,
they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150.
But few vehicles passed then. Forty years later, no fewer than ninety
coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!
XIII
BARNET, or Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet, as it is variously called,
stands on the summit of a steep and high ridge running east and west. On
the east the height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned
conspicuously with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra
Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the range of
hills stretching away to Elstree. Other Barnets, old and new, are
plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the modern suburb of New Barnet.
Chipping Barnet derives the first part of its name from its ancient
chepe, or weekly market, granted by Henry the Second, and its more common
prefix of “High,” from its situation on the ridge just mentioned.
Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out of London,
and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and posting traffic of
those two great thoroughfares—the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road.
When the Stamford “Regent,” the York “Highflyer,” and the early morning
coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool arrived, the
passengers, who had not found time for breakfast before starting, were
generally very sharp-set indeed, and the viands already prepared and
waiting in the cosy rooms of the old hostelries, disappeared before their
onslaught “in less than no time.” The battle of Barnet was fought over
again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who contended
together, nor was the subject of their contention the Crown of England.
They were just famished travellers who struggled to get something to eat
and drink before the guard made his appearance at the door, with the
fateful cry, “Time’s up, gentlemen; take your seats please.” When the
horn sounded in the yard, desperate men would rush forth with hands full
of food, and finish their repasts as best they might on the coach.
[Picture: High Street, Barnet]
The two principal inns were the “Red Lion” and the “Green Man.” It was,
and is now in some degree, a town of inns, but these were the
headquarters of the two great political parties. Neither was a
“coaching” inn, for they despised trafficking with ordinary travellers,
and devoted themselves wholly to the posting business. The “Red Lion”
was originally the “Antelope.” Standing in the most favourable position
for intercepting the stream of post-chaises from London, it generally
secured the pick of business going that way, unless indeed the political
bias of gentlemen going down into the country forbade them to hire
post-horses at a Tory house. In that case, they went to the “Green Man,”
further on, which was Whig. And perhaps, in sacrificing to politics,
they got inferior horses! The “Green Man” placed in midst of the town,
was in receipt of the up traffic, and was the largest establishment,
keeping twenty-six pairs of horses and eleven postboys, against the
eighteen pairs and eight postboys of the “Red Lion”; and it is recorded
that between May 9th and 11th, when, on May 10th, 1808, two celebrated
prizefighters, Gully and Gregson, fought at Beechwood Park, Sir John
Sebright’s place down the road, near Flamstead, no fewer than one hundred
and eighty-seven pairs were changed. Those three days formed a record
time for the “Green Man,” according to these figures:—
Posting £141 17 10½
Bills in the house 54 19 0
Bills in the yard 14 10 0
£211 6 10½
The “boys” of the “Green Man” wore blue jackets; those of the “Red Lion,”
yellow jackets and black hats.
An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but
it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters. It may be seen
at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through
the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off.
Thus the “Red Lion” remains, long after the eclipse of its rival. Its
frontage is impressive by size rather than beauty. With a range of
fifteen windows in line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing
himself at the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is
eloquent of the old days. The lion turns his head north, gazing away
from the direction in which his chief customers came.
But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for
this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted. The
house he refers to in his diary is the “Old Red Lion”; down the hill, at
the approach to Barnet. There he “lay” in 1667. “August 11th, Lord’s
Day,” he writes: “Up by four o’clock . . . and got to the wells at Barnet
by seven o’clock, and there found many people a-drinking.” After
“drinking three glasses and the women nothing,” the party sojourned “to
the Red Lion, where we ’light and went up into the great room, and there
drank, and ate some of the best cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.”
The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the last few
years of the coaching age is scarcely credible. It was a fierce
competition. The landlord of the “Red Lion” at Barnet thought nothing of
forcibly taking out the post-horses from any private carriage passing his
house, and putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St.
Albans. This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the business
going to the hated rival. Mine host of that hotel also had his little
ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of sherry and a sandwich,
gratis, to the travellers changing there. But things did not end here.
The landlord of the “Red Lion,” finding, perhaps, that the sherry and
sandwich at the “Green Man” was more attractive than his method, engaged
a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing chaises, and even to haul them
out of his rival’s stable-yard. Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed
victualler! After several contests of this kind, the authorities
interfered. The combatants were bound over to keep the peace, the
punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the tapping of claret ceased,
and people travelling down the road were actually allowed to decide for
themselves which house they would patronise!
XIV
FROM Barnet the road runs across Hadley Green, a broad and picturesque
expanse, cursed nowadays with the ubiquitous golfer. Here, where the
road divides—the Great North Road to the right and the old Holyhead Road
to the left—stands the obelisk known as Hadley Highstone, which serves
both as a milestone and as a memorial of the great battle of Barnet,
fought here on that cold and miserable Easter Day, April 14, 1471, when
Edward the Fourth utterly defeated the Lancastrians under the Earl of
Warwick, the “King Maker.” Warwick fell, and the Red Rose was finally
crushed. Hadley Green was then a portion of a wide stretch of unenclosed
country known as Gladsmoor Heath, extending up to Monken Hadley church,
away on the right. The obelisk was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke in
1740 on the spot where Warwick is said to have been slain. There is,
however, another spot which aspires to the honour, at Rabley Park, near
South Mimms. This also has its monumental pillar, but without
inscription. Among the guileless youth of the neighbourhood it is said
to mark “the place where a soldier was knocked down,” which is a
commonplace way of stating the fact. But who knocked him down, or why,
or when, is beyond them when questioned.
Past the lodge gates of Wrotham Park and by Ganwick Corner, where stands
the “Duke of York” inn with its bust of that wonderful strategist. He is
looking enquiringly south, from his alcove over the front door, as though
wondering what has become of all the post-chaises and coaches of old. He
is that great commander who managed, according to the well-known rhyme,
to march his ten thousand men to the top of a hill and then down
again—but he never otherwise distinguished himself—except by the
magnitude of his debts.
[Picture: Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet]
Potter’s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and Hertford join. It
is not a place of delirious delights, consisting of stuccoed villas
fondly supposed to be Italian, and unfinished roads, and streets in a
state of suspended animation. Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an
old toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and
toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had given
Potter’s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads at the north end of
the village, commanding the high-road and the road on the right to
Northaw. [Picture: Old Toll-House, Potter’s Bar] It was not a beautiful
building, but it hinted of old times, and its disappearance is to be
regretted. It was taken down because already, in the first twelve months
of the new automobile era a car had dashed into it and done most of any
demolition necessary. A War Memorial now stands on the site. Between
this and Hatfield the road goes in undulating fashion, with the Great
Northern Railway on the left hand nearly all the way, but chiefly
downhill. Down Little Heath Hill and then half-way up the succeeding
incline we come to a cutting which affords a newer and easier road than
the hilly route to the left. [Picture: Ganwick Corner] Where this joins
the old road again, nearly two miles onward, at Bell Bar, stands the
pretty “Swan” inn. The “bar” has, of course, long since disappeared.
Immediately ahead is Hatfield Park, stretching away for over three miles.
Through the park, by where the present south lodge stands, the highway
used to run in former times, and brought wayfarers between the wind and
the nobility of the Cecils. Accordingly the road was diverted at the
instance of the then Lord Salisbury, and the public no longer offend him,
his heirs, executors, or assigns. And now, for ever and a day, those who
use the road between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield village must go an extra
half mile. This is indeed a free and happy country.
[Picture: Bell Bar]
Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield
House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour. And yet, amid its
tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with
bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye,
if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair.
Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid advertisements, have
helped to ruin Hatfield, and the railway does its share, running closely
to the main road, and, with the station directly opposite the highly
elaborate modern wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House,
detracting not a little from that state of dignified seclusion by which,
as we have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such store. Let
us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old home. If it does, it
must be sorely vexed.
But at any rate, that Marquis who was one of Queen Victoria’s Prime
Ministers, sits there in bronze portrait-effigy. He gazes mournfully,
directly at the railway booking-office, as one who has long been waiting,
without hope, for a train. It is a fine statue, by Sir George Frampton,
R.A., and bears the inscription:—
ROBERT ARTHUR TALBOT,
Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., G.C.V.O.,
Three times Prime Minister of
Great Britain and Ireland,
1830–1903.
Erected to his memory by his Hertfordshire friends
and neighbours in recognition of a great life devoted
to the welfare of his country.
Hatfield House, that great historical museum and ancient repository of
State secrets, is little seen from the village, nor have we, as wayfarers
along the road, much to do with it. It is by the parish church, its
characteristic Hertfordshire extinguisher spire so prominent above the
tumbled roofs of Hatfield, that we may glimpse the older parts of the
house. In that church lies its builder, the great Robert Cecil, his
effigy, with the Lord Treasurer’s wand of office, recumbent on a slab
uplifted by statues emblematic of Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and
Temperance, and a skeleton below, to show that even Lord Treasurers,
possessed though they be of all the virtues, are mortal, like less
exalted and less virtuous men.
The house that he built seems sadly out of repair. The history of it is
romantic to a degree. Originally the palace of the Bishops of Ely, whose
delicate constitutions could not stand the fen-land vapours which
enwrapped the neighbourhood of their glorious Cathedral (but perhaps were
not harmful to the less dignified clergy!), it remained in their
possession until it was coveted by Henry the Eighth, who gave some land
at Ely in exchange. So the bishops had, doubtless with an ill grace, to
go back to that fertile breeding-ground of agues and rheumatism, and one
can well imagine the resident inferior clergy, between their aches and
pains, chuckling secretly about this piece of poetic justice.
And so in Royal possession the old palace continued until James the First
in his turn exchanged it for the estate of Sir Robert Cecil at Theobalds.
Previously it had been the home—the prison, rather of the Princess
Elizabeth during her sister Mary’s reign. The oak is still shown in the
park under which she was sitting when the news of Mary’s death and the
end, consequently, of the surveillance to which she was subjected, was
brought her, November 17, 1588. (But is tradition truthful here? Would
she have been sitting under an oak in November?) “It is the Lord’s
doing, it is marvellous in our eyes,” she exclaimed, quoting from the
Psalms. Three days later she held her first council in the old palace,
and then on the 23rd set out for London.
There are relics of the great queen at Hatfield House: a pair of her
stockings and the garden hat she was wearing when the great news came to
her. But the house is nearly all of a later date, for when Sir Robert
Cecil obtained it in exchange for Theobalds, he pulled down the greater
part of the old palace and built the present striking Jacobean building,
magnificent and impressive, and perhaps not the less impressive for being
also somewhat gloomy. This is no place to recount the glories of its
picture-galleries and its noble state-rooms, or of the long line of the
exalted and the great who have been entertained here. Moreover, the
great are not uncommonly the dullest of dull dogs. It is rather with
those of less estate, and with travellers, that in these pages we shall
find our account. Pepys, for instance, whom we need not object to call
the natural man (for does not Scripture tell us that the human heart in a
natural state is “desperately wicked”? and Samuel was no Puritan), who
was here lusting to steal somebody’s dog, as he acknowledged in that very
outspoken _Diary_ of his:—“Would fain have stolen a pretty dog that
followed me, but could not, which troubled me.”
There was a tragical happening at Hatfield, November 27, 1835, when the
house was greatly injured by fire, and the old and eccentric Dowager
Marchioness of Salisbury burnt to death, in her eighty-fifth year. The
pious declared it to be a “judgment” for her playing cards on Sunday; but
what a number of conflagrations we should have if that were true and
Providence consistent in its vengeance!
XV
LEAVING Hatfield and its memories behind, we come, past the tree-shaded
hamlet of Stanborough, to the long gradual rise of Digswell Hill,
beautifully engineered over the uplands rising from the marshy banks of
the little river Lea. Off to the left, at the foot of the hill, goes the
old road at a wide tangent, and with a decidedly abrupt plunge down into
the water-meadows, crossing the Lea by Lemsford Mills, and rejoining the
newer road on an equally abrupt and difficult rise half-way up the hill,
by the wall of Brockett Hall Park. It was here that Brickwall turnpike
gate was situated in the old days. The brick wall of the park that gave
the gate its name is still there and a very old, substantial, and
beautifully lichened red-brick wall it is—but the gate and the toll-board
and the toll-house have all vanished. Digswell Hill is beautiful, and so
is Ayot Green, at the summit, with its giant trees and humble cottages
stretching away on the left to the Ayot villages. Not so the “Red Lion”
close by. More beautiful still—and steeper—is the descent into Welwyn,
beneath over-arching trees and rugged banks, down from which secluded
rustic summer-houses look upon the traffic of the highway.
Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river—or, more correctly
speaking, the streamlet—of the Mimram. Street and houses face you
alarmingly as you descend the steep hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if
the sharp corner can safely be rounded, or if you must needs dash through
door or window of the “White Hart,” once one of the two coaching inns of
the village.
The “White Hart” at Welwyn was kept in the “twenties” by “old Barker,”
who horsed the Stamford “Regent” a stage on the road, and was, in the
language of the coachmen, a “three-cornered old beggar.” That is to say,
he kept a tight hand over the doings of coachmen and guards, did not
approve of “shouldering,” and objected to the coachmen giving lessons to
gentlemen coachmen, or allowing amateurs to “take the ribbons.” From the
passengers’ point of view this was entirely admirable of “old Barker,”
for many an inoffensive traveller’s life had been jeopardised by the
driving of unqualified persons. Colonel Birch Reynardson tells a story
of him and of Tom Hennesy, the best known of the “Regent” coachmen—one
who could whistle louder, hit a horse harder, and tell a bigger lie than
any of his contemporaries. Hennesy had resigned the reins to him one day
between London and Hatfield, but when they neared Welwyn, the
accomplished Tom thought he had better resume them. “It would never do
for old Barker to see you driving,” said he. The words were scarcely out
of his mouth before the “three-cornered old beggar” himself appeared,
walking up the hill, with the double object of taking a constitutional
and of seeing if any “shouldering” was going on.
“Don’t look as if you seed him,” said Tom. “We’ll make the best of it we
can.”
[Picture: Welwyn]
Down they went to the inn door, where the fresh team was standing. By
the time the horses had been got out of the coach, old Barker, who had
turned back, looking anything but pleasant, was upon them.
“Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,” said Tom, with all the impudence he
could command. “Did you ever see a young gentleman take a coach steadier
down a hill? ’Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better. He’s
a pupil of mine, sir, and I’m blessed if he did not do it capital; don’t
you think he did, sir, for you seed him?” “Hum,” said old Barker; “you
know it’s all against the laws. Supposing anything happened, what then?”
“Well, sir, I did not expect anything _would_ happen, with such horses as
these of yours; there’s no better four horses, sir, betwixt London and
Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why, they’ll hold anything.” This,
of course, was pouring balm into old Barker’s wounds, which seemed to
heal pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said, “Well,
Hennesy, you know I don’t like ‘gentlemen coachmen,’ and, above all
things, very _young_ ones. Don’t you do it again.”
Was Hennesy grateful? Not at all; for, when they had driven away, he
said, “Well, he was wonderful civil for _him_,” and added that if he
could only catch him lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck
and kill him, “blessed if he wouldn’t!”
This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman, came down
in the world when railways drove the coaches off the main roads, and was
reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between Cambridge and Huntingdon.
More picturesque than the “White Hart” is the “Wellington,” which
composes so finely with the red-brick tower of the church, at the further
end of the village street, where the road abruptly forks. It is a street
of all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly grouped.
But Welwyn has other claims upon the tourist. It was the home for many
years of Young, author of the once-popular _Night Thoughts_. Who reads
that sombre work now? He was rector here from 1730 until 1765, when he
died, but lives as a warning to those who inevitably identify an author
with his books. His work, _The Complaint_, _or_, _Night Thoughts on
Life_, _Death_, _and Immortality_, is dour reading, but he was so little
of a sombre man that we find him not infrequently in the company of, and
a fellow spirit among, the convivial men of his time. This was only a
product of his “sensibility,” that curious quality peculiar to the
eighteenth century, and did not necessarily prove him a weeping
philosopher. He had, indeed, a mental agility which could with ease fly
from the most depressing disquisitions on the silent tomb, to the proper
compounding of a stiff jorum of punch. Young, on his appointment to
Welwyn, married Lady Elizabeth (“Betty”) Lee, daughter of the Earl of
Lichfield. He found the rectory too small (or perhaps not good enough
for her ladyship), and so purchased a more imposing house called the
“Guessons”—anciently the “Guest House” of some abbey. With it he bought
land, and planted the lime-tree avenue which still remains a memorial of
him. There is a votive urn here, erected by Mr. Johnes-Knight, a
succeeding rector; but probably the most enduring memorial of Young is
the very first line of the _Night Thoughts_, the fine expression:—
“Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”
No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the
most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare. Alas, poor
Young!
Young erected a sundial in his garden here, with the motto, “_Eheu_,
_fugaces_!” “Alas, how fleeting!” It was not long before some midnight
robbers came, and, carrying it off, justified the inscription. Nowadays,
besides the avenue and the votive urn, all that remains to tell of him is
the tablet to his memory on the south wall of the aisle.
Knebworth Park, with mansion and an ancient parish church full of
monuments to Strodes, Robinsons and Lyttons, is just off to the left.
There is no Lytton blood in the Earls “of” Lytton, who are not of Litton,
near Tideswell, in Derbyshire, whence came the now extinct Lytton family.
The whole assumption is romantic rather than warranted by facts.
Knebworth is a place of much combined beauty and historic interest,
together with a great deal of vulgar and uninteresting sham. It has been
described as “a sham-old house, with a sham lake, sham heraldic monsters,
and sham-ancient portraits.” Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton—“Bulwig,” as
someone, to his intense annoyance, called him—was intensely fond of
Gothic architecture and ornamentation; fond of it in an undiscriminating,
Early Victorian, uninstructed way, and he stuck his house of Knebworth
all over with gimcrackery that he fondly thought to be mediæval.
Crockets, tourelles, pinnacles and grotesque gargoyles were added in
wholesale fashion, and in a very carpenterish way. One might almost say
they were _wafered_ on. They were not carved out of stone, but moulded
cheaply in plaster, and in his son’s time were always falling. As they
fell, they were relegated to the nearest dustheap, and their places
remained vacant. A visitor to the second Lord Lytton tells, apropos of
these things, how he was walking on the terrace with his host, when the
gardener came up and said, “If you please, my lord, another of them
bloody monkeys has fallen down in the night.” It was, of course, one
more of “Bulwig’s” quasi-Gothic abominations come to its doom.
The Earls Lytton are neither baronial Bulwers nor ancient lordly Lyttons.
Their real name is the very much more plebian one of Wiggett. So far
back as 1756, William Wiggett assumed the name of Bulwer on his marriage
with a Sarah of that ilk. His youngest son, the novelist, the child of
another wife, who had been an Elizabeth Warburton, added the name of
Lytton to his own on succeeding to his mother’s property of Knebworth.
But that does not at once bring us to the Lytton connection. For that,
we must quote the late Augustus J. C. Hare, who was an adept at
relationships to the remotest degree. He had hundreds of cousins of his
own, and knew who was everybody else’s twentieth or thirtieth cousin. He
tells us that this Elizabeth Warburton’s very remote connection with the
real Lyttons lay in the fact that “her grandfather, John Robinson, was
cousin (maternally) to Lytton Strode, who was great-nephew of a Sir
William Lytton, who died childless in 1704.” It will be allowed that the
connection _is_ remote; practically indeed, non-existent.
Nor is the name of Bulwer as distinguished as the novelist wished it to
appear. He sought to range it with Bölver, one of the war-titles of the
Norse god, Odin; but it really derived from some plebian cattle-driver,
or Bullward.
The road rises steeply out of Welwyn, in the direction of Stevenage.
Here some of the coaches had a narrow escape from destruction at the
hands of unknown miscreants, ancestors of the criminal lunatics who place
obstacles upon the railways in our times. Our murderous larrikins had
their counterparts in the old days, in those who placed gates across the
roads, so that the coaches should run into them in the darkness. An
incident of this kind happened here on the night of June 5, 1805, when
two gates were found set up in the main road, and another at Welwyn
Green. Fortunately, no accident resulted, and the ruffians, who
doubtless were waiting the result of their work, must have gone home
disappointed.
From the beautiful expanse of gorsy and wooded hillside common above the
village may be glimpsed the great red-brick viaduct of Welwyn, carrying
the main line of the Great Northern Railway across the wide and deep
valley of the Mimram, an insignificant stream for such a channel.
Woolmer Green and Broadwater, between this point and Stevenage, are
modern and uninteresting hamlets, created out of nothingness by the
speculative builder and the handy situation of Knebworth station, beside
the road, which now begins to give another example of its flatness.
Leisurely wayfarers will notice the old half-timbered cottage at the
entrance to the churchyard. On its side wall are hung two stout long
poles with formidable hooks attached. These are old fire-appliances,
used in the days of thatched roofs, for pulling off the whole of the
blazing thatch. Travellers, leisured or otherwise, will scarce be able
to miss seeing the great and offensive boards hereabouts, advertising a
new suburban or “Garden Suburb” settlement in course of building away to
the right, since 1920; blessed and boomed by Lord Northcliffe, and
apparently to be given the name of “Daily Mail.” Horrible!
The entrance to Stevenage is signalised by a group of new and commonplace
cottages elbowing the famous Six Hills, a series of sepulchral barrows of
prehistoric date, beside the highway. These six grassy mounds might not
unreasonably be passed unthinkingly by the uninstructed, or taken for
grass-grown heaps of refuse. Centuries of wear and weather have had
their effect, and they do not look very monumental now; but they were
once remarkable enough to give the place its name, Stevenage deriving
from the Saxon “_stigenhaght_,” or “hills by the highway.”
To coachmen, who were adepts in the art of what the slangy call
“spoofing,” and were always ready—in earlier slang phrase—to “take a rise
out of” strangers, the Six Hills afforded an excellent opportunity of
practising a diluted form of wit, and often brought them a glass of
brandy or rum-and-milk at the next pull-up, in payment of the bets they
would make with the most innocent-looking passenger, that he could not
tell which two of the hills were furthest apart. They are, as nearly as
possible, equi-distant; but strangers would select one couple or another,
according to their fancy; whereupon the coachman would triumphantly point
out that the first and the last were, as a matter of fact, the most
widely divided. This perhaps does not exhibit coaching wit in a
strikingly robust light; but a very weak kind of jocularity served to
pass the weary hours of travel in our grandfathers’ days.
[Picture: The “Six Hills,” Stevenage]
XVI
STEVENAGE is the first of the many wide-streeted towns and villages whose
emptiness proclaims the something missing that was provided for by all
this vast roominess. Its one street, lining the old road, was originally
laid out so spaciously for the purpose of affording room for the traffic
for which, once upon a time, it was not too spacious. It is all too wide
now that the intercourse of two nations proceeds by rail, and many of the
old inns that once did so famous a trade are converted into private
residences. Prominent among them was the “Swan,” which may now be sought
in the large red-brick house on the right-hand side of the forking roads,
as the town is left for Baldock. It may readily be identified by its
archway, which formerly led to the spacious stables.
The “Swan” at Stevenage, kept in pre-railway days by a postmaster named
Cass, was one of those exclusive houses which, like the “Red Lion” and
the “Green Man” at Barnet, did not condescend to the ordinary
coach-traveller. Cass kept post-horses only, and his customers ranged
from princes and dukes down to baronets and wealthy knights.
“Posting in all its branches,” as the postmasters used to say in the
announcements outside their establishments, was at the beginning of the
nineteenth century essentially aristocratic; but it had many changes,
from its beginning, about the dawn of the seventeenth century, to its
end, before the middle of the nineteenth. Originally “posting” meant the
hire of horses only, and the traveller rode horseback himself,
accompanied perhaps by a mounted guide. Thus Fynes Morison, in his
_Itinerary_, published in 1617, speaks of the early days of posting:—“In
England, towards the south, and in the west parts, and from London to
Barwick upon the confines of Scotland, post-horses are established at
every ten miles or thereabouts, which they ride a false gallop after some
ten miles an hour sometimes, and that makes their hire the greater; for
with a commission from the chief postmaster or chiefe lords of the
councell (given either upon publike businesse, or at least pretence
thereof), a passenger shall pay twopence halfpenny each mile for his
horse, and as much for his guide’s horse; but one guide will serve the
whole company, though many ride together, who may easily bring back the
horses, driving them before him, who ‘know the waye as well as a beggar
knowes his dishe.’ This extraordinary charge of horses’ hire may well be
recompensed with the speede of the journey, whereby greater expences in
the innes are avoided; all the difficultie is, to have a body able to
endure the toyle. For these horses the passenger is at no charge to give
them meat onely at the ten miles, and the boy that carries them backe
will expect some few pence in gift.”
When carriages were introduced, the very great personages of the realm
“progressed” in them, and had their love of display gratified thereby.
But what they gained in pomp they lost in speed, for at the best of it
they rarely travelled at a greater pace than seven miles an hour.
An odd institution with the noble and the wealthy families of that bygone
age was the “running footman.” It has sometimes been supposed that these
deer-footed servitors were for town service, perhaps because “old Q,” the
profligate Marquis of Queensberry, who was the last to keep one, lived in
town during his last years and necessarily kept his lackey running London
streets. The unique sign of the “running footman,” with the portrait of
such an one in costume, is also in London, and may be seen any day on a
little public-house, still chiefly frequented by men-servants, in Charles
Street, Berkeley Square. He wears a uniform consisting of blue coat and
breeches, trimmed with gold lace. Round his waist is a red sash, on his
head a cap with a nodding plume, and in his hand the long staff carried
by all his tribe. This is an outfit somewhat different from that usually
worn, for we are told that they wore no breeches, but a short silk
petticoat kept down by a deep gold fringe.
The function of a running footman was to run ahead of his employer’s
carriage, to point out the proper turnings to take, or to arrange for his
reception at the inns; but as time went on and accommodation increased,
he was not of any practical use, and became simply a kind of unnecessary
fore-runner, who by his appearance advertised the coming of my lord and
upheld my lord’s dignity. It is said that these ministers to senseless
pomp and vanity usually ran at the rate of seven miles an hour, and
frequently did sixty miles a day. The long and highly ornamented staff
they carried had a hollow silver ball at the end containing white wine.
Unscrewing it, the footman could refresh himself. More white wine, mixed
with eggs, was given him at the end of his journey, and he must have
needed it! Over the bad and hilly roads of a hundred and fifty years
ago, the running footman could readily keep ahead of a carriage; on the
flat the horses, of course, had the advantage.
Post-chaises were unknown in England until after the middle of the
eighteenth century had come and gone. Thus we find Horace Walpole and
Gray, taking the “grand tour” together in 1739, astonished to laughter at
the post-chaises which conveyed them from Boulogne towards Paris. This
French vehicle, the father of all post-chaises, was two-wheeled, and not
very unlike our present hansom-cab, the door being in front and the body
hung in much the same way, only a little more forward from the wheels.
The French _chaise de-poste_ was invented in 1664, and the first used in
England were of this type; but they proved unsuitable for use in this
country, and English carriage-builders at length evolved the well-known
post-chaise, which went out only with the coaching age. But it was long
before it began to supplant the post-horses and the feminine pillion.
Every one is familiar with the appearance of the old post-chaise, which,
according to the painters and the print-sellers, appears to have been
used principally for the purpose of spiriting love-lorn couples with the
speed of the wind away from all restrictions of home and the Court of
Chancery. A post-chaise was (so it seems nowadays) a rather cumbrous
affair, four-wheeled, high, and insecurely hung, with a glass front and a
seat to hold three, facing the horses. The original designers evidently
had no prophetic visions as to this especial popularity of post-chaises
with errant lovers, nor did they ponder the proverb, “Two’s company,
three’s none,” else they would have restricted their accommodation to
two, or have enlarged it to four.
It was an expensive as well as a pleasant method of travelling, costing
as it did at least a shilling a mile, and, in times when forage was dear,
one shilling and threepence. The usual rates were chaise, nine-pence a
mile, pair of post-horses, sixpence; four horses and chaise, supposing
you desired to travel speedily—say at twelve miles an
hour—one-and-ninepence. But these costs and charges did not frank the
traveller through. The post-boy’s tip was as inevitable as night and
morning. Likewise there were the “gates” to pay every now and again.
One shudders to contemplate the total cost of posting from London to
Edinburgh, even with only the ordinary equipment of two horses. There
were thirty post-stages between the two capitals, according to the books
published for the use of travellers a hundred years ago. Those books
were very necessary to any one who did not desire to be charged for
perhaps a mile more on each stage than it really measured, which was one
of those artful postmasters’ little ways. Here is a list of these stages
with the measurements, to which travellers drew the attention of those
postmasters who commonly endeavoured to overcharge:—
Miles Furlongs Miles Furlongs
Barnet 11 0 York 9 3
Hatfield 8 4 Easingwold 13 3
Stevenage 11 7 Thirsk 10 3
Biggleswade 13 5 Northallerton 9 0
Buckden 15 7 Darlington 16 0
Stilton 13 7 Durham 18 2
Stamford 14 2 Newcastle 14 4
Witham Common 11 2 Morpeth 14 6
Grantham 9 5 Alnwick 18 6
Newark 14 3 Belford 14 5
Tuxford 13 2 Berwick 15 3
Barnby Moor 10 4 Press Inn 11 5
Doncaster 12 0 Dunbar 14 3
Ferrybridge 15 2 Haddington 11 0
Tadcaster 12 7 Edinburgh 16 0
Nearly four hundred miles by these measurements. This, at a shilling a
mile for the posting, gives £20; but, including the postboys’ tips,
“gates,” and expenses at the inns on the road, the journey could not have
been done in this way under £30, at the most modest calculation. This
list of post-stages was one drawn up for distances chiefly between the
towns, but nothing is more remarkable along the Great North Road than the
number of old posting-houses which still exist (although of course their
business is gone) in wild and lonely spots, far removed from either town
or village.
Another “branch” of posting was the horsing alone, by which a private
carriage could be taken to or from town by hiring posters at every stage.
This was a favourite practice with the gentry of the shires, who thus had
all the _éclat_ of travelling in private state, without the expense and
trouble of providing their own horses. It is probably of this method
that De Quincey speaks in the following passage:—
“In my childhood,” says he, “standing with one or two of my brothers
and sisters at the front window of my mother’s carriage, I remember
one unvarying set of images before us. The postillion (for so were
all carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits and starts, but
always and eternally, in quartering, _i.e._ in crossing from side to
side, according to the casualties of the ground. Before you
stretched a wintry length of lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture
the leg of a horse, filled to the brim with standing pools of
rain-water; and the collateral chambers of these ruts kept from
becoming confluent by thin ridges, such as the Romans called _lirae_,
to maintain the footing upon which _lirae_, so as not to swerve (or
as the Romans would say, _delirare_), was a trial of some skill, both
for the horses and their postillion. It was, indeed, next to
impossible for any horse, on such a narrow crust of separation, not
to grow _delirious_ in the Roman metaphor; and the nervous anxiety
which haunted me when a child was much fed by this image so often
before my eyes, and the sympathy with which I followed the motion of
the docile creatures’ legs. Go to sleep at the beginning of a stage,
and the last thing you saw—wake up, and the first thing you saw—was
the line of wintry pools, the poor off-horse planting his steps with
care, and the cautious postillion gently applying his spur whilst
manoeuvring across the system of grooves with some sort of science
that looked like a gipsy’s palmistry—so equally unintelligible to me
were his motions in what he sought and in what he avoided.”
XVII
BEFORE we leave Stevenage, we must pay a visit to the “Old Castle” inn,
in whose stable the body of the eccentric Henry Trigg is deposited, in a
coffin amid the rafters, plain for all to see; somewhat dilapidated and
battered in the lapse of two centuries, and with a patch of tin over the
hole cut in it by some riotous blades long ago, but doubtless still
containing his bones. His Will sufficiently explains the circumstances.
IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN.
I, HENRY TRIGG, of Stevenage, in the County of Hertford, Grocer,
being very infirm and weak in body, but of perfect sound mind and
memory, God be praised for it, calling into mind the mortality of my
body, do now make and ordain this my last Will and Testament, in
writing, hereafter following: that is to say:—Principally I recommend
my soul into the merciful hands of Almighty God that first gave me
it, assuredly believing and only expecting free pardon and
forgiveness of all my sins, and eternal life in and through the only
merits, death, and passion of Jesus Christ my Saviour; and as to my
body I commit it to the West end of my Hovel, to be decently laid
there upon a floor erected by my Executor, upon the purlin, for the
same purpose; nothing doubting but at the general Resurrection I
shall receive the same again by the mighty power of God; and as for
and concerning such worldly substance as it hath pleased God to bless
me with in this world, I do devise and dispose of the same in manner
and form here following.
[Picture: Trigg’s Coffin]
_Imprimis_. I give and devise unto my loving brother Thomas Trigg,
of Letchworth, in the County of Hertford, Clerk, and to his Heirs and
Assigns for ever, all those my Freehold Lands lying dispersedly in
the several common fields in the parish of Stevenage aforesaid, and
also all my Copyhold Lands, upon condition that he shall lay my body
upon the place before mentioned; and also all that Messuage, Cottage,
or Tenement at Redcoats Green in the Parish of Much Wymondly,
together with those Nine Acres of Land (more or less) purchased of
William Hale and Thomas Hale, Jun.; and also my Cottage, Orchard, and
barn, with four acres of Land (more or less) belonging, lying, and
being in the Parish of Little Wymondly, and now in the possession of
Samuel Kitchener, labourer; and all my Cottages, Messuages, or
Tenements situate and being in Stevenage, aforesaid: or, upon
condition that he shall pay my brother, George Trigg, the sum of Ten
Pounds per annum for life: but if my brother shall neglect or refuse
to lay my body where I desire it should be laid, then, upon that
condition, I will and bequeath all that which I have already
bequeathed to my brother Thomas Trigg, unto my brother George Trigg,
and to his heirs for ever; and if my brother George Trigg should
refuse to lay my body under my Hovel, then what I have bequeathed
unto him, as all my Lands and Tenements, I lastly bequeath them unto
my nephew William Trigg and his heirs for ever, upon his seeing that
my body is decently laid up there as aforesaid.
_Item_. I give and bequeath unto my nephew William Trigg, the sum of
_Five Pounds_, at the age of Thirty years; to his sister Sarah the
sum of _Twenty Pounds_; to his sister Rose the sum of _Twenty
Pounds_; and lastly to his sister Ann the sum of _Twenty Pounds_; all
at the age of Thirty Years: to John Spencer, of London, Butcher, the
sum of _One Guinea_; and to Solomon Spencer, of Stevenage, the sum of
_One Guinea_, Three Years next after my decease; to my cousin Henry
Kimpton, _One Guinea_, One Year next after my decease, and another
_Guinea_ Two Years after my decease; to William Waby, _Five
Shillings_; and to Joseph Priest, _Two Shillings and Sixpence_, Two
Years after my decease; to my tenant Robert Wright the sum of _Five
Shillings_, Two years next after my decease; and to Ralph Lowd and
John Reeves, _One Shilling_ each, Two Years next after my decease.
_Item_. All the rest of my Goods and Chattels, and personal Estate,
and Ready Money, I do hereby give and devise unto my brother Thomas
Trigg, paying my debts and laying my body where I would have it laid;
whom I likewise make and ordain my full and sole Executor of this my
last Will and Testament, or else to them before mentioned; ratifying
and confirming this and no other to be my last Will and Testament, in
witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this
Twenty-eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord One Thousand
Seven Hundred and Twenty-four
HENRY TRIGG.
Read, signed, sealed, and declared by the said Henry Trigg, the
Testator, to be his last Will and Testament, in the presence of us
who have subscribed our names as witnesses hereto, in the presence of
the said Testator.
JOHN HAWKINS, Sen.
JOHN HAWKINS, Jun.
× The mark of WILLIAM SEXTON.
Proved in the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon, the 15th day of October,
1724, by the Executor Thomas Trigg.
The inn-signs of Stevenage afford some exercise for the contemplative
mind. As the town is approached from London, the sign of “Our Mutual
Friend” appears, nearly opposite a domestic Gothic building of red and
white brick, originally a home for decayed authors, founded by Charles
Dickens and the first Lord Lytton. The decayed authors did not take
kindly to the scheme. Perhaps they did not like being patronised by
authors of better fortunes than their own. The institution was a
failure, and the building is now put to other uses. No doubt the sign of
“Our Mutual Friend” derives from those times when Dickens and Lytton
foregathered here and at Knebworth. At quite the other end of the town
appears the obviously new sign of the “Lord Kitchener,” almost opposite
that of another military hero, the “Marquis of Granby.”
Passing through the little old-world village of Graveley, succeeded by
the beautifully graded rise and fall of Lannock Hill, we come into the
town of Baldock, with its great church prominent in front, and its empty
streets running in puzzling directions. It was at Baldock that Charles
the First, being conducted as a prisoner to London, was offered wine in
one of the sacramental vessels by the vicar, Josias Byrd, and it was on
the road outside the town, near where the old turnpike gate stood, that
the Newcastle wagon, on its way to London, was plundered of £500 in coin
by three mounted highwaymen, on a February morning in 1737.
Our old friend Mr. Samuel Pepys, journeying on August 6th, 1661, from
Brampton, came into Baldock, and stayed the night, at some inn not
specified. He says, “Took horse for London, and with much ado got to
Baldwick. There lay, and had a good supper by myself. The landlady
being a pretty woman, but I durst not take notice of her, her husband
being there.”
Always some spoil-sport in the way!
Baldock, from its stunted extinguisher spire to its fine old brick houses
and nodding plaster cottages, is characteristically Hertfordshire. Among
other things of general interest, it has a row of almshouses, duly
inscribed:—
“Theis Almes Howses are
the gieft of Mr. John Wynne
cittezen of London, Latelye
Deceased, who hath left a
Yeareley stipend to everey
poore of either howses to
the Worldes End. September
Anno Domini 1621.”
The worthy citizen reckoned without the Charity Commissioners, who may
confidently be expected to propound a “scheme” some day long anterior to
the final crash, by which his wishes will be entirely disregarded.
Away to the left of Baldock will be noticed a new town, and the factory
chimneys of it. This is Letchworth, the “Garden City,” developed out of
Letchworth, the little village of old. This “First Garden City,” founded
in 1902, on a nominal capital of £300,000 actual £125,000, by the Garden
City Association, itself founded in June, 1899, with a capital of about
thirty shillings, represents a passionate quest of the ideal life on a 5
per cent. basis of profit. The problem of how to create an earthly
paradise (plus industrial factories) was here to be tackled. The
beginnings of such things are always the most charming; and Letchworth
began ideally. But the factories and the five per cent. always have a
way of overcoming ideals; and we shall see.
[Picture: At the 39th mile]
The stone outside Baldock, marking the thirty-ninth mile is milestone and
upping-block as well.
Midway between Baldock and Biggleswade, at Topler’s Hill, the
Bedfordshire border is crossed. We may perhaps be excused if we pass
Topler’s Hill unwittingly, for the rises called “hills” on the Great
North Road would generally pass unnoticed elsewhere. Biggleswade town
and neighbourhood are interested wholly in cabbages and potatoes and
other highly necessary, but essentially unromantic, vegetables. The
surrounding country is in spring and summer one vast market-garden; at
other times it is generally a lake of equal vastness, for the Ivel and
the Ouse, that run so sluggishly through the flat lands, arise then in
their might and submerge fields and roads for miles around.
As for Biggleswade itself, it is a town with an extraordinarily broad and
empty market-place, a church with a spire of the Hertfordshire type, and
two old coaching inns—the “White Swan” and the “Crown”—facing one another
in an aggressive rivalry at a narrow outlet of the market-place. The
“White Swan” was the inn at which the up “Regent” coach dined. It was
kept at that time by a man named Crouch, “that long, sour old beggar,” in
the words of Tom Hennesy. Here “the process of dining on a really cold
day in winter,” to quote Colonel Birch Reynardson, “was carried on under
no small amount of difficulty. Your hands were frozen, your feet were
frozen, your very mouth felt frozen, and in fact you felt frozen all
over. Sometimes, with all this cold, you were also wet through, your hat
wet through, your coat wet through, the large wrapper that was meant to
keep your neck warm and dry wet through, and, in fact, you were wet
through yourself to your very bones. Only twenty minutes were allowed
for dinner; and by the time you had got your hands warm enough to be able
to untie your neck wrapper, and had got out of your great-coat, which,
being wet, clung tenaciously to you, the time for feeding was half gone.
By the time you had got one quarter of what you could have consumed, had
your mouth been in eating trim and your hands warm enough to handle your
knife and fork, the coachman would put his head in, and say: “Now,
gentlemen, if you please; the coach is ready.” After this summons,
having struggled into your wet greatcoat, bound your miserable wet
wrapper round your miserable cold throat, having paid your two and
sixpence for the dinner that you had the will, but not the time, to eat,
with sixpence for the waiter, you wished the worthy Mr. Crouch good day,
grudged him the half-crown he had pocketed for having dined so miserably,
and again mounted your seat, to be rained and snowed upon, and almost
frozen to death before you reached London.”
[Picture: Biggleswade]
Leaving Biggleswade, the Ivel is crossed and Tingey’s Corner passed.
Tingey’s Corner marks the junction of the old alternative route from
Welwyn, by Hitchin to Lower Codicote, the route adopted by
record-breaking cyclists. The hamlets of Lower Codicote and Beeston
Green open up a view of Sandy, away to the right, with its range of
yellow sand-hills running for some three miles parallel with the road,
and seeming the more impressive by reason of the dead level on which they
look. The canal-like, bare banks of the Ivel are passed again at
Girtford, and the roadside cottages of Tempsford reached; the village and
church lying off to the left, where the Ouse and the Ivel come to their
sluggish confluence, and form a waterway which once afforded marauding
Danes an excellent route from the coast up to Bedford. Even now the
remains of a fortification they constructed to command this strategic
point are visible, and bear the name of the “Dannicke”; that is to say,
the “Danes’ work,” or perhaps the “Danes’ wick,” “wick” meaning
“village.”
An infinitely later work—Tempsford turnpike-gate, to wit—has disappeared
a great deal more effectively than those ancient entrenchments, and the
way is clear and flat, not to say featureless, over the Ouse, past the
outlying houses of Wyboston, and so into Little End, the most southerly
limit of Eaton Socon.
XVIII
PAST Tempsford some of the coaches, notably the Stamford “Regent,” turned
off into the loop road by St. Neots and Huntingdon. In the winter time,
or when the spring rains were falling, they did this at some risk, for
the low-lying land by the river Ouse was often awash. Two old ladies
were on one occasion given a terrible fright, the road being deeply
flooded and the water coming into the coach, so that they had to stand on
the seats. They quite thought they were going to be drowned, and perhaps
they would have been had the “Regent” been driven by one unused to the
road. Had the coachman driven into a ditch—as he might easily have done
with the floods covering all the landmarks—it would have been “all up”
with the “insides” for certain and perhaps for the “outsides” as well.
The most prudent coachmen in winter time kept to the main road, which
lies somewhat higher, and passed through Eaton Socon. Once—to judge by
its name—a place of importance, this is now only a long village of one
straggling street. At some undetermined period the head of a “soke,” or
separate legal jurisdiction, all memories of the dignity implied are
gone, save only the empty title, which Dickens makes fun of by calling
the village in _Nicholas Nickleby_ “Eton Slocomb.” The “White Horse,” a
picturesque roadside inn, may be looked upon with interest by those keen
on identifying Dickens landmarks. In later days it became a favourite
resort of the North Road Cycling Club, and witnessed the beginning and
ending of many a road race in the “eighties” and early “nineties,” when
such things were.
The story of the London to York cycling record is fitly to be told in
this page. It is not so long a tale as that of the famous one from
London to Brighton and back, but it stands for greater efforts and for a
vast amount of pluck and endurance. There have been those
unsportsmanlike souls who, not finding sport an end in itself, have
questioned the use of record making and breaking. But it has had its
use, and even from this point of view has amply justified itself, for the
continually increasing speed required out of cycles for these purposes
has led to the perfecting of them within what is, after all, a
comparatively short time; so that the sporting clubman has, after all,
while strictly occupied within the range of his own ambitions,
contributed to the general good by bringing about the manufacture of a
vehicle which, used by many hundreds of thousands of people who never
raced in their lives, and are probably incapable of a speed of more than
twelve miles an hour, has brought the roads and lanes of the country
within the knowledge of many to whom rural life was something new and
strange.
The first recorded cycle ride to York in which speed was an object was
that of C. Wheaton, September 1872. That pioneer took two days to
perform the journey, making Stamford, a distance of eighty-nine miles,
the end of his first day’s adventure, in 15½ hours, and on the second day
reaching York in a further 26 hours 40 minutes: total, 42 hours 10
minutes. This, with the front-driving low cycle of those days, was an
achievement. Wooden wheels and iron tyres did not conduce to either
speed or ease, and that now historic figure, painfully crawling (as we
should now think his progress) to York is heroic.
Perhaps this tale of hardship was calculated to deter others from trying
their mettle, but at any rate it was not until July 9, 1874, that two
others, Ian Keith-Falconer and J. H. Stanley Thorpe, followed, and they
failed in the effort. After another two years had almost passed, on June
5, 1876, Thorpe made another attempt. Leaving Highgate Archway at 11.10
P.M., he arrived the next day at York at 9.40 P.M. = 22 hours 30 minutes;
chiefly, of course, by favour of that then “improved” form of bicycle,
the tall “ordinary.”
Thirteen years passed before this record was lowered, and the one that
replaced it was not a remarkable performance, considering the further
great improvements in cycles. This ride, in the summer of 1889,
performed on a solid-tyred “safety,” took 21 hours 10 minutes, and was
beaten in the same year by six minutes by H. R. Pope, riding a tricycle;
himself displaced, shortly after, by F. T. Bidlake, also mounted on a
tricycle, who did the 197 miles in 18 hours 28 minutes.
In 1890, and for several years following, records came and went with
increasing rapidity. In 1890 J. M. James put the safety record at 16
hours 52 minutes, and T. A. Edge soon followed, reducing it to 14 hours
33 minutes, James regaining the record again in 1891 by a bare thirteen
minutes. In the following year, S. F. Edge, on a front-driving safety,
made a splendid record of 12 hours 49 minutes, but had the mortification
to see it beaten the next day, June 27, by F. W. Shorland, in 39 minutes
less. In this year there were several rival tricycle records: that of W.
J. A. Butterfield, of 18 hours 9 minutes being lowered by F. T. Bidlake
by nearly three hours, and beaten again, on September 29, Bidlake’s
figures on this occasion being 13 hours 19 minutes. On the same day M.
A. Holbein and F. W. Shorland rode to York on a tandem tricycle in
exactly the same time.
C. C. Fontaine went for the safety record on August 29, 1894, when he put
the figures down to 11 hours 51 minutes. Fontaine lowered his own record
in the following year, on October 18, by 21 minutes 45 seconds, and this
was disposed of by George Hunt on May 7, 1896, when he got well within
the eleven hours, at 10 hours 48 minutes.
This was lowered by F. R. Goodwin on July 19, 1899, his time being 10
hours 16 minutes; the speed on this occasion averaging rather over
nineteen miles an hour. Even this could not have been accomplished
without the aid of the most perfect motor pace-making arrangements.
Goodwin smashed all these previous records on his way to establish the
London to Edinburgh record of 25 hours 26 minutes, in which the average
was somewhat higher; nearly twenty miles an hour.
The next, and latest, safety cycle record to York was made, unpaced, in
1900; when H. Green performed the journey in 10 hours 19 minutes.
The tandem safety London to York records should be mentioned. The first
two were set up on July 24, 1895, and October 2, 1896, respectively: by
G. P. Mills and T. A. Edge; and T. Hobson and H. E. Wilson, the times
being 12 hours 33 minutes, and 11 hours 35 minutes.
These were followed by:—
Hrs. Mins.
1901. A. H. and P. S. Murray (unpaced) 10 59
1905. R. L. I. Knipe and S. Irving 10 52
(unpaced)
1907. F. H. Wingrave and R. A. Wingrave 9 30
(unpaced)
The London to Edinburgh records are:
SAFETY BICYCLE.
Hrs. Mins.
1889. F. W. Shorland 44 49
1891. P. A. Ransom 43 25
1892. R. H. Carlisle 32 55
1894. G. P. Mills 29 28
,, C. C. Fontaine 28 27
1895. W. J. Neason 27 38
1897. J. Hunt 26 47
1899. F. R. Goodwin (motor-paced) 25 26
1903. F. Wright (unpaced) 31 48
1904. E. H. Grimsdell 28 3
,, G. A. Olley 27 10
1905. E. H. Grimsdell 26 10
,, R. Shirley 23 43
A tricycle record, unpaced, made by F. W. Wesley in 1905, at 32 hours 42
minutes yet stands.
Tandem safety records:—
Hrs. Mins.
1894. E. Oxborrow and H. Sansom 27 33
1905. E. Bright and P. H. Miles (unpaced) 27 54
XIX
EATON Socon, its long straggling street and beautiful church-tower, left
behind, the road descends to the “river Kym,” as the guidebooks call the
tiny stream which, bordered by marshes, crosses under the road at a point
known as Cross Hall. The “river Kym” certainly is, or was, important
enough to confer its name upon the neighbouring townlet of Kimbolton, but
the country folk now only know it as Weston Brook. The descent to it has
of late years acquired the name of “Chicken Hill,” given by the North
Roaders, racing cyclists, who must often have run over the fowls kept by
the people of a cottage at the bottom. This is succeeded by Diddington
Bridge, a picturesque, white-painted timber structure spanning the little
Diddington Brook, which has eaten its way deeply into the earth, and is
romant
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