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.
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.
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.