XXVII
Grantham, one hundred and ten and a quarter miles from London by road, and five miles less by rail, is three miles and a half distant from Great Ponton. Entered down the very long and steep descent of Spitalgate Hill, the utterly modernised character of the town becomes at once apparent, and all pleasurable anticipations based upon memories of the lettered ease of Stamford are instantly dispelled. The expectant traveller comes to Grantham hopeful of a fine old town with streets and buildings befitting its historic dignity; but these hopes are soon dispelled by grimy engine-shops and roads gritty with coal-dust, giving earnest of an aggressive modernity fully unfolded when the level is reached and the town entered at Spitalgate and St. Peter’s Hill. Grantham is a red-brick town, and modern red brick at that. A cruelly vulgar Town Hall, all variegated brick, iron crestings, and general spikiness, fondly believed to be “Italian,” testifies at once to the expansive prosperity of Grantham and to its artlessness. This monument of Grantham’s pride faces the grass-plots that border the broad thoroughfare of St. Peter’s Hill (which is flat, and not a hill at all) where stand bronze statues of Sir Isaac Newton, Grantham’s great man, and of a certain Frederick James Tollemache, M.P. for Grantham, who departed this life in 1888, after having probably achieved some kind of local celebrity which, whatever it may have been, has not sent the faintest echo to the outer world. It is an odd effigy, representing the departed legislator in an Inverness cloak, and holding in his right hand a something which looks curiously like a billiard-cue, but is probably intended for some kind of official wand. The untutored might be excused for thinking this a monument to a champion billiard-player.
Great are the Tollemaches in Lincolnshire, great territorially, that is to say; for the Earls of Dysart, at the head of the family, own many manors and broad acres; from Witham and Buckminster, away along the road to Foston and Long Bennington, and so to where the Shire Dyke divides the counties of Lincolnshire and Nottingham, on the marches of the Duke of Newcastle’s estates.
To an Earl of Dysart, Grantham owes the ugly polished granite obelisk in the market-place, with a lying inscription which purports to mark the spot where the ancient Eleanor Cross formerly stood, before it was utterly demolished by Puritan fanatics in 1645. That spot was really on St. Peter’s Hill, at quite the other end of the town!
Grantham owes its name to the river on which it stands, now the Witham, but once called the Granta, and its ancient prosperity to its position on the road to the North. To this circumstance is due also its long reputation as a town of many and excellent inns, from those early times when the Church was the earliest inn-keeper, to those others when the coaches were at their best and “entertainment for man and beast” a merely secular business. The “Angel” and the “George” at Grantham have a long history. The “Angel” still survives as a mediæval building, and, like the equally famous “George” at Glastonbury, contrives to please alike the antiquary and the guest whose desire for modern creature comforts takes no account of Gothic architecture. Anciently a wayside house of the Knights Templar, the existing building belongs to the mid-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On either side of its great archway now appear the carved stone heads of Edward the Third and the heroic Queen Philippa, and at the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a supporting corbel to the beautiful oriel window above, is an angel, supporting a shield of arms; not the old sign, indeed, but an architectural adornment merely. This, and all the numerous “Angels” and the several “Salutations” on the road, derived from the religious picture-sign of the Annunciation, of which the saluting angel in the “Hail Mary” group in course of time alone remained.
Before coaches or carriages were, kings and courtiers on their way north or south made the “Angel” their headquarters, coming to it, of necessity, on horseback. Thus, John held his Court here in the February of 1213, in the building which preceded even this old one, and Richard the Third signed Buckingham’s death-warrant in 1483 in the great room, now divided into three, and that once extended the whole length of the frontage on the first floor. Perhaps it was in the bay of this oriel window that he “off’d with his head!” in the familiar phrase mouthed by many generations of gory tragedians and aspiring amateurs; and exclaiming “So much for Buckingham!” turned on his heel, in the attitude of triumphant villainy we know so well. But, unhappily for the truth of this and similar striking situations, it is to be feared that Richard, unappreciative of the situation—the “situation,” that is to say, in the theatrical sense—signed the warrant in a businesslike way, and neither mouthed nor struck attitudes. He left that scene to be exploited by Shakespeare or Colley Cibber as authors, and by Charles Kean and many another as actors. Between them, they could have shown him how to play the part.
But let us to less dramatic—and safer—times. The “Angel” divided the honours in coaching days with the “George,” a house with a history as long, but not so distinguished, as this old haunt of bloody minded monarchs. The old “George,” burnt down in 1780, was an equally beautiful house, and was rebuilt in the prevailing Georgian taste—or want of taste—that raised so many comfortable but ugly inns toward the close of the eighteenth century. “One of the best inns in England,” says Dickens, in describing the journey from London to Yorkshire in Nicholas Nickleby, and there is not wanting other testimony to its old-time excellence.
“At the sign of the ‘George’ you had a cleaner cloth, brighter plate, higher polished glass, and a brisker fire, with more prompt attention and civility than at most other places,” says one who had occasion to know; and so the local proverb, current among towns and villages adjacent to Grantham, “Grantham gruel; nine grots and a gallon of water,” was evidently no reflection upon the quality of this inn. The “George” was busy with the coaches, early and late. First to arrive was the Edinburgh mail, at twenty-three minutes past seven in the morning. Three lengthened blasts of the horn announced its arrival, and out stepped night-capped passengers, half asleep and surly, but fresh water and good spirits dispelled the gloomy faces, and down went, for the allotted period of forty minutes, hot rolls, boiled eggs, and best Bohea; good fare after weary wayfaring, and calculated to make the surliest good-tempered.
Francis, Lord Jeffrey, writing from his hotel (doubtless the “George”) at Grantham, when journeying to London in January 1831, is not so enthusiastic on old-time travel as he might have been, considering the high character of Grantham’s inns. “Here we are,” says he, “on our way to you; toiling up through snow and darkness, with this shattered carcase and this reluctant and half-desponding spirit. You know how I hate early rising; and here have I been for three days, up two hours before the sun, and, blinking by a dull taper, haggling at my inflamed beard before a little pimping inn looking-glass, and abstaining from suicide only from a deep sense of religion and love to my country. To-night it snows and blows, and there is good hope of our being blocked up at Wytham Corner or Alconbury Hill, or some of these lonely retreats, for a week or so, or fairly stuck in the drift and obliged to wade our way to some such hovel as received poor Lear and his fool in some such season. Oh, dear, dear! But in the meantime we are sipping weak black tea by the side of a tolerable fire, and are in hopes of reaching the liberties of Westminster before dark on Wednesday.” He was writing on Monday evening!
At any rate such as he could afford to take his ease and partake of the best. Those who needed pity were the poor folk who had just enough for the journey, and could not afford to stay at expensive inns, waiting until better weather came. But, however much we may read in novels of the charm of winter travelling in the old coaching days, if we turn to contemporary accounts, by the travellers themselves, we shall always find that even those who could afford the best did not like it.
Henry St. George Tucker, afterwards Chairman of the East India Company, travelled from Edinburgh to London in 1816, in the depth of winter. He wrote:—
“Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we had a violent storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was more severe than I had felt it before. The coach was not wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was obliged to keep my window open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the produce of whisky, rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I should have been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings. To aggravate the evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with. We picked up sundry vagabonds on the road, but there was only one, between Edinburgh and York, who bore the ‘slightest appearance of being a gentleman.’” He, however, we learn was “effeminate and affected.”
In Mozley’s Reminiscences we find a horrid story of the endurance practised by a woman travelling by coach from Edinburgh to London. “I once travelled,” he says, “to London vis-à-vis with a thin, pale, elderly woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or even moved to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and shoulders. I spoke to the guard about her. He said she had come from Edinburgh and had not moved since changing coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared that if she once got down she would not he able to get up again. She had taken no food of any kind.”
There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is lost. Who was she who endured so much? Had she come to London to purchase with her few savings the discharge of an only son who had enlisted in the army? Had she made this awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to death or transportation? Surely some such story was hers, but we can never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its endurance, haunts the memory and the baffled curiosity like an enigma.
Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its inns. This is not the confession of a bon vivant, suspicious though it sounds, but is just another way of stating the baldness of Grantham’s street. One of these few things is the tall steeple of the parish church, which has a fame rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away. Journeying by road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham itself remains undisclosed. If this were a proper place for it much might be said of the church and spire of St. Wulfran’s: how the tower rises to a height of one hundred and forty feet, and the slim crocketed spire to one hundred and forty feet more; being sixth in point of measurement among the famed spires of England. Salisbury is first, with its four hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael’s, Coventry, three hundred feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two feet. But generalities must serve our turn here. If the spire is only sixth in point of measurement it is first in date, being earlier than Salisbury’s. Sir Gilbert Scott held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but Scott’s reputation in matters of taste had slight foundations, and, beautiful though Grantham’s spire is, there are others excelling it. The majesty of Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so apparently frail a fashion.
We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is connected with them, the town being annually edified by the so-called “Drunken Sermon” preached at it in the terms of a bequest left in the form of an annual rent-charge of forty shillings on the “Angel” by one Michael Solomon.
But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are more notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known variously as the “Beehive” or the “Living Sign.” Immediately in front of the house is a small tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling attention to the fact in the lines:
“Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
‘GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,
A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.’”
It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to “explore” an inhabited beehive is an unfortunate choice of a word.
There is (unless it has lately been abolished) another curiosity at Grantham. It is a custom. When the time-expired Mayor vacates his office, what has aptly been called a “striking” ceremony takes place. His robe is stripped off, his chain is removed from his shoulders, and with a small wooden hammer the Town Clerk takes the ex-Chief Magistrate on the head to typify the end of his authority. There is only one possible method more derogatory than this humiliating treatment, but it need not be specified.