London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

by Arthur Warren

And so it was natural enough that he should have built a summer home on the mainland, Aldworth, where there was no summer resort and no plague of the curious. His friend, James Knowles, of the Nineteenth Century, designed the house, and there Tennyson passed many happy summers and autumns. And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of 1892, he died. Whether he loved Farringford more, or Aldworth more, I do not know. But probably he was as much attached to one as to the other, for each had its special associations.

The Tennysonian cloak, the Tennysonian hat, the rolling collar, and the touzled beard and hair were not unique. There lived at one time in Freshwater a brother of the poet. He resembled the poet and dressed like him. At the same time there was another resident of the place who not only resembled Lord Tennyson but "got himself up" in close imitation of his dress and manner. He was a warm admirer of Tennyson, and was immensely flattered to be mistaken for him by strangers. Small boys of the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny tips from this adoring person by pretending to mistake him for their celebrated townsman. On the whole it was rather a good thing to have three figures in the place, any one of which might be looked upon or followed by the summer visitor as the famous poet. It might be puzzling if the stranger met two or three Tennysons in a mile, but two of them could easily divert attention from the third, who was skilled in avoiding strangers.

There was an aged man who had been a gardener at Farringford and was living on a little pension from that quarter. One morning he heard that the Poet Laureate had died. Meeting Father Peter in the road he expressed his grief that "his pore ludship have passed away." Then, with much concern for the succession, he asked:

"D'ye think likely Mr. Hallam will follow his father's business?"

Father Peter thought it quite unlikely.

"Ah," said the pensioner, much relieved. "I think nowt on 't, nowt!"

I have seen Farringford described as "a beautifully wooded gentleman's park." It must, at least, be acknowledged that if the gentleman were not beautifully wooded, he lived there, and that he lived a beautiful and serene life, a noble life, adding greatly to the fame of England, and no less to the human lot. Forty of his eighty-three years were Farringford years. Never was poet more happily placed than in this earthly paradise. Every circumstance of loyalty and love, of understanding and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aldworth. And never had genius a more devoted aid than Tennyson had in his son Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson, shield and buckler to his father and to his gentle mother, the dear lady who seemed like a spirit held on earth only by the devotion of husband and son. A family life richer and more tender one does not know among all the lives that one has seen, or ever heard of. To write more about it now would be impious.

Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in Westminster Abbey, on an October day in 1892, a committee of his neighbours in Freshwater was formed for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the rural region where half his life had been passed. The memorial was meant to be a local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a monument, tablet, or window, in the village church. But a more fitting idea was adopted.

There stood on the summit of the High Down, "Tennyson's Down" as it is more generally known, a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber surmounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long ago, fire had blazed when alarms were signalled from hill to hill along the coast. This beacon had been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of ships passing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by the Needles. Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the edge of a long white cliff, it was easily seen by navigators bound inward or outward. For forty years Tennyson had made it a point of call in his almost daily walks. The committee believed that in the place of the old wooden structure a granite shaft could be erected, serving at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to seamen.