Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

In 1832 he exhibited ‘Sir Richard Steele’s Cottage, Hampstead,’ and the next year finds him lecturing on art in the Assembly Room on Holly Bush Hill. The date of his last lecture before the Literary and Scientific Institution was July 26, 1836. I was told a little story of Constable, recounted by his son to an old gentleman who resided at Hampstead, which exhibits the painstaking genius of the painter. As a boy, he said, he used to sleep in his father’s studio, and one of his earliest recollections was that of being startled by seeing his father enter the room in the middle of the night, very lightly clad, with a candle in one hand and a brush in the other, for the purpose of adding a suddenly conceived idea or additional touch to a picture, before the suggestion should have faded away. After the death of his wife, Constable retained his Hampstead house as an occasional residence. He died in London in 1837, and rejoined his beloved and two of their little ones in the churchyard at Hampstead.

In the magnificent summer of 1834 the brothers Chalons, as full of charm, brightness and fancy as their pictures, spent six delightful weeks at Hampstead, giving Constable an opportunity he never lost of pointing out his pet views and all the loveliest trees and best bits of his ‘Sweet Hampstead.’

I remember Mr. and Mrs. Valentine Bartholomew, who knew them well, telling me the following story of the pleasant brothers: how a very large, straggling old vine which covered the back of their house, and that of a titled neighbour in a quiet street off a then fashionable square, suddenly appeared en papilotte, to the astonishment of the next-door household, whose share of the vine had never developed a single blossom. A few days later a ladder was laid against the wall, and one or other of the brothers ascended it, and appeared deeply interested in examining the vintage, which, looking at the number of paper bags covering the vine, appeared to be quite wonderful. The artists’ old French manservant and the housekeeper next door were on very friendly terms, and she had essayed all her arts to discover the mystery of the one-sided behaviour of the vine; but the secret of its productiveness was his master’s, and Le Brun was impenetrable. At last—for there had been other innocent delusions and merry conceits on the part of the light-hearted brothers—this daughter of Eve fell upon the plan of pretending distress at the fruiterer’s failing to send grapes in time for dessert, conscious that, if there was any reality in appearances, this feint would discover it, and was more than ever confounded when the old Frenchman made his appearance no great while after, with messieurs his masters’ compliments, and a basket of delicious grapes—‘their own fruit.’

Doubtless there have been other residents in Well Walk of ‘mark and likelihood,’ but I am ignorant of them. The most important houses in it in my time were the Pump-House School, the Long Room, and its close neighbour, the gloomy-looking Bergh, then the officers’ quarters of the militia barracks close by. This, I am told, is now a private residence, with handsome grounds and garden, concealed by high walls. The Wells died out slowly, for outsiders still retained their faith in the potency of the waters.

When Dr. Hughson in 1809 published his ‘History of London and its Neighbourhood,’ he states that Hampstead then ranked high for the number and variety of its medicinal waters; that beside the old spa of chalybeate quality, there were two other kinds of mineral water. One of them, a saline spring, was discovered by Mr. John Bliss, an eminent surgeon of Hampstead, 1802. The other owed its disclosure to Dr. Goodwin, another local practitioner; so that it would appear that, though no longer a place of amusement, the Wells continued to be resorted to by invalids.

In my own time it was quite common for working men from Camden and Kentish Towns, and even places much farther off, to make a Sunday morning’s pilgrimage to Hampstead to drink the water, and carry home bottles of it as a specific for hepatic complaints, and as a tonic and eye-water.

We know from modern analysis that only one of the springs contained sufficient iron to be of any medical use, but, on the other hand, we have the practical testimony of Dr. Gibbons, and of the royal physician, Dr. Arbuthnot, to their curative qualities. May not modern building and drainage have interfered with the sources of the springs and deteriorated them?

There has always been an uncertainty in modern times as to the origin of the chapel in Well Walk. Hampstead’s own historian, Park, appears to have had no better foundation for his short notice of it (p. 236, 1818 edition) than surmise and tradition; but there are cases in which Tradition may be trusted as the handmaid of Truth, and this is certainly one of them.

The chapel appears to have served a very useful purpose for more than a hundred years, ninety-three of them as a chapel of ease to the parish church, St. John’s Chapel, on Downshire Hill, not having been built till 1818. For many years after I knew Hampstead these three continued to be the only places of worship connected with the Establishment; now I understand there are, within the fourteen ecclesiastical districts into which the parish is divided, as many churches, besides a number of other places of worship.