For some time Sir Gilbert Scott, the architect, resided in an adjacent house, afterwards occupied by Mr. Henry Sharpe, after whose name Baines has added the suffix, ‘a good man.’
When I last visited Hampstead, the talented authoress of the ever-popular ‘Schomberg-Cotta Family’ was living in her pleasant home, Combe Edge, Branch Hill, where, in a grove of evergreens, I listened to a blackbird whistling on the third day of the New Year, 1896. Early in this year the kind heart, the active brain, and busy hands of this wholesome writer and benevolent woman ceased their work, to the deep regret of many friends and the great loss of the patients of the North London Hospital for Consumption, to whom she had been a constant visitor and sympathetic friend.
Her friends honoured her memory by endowing an additional bed in the hospital. A tablet, upon which is inscribed, ‘The Elizabeth Rundle Charles Memorial bed,’ was unveiled by the Princess Christian (whose sympathy with all charitable work is well known) on December 18, 1896.
The Frognal of to-day, though a charming neighbourhood, with its air of affluence, ease, and ordered neatness, has lost the more natural charms of fifty years ago. The old mystery of high walls is still with us, but the free wildness of grassy slopes and shady trees, with little neighbourly short-cuts crossing one another, or unpremeditated footpaths meandering about in aimless fashion, though to good purpose, are there no longer. I like not the wide road bisecting it, nor the lofty, many-windowed, scarlet-faced mansions overlooking it. For me they have destroyed too much of the tree-grouped greensward of my early days, and park-like look of the old Frognal precinct, and the pretty, tree-shaded, devious ways that led to unexpected places. I remember wandering by one of these narrow footways with a few trees hanging over one side of it, when suddenly I found myself in front of a dilapidated lodge and other offices appertaining to the sham Tudor mansion known as Frognal Priory.[98] At that time—1869—it was a tottering ruin, supported by beams of timber on one side to make it tenantable; and, as I soon found, giving off, through neglected drainage, mal odours enough to defy all but the curiosity of a press interviewer, or of the London Sunday visitors, whose purses helped to support the ancient, self-constituted custodian.
Half a century earlier this house, with its simulated Elizabethan appearance, must have been a really pictorial object. The irregularly gabled front of ruddy bricks, its oriel and mullioned windows, carved window-frames, quaint waterspouts, and twisted chimneys, even in this stage of ruin and combined with squalor, was eminently picturesque, and, from an artist’s point of view, really effective. On this account, and for the sake of some lovely views to be seen from the upper windows at the back, a few youthful enthusiasts of the profession, devoted to form and colour, would lodge here for days together, despite the unsafe walls, morbific air, and fearful effluvia from the ground-floor premises.
The history of this modern antique house—the building of which many people living at Hampstead in the fifties could remember—is too curious to be left out of our account of Frognal. It was built by one Thompson,[99] better known to his friends as ‘Memory Corner Thompson.’
Originally a public-house broker and salesman, he is said to have gained this distinctive appellation from a marvellous feat of memory—nothing less than stating for a bet the name and occupation of everyone who kept a corner shop in the city of London. But as pawnbrokers, chemists, and publicans generally monopolize these usually Janus-faced houses, the difficulty may have been more apparent than real to one whose business with the latter made him naturally notice the shops emphasized by exemption from his professional occupation. At any rate, he won the bet, and became known by this prefix ever after.
In the course of his business career as auctioneer and broker, he had had many opportunities of collecting ancient furniture and other antiquities, for which he appears to have had a natural taste, and he resolved to build a characteristic mansion to lodge them in. He obtained a lease of twenty years, subject to a fine to the Lord of the Manor, and built this house on the traditionary site of the ancient priory, where Cardinal Wolsey is said to have occasionally lived.
Exceedingly rich and ostentatious, Mr. Thompson took pleasure in turning his house into an exhibition, without the rules and order observed in public ones. Visitors were admitted at all times, and a lady who was in the habit of calling on his wife informed Miss Meteyard that no meal was sacred from intrusion, nor were the feminine members of the family secure even when engaged with their toilets, but were frequently obliged to rush out of the way while a company of strangers inspected their bedrooms.
The hall and largest room in the house were devoted to the exhibition of medieval furniture, real or spurious. The library, a charming little room, looked into the garden and out away over what were then the Finchley meadows; the light from the square mullioned window was softened with painted glass; the shutters and doorways were to appearance carved, and the panelled ceiling handsomely emblazoned with coats-of-arms; the walls were surrounded with antique book-presses, glazed and guarded with brass nettings, and filled with rare and costly volumes beautifully bound. The whole of this display was a deception. Mr. Memory Corner Thompson had no personal interest in the coats-of-arms; the carving was stucco; the volumes, the titles of which must have awakened sharp longings in the breasts of scholarly visitors—if any such did visit the Priory—were mere shades of books, pasteboard integuments of them with nothing real about them but the titles. The building itself was of the same make-believe character both as to material and workmanship. Plaster-of-Paris mouldings had been made to do duty for carved stone wherever this was characteristically required. The divisional walls were of simple lath and plaster, and the exterior ones not much more solid. They lasted, however, the proprietor’s time, who, having no children living, left it, with part of his large fortune, to his niece, who had married the notorious Gregory, the proprietor of that disgraceful publication called the Satirist, and who, it was known, made money by threatening persons of ‘mark and likelihood’ with scandalous libels, unless they would pay smartly to have them suppressed. On one occasion, instead of finding a victim, the miscreant ‘caught a Tartar,’ who prosecuted him, and Gregory was properly sentenced to some months’ imprisonment for his attempted extortion. At this juncture Mr. Thompson died, and on Gregory’s coming out of prison he found himself, through his wife’s fortune, a rich man, and set up a new rôle amongst the many he had attempted, that of gentleman; but as his conception of the part induced much extravagance and dissipation, it was very soon played out, and ended in the loss of all his possessions.[100]