Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

Next to the Ferns was the so-called Manor House, the residence for some years of the head of the well-known publishing firm of Longman and Co.[104] A few yards further, the road dipped down into a green hollow, with meeting elm-boughs overhead, and there was a seat pleasantly placed for the comfort and rest of wayfarers. Beside it a gate and footpath led aslant over two grass fields hemmed round by hedgerows and trees, the second of them having two very aged oak-trees in it; one of them, hollow and gnarled, but still sprouting forth a green head, stood one half within and one half without the gate, which separated the fields directly in the middle of the pathway which led round it. Of these fields we find a pleasant memory in a letter of Miss Meteyard’s, published by Mr. Stephens in his ‘Life of Sir Edwin Landseer,’ whose father, in 1849-50, resided (as his family have since continued to do) at St. John’s Wood. At this period the Howitts were living in the avenue close by, and being well acquainted, William Howitt and the elder Landseer often met in their walks, or would go or return together.

‘One evening in passing along the Finchley Road towards Child’s Hill, Mr. Landseer stayed at a gate of ancient look, and said to his friend, “These two fields were Edwin’s first studios. Many a time have I lifted him over this very stile. I then lived in Foley Street, and nearly all the way between Marylebone and Hampstead was open fields. It was a favourite walk with my boys, and one day when I had accompanied them, Edwin stopped by this stile to admire some sheep and cows which were quietly grazing. At his request I lifted him over, and finding a scrap of paper and a pencil in my pocket, I made him sketch a cow. He was very young indeed then, not more than six or seven years old. After this we came on several occasions, and as he grew older, this was one of his favourite spots for sketching. He would start off alone, or with John or Charles, and remain till I fetched him in the afternoon.... Sometimes he would sketch in one field, sometimes in the other ... but generally in the one beyond the old oak we see there, as it was more pleasant and sunny.”’[105] This was the upper field, nearest West End Lane, which some of my readers will remember. Nor will it lessen their interest in this once pleasant locality, that it was while walking in these fields that William Howitt, whose name is a household word in English family literature, told the story to Miss Meteyard, who was never wearied of expatiating on the woodland beauty of this neighbourhood.

Within her own recollection it was famous for the number and beauty of its oak-trees—‘a region of them,’ she called it—and West End Lane was then a deep-hedged, tree-shaded alley all the way to Fortune Green.

In the May of 1815 (it should be 1816) we find Haydon, the disappointed, sad-lived artist, ‘sauntering,’ as he tells us, ‘to West End Lane, and so to Hampstead, with great delight.’ And no wonder, for besides the spring-dressed beauty of Nature around him, he had for his companion that lover and evangelist of it, Wordsworth, and they were bound for the Vale of Health, and Leigh Hunt’s cottage, where Cumberland joined them, and afterwards walked with Haydon on the Heath. This excerpt from the artist’s diary closes the mouths of the sceptics who doubt that Wordsworth visited the ‘pink of Poets,’ as his critics sarcastically called the author of ‘Rimini,’ in his humble retreat at Hampstead.

Park, to whom I am so much indebted, tells us that the demesne land, occupying from four to five hundred acres of the richest land in the parish, lay scattered along the western side of the hill from Child’s Hill, north, to Belsize, south, and that the name of manor was in his time appropriated to that portion of them situated south of West End Lane. He also says that the old manor-house, which some of the then living inhabitants of Hampstead remembered, was a low, ordinary building in the farmhouse style, but with a very capacious hall.

Vale of Health, Lower Heath, 1840.

The old manor-house had stood on the north side of the lane, in Park’s time the site of a modern house, on what was called the Manor Farm, occupied by General Sir Samuel Bentham, who, ‘tired of war’s alarms,’ had settled down to a peaceful life in a lovely neighbourhood, and took pleasure in pointing out to his visitors an old pollard oak in his grounds, which he believed was the identical oak which had given its name to the manor-farm—Hall Oak Farm. This name, Park tells us, was cut upon a stone built in as the keystone of the arched doorway of a large old barn. ‘The late lessee of the manor-farm (Mr. Thomas Pool) made great alterations in the disposition of the homestall. He pulled down the old house, and built a substantial residence upon the spot. At this house the manor courts were held till Pool removed to a smaller house on the other side of the road, and the courts were removed with him.’

But the house built on the site of the old manor-house, known in Park’s time as Hall Oak Farm, has now—1899—the name of Manor Lodge. ‘The title of Manor House was in 1813 appropriated to the adjoining house, then the residence of Thomas Norton Longman, Esq.,[106] which was without doubt a part of the original homestead, and in which the manor courts have occasionally been kept.’[107]

But in spite of the respectability of its antiquity and inhabitants, West End was not without its drawbacks. The Cock and Hoop upon the edge of the green (it is there still, 1896) was by no means an overnice hostel in the matter of customers. It lay on the road to Finchley Common, and ‘first come, first served,’ liberally read, seems to have been the motto of successive landlords. It had the reputation of being a rendezvous of highwaymen and robbers. An annual fair, which had grown up no one knew how, having no legal sanction by charter or otherwise, must also have been, from the number of tramps and roughs, and other disreputable and dangerous characters it brought together, a real grievance to the respectable inhabitants. Ostensibly it was an innocent fair enough, dealing chiefly in toys and gingerbread, with the usual accompaniment of travelling shows and theatres, attractions which brought together a concourse of people, and as naturally a number of thieves and pickpockets. Yet, being regarded as a pleasure fair, and taking place in mid-summer, it appears to have been frequented during daylight by respectable persons, and when evening came by decent tradespeople, and others of a class who have made great progress in social refinement since then. A newspaper cutting subsequent to July 28, 1819, informs us, under the head of Bow Street, that in consequence of the outrageous and daring scenes of disorder, robberies, wounding and ill-treating of a number of persons at the West End Fair near Hampstead on Monday evening, and during the night, an additional number of constables from this office, as well as officers from Hatton Garden, and a number of the inhabitants of Hampstead as special constables, attended the fair on Tuesday, to detect and apprehend the various gangs who attacked defenceless individuals, if possible more brutally than on Monday night. They pushed the people down, and not only robbed them of their watches and money, but actually tore off and possessed themselves of their clothes. One woman had her earrings torn from her ears. A number of desperate characters were taken up on this occasion, several of whom were committed, and others summarily dealt with as rogues and vagabonds. Long years after this date (for West End Fair was not suppressed), attendance at it appears to have been ‘a desperate pleasure.’ Apart from the perils of the fair itself, as soon as night fell the lanes and footpaths about Hampstead—the Kilburn meadows, the hedgerows in Pancras Vale, even the highways themselves—were infested with footpads and robbers, so that in the memory of an eye-witness living in 1849 it was customary for the decent part of the company to wait till the drummer went round the fair to recall the soldiers present to their quarters, and then to fall in with them for safety’s sake, and thus escorted march back to town.