Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

It is worth while leaving the cycle at the inn and to explore the neighbourhood of Cobham village and park. The village church is well known to antiquaries as containing the largest collection of brasses in England. There are no fewer than twenty-four fine examples, principally to members of the ancient and knightly family of the Cobhams, who once were lords of this and many another manor in Kent, and lived at the Cobham Hall which preceded the Elizabethan and Jacobean building now standing, the seat of the Earl of Darnley. The Cobhams have been extinct for centuries, and Lennoxes, Cliftons, and Darnleys have owned the place since, but none of them have left anything like the impress upon it that the old family achieved. Here, in the village, is that now old almshouse, the New College, founded by a Cobham in place of the Old College, the dissolved religious house founded many years before by an ancestor; and there, on the floor of the chancel in the parish church, are their memorials.

Cobham Park is a lovely expanse of lawns and woods and grand avenues, open to the wayfarer freely to come and go. Deer roam about in great herds, and wild life abounds in the tangled glades. The Hall is shown only on Fridays. Tickets are to be purchased at Rochester and Gravesend. To see the Hall and its great collection of pictures is a quite separate undertaking from touring on a cycle, and so we will journey on towards Rochester, regaining the road and making for a landmark known in all this countryside as the “Three Crouches.” When we arrive at the place, we discover it to be an inn called the “Three Crutches,” displaying a shield of arms bearing a chevron between three aces of clubs. The three aces, distinctly resembling crosses, are the so-called “Three Crutches.” Compare with this the name of “Crutched Friars,” who were originally the “crossed friars,” from the cross they wore on their habits; and with that of the “Crouch Oak” at Addlestone in Surrey, an ancient boundary tree standing at the “cross” roads. The motto, Sub umbra alarum Tuarum—“under the shadow of thy wings”—is seen below.

From this point it is chiefly downhill into Strood and Rochester; very steeply downhill at Strood, too. Through its mile-long street and on to Rochester Bridge, the rude ribs of the ancient castle rise boldly up from the other side of the Medway, with the Cathedral beside it, looking quite humble. Very maritime looks Rochester’s High Street, with the great gilded model of a line-of-battle ship, fully rigged and armed, that serves for vane, twirling over its Guildhall. Over all is the bustle, roar, and rattle of the trains, rolling in thunder over the railway bridge that cuts off the view downstream.

HIGH STREET, ROCHESTER.

Rochester, adjoining as it does the busy dockyard town and seaport of Chatham, is not one of the slumberous examples among cathedral cities, for its narrow and, if truth be told, dirty streets are crowded with the waggons and carts going to and from railways and wharves. The “Bull Inn” still remains very much what it was when Jingle recommended it to the Pickwickians.

The “Bull” itself is exactly hit off in Dickens’ description of it, and in the hall the “illustrious larder with glass door, developing cold fowls and noble joints, and tarts wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdraws itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a lattice-wall of pastry,” still develops good things for a later generation. A latter-day stupidity had changed the name to the “Victoria and Bull,” but this has been remedied recently, and it is the “Bull” once more.

Other things noticed by Dickens in Rochester are much the same. He calls the projecting clock of the Corn Exchange the “moon-faced” clock. It still impends over the pavement, and its white dial does indeed suggest the moon. But exquisitely exact is that other description in the “Seven Poor Travellers,” where he speaks of the High Street “oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red building, as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign.” Also, although restorations have since taken place in the darkling cathedral, no description of it, even now, matches that concise and breathless commentary the novelist puts into Jingle’s mouth: "Old Cathedral, too—earthy smell—pilgrims’ feet worn away the old steps—little Saxon doors—Confessionals like money-takers’ boxes at theatres—queer customers, those monks—Popes and Lord Treasurers, and all sorts of old fellows with great red faces and broken noses, turning up every day.”

You enter the Close directly from the High Street, beside or through what all readers of Edwin Drood know as “Jasper’s Gatehouse,” although the real name of it is “Chertsey’s.” The old church of St. Nicholas, patron saint of fishermen and thieves, who (the thieves, not the fishermen) were from that circumstance known as “St Nicholas’ Clerks,” stands side by side with the cathedral, and opposite is the churchyard. It is well known that Dickens’ own wish was to be buried here, but a national desire that he should rest in Westminster Abbey prevailed. This was recalled to the present writer’s recollection by a stranger when recently at Rochester. “He wanted to be buried there,” said the stranger, pointing with his walking-stick. “’Twould have done Rochester a lot of good,” he added regretfully. “You see, he’s wasted where he is; but if he was here, thousands more visitors would come,” and he went away grumbling.