ARCH CARRYING THE ROAD, PARK PLACE.
REMENHAM CHURCH.
Henley is, of course, famed, above all else, for its Regatta, established as an annual event since 1839, following upon an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race here in 1837. It is now pre-eminently the function of the river season, whether we consider it from the point of view of sport or fashion. Here every June the best oarsmanship in the world is displayed over this course of one-and-a-quarter miles: indisputably the best for anything up to that distance, for the regatta is now attended by the best oarsmen of the New World as well as of the Old. The regatta is, from a social and hospitable point of view, very much what the Derby is among horseraces; and the house-boat parties and riverside house-parties for the Henley Week dispense much hospitality and champagne. There is yet another side to the regatta: it is, almost equally with Ascot and Goodwood, recognised as an opportunity for the display of fine dresses. The Oxfordshire bank is at such times the most exclusive, and to the Berkshire shores are principally relegated the pushing, struggling crowds of humbler sportsmen and sightseers. But here, where every point is legally open to all, except where private lawns reach down to the river, the real exclusiveness of Goodwood or Ascot is, of course, impossible. Henley town is at such times anything but exclusive, and is thronged to excess. In these later times of motor-cars it is also apt to be a great deal more dusty than ever it used to be. To see Henley in Regatta Week, and again Henley in any other week, affords an astonishing contrast; for at all other times it is, as a town, among the dullest of the dull, and its broad High Street a synonym for emptiness.
I do not propose in this place to enlarge further upon Henley, but to mention Henley at all and not its famous old coaching-inn by the bridge, the Red Lion, has never yet been done; and shall I be the first to make the omission? No! It is a famous old inn, and of enormous size. Every one knows it as the hostelry where Shenstone the poet, about 1750, scratched with a diamond upon a window the celebrated stanza about “the warmest welcome at an inn,” but that window-pane has long been lost; and it is really doubtful if the inscription was not rather at another Henley: i.e. Henley-in-Arden. I have fully discussed that question elsewhere,[1] and so will not repeat it in this place.
Mr. Ashby-Sterry is quite right in his description of the Red Lion, standing red-brickily by the bridge:
“’Tis a finely-toned, picturesque, sunshiny place,
Recalling a dozen old stories;
With a rare British, good-natured, ruddy-hued face,