It is curious to note the learned Doctor’s indignation when asked to write an English epitaph for setting up in Westminster Abbey. The great authority on the English language, the compiler of that monumental dictionary, exclaimed that he would not desecrate its walls with an inscription in his own tongue. Thus the pedant!
There is one Latin epitaph at Streatham that reads curiously. It is on a tablet by Richard Westmacott to Frederick Howard, who in pugna Waterlooensi occiso. The battle of Waterloo looks strange in that garb.
But Latin is frequent here, and free. The tablets that jostle one another down the aisles are abounding in that tongue, and the little brass to an ecclesiastic, nailed upon the woodwork toward the west end of the north aisle, is not free from it. So the shade of the Doctor, if ever it revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quantity, although it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.
XI
Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in 1792, says that “Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres, surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in circumference.” Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions built in the seventeenth century, of a debased classic type.
GIBBETS BY THE WAY
Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston’s time, and indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad. Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his “Britannia” of 1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later editor, who issued an “Ogilby Improv’d” in 1731, they still decorated the wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.
At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where the extra large and permanent gallows stood, like a football goal, at what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later years been persuaded to play.
Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall, the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon, resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. “T 180,” as he was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898, and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul’s Cathedral by the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised commercial circles.