The road, coming to South End, comes really and truly to the end of London and its suburbs, and is at present prettily rural. Only those who know the district well are aware that, a short way off to the right hand, there is a little Erebus at Bell Green, where the gasworks are. If our old vituperative Cobbett were back again, taking his rural rides, I have no doubt he would call the place Hell Green, and he would not be altogether unjustified in doing so. But for my own part, I prefer to dwell rather upon South End, and feel inclined to curse the exploratory activity that led me to discover that awful place at the back of the road; so abject, so unutterably vile.
South End owes much—almost everything, in fact—to the beneficent Ravensbourne, which flows beside the road, and long ago was enlarged into a lake at this point. It is a pretty lake, the prettier because unexpected, and there are those who actually fish in it; not for the lordly salmon, nor even for grayling or dace. No, it is rather the humble “tiddler” who makes sport for the small boy with a twig, a piece of cotton and a pickle-bottle; and I declare that no fisherman in india-rubber waders, up to his thighs in the middle of a stream and at grips with a salmon, experiences a wilder ardour than that of these sportsmen of the neighbouring streets. I feel sorry, however, for the tiddlers, thus slain in their thousands. They do not long survive the water of the pickle-bottle, and presently, giving up the ghost, collapse and develop those extraordinary spikinesses which, I suppose, give them their proper name of “sticklebacks.”
VII
It is a long, long rise from South End to Bromley, which stands among the breezy heights near Keston and Hayes. Half way up it there are still traces of the deep dingle that gave the spot the name “Holloway,” by which it was known to the road-books of the coaching age.
ENTRANCE TO THE WIDOWS’ COLLEGE.
It was an ominous place, suitable for the footpad’s leap in the dark upon the traveller’s back, and those wayfarers who were obliged to pad the hoof alone through Holloway when night was come wished they had eyes in the back of the head, in addition to the usual pair. Near by stood, and still stands, Bromley Hill House, once the seat of Charles Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough. In the dairy at that place one John Clarke, gardener, murdered Elizabeth Mann, a dairy-maid, and over against Holloway there was erected a gallows, and on it John Clarke, brought in a cart from Maidstone gaol, in due time swung.
At the threshold of Bromley stands the College, not an educational establishment, but a superior kind of almshouse, whose purpose is explained by the inscription set up over the doorway:
Deo et Ecclesiæ
This College for Twenty poore
widowes (of orthodox and Loyall
Clergymen) & A Chaplin was
given by Iohn Warner late Ld.
Bishop of Rochester
1666
John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, was a staunch supporter of Church and King, in times when both the Establishment and the Monarchy were in a bad way. Charles the First was not wholly responsible for the troubles and tragedies of his reign. An acrid Puritanism was in the air, and had already manifested itself, very unpleasantly, in his father’s time. It was the inevitable reaction from the Renaissance gaieties under Elizabeth. The times were such that, even in the first year of Charles the First’s rule, Warner found it necessary to deliver a bitter sermon directed against the politico-religious activities of the Puritans, based upon the text, Matt. xxi. 38: “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.” No one had in those early days of strife thought of beheading Charles, and we must therefore count Warner among the prophets.