The “Castle Hotel” at Conway has an interesting and historic object, in the shape of an authentic contemporary portrait of Dame Joan Penderel, mother of the Penderel brothers of Boscobel, who secreted Charles the Second in the “Royal Oak.” It came to the hotel as a bequest to the landlord, from a friend who in his turn had received it from a man who had bought it among a number of household odds and ends belonging to two old maiden ladies of Broseley, connections of the Penderel family. It was then, to all appearance, nothing more than a dirty old stretched canvas that had long been used as “blower” to a kitchen fire; but, on being cleaned, was found to be a portrait of a woman wearing an old-fashioned steeple-crowned hat, and holding in her hand a rose. The portrait would never have been identified, but fortunately it was inscribed “Dame Pendrell, 1662.”
THE “RED LION,” CHISWICK.
A curious relic is to be seen to this day, chained securely to the doorway of the “Red Lion” inn at Chiswick. There are, in effect, two Chiswicks: the one the Chiswick of the Chiswick High Road, where the electric tramcars run, and the other the original waterside village in a bend of the river: a village of which all these portents of the main road are merely offshoots. In these latter days the riverside Chiswick is becoming more or less of a foul slum, but still, by the old parish church and the famous Mall—that roadway running alongside the river—there are old and stately houses, and quaint corners. It is here you find the “Red Lion”; not an ancient inn, nor yet precisely a new: a something between waterside tavern and public-house. It has a balcony looking out upon the broad river, and it also displays—as do many other waterside inns—drags and lifebelts, the rather grim reminders of waterside dangers. At hand is Chiswick Eyot, an island densely covered with osier-beds; and hay- and brick-barges wallow at all angles in the foreshore mud. The relic so jealously chained in the doorway of the “Red Lion” is a huge whetstone, some eighteen inches long, inscribed: “I am the old Whetstone, and have sharpned tools on this spot above 1000 years.” Marvellous!—but not true, and you who look narrowly into it will discover that at some period an additional “0” has been added to the original figure of 100, by some one to whom the antiquity of merely one century was not sufficient. This is readily discoverable by all who will take the trouble to observe that the customary spacing between all the other words is missing between “1000” and “years.”
The whetstone has, however, been here now considerably over a century. It existed on this spot in the time of Hogarth, whose old residence is near at hand; and at that time the inn, of which the present building is a successor, bore the sign of the “White Bear and Whetstone.” The stone then had a further inscription, long since rubbed away, “Whet without, wet within.”
The whetstone is thus obviously in constant use. And who, think you, chiefly use it? The mowers who cut the osiers of Chiswick Eyot. It was for their convenience, in sharpening their scythes—and incidentally to ensure that they “wetted their whistles” here—that the long-forgotten tapster first placed the whetstone in his doorway.
Among inns with relics the “Widow’s Son” must undoubtedly be included. Unfortunately it is by no means a picturesque inn, and is, in plain, unlovely fact, an extremely commonplace, not to say pitifully mean and ugly, plaster-faced public-house in squalid Devons Road, Bromley-by-Bow.
The history of the “Widow’s Son” is a matter of tradition, rather than of sheer ascertainable fact. According to generally received accounts, the present house, which may, by the look of it, have been built about 1860, was erected upon the site of a cottage occupied by a widow whose only son “went for a sailor.” Not only did he, against her wishes, take up the hazardous trade of seafaring, but he must needs further tempt Fate by sailing on a Friday, and, of all possible Fridays, a Good Friday! Such perversity, in all old sailor-men’s opinions, could only lead to disaster; it would be, in such circles, equivalent to committing suicide.
