The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of Old

by Charles G. Harper

THE RECRUITING SERGEANT

I should suppose it was at Kingston that John Collett conceived the idea of his picture of “The Recruiting Sergeant,” reproduced here; for the wagon that stands in the road is labelled “Portsmouth Common Stage Waggon,” and the sign of the “Three Jolly Butchers” is clearly a reminiscence of the “Jolly Butchers” at Clattern Bridge.

The recruiting sergeant was a scarcely less familiar figure on the road than the stage-coach a hundred years ago, and a figure, too, that has ever been seized upon by painters and writers alike for sentimental reasons. Has he not been made notorious as “Sergeant Kite,” the unscrupulous ruffian who inveigled the country yokel into drink and the acceptance of the King’s shilling at the roadside inn? Evidently the painter of this picture was a sentimentalist who regarded the recruiting sergeant in the worst light. The composition and the figures are alike theatrical and conventional. The weeping sweetheart is a figure borrowed from the stage, and so are the two other prominent actors, the Sergeant and the Recruit. The other figures are interesting. In the wagon a fellow is in the act of kissing a girl, while an old woman belabours him about the head. Two children are fearfully feeling the edge of a halberd in the foreground, while a distressed dame—possibly the Recruit’s mother—is being comforted by some women friends.

At Kingston we had better take Mr. Shoolbred’s “New Times” coach to Guildford. That is to say, if we can find a seat; for this popular drive is patronized so extensively that booking is brisk throughout the coaching season. At eleven o’clock punctually, on every week-day forenoon in the heyday of the year, the “New Times” starts from the “Berkeley” Hotel, Piccadilly. The fame of this sole survivor of the Guildford coaches is of no mere mushroom growth, for it is now over twenty years since Mr. Walter Shoolbred first drove his own teams over this road, so that to-day he is become an institution. Time was (and that but a few years since) when a Portsmouth coach was the delight of the road; but Captain Hargreaves’ “Rocket” no longer enlivens the way, and, below Guildford, the Portsmouth Road is unexploited. To-day we fare no farther behind our four-in-hand than Mr. Shoolbred can take us, and he has the route entirely to himself.

ROAD AND RAIL: DITTON MARSH, NIGHT.

DITTON MARSH