NEW GODALMING STATION.
OGLETHORPE
At a short distance from the church, on the edge of a thickly-wooded hill overlooking New Godalming station, stands the house and small estate of Westbrook, once belonging to the Oglethorpes, who settled here from Yorkshire in the seventeenth century. Of this family was that notable octogenarian, General Oglethorpe, the literary discoverer of Dr. Johnson, friend of Whitefield and founder of Georgia. During a long and active life that extended from 1698 to 1785, Oglethorpe had many experiences. He warred with the Indians who threatened the North American Colonies; he was secretary and aide-de-camp to Prince Eugene, when, according to the alliterative poet, that “good prince” bade
“An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery bombard Belgrade.”
He was suspected of Jacobite leanings, and was court-martialled for want of diligence in following up the Pretender’s forces in their retreat from Derby; but he is memorable from a Londoner’s point of view chiefly because he claimed to have, when a young man, shot woodcock on the spot where in his old age rose the fashionable lounge of Regent Street.
Westbrook, too, has some slight connection with the Stuart legend; for General Oglethorpe’s father—Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe—was a devoted partisan of that unlucky House, and it was whispered that one of his sons was the famous child smuggled into Whitehall Palace in a warming-pan, and known afterwards as the Old Pretender.
One of the most pleasing views of Godalming is that from the grounds of Westbrook, above the railway-station, and the station of New Godalming itself and its situation are distinctly picturesque, composing finely with the Frith Hill and the uplands away in the direction of Charterhouse.