BRENT KNOLL.
An elaborate mural monument to one “John Somersett,” 1663, and his two wives, occupies great space on the south side of the nave; John Somerset himself represented in half-length, with a portrait-bust of a wife on either side. There are, further, effigies of himself and the two Mrs. Somerset praying, accompanied by a chrisom child; together with an alarming effigy starting up in a coffin and praying earnestly to an angel who, armed with a trumpet like a megaphone, wallows amid clouds, blowing reassuring messages, which issue from the trumpet visibly in lengths, not unlike the news from modern tape-machines. An elderly angel, with an oily smile of smug satisfaction, beams greasily below. The whole curious composition has been recently very highly coloured, in reproduction of the original scheme.
CHAPTER XII
BURNHAM—HIGHBRIDGE—BAWDRIP—“BATH BRICKS”—THE RIVER PARRET
The upstart capital of these levels is Burnham, but the supremacy is disputed by Highbridge. Now Burnham and Highbridge, although but a mile and a half apart, are places very different, socially and geographically. The first stands amid sands, by the seashore; the other is situated about the distance of a mile from the sea, on the muddy, sludgy banks of the river Brue. Burnham is a pleasure resort, of sorts, to which all the railways of Somerset and Dorset run frequent cheap excursions. It is the ideal of the average Sunday School manager, seeking a suitable place for the school’s annual treat; for here you have sands—a little muddy perhaps, but eminently safe. It would be possible to get drowned only after superhuman exertions in finding a sufficient depth of water; unless indeed one wandered off in the direction of the Brue estuary in one direction or the lonely shores of Berrow in the other; where it is easily possible to be drowned in the swiftest and most effectual manner; as demonstrated every summer by a few rash and unfortunate bathers, who generally prove, strange to say, to be local folk, presumably well informed of the risks they run—and foolishly contemptuous of them.
Highbridge is not a pleasure resort. Not even a Sunday School manager would fall into that error. It was once (but a time long enough ago) a place inoffensive enough; a hamlet of no particular character, good or ill, beside the river Brue, and taking its name from the original humpbacked bridge that here spanned the stream; built in that manner for the purpose of allowing masted barges and other craft to pass under. That was Highbridge. Nowadays, the old bridge is replaced by a modern flat iron affair, and there are railway sidings and docks, and great sluice-gates to the river Brue. Here, too, are the engine shops and works of the Somerset and Dorset Railway, with a large and offensive, and exceptionally blackguardly, colony of railway men, Radicals and Socialists to a man, and not content with holding their own views, but insistent upon imposing them upon their neighbours at election-times, with threats and violence. There are railwaymen and railwaymen, but the country in general has, as yet, little comprehension of their essentially disaffected, selfish, and dangerous character, as a body: the more dangerous in that they have largely in their power the communications of the land. We shall hear more of them some day not far distant, and governments will be obliged to give them a sharp lesson in social discipline.
But enough of Highbridge and its forlorn, abject houses, and its paltry modern church with red and black tiled spire, apparently designed by some infantile architect. Let us return to Burnham, and contemplate the crowded promenade there.
Weston we have seen to be a children’s paradise; but there they are largely mingled with “grownups.” Here they predominate, and the vast sand-flats, that at low tide stretch out more or less oozily and muddily as you advance, some four miles, are converted for a goodly distance from the promenade wall into a manufactory of sand-castles and mud-pies. The Burnham donkeys must feel a blessed relief when the season is over, for they are in great request for rides, even so far as the straddle-legged lighthouse that stands on iron posts to the north of the town; yea, and even unto the sandhills—or “tots,” as the local tongue hath it—of Berrow.
All the eastern ports of the Somerset coast are severely afflicted by “trippers,” who descend in their thousands upon Clevedon, Weston-super-Mare, and Burnham, not to mention the neighbouring villages. Truth to tell, they are effusively welcomed at these places, at any rate by the refreshment caterers and the proprietors of swing-boats, donkeys, sailing and rowing-boats, and by the “pierrots”; but the rest of the community resent the presence of these hordes of half-day holiday makers, and act the superior person towards them. Yet, when you hear, at any of these resorts, visitors, obviously present on sixteen days’ excursion-trip tickets, speaking disparagingly of “trippers,” you wonder really what constitutes such an one. What is that time-limit within which a holiday-maker becomes a mere “tripper,” and when does he become enlarged as one of the elect, who do not trip, but make holiday?
The definition of a tripper, in these parts, is a person who comes across the Bristol Channel from Barry, Cardiff, Swansea, or any other of the South Wales ports, for half a day, and “brings his nosebag with him”; or, if it be a family party of trippers, a family handbag with provisions; including a bottle of beer for mother and father, and milk for the children. Thousands of these family parties came over by cheap steamboat excursions on most fine days in summer, and may be observed on the sea-front at Weston and other favoured resorts, where they are apt to leave an offensive residuum of their feasts behind them, in the shape of greasy paper and pieces of fat, as often as not upon the public seats. Those are the trippers.