The Golf House and Windmill, Wimbledon Common.
Wimbledon will never belong to the town so long as it keeps its common. It is the wildest thing near London. It is almost as wild and lonely a place to-day as when in Georgian and early Victorian days statesmen and noblemen chose it as a fashionable and convenient ground for duelling. The common has seen more than one historic duel. The Duke of York and Colonel Lennox met there in 1789; the Duke received the Colonel's fire, and the ball grazed his hair, but he did not fire in return. Pitt fought a duel with a member of Parliament on Putney Heath north of the common in 1798; each fired twice at twelve paces and hit nothing. Sir Francis Burdett and Mr. John Paull fought in 1807, wounded each other and went back together to London in the same carriage. Canning and Castlereagh fought in 1809, and Grattan, two years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, received Lord Londonderry's fire and himself fired in the air. Another Grattan could meet another Irish peer to-day, and if they chose their places well, nobody would hear a pistol at all. The bracken and the heather slope into dells and valleys which would shelter three duels in a morning; you could deliver a salvo and hardly scare a nursery maid.
But Wimbledon's longest acquaintance with firearms was in the days before the National Rifle Association moved to Bisley. Queen Victoria fired the first shot on July 2nd, 1860, when she pulled a scarlet cord and scored a bull's-eye with a Whitworth rifle; a red and white flag was shown in an instant, you read, and "three points were scored to the Queen of England." The last shot was fired in 1889. I went to that meeting as a schoolboy, and am even now filled with an awe that belongs to spacious days, remembering that we were told that on the last evening the whole camp was to give three great groans for "George Ranger," the Duke of Cambridge, whose duty it had been to declare the common unfitted for the distant probings of misdirected Martini-Henry bullets. Those concerted, resentful, thousand-throated groans seemed a tremendous nightly business; there were camp-fires, one imagined, from which the circular groan would ascend, a rumble which should expel a ministry, unseat a prince. Not very much came of the groaning, I suppose; certainly the Volunteers liked the Bisley ranges, next year, much better. But the old windmill, which looked on in its time at thirty full meetings, still surely misses the week when the dells and the long stretches of heather rattled from the first gun to sunset with the crackle of Martinis and match rifles. The windmill watches red-coated golfers to-day, playing to some of the prettiest greens in the south of England; but the days for the windmill were when the tents were white about the heather, and when they sold Stewart's Verniers where to-day a more leisured generation misses short putts.
CHAPTER XLII
THE SURREY SIDE
Mortlake.—The Boat Race.—A duel.—Putney-by-the-sea.—Punch and Judy.—Kennington.—Gallows and faggots.—The proper way to subscribe to a Cricket Club.—Camberwell Beauties.—The Tradescants and their Dodo.—Mr. Jeffery Saffery.—The old Surrey Side.—The Tabard.—The Old Road.
The Surrey side begins, perhaps, if it begins anywhere definitely, at Mortlake, where the Boat-race ends. By Kew and Richmond the Thames runs for pleasure-boats, gigs and skiffs with shining oars. Below Mortlake the river hears the forge and the dockyard; torpedo-boats drive out into the tide; it is different water, London water, under their bows. The four miles of the Thames of the Boat-race mark the gradual change. On a rough day the two eights ride through waves which are less like a river than a sea; and perhaps the rough water has made some of the best history of the race. When Cambridge sank in 1859 she was waterlogged early in the race; she could not have won, but the steamers following the eights prevented her even from passing the winning-post, by swamping her with their wash. Oxford won, but Cambridge's was an equal honour. The crew rowed on as the boat went under the water; and the name that will always belong to that race is that of a future Lord Justice, Mr. A.L. Smith. Cambridge and Mr. A.L. Smith went on rowing in the water, knowing that Mr. Smith could not swim. On another rough day, thirty-nine years later, the race was lost and won by the toss; the Cambridge boat filled at the start, and Oxford rowed in out of the wind. Other historic races belong to the curve of the river above Barnes Bridge; three in particular, in 1886, 1896, and 1901, when the crew that was behind at Barnes Bridge passed the other crew at the bend of the river and won. Of other historic races, perhaps the wins of the two crews in which a Goldie turned the fortunes of his University will always possess peculiar glories. The first Goldie, in 1870, ended a series of nine Oxford wins. Another Goldie, in 1899, helped Cambridge to end another series, also of nine. The name and the two nines in the date surely made the feat inevitable.
The river water does not change, but the banks have altered from grass and reeds to concrete and stone. It was a mile or so from Barnes Bridge, in a field near Barn Elms (but who could guess where?) that the second Duke of Buckingham fought and shot Lord Shrewsbury. The Duke left behind him one of the wickedest lives of the most dissolute Courts of English history; but he left nothing viler than the name of Lord Shrewsbury's Countess, who rode in boy's clothes as a page to the duelling ground, and then held her seducer's horse while he shot her husband. They left him dying and rode back together. That was in 1667; an earlier and a kindlier association of Barn Elms is a resident who afterwards died at Chertsey, Abraham Cowley; later came Jacob Tonson, bibliophile and publisher of Pope and Dryden. And it was at Barn Elms, too, that the Kit-Kat Club, the thirty who dined at Christopher Kat's in the Strand, and bound themselves to uphold the Protestant succession, met and dined and looked at their portraits painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. The Kit-Kat portraits are now at Bayfordbury, near Hertford, and for the last fifteen years Barn Elms has housed, not publishers or painters, but polo players. The Ranelagh Club was born to help Hurlingham over the water provide grounds for the youngest of the great games naturalised in England. Nine years later Barnes welcomed another club, Roehampton, which added three more grounds to the four of Hurlingham and Ranelagh.
The Boat-race finishes at Mortlake; it starts at Putney, and Putney is the headquarters and the rendezvous of many clubs and rowing men. The Surrey bank from Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses, boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by brimming tides, sometimes broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return of the practising crews, and to watch the blue-scarved oarsmen in and out of the boathouses and the balcony windows. There is somewhere an air of the sea-side about that stretch of gravel and open river bank; it is the sunshine on the varnish of the boats, perhaps, or a smell of tar in the wind, or of salt from the weeds that the tides leave dry; or is it the banjo of the occasional nigger blacked to get pence from the waiting crowd? On a September day a year or two ago, when Cambridge within a week was to race Harvard, I saw on that strip of road one of the very last of the genuine London Punch-and-Judy shows. Toby, of course, had gone; dogs may sit no more in frills to cadge for coppers. But the rest of it was correct enough; the chequered canvas, of the proper shade of blue, draped the wooden frame discreetly at the right moment; there was the old interval of suspense, the old, the piercing squeal, the dexterous cock of the red legs over the balcony; the crocodile came and the hangman, and the devil; I watched them all. So did two of the Harvard crew, and did not know their luck. Nothing of English pride stirred in the blood of those two stalwart young men; they walked off even before the turn of the hangman.