A Porch at Haslemere Church.
Haslemere's history is mostly political, and not always very respectable. Elizabeth, perhaps, made the village a borough; at all events, two members sat for Haslemere first in the Parliament of 1584, and two members represented the borough until it was unkindly abolished by the reforms of 1832. Some of its members came of old Surrey families—Carews, Mores, Oglethorpes, Onslows, Evelyns; and some of its elections were highly irregular. One of the most successful pieces of jobbery stands to the credit of the year 1754, when the Tory sitting members, General Oglethorpe and Peter Burrell, were opposed by two Whigs, James More Molyneux and Philip Carteret Webb, a London lawyer. Molyneux and Webb were elected by 73 votes to 45, but some at least of the 73 (perhaps also some of the 45) would not have borne strict investigation. Eight of the winning votes were faggot votes manufactured out of the Cow Inn, of Haslemere, which inspired Dr. William King, Principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, to a ballad of forty-two verses, entitled The Cow of Haslemere, or The Conjurer's Secretary at Oxford. Dr. King liked politics in poetry to be hot and strong, thus:—
"No Man could hear,
But he must fear
Her loud infernal Roar,
Such horrid Lies,
And Blasphemies
She bellow'd out and swore.
But what must make
The stoutest quake,
And all with Horror gape,
At one strange Birth,
This Cow cast forth
Eight Calves in human Shape.
For in this Cow
Each did somehow
A Tenement possess,
How big this Beast
Must be at least
From hence, Sirs, ye may guess.
The Crew march'd out,
An horrid Rout,
No Bear's Cubs could be bolder!
Each calf did vote,
And swear by Rote
He was a good Freeholder."
One, at least, of Haslemere's members was more than a mere party politician. General James Edward Oglethorpe, who was defeated on the occasion of the Cow's remarkable parturition, was the son of a former member, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, and sat for Haslemere from 1722 till he was beaten at the poll. He was the great philanthropist of his day; he was the generous and active friend of imprisoned debtors; he was the founder of the colony of Georgia, and a general who held a position with 650 men against 5,000 Spaniards. It was General Oglethorpe who obtained an inquiry by Parliament into the management of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. A friend of his named Castell had been thrown into the Fleet for debt, and because he could not pay the warder's dues had been shut in a house where the small-pox was raging: he took the disease and died. Oglethorpe was thoroughly roused, and the inquiry held into the gaol system of the country was the beginning of his work for debtors and prisoners. Later, he got Parliamentary sanction and large sums of money to found a colony of emigrant debtors in the New World, made friends with the Creek and the Choctaw Indians, fought the Spaniards, and planted the roots of his little settlement so firmly that he lived to see Georgia acknowledged by the Mother Country as a sovereign independent State.
Some years ago there was an exhibition of Old Haslemere held at the Museum, of which Mr. Swanton very kindly gave me particulars. One of the pictures lent by Mr. J.W. Penfold, an old, if not the oldest, inhabitant, shows General Oglethorpe with the accompanying note:-"General James Oglethorpe. Died 30th June, 1785, Aged 102, said to be the oldest General in Europe. Sketched from life at the sale of Dr. Johnson's books, February 18, 1785, where the General was reading a book he had purchased without spectacles. In 1706 he had an Ensign Commission in the Guards, and remember'd to have shot snipes in Conduit Mead, where Conduit Street now stands." The compiler of the note may have been right about the snipes, but he was wrong about the General's age, for he was no more than 96. But the admirable caution of the phrase "said to be" remains on record.
When Haslemere was finally deprived of its two members, the local reformers were jubilant. One of them, in The Burial of the Boroughs, printed at Petersfield in 1832, burst into verse:—
"Old Borough-bridge is broken down,
In spite of its proud pier;
And Seaford, too, is just dry'd up,
And so is Hasle-mere.
It is not strange they've damn'd Newport,
It is such cursed trash;
And where's the gourmand would complain
For kicking out Salt-ash.
Toll, toll: these Boroughs ne'er will be
By us through life forgotten;
Nor will their patrons when they lie,
Just like their Boroughs, rotten."
After the burial of the rotten boroughs came the railway, and a long time after the railway the artists and authors. Most of them climbed further, up to Hindhead, but Haslemere kept a few. Mrs. Allingham painted the Haslemere fish-shop and other village scenes, though she lived nearer Witley than Haslemere. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle played cricket for Haslemere till he went up the hill: Dr. George Macdonald built a house on the London road: the Whympers we have met. Tennyson's memorial is in the church, but Tennyson's was a Sussex home, on Blackdown.
Shottermill joins Haslemere on the west, and has had its own author. George Eliot wrote much of Middlemarch in a cottage near the church. Fishermen know Shottermill, for its hillsides are ladders of small ponds, in which tens of thousands of trout have been bred for other, wilder streams. The Surrey Trout Farm began its existence in one of these chains of ponds; its farmers breed their Loch Levens and rainbows now, I think, in another chain. What is the métier of a trout farm? Who shall decide? There are fishermen who would never knowingly throw a fly over a trout that had been hand-fed with chopped horseflesh; and there are other fishermen who, if there were no trout farms, would never have anything to fish for. The ponds have their own fascination; not, perhaps, at meal-times, when the water is lashed to froth by the darting, gleaming bodies—that is too greedy a business. But when a passer-by on a spring morning sees a pound fish fall back into the water with a meditative flop, he may pay the pond the compliment of wishing himself elsewhere. One accompaniment of a trout farm he may hope to escape—the sight of a dead kingfisher. Without wire netting, kingfishers find out the young fry only too quickly, and a dead kingfisher spoils all pleasure for a fisherman.
And so, from Haslemere by a rough path up the hill, or through Shottermill by a straight main road, or a shady lane grown over with almost every tree of hedgerows and woods, we come to Hindhead. There are many ways to the top, and these, though in some ways the most convenient, are not the best. But the best, which is to reach it by the old Portsmouth road from Thursley, can be kept for later in the day. The worst way to see Hindhead is to follow the motor-cars up the main road. The motor-cars see the road, but never Hindhead at all.