Early in 1813 our interesting family were in Edinburgh, where the Borrow boys were sent to the celebrated High School, and George entered with zest into the faction fights between the Auld and the New Toon. More, and better than this, he picked up just such a wild character as fitted in with his romantic scheme of things. This was David Haggart, son of a gamekeeper and guilty of nearly every crime in the Statute Book under various aliases—John Wilson, John Morrison, John McColgan, David O’Brien, and “The Switcher.” Haggart enlisted as a drummer-boy in Captain Borrow’s recruiting-party at Leith Races in July, 1813, being then just twelve years old; but soon tiring of discipline and scanty pay, obtained his discharge, soon after embarking on a career of crime which culminated in his well-deserved hanging at Edinburgh in 1821, at the age of twenty.
Crown and Angel, St. Stephen’s. From Drawing by Mr. H. W. Tuck
In June, 1814, the West Norfolk Regiment was ordered south; some went by sea, those who preferred by land. Captain Borrow chose the latter, and on July 18th his division entered Norwich, and the Earl of Orford, colonel of the regiment, entertained the officers and their friends at the Maid’s Head Hotel. At this time Captain Borrow and his family went to lodge at the Crown and Angel, an ancient hostelry in St. Stephen’s Street. From that convenient centre, the recruiting-parties under Captain Borrow were very successful in obtaining men, by beat of drum instead of by ballot, as had previously been the practice. But troubles arose in Ireland, and in August, 1815, the West Norfolks were again on the move. They found themselves at Cork early in September, and marched on to Clonmel.
During their short interval at Norwich, George went to the Grammar School, and his brother studied painting with “Old Crome.”
Captain Borrow commanded a division, and George walked by his side, holding the stirrup-leather of his horse, while John Thomas Borrow, gazetted ensign in May and lieutenant in December, was in his place in the regiment. At Clonmel the Borrows lodged with a handsome athletic man and his wife, who enthusiastically welcomed them. “I have made bold to bring up a bottle of claret,” said the Orangeman, “. . . and when your honour and your family have dined, I will make bold too to bring up Mistress Hyne from Londonderry, to introduce to your honour’s lady, and then we’ll drink to the health of King George, God bless him; to the ‘glorious and immortal’—to Boyne water—to your honour’s speedy promotion to be Lord-Lieutenant.”
Here at Clonmel our hero “read the Latin tongue and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman, who sat behind a black oaken desk, with a huge Elzevir Flaccus before him.” “Here,” says Borrow, “I was in the habit of sitting on a large stone, before the roaring fire in the huge open chimney, and entertaining certain of the Protestant young gentlemen of my own age . . . with extraordinary accounts of my own adventures and those of the corps, with an occasional anecdote extracted from the story-books of Hickathrift and Wight Wallace, pretending to be conning the lesson all the while.” Borrow calls Hickathrift his countryman; the legend is that Tom Hickathrift ridded the Fenland between Lynn and Wisbech, of a monstrous giant, by slaying him with the axle-tree of his cart. I gave the full story of this Norfolk giant-killer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, for January, 1896. The boy’s genius for story telling was quite exceptional, and when he was at Norwich Grammar School, as his schoolfellow Dr. Martineau informed me, “He used to gather about him three or four favourite schoolfellows, after they had learned their class lesson and before the class was called up, and with a sheet of paper and book on his knee, invent and tell a story, making rapid little pictures of each Dramatis
Persona. The plot was woven and spread out with much ingenuity, and the characters were various and well-discriminated. But two of them were sure to turn up in every tale, the Devil and the Pope: and the working of the drama invariably had the same issue—the utter ruin and disgrace of these two Potentates.”
At Clonmel it was his good luck to make friends with one more notable character, another figure in his gallery of strange personages—Murtagh, a Papist gasoon, sent to school by his father to be “made a saggrart of and sent to Paris and Salamanca.” But the gasoon loved cards better. George had a new pack, which soon changed hands. “You can’t learn Greek, so you must teach Irish!” said George. “Before Christmas, Murtagh was playing at cards with his brother Denis, and I could speak a considerable quantity of broken Irish.”
In January, 1816, the regiment was moved on to Templemore, a charming town in mid-Tipperary, where the Borrows remained but a short time, reaching Norwich again on May 13th, and tarrying at the Crown and Angel till they settled at the historic little house in King’s Court, Willow Lane, which they leased from a builder named Thomas King. At the instance of Sir Peter Eade, it was re-named Borrow’s Court, and the tablet commemorating the residence there of George Borrow was affixed on November 6th, 1891. Now, by the generosity of the Lord Mayor of Norwich (Arthur Michael Samuel), in this year of grace 1913, it has become a possession of the City of Norwich as a Borrow Museum in perpetuity.