The Skirts of the Great City

by N. D'Anvers

The chief interest of Harrow is, of course, the famous school, that ranks second only to Eton amongst the great centres of education in England, and is intimately associated with the memory of many distinguished men, including amongst the headmasters Dr. Vaughan, who ruled from 1844 to 1859, and his successor Dr. Butler, who held office until 1885; while amongst the students were the intrepid traveller James Bruce, the Oriental Sir William Jones, the accomplished scholar Dr. Samuel Parr, Admiral Lord Rodney, the witty writer Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the novelist Theodore Hook, the statesmen Sir Robert Peel, Lord Ripon, Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, and Sir Spencer Perceval, Cardinal Manning, Archbishop Trench, the philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury, and, most celebrated of them all, the poet Lord Byron.

Founded in 1571 by John Lyon, a yeoman of the hamlet of Preston, to whom there is a fine brass in Harrow Church, the school had in it from the first the elements of growth, and its interests were watched over with untiring care for twenty years by its generous originator. No detail was too trivial for his consideration, and the statutes laid down by him were eminently practicable yet sufficiently elastic to allow of future development, though their simple-hearted author certainly never dreamt of what that development was to be. The salaries of the masters, the books to be used, were all specified; and it is a noteworthy fact that very special stress was laid on the exercise of shooting, all parents being bound to give their boys 'bowstrings, shafts, and braces,' that they might practise archery, which at that time represented what rifle-shooting does now. To arouse the ambition of the students, a prize of a silver arrow was given every year to the best marksman out of six or twelve carefully selected competitors, and it was not until 1771 that the ancient custom was discontinued by the then headmaster, Dr. Heath, on account, he said, of the rowdy crowds who used to flock from London to witness the contests, and the serious interruption it caused in the routine of the school work. The butts at which the students, in picturesque costumes of white and green, used to shoot, and the little hill on which they stood, are gone, their place being taken by modern houses; but the silver arrow made for the competition of 1772 is preserved in the school library, a silent witness to John Lyon's recognition of the fact, on which Lord Roberts and other enlightened patriots are now laying such stress, that every boy should learn how to aid in the defence of his native country.

The first endowment of Harrow School was made in 1575, when Lyon bequeathed to the governors certain lands at Harrow and Preston; but it was not until 1615, twenty years after his death, that his instructions were carried out for the building of a 'large and convenient schoolhouse, three stories high, with a chimney in it, and meet and convenient roomes for the schoolmaster and usher to dwell in, and a cellar under the said roomes to lay in wood and coales ... divided into three several roomes, one for ye master, the second for ye usher, and the third for ye schollers.' Until 1650 this house met all the requirements of the institution, the students boarding, as they do now, in outlying houses; and the big class-room, known for many generations as the Fourth Form Room, with the three small apartments above it and the attic called the Cockloft, still remain much what they were four hundred years ago, and are venerated by all Harrovians as the most ancient portion of their beloved school. The rest of the present buildings are all modern; a new wing with a speech-room, class-rooms, and a library, were added in 1819, and in 1877 it was in its turn supplemented by yet another speech-room. The chapel now in use replaces two earlier ones, and was built in 1857, after the designs of Sir Gilbert Scott. The Vaughan library, commemorating the headmaster after whom it is named, was opened in 1863; and the beautiful Museum buildings, that are perhaps the most satisfactory from an æsthetic point of view of the recent erections, were completed in 1886.

CHAPTER III

SOME INTERESTING VILLAGES NORTH OF LONDON,
WITH WALTHAM ABBEY AND EPPING FOREST

Of the many beautiful villages north of London that have of late years been transformed into suburbs of the ever-growing metropolis, few retain any of their original character, or can, strictly speaking, be called picturesque. Tottenham, in spite of its fine situation, with the river Lea forming its eastern and the New River its western boundaries, is to all intents and purposes a town, the restored High Cross, about which there has been so much learned controversy, the ancient parish church, and two or three old houses near the green, alone bearing witness to the good old times when the quaint poem of The Tournament of Tottenham was written. It is much the same with Edmonton, where, in the still standing Bay Cottage, Charles Lamb lived for some time and died, and in the churchyard of which he and his sister are buried, and where John Keats served his apprenticeship to a surgeon and wrote his earliest poems. It bears but a faint resemblance to the village into which John Gilpin of immortal fame dashed on his famous ride after his vain attempt to pull up at the Bell Inn, on the left-hand side of the road from London. The once charming little hamlet of Whetstone, too, a short distance further north, where, according to local tradition, the soldiers halted to sharpen their swords on the way to Barnet Field, is rapidly losing its rural appearance. On the other hand, the scattered settlement of Friern Barnet—beyond the completely modernised Finchley—with its picturesque church that retains a fine Norman doorway, is still quite a country place; whilst Edgware, the two Stanmores, Elstree, High Barnet, East Barnet, and Enfield, though they too are already marked for destruction, are as yet full of the aroma of the past. Edgware, situated on the ancient Watling Street, prides itself on owning the forge in which Handel, having taken refuge from a storm, was inspired by the rhythmic beats of the hammer on the anvil with the famous melody of the 'Harmonious Blacksmith'; and it also owns several quaint old inns, one of which, the Chandos Arms, preserving the memory of the great mansion—known as The Canons, because it occupied the site of a monastery—that was built for the Duke of Chandos whilst he held the lucrative post of paymaster to the forces, but was pulled down after his death by his successor. Fortunately, however, the richly decorated private chapel of The Canons, in which Handel was organist from 1718 to 1721, and containing the organ on which he played, is still preserved as part of the parish church of Little Stanmore, or Whitchurch, a pretty village about half a mile from Edgware, and in its graveyard Handel and the blacksmith whose name is so closely associated with his are buried not far from each other.

Great Stanmore, near to which are the eighteenth-century mansion known as Bentley Priory, replacing a suppressed monastery, and the beautiful Stanmore Park, the seat of Lord Wolverton, is beautifully situated on a hill commanding very extensive views, and has two churches, one now disused, containing some interesting seventeenth and eighteenth century effigies, the other a somewhat uninteresting modern building. The chief charm of the old-fashioned village of Elstree, originally called Eaglestree, because it was much frequented by eagles, is the fine artificial reservoir haunted by water-fowl, which is nearly as extensive as that of Kingsbury, and it also owns a beautiful old Elizabethan mansion.