We reach at last the nineteenth century. The town, like the county, and like all rural England, was in grave alarm in 1830 at the time of the “rick-burnings.” Mrs. Mary Frampton’s Journal speaks much of the scenes of riot and of wild alarms. I possess letters written by my mother, then the young mistress of Fordington Vicarage,[50] in which she speaks of the nightly watch and ward kept all around, and of her husband’s active share in it, and the relief, under the terrible strain, which was given by the friendly attitude of Fordington towards him. Just later the Frampton Journal describes the battle royal of an election scene on Poundbury (Pummery, as I must be allowed still to call it), when the greatest of all Dorset’s sons, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, stood for the county.
That date brings me to times only a little previous to my own memory, and well within the memory of my brothers and friends, and familiar of course to my father, who from 1829 to 1880, as Vicar of Fordington, laboured alike for the spiritual and social good of his parishioners. I may be allowed to close my narrative with a small sheaf of reminiscences from his and other memories. Then, after a brief glance of the mind’s eye over my native town, my task of love is done.
My father knew very old people who “remembered when rooms were first carpeted at Dorchester.” One aged parishioner could recall the change of style in the calendar in 1752; the children were taken to a stile in the Great Field as a memento. He and my mother saw, from Maumbury, about 1832, the Princess Victoria with her mother, passing in their carriage on the way to Weymouth. My brother, since 1880 Bishop in Mid-China, recalls the bringing into the town, in carts, about 1834, of loads of saplings sent to be planted along the London Road; and a noble avenue they made, which now, alas! is no more than a relic of itself.
I just remember the days of the stage coaches in Dorchester. I see the old Emerald still, and hear the bugle of the guard. In 1852 I travelled by coach to Dorchester from Bath. And how vividly I can see the excitement of the crowd on the arrival of the first South-Western train, in 1847! An old woman still runs across my field of view, crying out: “There, I did never zee a coach avore goo wi’out ’osses!” I remember, two years later, Prince Albert’s arrival at the station, where he took carriage for Weymouth, there to lay the first stone of the Breakwater. Very vividly I recall the thousands of lamps festooned along the Walks to illuminate an entertainment for old people after the Crimean peace. Two years earlier, a few weeks before the Alma, I remember the awful outburst of the cholera in Fordington; it was brought from London in tainted clothing which was sent to the wash in a Fordington cottage. My father “stood between the dead and the living” at that dark time, and, with admirable assistance, was able, under God, to bar the pestilence from entering the town.
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Cornhill
But I must not ramble further into narrative. Dorchester, with its integral neighbour, Fordington (incorporated into the borough in 1835), is very dear to my heart, and it is not easy to put narrow limits upon reminiscence. Yet scarcely a word has been said here about our chief architectural features of the place. I have but named Trinity Church, the third structure in succession to that which perished in 1613, as All Saints’ Church is the second in like sequence—All Saints’, whose fine spire, raised in 1852, gave a wholly new feature to the town. St. Peter’s is the ecclesiastical crown of Dorchester—a noble Perpendicular church, with a dignified tower, vocal with eight fine bells; in its churchyard stands a bronze statue of our Dorset poet, William Barnes. At the head of High Street, where the tree-vaulted Bridport road runs out westward, stands the modern St. Mary’s, the church of West Fordington; the pretty original church, Christ Church, now the chapel of the Artillery Barracks, was built by my father’s efforts in 1847, when the parish was divided from old Fordington. The County Hall and Town Hall are leading features of the High Street. The present Town Hall, in 1849, took the place of a building visible still to my memory, under which opened an archway leading into North Square, and which itself succeeded, in 1791, “The Cupola,” near the Town Pump. The Museum, where my brother, Henry Moule, long superintended and developed the excellent geological and antiquarian collections, is a handsome modern feature of the middle High Street; it stands at a point where, almost within the oldest living memory, projecting houses so narrowed the roadway that the stage-coach could pass up and down only with great caution. The County Hospital, founded in 1841, has grown into abundant usefulness, and makes, with its beautiful little chapel, a dignified feature of the place. In South Street the quaint front of the “Napper’s Mite” almshouses, and the Grammar School, are conspicuous.
Sidney Heath