Rabbit coursing, or rabbit worrying, with terriers; and pigeon, starling, and sparrow shooting from traps, were the favourite pastimes. The crowds which gathered to witness these matches were not nice to see and hear, nor were they representative of the people of any London district; they were, in fact, largely composed of the lowest roughs drawn from a population of a million souls—raucous-voiced, lawless, obscene in their language, filthy in their persons, and vicious in their habits. Yet you will find many persons, not of this evil description, who lament that these doings on the Marsh have been abolished, so dear is sport of some kind, involving the killing of animals, to the natural man! Others rejoice at the change. One oldish man, who said that he had known and loved the Marsh from boyhood, and had witnessed the sports for very many years, assured me that only since the County Council had taken this open space in hand was it possible for quiet and decent folks to enjoy it. As to the wild bird shooting, he was glad that that too had been done away with; men who spent their Sundays shooting at starlings, larks, and passing pigeons were, he said, a rough lot of blackguards. Two of his anecdotes are worth repeating. One Sunday morning when he was on the Marsh a young sportsman succeeded in bringing down a pigeon which was flying towards London. The bird when picked up was found to have a card attached to its wing—not an unusual occurrence as homing birds were often shot. On the card in this case was written the brief message, ‘Mother is dead.’ My informant said that it made him sick, but the young sportsman was proud of his achievement.
The other story was of a skylark that made its appearance three summers ago in a vacant piece of ground adjoining Victoria Park. The bird had perhaps escaped from a cage, and was a fine singer, and all day long it could be heard as it flew high above the houses and the park pouring out a continuous torrent of song. It attracted a good deal of attention, and all the Hackney Marsh sportsmen who possessed guns were fired with the desire to shoot it. Every Sunday morning some of them would get into the field to watch their chance to fire at the bird as it rose or returned to the ground; and this shooting went on, and the ‘feathered frenzy,’ still untouched by a pellet, soared and sung, until cold weather came, when it disappeared.
To return to the White House. This has for the last ninety years been in the possession of a family named Beresford, who have all had a taste for collecting rare birds, and their collection, now split up and distributed among the members of the family, shows that during the last four or five decades Hackney Marsh has been visited by an astonishing variety of wild birds. The chief prize is a cream-coloured courser, the only specimen of this rare straggler from Asia ever obtained in the neighbourhood of London. It was shot on the morning of October 19, 1858, and the story is that a working man came full of excitement to the White House to say that he had just seen a strange bird, looking like a piece of whity-brown paper blowing about on the Marsh; whereupon the late Mr. George Beresford took down his gun, went out, and secured the wanderer.
It may be seen on the map of London that Hackney Marsh lies in that broad belt of low wet ground which forms the valley of the Lea, and cuts obliquely through North-east and East London to the Thames at Bugsby’s Reach, as that part of the river between Woolwich and the Isle of Dogs is beautifully named. Leyton Marsh, Hackney Marsh, Stratford Marsh, West Ham Abbey Marsh, and Bromley Marsh are all portions of this low strip, over and beyond which London has spread. This marshy valley is not wholly built over; it contains a great deal of mud and water, and open spaces more or less green; but on account of the number of factories, gasworks, and noisy industries of various kinds, and of its foul and smoky condition, it is not a home for wild bird life.
Some distance beyond or east of this marshy belt—seven miles east of St. Paul’s in the City—there is Wanstead Park, or Wanstead Old Park, and this is the last and outermost public open space and habitation of wild birds belonging to East London to be described here. Epping Forest (with Wanstead Flats), although quite close to Wanstead Park at its nearest end, runs far into Essex, and lies in a perfectly rural district. Wanstead Park itself may seem almost too distant from London to be included here; but Wanstead village and Snaresbrook are all one, and Snaresbrook and Leytonstone extend loving tentacles and clasp each other, and Leytonstone clasps Leyton, and there is no break in spite of the mud and water; and the only thing to be said is that east of the Lea it is Bethnal Green mitigated or ruralised.
‘I was in despair for many days,’ some old traveller has said, relating his adventures in uninhabited and savage places, ‘but at length, to my great joy, I spied a gibbet, for I then knew that I was coming to a civilised country.’ In like manner, at Snaresbrook and Leytonstone many things tell us that we are coming to, and are practically in, London. But Wanstead Park itself, and the open country adjoining it, with its fine old trees, and the River Roding, when the rains have filled it, winding like a silver serpent across the green earth, is very rural and beautiful and refreshing to the sight.
The park (182 acres) is mostly a wood, unlike Highgate, Churchyard Bottom, Wimbledon, or any other wood open to the public near London. It has green spaces and a great deal of water (the lakes and the Roding, which runs through it), and is very charming in its openness, its perfect wildness, and the variety of sylvan scenery contained in it. As might be supposed, this park is peculiarly rich in wild bird life, and among the breeding species may be mentioned mallard and teal, ringdove and turtle-dove, woodpecker, jay, hawfinch, and nightingale. But the chief attraction is the very large rookery and heronry contained on one of the two large wooded islands. It has sometimes happened when rooks and herons have built on the same trees, or in the same wood, that they have fallen out, and the herons have gone away in disgust to settle elsewhere. At Wanstead no disastrous war has yet taken place, although much quarrelling goes on. The heronry is probably very old, as in 1834 it was described as ‘long established and very populous.’ The birds subsequently abandoned their old quarters on Heron Island and established their heronry on Lincoln Island, and in recent years they appear to have increased, the nests in 1896 numbering fifty or fifty-one, and in 1897 forty-nine.
In conclusion, I wish to suggest that it would be well to make Wanstead Park as far as possible a sanctuary for all wild creatures. A perfect sanctuary it could not very well be made—there are certain creatures which must be kept down by killing. The lake, for instance, is infested by pike—our crocodile, and Nature’s chief executioner in these realms. I doubt if the wild duck, teal, little grebe, and moorhen succeed in rearing many young in this most dangerous water. Again, too many jays in this limited space would probably make it very uncomfortable for the other birds. Finally, the place swarms with rats, and as there are no owls, stoats, and weasels to keep them down, man must kill or try to kill them, badly helped by that most miserable of all his servants, the ferret.
But allowing that a perfect sanctuary is not possible, it would be better to do away with the autumn and winter shooting. It is as great a delight to see wild duck, snipe, ringdoves in numbers, and stray waders and water-fowl as any other feathered creatures; and it is probable that if guns were not fired here, or not fired too often, this well-sheltered piece of wood and water would become the resort in winter of many persecuted wild birds, and that they would here lose the excessive wariness which makes it in most cases so difficult to observe them.