THE EXETER ROAD

THE
E X E T E R R O A D

THE STORY OF
THE WEST OF ENGLAND HIGHWAY
By CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of ‘The Brighton Road,’ ‘The Portsmouth Road,’
‘The Dover Road,’ and ‘The Bath Road’

THIS, the fifth volume in a series of works purporting to tell the Story of the Great Roads, requires but few forewords; but occasion may be taken to say that perhaps greater care has been exercised than in preceding volumes to collect and put on record those anecdotes and floating traditions of the country, which, the gossip of yesterday, will be the history of to-morrow. These are precisely the things that are neglected by the County Historians at one end of the scale of writers, and the compilers of guide-books at the other; and it is just because this gossip and these local anecdotes are generally passed by and often lost that those which are gathered now will become more valuable as time goes on.

For the inclusion of these hitherto unconsidered trifles much archæology and much purely guide-book description have been suppressed; nor for this would it seem necessary to appear apologetic, even although local patriotism is a militant force, and resents anything less than a detailed and favourable description of every village, interesting or not.

How militant parochial patriots may be the writer already knows. You may criticise the British Empire and prophesy its downfall if you feel that way inclined, and welcome; but it is the Unpardonable Sin to say that Little Pedlington is anything less than the cleanest, the neatest, and the busiest for its size of all the Sweet Auburns in the land! Has not the writer been promised a bad quarter of an hour by the local press, should he revisit Crayford, after writing of that uncleanly place in the Dover Road? and have the good folks of Chard still kept the tar and feathers in readiness for him who, daring greatly, presumed to say the place was so quiet that when the stranger appeared in its streets every head was out of doors and windows?

Point of view is everything. The stranger finds a place charming because everything in it is old, and quiet reigns supreme. Quietude and antiquity, how eminently desirable and delightful when found, he thinks. Not so the dweller in such a spot. He would welcome as a benefactor any one who would rebuild his house in modern style, and would behold with satisfaction the traffic of Cheapside thronging the grass-grown market-place.

No brief is held for such an one in these pages, nor is it likely that the professional antiquary will find in them anything not already known to him. The book, like all its predecessors, and like those that are to follow it, is intended for those who journey down the roads either in person or in imagination, and to their judgment it is left. In conclusion, let me acknowledge the valuable information with regard to Wiltshire afforded me by Cecil Simpson, Esq., than whom no one knows the county better.

CHARLES G. HARPER.

Petersham, Surrey,
October 1899.

THE ROAD TO EXETER

I

From Hyde Park Corner, whence it is measured, to the west end of Hounslow town, the Exeter Road is identical with the road to Bath. At that point the ways divide. The right-hand road leads to Bath, by way of Maidenhead; the Exeter Road goes off to the left, through Staines, to Basingstoke, Whitchurch, and Andover; where, at half a mile beyond that town, there is a choice of routes.

The shortest way to Exeter, the ‘Queen City of the West,’ is by taking the right-hand road at this last point and proceeding thence through Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, Park House, and Amesbury to Deptford Inn, Hindon, Mere, Wincanton, Ilchester, Ilminster, and Honiton. This ‘short cut,’ which is the hilliest and bleakest of all the bleak and hilly routes to Exeter, is 165 miles, 6 furlongs in length. Another way, not much more than 2¼ miles longer, is by turning to the left at this fork just outside Andover, and going thence to Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Yeovil, Crewkerne, and Chard, to meet the other route at Honiton; at which point, in fact, all routes met. A third way, over 4½ miles longer than the last, instead of leaving Salisbury for Shaftesbury, turns in a more southerly direction, and passing through Blandford, Dorchester, Bridport, and Axminster, reaches Exeter by way of the inevitable Honiton in 172 miles, 6 furlongs.

It is thus, by whichever way you elect to travel, a far cry to Exeter, even in these days; whether you go by rail from Waterloo or Paddington—171½ and 194 miles respectively, in three hours and three-quarters—or whether you cycle, or drive in a motor car, along the road, when the journey may be accomplished by the stalwart cyclist in a day and a half, and by a swift car in, say, ten hours.

But hush! we are observed, as they say in the melodramas. Let us say fourteen hours, and we shall be safe, and well within the legal limit for motors of twelve miles an hour.

Compare these figures with the very finest performances of that crack coach of the coaching age, the Exeter ‘Telegraph,’ going by Amesbury and Ilchester, which, with the perfection of equipment, and the finest teams, eventually cut down the time from seventeen to fourteen hours, and was justly considered the wonder of that era; and it will immediately be perceived that the century has well earned its reputation for progress.

OLD ROUTES

It may be well to give a few particulars of the ‘Telegraph’ here before proceeding. It was started in 1826 by Mrs. Nelson, of the ‘Bull,’ Aldgate, and originally took seventeen hours between Piccadilly and the ‘Half Moon,’ Exeter. It left Piccadilly at 5.30 A.M., and arrived at Exeter at 10.30 P.M. Twenty minutes allowed for breakfast at Bagshot, and thirty minutes for dinner at Deptford Inn. The ‘Telegraph,’ be it said, was put on the road as a rival to the ‘Quicksilver’ Devonport mail, which, leaving Piccadilly at 8 P.M., arrived at Exeter at 12.34 next day; time, sixteen hours, thirty-four minutes. Going on to Devonport, it arrived at that place at 5.14 P.M., or twenty-one hours, fourteen minutes from London. There were no fewer than twenty-three changes in the 216 miles.

II

But those travellers who, in the early days of coaching, a century and a half ago, desired the safest, speediest, and most comfortable journey to Exeter, went by a very much longer route than any of those already named. They went, in fact, by the Bath Road and thence through Somerset. The Exeter Road beyond Basingstoke was at that period a miserable waggon-track, without a single turnpike; while the road to Bath had, under the management of numerous turnpike-trusts, already become a comparatively fine highway. The Somersetshire squires were also bestirring themselves to improve their roads, despite the strenuous opposition encountered from the peasantry and others on the score of their rights being invaded, and the anticipated ruin of local trade.

A writer of that period, advocating the setting up of turnpikes on the direct road to Exeter, anticipated little trouble in converting that ‘waggon-track’ into a first-class highway. Four turnpikes, he considered, would suffice very well from Salisbury to Exeter; nor would the improvement of the way over the Downs demand much labour, for the bottom was solid, and one general expense for pickaxe and spade work, for levelling, and for widening at the approaches to the villages would last a long while; experience proving so much, since those portions of the road remained pretty much the same as they had been in the days of Julius Cæsar.

‘It may be objected,’ continues this reformer, ‘that the peasantry will demolish these turnpikes so soon as they are erected, but we will not suppose this is in a well-governed happy state like ours. Lex non supponet odiosa. If such terrors were to take place, the great legislative power would lie at the mercy of the rabble. If the mob will not hear reason they must be taught it.

A PLEA FOR GOOD ROADS

‘It may be urged that there are not passengers enough on the Western Road to defray the expenses of erecting these turnpikes. To this I answer by denying the fact; ’tis a road very much frequented, and the natural demands from the West to London and all England on the one part, and from all the eastern counties to Exeter, Plymouth, and Falmouth, etc., on the other are very great, especially in war-time. Besides, were the roads more practicable, the number of travellers would increase, especially of those who make best for towns and inns—namely, such people of fashion and fortune as make various tours in England for pleasure, health, and curiosity. In picturesque counties, like Cornwall and Devon, where the natural curiosities are innumerable, many gentlemen of taste would be fond of making purchases, and spending their fortunes, if with common ease they could readily go to and return from their enchanted castles. Whereas, a family, as things now stand, or a party of gentlemen and ladies, would sooner travel to the South of France and back again than down to Falmouth or the Land’s End. And ’tis easier and pleasanter—so that all beyond Sarum or Dorchester is to us terra incognita, and the mapmakers might, if they pleased, fill the vacuities of Devon and Cornwall with forests, sands, elephants, savages, or what they please. Travellers of every denomination—the wealthy, the man of taste, the idle, the valetudinary—would all, if the roads were good, visit once at least the western parts of this island. Whereas, every man and woman that has an hundred superfluous guineas must now turn bird of passage, flit away across the ocean, and expose themselves to the ridicule of the French. Now, what but the goodness of the roads can tempt people to make such expensive and foolish excursions, since, out of fifty knight-and lady-errants, not two, perhaps, can enounce half a dozen French words. Their inns are infinitely worse than ours, the aspect of the country less pleasing; men, manners, customs, laws are no objects with these itinerants, since they can neither speak nor read the language. I have known twelve at a time ready to starve at Paris and lie in the streets, though their purses were well crammed with louis d’or. When they wanted to go to bed, they yawned to the chambermaid, or shut their eyes; when hunger attacked, they pointed to their mouths. Even pretty Miss K., and Miss G., realised not the distortion of their labial muscles, but cawed like unfledged birds for food. They paid whatever the French demanded, and were laughed at (not before their faces, indeed) most immeasurably. And yet simpletons of this class spent near £100,000 last year in France.

‘But to return. A rich citizen in London, a gentleman of large fortune eastwards, has, perhaps, some very valuable relations or friends in the West. Half a dozen times in his lifetime he hears of their welfare by the post, and once, perhaps, receives a token when the Western curate posts up to town to be initiated into a benefice—and that is all. He thinks no more of visiting them than of traversing the deserts of Nubia, considering them as a sort of separate beings, which might as well be in the moon, or in Limbo Patrum.

CONSERVATIVES

‘I hear the nobility and gentry of Somersetshire have exerted a laudable spirit, and are now actually erecting turnpikes, which will give that fruitful county a better intercourse with its neighbours, and bring an accession of wealth into it; for every wise traveller who goes from London to Exeter, etc. will surely take Bath in his way (as the digression is a mere nothing). At least, all the expensive people with coaches certainly will—and then the supine inhabitants of Wilts and Dorset may repine in vain; for when a road once comes into repute, and persons find a pleasant tour and good usage, they will never return to that which is decried as out of vogue; unless, indeed, they should reason as a Marlborough stage-coachman did when turnpikes were first erected between London and Bath. A new road was planned out, but still my honest man would go round by a miserable waggon-track called “Ramsbury narrow way.” One by one, from little to less, he dawdled away all his passengers, and when asked why he was such an obstinate idiot, his answer was (in a grumbling tone) that he was now an aged man; that he relished not new fantasies; that his grandfather and father had driven the aforesaid way before him, and that he would continue in the old track to his death, though his four horses only drew a passenger-fly. But the proprietor saw no wit in this: the old Automedon “resigned” (in the Court phrase), and was replaced by a youth less conscientious. As a man of honour, I would not conclude without consulting the most solemn-looking waggoner on the road. This proved to be Jack Whipcord, of Blandford. Jack’s answer was, that roads had but one object—namely, waggon-driving; that he required but 5 feet width in a lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the rest might go to the devil. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be damned, and not run gossiping up and down the country. No turnpikes, no improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for him was Jeremiah vi. 16.[1] Thus, finding Jack an ill-natured brute and a profane country wag, I left him, dissatisfied.’

III

In these pages, which purport to show the old West of England highway as it was in days of old and as it is now, it is not proposed to follow either of the two routes taken by the ‘Telegraph’ coach or the ‘Quicksilver’ Devonport mail, by Amesbury or by Shaftesbury, although there will be occasion to mention those smart coaches from time to time. We will take the third route instead, for the reasons that it is practically identical with the course of the Via Iceniana, the old Roman military way to Exeter and the West; and, besides being thus in the fullest sense the Exeter Road, is the most picturesque and historic route. This way went in 1826, according to Cary, those eminently safe and reliable coaches, the ‘Regulator,’ in twenty-four hours; the ‘Royal Mail,’ in twenty-two hours; and the ‘Sovereign,’ which, as no time is specified, would seem to have journeyed down the road in a haphazard fashion. Of these, the ‘Mail’ left that famous hostelry, the ‘Swan with Two Necks’ (known familiarly as the ‘Wonderful Bird’), in Lad Lane, City, at 7.30 every evening, and Piccadilly half an hour later, arriving at the ‘New London Inn,’ Exeter, by six o’clock the following evening.

EARLY COACHING DAYS

But even these coaches, which jogged along in so leisurely a fashion, went at a furious and breakneck—not to say daredevil—pace compared with the time consumed by the stage coach advertised in the Mercurius Politicus of 1658 to start from the ‘George Inn,’ Aldersgate Without, ‘every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To Salisbury in two days for xxs. To Blandford and Dorchester in two days and a half for xxxs. To Exminster, Nunnington, Axminster, Honiton, and Exeter in four days xls.’

The ‘Exeter Fly’ of a hundred years later than this, which staggered down to Exeter in three days, under the best conditions, and was the swiftest public conveyance down this road at that time, before the new stages and mails were introduced, had been known, it is credibly reported, to take six.

FARES

Palmer’s mail coaches, which were started on the Exeter Road in the summer of 1785, rendered all this kind of meandering progress obsolete, except for the poorest class of travellers, who had still for many a long year (indeed, until road travel was killed by the railways) to endure the miseries of a journey in the great hooded luggage waggons of Russell and Company, which, with a team of eight horses, started from Falmouth, and travelling at the rate of three miles an hour, reached London in twelve days. A man on a pony rode beside the team, and with a long whip touched them up when this surprising pace was not maintained. The travellers walked, putting their belongings inside; and when night was come either camped under the ample shelter of the lumbering waggon, or, if it were winter, were accommodated for a trifle in the stable lofts of the inns they halted at. Messrs. Russell and Company were in business for many years as carriers between London and the West, and at a later date—from the ’20’s until the close of the coaching era—were the proprietors of an intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. This was the ‘Fly Van,’ of which, unlike their more ancient conveyances which set out only three times a week, one started every week-day from either end. This accommodated a class of travellers who did not disdain to travel among the bales and bundles, or to fit themselves in between the knobbly corners of heavy goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the journey from the Far West occupying the best part of a fortnight. So they paid a trifle more and travelled the distance between Exeter and London in two days, in times when the ‘Telegraph,’ according to Sir William Knighton, conveyed the aristocratic passenger that distance in seventeen hours. He writes, in his diary, under date of 23rd September 1832, that he started at five o’clock in the morning of that day from Exeter in the ‘Telegraph’ coach for London. The fare, inside, was £3: 10s., and, in addition, four coachmen and one guard had to be paid the usual fees which custom had rendered obligatory. They breakfasted at Ilminster and dined at Andover. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘can exceed the rapidity with which everything is done. The journey of one hundred and seventy-five miles was accomplished in seventeen hours[2]—breakfast and dinner were so hurried that the cravings of appetite could hardly be satisfied, and the horses were changed like lightning.’ The fare, inside, was therefore practically 5d. a mile, to which must be added at least fifteen shillings in tips to those four coachmen and that guard, bringing the cost of the smartest travelling between London and Exeter up to £4: 5s. for the single journey; while the fares by waggon and ‘Fly Van’ would be at the rate of a halfpenny and twopence per mile respectively, something like 7s. 6d. and 29s. 6d.; without, in those cases, the necessity for tipping.

There were, however, more degrees than these in the accommodation and fares for coach travellers. The proper mail coach fare was 4d. a mile, but the mails were not the ne plus ultra of speed and comfort even on this road, where the ‘Quicksilver’ mail ran a famous course. Hence the 5d. a mile by the ‘Telegraph.’ But it was left to the ‘Waggon Coach’ to present the greatest disparity of prices and places. This was a vehicle which, under various names, was seen for a considerable period on most of the roads, and can, with a little ingenuity, be looked upon as the precursor of the three classes on railways. There were the first-class ‘insides,’ the second-class ‘outsides,’ and those very rank outsiders indeed, the occupants of the shaky wickerwork basket hung on behind, called the ‘crate’ or the ‘rumble-tumble,’ who were very often noisily drunken sailors and people who did not mind a little jolting more or less.

Some very fine turns-out were on this road at the end of the ’30’s. Firstly, there was the ‘Royal Mail,’ between the ‘Swan with Two Necks,’ in Lad Lane, and the ‘New London Inn,’ Exeter, both in those days inns of good solid feeding, with drinking to match. It was of the first-named inn, and of another equally famous, that the poet (who must have been of the fleshly and Bacchic order) wrote:—

At the Swan with Two Throttles
I tippled two bottles,
And bothered the beef at the Bull and the Mouth.

One can readily imagine the sharp-set and shivering traveller, fresh from the perils of the road, ‘bothering the beef’ with his huge appetite, and tippling the generous liquor (which, of course, was port) with loud appreciative smackings of the lips.

Then there were the ‘Sovereign,’ the ‘Regulator,’ and the ‘Eclipse,’ going by the Blandford and Dorchester route; the ‘Prince George,’ ‘Herald,’ ‘Pilot,’ ‘Traveller,’ and ‘Quicksilver,’ by Crewkerne and Yeovil; and the ‘Defiance,’ ‘Celerity,’ and ‘Subscription,’ by Amesbury and Ilminster; to leave unnamed the short stages and the bye-road coaches, all helping to swell the traffic in those old days, now utterly forgotten.

IV

A very great authority on coaching—the famous ‘Nimrod,’ the mainstay of the Sporting Magazine—writing in 1836, compares the exquisite perfection to which coaching had attained at that time with the era

A RIP VAN WINKLE

of the old Exeter ‘Fly,’ and imagines a kind of Rip Van Winkle old gentleman, who had been a traveller by that crazy conveyance in 1742, waking up and journeying by the ‘Comet’ of 1836. Rousing from his long sleep, he determines to go by the ‘Fly’ to Exeter. In the lapse of ninety-four years, however, that vehicle has been relegated to the things that were, and has been utterly forgotten. He waits in Piccadilly. ‘What coach, your honour?’ asks a ruffianly-looking fellow.

‘I wish to go home to Exeter,’ replies the old gentleman.

‘Just in time, your honour, here she comes—them there gray horses; where’s your luggage?’

But the turn-out is so different from those our Rip Van Winkle knew, that he says, ‘Don’t be in a hurry, that’s a gentleman’s carriage.’

‘It ain’t, I tell you,’ replies the cad; ‘it’s the “Comet,” and you must be as quick as lightning.’ Whereupon, vehemently protesting, the ‘cad’ and a fellow ruffian shove him forcibly into the coach, despite his anxiety about his luggage.

The old fellow, impressed by the smartness of the Jehu—a smartness to which coachmen had been entire strangers in his time—asks, ‘What gentleman is going to drive us!’

‘He is no gentleman,’ replies the proprietor of the coach, who happens to be sitting at his side; ‘but he has been on the “Comet” ever since she started, and is a very steady young man.’

‘Pardon my ignorance,’ says our ancient, ‘from the cleanliness of his person, the neatness of his apparel, and the language he made use of, I mistook him for some enthusiastic bachelor of arts, wishing to become a charioteer after the manner of the illustrious ancients.’

‘You must have been long in foreign parts, sir,’ observes the proprietor.

Presently they come to Hyde Park Corner. ‘What!’ exclaims Rip, ‘off the stones already?’

‘You have never been on the stones,’ says a fellow-passenger; ‘no stones in London now, sir.’

The old gentleman is engaged upon digesting this information and does not perceive for some time that the coach is a swift one. When he discovers that fact, and mentions it, he is met with the rejoinder, ‘We never go fast over this stage.’

So they pass through Brentford. ‘Old Brentford still here?’ he exclaims; ‘a national disgrace!’ Then Hounslow, in five minutes under the hour. ‘Wonderful travelling, but much too fast to be safe. However, thank Heaven, we are arrived at a good-looking house; and now, waiter, I hope you have got breakf——’

Before the last syllable, however, of the word can be pronounced, the worthy old gentleman’s head strikes the back of the coach with a jerk, and the waiter, the inn, and indeed Hounslow itself, disappear in the twinkling of an eye. ‘My dear sir,’ exclaims he, in surprise, ‘you told me we were to change horses at Hounslow. Surely they are not so inhuman as to drive those poor animals another stage at this unmerciful rate!’

THE GALLOPING GROUND

‘Change horses, sir!’ says the proprietor; ‘why, we changed them while you were putting on your spectacles and looking at your watch. Only one minute allowed for it at Hounslow, and it is often done in fifty seconds by those nimble-fingered horse-keepers.’

Then the coach goes fast and faster on the way to Staines. ‘We always spring ’em over these six miles,’ says the proprietor, in reply to the old gentleman’s remark that he really does not like to go so fast. ‘Not a pebble as big as a nutmeg on the road, and so even that the equilibrium of a spirit-level could not be disturbed.’

‘Bless me!’ exclaims the old man, ‘what improvements; and the roads!!!’

‘They are at perfection, sir,’ says the proprietor. ‘No horse walks a yard in this coach between London and Exeter—all trotting-ground now.’

‘A little galloping ground, I fear,’ whispers the senior to himself. ‘But who has effected all this improvement in your paving?’

‘An American of the name of M’Adam,’ is the reply; ‘but coachmen call him the Colossus of Roads.’

‘And pray, my good sir, what sort of horses may you have over the next stage?’

‘Oh, sir, no more bo-kickers. It is hilly and severe ground and requires cattle strong and staid. You’ll see four as fine horses put to the coach at Staines as ever you saw in a nobleman’s carriage in your life.’

‘Then we shall have no more galloping—no more springing them as you term it?’

‘Not quite so fast over the next stage,’ replies the proprietor; ‘but he will make good play over some part of it; for example, when he gets three parts down a hill he lets them loose, and cheats them out of half the one they have to ascend from the bottom of it. In short, they are half-way up it before a horse touches his collar; and we must take every advantage with such a fast coach as this, and one that loads so well, or we should never keep our time. We are now to a minute; in fact, the country people no longer look to the sun when they want to set their clocks—they look only to the Comet.’

Determined to see the changing of the team at the next stage, the old gentleman remarks one of the new horses being led to the coach with a twitch fastened tightly to his nose. ‘Holloa, Mr. Horsekeeper!’ he says, ‘you are going to put an unruly horse in.’—‘What! this here ’oss,’ growls the man; ‘the quietest hanimal alive, sir.’ But the good faith of this pronouncement is somewhat discounted by the coachman’s caution, ‘Mind what you are about, Bob; don’t let him touch the roller-bolt.’ Then, ‘Let ’em go, and take care of yourselves,’ his next remark, seems a little alarming. More alarming still the next happening. The near leader rears right on end, the thoroughbred near-wheeler draws himself back to the extent of his pole-chain, and then, darting forward, gives a sudden start to the coach which nearly dislocates the passengers’ necks.

We will not follow every heart-beat of our old friend on this exciting pilgrimage. He quits the coach at Bagshot, congratulating himself on being still safe and sound, and rings the bell for the waiter.

THE ‘REGULATOR’

A well-dressed person appears, whom he takes for the landlord. ‘Pray, sir,’ says he, ‘have you any slow coach down this road to-day?’—‘Why, yes, sir,’ replies the waiter. ‘We shall have the “Regulator” down in an hour.’

He has breakfast, and at the appointed time the ‘Regulator’ appears at the door. It is a strong, well-built drag, painted chocolate colour, bedaubed all over with gilt letters—a Bull’s Head on the doors, a Saracen’s Head on the hind boot, and drawn by four strapping horses; but it wants the neatness of the other. The waiter announces that the ‘Regulator’ is full inside and in front; ‘but,’ he says, ‘you’ll have the gammon-board all to yourself, and your luggage is in the hind boot.’

‘Gammon-board! Pray, what’s that? Do you not mean the basket?’

‘Oh no, sir,’ says John, smiling, ‘no such a thing on the road now. It’s the hind-dickey, as some call it.’

Before ascending to his place, our friend has cast his eye on the team that is about to convey him to Hartford Bridge, the next stage. It consists of four moderate-sized horses, full of power, and still fuller of condition, but with a fair sprinkling of blood; in short, the eye of a judge would have found something about them not very unlike galloping. ‘All right!’ cries the guard, taking his key-bugle in his hand; and they proceed up the village at a steady pace, to the tune of ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,’ and continue at that pace for the first five miles. The old gentleman again congratulates himself, but prematurely, for they are about to enter upon Hartford Bridge Flats, which have the reputation at this time of being the best five miles for a coach in all England. The coachman now ‘springs’ his team and they break into a gallop which does those five miles in twenty-three minutes. Half-way across the Flats they meet the returning coachman of the ‘Comet,’ who has a full view of his quondam passenger—and this is what he saw. He was seated with his back to the horses—his arms extended to each extremity of the guard-irons—his teeth set grim as death—his eyes cast down towards the ground, thinking the less he saw of his danger the better. There was what was called a top-heavy load, perhaps a ton of luggage on the roof, and the horses were of unequal stride; so that the lurches of the ‘Regulator’ were awful.

Strange to say, the coach arrives safely at Hartford Bridge, but the antiquated passenger has had enough of it, and exclaims that he will walk into Devonshire. However, he thinks perhaps he will post down, and asks the waiter, ‘What do you charge per mile, posting?’

‘One and sixpence, sir.’—‘Bless me! just double! Let me see—two hundred miles at two shillings per mile, postboys, turnpikes, etc., £20. This will never do. Have you no coach that does not carry luggage on the top?’—‘Oh yes, sir,’ replies the waiter; ‘we shall have one to-night that is not allowed to carry a bandbox on the roof.’—‘That’s the one for me; pray, what do you call it?’—‘The “Quicksilver” Mail, sir; one of the best out of London.’—‘Guarded and

THE ‘QUICKSILVER’ MAIL

lighted?’—‘Both, sir; blunderbuss and pistols in the sword-case; a lamp each side the coach, and one under the footboard—see to pick up a pin the darkest night of the year.—‘Very fast?’—‘Oh no, sir, just keeps time, and that’s all.’—‘That’s the ‘coach for me, then,’ says our hero.

Unfortunately, the ‘Devonport’ (commonly called the ‘Quicksilver’) mail is half a mile faster in the hour than most in England, and is, indeed, one of the miracles of the road. Let us then picture this unfortunate passenger seated in this mail on a pitch-dark night in November. It is true she has no luggage on the roof, nor much to incommode her elsewhere; but she is a mile in the hour faster than the ‘Comet,’ at least three miles quicker than the ‘Regulator.’ and she performs more than half her journey by lamplight. It is needless to say, then, our senior soon finds out his mistake; but there is no remedy at hand, for it is dead of night, and all the inns are shut up. The climax of his misfortunes then approaches. He sleeps, and awakes on a stage called the fastest on the journey—it is four miles of ground, and twelve minutes is the time. The old gentleman starts from his seat, dreaming the horses are running away. Determined to see if it is so, although the passengers assure him it is ‘all right,’ and assure him he will lose his hat if he looks out of window, he does look out. The next moment he raises his voice in a stentorian shout: ‘Stop, coachman, stop. I have lost my hat and wig!’ The coachman hears him not—and in another second the broad wheels of a road waggon have for ever demolished the lost headgear. And so we leave him, hatless, wigless, to his fate.

V

The late Thomas Adolphus Trollope, brother of the better-known Anthony, was never tired of writing voluminously about old times, and what he has to say about the coaches on the Exeter Road is the more interesting and valuable as coming from one who lived and travelled in the times of which he speaks.

The coaches for the South and West of England, he says, started from the ‘White Horse Cellars,’ Piccadilly, which was one of the fashionable hotels of 1820, the time he treats of.

COACH CONSTRUCTION

The ‘White Bear,’ Piccadilly, he adds, was looked upon with contempt, as being the place whence only the slow coaches started. The mails and stages moved off to the accompaniment of news-vendors pushing the sale of the expensive and heavily taxed newspapers of the period, and the cries of the Jew-boys who sold oranges and cedar pencils on the pavement at sixpence a dozen. Once clear of town, his enthusiasm over the travel of other days finds scope, and he begins: ‘What an infinite succession of teams! What an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we clattered through the streets of quiet little country towns at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the morning; ourselves the only souls awake in all the place. What speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman as he “left you here, sir,” in the small hours!’

Then he goes on to give a kind of gossipy history of the smart mails put on the road about 1820.

‘A new and accelerated mail-coach service was started under the title of the “Devonport Mail,” at that time the fastest in England. Its performances caused a sensation in the coaching world, and it was known in such circles as the “Quicksilver Mail.” Its early days had chanced, unfortunately, to be marked by two or three accidents, which naturally gave it an increased celebrity.

‘And if it is considered what those men and horses were required to perform, the wonder was, not that the “Quicksilver” should have come to grief two or three times, but rather that it ever made its journey without doing so. What does the railway traveller of the present day, who sees a travelling Post Office and its huge tender, crammed with postal matter, think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his solitary post behind the coach on the top of the receptacle called, with reference to the constructions of still earlier days, the hinder-boot, sat on a little seat made for one, with his pistol and blunderbuss in a box in front of him. And the original notion of those who first planned the modern mail coach was that the bags containing the letters should be carried in the hinder-boot. The fore-boot, beneath the driver’s box, was considered to be appropriated to the baggage of the three outside and four inside passengers, which was the Mail’s entire complement. One of the outsiders shared the box with the driver, and two occupied the seat on the roof behind him, their backs to the horses, and facing the guard, who had a seat all to himself. The accommodation provided for these two was not of a very comfortable description. They were not, indeed, crowded, as the four who occupied a similar position on another coach often were; but they had a mere board to sit on, whereas the seats on the roof of an ordinary stage coach were provided with cushions. The fares by the mail were nearly always somewhat higher than those by even equally fast, or, in some cases, faster, coaches; and it seems unreasonable, therefore, that the accommodation should have been inferior. I can only suppose that the patrons of the mail were understood to be compensated for its material imperfections by the superior dignity of their position. The box-seat, however, was well cushioned.

THE COACHING AGE

‘But if the despatches, which it was the mail’s business to carry, could once upon a time be contained in the hinder-boot, such soon ceased to be the case. The bulk of postal matter which had to be carried was constantly and rapidly increasing, and often as many as nine enormous sacks, which were as long as the coach was broad, were heaped upon the roof. The huge heap, three or four tiers high, was piled to a height which prevented the guard, even when standing, from seeing or communicating with the coachman. If to these considerations the reader will add the consideration of the Devon and Somerset roads, over which this top-heavy load had to be carried at twelve miles an hour, it will not seem strange that accidents should have occurred. Not that the roads were bad. They, thanks to M’Adam, were good, hard, and smooth, but the hills were numerous and steep.

‘The whole of the service was well done and admirable, and the drivers of such a coach were masters of their profession. Work hard, but remuneration good. There were fewer passengers by the mail to “remember” the coachman, but it was more uniformly full, and somewhat more was expected from a traveller by the mail. It was a splendid thing to see the beautiful teams going over their short stage at twelve miles an hour. None but good cattle in first-rate condition could do the work. A saying of old Mrs. Mountain, for many years the well-known proprietress of one of the large coaching inns in London, used to be quoted as having been addressed by her to one of her drivers: “You find whip-cord, John, and I’ll find oats.” And, as it used to be said, the measure of the corn supplied to a coach-horse was—his stomach!

‘It was a pretty sight to see the changing of the horses. There stood the fresh team, two on the off side, two on the near side, and the coach was drawn up with the utmost exactitude between them. Four ostlers jump to the splinter-bars and loose the traces; the reins have already been thrown down. The driver retains his seat, and, within the minute (more than once, within fifty seconds by the watch) the coach is again on its onward journey.

‘Then how welcome was breakfast at an excellent old-world country inn—twenty minutes allowed. The hot tea, after your night’s drive, the fresh cream, butter, eggs, hot toast, and cold beef, and then, with your cigar alight, back to the box and off again.

‘I once witnessed on that road—not quite that road, for the “Quicksilver” took a somewhat different line—the stage of four miles between Ilchester and Ilminster done in twenty minutes, and a trace broken and mended on the road. The mending was effected by the guard almost before the coach stopped. It is a level bit of road, four miles only for the entire stage, and was performed at a full gallop. That was done by a coach called the “Telegraph,” started some years after the “Quicksilver,” to do the distance between Exeter and London in one day. We started at 5 A.M. from Exeter and reached London between 9 and 10 that night, with time for breakfast and dinner on the road. I think the performance of the Exeter “Telegraph” was the ne plus ultra of coach-travelling. One man drove fifty miles, and then meeting the other coach on the road, changed from one box to another and drove the fifty miles back. It was tremendously hard work. “Not much work for the whip arm?” I asked a coachman. “Not much, sir; but just put your hand on my left arm.” The muscle was swollen to its utmost, and as hard as iron. Many people who have not tried it think it easier work to drive such a coach and such a team as this than to have to flog a dull team up to eight miles an hour.’

AN OLD MAIL-GUARD

Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s reminiscences may be fitly supplemented by those of Moses James Nobbs, who died in June 1897, at the age of eighty years, and was one of the last of the mail-guards on the Exeter Road. To say that he was actually the last would be rash, for coachmen, postboys, and guards were a long-lived race, and it would not be at all surprising to learn that some ancient veterans still survive. Nobbs entered the service of the Post Office in 1836, and was transferred from the Bristol and Portsmouth to the London, Yeovil, and Exeter Mail in 1837.

Retiring at the close of 1891, he therefore saw fifty-five years’ service, and vividly recollected the time when the mails were conveyed in bags secured on the roof of the coach. At Christmas-time the load was always heavy; but although the correspondence of that season sometimes severely strained the capacity of the vehicle, it is not recorded that the mail had to be duplicated, as had to be done sometimes in after years when railways had superseded coaches.

When the Great Western Railway was opened through to Exeter in 1844 and the last mail coach on this route had been withdrawn, Nobbs was given the superintendence of the receiving and despatching of the mails from Paddington, and often spoke of the extraordinary growth of the Post Office business during the railway era. At one Christmas-tide he despatched from Paddington in a single day no less than twenty tons of letters and parcels.

He had not been without his adventures. ‘We had a very sad accident,’ he says, ‘with that mail on one occasion, between Whitchurch and Andover. The coach used to start from Piccadilly, where all the passengers and baggage were taken up. On this occasion the bags were brought up in a cart, as usual, and we were off in a few seconds. My coachman had been having a drinking bout with a friend that day, and when we had got a few miles on the road, I discovered that he was the worse for drink and that it was not safe for him to drive. So when we reached Hounslow I made him get off the box-seat; and after securing the mail-bags and putting him in my seat and strapping him in, I took the ribbons. At Whitchurch the coachman unstrapped himself and exchanged places with me, but we had not proceeded more than three miles when, the coach giving a jolt over a heap of stones, he fell between the horses, and the wheels of the coach ran over him, killing him on the spot. The horses, having no driver, broke into a full gallop, so, as there was no front passenger, I climbed over the roof, to gather up the reins, when I found that they had fallen among the horses’ feet and were trodden to bits. Returning over the roof, I missed my hold and fell into the road, but fortunately with no worse accident than some bruises and a sprained ankle. The horses kept on till they reached Andover, where they pulled up at the usual spot. Strange to say, no damage was done to the coach, though there was a very steep hill to go down. The “Old Exeter Mail,” which came behind our coach, found the body of my coachman on the road, and, a mile farther, picked me up.’

VI

THE SHORT STAGES

Suppose, instead of taking one of the fast mails to Exeter, and journeying straight away, we book a seat in one of the ‘short stages’ which were the only popular means of being conveyed between London and the suburbs in the days before railways, omnibuses, and tramways existed. We will take the stage to Brentford, because that is on our way.

What year shall we imagine it to be? Say 1837, because that date marks the accession of Her Majesty and the opening of the great Victorian Era, in which everything except human nature (which is still pretty much what it used to be) has been turned inside out, altered, and ‘improved.’

If, in the year 1837, we wished to reach Brentford and could not afford to hire a trap or carriage, practically the only way, other than walking the seven miles, would have been to take the stage; and as these stages, starting from the City or the Strand, were comparatively few, it was always advisable to go down to the starting-places and secure a seat, rather than to chance finding one vacant at Hyde Park Corner.

‘How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages that draw up in a line in Piccadilly, after the mails are gone,’ says Hazlitt, writing of the romance of the Mail Coach. Well, it may be that their five or ten mile journeys afforded no hold for the imagination, compared with the dashing ‘Quicksilver’ and the lightning ‘Telegraph’ to Exeter; but what on earth the Londoner of modest means who desired to travel to Putney or to Brentford would in those pre-omnibus times have done without those stages it is impossible to conceive. We, in these days, might just as well find romance in the majesty of the beautiful Great Western Express locomotives that speed between Paddington and Penzance, and then turn to the omnibuses that run to Hammersmith, and say, ‘How we hate the ’buses!’

All these suburban stages started from public-houses. There were quite a number which went to Brentford and on to Hounslow, and they set out from such forgotten houses as the ‘New Inn,’ Old Bailey; the ‘Goose and Gridiron,’ St. Paul’s Churchyard; the ‘Old Bell,’ Holborn; the ‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly; the ‘White Hart,’ ‘Red Lion,’ and ‘Spotted Dog,’ Strand; and the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street. It is to be feared that those stages were not ‘Swiftsures,’ ‘Hirondelles,’ or ‘Lightnings.’ Nor, indeed, were ‘popular prices’ known in those days. Concessions had been made in this direction, it is true, some seven years before, when the man with the extraordinary name—Mr. Shillibeer—introduced the first omnibus, which ran between the ‘Yorkshire Stingo,’ in the New Road, Marylebone, and the City; and the very name ‘omnibus’ was originally intended as a kind of finger-post to point out the intended popularity of the new conveyance, but as the fare to the City was one shilling, it may readily be supposed that Bill Mortarmixer, Tom Tenon, and the whole of

THE ‘GOOSE AND GRIDIRON’

their artisan brethren, who did not in those times aspire to one-and-twopence per hour, preferred to walk. For the same reason, they were only the comparatively affluent who could afford the eighteenpenny fare, or the two-hours journey, to Brentford by the ‘stage.’

Let us suppose ourselves to be of that fortunate company, and, paying our one-and-sixpence, set out from the ‘Goose and Gridiron.’

That old-fashioned hostelry, which stood modestly back from the roadway on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard, was, unhappily, demolished in 1894, after a good deal more than two centuries’ record for good cheer. It was originally the ‘Swan and Harp,’ but some irreverent wag, probably as far back as the building of the house in Wren’s time, found the other name for it, and the effigies of the goose and the gridiron remained even to our own time.

This year of our imaginary journey affords a strange contrast with the appearance the streets will possess some sixty years later. Ludgate Hill, in 1837 an exceedingly narrow thoroughfare, paved with rough granite setts, will in the last decade of the century present a very different aspect. Instead of the dingy brick warehouses there will be handsome premises of some architectural pretensions, and the Hill will be considerably widened. The setts will have disappeared, to be replaced by wood pavement, and the traffic will have increased tenfold; until, in fact, it has become a continuous stream. There will be strange vehicles, too, unknown in 1837,—omnibuses, hansom-cabs, and motor cars, and where Ludgate Hill joins Fleet Street there will be a Circus and an obstructive railway-bridge.

We proceed in leisurely fashion down Ludgate Hill, and halt for passengers and parcels at the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street, which is now a railway receiving office. Thence by slow degrees, calling at the ‘Red Lion,’ ‘Spotted Dog,’ and the ‘White Hart,’ we eventually reach the ‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly, re-built many years ago, and now the ‘Berkeley Hotel.’ Beyond this point, progress is fortunately speedier, and we reach Hyde Park Corner in, comparatively speaking, the twinkling of an eye. Hyde Park Corner in 1837, this year of the Queen’s accession, has begun to feel the great changes that are presently to alter London so marvellously. We have among our fellow-travellers by the stage an old gentleman, a Cobbett-like person, who wears a rustic, semi-farmer kind of appearance, and recollects many improvements here; who can ‘mind the time, look you,’ when the turnpike-gate (which was removed in 1825) stood at the corner; when St. George’s Hospital was a private mansion, the residence of Lord Lanesborough; and when the road leading past it to Pimlico was quite wild country, as in the picture on page 43, where sportsmen shot snipe in those marshes that were in future years

to become the site of Belgrave Square and other aristocratic quarters.

At this spot Mr. Decimus Burton had already built the great Triumphal Arch forming the entrance to Constitution Hill, together with the Classic Screen at Hyde Park Corner. The Screen was built in 1828, and the Arch, which is a copy of the Arch of Titus at Rome, in 1832. Already, in 1820, Apsley House had become the residence of the Iron Duke, but it was not until 1846 that what Thackeray justly names ‘the hideous equestrian monster’ was placed on the summit of that Arch, opposite the Duke’s windows. Here is an illustration of it, before it was hoisted up to that height. Beside it you see the Duke himself, in his characteristic white trousers, in company with several weirdly dressed persons. Again, over page, may be seen the Arch, with the statue on it, and the neighbourhood vastly changed from the appearance it wears in the picture of the ‘North-East Prospect of St. George’s Hospital.’ Instead of the great hooded waggons starting for the West Country, the road is occupied with very crowded traffic, and among the vehicles may be noticed two omnibuses, one going to Chelsea, the other (for this is the year 1851) to the Exhibition,—the first exhibition that ever was. If, ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased to look at those omnibuses, you will see that they have neither knifeboards nor seats on the roof, and that passengers are squatting up there in the most supremely uncomfortable, not to say dangerous, positions. Also, in those dark ages of London locomotion, the ascent to that uncomfortable roof was of itself perilous, for no

one had as yet dreamed of the staircase. Other curious points will be noticed by the observant, and among them the fact that ’buses then had doors. The present historian vividly recollects a door being part of the equipment of every ’bus, and of the full-flavoured odour of what Mr. W. S. Gilbert calls ‘damp straw and squalid hay’ which assailed the nostrils of the ‘insides’ when that door was shut; but in what particular year did the door vanish altogether? Alas! the straw, with the door, is gone for evermore, and passengers no longer lose their small change in it to the great gain of the conductor, who, by the way, used to be called ‘the cad,’ even although he commonly wore a ‘top hat’ and a frock coat, as per the picture. The word ‘cad’ has since then acquired a much more offensive meaning, and if you addressed a conductor by that name nowadays, he would probably express a desire to punch your head.

The hideous statue of the Duke and his charger ‘Copenhagen,’ which the French said ‘avenged Waterloo,’ was removed to Aldershot in 1884, when the alterations were made at Hyde Park Corner.

VII

And now we come to the first toll-gate, which, removed to this spot in 1825, opposite where the Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until 1854.

There were many troublesome survivals in 1837 which have long since been swept away. Toll-gates,

THE PIKEMEN

for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty, fifty, forty years ago was a very real grievance, both on country roads and in London itself, or in those districts which we now call London. Many people objected to pay toll then, and a favourite amusement of the young bloods was fighting the pikeman for his halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as the case might be. Sometimes the pikeman won, sometimes those gay young sparks; and the pikeman always took those terrific encounters as part of the day’s work, and never summoned those sportsmen for assault and battery. In fact, they were such sporting times that, whether the pikeman or the Corinthian youth won, the latter would probably chuck his antagonist a substantial coin of the realm, whereupon the pikeman would say that ‘his honour was a gemman,’ and exeunt severally to purchase beef-steaks for the reduction of black eyes.

The present generation has, of course, never seen a pikeman. He wore a tall black glazed hat and corduroy breaches, with white stockings. But the most distinctive part of his costume was his white linen apron. No one knows why he wore an apron; neither did he, and the reason of it must now needs be lost in the mists of history, because the last pikeman, whom otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to Hades, where he probably is still going through a series of shadowy encounters beside the shores of the Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of long ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his ferry across the stream.

But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837 as quiet a spot as you could find round London, with scattered cottages of the rustic, rose-embowered kind. Knightsbridge Green was a green in those days, and not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and for many years afterwards, the soldiers from the neighbouring barracks would walk with the nursemaids in the country lanes, and take tea in the tea-gardens which stood away behind the highroad and were a feature of Brompton. Where are those tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred the road by the barracks? Gone, my friends; swept away like the gossamer threads of the spiders that spun webs in the arbours of those gardens and dropped in the nursemaids’ tea and the soldiers’ beer. Those soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else it would be a pleasing, a curious, and an instructive thing to take them, tottering in their old age, by the hand and say: ‘Here, my gallant warrior of eighty years or so,’ and ‘Here, my pretty maiden of four-score, is Knightsbridge, the self-same Knightsbridge you knew, but with some new, and somewhat larger, buildings.’ They would be as strangers in a strange land, and, dazed by the din of the thronging traffic amid the sky-scraping buildings, beg to be taken

THE ‘NEW POLICE’

away. But to bring back the policeman of that era, if that were possible, and set him to control this traffic, would be more instructive still. When the last years of the coaching age along this road were still running their course, ‘Robert,’ the ‘Peeler,’ or the ‘New Police,’ as he was variously named, had an easy time of it here. Not so his successors, who have to deal with an almost continual block, all day long and every day.

The ‘New Police’ were a novel body of men in the early years of the reign, having been introduced in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel. Hence the brilliant appropriateness of those nicknames. There still, however, lingered in various parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution, the Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and announced the hours in a curious sing-song voice with remarks upon the state of the weather added. Those who sat up late were familiar with the chant: ‘Twelve o’clock, and a stormy night!’ and found comfort in the companionship of that voice.

The watchmen, although scarce anyone now living can have seen one of those many-caped, tottering old fellows, seem strangely familiar to us. That is because we have read so much about them in the exploits of Tom and Jerry, the Corinthian youth of the glorious days of George the Fourth, when the most popular forms of sport were knocker-wrenching, bilking a pikeman, and thrashing a Charley. A ‘Charley’ was, of course, a watchman. The thrashing of a ‘Charley’ was not an heroic pursuit, but (or, rather, therefore) it was extremely popular. They were generally old men, and not capable of very serious reprisals upon the gangs of muscular youths who thumped, whacked, larrupped, and beat them unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to them, so that those poor old men were imprisoned until some Samaritan came by and released them. No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the ‘New Police,’ who were not old and decrepit men, but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows. Perhaps that was why the ‘New Police’ were so violently objected to, although the ostensible grounds of objection were founded on the supposition that the continental system of a semi-military gendarmerie was intended. The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep the police a strictly citizen force, and although a uniform was, of course, necessary, one as nearly as possible like civilian dress was chosen. The present uniform of the police, and the police themselves, if they had then worn a helmet, would have been howled out of existence by the violent Radicals and Chartists who troubled the early years of the Queen’s reign. They did not, therefore, wear a helmet at all, but a tall glazed hat of the chimney-pot kind. A swallow-tailed coat, tightly buttoned up, with a belt round the waist, a stiff stock under the chin, and trousers of white duck gave him, altogether, a very respectable and citizen-like aspect. It has been left to later years to alter this uniform.

VIII

KENSINGTON

But we must not forget that we are travelling to Brentford sixty-two years ago. Let us, therefore, whip up the horses, and, passing the first milestone at the corner of the lane which a future generation to that of 1837 is to know by the name of the Exhibition Road, hurry on to Kensington.

Kensington in this year of the accession of Her Majesty Queen Victoria is having an unusual amount of attention paid to it. Every one is bursting with loyalty towards the girl of eighteen suddenly called upon to rule over the nation, and crowds throng the old-fashioned High Street of Kensington at the end by Palace Green, eager to see Her Majesty drive forth from Kensington Palace. They are kept at a respectful distance by a sentry in a dress which succeeding generations will think absurd. White trousers, coatee, stiff stock, rigid cross-belts, and a shako like the upper part of the funnel of a penny steamer were whimsical things to go a-soldiering in, but the Tommy Atkins of that time had no other or easier kind of uniform, and it will be left for the Crimean War, seventeen years later, to prove the folly of it.

The palace is well guarded, for the Government, for their part, have not yet learned to trust the people; nor, indeed, are the people at this time altogether to be trusted. The long era of the Georges did not breed loyalty, and for William the Fourth, just dead, the people had an amused contempt. They called him ‘Silly Billy.’ At this time, also, aristocracy drew its skirts daintily from any possible contact with the lower herd. Alas! poor lower herd, and still more, alas! for aristocracy.

REMINISCENCES

Our fellow-traveller in the Brentford stage has a friend with him, and, as we jolt from Kensington Gore into the High Street, points out the palace, and tells how William the Third and Queen Mary lived and died there, amid William’s stolid Hollanders. He tells a story which he heard from his grandfather, of how Dr. Radcliffe, called in to look at the King’s dropsical ankles, said, when asked what he thought of them, ‘Why, truly, I would not have your Majesty’s two legs for your three kingdoms.’ He tells the friend that the King procured a more courtly and less blunt medical adviser; and we can well believe it. More stories beguile the way: how Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark ended here in the fulness of time; how their successor, George the First, furious with Sir Robert Walpole, with his queen, with the servants, and anything and everything, used to tear off his wig and jump on it, in transports of rage. How he would gaze up at the vane on the clock-tower entrance to the palace (which we can just glimpse as we pass), anxious for favouring winds to waft his ships to England with despatches from his beloved Hanover, and how he died suddenly at breakfast one morning after being disappointed in those breezes.

These are hearsay stories. Our friend, however, has reminiscences of his own, and can recollect the Princess Caroline, the eccentric wife of the Prince Regent, living at the palace between the years 1810 and 1814—‘a red-faced huzzy, sir, with yellow towzled hair, all spangles and scarlet cloak, like a play-actress, making Haroun-al-Raschid visits among the people, and bothering the house-agents in the neighbourhood for houses to let.’ The old gentleman who says this is a Radical, and, like all of that political creed, likes to see Royalty ‘behaving as sich, and not like common people such as you an’ me.’ Whereupon another passenger in the stage, on whom the speaker’s eye has fallen, audibly objects to being called, or thought, or included among common persons; so that relations among the ‘insides’ are strained, and so continue, past Kensington Church, a very decrepit and nondescript kind of building; past the Charity School, the Vestry Hall, where a gorgeous beadle in plush breeches, white stockings, scarlet cloak trimmed with gold bullion, a wonderful hat, and a wand of office, is standing, and so into the country. Presently we come to the village of Hammersmith, innocent as yet of whelk-stalls and fried-fish shops, and so at last, past Turnham Green, to Brentford.

IX

Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of the Bath Road, for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex. Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for what says Gay?—

Brentford, tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.

‘BRENTFORD, TEDIOUS TOWN’

Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant, inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas, each ‘villa’ as like its neighbour as one new sixpence is to another; or the Cromwell Road at any time or under any conditions. Then you will have known tedium. At Brentford, however, all is life, movement, dirt, and balmy odours from a quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. The bargees and lightermen of this riverside town are swearing picturesquely at one another all day, while the gasmen, the hands at the waterworks, and the railwaymen join in occasionally. Sometimes the profanity so cheerfully bandied about leads to a fight, but not often, because when a bargee addresses his dearest friend by a string of epithets that might make a typical old-time stage-manager blush, it is all taken as a token of friendship. These are the shibboleths of the place.

When, however, Gay alludes to the ‘white-legged chickens,’ for which, he says, Brentford was known, we are at a loss to identify the breed. That kind of chicken must long since have given up the attempt to be white-legged, and have changed, by process of evolution, into some less easily soiled variety. For the dirt of Brentford is always there. It only varies in kind. In times of drought it makes itself obvious in clouds of black dust, composed of powdered coals and clinkers; and when a day of rain has laid this plague, it is forthwith re-incarnated in the shape of seas of oily black mud. The poet Thomson might have written yesterday—

E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;

while Dr. Johnson adds his weighty testimony, for when a contemporary, a native of Glasgow, was praising Glasgow to him, the Doctor cut his eloquence with the query: ‘Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?’ Here was sarcasm indeed! Happily, however, the Glaswegian had not seen Brentford, and so was not in a position to appreciate the retort. But Boswell, who, ubiquitous man, was of course present, knew, and told the Doctor this was shocking. ‘Why, then, sir,’ rejoined Johnson, ‘you have never seen Brentford!’

Then, when we have all this delightful testimony as to Brentford’s dirt, comes Shenstone, the melancholy poet who ‘found his warmest welcome at an inn,’ to testify as to the character of its inhabitants. ‘No persons,’ says he, ‘more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humours of a country christening; and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as “the quality” of Brentford.’

ODD STREET-NAMES

Despite these criticisms, it must be acknowledged that Brentford is a town of high interest. Its filthy gasworks, its waterworks, its docks have not sufficed to sweep away the old-fashioned appearance of the place. It may, in fact, be safely said that no other such truly picturesque town as Brentford exists near London. This will not long remain true of it, for, even now, new buildings are here and there taking the place of the old. For one thing, Brentford has a quite remarkable number of old inns, and the great stableyards and courtyards of other old coaching hostelries which themselves have disappeared. This was, in fact, the end of the first stage out of London in the coaching era, and the beginning of the last stage in; and in consequence, as befitted a town on the great highway to the West, had ample accommodation, both for man and beast. One of these old yards, indeed,—Red Lion Inn Yard—is historic, for it is traditionally the spot where Edmund Ironside, the king, was murdered by the Danes in 1016, after he had defeated them here. The most famous, however, of all the Brentford inns, the Three Pigeons, was brutally demolished many years ago, although it had associations with Shakespeare and ‘rare’ Ben Jonson. The ‘Tumbledown Dick,’ another vanished hostelry, whose sign was a satire on the nerveless rule and swift overthrow of the Protector’s son, Richard Cromwell, was a well-known house; while the names of some of the old yards—Green Dragon Yard and Catherine Wheel Yard—are reminiscent of once-popular signs.

Then Brentford has the queerest of street names. What think you of ‘Half Acre’ for the style and title of a thoroughfare? or ‘Town Meadow,’ which is less a meadow than a slum? Then there are ‘The Butts,’ with some fine, dignified Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick houses, situated in a quiet spot behind the High Street; and ‘The Hollows,’ a thoroughfare hollow no longer, if ever it was.

Fronting on to the High Street is the broad and massive old stone tower of St. Lawrence’s Church, the parish church of the so-called ‘New’ Brentford, itself old beyond compute. The tower dates back four hundred years or so, but the body of the church was rebuilt in Georgian days and is very like, and only a little less hideous than, the gasworks up the street.

SION

An extraordinary story is told by Cyrus Redding, in his Fifty Years’ Recollections, of a countryman’s adventures in London just before the introduction of railways. The adventures began at Brentford: ‘I had a relative,’ he says, ‘who, on stating his intention to come up to town, was solicited to accept as his fellow-traveller a man of property, a neighbour, who had never been thirty miles from home in his life. They travelled by coach. All went well till they reached Brentford, where the countryman supposed he was nearly come to his journey’s end. On seeing the lamps mile after mile, he expressed more and more impatience, exclaiming, “Are we not yet in London, and so many miles of lamps?” At length, on reaching Hyde Park Corner, he was told they had arrived. His impatience increased from thence to Lad Lane. He became overwhelmed with astonishment, They entered the “Swan with Two Necks,” and my relative bade his companion remain in the coffee-room until he returned. On returning, he found the bird flown, and for six long weeks there were no tidings of him. At length it was discovered that he was in the custody of the constables at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, his mind alienated. He was conveyed home, came partially to his reason for a short time, and died. It was gathered from him that he had become more and more confused at the lights and the long distances he was carried among them; it seemed as if they could have no end. The idea that he could never be extricated from such a labyrinth superseded every other. He could not bear the thought. He went into the street, inquired his way westward, and seemed to have got into Hyde Park, and then out again into the Great Western Road, walking until he could walk no longer. He could relate nothing more that occurred until he was secured. Neither his watch nor money had been taken from him.’

The country-folks who now journey up to town do not behave in this extraordinary fashion on coming to the infinitely greater and more distracting London of to-day.

At the western end of Brentford, just removed from its muddy streets, is Sion, the Duke of Northumberland’s suburban residence. The great square embattled stone house stands in the midst of the park, screened from observation from the road by great clusters of forest trees. Through the ornamental classic stone screen and iron gateway, erected in the well-known ‘Adam style’ by John Adam about 1780, the green sward may be glimpsed; the fresher and more beautiful by contrast with the dusty highroad. Above the arched stone entrance stands the Percy Lion, statant, as heralds would say, with tail extended.

Sion is well named, for no fairer scene can be imagined than this in the long days of summer, when the lovely gardens are at their best and the Thames flows by the park with glittering golden ripples. The Daughters of Sion, whose religious retreat this was, belonged to the Order of St. Bridget. Their abbey, with its lands and great revenues, was suppressed and confiscated by Henry the Eighth in 1532. Nine years later his Queen, Katherine Howard, was imprisoned within the desecrated walls before being handed over to the headsman, and in another seven years the body of the King himself lay here a night on its journey to Windsor. There is a horrid story that tells how the unwieldy corpse of the bloated royal monster burst, and how the dogs drank his blood.

In the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, Sion enjoyed a few years’ restitution of its rights and property, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne, the ‘Daughters’ were finally dispossessed. They wandered to Flanders, and thence, by devious ways, and with many hardships, eventually to Lisbon. The Abbey of Sion yet exists there, and the sisters are still solely Englishwomen. It is on record that they still cherish the hope of returning to their lost home by the banks of the Thames, and have to this day the keys of that abbey. Seventy years or so since, the then Duke of Northumberland, travelling in Portugal, called upon them, and was told of this fond belief. They even showed him the keys. But he was equal to the occasion, and cynically remarked that the locks had been altered since those days!

X

HOUNSLOW

Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated, like all the other places between this and Hyde Park Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as on the road to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the book on that highway. Coming to the place again, there seems no reason to alter or add much to what was said in those pages. The long, long uninteresting street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few houses of any note facing it are fewer. There remains, it is true, that old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ modernised with discretion, and at the parting of the ways the gallows-like sign of the ‘Bell’ still keeps its place on the footpath, with the old original bell still depending from it, although, at the moment of writing, the house itself is being pulled down. But the angle where the roads divide is under revision, and the hoardings that now hide from sight the old shops and the red-brick house, with high-pitched roof and dormer windows, that has stood here so long, will give place shortly to some modern building with plate-glass shop-fronts and a general air of aggressive modernity which will be another link gone with the Hounslow of the past. Thus it is that an illustration is shown here of the ‘parting of the ways’ before the transformation is complete; for although the fork of the roads leading to places so distant from this point, and from one another, as Bath and Exeter must needs always lend something to the imagination, yet a commonplace modern street building cannot, for another hundred years, command respect or be worth sketching, even for the sake of the significant spot on which it stands.

The would-be decorative gas-lamp that stands here in the centre of the road bears two tin tablets inscribed respectively, ‘To Slough’ and ‘To Staines,’ in a somewhat parochial fashion. They had no souls, those people who inscribed these legends. Did they not know that we stand here upon highways famed in song and story; not merely the flat and uninteresting seven and ten miles respectively to Staines and Slough, but the hundred and fifty-five miles to Exeter and the ninety-five miles to Bath?

Here, then, we see the Bath Road going off to the

AN OLD COACHMAN

right and the Exeter Road to the left in semi-suburban fashion. Had it not been for the winter fogs this level stretch would have invariably been the delight of the old coachmen; but when the roads were wrapped in obscurity they were hard put to it to keep on the highway. Sometimes they did not even succeed in doing so, but drove instead into the noisome ditches, filled with evil-smelling black mud, which at that time divided the road from Hounslow Heath.

Charles Ward, whom the coaching critics of his age united to honour as an artist with ‘the ribbons,’ drove the famous Exeter ‘Telegraph’ the thirty miles to Bagshot, reaching that village usually at 11 P.M., and taking the up coach from thence to London at four o’clock in the morning. He tells how in the winter the mails had often to be escorted out of London with flaring torches, seven or eight mails following one another, the guard of the foremost lighting the one following, and so on, travelling at a slow pace, like a funeral procession. ‘Many times,’ he says, ‘I have been three hours going from London to Hounslow. I remember one very foggy night, instead of arriving at Bagshot at eleven o’clock, I did not get there till one in the morning. On my way back to town, when the fog was very bad, I was coming over Hounslow Heath, when I reached the spot where the old powder-mills used to stand. I saw several lights in the road and heard voices which induced me to stop. The old Exeter mail, which left Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had met with a singular accident. It was driven by a man named Gambier; his leaders had come in contact with a hay-cart on its way to London, which caused them to suddenly turn round, break the pole, and blunder down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which was a narrow deep ditch, filled with water and mud. The mail coach pitched on the stump of a willow tree that overhung the ditch; the coachman and the outside passengers were thrown over into the meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch. The unfortunate wheelers were drowned or smothered in the mud. There were two inside passengers, who were extricated with some difficulty, but fortunately no one was injured. I managed to take the passengers with the guard and mail bags on to London, leaving the coachman to wait for daylight before he could make an attempt to get the mail up the embankment. They endeavoured to accomplish this with cart horses and chains, and they had nearly reached the top of the bank when something gave way, and the poor old mail went back into the ditch again. I shall never forget the scene. There were about a dozen men from the powder-mills trying to render assistance, and with their black faces, each bearing a torch in his hand, they presented a curious spectacle. This happened about 1840. Posts and rails were erected at the spot after the accident. I passed the place in 1870, and they were there still, as well as the old pollard willow stump.’

HIGHWAYMEN

The old-time associations of Hounslow Heath are almost forgotten now, for, where Claude du Vall and Dick Turpin waited patiently for travellers, there are nowadays long rows of suburban villas which have long since changed the dreary scene. Nothing so romantic as the meeting of the lawyer with the redoubtable Dick is likely to befall the traveller in these times:—

As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,
A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,
Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraid
Of Turpin, that mischievous blade?’

‘Oh! no, sir,’ says Turpin, ‘I’ve been more acute,
I’ve hidden my money all in my boot.’
‘And mine,’ says the lawyer, ‘the villain can’t find,
For I have sewed it into my cape behind.’

They rode till they came to the Powder Mill,
When Turpin bid the lawyer for to stand still.
‘Good sir,’ quoth he, ‘that cape must come off,
For my horse stands in need of a saddle-cloth.’

‘Ah, well,’ says the lawyer, ‘I’m very compliant,
I’ll put it all right with my next coming client.’
‘Then,’ says Turpin, ‘we’re both of a trade, never doubt it,
Only you rob by law, and I rob without it.’

The last vestige is gone of the bleak and barren aspect of the road, and even the singular memorial of a murder, which, according to the writer of a road-book published in 1802, stood near by, has vanished: ‘Upon a spot of Hounslow Heath, about a stone’s throw from the road, on leaving that village, a small wood monument is shockingly marked with a bloody hand and knife, and the following inscription: “Buried with a stake through his body here, the wicked murderer, John Pretor, who cut the throat of his wife and child, and poisoned himself, July 6, 1765.”’

XI

It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence to Staines, and the fact is sufficiently well known for it to be crowded on Saturday afternoons and Sundays with cyclists of the ‘scorcher’ variety, members of cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their pleasure at sixteen miles an hour, Indian file, hanging on to one another’s back wheel, with shoulders humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but the road surface.

HATTON

But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these highway crowds never come. Just such a lane is that which leads off here, by the river Crane and the Bedfont Powder Mills, to the right, and makes for Hatton—‘Hatton-in-the-Hinterland,’ one might well call it.

Have you ever been to Hatton? Have you, indeed, ever even heard of it? I suppose not, for Hatton is a remote hamlet, tucked away in that triangular corner of Middlesex situated between the branching Bath and Exeter Roads which is practically unexplored. Yet the place, after the uninteresting, unrelieved flatness of the market gardens that stretch for miles around, is almost pretty. It boasts a few isolated houses, and has (what is more to the point in this connection) a neat and cheerful-looking old inn, fronted by a large horse-pond.

The ‘Green Man’ at Hatton looks nowadays a guileless place, with no secrets, and yet it possesses behind that innocent exterior a veritable highwayman’s hiding-place. This retiring-place of modest worth, eager to escape from the embarrassing attentions of the outer world, may be seen by the curious traveller in the little bar-parlour on the left hand as you enter the front door.

It is a narrow, low-ceiled room, with an old-fashioned fire-grate in it, filling what was once a huge chimney-corner. At the back of this grate is a hole leading to a passage which gives access to a cavernous nook in the thickness of the wall. Through this hole, decently covered at most times with an innocent-looking fire-back, crawled those exquisite knights of the road, what time the Bow Street runners were questing almost at their heels.

And here, it is related, one of these fine fellows nearly revealed his presence while the officers of the law were refreshing themselves with a dram in that room. What with a cold in the head, and the accumulated soot and dust of his hiding-place, he could not help sneezing, although his very life depended on the question ‘To sneeze or not to sneeze.’

The minions of the law were not so far gone in liquor but that they heard the muffled sound of that sneeze, and it took all the landlord’s eloquence to persuade them that it was the cat!

MARKET GARDENS

Where footpads and highwaymen lurked on the scrubby heath, and the troopers of King James the Second, sent here to overawe London, lay encamped, there stretch nowadays the broad market gardens, where in spring-time the yellow daffodils, and in early summer the wallflowers, are grown by the acre for Covent Garden and the delight of Londoners. Orchards and vast fields of vegetables take up almost all the rest of the reclaimed waste, and if the country for many miles be indeed as flat as, or flatter than, your hand, and with never a tree but the scraggy hedgerow elms that grow here in such fantastic shapes, why amends are made in the scent of the blossoms, the bounteous promise of nature, and in the free and open air that resounds with the gladsome shrilling of the lark.

These market gardens that surround London have an interest all their own. Such scenes as that of Millet’s ‘Angelus’—the rough toil, that is to say, without the devotion—are the commonplaces of these wide fields, stretching away, level, to the horizon. All day long the men, women, and children are working, according to the season, in the damp, heavy clay, or in the sun-baked rows of growing produce, digging, hoeing, sowing, weeding, or gathering the cabbages, potatoes, peas, lettuces, and beans that go to furnish the myriad tables of the ‘Wen of wens,’ as Cobbett savagely calls London. He thought very little of Hounslow Heath, which he describes as ‘a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look. Yet,’ he says, writing in 1825, ‘all this is now enclosed, and what they call “cultivated.”’

What they call cultivated! That is indeed excellent. It would be well if Cobbett could take a ‘Rural Ride’ over the Heath to-day and see this cultivation, not merely so called, which raises some of the finest market-garden produce ever seen, and supplies London with the most beautiful spring blossoms. If it would not suffice to see the growing crops, it would perhaps be better to watch the loading of the clumsy market waggons with the gathered wealth of the soil. Tier upon tier of cabbages, neatly packed to an alarming height; bundles of the finest lettuces; bushels of peas; in short, a bounteous quantity of every domestic vegetable you care to name, being packed for the lumbering, rumbling, three-miles-an-hour journey overnight from the market gardens to the early morning babel of Covent Garden.

The market waggons, going to London, or returning about eight o’clock in the morning, form, in short, one of the most characteristic features of the first fifteen miles of this road. The waggoners, more often than not asleep, are jogged up to town by the philosophic horses who know the way just as well as the blinking fellows who are supposed to drive them. Drive them? One can just imagine the horse-laughs of those particularly knowing animals, who move along quite independently of the reclining figure above, stretched full length, face downwards, on the mountainous pile of smelly cabbages, if the idea could be conveyed to them.

A REFORMATORY

There is an exquisite touch of appropriateness in the fact that on converted Hounslow Heath, where these terrors of the peaceful traveller formerly practised their unlicensed trade, reformatories should be nowadays established. One of them, called by the prettier name of the ‘Feltham Industrial School,’ is placed just to the south of the road, near East Bedfont. It houses and educates for honest careers the young criminals and the waifs and strays brought before the Middlesex magistrates. The neighbourhood of this huge institution is made evident to the traveller across these wide-spreading levels by the strange sight of a full-sized, fully-rigged ship on the horizon. The stranger who journeys this way and has always supposed Hounslow Heath to be anything rather than the neighbour to a seaport, feels in some doubt as to the evidence of his senses or the accuracy of his geographical recollections. Strange, he thinks, that he should have forgotten the sea estuary on which the Heath borders, or the ship canal that traverses these wilds. But if he inquires of any one with local knowledge whom he may meet, he will learn that this is the model training-ship built in the grounds of the Industrial School. The ‘Endeavour,’ as she is called, if not registered A1 at Lloyd’s, or not at all a seaworthy craft, is at any rate well found in the technical details of masts and spars, and the rigging appropriate to a schooner-rigged Blackwall liner. Those among the seven hundred or so of the young vagabonds who are being educated here in the way they should go—those among them who think they would like a life on the bounding main, are here taught to climb the rigging with the agility of cats; to furl the sails or shake them free, or to keep a sharp look-out for the iron reefs that lurk on the inhospitable coasts of Hounslow Heath, lest all on board should be cast away and utterly undone. It is an odd experience to walk around the great hull, half submerged—half buried, that is to say—in the asphalt paths of the parade ground, but the oddest experiences must be those of the boys who, when they get aboard a floating ship, come to it thoroughly trained in everything save ‘sea-legs’ and the keeping of an easy stomach when the breezes blow and the surges rock the vessel.

XII

The village of East Bedfont, three miles from Hounslow, is a picturesque surprise, after the long flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out here, and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond, and real ducks! and an even more real village church whose wooden extinguisher spire peeps out from a surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a couple of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard gate.

THE BEDFONT PEACOCKS

The ‘Bedfont Peacocks,’ as they are called, are not so perfect as they were when first cut in 1704, for the trimming of them was long neglected, and these curiously clipped evergreens require constant attention. The date on one side, and the churchwardens’ initials of the period on the other, once standing out boldly, are now only to be discerned by the Eye of Faith. The story of the Peacocks is that they were cut at the costs and charges of a former inhabitant of the village, who, proposing in turn to two sisters also living here, was scornfully refused by them. They were, says the legend, ‘as proud as peacocks,’ and the mortified suitor chose this spiteful method of typifying the fact. Of course, the story was retailed to travellers on passing through Bedfont by every coachman and guard; nor, indeed, would it be at all surprising to learn that they, in fact, really invented it, for they were masters in the art of romancing. So the Fame of the Peacocks grew. An old writer at once celebrates them, and the then landlord of the ‘Black Dog,’ in the rather neat verse:—

Harvey, whose inn commands a view
Of Bedfont’s church and churchyard too,
Where yew-trees into peacock’s shorn,
In vegetable torture mourn.

At length they were immortalised by Hood, the elder, in a quite serious poem:—

Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvet wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod;
There, gentle stranger, thou may’st only see
Two sombre peacocks. Age, with sapient nod,
Marking the spot, still tarries to declare
How once they lived, and wherefore they are there.

Alas! that breathing vanity should go
Where pride is buried; like its very ghost,
Unrisen from the naked bones below,
In novel flesh, clad in the silent boast
Of gaudy silk that flutters to and fro,
Shedding its chilling superstition most
On young and ignorant natures as is wont
To haunt the peaceful churchyard of Bedfont!

If any one can unravel the sense from the tangled lines of the second verse,—as obscure as some of Browning’s poetry—let him account himself clever.

The ‘Black Dog,’ once the halting-place of the long extinct ‘Driving Club,’ of which the late Duke of Beaufort was a member, has recently been demolished. A large villa stands on the site of it, at the corner of the Green, as the village is left behind.

STAINES

The flattest of flat, and among the straightest of straight, roads is this which runs from East Bedfont into Staines. That loyal bard, John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet,’ was along this route on his way to the Isle of Wight in 1647. He started from the ‘Rose,’ in Holborn, on Thursday, 19th October, in the Southampton coach:—

We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses,
We wheel’d the top of the heavy hill call’d Holborn
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne),
And so along we jolted to St. Giles’s,
Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is,
To Staines that night at five o’clock we coasted,
Where, at the Bush, we had bak’d, boil’d, and roasted.

XIII

Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London, is, in fact, of that nondescript—‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red-herring’—character that belongs to places situated in the marches of town and country. Almost everything of interest has vanished, and although the railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with it the life and bustle that are generally conferred by railways on places near London. But, of course, Staines is on the London and South-Western Railway, which explains everything.

Staines disputes with Colnbrook, on the Bath Road, the honour of having been the Roman station of Ad Pontes, and has the best of it, according to the views of the foremost authorities. ‘At the Bridges’ would doubtless have been an excellently descriptive name for either place, in view of the number of streams at both, and the bridges necessary to cross them; but the very name of Staines should of itself be almost sufficient to prove the Roman origin of the place, even if the Roman remains found in and about it were not considered conclusive evidence. There are those who derive ‘Staines’ from the ancient stone still standing on the north bank of the Thames, above the bridge, marking the historic boundary up-stream of the jurisdiction exercised over the river by the City of London; but there can be no doubt of its real origin in the paved Roman highway, a branch of the Akeman Street, on which this former military station of Ad Pontes stood. The stones of the old road yet remained when the Saxons overran the country, and it was named ‘the Stones’ by that people, from the fact of being on a paved highway. The very many places in this county with the prefixes, Stain, Stone, Stan, Street, Streat, and Stret, all, or nearly all, originate in the paved Roman roads (or ‘streets’) and fords; and there is little to support another theory, that the name of Staines came from a Roman milliarium, or milestone, which may or may not have stood somewhere here on the road.

STAINES STONE

The stone column, very like a Roman altar, standing on three steps and a square panelled plinth, and placed in a meadow on the north bank of the river, is known variously as ‘Staines Stone,’ and ‘London Stone.’ It marks the place where the upper and lower Thames meet; is the boundary line of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire; and is also the boundary mark of the Metropolitan Police District. Besides these manifold and important offices, it also delimits the western boundary of the area comprised within the old London Coal and Wine Duties Acts, by which a tax, similar to the octroi still in force at the outskirts of many Continental towns, was levied on all coals, coke, and cinders, and all wines, entering London. Renewed from time to time, the imposts were finally abolished in 1889, but the old posts with cast-iron inscriptions detailing the number and date of the several Acts of Parliament under which these dues were levied, are still to be found beside the roads, rivers, and canals around London.

Much weather-worn and dilapidated, ‘London Stone’ still retains long inscriptions giving the names of the Lord Mayors who have officially visited the spot as ex-officio chairmen of the Thames Conservancy;—

Conservators of Thames from mead to mead,
Great guardians of small sprites that swim the flood,
Warders of London Stone,

as Tom Hood mock-heroically sings.

Above all is the deeply cut aspiration, ‘God Preserve the City of London, A.D. 1280.’ The pious prayer has been answered, and six hundred and twenty years later the City has been, like David, delivered out of the hands of the spoiler and from the enemies that compassed it round about; by which Royal Commissions and the London County Council may be understood.

AD PONTES

If the Roman legionaries could return to Ad Pontes and see Staines Bridge and the hideous iron girder bridge by which the London and South-Western Railway crosses the Thames they would be genuinely astonished. The first-named, which is the stone bridge built by Rennie in 1832, carries the Exeter Road over the river, and is of a severe classic aspect which might find favour with the resurrected Romans; but what could they think of the other?

We may see an additional importance in this situation of Ad Pontes in the fact that between Staines Bridge and London Bridge there was anciently no other passage across the river, save by the hazardous expedient of fording it at certain points. The only way to the West of England in mediæval times, it was then of wood, and zealously kept in repair by the grant of trees from the Royal Forest of Windsor and by the pontage, or bridge toll levied from passengers. Still, it was often broken down by floods. The poet Gay, in his Journey to Exeter, says, passing Hounslow:—

Thence, o’er wide shrubby heaths, and furrowed lanes,
We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines.
We ferried o’er; for late the Winter’s flood
Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood.

That would probably have been about the year 1720. In 1791 an Act of Parliament authorised the building of a new bridge, and accordingly a stone structure was begun, and eventually opened in 1797. This had to be demolished, almost immediately, owing to a failure of one of its piers, and an iron bridge was built in its stead, presently to meet with much the same fate. This, then, gave place to the existing bridge.

The ‘Vine Inn,’ which once stood by the bridge and was a welcome sight to travellers, has disappeared, together with most of the old hostelries that once rendered Staines a town of inns. Gone, too, is the ‘Bush,’ and others, although not demolished, have either retired into private life, or are disguised as commonplace shops. The ‘Angel’ still remains, but not the ‘Blue Boar,’ kept, according to Dean Swift, by the quarrelsome couple, Phyllis and John. Phyllis had run away from home on her wedding morn with John, who was her father’s groom, and a good-for-naught. At the inn they were installed at last, John as the drunken landlord, Phyllis as the kind landlady:—

They keep at Staines the Old Blue Boar,
Are cat and dog—

and other things unfitted for ears polite.

The church is without interest, but there lies in its churchyard, among the other saints and sinners, Lady Letitia Lade, the foul-mouthed cast-off chère amie of the Prince Regent, who married her off to John Lade, his coachman, whom he knighted for his complaisance.

XIV

RUNEMEDE

Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb—dusty, uninteresting. The old church has been modernised, and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in its old form—the ‘Catherine Wheel’—has recently lost all its old roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.

Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great Park, and a road turning off to the right hand leads beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past Cooper’s Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta island, where the ‘Palladium of our English liberties’ was wrung from the unwilling King John. A public reference to the ‘Palladium’ used unfailingly to ‘bring down the house,’ but it has been left to the present generation to view the very spot where it was granted, not only without a quickening of the pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You cannot expect reverence from people who possibly saw King John as the central and farcical figure of last year’s pantomime, with a low-comedy nose and an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna Charta to baronial supers armoured with polished metal dish-covers for breastplates and saucepans for helmets. ‘Nothing is sacred to a sapper,’ is a saying that arose in Napoleon’s campaigns. Let us, in these piping times of peace, change the figure, and say, ‘Nothing is sacred to a librettist.’

Long years before Egham ever became a coaching village, in the dark ages of road travel, when inns were scarce and travellers few, the ‘Bells of Ouseley,’ the old-fashioned riverside inn along this bye-road, was a place of greater note than it is now. Although forgotten by the crowds who keep the high-road, it is an inn happier in its situation than most, for it stands on the banks of the Thames at one of its most picturesque points, just below Old Windsor.

The sign, showing five bells on a blue ground, derives its name from the once-famed bells of the long-demolished Oseney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated, before the Reformation swept them away, for their silvery tones, which are said to have surpassed even those

Bells of Shandon
Which sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lea,

THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY’

of which ‘Father Prout’ sang some forty-five years ago. The abbey, however, possessed six bells. They were named Douce, Clement, Austin, Hauctetor, Gabriel, and John.

The ‘Bells of Ouseley’ had at one time a reputation for a very much less innocent thing than picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago, or thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class of footpads, who were used to waylay travellers by the shore, or on the old Bath and Exeter Roads, and, robbing them, were not content, but, practically applying the axiom that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ gave their victims a knock over the head, and, tying them in sacks, heaved them into the river. These be legends, and legends are not always truthful, but it is a fact that, some years ago, when the Thames Conservancy authorities were dredging the bed of the river just here, they found the remains of a sack and the perfect skeleton of a human being.

XV

Regarding the country through which the road passes, between Kensington, Egham, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith and Egham it is ‘as flat as a pancake,’ and the soil ‘a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of gravel.’ Sunninghill and Sunningdale, ‘all made into “grounds” and gardens by tax-eaters,’ are at the end of a ‘blackguard heath,’ and are ‘not far distant from the Stock-jobbing crew. The roads are level, and they are smooth. The wretches can go from the “‘Change” without any danger to their worthless necks.’