LATTER DAYS
A host of writers have written in praise--and rightly in praise--of that
fine flower of many centuries of innkeeping evolution, the Coaching Inn of
the early and mid-nineteenth century. Hazlitt, Washington Irving, De
Quincey, are all among the prophets; De Quincey, ceasing for the while his
mystical apocalyptic style, mournfully lamenting the beginnings of the end
that came even so long ago as his day, which, after all, ended not so very
long ago, for although he seems so ancient, he died only in 1859. He
writes, in early railway times, of “those days,” the days in question
being that fine period in coaching and innkeeping, the ’20’s of the
nineteenth century.
“What cosy old parlours in those days,” he exclaims, “low-roofed, glowing
with ample fires and fenced from the blasts of the doors by screens whose
folding doors were, or seemed to be, infinite! What motherly landladies!
won, how readily, to kindness the most lavish by the mere attractions of
simplicity and youthful innocence, and finding so much interest in the
bare circumstance of being a traveller at a childish age! Then what
blooming young handmaidens; how different from the knowing and worldly
demireps of modern high roads! And sometimes grey-headed, faithful
waiters, how sincere and attentive by comparison with their flippant
successors, the eternal ‘Coming, sir, coming,’ of our improved
generation!”
They all tell the same tale; those whose privilege it was to witness the
meeting of the old order and the new.
“It was interesting,” says Mr. Locker-Lampson, writing of old times, “as
the post-chaise drew up at the door of the roomy and comfortable hostel
where we were to dine or sleep, to see Boniface and his better half
smilingly awaiting us--Us in particular!--waiter and chamber-lasses
grouped behind them. The landlady advances to the carriage-window with a
cordial, self-respecting, ‘Will you please to alight.’ I remember that the
landlord, who announced dinner, sometimes entered with the first dish and
placed it on the table, bowing as he retired. Why, it all seems as if it
were but yesterday! Now it is gone for ever.”
Yes, irrevocably gone. Most of the old inns are gone too, and in their
place, only too frequently, the traveller finds the modern, company-owned
hotel, with a foreign manager who naturally takes no interest in the
guests he, as a matter of fact, rarely sees, and with whom no guest could
possibly foregather. In the modern barrack hotel the guest must
necessarily be impersonal--one of a number going to swell the returns. No
one quite willingly resigns himself to being a mere number; it is,
indeed, one of the greatest of the convict’s trials that he has lost his
name and become identified only by a letter and a row of figures. Just in
the same way, when we stay at hotels our self-respect is revolted at being
received and dismissed with equal indifference, and there are many who
would gladly resign the innovations of electric light and hydraulic lifts
for that “welcome at an inn” of which Shenstone speaks. The philosophy of
these regrets must, in fact, be sought in that illuminating phrase, “_Us
in particular_.” We travellers are unwilling to be thought of merely as
numbers identical with those of our bedrooms, and we like to believe,
against our own better judgment, that the old-fashioned hosts and
hostesses were pleased to see _us_; which of course, in that special
sense, was not the case. But a little make-believe sometimes goes a great
way, and we need never, unless we have a mind to distress ourselves, seek
the tongue of humbug in the cheek of courtesy.
The landlord of a good coaching house was a very important person indeed.
Not seldom he was a large owner of horses and employer of labour; a man of
some culture and of considerable wealth. He was not only a good judge of
wine and horseflesh, but of men and matters, and not merely the servant,
but the self-respecting and respected friend, of the gentry in his
neighbourhood. He was generally in evidence at his house, and he or his
wife would have scorned the idea of appointing a manager to do their work.
In those days, and with such men along the road, it was an established
rule of etiquette for the coming guest to invite his host to take a glass
of wine with him and to exchange the news. But the type has become quite
extinct, and even their old houses have been either demolished or else
converted into private residences. Such hosts were Mr. and Mrs. Botham, of
the “Windmill” at Salt Hill; or the long succession of notable landlords
of the “Castle” at Marlborough, on the Bath Road; such were Clark, of the
“Bell,” Barnby Moor, and Holt of the “Wheatsheaf,” Rushyford Bridge, on
the Great North Road,--to name but those.
They were men, too, of considerable influence, and, when equipped with
determination, wielded a certain amount of power, and brought great
changes to pass; as when Robert Lawrence, of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, by
dint of great personal exertions, brought the line of travel between
London and Dublin through Shrewsbury and Holyhead, instead of, as
formerly, through Chester. He died in 1806, and the curious may yet read
on his mural monument in St. Julian’s Church how he was “many years
proprietor of the ‘Raven’ and ‘Lion’ inns in this town,” and that it was
to his “public spirit and unremitting exertions for upwards of thirty
years, in opening the great road through Wales between the United
kingdoms, as also for establishing the first mail-coach, that the public
in general have been greatly indebted.”
Almost equally forceful were some of the old-time proprietors of the
“George” at Walsall. In 1781 Mr. Thomas Fletcher, one of an old and
highly respected family in that town, gave up the “Dragon” in High Street
and built the great “George Hotel.” He even procured an Act of Parliament
by which the present road from Walsall to Stafford was made, thereby
bringing Walsall out of a by-road into the direct line of traffic. He also
caused the Birmingham road to be straightened and widened, and gradually
brought coaching and posting through the town. His successors, Fletcher
and Sharratt, were equally energetic. In 1823 they remodelled the
“George,” giving it the classic-columned front that confers a kind of
third-cousin relationship to the British Museum, with unappetising and
gruesome thoughts of dining on fried mummy and kippered parchments. The
columns, which are still very solemnly there--or were, a year ago--came
from the Marquis of Donegall’s neighbouring seat of Fisherwick Hall,
demolished about that time, and the placing of them here was celebrated by
an inaugural feast, “the colonnade dinner,” presided over by Lord
Hatherton, a great patron of the house.
Those wonder-working innkeepers also, in 1831, promoted the Bill by which
the present Birmingham road through Perry Bar was made, superseding the
old route by Hamstead and Handsworth church.
Unfortunately, those fine old innkeepers, whatever else they were, were
not usually cultivators of the art of literary expression, and did not
write their memoirs and reminiscences. Yet they could, had they chosen,
have told an interesting tale of men and matters. Consider! They were in
the whirl of life, and often knew personages and affairs, not merely by
report, but at first hand. What would not the historian of social England
give for such reminiscences? They would open the door to much that is now
sealed, and would clothe the dry bones of mere facts with romance.
One such innkeeper, Mr. J. Kearsley Fowler, who kept the “White Hart,”
Aylesbury, in the last few years of its existence, has, however, left us
something by which we may see, described at first-hand, the life and
surroundings of a first-class old coaching and posting inn between 1812
and those middle years of the ’60’s, when a few branch-road coaches were
yet left, and the Squire and Agriculture were still prosperous.
He tells us, of his own knowledge, that the innkeepers had by far the
largest amount of capital invested in the country towns, where, as men
generally of superior manners and education, from their constant
association with the leading nobility, clergy, and magistracy, they took a
prominent position, both socially and politically, the leading houses
being the head quarters, respectively, of Whigs and Tories.
The “White Hart” at Aylesbury was generally believed to have dated back to
the time of Richard the Second, and in the time of the Wars of the Roses
to have been the rendezvous of the White Rose party, while the “Roebuck”
was affected to the Red Rose.
Until 1812 the “White Hart” retained its fine mediæval, three-gabled
frontage, with first floor overhanging the ground-floor, and the second
overhanging the first. Elaborately carved barge-boards decorated the
gables. In the centre of the front was a great gateway with deeply reeded
oaken posts and heavy double doors, which could be closed on occasion;
but, in the growing security of the land, had scarce within the memory of
man been shut to. Within was a spacious courtyard, partly surrounded by a
gallery supported on stout oaken pillars and reached by a staircase. From
this gallery, as in most other mediæval hostelries, the bedrooms and
principal sitting-rooms opened. The “Coffee Room” and “Commercial Room”
were at either side of the entrance from the street: the “Commercial Room”
itself having, before the days of “commercials,” once been called “the
Change,” and used, as asserted by local tradition, as the place where the
principal business transactions of the town were conducted, over suitable
liquor.
On the side opposite was the room called the “Crown,” where the collectors
of customs and excise, and other officials periodically attended. In the
“Mitre,” an adjoining room, the Chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln, and
the “Apparitor” of the Archdeacon had of old collected, for three hundred
years, the dues or fees of the Church. Another room, the “Fountain,” was
perhaps originally a select bar. Running under the entire frontage of the
house was the extensive cellarage, necessarily spacious in days when every
one drank wine, and many deeply.
At the end of the yard was the great kitchen, and beyond it large gardens
and a beautiful, full-sized bowling-green. Gigantic elms, at least three
centuries old, bordered the gardens, which were further screened from
outside observation by dense shrubberies of flowering shrubs, laburnums,
lilacs, mountain-ash, acacias, and red chestnuts. Ancient walnut-trees and
shady arbours completed this lovely retreat.
But this was not all. Beyond this very delightful, but merely ornamental,
portion was an orchard stocked with fine apple- and pear-trees: codlins,
golden and ribston pippins, Blenheim orange, russets and early
June-eatings, Gansell’s bergamot pear, and others. Three very fine
mulberry-trees, at least three centuries old, and of course a varied and
extensive stock of bush-fruit, were included in this orchard, and in
addition there was the kitchen-garden.
In the orchard were the cow-houses and piggeries, and the hospital for
lame or ailing horses. A mill-stream ran at the bottom, and in the midst
of it was a “stew,” a shallow pond for freshwater fish, in which was kept
an “eel-trunk,” a strong iron box about four feet long and two feet wide
and deep, perforated with holes. The lid of this contrivance was fastened
with lock and key, and was under the charge of the man-cook, who was head
of the servants. When eels were required for table, the trunk would be
hauled up to bank by a strong iron chain, and emptied.
The stables had stalls for about fifty horses, and over them were lofts
for hay, straw, and corn. Harness-rooms, waiting-room for the postboys,
and an “ostry,” _i.e._, office and store-room for the ostler, were
attached, together with chaise and coach-houses. The establishment of the
“White Hart”--and it was typical of many others in the old days--covered
from five to six acres.
The staff of such a house was, of course, large. Besides the innkeeper and
his wife, both of them working hard in the conduct of the business, there
were housekeeper, barmaid, man-cook, waiter and under-waiter, kitchenmaid,
scullerymaid, chambermaid, laundress, housemaid, nurse, boots, ostler,
tap-boy, first-turn postboy, and generally an extra woman: sixteen
persons, whom the innkeeper had to lodge and feed daily, in addition to
his guests.
The “White Hart” was re-fronted in a very plain, not to say ugly, manner
in 1813, and finally demolished in 1863. Not even that most lovely and
most famous feature of it, the celebrated “Rochester room,” was spared.
This was a noble apartment, built as an addition to the back of the house
in 1663 by the Earl of Rochester, as a return for a signal service
rendered by the landlord in that time--perilous to such Cavaliers as
he--the Commonwealth. It seems, according to Clarendon, that the Earl and
Sir Nicholas Armour came riding horseback into the town one night and put
up at the “White Hart,” then kept by a landlord named Gilvy, who was
affected strongly in favour of Cromwell and all his doings. The local
magistrate, hearing of the visit of the Earl, sent secretly to the
innkeeper requesting him to detain the travellers’ horses the next
morning, so that neither of them should be able to leave, pending an
inquiry upon their business; but the thing was not done secretly enough.
Probably one of the servants of the inn told those two guests of something
ominous being afoot; at any rate, the Earl had Gilvy up and questioned
him, and, telling him how probably the lives of himself and friend were in
his hand, gave him forty Jacobuses and suggested that they should, without
a word, depart that night. Clarendon expresses himself as unable to decide
whether the gold or the landlord’s conscience prompted his next action. At
any rate, Gilvy conducted the two fugitives from the inn at midnight “into
the London way.” They reached London and then fled over sea, while the
landlord was left to invent some plausible story to satisfy the Justice of
the Peace, who in his turn was suspected by Cromwell of being a party to
the escape.
At the Restoration, the landlord received a brimming measure of reward. He
was thanked by the King, and the Earl built for him that noble room,
forty-two feet long, by twenty-three wide, that was the pride and glory of
the “White Hart” for just two hundred years. It was panelled from floor
to ceiling in richly carved oak, set off with gilding, and embellished
with the figures of Peace and Concord and the initials C R, while the
ceiling was painted with nymphs and cherubim by Antonio Verrio.
Nothing has more changed from its former condition than the old inn which
has become the modern hotel. The “George,” the “Crown and Anchor,” the
“Wellington,” or the “King’s Head,” had an individuality which was never
lost. There was a personal kind of welcome from the landlord and the
landlady that simulated the hospitality of a friendly host and hostess,
mingled with the attention of a superior sort of body-servant. You were
not handed over to a number and a chambermaid, like a document in a
pigeon-hole tabulated by a clerk; but the hostess herself showed you your
rooms, and begged you to put a name to anything you might fancy. There was
no general coffee-room then, save for commercial travellers and such
social gentlemen as preferred even inferior company to solitude. There was
no table d’hôte dinner other than the ordinary, between twelve and two,
which was chiefly made for the convenience of travellers by the
stage-coach, who halted here for change and refreshment. Even the ladies
who might be on the road were served and kept apart from the, perhaps,
doubtful gents below; and mine host himself brought in the first dish and
set it on the table of the private room, which was as much _de rigueur_
then for ladies as the copper warming-pan and the claret with the yellow
seal, or the thick, deep red luscious port of old, ordered by the knowing
for the good of the house.
In the country the pretty little inn, with its honeysuckled porch and
scrambling profusion of climbing roses up to the bedroom windows, had an
even more home-like character in its methods of dealing with its guests.
Here the servants stayed on for years, till they grew to be as much part
of the establishment as the four-poster hung with red moreen and the
plated sconces for candles. And here everything was of perfect
cleanliness, and as fresh as fragrant. The eggs and milk and butter were
all sweet and new. Generous jugs of cream softened the tartness of the
black-currant pudding or the green-gooseberry tart. The spring chickens
and young ducklings had been well fed; the mutton was home-grown and not
under five years; the beef was home-grown too, and knew nothing of
antiseptic preparations or frozen chambers; and the vegetables came direct
from the garden, and had been neither tinned nor carted for miles in huge
waggon loads, well rammed down and tightly compressed. And all the meat
was roasted before an open fire, diligently basted in the process, till
the gravy lightly frothed on the browned skin, and the appetising scent it
gave out had no affinity with the smell of fat on heated iron, which for
the most part accompanies the modern roast in the modern oven. The linen
invariably smelt of lavender or dried rose-leaves, of which big bags were
kept among the sheets; but the washing apparatus was poor, and the
illumination was scanty. Wax candles in silver or plated branched
candlesticks, that vaguely suggested churches and sacraments, shed a
veritably “dim religious” glimmer in the sitting-room, and appeared
expensively under the form of “lights” in the bill--mistily suggestive of
food for hungry cats.
Yet the old country inn had, and still has--for it is not wholly
extinct--its charms that weigh against any little defect.
Of all this quasi-home life which belonged to the old inn of the past, the
hotel of the present has not a trace. For certain forms of luxury the
modern hotel is hard to beat. Thick carpets deaden the footsteps of
stragglers through the corridors, and your boots, invariably kicked into
infinities by midnight guests, do not--as they do in the older houses--fly
noisily along the bare boards. The rooms are lighted with electric light,
but usually set so high as to be useless for all purposes of reading or
working. In the drawing-room are luxurious chairs of all shapes and sizes;
in the reading-room papers of all colours, to suit here the red-hot
Radical and there the cooler Conservative. The billiard-room attracts the
men after dinner as--if in the country--the tennis-ground or the
golf-links had attracted them through the day. The telephone does
everything you want. Carriages, theatres, quotations, races, a doctor if
you are ill, a motor-car if you are well--nothing within the range of
human wants that can be ordered and not chosen comes amiss to the
telephone and its manipulators. All the rough edges of life are smoothed
down to satin softness. All the friction is taken away. A modern hotel is
as the isle of Calypso or the Garden of Armida, where all you have to do
is to make known your wants and pay the bill.
But it has not one single strain of Home in it. Home is the place where
the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the
complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you
are a document in a pigeon-hole--a number, not a person--an accident, not
substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You
get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management.
You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not
frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is
cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. Dinner is, of
course, fixed, and you take it in masses together: or so took it, for in
late years, especially in the first hotels of London, a revulsion of
feeling has led to the long tables being abolished, and small ones
installed, where, almost privately amid the throng, you and your little
party may dine. As a rule the waiters are Swiss and the meat is foreign,
the cook is a Frenchman and called a _chef_; and the materials are
inferior. The vegetables are tinned, and oysters, lobsters, salmon, and
hare in May follow suit. The sauces are all exactly the same in one hotel
as in another, and much margarine enters into their composition. Electric
bells emphasise the monotonous ordering of the whole concern, where as
little character is expressed in the ring as in the number it indicates;
and speaking-tubes sound in the corridors, like domestic fog-horns or
railway whistles, calling the chambermaids or waiters of such-and-such a
floor to listen to their orders from below. Wherever you go you find
exactly the same things--the same order, the same management, the same
appliances and methods. You arrive without a welcome, you leave without a
farewell. Your character is determined according to the tips you give on
parting, and an hour after you have gone your personality is forgotten.
But, above all things, Heaven save us from falling ill in the modern
hotel. No one cares for you, and no one even has the decency to make a
pretence of doing so.
Sometimes, however, if you go somewhat out of the season, and before the
rush of visitors begins, you get to a certain degree behind the scenes,
and learn a little of the heart and humanity of the management. The
chambermaid has time to have a little chat with you in the morning, and
the head waiter gives you bits of local information both interesting and
new. The manageress is not too busy for a few minutes’ gossip across the
counter which separates her from the hall, and screens her off in a
sanctuary of her own. And you may find her cheerful, chatty, kindly, and
willing to please for the mere pleasure of pleasing.
In the monster hotels of London and the great cities, while there may yet
be a “season”--a period of extra pressure and overcrowding--there is no
such slack time as the giant caravanserais of holiday resorts experience.
The pioneer of the many-storeyed, “palatial” hotels, gorgeous with marble
pavements, polished granite columns, lifts and gigantic saloons, was the
“Great Western Railway Hotel” at Paddington.[11] Since that huge pile set
the fashion, hundreds of others, huger and more magnificent, have been
built at Charing Cross, Euston, St. Pancras, Marylebone and other London
termini, with big brothers--in every way as big and well-appointed--in
provincial towns. They are the logical outcome of the times, the direct
successors of the coaching and posting inns that originally came into
existence to supply the wants, in food and lodging, of travellers set down
at the places where the coaches stopped. The final expression of the
coaching hostelry is still to be seen in London, in instructive company
with one of the largest of the railway hotels, in the Strand, where the
“Golden Cross,” built in 1832, looks upon the “Charing Cross Hotel” of
the South-Eastern Railway.
The management of a great modern hotel is no easy thing. It demands the
urbanity of an ambassador, the marketing instincts of a good housewife,
the soldier’s instinct for command, the caution of a financier, and a gift
for judging character. All these things--natural endowments, or the result
of training--must go to the making of an hotel-manager who has, perhaps, a
couple of hundred people on his staff, and hundreds of guests, many of
them unreasonable, to keep satisfied.
It has lately become a commonplace to say that cycling and the motor-car
have peopled the roads again. The old coaching inns have entered upon a
new era of prosperity by reason of the crowds of cyclists who fare forth
from London along the ancient highways, or explore, awheel, the
neighbourhoods of provincial towns. The “last” coach-driver, coach-guard,
and post-boy, killed off regularly by the newspapers, still survive to
witness this new cult of the wheel, and the ultimate ostlers of the
coaching era, a bit stiff in the joints, shaky at the knees, and generally
out of repair, have come forth blinking, from the dark and cavernous
recesses of their mouldering stables, all too large now for the horses
that find shelter there, to take charge of the machines of steel and iron
and rubber that will carry you infinite distances without fatigue.
There are elements of both fun and pathos in the sight of an old ostler
cleaning a muddy bicycle in a coach-yard from which the last coach-horses
departed nearly two generations ago. As a boy, he started life in the
place as a stable-help, and had scarce finished his novitiate when the
railway was opened and the coaches dropped off one by one, after vainly
appealing to the old-fashioned prejudices of their patrons to shun the
trains and still travel by the highways. How he has managed to retain his
place all this time goodness only knows. Perhaps he has been useful in
looking after the horses that work the hotel ’bus to and from the station;
and then the weekly market-day, bringing in the farmers with their gigs
and traps from outlying villages, is still an institution. For such
customers old George had, no doubt, the liveliest contempt in the fine old
free-handed days of coaching; but this class of business, once turned over
cheerfully to second- or third-rate inns, has long been eagerly shared
here.
To watch him with a bicycle you would think the machine a sensitive beast,
ready to kick unless humoured, for as he rubs it down with a cloth he
soothes it with the continuous “’ssh-ssh, ’ssh” which has become
involuntary with him, from long usage; while if indeed it can’t kick, it
succeeds very fairly in barking his shins with those treacherous pedals.
All the persuasive hissing in the world won’t soothe a pedal.
As for the motor-cars which are now finding their way into the old
inn-yards, the old ostler stands fearfully aloof from them, and lets the
driver of the motor look after the machine himself. The New Ostler, who
will be produced by the logic of events in the course of a very few more
years, will be an expert mechanic, and able to tittivate a gear and grind
in a valve of a motor-car, or execute minor repairs to a bicycle, just as
readily as an ostler rubs down or clips a horse.