Produced by Richard Tonsing, Chris Curnow and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD
[Illustration: EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY.]
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN
By CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of “_The Brighton Road_,” “_The Portsmouth Road_,” “_The Dover
Road_,” “_The Bath Road_,” “_The Exeter Road_,” “_The Great North
Road_,” and “_The Norwich Road_”
[Illustration]
_Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures_
_Vol. II. BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD_
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL
LTD. 1902
[_All rights reserved_]
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
PAGE
EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY. _Frontispiece_
BULL RING. (_From a Print after David Cox_) 5
OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL. 13
DUDLEY. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 31
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797. (_After
Rowlandson_) 47
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826. (_From an
Old Print_) 51
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860. (_From a
Contemporary Photograph_) 55
SHIFFNAL. 67
THE COUNCIL HOUSE. 141
THE HONOURABLE THOMAS KENYON. (_From an Old Print_) 153
THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN. 177
LLANGOLLEN. 183
LLANGOLLEN. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R. A._) 187
VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 207
CERNIOGE. 227
THE SWALLOW FALLS. (_From an Old Print_) 247
LLYN OGWEN AND TRIFAEN MOUNTAIN. 255
PENMAENMAWR. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 275
THE OLD LANDING-PLACE ON THE ANGLESEY SHORE. 283
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Vignette: Prince Rupert _Title Page_
List of Illustrations: The Black Country vii
The Holyhead Road 1
The “Hen and Chickens,” 1830 18
The “Old Royal” 24
Wednesbury 37
Old Hill, Tettenhall 59
The Sabbath-breaking Seamstress 60
Snedshill Furnaces 71
Haygate Inn 76
The Wrekin 79
The “Old Wall” 84
Wroxeter Church 85
Atcham Bridge 91
Lord Hill’s Monument 92
The English Bridge 97
Wyle Cop and the “Lion” 107
The “Lion” Yard 132
The Market-Place, Shrewsbury 138
Shelton Oak 144
The Breidden Hills 147
Queen’s Head 156
Offa’s Dyke 176
The Ladies of Llangollen. (_From an Old Print_) 198
Plas Newydd 203
Owain Glyndwr’s Mount 211
Cerrig-y-Druidion 224
The Waterloo Bridge 232
The Old Church, Bettws-y-Coed 234
Sign of the “Royal Oak” 238
Pont-y-Pair 245
Cyfyng Falls 250
Capel Curig 252
The Falls of Ogwen 257
Nant Ffrancon. (_After David Cox_) 258
Nant Ffrancon 260
Penrhyn Castle 263
Lonisaf Toll-House 264
The Penrhyn Arms 266
Penrhyn Castle and Snowdonia, from Beaumaris.
(_After David Cox_) 278
Deserted Stables, Menai Village 290
The Menai Bridge and the Isle of Benglas 291
The Anglesey Column 296
The Britannia Bridge 299
Near Mona Inn 303
Llangristiolus 304
Caer Ceiliog 306
The South Stack. (_After T. Creswick, R.A._) 323
Holyhead Mountain 325
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD
BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD
MILES
Birmingham (General Post Office) 109¼
Hockley 110½
Soho 111¼
Handsworth 111¾
West Bromwich 114½
Hilltop 116
Wednesbury 117¼
Moxley 118½
Bilston 119½
Wolverhampton 122¼
Chapel Ash 122¾
Tettenhall 124
The Wergs 125¼
Boningale 129½
Whiston Cross 130¼
Shiffnal 134¼
Prior’s Lee 137½
Ketley 139
Ketley Railway Station 139½
(Junction of Watling Street with Holyhead Road.)
Wellington (“Cock”) 140½
Haygate 141½
Burcot Toll-House 143
Norton 146½
Tern Bridge 147½
(Cross River Tern.)
Atcham 148¼
(Cross River Severn.)
Shrewsbury (Abbey Foregate) 151¼
(Cross River Severn.)
Shrewsbury (Market House) 152
Shrewsbury (Welsh Bridge and Frankwell) 152¼
(Cross River Severn.)
Shelton Oak 154
Bicton 154½
Montford Bridge 156¾
(Cross River Severn.)
Nesscliff 160½
West Felton 165¼
Queen’s Head 166¼
Oswestry 170
Gobowen 172¾
Chirk 175
(Cross River Ceiriog.)
Whitehurst Toll-House 177
Vron Cysylltan 179¾
Llangollen 182½
Berwyn Railway Station 184¼
Glyndyfrdwy 188
Carrog 189
Corwen 192½
(Cross River Dee.)
Maerdy Post Office 196
Pont-y-Glyn 197¾
Tynant 198¼
Cerrig-y-Druidion 202
Glasfryn 204½
Cernioge 205¾
Pentre Voelas 207¾
Bettws-y-Coed 214½
(Cross River Conway)
Swallow Falls 216
Cyfyng Falls 218½
Tan-y-Bwlch 219
Capel Curig 220
Llyn Ogwen 224
Ogwen Falls} 225
Pass of Nant Ffrancon}
Tyn-y-Maes 228
Bethesda 229¼
Llandegai 232¾
Bangor (Cathedral) 234½
Upper Bangor 236
Menai Bridge 237
(Cross Menai Straits)
Menai Village 237¼
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch 239¼
Gaerwen 242½
Pentre Berw (Holland Arms) 243
Llangristiolus 245½
Mona 247½
Gwalchmai 249¾
Bryngwran 252½
Caer Ceiliog 255
Valley 256
Stanley Sands 256¼
(Cross Stanley Sands Viaduct to Holy Island)
Holyhead (Admiralty Pier) 260½
THE OLD ROAD FROM MENAI VILLAGE TO HOLYHEAD
MILES
Menai Village 237¼
Braint 239½
Ceint 242½
Llangefni 244¾
Bodffordd 247
Gwyndû and Glanyrafon 249¾
Llynfaes 250¼
Trefor 251¼
Bodedern 254
Llanyngenedl 255¼
Valley and Four-Mile Bridge 258¼
Trearddur Bay 261½
(Cross Causeway over Straits to
Holy Island)
Holyhead 263½
[Illustration: The Holyhead Road]
BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD
I
There are said to be no fewer than a hundred and forty different ways of
spelling the name of Birmingham, all duly vouched for by old usage; but
it is not proposed in these pages to recount them, or to follow the
arguments of those who have contended for its derivation from
“Bromwicham.” It is singular that in the first mention we have of the
place, in Domesday Book, it is spelt “Bermingham,” almost exactly as it
is to-day, and this lends much authority to the view that we get the
place-name from an ancient Saxon tribe or family of Beormingas.
When the original Beormingas, the Sons of Beorm (whoever he may have
been), settled here, in the dim Saxon past, they founded better than
they knew; but they chose a hill-top, a place where no river runs,
unless we choose thus to dignify the little stream called the Rea. This
lack of watercourses mattered nothing at all to mediæval Birmingham, but
when, in spite of all disabilities, the place rose into commercial
importance, the want began to be severely felt, and herculean have been
the efforts in modern times to effect a proper water-supply.
Little but scattered mention is heard of Birmingham and its smiths
before the Civil War, but when that struggle broke out, they were heard
of to some purpose. Its 4000 inhabitants in 1643 were Puritans to a man,
and warlike. They furnished 15,000 sword-blades for Cromwell’s troops,
and at a convenient opportunity waylaid the King’s carriage and seized
it, his furniture, and his plate. For these enormities Prince Rupert
came later from Daventry and punished them severely in a battle on Camp
Hill, overlooking the town. Many Birmingham men were slain that day, and
eighty houses burnt; the whole affair piteously related in a tract of
that time called “The Bloody Prince; or, a Declaration of the Most
Cruell Practises of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers, in
fighting against God and the true Ministers of his Church.” A woodcut
intended to portray that sanguinary Prince appears on the cover, with
Birmingham flaming furiously in the background; Daventry in the rear.
The rest of the Cavaliers appear to be manœuvring somewhere else; at any
rate, Rupert is alone, on horseback, with a mild expression of
countenance and a big pistol.
Twenty-two years later the Plague depopulated the town, but in another
twenty-three years it had grown to double its former size, and by 1791
numbered between 70,000 and 80,000. Yet it had no Parliamentary
representation until 1832.
That Birmingham is seated on a hill is not so evident to railway
travellers, but he who comes to it by road is well advised of the fact
at Bull Ring, where the hilly entrance confronts him. Bull Ring is old
Birmingham of a hundred years and more ago; the nucleus of the town, and
little altered since David Cox drew his picture of the market there. The
market remains, but there has come about since his day an extraordinary
popular appreciation of the beauty of flowers, so that, instead of the
fowls pictured largely in his view, the crowded stalls are radiant with
blooms of every sort; cut flowers, and growing plants.
Here stands, as ever, St. Martin’s, the mother-church of Birmingham,
where the ancient manorial lords of the place lie; those de Berminghams
whose last representative was choused out of his rights in 1545. Here is
that statue of Nelson for whose proper cleansing a patriotic tradesman
left by will sixpence a week; and here occurred the Wesley riots of 1742
and the Chartist Riot of 1839. When Charles Wesley sought to preach, the
people set the church bells a-ringing to drown his voice, and then began
to pelt him with dirt and turnips; but the political riot was a much
more serious affair, resulting in the pillaging of shops and houses, and
immense damage.
II
In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one
street, yet that street was full of smiths, making knives and “all
manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and a
great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by
smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.”
Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but
it has largely changed its trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of
the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at
Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a
pin’s head, and in the murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is
pre-eminent.
“She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the
benefactress of the universal man, from the crowned head to the savage
of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their
governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to
the savage, guns warranted to hurt no one but he who uses them.
Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion too;
for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,”
is no longer restricted to those two materials, by reason of Birmingham
industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by wholesale, and at
extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks
of her hundred churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary
funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands, and thus help to
discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted
Mumbo-Jumbos they export.
[Illustration: BULL RING. _From a Print after David Cox._]
“Birmingham,” said Burke, a hundred years ago, “is the toyshop of
Europe.” Fancy articles in steel and paste; buckles, sword-hilts,
buttons, and a thousand other trifles were made, for home or export;
among them the sham, or “Brummagem” jewellery, and the base coin that
long cast a slur upon the town. Things coming from Birmingham were in
those times rightly suspect. One of its industries was the making of
“silver” buckles of a villainous kind of cheap white metal, called from
its nature “soft tommy.” A tale is told of the owner of the factory
where this precious stuff was made up, going through one of the
workshops and hearing a workman cursing the man who would chance to wear
the pair of buckles he was making.
“Why,” asked the astonished employer, “do you do that?”
“Well,” replied the workman, “whoever wears these buckles is bound to
curse the man that made them, and so I thought I would be the first.”
Those were the days when it was said that if you gave a guinea and a
copper kettle to a Birmingham manufacturing jeweller he would turn you
out a hundred guineas’ worth of jewellery!
Things are very different now. The trades of Birmingham seem almost
countless in their number; many of them conducted on a scale large
enough for each one to suffice a small township of workers.
Brass-founding, tube-making, gun-smithing, pin-making, wire-drawing,
screw-turning, gold-smithing, electro-plating, tinplate working, coining
(in the legitimate kind), steel pen-making—these are but a few of the
countless industries to whose skirts clings for livelihood a population
of half a million.
When Mr. Pickwick visited Birmingham, he repaired to the “Old Royal”
hotel. Where is the “Old Royal” now? Ask of the winds—nay, consult the
histories of Birmingham, and you shall learn. But if the old hotel and
many of its fellows be gone, at least the description of the entrance to
the town holds good, and “the dingy hue of every object visible, the
murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick-dust” are phrases that
awake echoes of recollection in the breasts of those who know the town
of old: but “the dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling
chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around,” is not so
descriptive of the Birmingham of to-day. For fully realising that
picture, and the added touches of the “deep red glow of furnace fires,
the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons laden with clashing
rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods,” one must journey to Dudley,
where such things may be seen and heard in a hellish crescendo:
Birmingham has largely put those things in the background. In Mr.
Pickwick’s time “the hum of labour resounded from every house, lights
gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the
whirr of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls, and
the din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead, heavy clanking
of engines was the harsh music that arose from every quarter”; but most
of these things are nowadays decently hid in purlieus remote, or masked
from the chief streets by the towering modern buildings of hotels,
banks, assurance offices, and all the hundred-and-one parasitical things
of a limited liability age, that fasten like vermin on the producing
body.
Birmingham became a City on January 11th, 1889. It is a City of two fine
streets, surrounded by many miles of formless, featureless, dull and
commonplace (or, at their worst, hideous and squalid) houses, workshops,
and factories of every size and description. New Street was only new at
a period over a century ago. Corporation Street was formed in 1871 by
boldly cutting through a mass of slums. In those two thoroughfares, and
the open space by the Town Hall to which they both lead, is included
almost everything of architectural note. In their course are to be found
the best and most attractive shops, and the principal banks and
commercial offices. The rest is merely of a local and provincial
character.
The geographical, municipal, and political centre is, of course, that
spot where the Town Hall stands, a grim and massive building in the
Corinthian style, with that air of age and permanency about its
rusticated basement, as though when the Anglo-Saxons came they had found
it here, the relic of an ancient civilisation. But the Town Hall can lay
no claim to antiquity, built as it was in 1832. Around it, in an open
space of a singularly irregular shape, are the General Post Office, the
Art Gallery, the great Free Library, and other municipal buildings
proper to a city so rich and prosperous; and, scattered about the
pavements, a miscellaneous collection of statues, facing towards New
Street Station, as though they formed some kind of deputation assembled
there to welcome visitors. It is a very oddly assorted crowd, captained
by Queen Victoria, and formed of such varied items as Joseph Priestley
(who with his burning glass looks as though he were critically examining
a bad coin), Peel, John Skirrow, Wright, George Dawson, James Watt, and
Sir Josiah Mason. In the little corner called Chamberlain Square the
curious will find a monument to the energy and enterprise (the
“pushfulness” as those who love him not might call it) of Joseph
Chamberlain, without whose work and initiative Birmingham would not own,
as it does to-day, its gas, water, and tramways, and could not show such
evidences of progress in new and handsome streets and model government.
It is a far cry from the Red Radical days of Birmingham’s great Mayor in
1874 to those of the Colonial Secretary, a pillar of the Empire and the
darling of Duchesses. Perhaps no other man has, politically, travelled
so far, estranged so many friends, or made such strangely alien
alliances, with the result that his sheaf has been exalted over his
brethren these years past. Hence the extreme bitterness of the hatred
his name arouses in certain circles.
The memorial to his work on the comparatively small stage of Birmingham,
before he trod the boards of Westminster, takes the form of a Gothic
canopied fountain, with a profile portrait medallion, whereon one may
trace in the aggressive, sharp-pointed nose a striking likeness to
William Pitt, and that suggestion of the crafty fox the venomous
caricaturists of a later day have seized and used to such advantage.
III
Sir William Dugdale, in his diary, under date of July 16th, 1679,
mentions the first Birmingham coach we have any notice of. He says, “I
came out of London by the stage-coach of Bermicham to Banbury.” That is
all we learn of specifically Birmingham coaches until 1731, when
Rothwell’s began to ply to London in two days and a half, according to
the old coaching bill still preserved.
Afterwards came the Flying Coach of 1742, followed in 1758 by an
“improved Birmingham Coach,” with the legend “Friction Annihilated”
prominent on the axle-boxes. This the _Annual Register_ declared to be
“perhaps the most useful invention in mechanics this age has produced.”
Much virtue lingered in that “perhaps,” for nothing more was heard of
that wonderful device.
In 1812 the Post Office established a Birmingham Mail, and great was the
local rejoicing on May 26th, when, attended by eight mail-guards in full
uniform, adorned with blue ribbons, it paraded the streets. After two
hours’ procession, when coachman and guards were feasted with wine,
biscuits, and sandwiches, the Mail set out for London from the “Swan”
Hotel, amid the ringing of St. Martin’s bells and the cheering of the
assembled thousands.
Eight years later it was estimated that Birmingham owned eighty-four
coaches. Forty of these were daily, and most plied on bye-roads.
[Illustration: OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL.]
BIRMINGHAM
STAGE-COACH,
In Two _Days_ and a half; begins _May_ the 24th,
1731.
SETS out from the _Swan-Inn_ in _Birmingham_,
every _Monday_ at six a Clock in the Morning,
through _Warwick_, _Banbury_ and _Alesbury_,
to the _Red Lion Inn_ in _Aldersgate street_,
_London_, every _Wednesday_ Morning: And returns
from the said _Red Lion Inn_ every _Thursday_
Morning at five a Clock the same Way to the
_Swan-Inn_ in _Birmingham_ every _Saturday_, at
21 Shillings each Passenger, and 18 Shillings
from _Warwick_, who has liberty to carry 14
Pounds in Weight, and all above to _pay One
Penny a Pound_.
Perform d (if God permit)
By Nicholas Rothwell.
_The_ Weekly Waggon _sets out every Tuesday
from the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham, to the_
Red Lion Inn _aforesaid, every Saturday, and
returns from the said Inn every Monday, to
the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham every
Thursday._
_Note. By the said_ Nicholas Rothwell _of_
Warwick, _all Persons may be furnished with
a By Coach Chariot, Chaise or Hearse, with a
Mourning Coach and able Horses, to any Part
of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates And
also Saddle Horses to be had._
* * * * *
From 1822 to 1826 Birmingham witnessed a great improvement in its
coaches. Waddell owned the two most prominent yards in the town, but had
many ardent competitors. In 1822 the “Tally-ho” was established, shortly
to be followed by the hotly competing “Independent,” “Real,” and
“Patent” Tally-hoes. Supposed to keep a pace of ten miles an hour, they
no sooner left the town behind than they started racing, to the terror
of the nervous and the delight of the sporting passengers. Annually, on
the First of May, they were spurred to superhuman and super-equine
exertions, and, we are told, covered the hundred and eight miles between
Birmingham and London “under seven hours.” How much under is not stated,
but as an even seven hours gives us fifteen miles an hour, including
stops, the pace must have been furious. Harry Tresslove, the coachman of
the “Independent Tally Ho,” always galloped the five-mile stage between
Dunchurch and the “Black Dog,” Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, in eighteen
minutes.
The existence of all stage-coaches being furiously competitive, they
could not afford to be quiet and plain, like the Mails. “Once I
remember,” says De Quincey, “being on the top of the Holyhead Mail
between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham,
some ‘Tally-ho’ or ‘Highflyer,’ all flaunting with green and gold, came
up alongside of us. What a contrast with our royal simplicity of form
and colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark
ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the Imperial arms,
but emblazoned in proportion as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal
of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering,
rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty State; whilst the
beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting,
perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its sprawling
flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For
some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side—a piece of
familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently
Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a
desperate intention of leaving us behind. ‘Do you see _that_?’ I said to
the coachman. ‘I see,’ was his short answer. He was wide awake, yet he
waited longer than seemed prudent, for the horses of our audacious
opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive
was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown
before he froze it. When that seemed right he unloosed, or, to speak by
a stronger word, he _sprang_ his unknown resources: he slipped our Royal
horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, after the affrighted game.
How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they
had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the
physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely, the King’s
Name. Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into
the rear with so lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself
the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a
shattering blast of triumph that was really too painfully full of
derision.”
The “Emerald” was a fast night coach between London and Birmingham,
“driven,” says Colonel Corbet, in his book, _An Old Coachman’s Chatter_,
“by Harry Lee, whose complexion was of a very peculiar colour, almost
resembling that of a bullock’s liver—the fruit of strong potations of
‘early purl’ or ‘dog’s nose,’ taken after the exertions of the night and
before going to bed.”
The last coach put on the road between London and Birmingham, we are
told, on the same authority, was in 1837. It was a very fast day mail,
started to run to Birmingham and then on to Crewe, where it transferred
mails and passengers to the railway for Liverpool. It was horsed by
Sherman, and timed at twelve miles an hour.
Early or late in the coaching era robbery flourished. In the opening
years the coaches, as already abundantly noted, were held up by the
conventional figure of the highwayman; but, as civilisation advanced,
methods changed, and, instead of bestriding a high-mettled steed at the
cross-roads, there to await the coach, the thief, in concert with a
chosen band, booked seats, and during a long journey cut open the boot
from the inside of the vehicle, and having safely extracted the bank
parcels and other valuables, made off from the next stopping-place with
ease and complete safety. The advantages of this method were so obvious
that coaching history teems with examples of such robberies. Very often,
however, the booty was in notes, and difficult to turn to any account.
Hauls such as that described in _Aris’s Birmingham Gazette_ of February
17th, 1823, were rare. It mentioned: “A parcel containing 600
sovereigns, directed to Messrs. Attwood and Spooner, was stolen last
week from one of the London coaches, on its way to Birmingham.” The
bankers never saw the colour of their money again.
IV
Birmingham, says De Quincey, was, under the old dynasty of stage-coaches
and post-chaises, the centre of our travelling system. He did not like
Birmingham. How many they are who do not! But, look you, he gives his
reasons, and acknowledges that circumstances, and not Birmingham wholly,
were the cause of _his_ dislike. “Noisy, gloomy and dirty” he calls the
town. “Gloomy,” because, having passed through it a hundred times, those
occasions were always and invariably (less once), days and nights of
rain. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred; what a monstrous proportion!
And even so, the hundredth was just one fleeting glimpse of sunshine, as
the Mail whirled him through; so that he—with a parting sarcasm—had not
time to see whether that sunshine was, in fact, real, or whether it
might not possibly be some gilt Brummagen counterfeit; “For you know,”
says he, “men of Birmingham, that you _can_ counterfeit—such is your
cleverness—all things in Heaven and earth, from Jove’s thunderbolts down
to a tailor’s bodkin.”
[Illustration: THE “HEN AND CHICKENS,” 1830.]
De Quincey put up, as most travellers of his time were used to do, at
the famous “Hen and Chickens”; the enormous “Hen and Chickens.” “Never
did I sleep there, but I had reason to complain that the discreet hen
did not gather her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till
two or three, I was kept waking by those who were retiring; and about
three commenced the morning functions of the porter, or of ‘boots,’ or
of ‘under-boots,’ who began their rounds for collecting the several
freights for the Highflyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all
points of the compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense
establishments) blundered into my room with that appalling, ‘Now, sir,
the horses are coming out.’ So that rarely, indeed, have I happened to
_sleep_ in Birmingham.”
The old Hen in High Street, ceased very many years ago to lay golden
eggs, and her Chickens were dispersed, to be gathered under a new roof
in 1798. The first notice of the original “Hen and Chickens” appeared in
an advertisement of December 14th, 1741. In 1770, a certain “Widow
Thomas” kept it, and in 1784 one Richard Lloyd. When he died, his widow
carried on the business until the expiration of the lease in 1798. This
lady, Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, was one of those enterprising and business-like
women who—like Mrs. Ann Nelson and Mrs. Mountain—left so great a mark
upon that age. She was not content to renew her lease of the old house,
for which she had hitherto paid £100 a year rent; but, with a keen
appreciation of Birmingham improvements, purchased a plot of land in the
newly formed New Street, and, some time before the lease of the old
house expired, began to build a much larger and imposing structure,
“from the designs of James Wyatt, Esq.” It was one of the first houses
in Birmingham to be built of stone, instead of brick. To this she
removed in 1798, and named it “Lloyd’s Hotel and Hen and Chickens Inn.”
Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, who to many of her more irreverent guests typified the
old Hen, sold her business and leased the inn five years later, April
16th, 1804, to William Waddell, of the “Castle,” High Street. He was the
son of a London oil merchant, and years before had married Miss
Ibberson, daughter of the proprietor of the “George and Blue Boar,”
Holborn.
It was during Waddell’s reign that the “Hen and Chickens” saw its
greatest prosperity. His rule extended from 1804 until 1836, ending only
with his death in that year; and not only covered the best years of the
coaching era, but almost saw its close. His was the greatest figure in
Birmingham’s coaching business. In 1830 he had purchased the freehold of
the “Hen and Chickens” and about the same time bought the “Swan,” and
with his son Thomas carried on a general coaching business and
contracting for the Mails.
In 1819 thirty coaches left the “Hen and Chickens” yard daily; by 1838
the ultimate year, the number was thirty-two. But by far the greatest
number started from the “Swan,” for in 1838 no fewer than sixty-one
coaches hailed from thence.
On Waddell’s decease the freeholds of both the houses were sold, and
bought in by members of the family; that of the “Hen and Chickens”
realising £14,500, and the “Swan,” £6,520. The beds alone of the “Hen
and Chickens” were then stated to bring in £800 per annum. The “Hen and
Chickens” was then leased by Devis, of the “Coach and Horses,” Worcester
Street, at a rent of £600. He shortly afterwards sublet it for £700 to
Mrs. Room, a widowed innkeeper, who remarried and gave it up in 1843,
after a term of seven years, when Devis resumed.
These appear to have been ill years for the famous old house. Coaching
and posting business had decayed, and the commercial growth of
Birmingham did not make amends for the loss of the good business done
with the nobility and gentry who resorted here in the old days of the
road, but now travelled through by train. Devis, accordingly disappears,
and the Waddell family, finding difficulties in getting a tenant, put in
a manager, Joseph Shore by name. A tenant was at length found in Frank
Smith, who had long been a druggist in New Street, but was now ready to
try his fortune as hotel-keeper. His rule extended from 1849 to 1867,
and was then changed for that of Oldfield, who reigned until 1878, when
the old fittings of the hotel were sold and its career brought to a
close. The end of the building, was, however, not yet, and the “Hen and
Chickens” continued in a modified form, until 1895. Lately it has been
pulled down, and a tall, showy “Hen and Chickens Hotel and Restaurant,”
in a Victorian Renaissance style and liver-coloured terra-cotta erected
on the site; a complete change from the old house, once looked upon as
an ornament to New Street, but become at last, owing to the rebuilding
carried on all around, altogether out of date and, by contrast, heavy
and gloomy. Its severe architecture had been frilled and furbelowed at
different times—a portico built out over the pavement in 1830, and a
stone attic storey added in more recent years, with a saucy turret at
one end—but, however comfortable within, the exterior suggested a bank
or some sort of public institution, rather than the warmth and good
cheer of an hostelry, and so it was swept away.
“The Fowls” as Young Birmingham delighted to call the “Hen and
Chickens,” housed of course many notable persons, but not those of the
most exclusive kind. The “Royal,” where no coaches came, was in those
days the first house. In later days, however, somewhere about 1874, the
“Hen and Chickens” lodged the Grand Duke of Hesse, and never ceased to
boast the fact. Absurdly much was made of him. He walked on special
carpets, dined off plate that had graced no plebeian board, and came and
went between rows of servants frozen at a reverential angle of
forty-five degrees. The management even went to the length of placing
likenesses of his wife on his dressing-table, to make it seem more
home-like. Excellent creatures! How touching a belief they cherished in
the prevalence of the domestic virtues, even in the august circumstances
of a Grand Duke!
V
Although the “Hen and Chickens” had so early been removed to New Street,
Bull Ring and High Street continued to be the chief coaching
thoroughfares. There stood the “Swan,” the “Dog” afterwards known as the
“Nelson,” the “Castle,” “Albion,” and “St. George’s Tavern.” In Bull
Street was the “Saracen’s Head.”
But the most exclusive and aristocratic of all was the “Royal,”
afterwards known as the “Old Royal.” This was the house mentioned in the
“Pickwick Papers,” where the waiter, having at last got an order for
something, “imperceptibly melted away.” It stood in Temple Row, and long
arrogated to itself, before ever the title of “Royal” came into use, the
name of “The Hotel.” Other hotels there were, but this proud house
professed ignorance of them. It was originally built, with its Assembly
Rooms, in 1772, and set forth, as a special attraction to its patrons,
the statement that no coaches ever approached to disturb the holy quiet
of Temple Row.
It was about 1825 that something of this seclusion was sloughed off, and
the business transferred to the old Portugal House in New Street, where,
with two additional wings, it blossomed forth as the “New Royal.” Its
old supremacy now began to be challenged by the newly established
“Stork,” in Old Square, then a quiet and dignified retreat, very
different from the same place to-day, with its flashing shops, electric
lights, and tramways; nothing now old about it, excepting its name. The
“Stork,” of course, suffered something at the hands and pens of
witlings, just as did the “Pelican” at Speenhamland, on the Bath Road!
and to make humorous reference to its “long bill” was the custom,
whether the charges were high or moderate.
[Illustration: THE “OLD ROYAL.”]
But the days of the old hotels, exclusive or otherwise, were in sight
when the railway came. Another sort replaced them, and, although the
kind in its turn has gone out of favour, examples may yet be found. Who
does not know the typical hotel of, say, the Fifties and the Sixties,
that abominably draughty type of building, all cold would-be
magnificence and interminable flights of stairs, with lofty rooms,
apparently built for a Titanic race fifteen feet in height, and, by
consequence, never warm, and never with an air of being fully furnished.
That such as these should ever have replaced the cosy old houses can
only be explained on the score of fashion, for there are illogical and
senseless fashions in architecture, as in everything else.
The railway era commenced in Birmingham with the opening of the Grand
Junction and the London and Birmingham Railways in 1837 and 1838. The
early railway engines and carriages, and, indeed, everything connected
with those days of the rail, are curious nowadays, and not the least
amusing are the comments then made on travelling by steam. “A railway
conveyance,” said one, writing in favour of the coaches, “is a
locomotive prison, and, the novelty of it having subsided, we shall
seldom hear of a gentleman condescending to assume this hasty mode of
transit.” That was a very bad shot at prophecy, but it was followed by a
perfect howler in the way of error. “It has already been proved,” says
this person, “that railways are not calculated to carry heavy goods.”
An early London and Birmingham train was an odd spectacle; the engine
with immensely tall funnel, and a huge domed fire-box; the carriages
modelled on the lines of stage-coaches, and their panels painted with
high-sounding names. Luggage was carried on the roof, and the first
guards rode outside with it, until the cinders and red-hot coals from
the engine half blinded them and destroyed their uniform, when they
quitted that absurd position and travelled inside. Early railway
journeys were penitential for travellers, for, instead of rolling
smoothly over wooden sleepers, the granite slabs to which the
fish-bellied rails of that time were riveted, produced a continual
jarring and a deafening rattle. Fares too, with less than a quarter of
the accommodation now provided, were almost double what they are now,
and the breaking-down of engines, and all manner of awkward accidents,
disposed many to think a revival of coaches probable.
VI
The way out of Birmingham is dismal and unpromising, by way of
Livery Street and Great Hampton Street. At the end of that
thoroughfare—formerly known as Hangman’s Lane—Birmingham is left
behind; but some seventeen miles of continuous streets, ill-paved
and hilly, and infested with tramways, yet lie before the pilgrim.
Livery Street, so-called (at a hazard) because its granite setts jolt so
unmercifully the cyclist who is rash enough to ride along it, gives an
outlook on to close-packed, mean, and frowsy little courts and
thoroughfares with grotesquely commonplace or absurd names—among them
“Mary Ann Street.” Here and along Great Hampton Street, where the smuts
from Snow Hill Station and those from adjacent factories now fall
thickest, the Birmingham of little more than a century ago ended, and
gave place to the open heath of Soho, enclosed only in 1793. “At the
second milestone,” says an old Birmingham guide-book, “on the left, when
you have passed through the turnpike, is Soho Factory, a magnificent
pile of buildings”; but that great workshop of Boulton and Watt has long
since disappeared and the turnpike itself forgot; while Soho Heath is
covered, far and near, with streets of a terribly monotonous kind—as
like one another as the peas in a pea-pod. The only landmarks and bright
spots are public-houses. Not inns for travellers, but gin-palaces for
boozers, where plate-glass, gas-lamps the size of balloons, and florid
architecture give the inhabitants of these wilds their only idea of
style and distinction, and that a mistaken one. All else is dull and
grey. Such are Hockley and Soho, and such is Handsworth.
Between those two last Warwickshire is left behind, and Staffordshire
entered—“Staffordshire ful of Queenys,” as an old writer has it. What he
meant by that, no commentator appears yet to have explained, but it
sounds complimentary.
The “elegant village” of Handsworth, as it is called by the author of
that old guide-book already quoted, was built over the great surrounding
commons, enclosed in 1798. That extraordinary person seems to look upon
this enclosing and filching of public property as virtuous and
altogether praiseworthy, and talks with unctuous satisfaction of “at
least 150 respectable houses erected on land which lay formerly entirely
waste. Plots of land”—he continues, with greasy delight—“have been sold
from £200 to £1,000 an acre.”
He tells the same tale of the waste lands of West Bromwich, enclosed in
1801, and realising similar sums. These long thoroughfares, therefore,
are nearly all built upon stolen property, and the rents of the houses
should by right go into municipal or imperial coffers, instead of
private pockets.
West Bromwich, the greater part of whose site was a rabbit-warren so
late as 1800, is a continuation of this weary street. Here, perhaps, it
was that Mr. Bull, “an eminent tea merchant,” while journeying on
horseback from Wolverhampton to London in October, 1742, was overtaken
by “a single Man on Horseback, whom he took for a Gentleman. After they
had rode three or four miles,” the account continues, “the highwayman
then ordered him to deliver, which Mr. Bull took to be in Jest; but he
told him that he was in Earnest, and accordingly robb’d him of about
four Guineas and his Watch, and afterwards rode with him three miles,
till they came near a Town, when the Highwayman rode off.”
West Bromwich is now a busy ironworking town, with newly opened
collieries and a population of 90,000. Just as the cuttle-fish obscures
its surroundings by exuding an inky fluid, so do West Bromwich and
Dudley, away to the left, belch forth clouds of smoke, and between them
till the sky with a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. The
road, running as it does at a considerable height, commands a good view
of the clustered towns and districts of the Black Country, with the
sullen-looking canals, collieries, blast-furnaces, and a hundred other
kinds of the commercial enterprises of this wonderful hive of industry.
Dudley, with its ancient castle on a hill-top, wreathed in inky fumes,
and Dudley Port down below, with rows of brick and tile works spouting
smoke so black and dense as to look almost solid, form the centre; with
Tipton, Oldbury, Priestfield, and Swan Village as satellites offering
their contributions to the general stock of grime and obscurity. At
night all this is changed, and the chimneys that in daylight seemed only
to smoke all become tipped with tongues of fire, casting a lurid glow
upon earth and sky. Turner has left, in his weird picture of Dudley, a
characteristic view of Black Country scenery; and Dickens, in the morbid
pages of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, has described its darker and more
repellent side. It is a country where every effort of Nature to put
forth leaves and grass is thwarted. Land not built upon has been
ransacked for mineral wealth and turned inside out, with the result that
on the shale and debris only the scantiest and most innutritious of
weeds can find a livelihood—and weeds commonly thrive where nothing else
can exist.
VII
At Hilltop, where the rattling and belching steam tramcars branch off
for Dudley, a descent is made by Holloway Bank to Wednesbury—the
“Wodensburgh,” as it is thought to have been, of Saxon times, and the
“Wedgebury” of modern local parlance. Wednesbury begins at the bottom of
this descent at Wednesbury Bridge, where the filthy stream called the
river Tame trickles between slimy mud-banks under the brick arches built
by Telford in 1826; but the end of one town and the beginning of another
in the Black Country, where the streets between half a dozen townships
are continuous, can only be noted with certainty by the borough
surveyors concerned. There are still on the West Bromwich side of the
bridge a few queerly gabled old cottages—kept white by dint of constant
recourse to the whitewash pail and brush—that show by their sunken
position how the road once dipped to the ford, before the bridge was
built.
[Illustration: DUDLEY _After J. W. M. Turner, R.A._]
Wednesbury is not, any more than its neighbours, a place of beauty; but
it is of far more remote origin than most, and, though it be dirty and
foul, and surrounded by waste lands like a vast congeries of domestic
dustbins, has a story going back to Saxon times, and the highly romantic
connection with Woden, the war-god, already hinted at. The old parish
church, conspicuous on the hill that forms the site of Wednesbury, is
beautiful within, even though as black as your hat outside, and,
moreover, dates as to its foundations from the Norman period. Those
foundations have an unusual interest, built as they are of the material
called “pockstone,” which is nothing less than surface-clay baked and
burnt by the underground fires that have raged at intervals from time
immemorial in the coal-beds underlying the town and its surroundings.
For Wednesbury is, or was, one great coalfield, and long before its
modern iron and steel trades had developed, was a place of collieries.
Many of them are exhausted now, but there were times when to dig in
one’s back-yard was to open up a private coal-mine and find fuel for the
seeking, so near the surface did the coal-measures lie. Even to this
day, when the streets are “up” for new gas or water pipes, the
excavating discloses coal of sorts: not perhaps equal to the best
Wallsend, but still coal that will burn and give out heat, and as such
eagerly pounced upon by the poor little ragamuffins of the town, who
come forth with bags and baskets and aprons to freely fill the domestic
scuttle.
The first coal-getting at Wednesbury was by “openworks,” just as gravel
is dug, or the brick-earth of brickfields is excavated. These
“openworks” are very ancient and mostly disused, and even in places
where they still yield coal, it is of inferior quality. To these
succeeded the “bell-pits” of the middle period, and the deep levels of
more modern times. In all this succession of years the underground
conflagrations continued, and the parish registers contain many
references to them; for example, when on “June y^e 20th, 1731,” a
collier was “most dismally scorched and roasted to death by ye Hellish
Wildfire.” Even in recent years these fires, thought to be caused by
spontaneous combustion, have broken out. Such was the one that burned
from 1894 until 1898, and not only destroyed a great part of the King’s
Hill Road, but caused the death of a watchman, who fell into one of the
gaping holes and was burnt to death.
Wednesbury’s blast-furnaces, foundries, iron and brass and steel tube
works, and manufacture of railway wheels and axles support the place,
now that coal is not so plentifully got. The quantities of railway
material may not surprise one, but feelings of astonishment arise on
contemplation of the tubing produced—tubing for bicycles, bedsteads,
water-pipes, gas-mains, and for many other purposes known only to
specialists in these matters; tubing from gauges as slender as a
lead-pencil to a size ample enough for one to crawl into, if so minded.
All the world, it might be thought from a sight of these things, has an
insatiable appetite for tubes!
The coal trade is not so completely exhausted but that pit-men are a
common enough sight in Wednesbury, and pit-girls too, or rather pit-bank
lasses; gentle creatures who sort and pick the coal over at the pit’s
mouth, and have muscles strong enough to fell an ox. It is not known
when a lass of the pit-bank ceases to be a lass; probably they always
remain so, just as postboys were, and “Cape boys” are, nominally
juveniles for the term of their natural lives. Let it not, however, be
thought that the pit-lass is being made fun of: it is done here in print
as little as it is likely to be within reach of her brawny arm.
A curious revival of old customs here is the trade of the “coal-jagger,”
a peripatetic retailer of coals to the poorer classes. The moneyed man
may have his coals in by the ton, but the working-man buys his by the
pony or donkey load of the jagger, who may be seen in the streets
leading a patient and depressed animal hitched up to three or more odd
little three-wheeled trucks, coupled together like a miniature
mineral-train. Each truck contains about a sackful of coals, offered
direct from the pit’s mouth at a price low enough to suit modest weekly
exchequers.
VIII
Down-hill from Wednesbury Market Place, and thence rising to Cock Heath
and Moxley, the road runs between rubbish-heaps; a scene of desolation
that, however ill it may be to live near to, makes a not unpleasing
picture in a sketch, taken at a backward glance, with the town grouped
on a curving sky-line. Moxley, perhaps, hints at decayed trade in the
sign of the mean little “Struggler” inn.
[Illustration: WEDNESBURY.]
As for Bilston, where is the man heroic enough to sound its praises?
Passengers by railway, passing through Bilston, see only deserted
slag-heaps, cinder mounds, and a general area of desolation, but the
road reveals Bilston in an added squalor of grimy houses and frowzy
courts. The collieries and ironworks that created the town are things of
the past, and their ruins only remain to tell of what it was a century
ago. Surely never was there a more second-hand looking place than
Bilston is now, with its long street apparently divided between
old-clothes shops, “marine stores,” pawnbrokers’ establishments, and
public-houses. Even Bilston gritstone, once prized for the making of
grindstones, is under a cloud, and the old saying, that “a Dudley man
and a Bilston grindstone may be found all the world over,” takes a new
significance in the fact that the enterprising native, if he wishes
scope for his enterprise, must go forth in the world to places as yet
unexhausted. But the decay of the town perhaps dates more certainly from
the fearful times of the cholera epidemic of 1882, when Bilston suffered
more severely than any other place; when so many died that help had to
be brought from other districts to bury them; and when hundreds of
children were left fatherless and motherless in the stricken town. Of a
population numbering 14,492, no fewer than 742 died.