become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified
churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more
secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose
spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the
promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the
far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered
between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a
considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and
twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still
Croydon grows.
In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620
they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to
be a "very obscure and darke place." Archbishop Abbot "expounded" it by
felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the
headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of
the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.
The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of
progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is
still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances
that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. It
_was_ the North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country
site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy
Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last
few years; but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a
busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks
"improvement"; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and
the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good
Whitgift's noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have
advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane
among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better
than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play
monkey-tricks--when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the
Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the
will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.
Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, "The
Hospital of the Holy Trinity," inscribed high up on the wall, seems
strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.
There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, the
_opposite_ side of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one
standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which
should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It
is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital
is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.
It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character
of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and
as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the
outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury
and eloquent with the motto _Qui dat pauperi non indigebit_, the stranger
has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old
Aubrey quaintly puts it, "a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a
college, by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late
Archbishop of Canterbury." The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass
lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two
floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation:
twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each L40
and L30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital
so long as of good behaviour, but "obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde
of charmmynge, or witchcrafte" are punished by the statutes with
expulsion.
[Illustration: THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.]
The fourth side of the quadrangle is occupied by the Hall, the Warden's
rooms, and the Chapel, all in very much the same condition as at their
building. The old oak table in the Hall is dated 1614, and much of the
stained glass is of sixteenth century date.
But it is in the Warden's rooms, above, that the eye is feasted with old
woodwork, ancient panelling, black with lapse of time, quaint muniment
chests, curious records, and the like. These were the rooms specially
reserved for his personal use during his lifetime by the pious Archbishop
Whitgift.
Here is a case exhibiting the original titles to the lands on which the
Hospital is built, and with which it is endowed; formidable sheets of
parchment, bearing many seals, and, what does duty for one, a gold angel
of Edward VI.
These are ideal rooms; rooms which delight with their unspoiled
sixteenth-century air. The sun streams through the western windows over
their deep embrasures, lighting up so finely the darksome woodwork into
patches of brilliance that there must be those who envy the Warden his
lodging, so perfect a survival of more spacious days.
[Illustration: The CHAPEL, Hospital of the Holy Trinity.]
A little chapel duly completes the Hospital, and here is not pomp of
carving nor vanity of blazoning, for the good Archbishop, mindful of
economy, would none of these. The seats and benches are contemporary with
the building, and are rough-hewn. On the western wall hangs the founder's
portrait, black-framed and mellow, rescued from the boys of the Whitgift
schools ere quite destroyed, and on the other walls are the portrait of a
lady, supposed to be the Archbishop's niece, and a ghastly representation
of Death as a skeleton digging a grave. But all these things are seen but
dimly, for the light is very feeble.
XII
The High Street of Croydon really _is_ high, for it occupies a ridge and
looks down on the right hand on the Old Town and the valley of the Wandle,
or "Wandel." The centre of Croydon has, in fact, been removed from down
below, where the church and palace first arose, on the line of the old
Roman road, to this ridge, where within the historic period the High
Street was only a bridle-path avoiding the little town in the valley.
The High Street, incidentally the Brighton Road as well, is nowadays a
very modern and commercial-looking thoroughfare, and owes that appearance,
and its comparative width, to the works effected under the Croydon
Improvement Act of 1890. Already Croydon, given a Mayor and Town Council
in 1883, had grown so greatly that the narrow street was incapable of
accommodating the traffic; while the low-lying, and in other senses low,
quarter of Market Street and Middle Row offended the dignity and
self-respect of the new-born Corporation. The Town Hall stood at that time
in the High Street: a curious example of bastard classic architecture,
built in 1808. Near by was the "Greyhound," an old coaching and posting
inn, with one of those picturesque gallows signs straddling across the
street, of which those of the "George" at Crawley and the "Greyhound" at
Sutton are surviving examples. That of the "Cock" at Sutton disappeared in
1898, and the similar signs of the "Crown," opposite the Whitgift
Hospital, and of the "King's Arms" vanished many years ago.
The "Greyhound" was the principal inn of Croydon in the old times. The
first mention of it is found in 1563, the parish register of that year
containing the entry, "Nicholas Vode (Wood) the son of the good wyfe of
the grewond was buryed the xxix day of January." The voluminous John
Taylor mentions it in 1624 as one of the two Croydon inns, and it was the
headquarters of General Fairfax in 1645, when Cromwell vehemently disputed
with him under its roof on the conduct of the campaign, urging more severe
measures.
Following upon the alteration, the "Greyhound" was rebuilt. Its gallows
sign disappeared at the same time, when a curious point arose respecting
the post supporting it on the opposite pavement. Erected in the easy-going
times when such a matter was nothing more than a little friendly and
neighbourly concession, the square foot of ground it occupied had by lapse
of time become freehold property, and as such it was duly scheduled and
purchased by the Improvements Committee. A sum of L400 was claimed for
freehold and loss of advertisement, and eventually L350 was paid.
[Sidenote: RUSKIN]
I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under
that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty
and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways.
I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way
for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with
John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is
referred to in "Praeterita":
"... Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more than
that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the 'Old King's Head' in
Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint
her Simone Memmi's 'King's Head' for a sign." And he adds: "Meantime my
aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the
little house still standing--or which was so four months ago[7]--the
fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop,
in the second story" (_sic_).
There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised
progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive
products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of
them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts created _ad
hoc_, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be
as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a
handkerchief.
The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about
the period of Croydon's first expansion, when the [Greek: ohi polloi]
impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces,
neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual
and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington.
Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of
the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration,
after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of
the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because
he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly
what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate
monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that
utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon's monument, however,
still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face
calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.
The vicars of Croydon have in the long past been a varied kind. The
Reverend William Clewer, who held the living from 1660 until 1684, when he
was ejected, was a "smiter," an extortioner, and a criminal; but Roland
Phillips, a predecessor by some two hundred years, was something of a
seer. Preaching in 1497, he declared that "we" (the Roman Catholics) "must
root out printing, or printing will root out us." Already, in the twenty
years of its existence, it had undermined superstition, and was presently
to root out the priests, even as he foresaw.
[Sidenote: THE ARCHBISHOP'S PALACE]
Unquestionably the sight best worth seeing in Croydon is that next-door
neighbour of the church, the Archbishop's Palace. Comparatively few are
those who see it, because it is just a little way off the road and is
private property and shown only by favour and courtesy. When the
Archbishops deserted the place it was sold under the Act of Parliament of
1780 and became the factory of a calico-printer and a laundry. Some
portions were demolished, the moat was filled up, the "minnows and the
springs of Wandel" of which Ruskin speaks, were moved on, and mean little
streets quartered the ground immediately adjoining. But, although all
those facts are very grim and grey, it remains true that the old palace is
a place very well worth seeing.
It was again sold in 1887, and purchased by the Duke of Newcastle, who
made it over to the so-called "Kilburn Sisters," who maintain it as a
girls' school. I do not know, nor seek to inquire, by what right, or with
what object, the "Sisters" who conduct the school affect the dress of
Roman Catholics, while professing the tenets of the Church of England; but
under their rule the historic building has been well treated, and the
chapel and other portions repaired, with every care for their interesting
antiquities, under the eyes of expert and jealous anti-restorers. The
Great Hall, chief feature of the place, still maintains its fifteenth
century chestnut hammerbeam roof and armorial corbels; the Long Gallery,
where Queen Elizabeth danced, the State bedroom where she slept, the Guard
Room, quarters of the Archbishops' bodyguard, are all existing; and the
Chapel, with oaken bench-ends bearing the sculptured arms of Laud, of
Juxon, and others, and the Archbishops' pew, has lately been brought back
to decent condition. Here, too, is the exquisite oaken gallery at the
western end, known as "Queen Elizabeth's Pew."
That imperious queen and indefatigable tourist paid several visits to
Croydon Palace, and her characteristic insolence and freedom of speech
were let loose upon the unoffending wife of Archbishop Parker when she
took her leave. "Madam," she said, "I may not call you; mistress I am
ashamed to call you; and so I know not what to call you; but, however, I
thank you." It seems evident that the daughter of Henry the Eighth had,
despite her Protestantism, an historic preference for a celibate clergy.
XIII
Down amid what remains of the old town is a street oddly named "Pump
Pail." Its strange name causes many a visit of curiosity, but it is a
common-place street, and contains neither pail nor pump, and nothing more
romantic than a tin tabernacle. But this, it appears, is not an instance
of things not being what they seem, for in the good old days before the
modern water-supply, one of the parish pumps stood here, and from it a
woman supplied a house-to-house delivery of water in pails. The
explanation seems too obvious to be true, and sure enough, a variant kicks
the "pail" over, and tells us that it is properly Pump Pale, the Place of
the Pump, "pale" being an ancient word, much used in old law-books to
indicate a district, limit of jurisdiction, and so forth.
[Sidenote: JABEZ BALFOUR]
The modern side of all these things is best exemplified by the beautiful
Town Hall which Croydon has provided for itself, in place of the ugly old
building, demolished in 1893. It is a noble building, and stands on a site
worthy of it, with broad approaches that permit good views, without which
the best of buildings is designed in vain. It marks the starting point of
the history of modern Croydon, and is a far cry from the old building of
the bygone Local Board days, when the traffic of the High Street was
regulated--or supposed to be regulated--by the Beadle, and the rates were
low, and Croydon was a country town, and everything was dull and humdrum.
It was a little unfortunate that the first Mayor of Croydon and Liberal
Member of Parliament for Tamworth, that highly imaginative financier Jabez
Spencer Balfour, should have been wanted by the police, a fugitive from
justice brought back from the Argentine, and a criminal convicted of fraud
as a company promoter; but accidents will happen, and the Town Council did
its best, by turning his portrait face to the wall, and by subsequently
(as it is reported) losing it. He was sent in 1895, a little belatedly, to
fourteen years' penal servitude, and the victims of his "Liberator" frauds
went into the workhouse for the most part, or died. He ceased to be V 460
on release on licence, and became again Jabez Spencer Balfour, and so
died, obscurely.
The Liberal Party in the Government had, over Jabez Balfour, one of its
several narrow escapes from complete moral ruin; for Balfour was on
extremely friendly terms with the members of Gladstone's ministry,
1892-94, and was within an ace of being given a Cabinet post. Let us pause
to consider the odd affinity between Jabez Balfour and Trebitsch Lincoln
and Liberal politics.
The Town Hall--ahem! Municipal Buildings--stands on the site of the
disused and abolished Central Croydon station, and the neighbourhood of it
is glimpsed afar off by the fine tower, 170 ft. in height. All the
departments of the Corporation are housed under one roof, including the
fine Public Library and its beautiful feature, the Braithwaite Hall. The
Town Council is housed in that municipal splendour without which no civic
body can nowadays deliberate in comfort, and even the vestibule is worthy
of a palace. I take the following "official" description of it.
[Illustration: CROYDON TOWN HALL.]
"On either side of the vestibule are rooms for Porter and telephone.
Beyond are the hall and principal staircase, the shafts of the columns
and the pilasters of which are of a Spanish marble, a sort of jasper,
called Rose d'Andalusia; the bases and skirtings are of grand antique. The
capitals, architrave, cornices, handrails, etc., are of red Verona
marble; the balusters, wall-lining and frieze of the entablature of
alabaster, and the dado of the ground floor is gris-rouge marble. The
flooring is of Roman mosaic of various marbles, purposely kept simple in
design and quiet in colouring. One of the windows has the arms of H.R.H.
the Prince of Wales, and the other the Borough arms, in stained glass.
Above the dado at the first floor level the walls are painted a delicate
green tint, relieved by a powdering of C's and Civic Crowns. The doors and
their surroundings are of walnut wood."
[Sidenote: THE RATEPAYER'S HOME]
Very beautiful indeed. Now let us see the home of one of Croydon's poorer
ratepayers:
On one side of the hall are two rooms, called respectively the parlour and
the kitchen. Beyond is the scullery. The walls of the staircase are
covered with a sort of plaster called stucco, but closely resembling
road-scrapings: the skirtings are of pitch-pine, the balusters of the same
material. The floorings are of deal. The roof lets in the rain. One of the
windows is broken and stuffed with rags, the others are cracked. The walls
are stained a delicate green tint relieved by a film of blue mould, owing
to lack of a damp-course. None of the windows close properly, the flues
smoke into the rooms instead of out of the chimney-pots, the doors jam,
and the surroundings are wretched beyond description.
Electric tramways now conduct along the Brighton Road to the uttermost end
of the great modern borough of Croydon, at Purley Corner. Here the
explorer begins to perceive, despite the densely packed houses, that he is
in that "Croydene," or crooked vale, of Saxon times from which, we are
told, Croydon takes its name; and he can see also that nature, and not
man, ordained in the first instance the position and direction of what is
now the road to Brighton, in the bottom, alongside where the Bourne once
flowed, inside the fence of Haling Park. It is, in fact, the site of a
prehistoric track which led the most easy ways across the bleak downs,
severally through Smitham Bottom and Caterham.
Beside that stream ran from 1805 until about 1840 the rails of that
long-forgotten pioneer of railways in these parts, the "Surrey Iron
Railway." This was a primitive line constructed for the purpose of
affording cheap and quick transport for coals, bricks, and other heavy
goods, originally between Wandsworth and Croydon, but extended in 1805 to
Merstham, where quarries of limestone and beds of Fuller's earth are
situated.
This railway was the outcome of a project first mooted in 1799, for a
canal from Wandsworth to Croydon. It was abandoned because of the injury
that might have been caused to the wharves and factories already existing
numerously along the course of the Wandle, and a railway substituted. The
Act of Parliament was obtained in 1800, and the line constructed to
Croydon in the following year, at a cost of about L27,000. It was not a
railway in the modern sense, and the haulage was by horses, who dragged
the clumsy waggons along at the rate of about four miles an hour. The
rails, fixed upon stone blocks, were quite different from those of modern
railways or tramways, being just lengths of angle-iron into which the
wheels of the waggons fitted: |_ _|. Thus, in contradistinction from all
other railway or tramway practice, the flanges were not on the wheels, but
on the rails themselves. The very frugal object of this was to enable the
waggons to travel on ordinary roads, if necessity arose.
From the point where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at Wandsworth,
along the levels past Earlsfield and Garratt, the railway went in double
track; continuing by Merton Abbey, Mitcham (where the present lane called
"Tramway Path" marks its course) and across Mitcham Common into Croydon by
way of what is now called Church Street, but was then known as "Iron
Road." Thence along Southbridge Lane and the course of the Bourne, it was
continued to Purley, whence it climbed Smitham Bottom and ran along the
left-hand side of the Brighton Road in a cutting now partly obliterated by
the deeper cutting of the South Eastern line. The ideas of those old
projectors were magnificent, for they cherished a scheme of extending to
Portsmouth; but the enterprise was never a financial success, and that
dream was not realised. Nearly all traces of the old railway are
obliterated.
The marvel-mongers who derive the name of Waddon from "Woden" find that
Haling comes from the Anglo-Saxon "halig," or holy; and therefrom have
built up an imaginary picture of ancient heathen rites celebrated here.
The best we can say for those theories is that they _may_ be correct or
they may not. Of evidence there is, of course, none whatever; and
certainly it is to be feared that the inhabitants of Croydon care not one
rap about it; nor even know--or knowing, are not impressed--that here, in
1624, died that great Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham.
It is much more real to them that the tramcars are twopence all the way.
At the beginning of Haling Park, immediately beyond the "Swan and
Sugarloaf," the Croydon toll-gate barred the road until 1865. Beyond it,
all was open country. It is a very different tale to-day, now the stark
chalk downs of Haling and Smitham are being covered with houses, and the
once-familiar great white scar of Haling Chalk Pit is being screened
behind newly raised roofs and chimney-pots.
The beginning of Purley is marked by a number of prominent public-houses,
testifying to the magnificent thirst of the new suburb. You come past the
"Swan and Sugarloaf" to the "Windsor Castle," the "Purley Arms," the "Red
Deer," and the "Royal Oak"; and just beyond, round the corner, is the "Red
Lion." At the "Royal Oak" a very disreputable and stony road goes off to
the left. It looks like, and is, a derelict highway: once the main road to
Godstone and East Grinstead, but now ending obscurely in a miserable
modern settlement near the newly built station of Purley Oaks, so called
by the Brighton Railway Company to distinguish it from the older Purley
station--ex "Caterham Junction"--of the South Eastern line.
It was here, at Purley House, or Purley Bury as it is properly styled,
close by the few poor scrubby and battered remains of the once noble
woodland of Purley Oaks, that John Horne Tooke, contentious partisan and
stolid begetter of seditious tracts, lived--when, indeed, he was not
detained within the four walls of some prison for political offences.
[Sidenote: HORNE TOOKE]