_FROGNAL AND WEST END._
Frognal claims to be considered the very heart of Hampstead, the site
of its first settlement, the spot on which the ancient manor-house and
the humble little chapel to St. Mary primitively arose, and around
which gathered by degrees the wattle and dab cottages that succeeded
the ruder huts of the villani and bordarii of the Conqueror’s time. The
path through the churchyard leads straight to the entrance of a narrow
lane, guarded in my time by a small toll-house and gate. This lane
is partly made by the wall enclosing the Mansion, an old-fashioned,
grave-looking, two-storied house, standing in its own grounds, in which
grew some remarkably fine yew-trees; and between these grounds and the
end of the new burial-ground on the eastern side of St. John’s stands a
small Roman Catholic chapel, dedicated to St. Mary, erected by a French
_émigré_—l’Abbé Morel—early in the present century.
The family living at the Mansion between forty and fifty years ago were
of Irish extraction, and of the creed of their country, circumstances
that in those days (especially in small places) subjected the persons so
conditioned to a measure of suspicion and unreasoning antagonism scarcely
to be comprehended in these more liberal times.
Whether this was or was not the case with the Sullivan family, I cannot
say. Their society was not generally courted, and outside their own
special circle they made few friends. They lived a quiet, retired life,
and after her father’s death Miss Sullivan was most frequently heard of
in connection with the toll-gate, which appertained to her residence.
I am informed that a toll of one penny for each cart or carriage was
exacted for the use of the gate and lane, but no one had the privilege of
_driving_ through it without permission of the lady of the Mansion; and
as it was the straight and short way to any part of Frognal, it became a
constant source of friction between the public and the owner. There was
something very arbitrary and vexatious in the way Miss Sullivan resisted
all requests and representations on the part of her neighbours and the
inhabitants generally.
It was her right, and she resolved not to abate an iota of her power;
so the struggle became continuous till quite recent times, when the
parochial authorities resolved on doing away with the gate, offering the
owner a fair pecuniary equivalent for the ground belonging to her; but
whether she came to terms I do not know. Her death probably facilitated
the matter, and when I last visited Hampstead (1895-96) I found the
little toll-house standing, but the gate that for so many years had
pertinaciously obstructed the thoroughfare lay wide open, while an
appearance of unresisted desolation and neglect enshrouded the house and
grounds, which I heard were to be sold.[73] Since then many houses have
been built upon the grounds of the old Mansion.
Frognal gives its name to several good houses in the vicinity, as Frognal
Hall, Frognal Lodge, Frognal House, Frognal Grove, etc., and preserves
(Park suggests) in its own the diminutive of the title of the ancient
manor-house, the appellation of Hall being very early given to the
mansion of a manorial district. He imagines that Frognal may probably
come from Frogen Hall. How the hall originally came by this designation,
if it ever had it, he does not tell us. By some it has been deemed merely
a name of derision—Froggenhal or Frogs’ Hall.
Mr. Walter Rye, the well-known Norfolk antiquary, and present proprietor
of Frognal House, strongly supports Park’s view of the origin of the
name, of which there are many examples in various parts of the country.
Frognal is situated on the demesne land, which formerly extended from
Child’s Hill, north, to Belsize, south, the site of the old church, or,
rather, chapel, of St. Mary,[74] and that of the ancient manor-house,
clearly indicating the portion of the manor first peopled.[75]
At Frognal Rise the ground is level with Mount Vernon, but it gradually
descends, till at the ruined house (no longer standing) known in my time
as Frognal Priory it is nearly flat. Like every other part of Hampstead,
Frognal has its reminiscences. At the beginning of this century there
was still standing on the rise of the hill, where a high wall (said to
have been part of it) skirted a narrow lane leading up to Mount Vernon,
a remarkable old brick mansion, of the origin or owners of which neither
Lysons nor Park gives any account. It is picturesque, with two high
pointed gables, mullioned windows, connected by a balustraded gallery,
deep bays and dormers on the roof. Park, in his ‘History of Hampstead,’
gives an engraving of it, taken in 1814, from a picture by William
Alexander, painted in 1801. For some cause or other, the fine old fabric
had suffered neglect, and some time prior to 1725 was let in apartments.
It occupied a beautiful situation, and here, amongst other lodgers,
Colley Cibber and his theatrical friends, Booth and Wilks, were frequent
visitors in summer.
Subsequently the lease was purchased by the parochial authorities of
Hampstead, and the fine old house was converted to the uses of the
village poor-house. It seems to have served this purpose till 1800, when
it had become so decayed and ruinous, and so prejudicial to the health
and comfort of the inmates, that the minister[76] and parishioners,
with Josiah Boydell at their head,[77] petitioned Parliament for leave
to bring in a Bill to build, or provide, a new workhouse. The Bill was
granted the following May, and the mansion belonging to Mrs. Leggett at
New End being to be sold, it was purchased, and there is lying before me
the printed specification of the alterations required to fit it for its
present occupation.
From this period the old house at Frognal fell into desuetude and
decay—an interesting object to the antiquary and the delight of artists,
but daily becoming more dangerous to the public, on which account it was
taken down a few years before Park published the first edition of his
history (1813). White, of Fleet Street, published an engraving of it in
1814.
The first house on the west side of the churchyard is Frognal Hall,
formerly in the occupation of a very remarkable man, Mr. Isaac Ware,
who, by his genius and self-education, aided by Lord Burlington,
raised himself from the humble position of chimney-sweep to that of
an eminent architect. He was the author, Park tells us, of a correct
and valuable edition of Palladio’s ‘Architecture,’ which, self-taught,
he had translated from the Italian, and had also engraved the plates
after tracings taken from the original work. He afterwards translated
Lorenzo Sarigatti’s ‘Perspective,’ and brought out an accurate edition
of Palladio’s first five books on the Five Orders, which was then
considered the standard of the English School, and was himself the author
of a ‘Complete Body of Architecture.’ He was of His Majesty’s Board of
Works. Truly a remarkable man;[78] but there was a flaw somewhere, for,
with all his talent and success in his career, he died in distressed
circumstances at his house in Kensington Gravel Pits.
Frognal Hall subsequently became the residence of the Guyons, a French
family of eminent merchants. ‘Stephen Guyon, Esq.,’ so says the slab
in the churchyard, ‘ob. Dec. 5th, 1779, æt. 73; and Henry Guyon, Esq.,
ob. May 15th, 1790.’ The house was sold on the death of Stephen Guyon.
Another member of the family continued to reside at Hampstead till his
death (May, 1806).[79]
After having had one or two other tenants, it was occupied by Lord
Alvanley, ‘Richard Pepper Ardennes, Esq., a descendant of the ancient
family of the Ardennes of Cheshire, who successively held the high
offices of Solicitor and Attorney General, Chief Justice of Chester,
Master of the Rolls, and Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas, and was
finally raised to the peerage by the title of Lord Alvanley.’ He died at
Hampstead, March 19, 1804,[80] and was buried in the Rolls Chapel,[81]
now ruthlessly destroyed.
Lady Alvanley continued to reside at Frognal Hall for some years
subsequently.
Lord Alvanley was as remarkable for the smallness of his stature as for
the importance of the offices he had arrived at. As a gentleman of the
long robe, he made a frequent subject for the caricaturists and the
paragraph-writers of the day. He appears to have been a kind man as well
as a clever lawyer, with a sense of humour that did not take offence at
being the cause of it in others.
In 1813 Thomas Wilson, Esq., resided at Frognal Hall. It was afterwards
tenanted by a Mr. Cole, and subsequently by Julius Talbot Airey, Esq. At
present it is occupied as a Roman Catholic boarding-school.
On the opposite side of the lane is Frognal Lodge, the probable site of
Alderman Boydell’s house, who some years before his death had moved from
North End to Frognal, and is said to have been the near neighbour and
friend of Lord Alvanley, whom he outlived a few months. Abrahams tells
us that the house, gardens, grounds, lands, coach-house, and stables
belonging to this ‘grand encourager of art,’ as he truly calls him, and
which had lately been sold for £3,400, had been rated at £70 per annum,
but should have been rated at £150. The discovery came too late to be
rectified.
The art-loving Alderman and famous print-seller, whose house had
supplied, not only the chief cities of Europe, but those of the whole
civilized world, with the highest productions of the painter’s and
engraver’s art, found himself ruined by the long-continued war, which
effectually closed commercial intercourse with foreign countries,
and caused him such serious losses that he was compelled to petition
Parliament to be allowed to dispose of the large stock of pictures and
engravings on hand by lottery,[82] which took place after his death
(1804-5).
For years he had cherished the idea of forming a gallery of paintings
of Shakespearian characters and scenes, that should be at once an
offering to the genius of his immortal countryman and the crown of his
own efforts to exculpate art in England from the subordinate status
it held in comparison with that of other nations. To this end he had
engaged the most famous artists of his day—Sir Joshua Reynolds, Romney,
Fuseli, Northcote, Blake, and many others (amongst them he himself was
numbered)—and had built a handsome gallery (afterwards the British
Institution) in Pall Mall for the reception and exhibition of their works
and the engravings taken from them.
There is something very pathetic in the old man’s letter, which his
friend and fellow-Alderman, Sir J. William Andrews, read in the House of
Commons, pleading, after a life and fortune expended in perfecting and
accumulating these treasures of art, to be allowed to dispose of them by
lottery, in order that at the close of a long and honourable life—he was
eighty-five years of age—he might be enabled to pay his just debts.
He ‘knows no other way by which it can be effected but by a lottery, and
if the Legislature will have the goodness to grant a permission for that
purpose, they will, at least, have the assurance of the even tenor of a
long life that it will be fairly and honourably conducted.’
The objects were his pictures, galleries, drawings, etc., which,
unconnected with the copper-plates and trade, ‘are much more than
sufficient, if properly disposed of, to pay all he owes in the world.’
He hopes that every honest man at any age will feel for his anxiety
to discharge his debts, ‘but at his advanced age it becomes doubly
desirable.’
As a citizen of London Joshua Boydell had received the highest honours,
having filled the office of High Sheriff, and subsequently that of
Lord Mayor. While resident at Hampstead he had taken a leading part in
all that concerned the well-being of the inhabitants, and had given
the prestige of his name and the encouragement of his comradeship when
eighty-four years of age to the Hampstead Volunteers, of which corps he
was Colonel Commandant. He died on November 12, 1804.[83]
At the date of Abrahams’ pamphlet (1811) there were seventy-two houses
within the boundaries of Frognal, a hamlet of handsome residences,
surrounded by wooded groves and beautiful gardens of an extent begrudged
by builders in these modern days.
One of these, remarkable for its quaint comeliness, is Fenton House
(early Georgian), situated at the very top of the grove, an old red-brick
mansion, with a high-pitched, red-tiled roof, and key-patterned timber
cornice, painted white, running round it. The front, which recedes a
little in the centre, is ornamented with a pediment of the same pattern,
and the projecting ends have balustrades simulating galleries upon them.
A remarkable house, though, according to modern notions, an inconvenient
one.
[Illustration: _Fenton House._]
In or about 1793 Fenton House was the residence of Philip Robertson
Fenton, Esq., formerly an eminent Riga merchant, the son of Thomas Fenton
and Elizabeth his wife, of Hunslet, near Leeds. She was the daughter
of Sir Charles Hogton, of Hogton Tower, in Lancashire, where the slab
above his grave tells us her son ‘was born on the night of the 19th of
November, 1731, O.S.,’ she being on a visit to her brother. Mr. Philip
Fenton resided at Hampstead for fifteen years, and died there in the
seventy-second year of his age. Park, though a contemporary during the
latter years of his life, gives us no personal particulars of this
gentleman, but we find in the list of subscribers to the ‘History of
Hampstead’ the name of C. R. Fenton, Esq., of the India House; and in
1829, at a meeting of copyholders held at the Holly Bush in the July
of that year, to take measures to preserve the Heath from further
encroachments, a Mr. Fenton presided.
It is therefore probable that some of the family continued to reside at
Hampstead.
No doubt Fenton House[84] had had some other name previous to the
retired Riga merchant’s occupation of it. Some time in the summer of
1746 Johnson (he was not yet Doctor) had lodgings in Frognal. Park,[85]
and subsequently Brewer, who copied him, assure us that the house ‘so
dignified’ was the last in Frognal southward—then, in 1813-15, in the
occupancy of Benjᵉ Charles Stephenson, Esq., F.S.A., ‘where _the greater
part, if not the whole_, of the “Vanity of Human Wishes,” in imitation of
the tenth satire of Juvenal, was written.’[86]
I cannot help thinking that the Doctor’s literary reputation, rather
than a review of his pecuniary circumstances at this time, led to this
assumption, and believe that a much humbler dwelling sufficed for Mrs.
Johnson’s summer lodging than that which the well-known and well-to-do
architect would choose for his suburban residence; and I ground my belief
on the statement of Dr. Johnson himself, who says: ‘I wrote the _first
seventy lines_ in the “Vanity of Human Wishes” in that _small house_
beyond the church, Hampstead; the whole number were composed before I
threw a single couplet upon paper’—under pressure, probably, of fair,
frivolous, pretty Mrs. Johnson’s requirements, real or imaginary, who,
with her perpetual ailments and perpetual opium, was always craving for
country air—a craving sometimes gratified at great inconvenience to
her husband. At the period in question he was so poor that, in order
to afford his wife a change of air, he was obliged to dispense with a
town lodging for himself; and for want of means to pay the coach fare
to Hampstead, the roads to which were dangerous after dark, had nothing
left to him but to walk about till daylight, or, as in the old times with
Savage, to sleep on a bulk. Under the circumstances, we have to judge
whether the expression ‘that small house beyond the church’ could apply
to the ‘last house in Frognal southward.’
This reference to the Doctor is as eloquent as a volume in
exemplifying the exigeant selfishness of his wife’s character, and the
self-sacrificing kindness of his own, for with all his roughness and
‘bear-like growl,’ as Northcote calls it, there was a fine strain of
compassionate tenderness in his nature. I am afraid he found material for
the ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’ not far from home, for notwithstanding his
generous indulgence of his wife’s love of Hampstead air, ‘nice living
and unsuitable expense,’ Mrs. Desmoulins[87] tells us that she did not
‘always treat him with becoming complacency.’
It was very vexatious, with her fastidious love of cleanliness, which
her husband has borne witness to, to see him walking about in linen
the complexion of which Sir John Hawkins said _shamed her_, and it was
not less vexatious, perhaps, to have her personal wishes frustrated;
for, having hair as blond as a babe’s, we are told that she was always
endeavouring to dye it black, much to the great Khan of Literature’s
dissatisfaction. But with all her pitiful little failings, when death
had dulled the fair hair and stilled the querulous lips for ever, her
husband, we are told, sincerely mourned her loss.[88]
It is said that at one time Dr. Akenside lived in Frognal, but the place
of his abode is not known. Apropos of this unfortunate poet, a curious
story is told in connection with him, very disgraceful to the perpetrator
of the fraud. A literary man, known to Frederick, Prince of Wales, as a
poet and writer of varieties, when Dr. Akenside published his ‘Pleasures
of Imagination’ without his name, tacitly concurred in the supposition
that he was the writer of the poem, and absolutely maintained himself,
or was maintained, in Dublin for some years on the reputation it gained
him.[89]
[Illustration: _Priory Lodge._]
I find the family of the Bocketts, who were living in this neighbourhood
in 1722, resided at Frognal in 1811. They were connected with the
famous Lord Erskine; the late Mrs. Bockett, who died at Hampstead some
twenty-five years ago, was his niece.
Turning to the right past the toll-gate, the road runs between high
walls, fringed with ivy, pendent grasses, and long trails of purple
toad-flax overtopped by trees to Frognal Rise; past Frognal House,[90]
now the home of Mr. Walter Rye, and other modern mansions in handsome
grounds, whence the main road follows its course to Branch Hill, and
is continued to the West Heath Road. Branch Hill is the site of Branch
Hill Lodge, standing in ample grounds upon an elevation that commands
extensive and beautiful views. Brewer describes it as a well-proportioned
family residence, though not of capacious dimensions. It has, however,
undergone many additions and alterations since Brewer’s time.
Branch Hill Lodge was partly built by Sir Thomas Clarke, Master of the
Rolls, on the site of an older mansion, parts of which it included,
but it had been so altered and enlarged that only a very small portion
of it remained in the house which was standing when Lysons wrote. Sir
Thomas bequeathed it to his patron, the notorious Thomas Parker (Lord
Chancellor Macclesfield), ‘who was obliged to purchase the copyhold part
of the premises from the heirs of Sir Thomas Clarke, in consequence of
his having failed to surrender it to the uses of his will.’ It was after
Lord Macclesfield’s enforced retirement from office that he came to
reside here. Twenty-five years previously he had been impeached by the
House of Commons for fraudulent practices, for which he was condemned to
pay a fine of £30,000, with imprisonment till it was paid. The standard
of morality was not very high at this period, and though some person
amongst the crowd who had followed him on his way to the Tower cried
out that Staffordshire had produced three of the greatest rascals in
England—Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild, and Tom Parker—the cry had ceased
long before the six weeks of his imprisonment ended; and time and more
recent rascality somewhat shaded his lordship’s association in this
triumvirate before he took up his abode at Branch Hill Lodge, where he
lived for several years.
The house appears to have been particularly affected by members of the
law. It was tenanted by Mr. Thomas Walker, Master in Chancery, and
subsequently by Lord Loughborough (afterwards Lord Rosslyn). In 1799 it
was purchased by Colonel Parker, a younger son of Lord Macclesfield; and
later on it became the residence of Mr. Thomas Neave (eldest son of Sir
Richard Neave, Bart.), who was living here when Park wrote his history.
This gentleman amused himself by altering, adding to, and greatly
improving the house and grounds. He was fond of collecting painted glass,
and, besides some very fine Continental specimens, obtained much of that
which Bishop Butler possessed; and the pieces from the old Chicken House
were said to have found a sanctuary at Branch Hill Lodge.[91] The house
has had other tenants since then, and whether the painted glass has been
removed or still adorns the mansion, I know not.
Considerably raised above the road, to the left, upon a sort of
wedge-shaped promontory of land pushing out into the highway, between
Branch Hill and Frognal House, one is attracted by an ancient grove of
lime-trees, at the end of which is Montagu House, so called in honour
of Mr. Montagu, whose memory the people of Hampstead with great reason
revere.
The house was formerly the home of Mr. Flitcroft, the architect, who,
finding the then beautiful avenue ready grown, built a villa at the end
of it. He died in 1769. His fortune was due to what proved to be a happy
accident. A man of great natural talent, but employed at Burlington
House as a journeyman carpenter, a fall from a scaffold and a broken
leg brought him to the notice of Lord Burlington,[92] a born builder
himself, a patron of art, and evidently also a man of much humanity and
warmth of heart. In some drawings with which Flitcroft amused himself
during his recovery, his lordship discovered great cleverness, and
interesting himself in his advancement, got him placed on the Board of
Works, of which he eventually became Comptroller. He was the architect of
St. Giles’s Church, London, and unfortunately for his fame, as we have
elsewhere said, of St. John’s Church, Hampstead. His St. Olave’s, Tooley
Street, is his most original work; St. Giles’s is but an inferior copy of
Wren.
During his residence Montagu House had been known as Frognal Grove, a
name it retained during the residence of Edward Montagu, Esq., Master
in Chancery, who, some time subsequent to 1769, tenanted it.[93] A man
of sense and refined feeling, a philanthropist and practical benefactor
to Hampstead, he was one of the leaders of a band of gentlemen who
had wakened up from the general apathy as to the moral, social, and
religious wants of their poorer neighbours, and who (to quote Park),
‘setting their faces against the drinking habits prevalent in mixed
society, pledged themselves to keep within the bounds of temperance,
and to introduce subjects, or topics of conversation, that should tend
to improve the understanding and the mind. Under the ill-chosen name of
_Philo-investiges_, the members of the society held their meetings at
the Flask Tavern, and from the quarterly subscriptions, fines, etc.,
established a fund for charitable purposes.’[94]
In 1787 the members, with Mr. Montagu at their head, founded the
Hampstead Sunday-School, a proof that the intention of the society had
been adhered to, and had borne fruit after its kind, for in those days,
when neither national[95] nor other schools existed in villages for
the children of the poor, the value of Sunday-schools could scarcely
be overrated. Mr. Perceval also patronized this school. It is only
just to say that the absolute founder of the Sunday-school was Mr.
Thomas Mitchell, who kept a school at Hampstead for twenty-two years
on week-days, and was so real a philanthropist that he continued the
vocation on Sundays for the benefit of poor children.
To return to Mr. Montagu. This gentleman was the trusted friend of Lord
Mansfield, who placed in his hands his resignation of the Lord Chief
Justiceship. After Mr. Montagu’s death, and in honour of him, Frognal
Grove was called Montagu House, a name it still retains.
Stevens, the Shakespearian annotator, had a house in Frognal before he
purchased the premises of the Upper Flask, which is now known as Upper
Heath.
Previous to 1811 Lord Walpole had a residence at Frognal, which Mr.
Thomas Kestevan afterwards bought for £400, the price of a very humble
abode in the present day. At this time two of the four joint purchasers
of the Belsize estate, German Lavie and James Abel, Esqs., were living
in Frognal. Thomas Carr, Esq., had a residence here early in the present
century, where Crabb Robinson was a frequent visitor. His house appears
to have been the literary centre of this part of Hampstead, and the
pleasant diarist tells us of meeting there on one occasion Sir Humphry
Davy and his bride (Mrs. Apreece), the poet Wordsworth, and Joanna
Baillie, adding that ‘Sir Humphry and Lady D—— seem hardly to have
finished their honeymoon.’
Frognal in the present day is by no means devoid of literary
associations. In the cosy home known as Frognal End resides the
well-known and well-regarded Sir Walter Besant, whose unstained pen,
powerful as the lamp of Aladdin, has helped to raise a Palace of Delight
in the dreary heart of East London, and where the thick ‘darkness of
ignorance’ prevailed has let in light and hope, and the love of healthful
and intelligent pleasures.
When Baines was writing his ‘Records of Hampstead,’ the late well-known
artist and novelist, George du Maurier, was living in New Grove House.
He had been resident at Hampstead for many years, and, like others of
his brotherhood, appears to have found the neighbourhood helpful to his
art. A well-known writer[96] tells us ‘that the Hampstead scenery made in
_Punch_ his mountains and valleys, his backgrounds and foregrounds ...
the group of Scotch firs suggested a deer forest ... and the distant dome
of St. Paul’s an always interesting perspective point.’[97]
For some time Sir Gilbert Scott, the architect, resided in an adjacent
house, afterwards occupied by Mr. Henry Sharpe, after whose name Baines
has added the suffix, ‘a good man.’
When I last visited Hampstead, the talented authoress of the ever-popular
‘Schomberg-Cotta Family’ was living in her pleasant home, Combe Edge,
Branch Hill, where, in a grove of evergreens, I listened to a blackbird
whistling on the third day of the New Year, 1896. Early in this year the
kind heart, the active brain, and busy hands of this wholesome writer and
benevolent woman ceased their work, to the deep regret of many friends
and the great loss of the patients of the North London Hospital for
Consumption, to whom she had been a constant visitor and sympathetic
friend.
Her friends honoured her memory by endowing an additional bed in the
hospital. A tablet, upon which is inscribed, ‘The Elizabeth Rundle
Charles Memorial bed,’ was unveiled by the Princess Christian (whose
sympathy with all charitable work is well known) on December 18, 1896.
The Frognal of to-day, though a charming neighbourhood, with its air
of affluence, ease, and ordered neatness, has lost the more natural
charms of fifty years ago. The old mystery of high walls is still with
us, but the free wildness of grassy slopes and shady trees, with little
neighbourly short-cuts crossing one another, or unpremeditated footpaths
meandering about in aimless fashion, though to good purpose, are there
no longer. I like not the wide road bisecting it, nor the lofty,
many-windowed, scarlet-faced mansions overlooking it. For me they have
destroyed too much of the tree-grouped greensward of my early days, and
park-like look of the old Frognal precinct, and the pretty, tree-shaded,
devious ways that led to unexpected places. I remember wandering by
one of these narrow footways with a few trees hanging over one side of
it, when suddenly I found myself in front of a dilapidated lodge and
other offices appertaining to the sham Tudor mansion known as Frognal
Priory.[98] At that time—1869—it was a tottering ruin, supported by beams
of timber on one side to make it tenantable; and, as I soon found, giving
off, through neglected drainage, _mal odours_ enough to defy all but the
curiosity of a press interviewer, or of the London Sunday visitors, whose
purses helped to support the ancient, self-constituted custodian.
Half a century earlier this house, with its simulated Elizabethan
appearance, must have been a really pictorial object. The irregularly
gabled front of ruddy bricks, its oriel and mullioned windows, carved
window-frames, quaint waterspouts, and twisted chimneys, even in this
stage of ruin and combined with squalor, was eminently picturesque, and,
from an artist’s point of view, really effective. On this account, and
for the sake of some lovely views to be seen from the upper windows at
the back, a few youthful enthusiasts of the profession, devoted to form
and colour, would lodge here for days together, despite the unsafe walls,
morbific air, and fearful effluvia from the ground-floor premises.
The history of this modern antique house—the building of which many
people living at Hampstead in the fifties could remember—is too
curious to be left out of our account of Frognal. It was built by one
Thompson,[99] better known to his friends as ‘Memory Corner Thompson.’
Originally a public-house broker and salesman, he is said to have gained
this distinctive appellation from a marvellous feat of memory—nothing
less than stating for a bet the name and occupation of everyone who kept
a corner shop in the city of London. But as pawnbrokers, chemists, and
publicans generally monopolize these usually Janus-faced houses, the
difficulty may have been more apparent than real to one whose business
with the latter made him naturally notice the shops emphasized by
exemption from his professional occupation. At any rate, he won the bet,
and became known by this prefix ever after.
In the course of his business career as auctioneer and broker, he had had
many opportunities of collecting ancient furniture and other antiquities,
for which he appears to have had a natural taste, and he resolved to
build a characteristic mansion to lodge them in. He obtained a lease of
twenty years, subject to a fine to the Lord of the Manor, and built this
house on the traditionary site of the ancient priory, where Cardinal
Wolsey is said to have occasionally lived.
Exceedingly rich and ostentatious, Mr. Thompson took pleasure in turning
his house into an exhibition, without the rules and order observed in
public ones. Visitors were admitted at all times, and a lady who was in
the habit of calling on his wife informed Miss Meteyard that no meal
was sacred from intrusion, nor were the feminine members of the family
secure even when engaged with their toilets, but were frequently obliged
to rush out of the way while a company of strangers inspected their
bedrooms.
The hall and largest room in the house were devoted to the exhibition
of medieval furniture, real or spurious. The library, a charming little
room, looked into the garden and out away over what were then the
Finchley meadows; the light from the square mullioned window was softened
with painted glass; the shutters and doorways were to appearance carved,
and the panelled ceiling handsomely emblazoned with coats-of-arms; the
walls were surrounded with antique book-presses, glazed and guarded with
brass nettings, and filled with rare and costly volumes beautifully
bound. The whole of this display was a deception. Mr. Memory Corner
Thompson had no personal interest in the coats-of-arms; the carving
was stucco; the volumes, the titles of which must have awakened sharp
longings in the breasts of scholarly visitors—if any such did visit
the Priory—were mere shades of books, pasteboard integuments of them
with nothing real about them but the titles. The building itself was of
the same make-believe character both as to material and workmanship.
Plaster-of-Paris mouldings had been made to do duty for carved stone
wherever this was characteristically required. The divisional walls were
of simple lath and plaster, and the exterior ones not much more solid.
They lasted, however, the proprietor’s time, who, having no children
living, left it, with part of his large fortune, to his niece, who
had married the notorious Gregory, the proprietor of that disgraceful
publication called the _Satirist_, and who, it was known, made money by
threatening persons of ‘mark and likelihood’ with scandalous libels,
unless they would pay smartly to have them suppressed. On one occasion,
instead of finding a victim, the miscreant ‘caught a Tartar,’ who
prosecuted him, and Gregory was properly sentenced to some months’
imprisonment for his attempted extortion. At this juncture Mr. Thompson
died, and on Gregory’s coming out of prison he found himself, through
his wife’s fortune, a rich man, and set up a new rôle amongst the many
he had attempted, that of _gentleman_; but as his conception of the part
induced much extravagance and dissipation, it was very soon played out,
and ended in the loss of all his possessions.[100]
After his wife’s death, having neglected to pay the fine to the Lord of
the Manor, the latter recovered possession by injunction. The antique
furniture and articles of vertu, pictures, etc., collected by Thompson,
which he had not disposed of, or that were not sold at his death,
disappeared during Gregory’s occupation. The very fixtures vanished,
chimney-mantels and fire-grates were removed, so that with the exception
of a few pieces of painted glass in the guest-chamber over the library,
and a few mouldering bits of real carved oak in window fittings, or
cornices, nothing remained in proof of the antique taste of the original
proprietor of Frognal Priory.
A gate, under the trees on the left as one approached the very handsome
porch, the only real thing about the building,[101] led to a pleasant
slope once gay with garden-beds and flowering shrubs, where a fountain
then choked up had once played, and by which a weeping ash still
lingered. The greensward, rough and matted, was dotted about with groups
of trees, and there remained in part the raised terrace that had divided
this part of the grounds from the kitchen-garden, into which a flight
of steps led. Here the ruinous condition of the house was more apparent
than within it. Still a niched saint looked calmly down from beneath the
cross-surmounted gable of a pseudo-chapel, while the ruined parapet,
fissured and broken, threatened soon to bury its share of the sham
edifice in a heap of dust.
The late Sir Thomas Wilson desired to utilize the house as an office,
but for this purpose it required reparation, and the fear of an heir
to Thompson starting up prevented his bestowing any outlay on it till
it became too late. Some time after Gregory’s exit Sir Thomas Wilson’s
bailiff, to prevent the house and its materials being carried away
piecemeal, installed a labourer and his wife as caretakers, who remained
in it over twenty years. The man died, leaving certain instructions to
the woman, who, old and houseless but for its shelter, standing upon her
supposed right after twenty years’ possession, absolutely refused to
quit, and set at defiance all peaceable efforts to remove her; and though
the lessee of the ground (then being broken up for brickfields) had
managed to induct a tenant of his own, the oldest inhabitant was resolute
in remaining; the result was intermural war. The old woman, remembering
her husband’s injunction, fully believed that the Priory had lapsed to
her in right of her twenty years’ free tenancy, and she doubted the power
of the Lord of the Manor to remove her. It was not till some time after
I had left the neighbourhood, and only by taking legal proceedings, that
this too-tenacious inhabitant was expelled.
In these bygone years, on leaving Frognal Priory, if you took the first
turning to the right, you found yourself at the entrance to West End
Lane, then a really rustic lane, with high hedgerows and sheltering
trees.[102]