EPSOM
The Widest Street in Surrey.--A lucky find.--Barbara
Villiers.--Pepys at the Wells.--Nell Gwynne.--Aldermen and lazy
ladies.--Epsom's fall.--A knavish apothecary.--Baron Swasso, his
house.--Miss Wallin, bone-setter; bone-setter, Mrs. Mapp.--Epsom
re-made at the table.--Eclipse.--The Road to the Derby.--The Ring
round the Gibbet.--Catherine-wheels, Motor-cars, Kites, Pills.--Lord
Rosebery.--Lord Lyttelton's ghost.
Epsom is the centre of the country between the great railway lines. It
has its own railway, but it is midway between the lines that run express
trains to Brighton and Southampton: Epsom's own expresses only run for
two weeks in the year, when the races come round. For the other fifty
weeks Epsom is a quiet town of villas, once a village, now nearly a
suburb like Esher or Weybridge. Lord Rosebery sometimes lives near the
town, at Durdans, and deplores the large numbers of lunatics who are
brought to live near the town always. But Epsom is only occasionally
ruffled by the lunatics, and has developed a dangerously good train
service.
Epsom has the widest and breeziest main street of any Surrey town, and
you do not guess the reason until you read the history of the town
pretty closely. The story of Epsom, until the two great races that
belong to its downs were founded over Lord Derby's wine, is the story of
its wells. Before Epsom Salts there was hardly an Epsom to give them a
name. There may have been a tiny village where the church stands, but
that would be all; the rector preached to a few cottagers. Then, one hot
summer day in 1618, the lucky thing happened. Henry Wicker, trying to
water his cattle on the common, found a small hole with a spring in it;
he enlarged it, and took the cattle to the water, but could not make
them drink. Then the doctors were told about it. They used it first, as
Pownall the local historian tells you, "as a vulnerary and abstersive,"
and healed wounds with it; then some labourers accidentally drank it,
and Epsom's fortune was made. The doctors agreed; Epsom salts were
bitter, diluent, absorbent, soluble, cathartic--everything that salts
should be. In two years the wells were enclosed with a wall; in twenty
years France and Germany had heard of Epsom, and distinguished
foreigners obediently paced the common. But the great days were still to
come. As yet few buildings had grown up close to the Wells, merely "a
shed to shelter the sickly visitors." Then came the year 1670, when
Charles II gave Barbara Villiers his palace of Nonsuch two miles away.
She, as careless of a king's gift and as avaricious as a king's mistress
should be, turned the palace into cash, and out of its demolished walls
the local builder piled up houses by Epsom Wells.
One of Epsom's inns was already built, the King's Head--perhaps the Old
King's Head near the church, or an inn on the same site. Pepys was there
in 1667, and gives us a glimpse of Nell Gwynne, though she was at Epsom
to amuse herself, and was not one of Pepys's party. Pepys went on July
14th (Lord's day); he got up at four in the morning, and talked to Mrs.
Turner downstairs while his wife dressed, and got angry with Mrs. Pepys
because she was so long about it. They were off in the coach by five,
with bottles of wine and beer, and a cold fowl, and talked all the way
pleasantly, Pepys writes, and so came "to Epsom, by eight o'clock, to
the well; where much company, and I drank the water: they did not but I
did drink four pints. And to the town, to the King's Head; and hear
that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir
Charles Sedley with them; and keep a merry house." Lord Buckhurst had
just persuaded Nell Gwynne to leave the King's playhouse for a hundred
pounds a year and his company: she was to act no more, which saddened
Pepys. However, she was back at the playhouse next month, jeered at by
the graceful Buckhurst and as poor as ever. She was less exacting than
Barbara Villiers: she never had a palace to sell.
When Nonsuch was built up again into Durdans and other houses near the
Wells, then came the full tide. Epsom was completed. About the year
1690, Pownall dates the climax: Mr. Parkhurst, lord of the manor, built
a ball-room seventy feet long, and the inns sprang up on all sides.
"Taverns at that time reputed to be the largest in England were opened;
sedan chairs and numbered coaches attended, there was a public
breakfast, with dancing and music every morning at the Wells. There was
also a ring, as in Hyde Park; and on the downs races were held daily at
noon; with cudgelling and wrestling matches, foot races, &c., in the
afternoon. The evenings were usually spent in private parties,
assemblies or cards; and we may add, that neither Bath nor Tunbridge
ever boasted of more noble visitors than Epsom, or exceeded it in
splendour, at the time we are describing." So Pownall praises the great
days; but they have not left a glamour about Epsom, as the days of Nash
and Brummell have shed on Bath.
Why has Epsom so broad a main street? In the great days the open way was
narrower. Down the centre of the road as we see it Mr. Parkhurst planted
a long walk of elms, and there they stood from James the Second's day
till the nineteenth century. Then Sir Joseph Mawbey, lord of the manor,
cut them down and sold the timber. He made a good bargain too; for the
townpeople were grieved at losing their trees, and to quiet them he
promised to give L200 to help build a market-house, but he never did it,
and kept the cash. The trunks of the fallen trees must have made a
pleasant prospect for the New Inn, the fine red-brick building which in
Parkhurst's day was built for a tavern, and which still stands, but has
now fallen to shops. But in the days when the city aldermen brought
their wives to show off their finery, and the young sparks threw their
money about at Epsom, what a bustling, handsome, pursy, turtle-soup
sort of place the Wells must have been. John Toland, writing in 1711,
describes Epsom Wells at their height. Eudoxa is his mistress, and to
Eudoxa he pictures all Epsom's charms. I quote a few passages from a
long letter:--
"Here are two bowling-greens with raffling shops and musick for the
ladies' diversion, as at Tunbridge; but the ladies do not appear every
day on the walks as there. Here you see them, on Saturdays, in the
evening, as their husbands come from London; on Sundays at church, and
on Mondays in all their splendour, when there are balls in the
Long-rooms; and many of them shake their elbows at Passage and Hazard
with a good grace."
Surely they never forgave Toland for writing that. Here he writes on the
ladies' husbands:--"By the conversation of those that walk there, you
would fancy yourself to be this minute on the Exchange, and the next at
St. James's; one while in an East India factory, and another while with
the army in Flanders, or on board the fleet in the Ocean; nor is there
any profession, trade, or calling that you can miss of here, either for
your instruction or diversion."
Thus does Toland, unkinder than Pownall, set out the glories of Epsom
without comparing them to Bath. But what could be better than the luxury
of it all? "You would think yourself in some enchanted camp, to see the
peasants ride to every house with the choicest fruits, herbs, roots and
flowers; with all sorts of tame and wild fowl, with the rarest fish and
venison, and with every kind of butcher's meat, among which
Banstead-down mutton is the most relishing dainty. Thus, to see the
fresh and artless damsels of the plain, either accompanied by their
amorous swains or aged parents, striking their bargains with the nice
court and city ladies, who, like queens in a tragedy, display all their
finery on benches before their doors (where they hourly censure, and are
censured), and to observe how the handsomest of each degree equally
admire, envy and cozen one another, is to me one of the chiefest
amusements of the place. The ladies who are too lazy, or too stately,
but especially those who sit up late at cards have their provisions
brought to their bedsides, where they conclude the bargain with the
higler; and then--perhaps after a dish of chocolate--take another nap,
till what they have thus purchased is got ready for dinner."
One single attraction Toland admits Epsom never had--it lacks a river.
"One thing is wanting--and happy is the situation that wants no more;
for in this place notwithstanding the medicinal waters, and sufficient
of sweetes for domestic use, are not to be heard the precipitant murmurs
of impetuous cascades. There are no purling streams in our groves, to
tempt the shrill notes of the warbling choristers, whose never-ceasing
concerts exceed Bononcini and Corelli."
That was in 1711; Epsom never saw better days in spite of the lack of
those miraculous concerts. And in 1715 it had all come to an end.
Epsom's glories tumbled like a pack of cards. It was the fault of one
man: Pownall has gibbeted the rascal; Epsom fell through the "knavery of
Mr. John Livingstone, an apothecary." Mr. Livingstone may have been a
knave, but he was also evidently a fool. He began admirably, as a doctor
with a speculative eye should do, by building a large house with an
assembly room for dancing and music, "and other rooms for raffling,
diceing, fairchance (what a perversion of terms!) and all sorts of
gaming; together with shops for milliners, jewellers, toymen, etc." He
was quite a heathen, for he planted a grove, and he made a
bowling-green, and then spoiled it all by sinking a well, putting a pump
to it, and calling the place the New Wells. The new water was neither
diluent, nor absorbent, nor cathartic, nor anything else that water at a
watering-place should be, and the visitors found out the difference. But
the end was the maddest thing of all. Somehow or other, John Livingstone
got a lease of the old wells, the real, genuine spring. Then he locked
up the old wells, and tried to make money with the new. It killed the
watering-place.
But Epsom revived--to relapse and revive again. First, it was brought to
life again by the South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life
anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews
came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New
houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as
to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall
could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso
failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom
the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she was not so crazy. Miss
Wallin was a bone-setter: she could put in a man's shoulder without
help, and she was not to be imposed upon. Once a cheat came to her with
his head done up in a bandage, and asked her to set his dislocated wrist
for him; it was not dislocated, and he wanted to show Miss Wallin up as
an impostor. She saw through that, and dislocated his wrist on the spot,
telling him to go back to the fools that sent him. Such a woman should
have been kept at Epsom; she was worth more than mere cathartic waters.
But Epsom could not keep her; she desired more than anything else in the
world to marry one Mr. Hill Mapp, who did not and would not live at
Epsom. She pursued him, always with an eye on the church, and Mapp
capitulated; but they were married in London. Epsom took back Mrs. Mapp,
but she could not live for ever.
After Mrs. Mapp, the end came quickly. Sea-bathing finished the little
town altogether; "the modern delightful practice of sea-bathing," as
Pownall puts it with tolerance. He does not give up hope, even in 1825;
he hopes that the medical profession will still give the wells a trial,
and believes that the waters will be found worthy. After that he comes
to the consideration of Epsom's races.
Water ended Epsom in 1715; wine began Epsom again in 1780. A party of
gentlemen, drinking at Lord Derby's table at Lambert's Oaks, a house on
the high ground above the town, lifted their glasses to the glories of
horse-racing. They founded two races, one, in 1779, for three-year-old
fillies; another, in 1780, for three-year-old colts and fillies. They
named the races after their host and the house where they drank, and
Epsom was made again. The Derby and the Oaks became national
institutions. Before that roystering party, the downs had seen racing,
but had not seen a racing crowd. Charles II had run his horses on Epsom
and Banstead downs; perhaps his horse now and then bore away the silver
bell, which was the first and simple prize when horses began racing.
Queen Anne may have entered a colt or two at Epsom: her consort, Prince
George of Denmark, loved horse-racing and drank Epsom waters. Greatest
of all memories of the Turf, Eclipse lived for years by Epsom downs, and
won poor little races for an obscure commoner. He would have won any
race he could have been asked by a king, but it was the fate of the
finest racehorse ever foaled to live before the Derby was founded, and
before he could race another horse worthy to pass the starting post with
him. Pownall, in his _History of Epsom_, has a pleasant passage
extolling Eclipse's merits. He writes in 1825: he has studied, he tells
us, Lawrence's _History of the Horse_ and Bingley's _British
Quadrupeds_, and this is the result:--
"Eclipse was withheld from the course till he was five years of age, and
was first tried at Epsom. He had considerable length of waist, and stood
over a large space of ground, in which particular he was an opposite
form to the flying Childers, a short backed, compact horse, whose reach
lay in his lower limbs; but, from the shape of his body, we are inclined
to believe that Eclipse would have beaten Childers in a race over a mile
course with equal weights. He once ran four miles in eight minutes,
carrying twelve stone, and with this weight Eclipse won eleven King's
plates.[A] He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or
felt the tickling of a spur; nor was he ever for a moment distressed by
the speed or rate of a competitor; out-footing, out-striding, and
out-lasting (says Mr. Lawrence) every horse which started against him."
Eclipse, like Homer, had many birthplaces. Mr. Theodore Cook, who has
written authoritatively of him where others have guessed or accepted
tradition, has been informed of more than seven; and, in collecting
details of relics of the great horse, he has been supplied with evidence
that Eclipse possessed no fewer than six "undoubted" skeletons, nine
"authentic" feet, sufficient "genuine" hair to have stuffed the largest
armchair in Newmarket, and "certified" portions of skin which would
easily have carpeted the yard at Tattersall's. There never was such an
omnipresent animal.
After 1780, the horse-racing crowd grew. In Pownall's time, when the
Derby and Oaks had not been established forty-five years, the Derby
attracted some sixty subscribers, and the Oaks about forty, of fifty
guineas apiece, and Epsom was full to overflowing. The watering-place
has become a circus. The race week brings down all London. "At an early
hour in the morning, persons of all ranks, and carriages innumerable,
are seen pouring into the town at every inlet. All the accommodations
and provisions that the surrounding villages can supply are put in
requisition." The royal family would come to look on; sixty thousand
spectators, Pownall thinks, met on the downs.
But Pownall has nothing to say of the road. The road must have been the
thing to see; not as we see it to-day, when motor cars start for the
course before lunch instead of before breakfast, and luxurious railway
trains draw decadent race-goers to Tattenham Corner. In the real Derby
days all racing men that were men drove to Epsom, early in the morning,
by the road. Four-in-hand coaches travelled level in the pack and the
dust by costermongers' donkeys; at every inn there were touts and
tipsters, haunting creatures with secrets of betting; they knew what
would win outright and what would certainly lose; the Duke's trainer had
whispered to them, the swindling Captain had tipped them the wink; you
merely had to pay for the knowledge. Wayside strips of green were turned
into cocoanut shies, wherever a man might wish to shy at nuts; clowns on
stilts stalked in chequered blue; bare-legged boys and girls turned
amazing Catherine wheels. There was the hill to finish with by the
course, and the plaudits of the crowd for him who took his team up in
spanking style. They still drive four-in-hand coaches up the hill; but
the motor-horn follows the coach-horn.
Frith has made the Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand
has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself
"Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing
scenes in the forties, has set down in his _Bye-lanes and Downs of
England_ a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In
his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of
a gibbet"--_similia similibus_, you might suppose reading the list of
heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace';
my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon
Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite,
billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster,
double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and Handsome Jack contrasted in
the pig's skin; and, ye Centaurs! what seats were there!" It must have
been a sight for proper men to see. Not the veriest tailor would walk on
Derby day. He "would mount a mis-teached hippogriff, and risk the chance
of a purl, rather than not show at the covert-side." Who, indeed, would
not bestride a steed when he might meet the Assassin and the O'Bluster
in the ring? But there were others:--
At the time we write of, "Old Crutch," too, with his scaffolding
under his arm, and disabled limb dangling like a loose girth from
his rosinante's side, a quadruped equalling the Dollar's mount in
beauty,--might have been seen side by side with Lord Chesterfield,
on his thoroughbred, and addressing him in all the Timbobbinish
horrors of his frightful vernacular. My lord was then in the zenith
of his good looks and humour, and was, moreover, so well upon
Cotherstone, that he saw graces in Old Crutch's physog, with the
charming "thousand to forty" he hoped to draw him of on the Tuesday
_prochain_,--that he joked and rattled with the uncouth old cripple
in undisguised merriment. With these might have been noticed the
elegant form of Lord Wilton, on his roan, shaded again by a
round-shouldered knave from Manchester, with ungloved hands and snub
nose, who had "potted the crack" for his special line of action. His
yeoman Grace of Limbs, fresh and hearty as a summer gale, mounted on
his Blue-eyed Maid, loomed in stalwart manhood by the side of some
pallid greek or city trader, having a word of greeting and jollity
for all alike, for _he_ was there for the sake of sport, and had no
anxiety beyond his "pony."
The _Heavies_, as Thornhill of Riddlesworth, Sir Hercules
Fitzoutlawe, and poor fatty Sutherland, together with my Lord
Miltown, from his not being particularly adapted for an equestrian
display, appeared in their several chariots on the outskirts of the
ring, an occasional lull in the wordy tumult permitting the
Irishman's lisping scream to penetrate the dense and agitated
circle, in his praiseworthy efforts to do business. Old Crocky, too,
was there, mounted on a subdued wretch of the horse-species,
tenanted, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, by the evil spirit
of some defunct croupier, and ready to "return on the nick" as
usual. In this "mess tossed up of Hockley-Hole and White's," in
addition to our foregoing inventory, were dukes and butchers....
But these are perhaps enough. Has the crowd on the hill changed much
since the forties? The Ring roars no longer round a gibbet, of course; a
Grand Stand of vast dimensions overlooks the course from starting-gate
to paddock; dukes no longer ride side by side with butchers to make
bets. But the crowd itself, and what the crowd does, and what it sees
and feels--all that, surely, has changed hardly at all. The gipsies
still swarm, and the touts still swindle; the bookmakers, bedizened with
belts of silver coin, and outlandish hats, and flaring assertions of
personal integrity, still clamour by their blackboards; they still chalk
up the odds they offer against horses whose names they mis-spell; the
sun still shines on the jockeys' silk jackets; still, down a course
cleared empty, distracted dogs rush madly; still, before the start for
the great race, there broods over that huge concourse an intense, almost
a dreadful silence; still there is the shout as the jackets flash from
the starting-gate, still the hum as they sweep down the bend, the roar
as they rush for the straight, the yell as the leader drops back, shoots
out, thunders past the judge. All that remains, and will remain. But two
changes are insistent. One is the motor-cars, which are all over the
hill and almost everywhere else; but that is a permanent thing. The
other is the advertisements on the kites. In the old days the downs lay
under blue sky and white clouds. Now they lie, on Derby day, under
strings of kites. You may go to Epsom to see horse-racing, but you will
not escape soap, mustard, or pills.
Of Epsom's residents and neighbours, Lord Derby won the race named after
him in 1787, and doubtless others have won since. But the best record
belongs to the owner of Durdans, who won the Derby in 1894 with Ladas,
in 1895 with Sir Visto, and in 1905 with Cicero; and who, in addition to
his career as politician, man of letters, and owner of racehorses, has
added difficulties to the tasks of other writers by contributing to Mr.
Gordon Home's _Guide to Epsom_ a discouragingly brilliant preface.
Another peer has made Epsom history in a different way. At Pit Place
lived the second Lord Lyttelton, and at Pit Place he died, leaving
behind him a profligate name and a ghost story which Dr. Johnson thought
the most extraordinary he had ever heard. It was in November, 1779; Lord
Lyttelton had just returned from Ireland, and was seized with
suffocating fits. One night he dreamt a dream. A dove hovered over him,
changed to a woman in white, and spoke to him. It was a dead face, and
he knew who it was; her two daughters were under his roof. Her words
were few: "Lord Lyttelton, prepare to die!" "When?" he gasped. "In three
days," she answered, and vanished. He called his man, who found him wet
with sweat and his whole frame working. The third day came, and he
jested with his guests at breakfast--"If I live over to-night, I shall
have jockeyed the ghost." He dined at five, went to bed at eleven,
called his servant a slovenly dog for not bringing a spoon for his
medicine, and sent for a spoon. The man returned, found him in a fit,
and roused the house. But Lord Lyttelton was dead. He was thirty-five.
[Illustration: _A Quiet Corner in Witley_ (_p. 159_).]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: It is generally admitted, that a horse which will run four
miles in eight minutes, carrying a weight of eight stone and a-half,
must win plates.
_Bingley._]