skirmish in the Civil War between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and the
residence in the early part of the century of a peculiarly heartless
murderer. The passengers by the two-horsed "short-stages" which in the
first half of this century travelled from London to the outlying villages
and halted at the "Pack Horse and Talbot," doubtless were curious
regarding Linden House, near by, notorious from association with Thomas
Griffiths Wainewright, author and poisoner. He was born at Chiswick in
1794, and was a grandson of Dr. Ralph Griffiths of Turnham Green. He began
life by serving in the army, but presently took to literature as a
profession, and wrote voluminously in the magazines of that day. As an
author, although possessed of a sprightly wit, he would long since have
been forgotten had it not been for the sensational career of crime upon
which he entered in 1824. In that year he forged the signatures of his
trustees, in order to obtain possession of a sum of L2259. He induced his
uncle, Mr. G. E. Griffiths, of Linden House, to receive him there as an
inmate. Within a few months his relative died, poisoned with nux vomica,
and Wainewright came into possession of his property. In 1830 he persuaded
a Mrs. Abercromby, a widow lady, to take up her abode with him and his
wife at Linden House. She came with her two daughters and was promptly
poisoned with strychnine. After this he removed from the neighbourhood,
and embarked upon a further series of murders in London. Eventually
detected, he was convicted and transported for life to the Australian
colonies, where he is credibly said to have poisoned others. Murder by
poison was, in fact, an obsession with this man, although he was
sufficiently sane and sordid to select victims whose deaths would bring
him pecuniary advantage. Wainewright's _metier_ in literature was chiefly
art criticism, and his style narrowly resembles that of a revolting
person, now ostracised from Society, who also dabbled in Art and actually
wrote and published an "appreciation" of the poisoner some few years
since.
Linden House was pulled down some fifteen years ago, and its site is
marked by the modern villas of Linden Gardens. The recollection of it
brings a train of reminiscences.
X
[Sidenote: _SUBURBAN CHANGES_]
Reminiscences are soon accumulated in these times. It needs not for the
Londoner to be in the sere and yellow leaf for him to have known many and
sweeping changes in the pleasant suburbs which used to bring the country
to his doors, and the scent of the hawthorn through his open window with
every recurring spring. For myself, I am not a lean and slippered
pantaloon, on whose head the snows of many winters have fallen. The
crow's-feet have not yet gathered around the corners of my eyes; and yet I
have known many rural, or semi-rural, villages around the ever-spreading
circle of the Great City which in my time have been for ever engulfed in
the on-rolling waves of bricks and mortar. It is no effort of memory for
me, or for many another, to recall the market gardens, the orchards, the
open meadows, and the fine old seventeenth and eighteenth century
red-brick mansions, each one enclosed within its high garden walls, with
the jealous seclusion of a monastery, which occupied the sites where the
streets of Brompton, Earl's Court, Fulham, Walham Green, and Putney now
stretch their interminable ramifications, and are accounted, justly
enough, as London. Tell me, if you can, what are the bounds of London,
north, south, east, or west. Does from Forest Gate on the east, to
Richmond on the west, span its limits in one direction? and from Wood
Green on the northern heights, to Croydon on the south, encompass it on
the other? They may in this year of grace, but where will the boundary of
continuous brick and mortar be set ten years hence? and where will then be
the pleasant resorts of the present-day wheelman? They will all be ruined,
and not, mark you, ruined from the commercial point of view, for the
coming of the builder spells riches for the suburban freeholder, whose
land, in the slang of the surveying fraternity, has become "ripe." These
rustic places are, nevertheless, ruined from the point of view of the
lover of the picturesque, and when he sees the old mansions going, the
meadows trenched for foundations, and the lanes widened and paved by the
newly constituted vestry, he groans in spirit. I am, for instance,
especially aggrieved at the workings of modernity with Turnham Green.
I went to school there in the days when London was remote. We used to talk
of "going up to London" then. Do any of the present-day inhabitants of
Turnham Green, I wonder, speak thus? I imagine not. Turnham Green was then
as rural as its name sounds now. The name, alas! is all that remains of
its rurality, save, indeed, the two commons, the "Front" and "Back," as
they are called. No one now remembers, I suppose, that the so-called "Back
Common" is really Turnham Bec, even as the open space at Tooting remains
Tooting Bec to this day. It is so, however, and it is only through this
corruption that what is really and truly the original green of Turnham
Green is dubbed the "Front Common." You see the humour of it?
[Sidenote: _THE NEW SUBURB_]
Turnham Green remained countrified until the railway came and took a slice
off the so-called "Back Common," and built a station, and thus established
the first outpost of Suburbia. Then another railway came, and took another
slice, and a School Board filched another piece; and then great black
boards, with white letters, began to be planted in the surrounding
orchards, setting forth how "this eligible land" was to be let on building
lease. Presently men who wore corduroys and waistcoats with sleeves to
them, and leather straps round their trousers below the knees came along,
and, with much elaborate profanity, built what were, with much humour,
termed "villas" there. Streets of them, and all alike! After this, a
tramway was made along the high-road, starting at Hammersmith, and ending
at Kew Bridge. That tramway was amusing to us schoolboys, so long as the
novelty of it lasted. Our school--it had the imposing name of Belmont
House--faced the high-road, and it was our greatest delight of summer
evenings to throw pieces of soap at the outside passengers of the trams
from the bedroom windows. The expenditure of soap was tremendous, and
sometimes those "outsiders" were hit, whereupon there was trouble! There
was a gloomy old mansion opposite our school, called "Bleak House," and we
used to think it was the veritable "Bleak House" of Dickens's story. We
know better now. It still stands, but a furniture warehousing firm have
built warehouses on to it, and it is no longer romantically gloomy.
[Illustration: ROBIN HOOD AND LITTLE JOHN.]
The school has gone, too, where I learnt, and promptly forgot, Latin and
Greek; and a row of shops, with big plate-glass windows and great gas
lamps, have taken its place; and where we construed those dead (and
deadly) languages, the linen-draper's assistant measures out muslins and
calicoes. I have walked along these pavements during the last few days,
and have noted more changes. There used to stand, beside the road, on the
right hand as you go towards Gunnersbury, a little wayside "pub," with bow
windows, and a bent and hunch-backed red-tiled roof. It was called the
"Robin Hood," and an old-fashioned wooden post, supporting the swinging
sign, stood on the kerb-stone, beside a horse-trough. I remember the sign
well, for it had quite an elaborate picture painted upon it, representing
Robin Hood and Little John. I can see quite clearly now that the artist of
this affair obtained his ideas from the pictorial diplomas of the Ancient
Order of Foresters; but, at the time, I thought it a very fine painting.
The feathered hats impressed me very much indeed, although I always used
to wonder why those two magnificent fellows hadn't pulled up their socks.
It was some time before I discovered that they were not socks, but the big
bucket boots of romance. They have pulled this old house down, and have
built a glaring, flaring, gin-palace on the site of it, just as they did
some five years ago to the old "Roebuck," not far off. The sign is gone,
too, and wayfarers are no longer invited, if Robin Hood is not at home, to
take a glass with Little John. What would happen, I often speculated, if
both those heroes were away? Would, one take a glass, in that case, with
Friar Tuck or Maid Marian?
[Illustration: THE "OLD WINDMILL."]
[Sidenote: _OLD SUBURBAN INNS_]
There is an old inn still standing in this same high-road--most
appropriately, by the way, situated next door to the Police Station,
which, in its time, has extended hospitality to many a bold "road agent"
who found his living on the Bath and Exeter Roads. The "Old Windmill" is a
shy, retiring house which lies modestly some way back from the line of
houses fronting the road. It has an open gravelled space in front, and a
swinging sign on a post, which, together with an immense sundial on the
front of the house, proclaims that the "Old Windmill" dates back to 1717.
These are vestiges of the time when the Chiswick High Road was bordered by
hedges instead of houses. The house, although it wears a certain
old-world air, can scarce be called picturesque. The huge sundial just
mentioned, with its mis-spelled legend, "So Fly's Life Away," gives it an
interest, and so does the record of how one Henry Colam was arrested here
one night toward the close of last century, on the charge, "For that he
did molest and threaten certain of His Majesty's liege subjects upon the
highway, in company with divers others, still at large." Henry had, as a
matter of fact, "with divers others," attempted to rob the Bath Mail near
this spot. He failed in his enterprise, but Bow Street had him all the
same, and it does not require a very vivid imagination to conjure up a
picture of his end.
Another old inn, which still stands at Turnham Green, although greatly
altered, has a history not to be forgotten.
[Sidenote: _TREASON AND TREACHERY_]
At the "Old Pack Horse" (not by any means to be confounded with the "Pack
Horse and Talbot," a quarter of a mile nearer on the road to London)
assembled parties of the conspirators who, headed by their two principals,
named, oddly enough, Barclay and Perkins,[1] plotted the assassination of
King William the Third, on February 15, 1696. They were authorized by the
exiled James the Second to do the deed, and had planned for forty of their
band to surround the King's carriage as he returned from one of his weekly
hunting expeditions from Kensington Palace to Richmond Park. His coach,
they knew, would pass along a narrow, morass-like lane from the waterside
on to Turnham Green, near where the church now stands, and they were well
aware that, as it could at this point proceed only at a walking pace,
William would fall an easy victim. It chanced, however, that there were
traitors among their number, who informed the King's friends, so that on
two succeeding Saturdays, while they were expecting him, he remained at
Kensington. Many of the band were arrested, and six suffered the penalty
of high treason.
The spot where the proposed assassination was to have been consummated is
now known as Sutton Lane. At the corner of this suburban thoroughfare,
where Fromow's Nursery stands, the fate of England was to have been
decided.
[Illustration: THE "OLD PACK HORSE."]
The "Old Pack Horse" has been somewhat modernized of late years by
additions built out on the ground floor, but it remains substantially the
same building at which Jack Rann, the famous "Sixteen-string Jack" of
highway romance, may have taken a last drink with which to screw up his
courage just before setting out to rob Dr. Bell, the chaplain to the
Princess Amelia, in Gunnersbury Lane, near by. "Sixteen-string Jack" was
hanged for that job in 1774.
He was peculiarly unfortunate, for Turnham Green and Gunnersbury were
veritable Alsatias then, and those who travelled here should not have
mentioned so ordinary a happening as having their purses taken. Indeed, it
was so usual an occurrence that Horace Walpole tells us of a certain Lady
Brown who, visiting here, always went provided with a purse full of brass
tokens for the highwaymen. Imagination, conjuring up a picture of a Turpin
or a Claude du Vall riding away with a pocketful of guineas which, on
arriving home, he discovers to be counterfeits, provokes a smile.
XI
There are changes impending not far from here. Who that knows Kew Bridge
has not an affection for that hump-backed old structure, although it
presents many difficulties to the rider? Kew Bridge is doomed, and the
powers that be are going to pull it down and build another in its
stead--and one, it is almost unnecessary to add, not at all picturesque.
Farewell, then, to the suburban delights of Kew. They are going to
"improve" the river at Kew also--that river where, in summer time, the
steamers get hung up on the sandbanks for lack of water. Alas, then, for
the picturesque foreshore of Strand-on-the-Green!
[Illustration: KEW BRIDGE, LOW WATER.]
[Sidenote: _HIGHWAYMEN_]
The passengers by the Bath Flying Machine grew at this point a shade
paler. They generally expected to be robbed on Hounslow Heath, and their
expectations were almost invariably realized by the gentlemen in cocked
hats and crape masks, who were by no means backward in coming forward. The
fine flower of the highwaymen practised on the Heath, and they did their
spiriting gently and with so much courtesy that it was almost (not quite)
a pleasure to hand over those rings and guineas of which so plenteous a
store was collected every night.
Before, however, we come to Hounslow Heath, we have to cast a glance round
Brentford, a town which holds the proud position of the county town of
Middlesex. Foreigners might, in the innocence of their hearts, suppose
that London would hold that honour; but to Brentford, known from time
immemorial, and with the utmost justice, as "dirty Brentford," it has
fallen. Has Brentford risen to the occasion? It must sorrowfully be
admitted that it has not, and is a very marvel of dirt and dilapidation,
and--But no matter! Until quite recently it also possessed, in the church
of Old Brentford, the very ugliest church in England, which was so very
ugly that it used to be credibly reported that people came long distances
to see such a marvel of the unlovely. Alas! the church has been rebuilt,
and so Brentford has lost a claim to distinction.
But Brentford has the honour of being mentioned in Shakespeare, in a
passage whose allusions not all the efforts of antiquaries have been able
to explain, and distinguished itself in a peculiar way during the reign of
King William the Fourth, whom people used to call, for no very good
reason, Silly Billy. The King and Queen were expected to drive through the
town, on their way from Windsor to London, and the streets were decorated.
But the inhabitants spiced their loyalty with sarcasm, for hanging on a
line, stretched prominently across the road, was an old coat, turned
inside out, in allusion to His Majesty's uncertain policy. Not satisfied,
however, with this delicate way of calling him a turncoat, Brentford had
another insult ready a little way down the street. The King was generally
supposed to be very much under the influence of Queen Adelaide, and this
was more or less gracefully alluded to by a pair of trousers fluttering in
the wind like a banner suspended across the road. Their Majesties
testified their recognition and appreciation of Brentford wit by never
passing through the town again.
[Sidenote: _SORDID HOUNSLOW_]
A little further afield takes us to Hounslow, where John Jerry is busy
putting up those long streets of "villas," whose deadly sameness vexes the
soul of the artist. He has torn down the old houses, in one of which, or
rather, in several of which--for they had intercommunicating
passages--Dick Turpin was wont to hide when he was in refuge from the Bow
Street runners.
"Bold Turpin vunce, on Hounslow Heath,
His mare, Black Bess, bestrod--er;
Ven there he see'd the bishop's coach
Coming along the road--er."
Thus sang Sam Weller; but "Bold Turpin" would be hard put to it to
identify his suburban haunts now, and we, before our hair is grey, will
find those places strange which were so familiar the matter of a few years
ago.
[Illustration: COTTAGES, SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN THE HAUNTS OF DICK TURPIN.]
The town of Hounslow is as unprepossessing as its name, which is saying a
great deal. Its mile-long street, unlivened by any interesting features,
is dull without descending to the positively interesting unloveliness of
Brentford. Just as collectors prize old china whose shape and colouring
are frankly hideous to those who are not of the elect in those matters, so
the grotesquely dirty and ugly streets of Brentford have an interest for
the tourist who does not often come upon their like. Hounslow's is just a
commonplace ugliness. The curtailed remains of its once numerous and
extensive coaching inns are become, as a rule, low pot-houses, in which
labourers in the market-gardens that practically surround the town, sit
and drink themselves stupid in the evening; and the business premises and
private houses which alternate along the highway are either shabby old
places, not old enough to claim any interest on the score of antiquity; or
of a pretentious bad taste rather more difficult to bear with than the
dirty hovels and tumbledown cottages they have displaced. Here, indeed, is
the debateable ground between town and country. Rurality is (appropriately
enough) in its last ditch, while civilization has established a precarious
outpost beside it. Flashy "villas" jostle the market-gardeners' cottages;
and respectability sits self-satisfied in its prim Early Victorian
drawing-rooms, amid its chairs upholstered in green rep, its horse-hair
sofas and cut-glass lustres; while on either side the vulgar herd sits at
open windows in its shirt-sleeves, and smokes black and exceedingly foul
pipes, and gazes complacently upon the clothes hanging out to dry in the
garden.
[Sidenote: _HOUNSLOW'S COACHING DAYS_]
Hounslow presented a different picture before the opening of the railways
to the West. Two thousand post-horses were then kept in the town, and
coaches and private carriages went dashing through at all hours of the day
and night, so closely upon one another that they almost resembled a
procession. As the poet says, the pedestrian then forced his way--
"Through coaches, drays, choked turnpikes, and a whirl
Of wheels, and roar of voices, and confusion;
Here taverns wooing to a pint of 'purl,'
There mails fast flying off, like a delusion."
And, indeed, they have, like delusions, vanished utterly. So early as
April, 1842, a daily paper is found saying: "At the formerly flourishing
village of Hounslow, so great is the general depreciation of property, on
account of the transfer of traffic to the railway, that at one of the inns
is an inscription, 'New milk and cream sold here;' while another announces
the profession of the landlord as 'mending boots and shoes.'" The turnpike
tolls at the same time, between London and Maidenhead, had decreased from
L18 to L4 a week.
Yet Hounslow very narrowly missed becoming a great railway junction. That,
indeed, was its proper destiny when the coaching era was done and the
place decaying. Hounslow became the busy place it was in the days of
road-travel, because it commanded the great roads to the West. The Bath
and Exeter Roads, which were one from Hyde Park Corner as far as this
town, branched at its western end, and it was also on the route to
Windsor. It should thus have become an important station on the Great
Western Railway, and might have been, had not other interests prevailed.
It was the original intention of the Great Western directors, when the
line was planned by Brunel in 1833, to keep close to the old high-road to
Bath; but landed interests, both private and corporate, brought about
numerous deviations, and so Hounslow was left to its fate, and the Great
Western main line passes through Southall, two and a half miles distant,
instead.
XII
We will now press on to the Heath, for our friends the highwaymen are
anxiously awaiting us. Right away from the seventeenth century this spot
bore a bad repute, when one of the most daring exploits was performed on
its gloomy expanse. This was no less a feat than the plundering of that
warlike general, Fairfax, by Moll Cutpurse. The most capable soldier of
the age robbed by a woman highwayman, if you will be pleased to excuse the
Irishry of the expression! But, indeed, the Roaring Girl, as her
contemporaries called her, was the best man among the whole of that daring
crew, and to her courage, her cunning, and her ready wit she owed the
successful career that was hers. She wore the breeches in no metaphorical
sense, but through all her career habited herself in man's garments. Only
when she had amassed a fortune and had retired from "the road" did she don
the skirt.
[Sidenote: _CLAUDE DU VALL_]
It is sad to think that the greatest of all the brotherhood who made
Hounslow Heath and highway robbery synonymous terms was cut off in the
full tide of his success. At least, it seems so to us, although the
travellers of the period doubtless felt a certain satisfaction when Du
Vall was executed, on January 21, 1670. He was but twenty-seven years of
age, and already had become a star of the first magnitude. He was, in
fact, a master of the whole art and mystery of robbing upon the road, and
to this he brought the most perfect courtesy. Violence had no part in the
methods of this artist, and he would have scorned, we may be sure, the
ruffianly and even murderous acts of a later generation of the craft,
which not only despoiled travellers of their goods, but rendered the Heath
dangerous to life and limb. His chief exploit is classic, and is set forth
so eloquently, and with such an engaging profusion of capital letters, in
a contemporary pamphlet, that one cannot do better than quote it:--
"He, with his Squadron, overtakes a Coach which they had set over Night,
having Intelligence of a Booty of four hundred Pounds in it. In the Coach
was a Knight, his Lady, and only one Serving-maid, who, perceiving five
Horsemen making up to them, presently imagined that they were beset; and
they were confirmed in this Apprehension by seeing them whisper to one
another, and ride backwards and forwards. The Lady, to shew that she was
not afraid, takes a Flageolet out of her pocket and plays. Du Vall takes
the Hint, plays also, and excellently well, upon a Flageolet of his own,
and in this Posture he rides up to the Coachside. 'Sir,' says he to the
Person in the Coach, 'your Lady plays excellently, and I doubt not but
that she dances as well. Will you please to walk out of the Coach and let
me have the Honour to dance one Currant with her upon the Heath?' 'Sir,'
said the Person in the Coach, 'I dare not deny anything to one of your
Quality and good Mind. You seem a Gentleman, and your Request is very
reasonable.' Which said, the Lacquey opens the Boot, out comes the knight,
Du Vall leaps lightly off his horse and hands the Lady out of the Coach.
They danced, and here it was that Du Vall performed Marvels; the best
Masters in London, except those that are French, not being able to shew
such footing as he did in his great French Riding Boots. The Dancing being
over (there being no violins, Du Vall sung the Currant himself) he waits
on the Lady to her coach. As the knight was going in, says Du Vall to him,
'Sir, you have forgot to pay the Musick.' 'No, I have not,' replies the
knight, and, putting his Hand under the Seat of the Coach, pulls out a
hundred Pounds in a Bag, and delivers it to him, which Du Vall took with a
very good grace, and courteously answered, 'Sir, you are liberal, and
shall have no cause to repent your being so; this Liberality of yours
shall excuse you the other Three Hundred Pounds,' and giving the Word,
that if he met with any more of the Crew he might pass undisturbed, he
civilly takes his leave of him. He manifested his agility of body by
lightly dismounting off his horse, and with Ease and Freedom getting up
again when he took his Leave; his excellent Deportment by his incomparable
Dancing and his graceful manner of taking the hundred Pounds."
When this hero had gone the inevitable way of his fellows, he was buried
with great pomp and circumstance in the church of St. Paul, Covent Garden,
with a set of eulogistic verses for his epitaph. Unfortunately, the old
church was destroyed by fire and the epitaph with it.
[Sidenote: _HIGHWAY MURDERS_]