of St. Lawrence’s Church, the parish church of the so-called ‘New’
Brentford, itself old beyond compute. The tower dates back four hundred
years or so, but the body of the church was rebuilt in Georgian days and
is very like, and only a little less hideous than, the gasworks up the
street.
[Sidenote: _SION_]
An extraordinary story is told by Cyrus Redding, in his _Fifty Years’
Recollections_, of a countryman’s adventures in London just before the
introduction of railways. The adventures began at Brentford: ‘I had a
relative,’ he says, ‘who, on stating his intention to come up to town,
was solicited to accept as his fellow-traveller a man of property, a
neighbour, who had never been thirty miles from home in his life. They
travelled by coach. All went well till they reached Brentford, where the
countryman supposed he was nearly come to his journey’s end. On seeing
the lamps mile after mile, he expressed more and more impatience,
exclaiming, “Are we not yet in London, and so many miles of lamps?” At
length, on reaching Hyde Park Corner, he was told they had arrived. His
impatience increased from thence to Lad Lane. He became overwhelmed with
astonishment, They entered the “Swan with Two Necks,” and my relative
bade his companion remain in the coffee-room until he returned. On
returning, he found the bird flown, and for six long weeks there were no
tidings of him. At length it was discovered that he was in the custody
of the constables at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, his mind alienated. He
was conveyed home, came partially to his reason for a short time, and
died. It was gathered from him that he had become more and more confused
at the lights and the long distances he was carried among them; it
seemed as if they could have no end. The idea that he could never be
extricated from such a labyrinth superseded every other. He could not
bear the thought. He went into the street, inquired his way westward,
and seemed to have got into Hyde Park, and then out again into the Great
Western Road, walking until he could walk no longer. He could relate
nothing more that occurred until he was secured. Neither his watch nor
money had been taken from him.’
The country-folks who now journey up to town do not behave in this
extraordinary fashion on coming to the infinitely greater and more
distracting London of to-day.
At the western end of Brentford, just removed from its muddy streets, is
Sion, the Duke of Northumberland’s suburban residence. The great square
embattled stone house stands in the midst of the park, screened from
observation from the road by great clusters of forest trees. Through the
ornamental classic stone screen and iron gateway, erected in the
well-known ‘Adam style’ by John Adam about 1780, the green sward may be
glimpsed; the fresher and more beautiful by contrast with the dusty
highroad. Above the arched stone entrance stands the Percy Lion,
_statant_, as heralds would say, with tail extended.
Sion is well named, for no fairer scene can be imagined than this in the
long days of summer, when the lovely gardens are at their best and the
Thames flows by the park with glittering golden ripples. The Daughters
of Sion, whose religious retreat this was, belonged to the Order of St.
Bridget. Their abbey, with its lands and great revenues, was suppressed
and confiscated by Henry the Eighth in 1532. Nine years later his Queen,
Katherine Howard, was imprisoned within the desecrated walls before
being handed over to the headsman, and in another seven years the body
of the King himself lay here a night on its journey to Windsor. There is
a horrid story that tells how the unwieldy corpse of the bloated royal
monster burst, and how the dogs drank his blood.
In the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, Sion enjoyed a few years’
restitution of its rights and property, but when Elizabeth ascended the
throne, the ‘Daughters’ were finally dispossessed. They wandered to
Flanders, and thence, by devious ways, and with many hardships,
eventually to Lisbon. The Abbey of Sion yet exists there, and the
sisters are still solely Englishwomen. It is on record that they still
cherish the hope of returning to their lost home by the banks of the
Thames, and have to this day the keys of that abbey. Seventy years or so
since, the then Duke of Northumberland, travelling in Portugal, called
upon them, and was told of this fond belief. They even showed him the
keys. But he was equal to the occasion, and cynically remarked that the
locks had been altered since those days!
X
[Sidenote: _HOUNSLOW_]
[Illustration: THE ‘BELL,’ HOUNSLOW.]
Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated, like all the other
places between this and Hyde Park Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as
on the road to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the book
on that highway. Coming to the place again, there seems no reason to
alter or add much to what was said in those pages. The long, long
uninteresting street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few houses
of any note facing it are fewer. There remains, it is true, that old
coaching inn, the ‘George,’ modernised with discretion, and at the
parting of the ways the gallows-like sign of the ‘Bell’ still keeps its
place on the footpath, with the old original bell still depending from
it, although, at the moment of writing, the house itself is being pulled
down. But the angle where the roads divide is under revision, and the
hoardings that now hide from sight the old shops and the red-brick
house, with high-pitched roof and dormer windows, that has stood here so
long, will give place shortly to some modern building with plate-glass
shop-fronts and a general air of aggressive modernity which will be
another link gone with the Hounslow of the past. Thus it is that an
illustration is shown here of the ‘parting of the ways’ before the
transformation is complete; for although the fork of the roads leading
to places so distant from this point, and from one another, as Bath and
Exeter must needs always lend something to the imagination, yet a
commonplace modern street building cannot, for another hundred years,
command respect or be worth sketching, even for the sake of the
significant spot on which it stands.
The would-be decorative gas-lamp that stands here in the centre of the
road bears two tin tablets inscribed respectively, ‘To Slough’ and ‘To
Staines,’ in a somewhat parochial fashion. They had no souls, those
people who inscribed these legends. Did they not know that we stand here
upon highways famed in song and story; not merely the flat and
uninteresting seven and ten miles respectively to Staines and Slough,
but the hundred and fifty-five miles to Exeter and the ninety-five miles
to Bath?
Here, then, we see the Bath Road going off to the
[Sidenote: _AN OLD COACHMAN_]
[Illustration: HOUNSLOW: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.]
right and the Exeter Road to the left in semi-suburban fashion. Had it
not been for the winter fogs this level stretch would have invariably
been the delight of the old coachmen; but when the roads were wrapped in
obscurity they were hard put to it to keep on the highway. Sometimes
they did not even succeed in doing so, but drove instead into the
noisome ditches, filled with evil-smelling black mud, which at that time
divided the road from Hounslow Heath.
Charles Ward, whom the coaching critics of his age united to honour as
an artist with ‘the ribbons,’ drove the famous Exeter ‘Telegraph’ the
thirty miles to Bagshot, reaching that village usually at 11 P.M., and
taking the up coach from thence to London at four o’clock in the
morning. He tells how in the winter the mails had often to be escorted
out of London with flaring torches, seven or eight mails following one
another, the guard of the foremost lighting the one following, and so
on, travelling at a slow pace, like a funeral procession. ‘Many times,’
he says, ‘I have been three hours going from London to Hounslow. I
remember one very foggy night, instead of arriving at Bagshot at eleven
o’clock, I did not get there till one in the morning. On my way back to
town, when the fog was very bad, I was coming over Hounslow Heath, when
I reached the spot where the old powder-mills used to stand. I saw
several lights in the road and heard voices which induced me to stop.
The old Exeter mail, which left Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had
met with a singular accident. It was driven by a man named Gambier; his
leaders had come in contact with a hay-cart on its way to London, which
caused them to suddenly turn round, break the pole, and blunder down a
steep embankment, at the bottom of which was a narrow deep ditch, filled
with water and mud. The mail coach pitched on the stump of a willow tree
that overhung the ditch; the coachman and the outside passengers were
thrown over into the meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch.
The unfortunate wheelers were drowned or smothered in the mud. There
were two inside passengers, who were extricated with some difficulty,
but fortunately no one was injured. I managed to take the passengers
with the guard and mail bags on to London, leaving the coachman to wait
for daylight before he could make an attempt to get the mail up the
embankment. They endeavoured to accomplish this with cart horses and
chains, and they had nearly reached the top of the bank when something
gave way, and the poor old mail went back into the ditch again. I shall
never forget the scene. There were about a dozen men from the
powder-mills trying to render assistance, and with their black faces,
each bearing a torch in his hand, they presented a curious spectacle.
This happened about 1840. Posts and rails were erected at the spot after
the accident. I passed the place in 1870, and they were there still, as
well as the old pollard willow stump.’
[Sidenote: _HIGHWAYMEN_]
The old-time associations of Hounslow Heath are almost forgotten now,
for, where Claude du Vall and Dick Turpin waited patiently for
travellers, there are nowadays long rows of suburban villas which have
long since changed the dreary scene. Nothing so romantic as the meeting
of the lawyer with the redoubtable Dick is likely to befall the
traveller in these times:--
As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,
A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,
Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraid
Of Turpin, that mischievous blade?’
‘Oh! no, sir,’ says Turpin, ‘I’ve been more acute,
I’ve hidden my money all in my boot.’
‘And mine,’ says the lawyer, ‘the villain can’t find,
For I have sewed it into my cape behind.’
They rode till they came to the Powder Mill,
When Turpin bid the lawyer for to stand still.
‘Good sir,’ quoth he, ‘that cape must come off,
For my horse stands in need of a saddle-cloth.’
‘Ah, well,’ says the lawyer, ‘I’m very compliant,
I’ll put it all right with my next coming client.’
‘Then,’ says Turpin, ‘we’re both of a trade, never doubt it,
Only you rob by law, and I rob without it.’
The last vestige is gone of the bleak and barren aspect of the road, and
even the singular memorial of a murder, which, according to the writer
of a road-book published in 1802, stood near by, has vanished: ‘Upon a
spot of Hounslow Heath, about a stone’s throw from the road, on leaving
that village, a small wood monument is shockingly marked with a bloody
hand and knife, and the following inscription: “Buried with a stake
through his body here, the wicked murderer, John Pretor, who cut the
throat of his wife and child, and poisoned himself, July 6, 1765.”’
XI
It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence to Staines, and the
fact is sufficiently well known for it to be crowded on Saturday
afternoons and Sundays with cyclists of the ‘scorcher’ variety, members
of cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their pleasure at sixteen
miles an hour, Indian file, hanging on to one another’s back wheel, with
shoulders humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but the road
surface.
[Illustration: THE ‘GREEN MAN,’ HATTON.]
[Sidenote: _HATTON_]
But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these highway crowds never
come. Just such a lane is that which leads off here, by the river Crane
and the Bedfont Powder Mills, to the right, and makes for
Hatton--‘Hatton-in-the-Hinterland,’ one might well call it.
Have you ever been to Hatton? Have you, indeed, ever even heard of it? I
suppose not, for Hatton is a remote hamlet, tucked away in that
triangular corner of Middlesex situated between the branching Bath and
Exeter Roads which is practically unexplored. Yet the place, after the
uninteresting, unrelieved flatness of the market gardens that stretch
for miles around, is almost pretty. It boasts a few isolated houses, and
has (what is more to the point in this connection) a neat and
cheerful-looking old inn, fronted by a large horse-pond.
The ‘Green Man’ at Hatton looks nowadays a guileless place, with no
secrets, and yet it possesses behind that innocent exterior a veritable
highwayman’s hiding-place. This retiring-place of modest worth, eager to
escape from the embarrassing attentions of the outer world, may be seen
by the curious traveller in the little bar-parlour on the left hand as
you enter the front door.
It is a narrow, low-ceiled room, with an old-fashioned fire-grate in it,
filling what was once a huge chimney-corner. At the back of this grate
is a hole leading to a passage which gives access to a cavernous nook in
the thickness of the wall. Through this hole, decently covered at most
times with an innocent-looking fire-back, crawled those exquisite
knights of the road, what time the Bow Street runners were questing
almost at their heels.
And here, it is related, one of these fine fellows nearly revealed his
presence while the officers of the law were refreshing themselves with
a dram in that room. What with a cold in the head, and the accumulated
soot and dust of his hiding-place, he could not help sneezing, although
his very life depended on the question ‘To sneeze or not to sneeze.’
[Illustration: THE HIGHWAYMAN’S RETREAT, THE ‘GREEN MAN.’]
The minions of the law were not so far gone in liquor but that they
heard the muffled sound of that sneeze, and it took all the landlord’s
eloquence to persuade them that it was the cat!
[Sidenote: _MARKET GARDENS_]
Where footpads and highwaymen lurked on the scrubby heath, and the
troopers of King James the Second, sent here to overawe London, lay
encamped, there stretch nowadays the broad market gardens, where in
spring-time the yellow daffodils, and in early summer the wallflowers,
are grown by the acre for Covent Garden and the delight of Londoners.
Orchards and vast fields of vegetables take up almost all the rest of
the reclaimed waste, and if the country for many miles be indeed as flat
as, or flatter than, your hand, and with never a tree but the scraggy
hedgerow elms that grow here in such fantastic shapes, why amends are
made in the scent of the blossoms, the bounteous promise of nature, and
in the free and open air that resounds with the gladsome shrilling of
the lark.
These market gardens that surround London have an interest all their
own. Such scenes as that of Millet’s ‘Angelus’--the rough toil, that is
to say, without the devotion--are the commonplaces of these wide fields,
stretching away, level, to the horizon. All day long the men, women, and
children are working, according to the season, in the damp, heavy clay,
or in the sun-baked rows of growing produce, digging, hoeing, sowing,
weeding, or gathering the cabbages, potatoes, peas, lettuces, and beans
that go to furnish the myriad tables of the ‘Wen of wens,’ as Cobbett
savagely calls London. He thought very little of Hounslow Heath, which
he describes as ‘a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in
look. Yet,’ he says, writing in 1825, ‘all this is now enclosed, and
what they call “cultivated.”’
What they _call_ cultivated! That is indeed excellent. It would be well
if Cobbett could take a ‘Rural Ride’ over the Heath to-day and see this
cultivation, not merely so called, which raises some of the finest
market-garden produce ever seen, and supplies London with the most
beautiful spring blossoms. If it would not suffice to see the growing
crops, it would perhaps be better to watch the loading of the clumsy
market waggons with the gathered wealth of the soil. Tier upon tier of
cabbages, neatly packed to an alarming height; bundles of the finest
lettuces; bushels of peas; in short, a bounteous quantity of every
domestic vegetable you care to name, being packed for the lumbering,
rumbling, three-miles-an-hour journey overnight from the market gardens
to the early morning babel of Covent Garden.
The market waggons, going to London, or returning about eight o’clock in
the morning, form, in short, one of the most characteristic features of
the first fifteen miles of this road. The waggoners, more often than not
asleep, are jogged up to town by the philosophic horses who know the way
just as well as the blinking fellows who are supposed to drive them.
Drive them? One can just imagine the horse-laughs of those particularly
knowing animals, who move along quite independently of the reclining
figure above, stretched full length, face downwards, on the mountainous
pile of smelly cabbages, if the idea could be conveyed to them.
[Sidenote: _A REFORMATORY_]
There is an exquisite touch of appropriateness in the fact that on
converted Hounslow Heath, where these terrors of the peaceful traveller
formerly practised their unlicensed trade, reformatories should be
nowadays established. One of them, called by the prettier name of the
‘Feltham Industrial School,’ is placed just to the south of the road,
near East Bedfont. It houses and educates for honest careers the young
criminals and the waifs and strays brought before the Middlesex
magistrates. The neighbourhood of this huge institution is made evident
to the traveller across these wide-spreading levels by the strange sight
of a full-sized, fully-rigged ship on the horizon. The stranger who
journeys this way and has always supposed Hounslow Heath to be anything
rather than the neighbour to a seaport, feels in some doubt as to the
evidence of his senses or the accuracy of his geographical
recollections. Strange, he thinks, that he should have forgotten the sea
estuary on which the Heath borders, or the ship canal that traverses
these wilds. But if he inquires of any one with local knowledge whom he
may meet, he will learn that this is the model training-ship built in
the grounds of the Industrial School. The ‘Endeavour,’ as she is called,
if not registered A1 at Lloyd’s, or not at all a seaworthy craft, is at
any rate well found in the technical details of masts and spars, and the
rigging appropriate to a schooner-rigged Blackwall liner. Those among
the seven hundred or so of the young vagabonds who are being educated
here in the way they should go--those among them who think they would
like a life on the bounding main, are here taught to climb the rigging
with the agility of cats; to furl the sails or shake them free, or to
keep a sharp look-out for the iron reefs that lurk on the inhospitable
coasts of Hounslow Heath, lest all on board should be cast away and
utterly undone. It is an odd experience to walk around the great hull,
half submerged--half buried, that is to say--in the asphalt paths of the
parade ground, but the oddest experiences must be those of the boys who,
when they get aboard a floating ship, come to it thoroughly trained in
everything save ‘sea-legs’ and the keeping of an easy stomach when the
breezes blow and the surges rock the vessel.
XII
The village of East Bedfont, three miles from Hounslow, is a picturesque
surprise, after the long flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out
here, and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond, and real
ducks! and an even more real village church whose wooden extinguisher
spire peeps out from a surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a
couple of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard gate.
[Sidenote: _THE BEDFONT PEACOCKS_]
The ‘Bedfont Peacocks,’ as they are called, are not so perfect as they
were when first cut in 1704, for the trimming of them was long
neglected, and these curiously clipped evergreens require constant
attention. The date on one side, and the churchwardens’ initials of the
period on the other, once standing out boldly, are now only to be
discerned by the Eye of Faith. The story of the Peacocks is that they
were cut at the costs and charges of a former inhabitant of the
village, who, proposing in turn to two sisters also living here, was
scornfully refused by them. They were, says the legend, ‘as proud as
peacocks,’ and the mortified suitor chose this spiteful method of
typifying the fact. Of course, the story was retailed to travellers on
passing through Bedfont by every coachman and guard; nor, indeed, would
it be at all surprising to learn that they, in fact, really invented it,
for they were masters in the art of romancing. So the Fame of the
Peacocks grew. An old writer at once celebrates them, and the then
landlord of the ‘Black Dog,’ in the rather neat verse:--
Harvey, whose inn commands a view
Of Bedfont’s church and churchyard too,
Where yew-trees into peacock’s shorn,
In vegetable torture mourn.
[Illustration: EAST BEDFONT.]
At length they were immortalised by Hood, the elder, in a quite serious
poem:--
Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvet wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod;
There, gentle stranger, thou may’st only see
Two sombre peacocks. Age, with sapient nod,
Marking the spot, still tarries to declare
How once they lived, and wherefore they are there.
Alas! that breathing vanity should go
Where pride is buried; like its very ghost,
Unrisen from the naked bones below,
In novel flesh, clad in the silent boast
Of gaudy silk that flutters to and fro,
Shedding its chilling superstition most
On young and ignorant natures as is wont
To haunt the peaceful churchyard of Bedfont!
If any one can unravel the sense from the tangled lines of the second
verse,--as obscure as some of Browning’s poetry--let him account himself
clever.
The ‘Black Dog,’ once the halting-place of the long extinct ‘Driving
Club,’ of which the late Duke of Beaufort was a member, has recently
been demolished. A large villa stands on the site of it, at the corner
of the Green, as the village is left behind.
[Sidenote: _STAINES_]
The flattest of flat, and among the straightest of straight, roads is
this which runs from East Bedfont into Staines. That loyal bard, John
Taylor, the ‘Water Poet,’ was along this route on his way to the Isle of
Wight in 1647. He started from the ‘Rose,’ in Holborn, on Thursday,
19th October, in the Southampton coach:--
We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses,
We wheel’d the top of the heavy hill call’d Holborn
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne),
And so along we jolted to St. Giles’s,
Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is,
To Staines that night at five o’clock we coasted,
Where, at the Bush, we had bak’d, boil’d, and roasted.
XIII
Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into
Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find
within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed
villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for
numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and
the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London,
is, in fact, of that nondescript--‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good
red-herring’--character that belongs to places situated in the marches
of town and country. Almost everything of interest has vanished, and
although the railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with it the
life and bustle that are generally conferred by railways on places near
London. But, of course, Staines is on the London and South-Western
Railway, which explains everything.