the last survival of the right claimed by the citizens of London to hunt
in the forests of Middlesex. On Easter Monday the “hunt” assembled; it
consisted of many hundreds of gallant huntsmen mounted on animals of
every description, including the common donkey; there were also hundreds
of vehicles of every kind bringing people out to see the hunting of the
stag. It was a real stag and a real hunt. That is to say, the stag was
brought in a cart and turned out, the horsemen forming an avenue for him
to run, while the hounds waited for him. There was a plunge, a shout;
the stag broke through the horsemen and ran off into the cover of the
forest, followed by the whole mob at full gallop; the hounds seem to
have been for the most part behind the horses, which was certainly safer
for them. The stag was not killed, but was captured and taken away in
the cart that brought him. The Epping Hunt is no longer celebrated, nor
is Epping Forest any longer one of the haunts of Easter Monday.
[Illustration: Hampstead Heath, Looking “Hendon Way.”]
Five miles from St. Paul’s cathedral lies a broad heath on the plateau
of a hill. This is Hampstead Heath. Two hundred years ago, on the edge
of the heath was a Spa, with a fashionable assembly-room and a tavern.
The Spa decayed, and the place became the residence of a few wealthy
merchants, each with his stately garden. Some of these houses and these
gardens survive to this day; most of them are built over, and Hampstead
is now a suburb of eighty thousand people, standing on the slope and top
of a long hill rising to the height of nearly five hundred feet. The
heath, however, has never been built upon. It is a strangely beautiful
place; not a park, not a garden, not anything artificial, simply a wild
heath covered with old and twisted gorse bushes, with fern and bramble,
and in spring lovely with the white-thorn and the blackthorn and the
blossoms of the wild crab-apple, Britain’s only native fruit. The heath
is cut up into miniature slopes and tiny valleys; a high causeway runs
right across it; the place is so high that there is a noble view of the
country beyond, while at rare intervals, when the air is clear, the
whole valley of the Thames lies at the spectator’s feet, and London,
with her thousand spires and towers is clearly visible, with St. Paul’s
towering over the whole.
The heath is the favorite resort of the holiday makers of Easter Monday;
a kind of fair is permitted on one side, with booths and the customary
bawling. There are never any shows on Hampstead Heath—I know not why.
The booths are for rifle galleries, for tea and coffee and ices, for
cakes and ginger-beer, for crafty varieties in the game of dropping
rings or pretty trifles for bowls and skittles, and for “shying” sticks
at cocoanuts. No stalls are allowed for the sale of strong drink. Here
the people assemble in the morning, beginning about ten, and continue to
arrive all day long, dispersing only when the sun goes down and the
evening becomes too cold for strolling about. They may be numbered by
the hundred thousand. Here are the factory girls, going about in little
companies, adorned with crimson and blue feathers; they run about
laughing and shrieking in the simple joy of life and the exhilarating
presence of the crowd; they do not associate with the lads, who dress up
their hats with paper ribbon and hurl jokes, lacking in originality as
in delicacy, at the girls as they run past. There are a great many
children; the policemen in the evening bring the lost ones,
disconsolate, to the station. Some of them have come with their parents;
some of them, provided with a penny each, have come alone; it is
wonderful to see what little mites run about the heath, hand in hand,
without any parents or guardians. There are young married couples
carrying the baby. All the people alike crowd into the booths and take
their chance at what is going on; they “shy” at the cocoanuts as if it
were a new game invented for that day, they dance in the grass to the
inspiring strains of a concertina, they swing uproariously in the high
wooden carriages, they are whirled breathlessly round and round on the
steam-conducted wooden cavalry, and all the time with shouting and with
laughing incessant. For, you see, the supreme joy, the true foundation
of all this happiness, is the fact that they are all out again in the
open, that the winter is over and gone, and that they can once more come
out all together, as they love, in a vast multitude. To be out in the
open, whether on the seashore or on Hampstead Heath, in a great crowd,
is itself happiness enough. There is more than the joy of being in a
crowd; there is also the joy of being once more on the green turf. Deep
down, again, in the hearts of these townbred cockneys there lies,
ineradicable, the love of the green fields and the country air. So some
of them leave the crowd and wander on the less frequented part of the
heath. They look for flowers, and pick what they can find; the season is
not generally so far advanced as to tempt them with branches of
hawthorn, nor are the fields yet covered with buttercups; the buds are
swelling, the grass puts on a brighter green, but the spring as yet is
all in promise. There are other country places of resort, but Hampstead
is the favorite.
For those who do not go out of London on Easter Monday there are more
quiet recreations. On that day Canon Barnett opens his annual exhibition
of loan pictures at his schools beside his church at Whitechapel; to the
people of his quarter he offers every year an exhibition of pictures
which is really one of the best of the yearly shows, though the West End
knows nothing about it, and there is no private view attended by the
fashionable folk, who go to see each other. There is a catalogue; it is
designed as a guide and an aid to the reader; it is therefore
descriptive; in the evening ladies go round with small parties and give
little talks upon the pictures, explaining what the artist meant and how
his design has been carried out. Such a party I once watched before
Burne-Jones’s picture of “The Briar Rose.” The people gazed; they saw
the brilliant coloring, the briar-rose everywhere, the sleeping knights,
the courtyard—all. Then the guide began, and their faces lit up with
pleasure and understanding, and all went home that evening richer for
the contemplation and the comprehension of one great work of art.
At the People’s Palace there are concerts morning and evening; perhaps
also there is some exhibition or attraction of another kind; there are
other loan exhibitions possible besides those of art.
Some of the people, but not many, go off westward and wander about the
halls of the British Museum. I do not know why they go there, because
ancient Egypt is to them no more than modern Mexico, and the Etruscan
vases are no more interesting than the “Souvenir of Margate,” which
costs a penny. But they do go; they roam from room to room with listless
indifference, seeing nothing. In the same spirit of curiosity, baffled
yet satisfied, they go to the South Kensington Museum and gaze upon its
treasures of art; or they go to the National Portrait Gallery, finding
in Queen Anne Boleyn a striking likeness to their own Maria, but
otherwise not profiting in any discoverable manner by the contents of
the gallery. And some of them go to the National Gallery, where there
are pictures which tell stories. Or some get as far as Kew Gardens,
tempted by the reputation of the houses which provide tea and shrimps
and water-cresses outside the gardens, as much as by the Palm House and
the Orchid Houses within.
The streets on Easter Monday present a curious Sunday-like appearance,
with shops shut and no vehicles except the omnibus, but in the evening
the theater and the music-hall are open, and they are crammed with
people.
Therefore, though Easter Monday is the greatest of the people’s
holidays, it is so chiefly because it is the first, and because, like
the May-day of old, it stands for the end of the long, dark winter and
the first promise of the spring. Even in the streets, the streets of
dreary monotony, the East Londoners feel their blood stir and their
pulses quicken when the April day draws out and once more there comes an
evening light enough and long enough to take them out by tram beyond the
bricks.
The holiday of early summer is Whit-Monday, which is also a movable
feast, and falls seven weeks after Easter, so that it is due on some day
between May 12th and June 12th. I have already observed that the cold
east wind, which retards our spring, generally ceases before the middle
of May, though in our climate nothing is certain—not even hot weather in
July and August. When it falls reasonably late, say in the first week of
June, there is some probability that the day will be warm, even though
there may be showers; that the woods will be resonant with warblers, the
fields golden with buttercups, the hedges bright with spring flowers,
the bushes white and pink with May blossom, and the orchards glorious
with the pink of the apple and the creamy white of the cherry and the
pear. On this day the East Londoner goes farther afield; he is not
content with Hampstead Heath, and he will not remain under cover at the
Crystal Palace. Trains convey him out of London. He goes down to
Southend, at the mouth of the Thames; there, at low tide, he can gaze
upon a vast expanse of mud or he can walk down a pier a mile and a half
long, or, if it is high tide, he may delight in the dancing waters with
innumerable boats and yachts. Above all, at Southend he will find all
the delights that endear the seaside to him; there is the tea with
shrimps—countless shrimps, quarts and gallons of shrimps; he is among
his own kind; there is no one to scoff when, to the music of the
concertina, he takes out his companion to dance in the road; he sings
his music-hall ditties unchecked; he bawls the cry of the day, and it is
counted unto him for infinite humor. Southend on Whit-Monday is a place
for the comic man and the comic artist; it is also the place for the
humorist.
[Illustration: The Shooting-Gallery.]
One must not be hard upon the Whit-Monday holiday-maker. He is at least
good-humored; there is less drunkenness than one would expect; there is
very little fighting, but there is noise—yes, there is a good deal of
noise. These children of nature, if they feel happy, instinctively laugh
and shout to proclaim their happiness. They would like the bystanders to
share it with them; they cannot understand the calm, cold and
unsympathetic faces which gaze upon them as they go bawling on their
way. They would like a friendly chorus, a fraternal hand upon the
shoulder, an invitation to a drink. Let us put ourselves in their place
and have patience with them.
I have already mentioned Epping Forest in connection with the cockney
hunt of Easter Monday. But to be seen in the true splendor of its beauty
Epping Forest must be visited in early June. It is the East Londoner’s
forest; fifty years ago he had two; on the east of Epping Forest lay
another and a larger, called Hainault Forest. It was disforested and
cleared and laid out in farms in the year 1850. Epping, however,
remains. It is about sixteen miles north of the river; encroachments
have eaten into its borders, and almost into its very heart. For a long
time no one paid any attention. Suddenly, however, it was discovered
that the forest, which had once covered twelve thousand acres, now
covered only three thousand. Three fourths had been simply stolen. Then
the City of London woke up, appointed a verderer and rangers, drew a map
of what was left, and sternly forbade any more encroachments. What is
left is a very beautiful wild forest; deer roam about its glades; for
the greater part of the year it is quite a lonely place, only receiving
visitors on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. It is a narrow,
cigar-shaped wood about a mile broad and eight miles long. There are
outlying bits on the north and on the south. The ancient continuity of
the forest is gone, but there are tangles of real wood and coppice here
and there; the central point of the forest, that which attracts most
people, is a small bit of wild wood lying on a hill. Here the ground is
rough and broken; everywhere are oaks, elms, beeches, and hornbeams,
with a veritable jungle of wild roses, sloes, thorns, and brambles. The
woods are filled with singing birds; the ground is covered with wild
flowers. Imagine the joy of the East Londoner on Whit-Monday when he
plunges up to his knees in the buttercups, the wild anemones, and the
flowering grasses, while the lark sings overhead, and thrush and
blackbird call from the woods around him, and the sun warms him and the
sweet air refreshes him. Such an one I followed once and watched. He was
a young fellow of twenty-one or so, with his wife, a girl of nineteen,
behind him. He had taken the pipe out of his mouth; instinctively he
felt that the pipe was out of place; he threw himself down upon the
grass and clasped his hands under his head. “Gawspel truth, old gal!” he
cried, out of the fullness of his heart. “It’s fine! It’s fine!”
It was fine, and it was Whit-Monday, and a hundred thousand others like
unto this young fellow and his bride were wandering about the forest
that day.
There are not many students of archæology in East London, which is a
pity, since there are many points of interest within their reach. All
round the forest, for instance, and within the forest there are
treasures. To begin with, there are two ancient British camps still in
good preservation; there is a most picturesque deserted church, called
old Chingford church; there is the ancient Saxon church, whose walls are
oaken trunks, put up to commemorate the halt of those who carried St.
Cuthbert’s bones; there is Waltham Abbey, where King Harold lies buried;
and if you take a little walk to the east you will find yourself at
Chigwell, and you may dine at the inn where, in the Gordon troubles, as
presented in “Barnaby Rudge,” the landlord found a trifle of glass
broken. But the joy in things ancient has not yet been found out by the
London workman. Now and again he is a lover of birds or a student of
flowers; for such an one Epping is a haunt of which he can never tire,
for it is the only place near London where he can watch heron, hawk,
kingfisher, and the wild water-fowl.
Or the people go farther afield by cheap excursion trains. Their coming
is not welcomed by the inhabitants of the towns which are their
destination. They go to Brighton or to Hastings; they sit in long rows,
side by side, upon the shingle idly watching the waves; they go to
Portsmouth and sit on Southsea beach watching the ships. They even get
across to the Isle of Wight. Last year I was at a little town in that
island called Yarmouth. I there made the acquaintance of an ancient
mariner who was employed by Lloyd’s to take the names of all the ships
which passed into the Solent, here a narrow strait. He told me in
conversation that I ought to see their church, which is old and
beautiful. I replied that I had attempted to do so, but found the door
shut. Upon which he gave me the following remarkable reason for this
apparent want of hospitality. I quote his words to show the local
opinion of the tripper. “You see,” he said, “it’s all along of they
London trippers. One Whit-Monday they came here and they found the
church doors open and in they went, nosebags and cigarettes and all.
Then the parson he came along, and he looked in. ‘Well,’ says the
parson, ‘Dash my wig!’ he says. ‘Get up off of them seats,’ he says,
‘and take your ’ats off your ’eads,’ he says, ‘and take they stinkin’
bits o’ paper out of your mouths,’ he says, ‘and get out of the bloomin’
church,’ he says. And he puts the key in his own pocket, and that’s why
you can’t get into the church.” The remarkable language attributed to
the parson on this occasion illustrates the depth of local feeling about
East London out on a holiday.
The August bank-holiday is a repetition of Whit-Monday, without the
freshness of that early summer day. By the end of July the foliage of
the trees has become dark and heavy; the best of the flowers are over in
field as well as garden; the sadness of autumn is beginning. All through
the summer, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, the excursion trains
are running in all directions, but especially to the seaside; the
excursion steamers run to Southend, Walton, Margate, and Ramsgate. For
those who stay at home there are the East-End parks, Victoria Park, West
Ham Park, Finsbury Park, Clissold Park, Wanstead Park. They are thronged
with people strolling or sitting quietly along the walks. All these
parks are alike in their main features; they are laid out in walks and
avenues planted with trees; they contain broad tracts of green turf;
there is an inclosure for cricket; sometimes there is a gymnasium, and
there is an ornamental water, generally very pretty, with rustic
bridges, swans, and boats let out for hire. Where there is no park, as
at Wapping and Poplar by the riverside, there are recreation grounds. In
all of them a band of music plays on stated evenings.
[Illustration: On Margate Sands.]
This restoration of the garden to the people is a great feature of
modern attempts at civilization; it seems terrible that there should be
no place anywhere for children to play except the streets, or for the
old people to sit except in the public house. London is now dotted with
parks, chiefly small and covered with gardens. Nearly all the
churchyards have been converted into gardens; the headstones are ranged
along the walls; they might just as well be taken away; one or two
“altar tombs” are left. The rest of the ground is planted with flowering
shrubs—lilac, laburnum, ribes, the Pyrus Japonica, and the like; the
walks are asphalted, and seats are provided. Nearly all the year round
one may see the old people walking about the paths or sitting in the
sun; part of the ground is given to the children. It is difficult,
indeed, to exaggerate the boon conferred upon a crowded city by these
breathing-places, where one can be quiet. The summer amusements of the
people, you will observe, are not all made up of noisy crowds and
musical trippers; add the summer evening walk in the park and, all the
year round, the rest in the garden that is a disused burial-ground.
For the children there is the day in the country. Every summer day long
caravans of wagons filled with children, singing and shouting as they
go, drive along the roads to the nearest country place, or excursion
trains crammed with children are carried off to the nearest seaside
places. They run about on the seashore, they bathe, they sit down to a
tea of cake and buns, and they are taken home at night tired out but
singing and shouting to the end. This summer “day out” is the one great
holiday for the children; they scheme to get put on the lists of more
than one excursion; they look forward to it; they count upon it. Every
year vigorous appeals are made in the papers for help to send the
children away upon their annual holiday; these appeals are of course
pitched extravagantly high; they talk a conventional jargon about the
little ones who grow up without ever gazing upon a green leaf or a tree.
Rubbish! There is not a street anywhere in London where a garden, if it
is only a disused burial-ground, is not accessible if the children
choose to go there. Mostly the very little ones prefer the dirt pies in
the gutter, but even for them the wagonette comes now and then to carry
them off for the whole day to the grass of Victoria Park. Still, it is a
very great thing that they should, once at least in the year, be carried
away into real country and have a glimpse of meadows, woods, and cows
and sheep.
When they grow older they are still better off. It is quite common now
for young men who carry on the Settlements and the boys’ clubs to get
the lads under their care to save up week by week until they have
amassed the sum of five shillings. On this capital, with management,
they are enabled to get a week’s holiday by the seaside. It is a
glorious time for them. A convenient place is found; it must be on the
seashore; it should be quite free from any town or village; there must
be no temptations of any kind; the lads are there to breathe fresh air
and life, quite cut off from any suggestion of town life. They sleep,
every boy in his own rug, on dry, clean straw in a barn, which is also
their refectory, their lecture-hall, their concert and their
singing-room. On the seashore there are boats for them; they row and
sail and they go deep-sea fishing; they bathe every day, and they have
swimming matches; on the sands they run races; in the evening they sing,
they box, they look at dissolving views, and they lie down on the straw
to rest. Their food is plain; it consists principally of boiled beef and
potatoes, with cocoa and coffee and bread and butter. Of course this
magnificent holiday demands a head and leader and obedience. But there
is hardly ever any hitch or breakdown or row among the lads.
The hopping, considered as an amusement, should be placed next, but we
have already shown the place it takes in the year of the factory girl.
It is indeed amusement to all concerned, especially if the weather be
fine; it is amusement with profit; the hoppers come home with a pocket
full of money; they have left their pasty cheeks in the country, and
they bring back rosy cheeks and freckled noses and sunburned hands, with
the highest spirits possible. The hopping, I confess, is not always
idyllic. Last autumn it was reported that Maidstone Gaol was filled with
hoppers charged with being disorderly; their camps might be conducted
with more care for cleanliness; London roughs should not be allowed to
come down on Sunday and mar this Arcadia. But the complainant, a
well-known clergyman of the district, spoke with moderated condemnation.
A more careful classification of the families in each encampment, he
thinks; some check on the Sunday drink, which now flows at the sweet
will of the people; some hindrance to the incursion of the Sunday rough;
a more careful system of inspection—these things would go far to remove
all reproach from the hopping. Meantime, as a proof of the substantial
results of the work the roadway outside the principal station for their
return was this year observed to be strewn with the old boots discarded
by the hoppers when they bought new ones on their way home.
The river Lea, which, according to some, is the natural boundary of East
London,—but it has leaped across that boundary,—is part of the summer
amusements. The stream at its mouth, where it is a tributary to the
Thames, is a black and murky river indeed. Higher up above the works it
is a pleasant little river, winding along at leisure through a broad,
marshy valley. The ground is soft and easy to be worked, the incline is
so gradual that it might easily and at small expense be made an
ornamental stream, moderately broad and able to carry racing boats,
flowing beside gardens and under summer-houses and between orchards from
its source to its mouth. Instead of this, it has been mercilessly
divided into “cuts,” channels, and mill-streams running off at wide
angles, joining again lower down, separating again into other cuts and
channels, again to unite. On its way it receives the refuse of mills,
the refuse of towns; it passes Ware and Ryehouse, Tottenham, Clapton,
and Hackney; its course unfortunately lies for the most part through a
broad level of soft earth—marshy and low—which permits these cuttings
and humiliations. It is accused of being a sewer; young men row upon it;
boys bathe in it, but with remonstrance and complaint. The stream is, it
must be confessed, in its lower reaches, offensive. Sore throats are
caught beside its banks; sometimes people write indignantly about it to
the papers. There is a little fuss, summer passes, in the winter no one
goes near the river Lea, things are forgotten, and all goes on as
before.
It is not possible for a river to flow for thirty miles without having
lovely stretches and picturesque corners. The Lea, with all its
drawbacks, does possess these inevitable lapses into beauty. But in
these pages we cannot stop to point them out. Where the Lea is beautiful
it is outside the widest limits assignable to East London. Where the Lea
is ugly, dirty, and disreputable, it used to form the eastern boundary
to East London.