Yorkshire saying; one eminently characteristic of this county of stingo
and plurality of acres. The history of this particular saddler, or the
crime for which he was condemned, are unknown either here or at York, but
his end is a terrible warning to all Blue Ribbonites. It was in this
wise that the artificer in pigskin lost his life. Led forth to the fatal
tree, the procession halted on the way to present the condemned with the
customary parting bowl of ale, an institution on the way to the gallows
both in York and London. But the saddler would take none of their
farewell courtesies, and refused the drink; whereupon the enraged mob
strung him up, double quick. A few minutes later a reprieve arrived, and
they cut him down; but he was already dead, a melancholy warning to all
future generations of non-convivial souls.
Coaching days made Bawtry a busy townlet, for although the coaches and
the postmasters generally made a long stage of fourteen miles between
Doncaster and Barnby Moor, or else a nine and a half mile stage between
Doncaster and Scrooby Top, the by-roads gave a good proportion of
business to the “Angel” and the “Crown.” The “Crown” is still a
prominent feature of Bawtry’s now empty street, a street whose width is a
revelation of the space once considered necessary and now altogether
superfluous; just as the long pillared range of stableyards beyond the
old coach archway of the inn itself has now become.
Bawtry to-day is a great emptiness. Four-square red-brick houses of a
certain modishness, being indeed built on the model of town houses, look
across the void roadway, with a kind of patronising air, upon the peaked,
timbered, or lath-and-plaster gabled cottages that border the opposite
side of the street. Much older they are, those old cottages, and more
akin to the country. They were built long centuries before the coaching
age came, bringing a greater prosperity and consequent expansion to
Bawtry, and for a time they were quite put out of countenance by the
new-fangled brick houses, with their classic porticoes and brass knockers
and impudent red faces. But a period of eighty or ninety years, at the
most, saw the beginning and the end of this expansion, and this once
fashionable air has altered to an aspect of old-world dignity. Both the
gabled cottages and these Georgian houses would feel greatly degraded if
confronted with examples of the way in which the small country builder
runs up his tasteless structures nowadays, but happily Bawtry has nothing
of this type to show, and the white stuccoed elevation of the “Crown”
alone hints at a later phase in building fashion, typifying the dawn of
the nineteenth century and the course of taste in its earlier years.
This white-painted frontage marks the close of Bawtry’s busy days. Soon
afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of business
and activity, and began to merely exist. There are shops here—old
bow-windowed, many-paned shops—which have long seen their best days go
by. They came into existence under the influence of the beatific Law of
Demand and Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted
the thousand and one necessities of civilisation. They did a brave trade
in those times, and continued it until the railway snuffed it out in
1842. Since then no one has come to buy, and their stock must contain
many curiosities. Probably the stationer has still some of that goffered
and perfumed pink notepaper on which the young ladies of sensibility
wrote their love-letters in the long-ago, together with a goodly supply
of the wafers with which they were sealed; and, doubtless, those who seek
could find flint and steel and tinder-boxes elsewhere. Bawtry, in fine,
is a monument to the Has Been.
[Picture: The “Crown,” Bawtry]
Austerfield, where William Bradford was born in 1580, is a grim and
unlovely village to the left of Bawtry. Here yet stands his birthplace,
in its time a manor-house, but now occupied as two cottage-dwellings, it
is not a romantic-looking relic to be the place of origin of one who
became the first Governor of the Pilgrim colony in New England.
There was once a pond beside the road near Bawtry (where is it now,
alas!) to which a history belonged, for into it used to drive the
villainous postboys of lang syne, who were in the pay of the highwaymen.
They would, as though by accident, whip suddenly into it, and when the
occupants of the chaise let down the windows and looked out, to see what
was the matter, they were confronted with the grinning muzzle of a
pistol, and the dread alternative demand for their money or their lives.
Past this dread spot, and over the rise and dip in the road on leaving
the town, the galloping stage is reached, a dead level by the palings of
Rossington Park and on to Rossington Bridge, where the tollgate was, and
now is not. The inn too, has, like many another, taken down its sign,
and retired into private occupation. Off to the left is Rossington
village, and in the churchyard, the grave, for those who like to turn
aside to see it, of Charles Bosvile, “King of the Gipsies.” Here we are
four miles and a half from Doncaster, or, as a Yorkshireman would say,
four miles “and a way-bit.”
Ask a Yorkshireman how far it is to any place along the road, and he will
most likely answer you, so many miles “and a way-bit.” This is probably
his pronunciation of “wee bit.” It is often said that the “way-bit” is
generally as long as the rest put together. This expression compares
with the Scottish so many miles “and a bittock.”
XXXIV
FROM Rossington Bridge, a long pale rise, bordered by coppices of hazels
and silver birches, leads past Cantley to Tophall, where one of the old
road wagons was struck by lightning on the 22nd of May 1800. One of the
seven horses drawing the wagon was killed, and four others were stunned;
while the great lumbering conveyance and its load of woollen cloths,
muslins, cottons, rabbit-down and a piano were almost entirely burnt.
The disaster was a long-remembered event for miles round, and one of the
Doncaster inns was renamed from it, the “Burning Waggon.” This house has
long since been renamed the “Ship.”
Passing Tophall, and by a bridge over the railway cutting, Doncaster is
seen, with its great church-tower, smoking chimney-stalks, and puffing
locomotives, map-like, down below, three miles away. Two miles further,
past Hawbush, or Lousybush, Green, on which unaristocratically named spot
old-time tramps used to congregate, Doncaster racecourse is reached, on
the old Town Moor.
Doncaster, all England over, stands for racing and the St. Leger, just as
much as Epsom for the Derby, and racing has been in progress here
certainly ever since 1600, and perhaps even before. The renowned St.
Leger, which still draws its hundreds of thousands every September, was
established in 1778 and named by the Marquis of Rockingham after
Lieut.-Colonel Ashby St. Leger. All Yorkshire, and a large proportion of
other shires, flocks to witness this classic race, greatly to the benefit
of the town, which owns the racecourse and derives the handsome income of
some £30,000 per annum from it. Doncaster, indeed, does exceedingly well
out of racing, and the Town Council can well afford the £380 annually
expended in stakes. But the St. Leger week is a terrible time for quiet
folks, for all the brazen-throated blackguards of the Three Kingdoms are
then let loose upon the town, and not even this sum of £30,000 in relief
of the rates quite repays them for the infliction.
Robert Ridsdale, originally “Boots” at a Doncaster inn, rose to be owner
of Merton Hall, about 1830. He was a bookmaker. Betting is a pursuit in
which only the bookmakers secure the fortunes.
Dickens, who was here during the St. Leger week in 1857, in company with
Wilkie Collins, and stayed at the still extant “Angel,” saw this side of
horse-racing fully displayed. Looking down into the High Street from
their window, the friends saw “a gathering of blackguards from all parts
of the racing earth. Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from
an innocent horse had its representation in the streets,” and the next
day after the great race every chemist’s shop in the town was full of
penitent bacchanalians of the night before, roaring to the busy
dispensers to “Give us soom sal-volatile or soom damned thing o’ that
soort, in wather—my head’s bad!” Night was made hideous for all who
sojourned at the “Angel” by the “groaning phantom” that lay in the
doorway of one of the bedrooms and howled until the morning, like a lost
soul; explanation by the landlord in the morning eliciting the fact that
the fearsome sounds were caused by a gentleman who had lost £1,500 or
£2,000 by backing a “wrong ’un,” and had accordingly drank himself into a
_delirium tremens_.
Sir William Maxwell of Menreith, who won the St. Leger with Filho da
Puta, in 1815, celebrated his success by thrusting his walking-stick
through all the pier-glasses at the “Reindeer”; expressing his regret
that there were no more to smash, as an adequate relief to his feelings.
Dean Pigou, once vicar of Doncaster, bears later testimony to the
character of a large proportion of the race-crowds, and tells amusingly
how the contingents of pickpockets who flock here on these occasions
disguise themselves as clergymen, a fact well known to the police, and
resulting in the arrest of a genuine cleric on one occasion. “You old
rascal!” said the constable; “we’ve been looking for you for a long
time.”
Doncaster, out of the season, is a singularly quiet and inoffensive town,
and looks as innocent as its native butterscotch. Quiet, because the
locomotive and carriage-works of the Great Northern Railway are a little
way outside; inoffensive, because it is unpretending. At the same time
it is just as singularly devoid of interest. Almost its oldest houses
are those on Hall Cross Hill, as the traveller passes the elm-avenue by
the racecourse and enters the town from the direction of London; and they
are scarce older than the days of the Prince Regent. Very like the older
part of Brighton, this southern end of Doncaster is the best the town has
to show.
Hall Cross—originally called “Hob Cross”—was destroyed in the
seventeenth-century troubles. It was a late Norman structure, and is
copied in the existing Cross, set up by the Corporation, as an
inscription informs the passer-by, in 1793. A weird structure it is,
too, consisting of a stone pillar of five engaged shafts, reflecting
credit on neither the original designer nor the restorers. But there it
stands, elevated above the modern road, as evidence of a momentary
aberration in favour of restoring antiquity of which the Corporation were
guilty, a century or so ago. Doncastrians have purged themselves so
thoroughly of that weakness in later years that they have left no other
vestige of old times in their streets. The finest example of an old inn
belonging to the town was destroyed in the pulling down of the “Old
Angel” in 1846, in order to clear a site for the Guildhall. Others are
left, but, if old-fashioned, they are scarcely picturesque: the “Angel,”
“Ram,” “Elephant,” “Salutation,” and “Old George.”
[Picture: Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse]
In old newspaper files we find Richard Wood, of the “Reindeer” and “Ram”
inns, High Street, advertising that his coaches were the best—“the horses
keep good time—_no_ racing”; from which we conclude that there _had_ been
some. It was Richard Wood, then the foremost coach-proprietor in
Doncaster, who first gave employment to that celebrated painter of horses
and coaches, John Frederick Herring, who, although a Londoner born, lived
long and worked much at Doncaster. It was in 1814, when in his
nineteenth year, that he first came to the town, the love of horses
bringing him all the way. Seeing the “Royal Union” starting at eight
o’clock in the morning with “Doncaster” displayed in large letters on its
panels, on the inspiration of the moment he took a seat, and arrived in
time to witness the horse “William” win the St. Leger.
There is a tale of his observing a man clumsily trying to paint a picture
of the Duke of Wellington, seated on his charger, for the panel of a
coach to be called after that hero of a hundred fights. He had, somehow,
managed to worry through the figure of the Duke, and to secure a
recognisable likeness of him—because, for this purpose, all that was
necessary was the representation of an ascetic face and a large,
beak-like nose—but he boggled at the horse. Herring offered to paint in
the horse for him, and did it so well that he earned the thanks of the
proprietor, who happened to appear on the scene and commissioned him to
paint the insignia of the “Royal Forester,” Doncaster and Nottingham
coach; a white lion on one door and a reindeer on the other. These he
performed with equal credit, and taking a seat beside the proprietor in
question, who, with others, mounted for a ride to “prove” the springs and
christen the new coach, he at once offered himself as coachman. Mr.
Wood, for it was he, was naturally surprised at the idea of a painter
driving a coach, but consented to give him a trial the next day on the
“Highflyer,” and to abide by the decision of the regular driver of that
famous drag. The result was favourable, and Herring obtained the
box-seat, not of the “Royal Forester,” but of the “Nelson,” Wakefield and
Lincoln coach. He was, after two years, transferred to the Doncaster and
Halifax road, and thence promoted to the “Highflyer,” painting in his
leisure hours many of the signs of Doncaster’s old inns. It was when on
this road that he attracted the attention of a local gentleman, who
obtained him a commission for a picture which laid the foundation of his
success.
Nearly all the local signs that Herring painted have disappeared. Some
were taken down when he became famous, and added to private collections
of pictures; while others were renewed from the effects of time and
weather by being painted over by journeyman painters. Some landlords,
however, knew the value of these signs well enough. There was, for
instance, mine host of the “Doncaster Arms,” who, having come from
cow-keeping to the inn-keeping business, determined to change the name of
the house to the “Brown Cow.” He induced Herring to paint the new sign,
which immediately attracted attention. According to one story, a
gentleman posting north chanced to see it and stopped the postboy while
he endeavoured to drive a bargain for the purchase. He offered twice as
much as mine host had originally paid; ten times as much, but without
avail. “Not for twenty times,” said that licensed victualler; and the
connoisseur went without it.
The other version makes the traveller a very important man, travelling
with four post-horses, and represents the landlord as being away, and the
landlady as the obstinate holder. “I’s rare and glad, measter, my
husband’s not at home,” she said, “for p’r’aps he’d ha’ let thee hae it;
but I wain’t; for what it’s worth to thee it’s worth to me, so gang on.”
A list has been preserved of the signs painted by Herring at Doncaster,
but they will be sought in vain to-day. They were—
The Labour in Vain Marsh Gate.
The Sloop Marsh Gate.
The Brown Cow French Gate.
The Stag The Holmes.
The Coach and Horses Scot Lane.
The White Lion St. George Gate.
The “Labour in Vain” represented the fruitless labour of attempting to
wash a black man white.
The old sign of the “Salutation,” painted by a Dutchman in 1766, was
touched up by Herring. Many years ago it was removed, but has now been
replaced, and may be seen on the front of the house in Hall Cross. It is
much weather-worn, and represents, in dim and uncertain fashion, two
clumsy looking old gentlemen in the costume of a hundred and forty years
ago, rheumatically saluting one another. The sign of the “Stag,” painted
on plaster still remains, in a decaying condition.
Herring continued as a coachman for several years, and only left the box
in 1830, when he went to reside in London. From that date until his
death in 1865 he devoted himself entirely to painting.
Richard Wood, Herring’s first employer, was part-proprietor of the “Lord
Nelson” coach, among others. Especial mention must be made of this
particular conveyance, because if not the first, it must have been one of
the earliest, of the coaches by which passengers were allowed to book
through to or from London, and to break their journey where they pleased.
To those who could not endure the long agonies of a winter’s journey
except in small doses, this arrangement must have been a great boon. To
this coach belongs the story of a Frenchman, still preserved by Doncaster
gossips.
It was in the early part of the century that he wanted to travel from
“Doncastare” to London. Inquiring at the booking-office for the best
coach, the clerk mentioned the “Lord Nelson.”
“Damn your Lord Nelson!” says the Frenchman in a rage. “What others are
there?”
The names of the others heaped greater offence upon him, for they were
the “Waterloo” and the “Duke of Wellington.” So perhaps he posted
instead, and saved his national susceptibilities at the expense of his
pocket.
Another, and a later, coach-proprietor and innkeeper at Doncaster was
Thomas Pye, of the “Angel.” He lived to see railways ruin the coaching
business, but he kept the “Angel” for years afterwards, and his family
after him. The Queen, on her way to Scotland in 1861, slept there one
night, and the loyal family promptly added the title of “Royal” to the
old house.
Coaching days were doomed at Doncaster in 1859, when the Midland Railway
was opened and diverted the traffic; and nine years later, when the Great
Northern Railway came, the last coach was withdrawn.
Few think of Doncaster as a centre of spiritual activity. Racing seems
to comprehend everything, and to make it, like a famous winner of the St.
Leger a case of “Eclipse first; the rest nowhere!” Even Doncaster
butterscotch is more familiar than Doncaster piety, but the Church is
particularly active here, nevertheless. That activity only dates from
the appointment of Dr. Vaughan as vicar, in 1859. Before his time
religion was very dead, so that, when the great parish church of St.
George was burnt down in 1853, the then vicar, Dr. Sharpe, on seeing the
flames burst out, could at first only think of his false teeth, which he
had left in the building, and exclaimed in horror-stricken tones, “Good
gracious! and I have left my set of teeth in the vestry.”
The church was rebuilt by Sir Gilbert Scott. It is a magnificent
building, but too palpably Scott, and the details of the carving
painfully mechanical. Also, the stone was so badly selected that the
crockets and enrichments were long ago found to be decaying, and
“restoration” of a building not then fifty years old was found necessary.
Dr. Vaughan was a bitter opponent of horse-racing, and so was not popular
with the sporting element; and as Doncaster is, above everything, given
over to sport, this meant that his nine years’ vicariate was a sojourn in
a hostile camp. His predecessors had been more complaisant. Always
within living memory the church bells had been rung on the St. Leger day,
and generally at the moment the winning horse had passed the post. Dr.
Vaughan put an end to this and quietly inaugurated a new era, not by
raising a dispute, but by obtaining the keys of the belfry on the first
St. Leger day of his incumbency, and, locking the door, going for a walk
which kept him out of the town until the evening!
XXXV
LEAVING Doncaster and its racing and coaching memories behind, we come
out upon the open road again by Frenchgate, past the unprepossessing
“Volunteer” inn, in whose yard Mendoza and Humphries brought off their
prize-fight in 1790; past Marshgate and over the dirty Don to a parting
of the ways. To the left goes the Ferrybridge, Wetherby, and
Boroughbridge route to the North; to the right, that by way of Selby and
York. Both fall into one again at Northallerton; both claim to be the
true Great North Road; and both were largely travelled, so that we shall
have to pay attention to either. In the first instance, we will go via
York, the mail-route in later coaching days, and as flat and
uninteresting a road, so far as the cathedral city, as it is possible to
imagine. Beginning with the suburban village of Bentley, with its ugly
new cottages and handsome new church, it continues, with ruts and loose
stones as its chief features, to Askerne, passing through lonely woods
and past pools and lakes, with a stray grouse or so, and astonished hares
and rabbits, as the sole witnesses of the explorer’s progress in these
deserted ways. Off to the right-hand, two miles or so away, goes the
Great Northern Railway, one of the causes of this solitude, to meet the
North Eastern at Shaftholme Junction, where, as the chairman said, many
years ago, the Great Northern ends, ingloriously, “in a ploughed field.”
Askerne, in a situation of great natural beauty, amidst limestone rocks
and lakes, and with the advantage of possessing medicinal springs, has
been, like most Yorkshire villages, made hideous by its houses and
cottages, inconceivably ugly to those who have not seen what abominable
places Yorkshire folk are capable of building and living in. Askerne’s
fame as what its inhabitants call a “spawing place” has not spread of
late, but its old pump-room and its lake are the resorts of York and
Doncaster’s trippers in summer-time, and those holiday-makers derive just
as much health from rowing in pleasure-boats on the lake as did their
forefathers, who, a hundred years ago, quaffed its evil-tasting
sulphurous waters.
Thus Askerne. Between it and Selby, a distance of thirteen miles, the
road and the country around are but parts of a flat, watery, treeless,
featureless plain, its negative qualities tempered by the frankly mean
and ugly villages on the way, and criss-crossed by railways, sluggish
rivers, and unlovely canals. So utterly without interest is the road,
that a crude girder-bridge or a gaunt and forbidding flour-mill remain
vividly impressed upon the mental retina for lack of any other
outstanding objects.
[Picture: Brayton Church]
Nearing Selby, the octagonal Perpendicular lantern and spire of Brayton
church, curiously imposed upon a Norman tower, attracts attention as much
by the relief they give from the deadly dulness just encountered as for
their own sake; although they are beautiful and interesting, the lantern
having been designed to hold a cresset beacon by which the travellers of
the Middle Ages were guided at night across the perilous waste; the spire
serving the same office by day. Here, too, the isolated hills of Brayton
Burf and Hambleton Hough, three miles away, show prominently, less by
reason of their height, which is inconsiderable, than on account of the
surrounding levels, which give importance to the slightest rise.
Brayton, which, apart from its beautiful church, is about as miserable a
hole as it is possible to find in all Yorkshire (and that is saying a
good deal), is a kind of outpost between Selby and these wilds, standing
a mile and a half in advance of the town. In that mile and a half the
builders are busy erecting a flagrant suburb, so that the traveller
presses on, curious to witness the prosperity of Selby itself, arguable
from these signs. Even without them, Selby is approached with
expectancy, for its abbey is famous, and abbeys imply picturesque towns.
From this point of view Selby is distinctly disappointing. The glorious
Abbey, now the parish church, is all, and more than, one expects, and the
superlatively cobble-stoned Market-place, painful to walk in, is
picturesque to look at; but the rest is an effect of meanness. Mean old
houses of no great age; mean new ones; mean and threadbare waterside
industries; second-hand clothes-shops, coal-grit, muddy waters and
foreshores of the slimy Ouse, shabby rope-walks, and dirty alleys: these
are Selby.