re-named the "Great Eastern Railway"; "great in nothing but the name,"
as the spiteful said.
When matters were at their worst, the Lord Cranborne of that time was
invited to accept the position of chairman and to help extricate the
company from its difficulties. He accepted the post in January 1868
and held it until December 1871. In April 1868 he had succeeded to the
title of Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and prime minister of
later years was once a great figure in the railway world. His financial
abilities helped to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and
when he left it the railway was already greatly improved in every
respect. To-day, instead of being a "shocking example," it is a model
to be copied by other lines.
X
ALTHOUGH the last of the old coaches was long ago broken up, and the
Norwich Road is no longer lively with mail and stage travellers, it
has, in common with several other roads out of London, witnessed a
wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel Mail service
between London and Ipswich. When the Parcel Post came into being on the
1st August 1883, it was speedily discovered by the General Post-office
authorities that in paying, according to contract, 55 per cent. of
the gross receipts to the railway companies for the mere carriage of
parcels, they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system of Parcel
Mail coaches was established on several of the old roads, commencing
with the London to Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and
Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this was shortly
afterwards extended to Colchester, and thence to Ipswich by cart. This
curious enterprise of the Post-office was immediately successful,
and it has ever since been found to effect a large saving over the
railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery. The down mail leaves
London at a quarter to ten o'clock every night and the parcels arrive
at Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery the next
morning; while the country parcels come up to London by an equally
early hour. The way in which the service is worked will be gathered
from the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.
GENERAL POST OFFICE
THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF LONDONDERRY
Postmaster-General
LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, & IPSWICH ROAD
PARCEL SERVICE.
This
Guard's Remarks as Proper Actual Column
to Delays, &c. Times Times to be left
Date 190 . H. M. H. M. blank
Coach Service Mount Pleasant P.M.
between Distance Parcel Office dep. 9 45
London and M.F.
Colchester. 3 0 Eastern District {arr. 10 8
Contractor-- P.O. {dep. 10 10
C. Webster,
279 Whitechapel
Road, E. 11 3 Romford {arr. 11 40
{dep. 11 42
Cart between A.M.
Colchester & 6 2 Brentwood {arr. 12 29
Ipswich. {dep. 12 31
Contractor-- 5 0 Ingatestone {arr. 1 9
F. W. Canham, {dep. 1 11
Ipswich.
6 0 Chelmsford {arr. 2 0
{dep. 2 5
8 6 Witham {arr. 3 13
{dep. 3 15
3 2 Kelvedon {arr. 3 41
{dep. 3 43
9 6 Colchester {arr. 5 0
{dep. 5 5
Stratford St. {arr. 5 58
Mary {dep. 6 0
18 2 Ipswich arr. 7 20
Signature
of Guard 71 5
T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.
The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.
He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill
to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.
TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH
PARCEL MAIL.
The up service, starting with the mail-cart from Ipswich at 7·9 p.m.
and continued from Colchester by four-horse van at 9·30 p.m., brings
the country parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4·30 a.m., throughout the
year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone at 1·9 a.m. On this
service, as on all others, the vans go through, but the drivers and
guards exchange places; the London men changing on to the van from
Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning to London; the Colchester men
taking over the down van and similarly returning whence they came.
It is a curious and unexpected revival of old methods, but an entirely
successful one. No highwayman has ever attempted to "hold up" the
Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for generations mouldered
in his grave; but should any amateurs essay to complete this revival
of old coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards would be found
well armed. Their virgin steel and untried pistols have for years been
carried without any excuse for using them; but there need be no doubt
that, were the occasion to arrive, they would defend their parcels--the
pounds of country butter, the eggs, and wild flowers, or the
miscellaneous consignment from London--with their hearts' blood. There
are more romantic things in the world to die for than postal parcels
of eggs, cheese and butter, but the ennobling word DUTY might glorify
such a sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best fresh," or a
dozen of "new laid."
But although the possibility of attack is remote, a spice of danger and
romance savours the conduct of the parcel mails.
The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap on the night of October 11,
1890, when, owing to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch
near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and guard escaped injury, the
heavy vehicle resting against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one of
his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford, succeeded in overtaking the
down coach, which, returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded and
transferred the parcels, and continued to London, leaving the down mail
to be forwarded with local help. It eventually arrived at Colchester
four hours late.
XI
COACHING days, old and new, having now been disposed of, we might
set off down the road at once, were it not that our steps are at
once arrested by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner of
Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which, together with the "Old Red
Lion," adjoining, stands on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid
career.
It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin shot Matthew King
in 1737. He had stolen a fine horse belonging to a Mr Major, near
the "Green Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of the animal
to the inn, where he was found by the Bow Street runners in company
with Matthew and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself. The
landlord endeavoured to arrest King, who fired at him without effect,
calling to Turpin, "Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"
Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on his person--three brace of
pistols and a carbine slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew
King, whether by accident or design is not known. King first exclaimed,
"Dick! you have shot me; make off," but is said afterwards to have
cursed him as he went, for a coward. King died a week later of his
wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted mansion in Essex, and thence to a
cave in Epping Forest. It is usually said that it was the more famous
Tom King who met so dramatic an end, but original authorities give
Matthew; and certainly we find _a_ Tom King, highwayman, decorously
executed at Tyburn eighteen years later.
[Illustration: THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT
MATTHEW KING. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854._]
We have met Turpin before, notably at York, where he made an end, two
years after this exploit. This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and
the romantic imagination of the average errand boy belongs especially
to this road, for he was an Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705.
Apprenticed to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he commenced his
career of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow
farmer, and then joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and
housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set up a storehouse of
stolen goods in the cave just mentioned. This band became so notorious
that a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their arrest; but it
was not until the amount had been doubled that two of the ringleaders
were caught and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin was reduced
to scouring the roads singly, and pursued a solitary career until one
dreary February night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,
he saw a horseman approaching through the mist. At the time-honoured
demand, "Your money or your life!" the stranger simply laughed.
"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We are of a like trade."
Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up a partnership. If only one
quarter of the deeds assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very
gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on the roads of England.
Although by no means a mythical person, the stories told of him nearly
all belong to the regions of romance, and his true history shows him to
have had few redeeming qualities. Many of the old knights of the road
were courageous, and hand in hand with their courage went a humour not
seldom kindly; but Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage is
not an established fact, and whose humour, like the "tender mercies of
the wicked," was cruel, not to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to
attempt to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after this lapse of
time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance has enjoyed too great and too long a
popularity for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint him as
the cowardly ruffian he was.
Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of Turpin, owns an unenviable
repute, and its very name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,
however, goes back no greater distance in time than the first half
of the eighteenth century, for until that period it was not built
upon, and indeed "Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as 1761,
maps proving the old church to have been quite rural at that date.
Originally a chapel-of-ease to the great mother-parish of Stepney,
the district was erected into a separate parish so far back as the
fourteenth century and the original "white chapel"--doubtless so called
from its mediæval coats of whitewash--made a church. But old names
cling, and although it has been a church for over six hundred years, it
has not been able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish
itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly misleading nowadays, for
it is no longer a chapelry and its stately church is in red brick; so
that there is some force in the argument for re-christening the borough
and dignifying it by a revival of the old name of Eastminster, owned by
that not very fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by Edward the
Third in 1348, which formerly stood on the site of the Royal Mint.
[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.]
St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church, built in 1877, burnt
August 20, 1880, and since restored. It replaced the ugly old building,
which was "taken down for the simple reason that it would not stand
up." The ancient wrangling over its full title of St Mary Matfelon is
not yet done, and rash would be he who voted for any particular one
among the rival derivatives of the name. Matfelon, holds one school,
was the name of a forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions
are not stated. Who, then, would found, since benefits are thus forgot?
"_Mariæ, matri et filio_," an ancient dedication, say others; while yet
different parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning "mother of a
son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the most entertaining legend, however,
is that which tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,
in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between Estren and Witsontyd,
a fals Breton mordred a wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for
almasse withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and bar away alle
that sche hadde, and afterwards he toke socour of Holy Chirche in
Suthwark; but at the last he took the crosse and forswore the kynge's
land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd hym to come be the same place
where he had don that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh comen
out with stones and canell dong, and ther maden an ende of hym in the
hyghe strete." These things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's
evil fame.
The old church, as it stood until well into the nineteenth century, is
shown opposite this page, with one of the old road-waggons crawling
past. In another view of the same date the High Street itself is
seen, its long perspective fully bearing out the old description of
spaciousness. At the same time, it is seen to be empty enough to
resemble the street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly
old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and the shop windows
artfully constructed with the apparent object of obstructing instead
of admitting the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are now
left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding firm at No. 34
Whitechapel Road.
[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.]
This old picture has long ceased to be representative of Whitechapel's
everyday aspect. The coach has long ago whirled away into limbo,
the elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to Abraham's, or
another's, bosom, and Whitechapel knows their kind no more. Bustle,
and a dismal overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers' barrows,
tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic of to-day. Also, the
Jewish element is very pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably
dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names of Cohen, Abraham,
Solomon and the like, and others ending in "baum," or "heim." But
on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious street regains
something of its old rural character, in the open-air hay and straw
market held here, the largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad
thoroughfare and overflows into the side streets: the countrymen
who have come up on the great waggons by road from remote parts of
Essex lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling hay or straw,
attending to their horses, or refreshing in the old taverns. It is
Arcady come again. The eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the
hay-wains, and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic scent of their
heaped-up loads. It is true that Central Londoners also have their
so-called Haymarket, but hay is the least likely of articles to be
purchased there in these days.
What do they think, those countrymen, of the Whitechapel folks, the
"chickaleary blokes," used, as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth
century remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy," from
robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe," and the selling of painted
sparrows for canaries? Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr
Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice neighbourhood," said
Sam, as they rumbled along the crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery
remarkable circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and oysters go
together.... The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to
be for oysters.... An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The
street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's
wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in regular
desperation." Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper depth
than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty; whelks and villainy foregather
in Whitechapel at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.
But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel must not be too greatly
insisted upon. They may easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave
lives--all the braver that they are not flaunted in the face of the
world--exist in the cheerless and unromantic grey streets that lead
off the main road. The domestic virtues flourish here as well as--if
not better than--in the West End. The heroes and heroines of everyday
life--the greater in their heroism that they do not know of it--live
in hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved dulness of the
streets to right and left of Whitechapel Road and of the Mile End Road,
that go with so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to Bow.
XII
LET the Londoner who has never been "down East," and so is given to
speaking contemptuously of it, take a journey down the Whitechapel and
Mile End Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both in respect
of roadway and foot-pavements, those noble thoroughfares are endowed.
The London he has already known owns no streets so wide, save only in
the isolated and unimportant instance of Langham Place; while, although
it cannot be said that, taken individually, the houses of the great
East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet there is a certain
interesting quality in the roads as a whole, lacking elsewhere. This,
doubtless, is partly explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's
garb, and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners who throng the
pavements.
A strangely-named public-house--the "Grave Maurice"--is one of the
landmarks of the Whitechapel Road. Many have set themselves the task of
finding the origin of that sign and its meaning; but their efforts have
been baulked by the very multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or
otherwise. The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice," Prince
Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known Prince Rupert, the
dashing cavalier, but a difficulty arises from the fact that there was
another "Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person of the equally
well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau, who died of grief when the Spanish
overran Holland and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end here,
for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice" in one of his plays,
written at least thirty years before the time of those princes, in a
passage which reads as though it were the usual nickname at that period
for an officer.
Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign we come to the beginning
of the Mile End Road, one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and
for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed with the close of
the Coaching Age. Rowlandson has left us an excellent view of Mile End
Turnpike as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses, groups
of rustic cottages and a background of trees, to show how rural were
the surroundings towards the close of the eighteenth century; while
maps of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by fields, with
"Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary and the ducking-pond itself close
behind, where the scolds and shrews of that age were soused.
The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete as the rack, the
thumb-screw, and other ingenious devices of the "good old times"; but
most towns a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;
while, if they had no official pond for the purpose, any dirty pool
would serve, and the dirtier it were the better it was esteemed.
[Illustration: MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. _After Rowlandson._]
"The Way of punishing scolding Women is pleasant enough," says an old
traveller. "They fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve or
fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so that these two Pieces
of Wood, with their two Ends embrace the Chair, which hangs between
them on a sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and always
remains in the natural horizontal Position in which a Chair should be,
that a Person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let
it down. They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River, and over
this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the two Pieces of Wood, at
one End of which the Chair hangs just over the Water. They place the
Woman in the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often as the
Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate Heat."
One has only to go and look at the average rural pond to imagine the
horrors of this punishment. The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the
clinging green duckwood, common to them, must have made a ducking the
event of a lifetime.
The difference here, at Mile End, between those times and these is
emphasised by the close-packed streets on either side, and by the
crowded tram-cars that ply back and forth.
Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in the little
old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn that stands by itself, in
advance of the frontage of the houses, and takes up a goodly portion
of the broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when land was not
so valuable as now; when local authorities were easy-going, and when
anyone who had the impudence to squat down upon the public paths could
do so, and, remaining there undisturbed for a period of twenty-one
years, could thus derive a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is
an explanation of the existence of the "Vine" in this position.
Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695, for the
housing of old skippers and shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little
houses and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle where the
old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly while the curious passers-by
linger to gaze at them from the pavement, as though they were some
strange kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the pages of fiction
as this quiet haven in midst of the roaring streets, screened from them
by walls and gates of curious architecture surmounted by models of the
gallant old galleons that have long ceased to rove the raging main.
It is a spot alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by the
towering breweries, which indeed would have bought the old place and
destroyed it a few years ago, but for the indignation aroused when the
proposal of the governing body of the almshouses to sell became known.
There is nothing else to detain the explorer on his way into Essex.
The People's Palace, it is true, is a remarkable place, the result of
Sir Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the East who would
get culture and find recreation, but it is a dream realised as an
architectural nightmare, and is a very terrible example of what is done
to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art and Philanthropy.
XIII
AT last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come to Stratford-le-Bow
and its parish church. In these hurried times, and for some centuries
past, the old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and as "Bow"
alone it is familiar to all East-enders. The place is nowadays chiefly
associated with Bryant & May and matches, but there yet remain many old
Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by the roadside, telling of days
long before "patent safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel
and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.
"Bow," says the _Ambulator_ of 1774, "is a village a little to the
east of Mile End, inhabited by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here
has been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little inferior to
that of Chelsea." That description is now somewhat out of date. The
manufactory of porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is scarce,
and treasured accordingly. Whitsters--that is to say, bleachers of
linen--and scarlet dyers, also, are to seek.
Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound traveller in bold and
rugged fashion; its time-worn tower standing midway of the road and
challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little River Lea, just
beyond, to Stratford and into Essex. Church and churchyard split the
road up into two channels and thus destroy its width, which it never
afterwards regains until the suburbs are passed and the open country
reached. A modern touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in
advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory attitude
from its granite pedestal, and erected in his lifetime; recalling
the fervent hero-worshipping days of the "People's William." The
outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them that see statues raised
to themselves, unless indeed they be made of finer clay than most
mortals, kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years this bronze
Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been made to preside, as it were,
over an underground public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst
he rises, absurdly eloquent.
[Illustration: BOW.]