long to deliberate upon the concluding speeches of counsel. In half an
hour they returned, with the astonishing verdict, “That Mr. Windham is
of sound mind and capable of taking care of himself and his affairs.”
This announcement was received with cheers.
Both the verdict and its public reception reflect the feeling of the
time on questions of lunacy. The terrible scandals and revelations of
sane persons having in the past been “put away” by relatives for sake of
gain were fresh in the public mind, and no conceivable evidence short of
that of homicidal mania would have sufficed for a jury at that period.
Windham was left to his own devices. The costs of the action, coming out
of his estate, amounted to £20,000, and with the extravagance and
robbery that went on, unchecked, around him, speedily embarrassed the
unhappy creature. The vile parasites of the woman he had married had
sole control. They even appeared at Felbrigg, and gave orders for the
valuable timber to be cut down and sold. His wife, who had never made a
secret of the fact that she loathed him, went off with some one else;
but Windham, who in a lucid moment had brought divorce proceedings
against her, condoned the offence, and she returned for just as long as
there was any plunder to be obtained from the wreck of his fortunes.
Later, she was living with a man named Jack Abel, who then kept a
public-house, the “Lord Camden” (still standing) in Charing Cross,
Norwich. Abel was an unscrupulous, but successful horse-dealer, who had,
in earlier years, been in league with a gang of smugglers trading
between Wells and Thetford, and supplied the horses carrying their
illicit merchandise.
Meanwhile, Windham was throwing away money and property with both hands.
A passing mania for coaching led him to set up a Norwich and Cromer
coach, which became the terror of the countryside. To travel in or on
“Mad Windham’s” coach, or to be on the road when it came past, was
equally hazardous, and a respected Norfolk cleric still recalls his
solitary encounter with the maniac in a cloud of dust, with four rearing
horses, and a stentorian voice, yelling, “Out of the way, d——n your
eyes!”
There was every element of uncertainty about “Mad Windham’s” coach. It
was uncertain as to whether he would not suddenly decide to go to
Yarmouth instead, and equally uncertain whether, wherever it was, you
would get there safely; but, once there, certitude of a sort was
reached, in your unalterable determination not to return by him, and, if
needs were, to _walk_ back.
The story of his financial expedients is a long one, but it ended in
July, 1864, with final and irrevocable bankruptcy. He had completely
dissipated the residue of his extensive property, and was dependent upon
an allowance made by his uncle, whose efforts to save him from himself
had met with such misrepresentation. To keep him employed and out of
mischief, he was induced to accept a situation at £1 a week, to drive
the “Express,” Norwich and Cromer coach; and when that enterprise
failed—chiefly, we may suppose, because _he_ drove it, and because of an
absurd prejudice the passengers cherished against acquiring broken
necks—it was kept on the road solely for the same purpose; until,
indeed, he fell in love for the hundredth time. On this occasion it was
a Norwich barmaid who had caught his fancy. She thought coaching “low,”
and he gave it up, to please her.
The poor fool was drawing to his end. A few weeks longer of a miserable
existence at the “Norfolk Hotel,” where he had one solitary room, and it
was all over. He died there, after a few hours’ illness, February 2nd,
1866. A clot of blood on the lung cut his career short, in his
twenty-sixth year. His body was removed to Cromer, and thence to the
family vault at Felbrigg, where it lies among the real Windhams and the
sham. Tom Saul, an old coachman, together with a few cronies of the
Norfolk Tap, were the mourners.
Felbrigg had already passed out of the family, and had been purchased by
a man whose career was itself a romance.
John Kitton, who bought the estate and the Hall as they stood, including
the furniture, library, and the entire appointments of the house, had
been a grocer in a small way of business—one may almost say he had owned
a small chandler’s shop—in Norwich. His rise dated from a small
speculation in wheat shipped from Russia on the eve of the Crimean War.
By the time it had reached these shores the price of grain had become
enormously enhanced, and he netted a very handsome profit. His next
venture, of sending out a heavy shipment of oil-cake to the Crimea, was
equally successful, and laid a solid basis for the great fortune this
clever man of business rapidly acquired. The sum he is stated to have
given, in one cheque, for Felbrigg, “lock, stock, and barrel,” when the
estate was sold under “Mad Windham’s” bankruptcy, was £137,000. He then
changed his name to Ketton, and set up as a country squire. He died,
aged sixty-one, in 1872.
When Augustus Hare visited Felbrigg in 1885, he found Ketton’s daughters
had adopted the Windhams and all their heirlooms and traditions, as
though they were their very own. Nothing whatever had been removed at
the sale, and, as a matter of fact, the ancient family portraits and the
statesman’s library are here, even now. Said Miss Ketton: “Mr. Windham
comes every night to look after his favourite books in the library. He
goes straight to the shelves where they are: we hear him moving the
tables and the chairs about; we never disturb him, though, for we intend
to be ghosts ourselves some day, and to come about the old place, just
as he does”—so that Felbrigg Hall bids fair to become a congested area,
in the spookish sort
LII
THERE can be few more delightful woodlands than those of Felbrigg, and
no more romantic approach to a seaside than that of the woodland road
which goes, as though tunnelled through the trees, steeply down from
Felbrigg’s height to Cromer’s level. In the distance, down there, you
see the illimitable sea, Cromer’s great church tower standing up against
it, and the houses of the town clustered around—a little group set in a
vast expanse of salt water and green fields. This is the most delightful
way into Cromer, but we may not take it. Like Moses, permitted merely to
look upon the Promised Land, we must only gaze upon that road and
retrace our route to Roughton, there to pick up the coach-road, by no
means so delightful and prepossessing an entrance to Cromer.
It is, however, only comparatively that this entrance is to be despised.
It is true it leads past the railway station and a lengthy line of
suburbs, down a long gradient, with houses instead of seascape in front
of you; but if, indeed, everything be newly created and baldly
uninteresting, at least there in nothing sordidly unprosperous in view,
and everything is spick-and-span, even to the road-paving, which in
every street in Cromer is composed of asphalte. Almost every one of
those smart red-brick villas is of the boarding-house order, and only
when the very centre of the town is reached, by the church, do the shops
commence.
Cromer, until modern times a small fishing village, but now grown to the
proud estate of a fashionable, expensive, and exclusive seaside resort,
was once a portion of the town of Shipden, and lay quite half a mile
distant from the sea. “Shipedana” and “Seepedene,” the names by which
Shipden is referred to in the “Domesday Book,” remind us that Shipden
was not necessarily merely a place of ships, but that the name perhaps
came originally from Anglo-Saxon words meaning a sheep pasture. Vague
accounts still tell how Shipden was suddenly destroyed by a violent
storm and eruption of the sea in the reign of Henry IV., and half a mile
out to sea is still visible, at exceptionally low tides, the mass of
flint walling called the “Church Rock,” said to be the remains of
Shipden church. A Yarmouth excursion steamer was wrecked on it in the
summer of 1888.
Cromer was spoken of in 1374, and again in 1382, as “Crowmere.” Although
it thus, by the disappearance of Shipden, was thrust into the foremost
place, it never attained the size of that unfortunate town. The sea was
advancing too surely for a repetition of Shipden’s fate to be dared. In
1551, if we may judge from the petition then presented to the Privy
Council, Cromer was in sore case:—
“It is situate and adjoining so near the sees that of late in our
memorye, by the rages and surges of the same sees, the number of a grete
sort of houses knowen by us have been swallowed uppe and drownded. The
inhabitants hathe to their grete and importunate charges defended the
same by making of grete peers, and dayle put to insatiable charges
scharse and onetheable to be borne of the same inhabitants.”
This anxiety seems to have made havoc with their literary composition. A
direct result of this petition was the grant, thirty years later, of a
licence to levy dues upon wheat, barley, and malt, the revenue from them
to be applied in defending the town from the sea; but when Taylor, the
“Water Poet,” visited Cromer on his “Very Merry—Wherry—Ferry Voyage”
round the coast in 1623, the sea was still encroaching, and he describes
the place in doleful strain:—
It is an ancient market-town that stands
Upon a lofty cliff of mould’ring sands;
The sea against the cliffs doth daily beat,
And every tide into the land doth eat.
The town is poor, unable by expense,
Against the raging seas to make defence,
And every day it eateth further in,
Still waiting, washing down the sand doth run.
A goodly church stands on these brittle grounds,
Not many fairer in Great Britain’s bounds;
And if the sea shall swallow it, as some fear,
’Tis not ten thousand pounds the like could rear.
Very true; but the encroaching ocean has not made such great headway
since then as might have been expected from past history, and from the
soft nature of the cliffs on whose crest the town stands. Those cliffs,
100 feet high, are composed of sand, gravel, and clay, made rotten by
landsprings, and only saved from further decay in front of the town by
heavy concrete walls.
[Illustration: CROMER IN 1830.
_From a print after T. Creswick, R.A._]
The church, of whose grandeur Taylor speaks so highly, is the only
building in Cromer of any age, and is the town’s one land and sea mark.
There is no view of Cromer which does not include its great tower,
rising to a height of 159 feet, and the very inevitableness of it is apt
at last to change the admiration of a first glimpse into the intolerable
boredom created by photographic views from every conceivable and
inconceivable point. This great and beautiful building, in the lofty and
airy Perpendicular style, built shortly after Shipden was destroyed,
owes its present perfect state of repair to the restoration, begun in
1863. Before that work was undertaken, the chancel was a roofless ruin,
and had been in that condition ever since 1681, when it was purposely
destroyed with gun-powder. The discredit of this act of vandalism, given
by popular legend to Cromwell, is an injustice to the Lord Protector.
The real vandal was the Rev. Thomas Gill, Rector of Ingworth, lessee of
the great tithes under the Bishop of Ely. As lessee, an obligation was
laid upon him to keep the chancel in repair, and to save himself expense
he obtained permission to destroy it.
The church and its well-kept churchyard, in the very centre of the
little town, give the place all the dignity of a cathedral city. Modern
commercial buildings, many-storeyed and lofty, are, however, detracting
something from the apparent height and great bulk of the church. The old
rustic stones in the churchyard still remain, and look strange in the
unwonted urban modernity of their surroundings: doubtless some
“improving” hand will shortly away with them. Among these simple
memorials one may see, prominently displayed, that of five mariners,
part of the crew of the _Trent_, of North Shields, who were drowned on
Cromer beach in the great storm of February, 1836; while a memorial to
one John Nurse, who left the world without regret, says:—
Farewell, Vain World,
I’ve seen enough of the,
& careless I am what you
Can say or do to me.
I fear no threats from
An infernal crew;
My day is past, and I bid
The world “Adieu.”
LIII
IT was somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century,
contemporaneously with the general rise of seaside resorts, that the
invigorating air of Cromer first began to attract attention, and so
early as 1806 an anonymous visitor, seeking health here, published
_Cromer: a Descriptive Poem_, a wearisome production of several hundred
lines, in blank—very blank—verse. The reader shall be spared his
rhapsodies on the sea, but his circuitous description of a taxed cart,
typical of his literary method, is not without its unconscious humour:—
Quiet the steady _Sociable_ proceeds,
No danger in its course, and in the rear
The humbler vehicle, that bears displayed,
In letters legible to ev’ry eye,
The stamp of fiscal avarice.
If brevity be, indeed, the soul of wit, how witless this laboured
effort!
If our poet could but return and his poem were to do again, he would
have to wrestle with very changed conditions, and would probably give us
something like this:—
Noisy, th’ effluvious motor-car appears,
Throbbing and shaking like a jelly:
Smelling to Heaven in pestiferous clouds
Of ill-combusted petrol, blue and beastly.
Danger in its course of twenty miles
An hour, and in the rear a frightened horse
And battered trap. Wrecking the shops,
Frightening the old ladies, upsetting the Bath chairs,
Crumpling up the casual cyclist,
And, generally, playing the very deuce
With everything, it goes. Its licence plates
Boldly inscribed, designed by law to be
Legible to ev’ry eye, artfully obscured
With wraps and rugs. Give me my gun.
And so forth. There is room for lengthy eloquence on the subject.
Cromer has in these later years become the Motor Cad’s Paradise. Here
are the gorgeous “hotels” beloved of his little soul, and here the good
roads he can render dangerous to others with little risk to himself.
A wide gulf separates the Cromer of that poet’s time and ours, but the
change that has taken place is quite recent, and astonishingly sudden.
At the close of Georgian days a certain vogue had been established, and
a Bath House was built under the cliff. This was washed away during the
storm and high tide in 1836, but the “Bath Hotel” of that period,
stuccoed, white-painted, midway between cliff-top and sea, remains,
together with a few of the early Victorian bay-windowed seaside
lodging-houses, small but comfortable, that line the narrow streets near
the cliffs’ edge. It was following this great storm of 1836 that the
first of Cromer’s defensive sea-walls was built; but the greater storm
of 1845 wrecked it and washed away the timber jetty, built in 1822, at a
cost of £1,400. What Cromer was like at this period may be judged from
the illustration, which clearly shows how, from the picturesque point of
view, it has been spoiled.
In those days before railways, sea-borne goods came cheapest to Cromer,
on whose sands the cargo-boats of small burden were beached and unloaded
between tides. The few houses for the accommodation of summer visitors
had not overshadowed the fisher-village, and the narrow streets remained
paved, as from time immemorial they had been, with cobble-stones. The
great people, locally, of that period were the allied families of
Gurneys, Buxtons, and Hoares, of whom the few petty shopkeepers stood so
greatly in awe that no visitors could count upon being able to purchase
anything until those tradesfolk had made quite certain those grand
seigneurs were not likely to require the articles in demand. The
railway, which altered all this, was long kept away by the exclusives,
but it came at last, and, backed by the sentimental gush of Mr. Clement
Scott’s writings on what he was pleased to call “Poppyland,” spoiled
Cromer. The public read the articles on “Poppyland,” and fell all over
the place. There are those—and among them the present writer—who are
sick of the name of “Poppyland,” and for whom Overstrand is spoiled by
that much-quoted poem, the “Garden of Sleep,” on which the Great Eastern
Railway guide-book writers, and the manufacturers of pictorial
post-cards have traded, in and out of season.
[Illustration: CROMER.]
The evolution of Cromer from fisher-village to fashionable resort was
well on the way in 1892, when Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1841 was born at
the early nineteenth century mansion called Cromer Hall, took the title
of Cromer on his being created a Viscount; and the process was completed
in the summer of 1901, when the pleasure Pier, constructed at a cost of
£43,000, was opened. It replaced the wooden Jetty built at a cost of
£6,000, after the storm of 1845, and battered to pieces in 1897. The new
Pier, ornamental, and rather alien in appearance, is evidence of
Cromer’s determination to be select and to stand aloof from popular
vulgarities. Here those who seek the automatic machine shall not find,
and no stalls, and no advertisements are permitted. At Cromer, in fact,
the higher vulgarity is cultivated, just as at Yarmouth you plumb the
depths of the lower variety. The tripper, holiday-making at Yarmouth,
who comes over to see what Cromer is like, and finds no whelk and oyster
stalls, and no popular entertainments on the sands, thinks it dull; and
the average man, wandering along the Lighthouse cliffs in danger of
having an eye knocked out by the wealthy and selfish vulgarians who
practise golf there, is prone to consider Cromer a fine place, except
for the people who frequent it, and for whose benefit the giant hotels
facing the sea have been built, and still are building.
Looking upwards from the Pier, you see a long line of these great
caravanserai, skirting the cliff-top. The Hôtel de Paris, the Hôtel
Métropole, and others with titles equally English, astonish the
beholder, not only with their appearance on what was until recently the
rural Norfolk coast, but also with the rashness that reared such heavy
loads of bricks on a seaboard so notoriously storm-swept and on the
crest of crumbling cliffs. It does not need a prophet of very great
prescience to declare that either disaster must overtake them or the
cliffs must, from time to time, be strengthened at enormous cost, to
bear the weight. Cromer has been fortunate not to have suffered so much
as thought inevitable three hundred years ago, but the cliffs on either
side have been eaten away, and have lately suffered, to such an extent,
that the land it stands upon will soon be a promontory, in advance of
the general coast-line, and must accordingly be more exposed.
Meanwhile, the many-towered steep, whose sky-line is so picturesquely
serrated with cupolas and spires, is wonderfully effective when viewed
from the beach on some kindly day of hazy effects, when the raw edges of
those fire-new hotels are softened down, and imagination is given a
chance. _Then_ the sea-front of Cromer is even more charming than it was
in Creswick’s time, and has something of the Arabian Nights order of
lordliness.
Such is Cromer, whose population is mounting up to 4,000 souls. The
beauty of its situation is unquestionable, the purity and bracing
qualities of its air proverbial, and the hardiness of its fishermen well
known. But (to the great joy of the Great Eastern Railway) it is no
longer unspotted from the world, and has become modish and
sophisticated. It is a very pretty mode and a coquettish sophistication,
and if indeed you do very speedily exhaust Cromer itself—why, then the
magnificent _hinterland_ of wild tumbled hills and dark fir-woods is
well-nigh inexhaustible. But the solitude and the natural life of the
seaboard villages are extinct, even as are those features of Cromer.
Summer existence there is like that of the midges and butterflies; gay,
without care.
In winter, however, when the holiday folk are gone, its modern status
lies heavy, like a shadow, on one: for then the whole place, given over,
body and soul, to providing for visitors, is in doleful dumps. This is
the dark reverse of that bright summer picture, and the fact that
Cromer’s season is only of eight or ten weeks’ duration means many
little domestic miseries. To stand in the empty October streets and meet
the last bathing machine being drawn up from the deserted beach to
winter quarters; to see the restaurants and tea-shops without customers,
and cards offering rooms to let in most of the houses, is to realise
that a fisher-village on an open coast, without river or harbour, and
consequently no trade, cannot suddenly become a resort without a
tragical side to its comedy. I stand on the cliff-top as night shuts
down over the North Sea, and I have the place wholly to myself. The
hotels have switched on their electric lights, but those rooms, so gay
and crowded in August, are now for the most part empty. I am sorry for
the Cromer that was, and much more sorry for the Cromer that is.
[Illustration: THE END.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX
Albemarle, 6th Earl of, 201, 220-224
Ambresbury Banks, 55
Archer, Fred, 142-144, 165
Attleborough, 256-61, 264, 265-266
—— Mere, 263
Audley End, 92, 96-102
Aylsham, 315, 316, 326
Balsham Ditch, 116, 123
Barnham, 187-189
Barton Mills, 1, 11, 190, 193, 194, 197, 204
Bishop’s Stortford, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 57-66
Blickling, 315, 317-324
—— Hall, 317-322
Bourn Bridge, 121
Boy’s Grave, The, 168
Brent Ditch, 116, 121
Bridgeham, 245
—— High Tree, 245
Bure, River, 326
Bury St. Edmunds, 1, 11, 12, 167, 174-186, 264
Cam, River, 8, 102, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118
Cambridge Heath, 27, 28
Cawston Heath, 325
Chunk Harvey’s Grave, 215
Clapton, Lower, 32, 34
—— Upper, 35, 37
Coaches:—
Diligence (Norwich), 3
Expedition (Norwich), 4-9, 297
Express (Norwich and Cromer), 337
Flying Machine (Norwich), 3
Machine (Norwich), 3
Magnet (Norwich), 7-11, 206, 297
Norwich Mail (by Bury and Thetford), 11, 12, 43, 183, 294
Old Stortford (Bishop’s Stortford and London), 13, 65
Phenomenon, or Phenomena (Norwich), 12
Post Coach (Norwich), 3, 297
Safety (Norwich), 12
Stortford (Bishop’s Stortford and London), 66
Telegraph (Norwich), 11, 12
—— (Saffron Walden and London), 13
Unicorn (Norwich and Cromer), 294
Coaching, 12-14, 34, 53, 138, 183, 206, 220-223, 288, 294-297, 336
Coaching Notabilities:—
Gilbey, Henry, 65
Horne, Benjamin Worthy, 12
Low, William, 65
Nelson, Robert, 12
Cringleford, 272, 287-291
Cromer, 1, 2, 339-254
Crossdale Street, 328
Culford Park, 186
Deadman’s Slade, 44
“Deserted Railway,” The, 119-121, 123
Devil’s Ditch, 49, 116, 120, 124-129, 130, 133, 156, 258
Devil’s Punch Bowl, 247
Duleep Singh, Maharajah of Lahore, 201, 204, 206
East Wretham, 250
Eaton, 291
Edmund, Saint, 175, 176, 178, 211, 234, 256
Elveden, 11, 187, 188, 189, 190, 198-206
—— Gap, 206, 207
Epping, 14, 15, 18, 54
—— Forest, 14, 34, 38, 39, 43-48, 52-55
Erpingham, 321, 327
Euston, 187
Exning, 116, 130
Felbrigg, 328-339
Fleam Dyke, 116, 123
Folly Hill, 169-171
Fornham St. Geneviève, 185, 186
—— —— Martin, 185
Frampton, Tregonwell, 151
Gibbs, Capt. John, 133, 258
Gilbey, Sir Walter, Bart., 65, 66
Great Chesterford, 2, 8, 14, 15, 17, 113, 116, 117-119
Gwynne, Nell, 18, 91, 131
Hackney, 28-33
—— Road, 27-29
Hanworth, 327
Hargham, 206, 255
Harlow, 55
Hethersett, 272, 283-287
Hevingham, 315
High Beech, 44, 52
“Highflyer,” the Racehorse, 138
Highway Act of 1555, 16
Highway-men, 14, 28, 47-54, 139, 207, 244, 250, 260
Hockerill, 12, 57, 66-69
Horsham St. Faith, 309-311
Iceni, The, 114, 123, 127-129, 130
_Iciani_, Great Chesterford, 117
Icknield Way, The, 114-118, 187-189, 215, 231
Ingham, 186
Ingworth, 326