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THE HASTINGS ROAD
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
=The Portsmouth Road=, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.
=The Dover Road=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.
=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.
=The Holyhead Road=: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
=The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road=: The Great Fenland Highway.
=The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road=: Sport and History on
an East Anglian Turnpike.
=The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road=: The Ready Way to
South Wales. Two Vols.
=The Brighton Road=: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
=Cycle Rides Round London.=
=A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.=
=Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore.= Two Vols.
=The Ingoldsby Country=: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”
=The Hardy Country=: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
=The Dorset Coast.=
=The South Devon Coast.= [_In the Press._
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO HASTINGS, BY MINNIS ROCK AND THE OLD LONDON
ROAD.]
_THE_
_HASTINGS ROAD_
_AND_
_THE “HAPPY SPRINGS OF TUNBRIDGE”_
By CHARLES G. HARPER
_ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR_
[Illustration: Knight on horseback]
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1906
[_All rights reserved_]
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
PREFACE
[Illustration: Armor]
_The Road to Hastings is hilly. Not, perhaps, altogether so hilly as
the Dover Road, and certainly never so dusty, nor so Cockneyfied; but
the cyclist who explores it finds, or thinks he finds, an amazing
amount of rising gradient in proportion to downhill, no matter which
way he goes._
_Sevenoaks town, the matter of twenty miles down the road, is certainly
preceded by the long, swooping down-grades of Polhill; but the
lengthiest descent, by mere measurement in rods, poles, and perches,
is only an incident in descending, while the inevitable corresponding
rise is, the climbing of it, a long-drawn experience. To the motorist,
who changes from high-gear to lower, and then, as the gradient
stiffens, to lowest, and so with labouring engine crawls uphill, like
a bluebottle up a window-pane, the revulsion from charging along the
levels at an illegal pace, raising veritable siroccos of dust, is
heart-breaking._
_Sevenoaks town crests the ramparted downs, and the hilly road goes
up to it in steep lengths, with other lengths as near as may be flat,
leading you to believe you are there, when in sheer cold fact you are
not there, and still have other incredible gradients to climb. And yet,
returning, you shall find the descent by no means so precipitous. River
Hill by that time will have taken pride of place._
_For the other hills, let them be taken on trust; they are surely
there, as also are those long rises, insensible to the sight of the
toiling cyclist, but patent to his feeling as he wearily pushes round
his unwilling pedals. For the motor-cyclist, with disabled engine, the
Hastings Road is more tragical than anything Shakespeare ever staged._
_The_ HASTINGS ROAD _is, in short, the pedestrian’s road. You would
not say so much of the Bath Road or the Exeter Road between Hounslow
and Taplow, and Staines; nor even of the great North Road where it
runs flat through Bedfordshire and Hunts. There the way recedes ever
into the infinite, and there, if anywhere, the hurtling motorist is to
be excused of his illegality. Here, however, on the way to Hastings,
you linger by hillside and valley, for the road goes through the
most beautiful parts of Sussex and of Kent, and marches through much
diverting social and national history, to the scene of the crowning
tragedy of Battle. I am not of those who find the story of the Battle
of Hastings sheer dry-as-dust. It is to me a living story, though over
eight hundred years old, and it will live for you who explore that
stricken field, if so be you explore it away from the perfunctory
guides who parrot the half-holiday public through the grounds of Battle
Abbey._
_But they are not necessarily the larger happenings that interest me
in these pages. I can find it easily possible—nay, effortless—to turn
from catastrophic struggles, and take an absorbing interest in some
one’s back garden: that is the way to keep boredom at arm’s length. The
mediæval knight who swore by his “halidom,” and the modern hop-picker
who says “blimy!” (and stronger things than that) are both entertaining
persons; would that Time were bridged, and they could be introduced to
one another! What the knight and the “caitiff” would severally think of
either would be well worth the hearing._
_For mere topography: let us maintain an invincible curiosity as to
whence this river comes or whither it goes; as to what lies on the
other side of yonder hill, or at the end of some alluring byway. Let us
find entertainment in the manner in which the city, town, or village
next on the map is different from those we have already passed; and
with interests so varied the way will be all too short._
CHARLES G. HARPER.
PETERSHAM,
SURREY.
_April, 1906._
THE ROAD TO HASTINGS
MILES
London Bridge—
New Cross (New Cross Gate) 3¼
Loampit Hill 4½
(Cross Ravensbourne)
Lewisham (St. Mary’s Church) 5¾
Rushey Green 6½
South End 7¾
(Cross Ravensbourne)
Holloway 8¾
Bromley 10
Mason’s Hill 10¾
Bromley Common 12½
Lock’s Bottom 13¼
Farnborough 14
Green Street Green 15¼
Pratt’s Bottom 16¾
Halstead Station 18¼
Polhill 19½
Dunton Green 21¼
(Cross River Darent)
Riverhead 22
Sevenoaks (Station: Tubb’s Hill) 23
“ Town 24
River Hill 25¼
Hildenborough 27¾
Tonbridge 30
(Cross River Medway)
Pembury Green 35
Kipping’s Cross 36¼
Lamberhurst 40
Stone Crouch 43
Flimwell 44¾
Hurst Green 47¾
Silver Hill 48½
Robertsbridge 50¼
(Cross River Rother)
John’s Cross 51¾
Battle 55½
Starr’s Green 56¾
Baldslow 59
Ore 61¾
Hastings (Old Town) 63½
INTO HASTINGS BY “NEW LONDON ROAD”
Baldslow 59
Hollington 59¾
Silverhill 60½
Hastings (Albert Memorial) 62¼
[Illustration: LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]
SEPARATE PLATES
ENTRANCE TO HASTINGS, BY MINNIS ROCK AND THE OLD
LONDON ROAD _Frontispiece_
PAGE
LEWISHAM 19
ENTRANCE TO THE WIDOWS’ COLLEGE 27
IN THE FIRST QUADRANGLE, WIDOWS’ COLLEGE, BROMLEY 31
THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON 45
KNOCKHOLT BEECHES 59
AN OLD WAYSIDE COTTAGE, BELOW POLHILL 67
THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE (_Photo C. Essenhigh Corke & Co._) 99
THE PANTILES, TUNBRIDGE WELLS 127
THE TOAD ROCK 135
KENT 149
LAMBERHURST 155
SCOTNEY CASTLE 161
WEIRD OAST-HOUSES, LAMBERHURST 165
THE MOATED CASTLE OF BODIAM 183
“DUKE WILLIAM COMFORTS HIS YOUNG SOLDIERS” (_Central
Incident of the Battle of Hastings. From the
Bayeux Tapestry_) 211
BATTLE ABBEY 229
HASTINGS OLD TOWN 261
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
Business-Card of the “Bolt-in-Tun” Coach Office 9
The Colfe Almshouses 22
The Old Toll-house, Pratt’s Bottom 56
A Phyllis of Knockholt 61
Longford 69
Riverhead 72
Sign of the “Blackboy” Inn 78
Sign of the “Bricklayers’ Arms” 79
Old Mansion, formerly the “Cats” Inn 81
Seal of Sevenoaks Grammar School 83
Knole, from the Road 89
The Gateway, Knole 92
The Stone Court, Knole 95
The “Dumb Bell” 101
The Seven Oaks 103
The “White Hart” Inn 105
River Hill and the Kentish Weald 110
Tonbridge Castle 114
The “Chequers,” Tonbridge 118
A Sporting Weather-vane 119
Church of King Charles the Martyr 124
Tunbridge Ware 133
Scene at “High Rocks” 138
The Marquis of Abergavenny’s “A” 139
The Neville Gate, Frant 140
The “Blue Boys” Inn 143
Bayham Abbey: Across the Water-meadows 158
Etchingham Church 172
The Ancient Vane, Etchingham 174
Brass of Sir William de Etchingham 175
The Fox preaching to the Geese 176
The Abbey Farm 179
William the Conqueror (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 198
Last Stand of the English (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 213
Flight of the English Churls (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 215
A Descendant of the Saxon Churls 227
Battle Church 232
A Bye-road at Battle 233
The Road past Crowhurst Park 235
Junction of Roads spoiled by Tramways, Baldslow 238
“Huz and Buz”: Entrance to Holmhurst 241
Queen Anne, at Holmhurst 245
Ruins of the Old Church, Ore 247
The Old London Road 249
All Saints’ 253
Old House, All Saints’ Street 258
Old Tackle-boxes, Hastings 265
St. Clement’s Church 279
A Slain Norman (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 284
[Illustration:
_The
HASTINGS
ROAD_]
I
The road to Hastings is measured from what, in these times, seems the
unlikely starting-point of London Bridge, and is identical with the
Dover Road as far as New Cross, where it turns to the right and goes
through Lewisham, the Dover Road continuing by Deptford and Blackheath.
Few would now choose such a starting-point for a journey to Hastings,
but there is reason in most things, and when this road was first
travelled there was a very special reason for this choice. London
Bridge was, until 1750, the only bridge that crossed the Thames between
London and Putney, and the sole way to the southern counties therefore
lay through Southwark.
But in those comparatively early times the historian finds no mention
of the “Hastings” Road at all. Travellers very rarely wanted to
journey from London to that fisher village; and it is the road to Rye
for which the inquirer after these things must look in the classic
seventeenth-century pages of Ogilby’s “Britannia.” In that very
elaborate and accurate work, published in 1675, the Hastings Road
appears as the “road to Rye,” and thus, after Flimwell, 44¾ miles down,
where it makes as straight as may be for that once-busy port, the
chance pilgrim for Hastings had to find his way across country as best
he could by the directions of the country folk.
It is twenty miles from Flimwell to Hastings, and as I do not suppose
the rustics were nearly so well informed then as now as to routes and
distances, and as their knowledge on those matters is even now not
profound, I think we shall do well to feel sorry for that wayfarer of
long ago, thus left without a guide.
By the time the coaching age had arrived, and the road-books of Cary
and Paterson and a host of others began to be published, the “Hastings”
Road, rather than the road to Rye, had been invented, but still the way
lay over London Bridge, and was measured from the south side of it,
whence the distance is 63½ miles.
The traveller of to-day would probably find Westminster Bridge Road,
St. George’s Road, and the New Kent Road the best way out of London,
but it will be allowed that the best is bad.
As the imagination—whatever may be the facts—refuses to associate
the Borough High Street and the Old Kent Road with the sylvan
beauties of the road to Hastings, I do not propose here to recount the
description of those beginnings, given already in the pages of the
DOVER ROAD; but will, as Astley of the Circus suggested to the mere
dramatist, literally “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses,” _i.e._, a
consideration of the coaching history of the road.
II
The history of coaching on the Hastings Road will never be fully
written. There are too few materials for it. None of the great critics
of coaching—men of the eminence of “Nimrod” or “Viator Junior”—ever
wrote about the Hastings Road, for it was a road of many pair-horse
coaches, and “pair-horse concerns” were considered beneath the notice
of those lofty writers. Even the Royal Mail was a “pair-horse concern,”
and was looked down upon accordingly.
It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, and to the “Wells” that
we first hear of this route in the coaching way; and, as ever, we hear
first of the carriers and their waggons. Goods were conveyed on wheels
long before travellers, and the heavy, cumbrous wains, drawn by eight
or ten horses, and rarely going three miles an hour, carried heavy
merchandise and the poorest kind of wayfarers quite a century before
the horsemen, riding singly or with their ladies on a pillion behind
them, took to what was at first considered the “effeminate” practice of
riding in coaches.
Thus the early glimpses of the road reveal Nathaniel Field, carrier,
plying in 1681 between Tonbridge and the “Queen’s Head” Inn, Southwark,
once a week, together with another carrier, unnamed, a competitor in
the business. In the same year “Richard Cockett’s Waggon” came twice
weekly to the “Spur,” Southwark, from “Sunnock, in Kent”; and from
“Brumly in Kent” came thrice a week “Widow Ingerham’s Waggon,” to the
“King’s Arms in Barnaby Street, Southwark,” together with “William and
Daniel Woolf’s Waggon,” on the same days.
There is sufficient evidence in the diary of Samuel Jeake, junior,
of Rye, that there was no coach further than Tonbridge, or Tunbridge
Wells, in 1682; for he tells us that, journeying from Rye to London
on May 22nd of that year, “I rode with my wife and mother-in-law for
diversion, and came thither on the 23rd; had hot and dry weather.”
Returning on June 23rd, they went “from London in the stage-coach to
Tonbridge; and on the 24th, Saturday, came to Rye at night.”
On January 23rd, 1686, he went to London by himself. Starting from Rye
at 8.30 a.m., he rode the twenty-three miles to Lamberhurst by 2 p.m.
Refreshing there for an hour, he resumed his journey, in company with
others, for the security afforded by numbers, and between Woodgate and
Tonbridge, in the moonlight, the tracks being very bad and uneven,
he and another became separated from the party, and immediately lost
themselves. It was freezing hard. He alighted and led his horse, until
at last, coming to a pretty good track, he remounted, and by the grace
of God and at a very late hour came into Tonbridge.
Whether this adventure was due partly to the good cheer of the
“Chequers” at Lamberhurst, or wholly to the uncertainty of the track,
it would be rash to say. But it is all very vivid to me: the brushwood
alleys, the rimy branches of the shrouded woods, the clear, cold
radiance of the frosty moon, the iron-hard ruts, and the breath arising
like steam from Mr. Samuel Jeake and his horse; but most real to me
his joy when he saw at last, at the foot of Somerhill, the lights of
Tonbridge town.
Next morning he left Tonbridge for London, and—being by himself—rode
horseback all the way, performing the journey of thirty miles in ten
hours.
The stage-coach of 1682, in which the worthy Samuel Jeake brought his
wife and mother-in-law, went no further than Tunbridge Wells. It was
probably, even at that date, no new thing, for the “happy springs of
Tunbridge” had long been known, and had for some years been gaining
popularity among real or fancied invalids. We may well suppose it to
have been started somewhere about 1650.
III
With the dawn of the nineteenth century the service of coaches between
London and Hastings begins to take some definite shape. In 1807
Robert Gray, of the “Bolt-in-Tun,” Fleet Street, horsed the Hastings
Mail, and continued for many years. In 1828 it was jointly run by
Gray and by Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross.” Being only
a “pair-horse” mail, it was, like its fellows in the same category,
very slow. The Brighton, Portsmouth, and Hastings mails were, in
fact, the three slowest in the kingdom, and of these the Brighton was
the worst laggard. The mails, it should be explained, to correct the
impression created by the eloquence of De Quincey and Hazlitt, were not
_necessarily_ faster than the stage-coaches. In some instances they
were: in others they were not. Everything depended upon individual
cases, and much upon distance. Where great distances had to be
covered the speed would be very high, as in the Bristol, Devonport
(“Quicksilver”), and Birmingham mails, of which the first averaged
considerably over ten miles an hour; but in cases such as these of
Hastings, Portsmouth, and Brighton, all the night lay before them, and
the short distance could be taken very easily with pair-horse teams;
while the four-horse teams running to the West and North were always
upon their mettle, to keep their time-bills. The speed of the Hastings
Mail in 1837, its best period, averaged eight miles an hour; and that
in itself was a great advance from 1828, when the pace was under seven
miles an hour.
Mail-coaches were, therefore, not always the most dashing public
equipages of the King’s Highway. From about 1825, when the “fast”
day-coaches and the post-coaches began to set the pace, the mail on the
Hastings Road was for a time left hopelessly behind. In 1826 the “Royal
William,” starting from the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, at 9 a.m.,
was at Hastings by 5 o’clock: speed rather more than eight miles an
hour. Prodigious!
But that rate was very poor in comparison with the stage-coaches of
almost every other road, and even in 1828, the Golden Age of coaching,
proprietors, in announcing “Hastings to London in Eight Hours” appear
to have considered themselves wonderful fellows. Indeed, on the
old coaching bills of this period, discovered in 1893, during some
alterations, on the walls of a building in Castle Street, Hastings, one
coach-proprietor had the impudence (as we must think it) of setting
forth “Hastings to London in 9 hours!” He did well to conclude with
that exclamation-mark, although he placed it there in a different sense
from that in which we read it.
There were then, among others, the Royal Mail, in 9¾ hours; the
“Express” (a misnomer, indeed), in nine hours, from the “Golden Cross,”
by Tunbridge Wells; “Paragon,” in eight hours, by Tunbridge Wells;
and “Regulator,” by Tonbridge. Hastings, therefore, was always badly
served, and must have grumbled quite as much in the coaching era as it
does under the dilatory service of the South Eastern Railway.
The last years of the Hastings Mail, or, as it was known in its two
ultimate decades, the “Hastings and St. Leonards,” were signalised by
a successful attempt on the part of Horne and Gray and their country
partners to screw an extra mileage rate out of the tight-fisted Post
Office for carrying the mails. It seems that the Mail had not been
keeping time, and that the partners had received some remonstrances
on the subject from St. Martin’s-le-Grand. It was a fine opening for
a revision, and accordingly, in December, 1841, they informed the
Postmaster-General that they really could not keep strictly to the
terms laid down by the contract they had signed in 1835, unless the
mileage rate were raised from 1⅜_d._ a mile to 3⅜_d._ The extra
allowance would permit of four horses being used instead of two: a
thing not only desirable, they said, but really necessary on so hilly
a road. In January, 1842, the Postmaster-General graciously acceded to
this request, and for its expiring years the Mail rose to this unwonted
dignity.
The “Bolt-in-Tun” coach-office in Fleet Street still stands at the
corner of Bouverie Street, somewhat altered, and now the offices of
_Black and White_. The walls are the same, and the archway depicted in
the curious business-card, reproduced here, may yet be noticed.
[Illustration: BUSINESS-CARD OF THE “BOLT-IN-TUN” COACH OFFICE.]
Of the coachmen on the road to Tunbridge Wells and Hastings we know as
little as—nay even less than—of the coaches, and almost the only touch
of character is that drawn by a writer in the _Sporting Magazine_ of
1830, in describing one Stockdale, who drove some coach unnamed. He
was, we are told, “a good whip.” He was also, like poor old Cross, on
the King’s Lynn road, something of a literary character, and “beguiled
the time on the road with Cockney slang and quotations from Pope!” He
drove to London and back six days a week—the Sunday, he said, he spent
at home studying the Greek Testament and translating Οἱ οἱ τυφοὶ ὁδηοί
into “Wo, wo, ye blind leaders!”
But coaches were by no means the only public conveyances along this
road. There were, indeed, in 1838, many vans and waggons to Tunbridge
Wells and to Hastings. Bennett’s vans and waggons plied to Tunbridge
Wells four times a week; those of Jarvis thrice, Diggen’s five times,
Barnett’s four, Shepherd’s three, Young’s and Harris’s twice, and
Wickin’s once: twenty-seven vans and waggons weekly to “the Wells.”
To Hastings the waggons respectively of Moore & Co., Shepherd & Co.,
Stanbury & Co., and Richardson journeyed daily.
IV
The electric tramcars that nowadays take you all the way to Lewisham
from Westminster Bridge for threepence, and occupy incidentally forty
minutes in performing the journey of six miles, travel on the average
at the same speed as those old coaches; but, of course, this not very
brilliant rate of progression is determined by the crowded traffic of
Walworth and Camberwell. When New Cross is reached, and the comparative
solitudes of St. John’s, they bring you at a good twelve miles an hour
along those switchback roads to the journey’s end. They are not looked
upon with favour by that suburban neighbourhood, for, worse than the
burglars’ “villainous centre-bits” in _Maud_ they not only
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless night,
but noisily disturb every night.
It is a hilly district, revealed in these times by ascending and
descending vistas of roads and roof-tops, instead of the grass and
fields of yore; and Loampit Hill—the “Loam Pit Hole” of Rocque’s
map of 1745—is just a little interlude in the commonplace, where an
old retaining-wall in the hill-top sliced through in a bygone era
serves to keep the banks and the houses now built hazardously on them
from settling in the roadway. A number of old hollies give the spot
something of an old-world look.
Here, then, having come through all the hazards and chances of New
Cross and the Lewisham High Road, we are arrived at the Ravensbourne
and Lewisham. The Ravensbourne, although not a stream of great size,
and with a course of but twelve miles, from its fountain-head on Keston
Common to its mouth amid the mud of Deptford Creek, is yet a river of
considerable historic, or legendary, importance, and—more important
still—it is due to the Ravensbourne that the last surviving beauties
of Lewisham are so beautiful. Legends tell how the river obtained its
distinguished name, and in the telling take us back to those very
distant days of Cæsar’s second invasion, B.C. 54. The story seems to
support the theory of one school of antiquaries, that the lost Roman
station of _Noviomagus_ was at Keston; for it declares that Cæsar’s
legions were encamped on what we now call Keston Common, and suffered
greatly from lack of water until the constant visits of a raven to one
particular spot attracted attention and aroused the hope that it was
water which attracted him. The expectation proved correct, for there
they discovered the spring forming the source of the stream. A well,
called “Cæsar’s,” on that common still serves to keep the tradition
alive.
We may, therefore, well look upon the Ravensbourne with interest,
although it is true that a glance into it, over the bridge which here
carries the busy London street across, sadly disappoints romantic
anticipations. Deposits of mud, vestiges of pails past their prime,
and outworn boots which the veriest tramp would scorn to own, line
a discoloured stream, and grimy backyards abut upon it. To such a
pass has civilisation brought the lower reaches of this once silvery
watercourse, which is not so small but that it has tributaries of its
own. Such an one is the river Quaggy, which embouches hereabouts into
it. “Hereabouts,” I say, because only the local sewer authority could
readily point out the exact spot; the Quaggy being, in fact, at the
actual confluence, embedded in an underground pipe. But if you may not
see the actual meeting of the streams, you may at least see the Quaggy
on the other side of the road, a little distance before it joins forces
with the Ravensbourne. There you shall perceive how only a little
lesser indignity than a pipe has befallen it. Its little trickle still
flows on in the eye of day, but it is made to flow in a formal concrete
bed, here and there spanned by long stretches of pavement. A little
higher up “Lee Bridge” crosses it, and there be those lesser Stanleys
and Livingstones who have traced it to its source, even as those great
explorers sought the beginnings of the Nile. A certain disappointment
seems, however, to await those who seek the origin of the Quaggy, for
those who have essayed, and accomplished, the feat describe how it
rises on Shooter’s Hill “at the back of the Police-station”! Shooter’s
Hill is well enough, but that last little piece of particularity
destroys any lingering shred of romance.
I should not be greatly surprised to find the Quaggy the object of
police suspicion, for that name is merely an alias, its real ancient
title being the Ket Brook, whence the district of Kidbrook derives its
name. The “Quaggy” is a later title, conferred descriptively by those
who observed the quags, or marshy places, through which it descended
from Shooter’s Hill to these levels.
Here, as already remarked, we are come to Lewisham. Many thousands
of people remember Lewisham as still something of a village; and yet
so quick-presto are the suburban changes around London that they now
behold it not merely a thronged town, but much less distinguished even
than that—just a limb of great, sprawling London, and thus stripped of
most of its old-time individuality.
The place changes while you look. You turn your back awhile upon the
few surviving fields, the hedgerows, the ditches, and when you glance
upon the scene again they are gone, and carts are delivering loads
of slack-baked place-bricks for the foundations of little £25 houses
that will begin to settle down unsteadily and crack all down their
fronts almost before the roofs are on. Change is rampant here, and
Lewisham, that was once “Lewisham Village,” is a village no longer. The
proverbial saying, “Long, lazy, lousy Lewisham,” that once attached
to the place—a saying which, I doubt not, owed its existence more to
easy alliteration than to actual fact—is, in one respect at any rate,
out of date, for it is now become a very strenuous place indeed,
where tradesfolk hustle for business and crowds throng the pavements.
Modernity marches all over the place in its hobnailed fashion, and
scarifies the soul out of existence. It cannot survive in a modern
populous suburb of wage-earners who go forth at unconscionable hours
of the morning to earn the means of existence and come home to their
brick boxes, exhausted, merely to sleep; and so come to their prime,
joylessly, and decline greyly to an obscure end. The spectacle
frightens and saddens the observer who goes beneath the surface of
things. He wonders what lies in the lap of futurity for the race thus
dissociated from nature, nurtured on the pavements, and condemned to
lifelong comings and goings in the restricted outlook of streets; and,
looking upon old representations of what Lewisham was like in what
he is apt to think the halcyon days of the “20’s” of the nineteenth
century, he grieves for the spacious rusticities of days gone by.
V
How many, or how few, of Lewisham’s myriads ever idly speculate whence
came the name of the place? According to authorities who are now,
in these more scientific times, largely discredited, it comes from
Anglo-Saxon words meaning “the dwelling among the meadows,” or the
leas—the “leas home”—and was anciently spelled Levesham and Lewesham.
Just a few vestiges of this ancient rurality remain, in the strips of
meadows—now converted into what are shaping as beautiful parks—that
fringe the course of the Ravensbourne on either bank, from Catford
Bridge to Ladywell; but we are now bidden disregard those meadows
in any relationship with the name of Lewisham. The place is first
mentioned in a charter of Ethelbert of Wessex, dated A.D. 862, in which
it is called “Liofshema”; and fifty-six years later, in a charter
granted by Ethelswitha, daughter of Alfred the Great, it assumes the
form of “Lieuesham,” which gives us exactly the modern pronunciation.
This, it has been remarked, has nothing to do with meadows, leas, or
pastures, but means literally “dear son’s home.” But, having reached
that point, we come to a full stop, for no one can tell us who was that
“dear son”; and the theory that the name of Leveson similarly derives
from Liof-or Leof-suna, seems to have little bearing upon the history
of the place.
Ladywell, just mentioned, is itself the name of a great crowded
district, and it is thus curious to reflect that the name was
utterly unknown until modern times. It arose from one of two closely
neighbouring wells—one reputed to be medicinal—situated in what is
now the road turning off the highway, past Lewisham old vicarage, to
Ladywell railway-station and Brockley, which name itself—meaning, as
it does, the “badger’s meadow”—enshrines the former rustic appearance
of these parts. Ancient records and county histories may be searched
in vain for mention of the “Lady Well,” which, oddly enough, seems
to have acquired its name about the end of the eighteenth century.
It was, about 1820, the subject of a published plate, showing it
with a circular stone kerb, placed by the wayside of a pretty rustic
road, embowered in trees. Thus it remained, amid ever deteriorating
surroundings, until 1866, when it was destroyed in the course of
sewer-making operations for the newly risen suburb that had grown
around the South-Eastern railway-station of “Ladywell,” opened in
January, 1857.
The well had long become a thing of the past, and its very site was
merely a matter of vague tradition, when, in 1881, its stones were
discovered in the course of repairs to the bridge over the railway.
A signalman rescued them from being again covered over, and removed
them to a position beside his cabin, where they remained until 1896,
when the following notice appeared in a local paper: “It has now been
decided by the Lewisham Baths Commissioners to re-erect the stones by
the side of the public baths, where they will be used to surround a
public fountain to which the youths and maidens of to-day may once more
resort, and there whisper their hearts’ desire.” Accordingly, they may
be seen to this day in the Ladywell Road.
It seems likely, under the circumstances thus recounted, that the well
was given its name about a century ago by some forgotten fanciful local
antiquary who, bethinking himself that the parish church of St. Mary,
Lewisham, was but a hundred yards or so distant, dignified the hitherto
unnamed spring by the name of Our Lady.
That parish church is a singular, and in general an unbeautiful,
structure, built in 1777 on the site of an older, and enlarged at
the east end, in the same hybrid “classic” style, in 1881. It has a
great south porch, unmistakably Corinthian, though it would puzzle an
architect to put a name to the rest. But the tower has a character all
its own. Equally nondescript, it yet owns an engaging quaintness which
one would with sorrow see improved away for the sake of something more
pure in style. The lower stages of this tower are obviously the remains
of the old Gothic building, for the buttresses, some of the windows,
and a good deal of the old facing are left, while the upper part has
either been rebuilt or re-cased in a style resembling the practice of
the brothers Adam. Sculptured garlands in the famous manner of those
architects give a daintily decorative effect, and, together with the
four stone balls which occupy the places usually given to pinnacles,
render Lewisham church-tower memorable and unmistakable among its
fellows.
It is now, in short, with the neighbouring Colfe Almshouses, the most
characteristic and distinctive thing left to Lewisham. The surrounding
churchyard is very large, and the approach is made beautiful by a long
arched yew walk, still charmingly rustic in appearance.
The almshouses, it seems, are doomed to destruction. They are relics of
the times when it could yet be said with truth of Lewisham that “its
convenient distance from the metropolis and its beautiful situation
have rendered it a favourite place of residence, and the neighbourhood
is thickly studded with gentlemen’s seats, many of which are splendid
mansions, and with numerous handsome villas, the country residences of
opulent merchants.”
Abraham Colfe, who founded these quaint old almshouses, was vicar of
Lewisham about the middle of the seventeenth century. He died in 1657,
and left property in trust for the purpose to the Leathersellers’
Company, who accordingly built them, as a tablet over the main entrance
informs the passer-by, in 1664.
[Illustration: LEWISHAM.]
Another survival is the handsome old late seventeenth-century vicarage,
already mentioned, standing a little out of its element, as it were,
beside the high road. It was built in 1692-3 by Dr. Stanhope, the
then vicar, and, as his surviving accounts tell us, it cost him £739
13_s._ to build. Dr. Stanhope, if we may accept the estimate of his
character given by his monument in the church, was one of the best,
for (_inter alia_) his “piety was real and rational, his charity great
and universal.... His learning was elegant and comprehensive, his
conversation polite and delicate, Grave without Preciseness, Facetious
without Levity. The good Christian and solid Divine and the fine
gentleman in him were happily united.”
That, I think, is the _ne plus ultra_, the last word, in monumental
eulogy. You cannot get better than the best, unless indeed you visit
modern Lewisham and do your shopping at its popular “stores,” where a
searching glance may discover “best fresh eggs” at one shilling and
sixpence a dozen, and “superior” at two shillings.
For the rest, a few strips of garden here and there border the high
road through modern urban Lewisham, sometimes owning elms that in the
old days were tall wayside trees. Here a giant workhouse, neighbouring
the Colfe Almshouses, serves by its presence to underline and emphasise
the social distance travelled—whether it be upwards or downwards
let those decide who will—between the seventeenth century and the
twentieth, and a few scattered weather-boarded cottages are left,
showing what manner of buildings were those that fringed the road
in days for ever gone. Midway between the date of those humble old
dwellings and the modern shops is one old-fashioned shop where they
sell hay, corn, straw, beans, and sweet-smelling seeds of all kinds.
The name over the fascia is “Shove,” singularly inapplicable to this
quiet, unassuming frontage.[1] To gaze upon its small-paned windows, to
see and scent the hay and the fragrant contents of its bins of beans,
peas, and varied seeds, must surely, with the coming of every spring,
set the prisoned wage-earners of Lewisham longing keenly for the
banished country whose breath comes fragrant from within.
[Illustration: THE COLFE ALMSHOUSES.]
[1] Alas! since writing the above, the shop is closed, and the house to
be demolished.
VI
The streets of Lewisham the long end, in the present year of grace,
a little beyond Rushey Green, where a side-road comes in from Forest
Hill and Catford Bridge. Shall we pluck the rushes of Rushey Green,
wander awhile in the groves of Forest Hill, or gather primroses by
the river’s brim at Catford Bridge? God bless you, ye innocent, there
are no forests but forests of chimneys at Forest Hill, and the rushes
of Rushey Green have long been replaced by macadam and York stone
pavements; and although, I doubt not, you can find primroses in their
season at Catford Bridge, they are only those that are sold by the
flower-girls outside the railway-station, at what they style, in their
Cockney twang, “one punny a morky barnch,” a phrase which has been
translated into English by the learned as meaning “one penny a market
bunch.”
Although the road onwards from Rushey Green becomes in a little
distance rural, or at the worst dotted only here and there sporadically
with new houses, there are marked signs that the fields and the
remaining hedgerows are doomed. Among these unmistakable portents is
the new railway-station of Bellingham, placed at the present time
lonely, in the midst of fields, near the solitary Bellingham Farm.
No railway company builds a large station for the express purpose of
serving one farmhouse, and this is simply another instance of that
intelligent anticipation of events for which railway companies are now
showing an unwonted aptitude. Time was when the companies would tardily
provide station accommodation ten years or so after the appearance of a
thronged suburb, and then only after being memorialised to do so; but a
different policy now rules: it is the policy suggested by the depleted
pocket.
If, however, the main road remains rural, things are far otherwise
over to the eastward, between this and Burnt Ash, where the octopus
arms of the Corbett Estate are spreading out and embracing the fields
in a deadly grip. The long lines of streets and roofs, ascending the
hillside, may be discerned from the highway, and it is abundantly
evident that London is making a sly flank march that way, into Kent.
The Corbett Estate is, it should be said, a building estate of cheap
houses, chiefly for working men, and is administered on “temperance”
lines, public-houses for the sale of drink being forbidden. Here,
then, we see the working of one of those many fads for the making
of a perfect community which distinguishes the present age. Here it
is a Community of the Pump that is aimed at; there a Garden City,
and elsewhere other nostrums are on trial, all directed towards the
hastening of the millennium. But the wheels of progress towards
perfection are not to be set rolling at anything above their normal
speed by even the best intentioned, armed with the most exceptional
opportunities, and this thirsty Sahara among suburbs irrigates itself
just the same, albeit with considerable trouble.
D—n his eyes, whoever tries
To rob a poor man of his beer,
in effect says the working man of the Corbett Estate, and, to show his
independence on those occasions when he journeys a weariful distance
across the boundary of this drinkless district in order to get his
supper beer, takes more than he ordinarily would, returning home a
discredit to the good people who want to dragoon him into an avoidance
of Bung and all his vats, in preparation for their new Heaven and new
Earth.
The net result, and one wholly unlooked for, is that this prohibition
policy has practically conferred an immense endowment upon the inns
of Rushey Green, which, once modest enough, have blossomed forth as
immense public-houses, doing a roaring trade with the unregenerate.
The road, coming to South End, comes really and truly to the end of
London and its suburbs, and is at present prettily rural. Only those
who know the district well are aware that, a short way off to the
right hand, there is a little Erebus at Bell Green, where the gasworks
are. If our old vituperative Cobbett were back again, taking his rural
rides, I have no doubt he would call the place Hell Green, and he would
not be altogether unjustified in doing so. But for my own part, I
prefer to dwell rather upon South End, and feel inclined to curse the
exploratory activity that led me to discover that awful place at the
back of the road; so abject, so unutterably vile.
South End owes much—almost everything, in fact—to the beneficent
Ravensbourne, which flows beside the road, and long ago was enlarged
into a lake at this point. It is a pretty lake, the prettier because
unexpected, and there are those who actually fish in it; not for the
lordly salmon, nor even for grayling or dace. No, it is rather the
humble “tiddler” who makes sport for the small boy with a twig, a
piece of cotton and a pickle-bottle; and I declare that no fisherman
in india-rubber waders, up to his thighs in the middle of a stream
and at grips with a salmon, experiences a wilder ardour than that of
these sportsmen of the neighbouring streets. I feel sorry, however, for
the tiddlers, thus slain in their thousands. They do not long survive
the water of the pickle-bottle, and presently, giving up the ghost,
collapse and develop those extraordinary spikinesses which, I suppose,
give them their proper name of “sticklebacks.”
VII
It is a long, long rise from South End to Bromley, which stands among
the breezy heights near Keston and Hayes. Half way up it there are
still traces of the deep dingle that gave the spot the name “Holloway,”
by which it was known to the road-books of the coaching age.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE WIDOWS’ COLLEGE.]
It was an ominous place, suitable for the footpad’s leap in the dark
upon the traveller’s back, and those wayfarers who were obliged to pad
the hoof alone through Holloway when night was come wished they had
eyes in the back of the head, in addition to the usual pair. Near by
stood, and still stands, Bromley Hill House, once the seat of Charles
Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough. In the dairy at that place one John
Clarke, gardener, murdered Elizabeth Mann, a dairy-maid, and over
against Holloway there was erected a gallows, and on it John Clarke,
brought in a cart from Maidstone gaol, in due time swung.
At the threshold of Bromley stands the College, not an educational
establishment, but a superior kind of almshouse, whose purpose is
explained by the inscription set up over the doorway:
Deo et Ecclesiæ
This College for Twenty poore
widowes (of orthodox and Loyall
Clergymen) & A Chaplin was
given by Iohn Warner late L^d.
Bishop of Rochester
1666
John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, was a staunch supporter of Church
and King, in times when both the Establishment and the Monarchy were
in a bad way. Charles the First was not wholly responsible for the
troubles and tragedies of his reign. An acrid Puritanism was in the
air, and had already manifested itself, very unpleasantly, in his
father’s time. It was the inevitable reaction from the Renaissance
gaieties under Elizabeth. The times were such that, even in the first
year of Charles the First’s rule, Warner found it necessary to deliver
a bitter sermon directed against the politico-religious activities of
the Puritans, based upon the text, Matt. xxi. 38: “This is the heir;
come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.” No one had
in those early days of strife thought of beheading Charles, and we must
therefore count Warner among the prophets.
The bishop came very near being impeached before Parliament for this
exploit, and only escaped by the King stepping in and “pardoning” him
in advance of Parliamentary action.
It is not surprising to find that, when the troubles culminated in war,
the House was swift to sequestrate the bishop from his see, and even to
seize his property. They proved the innuendo of his discourse at his
own expense, he was forced to leave his palace at Bromley in disguise,
fearing for his personal safety at the hands of the saints, and for
years he wandered in poverty in the West Country. Like other survivors
of the dispossessed clergy, high-placed and low, he came to his own
again at the Restoration in 1661, but he was then an old man of eighty.
Five years later he was dead.
[Illustration: IN THE FIRST QUADRANGLE, WIDOWS’ COLLEGE, BROMLEY.]
A many-sided benefactor, he was not without his critics, who declared
him mean. He seems to have somewhat keenly felt the charge, for he
repelled it by remarking that he “did eat the scragg ends of the neck
of mutton, that he might leave the poor the shoulder.” We do not learn
whether those critics had the grace to be ashamed.
His College was a noble thought. He bequeathed £8,500 to establish it,
and left a perpetual rent-charge of £450 per annum, secured upon his
manor of Swayton, Lincolnshire, to provide pensions of £20 per annum
for each of its twenty destined inmates, who were to be poor widows of
clergymen, preferably, but not exclusively, of the see of Rochester.
The odd £50 was for the chaplain’s stipend.
The College stands within six acres of beautifully wooded grounds,
with lovely lawns and gardens, and is very thoroughly fenced off from
the clatter of the outside world by an ancient brick wall, tall and
thick. Through the wrought-iron gateway, dated 1666, flanked by piers
surmounted with sculptured mitres, glimpses of the front are caught
behind the blossoming horse-chestnuts.
The little houses surround the quadrangle, which has its lawn, its
covered walk, like an up-to-date and domesticated cloister, and its
climbing-plants twisting round the pillars of the Jacobean colonnade.
They are very desirable little houses, with basement kitchens, a quaint
little hall, a fine sitting-room, and, on the first and attic floors,
from two to four bedrooms. Those fortunate enough to secure such a
haven for life are fortunate indeed, and in this sheltered backwater
of existence often live to be centenarians. But probably no one would
resent being styled “poor” more than these collegians themselves.
Poverty is a matter of comparison, and many would be content to
“endure” it on terms of a dainty house, free of rent, repairs, and
taxes, with from £38 to £44 a year thrown in—for many later bequests
have rendered it possible to raise the pension to those sums. Moreover,
to qualify for admission, a “poor” widow has now to be already rich
enough to possess an income of at least £40, and probably most of them
have much more.
Bromley College is therefore a kind of a minor Hampton Court, and great
is the competition to win to it when a vacancy occurs. Well-dressed and
well cared for in every way, the collegians are not to be pitied.
The occasional artist who comes to sketch the buildings finds the place
delightful. There are pretty girls reading novels or presiding over
dainty tea-tables: there are poverty-stricken widows in lace-caps, silk
gowns, and gold chains—all well known stigmata of a plentiful lack of
pence—and there is sometimes good music from soft-toned pianos.
The chapel provided for by the good bishop was rebuilt, at a cost of
£6,000, in 1860, by the aid of subscriptions. The Jacobean building it
replaces is said to have been extremely ugly, but that is easily said
of anything already marked for destruction; and the ’60’s were scarce
sufficiently well-disposed towards architecture of that period to be
able to determine fairly what was ugly and that which was merely not
at that time fashionable in bricks and mortar.
There are now forty widows in the College, and a second quadrangle was
added and endowed about 1790, from funds provided jointly by William
Pearce, brother of Bishop Zachary Pearce, and Mrs. Bettinson.
There has been in the past a good deal of nepotism in the government
of the College, and father has succeeded son in the chaplaincy, often
held by greedy pluralists, and often thrown in as a kind of extra sop
for the vicar of Bromley. Things like these must surely vex the spirit
of that truly pious benefactor, who, when raised to be bishop, could
not endure to hold his many preferments, and accordingly resigned them,
much against the spirit of his age.
An even later addition to this institution was made in 1840, when
the “Sheppard College” was built in the grounds. It consists of five
houses, endowed with £44 each per annum, for the benefit of daughters
who have lived with and attended upon their mothers in the original
College.
VIII