and Tunbridge Wells leave Tonbridge and proceed immediately to climb
steep hills out of the Vale of Medway. On the right goes the road to
“the Wells,” up Quarry Hill, and to the left, up Somerhill, ascends
the Hastings Road. At the summit of this very considerable eminence,
where a road on the right-hand leads to Tunbridge Wells, once stood
the toll-house, known (incorrectly) as Wood’s Gate. Its real name was
Woodgate, the spot where that early traveller, Mr. Samuel Jeake, lost
himself so effectually on that January night of long ago.
Tunbridge Wells is not on the direct road to Hastings, but it gave so
distinctive a feature to the first half of the road, and lies so near
at hand, that it will simply not be disregarded.
XXV
The father of Tunbridge Wells was Dudley, Lord North, a dissolute young
nobleman, who in 1605 “fell into a consumption,” and was advised by his
doctors to try the country air and that remedy at the present moment so
much talked of but little practised, unless empty pockets and the lack
of credit compel—the “simple life.”
Suffering from “the pleasures of town,” as to whose nature we need not
inquire too closely lest we be shocked, my lord resorted to Eridge, on
a visit to Lord Abergavenny. But the bracing air did him little good,
and he was returning, despondent, to London in his carriage across the
then lonely woods and heaths, when he noticed a pool of water by the
way, covered with a slimy mineral scum. The idea occurred to him that
here was his remedy. He drank of the water, felt better, and returned
as soon as possible, to drink again and be well. He clearly did not
deserve his good fortune, for he had no sooner recovered his tone
than he “again gave himself up to all the gallantries of the age.”
But medicinal waters—fortunately—make no discrimination between the
deserving and others, and so, by carefully alternating his debaucheries
with spells of fresh air and “taking the waters,” Lord North lived to
the age of eighty-five, and died in 1666, an example to his fellows of
how much you can dare and do if only you do and dare with discretion.
He published a work to show the advantages of the place to his brother
libertines, and in this curious book, entitled “A Forest Promiscuous
of Several Seasons’ Production,” he in this manner claims their
discovery: “The use of Tunbridge and Epsom waters for health and cure
I first made known to London and the King’s people. The Spaw,” that
is, the Spa in Belgium, “is a chargeable and inconvenient journey
to sick bodies, besides the money it carries out of the kingdom and
inconvenience to religion. Much more I could say, but I rather hint
than handle—rather open the door to a large prospect than give it.”
Already, in 1630, twenty-four years after his discovery, he had seen
the place stamped with the approval of royalty, when Henrietta Maria,
Queen of Charles the First, stayed six weeks here under canvas.
It was then quite uncertain what name would find favour among all
those proposed for it. “Queen’s Wells” was suggested, “Frant Wells,”
“Speldhurst Wells”; but the circumstances of travel finally resolved
the choice. Visitors from London not only approached the health-giving
springs by way of Tonbridge, but were originally, in the absolute lack
of accommodation, obliged to lodge in that town, nearly six miles
distant. Thus the springs, by dint of association, became “Tunbridge
Wells,” the spot being actually in the three separate parishes of
Speldhurst, Frant, and Tonbridge.
That famous promenade afterwards known as the Pantiles was first made
in 1638, when the sloping side of a meadow was levelled and embanked to
afford a recreative walk for those who took the waters. Two buildings
only stood on the spot, the Ladies’ and the Gentlemen’s Coffee-houses.
Things remained very much the same through the long years of the
Commonwealth. The “wells” were not deserted, for there were ailing
bodies even among the elect; but the coffee-houses were not so gay, and
the religious cast that came over the scene was reflected in the names
then first given to the encircling hills. The Puritans named them after
some fancied resemblance to Jerusalem, and thus Mount Ephraim and Mount
Sion were christened, and the neighbouring Calverley is in like manner
supposed to derive from “Calvary.”
With the Restoration “the happy springs of Tonbridge” began to grow
merry again, and the card-playing, the dicing, the dancing that were
all ended under Puritan rule grew again furious. There was still no
town, and the men and women of fashion who did not choose to lodge
at Tonbridge had to find rustic accommodation in the cottages of
Speldhurst. Presently wooden huts on wheels appeared on the common,
and were moved from place to place, as the fancy of the fashionables,
playing at rustics, dictated.
To add to the Arcadian delights of that most primitive and pleasant
period in the existence of Tunbridge Wells, a daily fair went forward
at the spring-head. Rosy-cheeked farmers’ daughters brought chickens,
cherries, and cream and sold them with great profit to town gallants,
much too taken with the unspoiled graces of those rustic beauties to
be able to drive bargains; and soon a bazaar became established under
the trees, where milliners designed “rustic” dresses at town prices
for ruralising London fair ladies. You might lose or win a fortune at
basset under those innocent trees, and wind up the summer evening
with open-air dances on the green. It was the “open-air life,” if not
the simple one, that then prevailed, and for at least a century that
was the especial note of Tunbridge Wells. Evelyn describes it as “a
very sweet place, private and refreshing,” but that privacy may be
questioned, for when houses were so few it was impossible to be other
than public, and at a later period, when the town came into existence
around the spring, it was especially ordained by the autocratic Nash
that “every visitor should live in public.”
[Illustration: CHURCH OF KING CHARLES THE MARTYR.]
One of the earliest evidences of the permanence of this settlement
was the building of a chapel, in 1684. This is the existing church,
dedicated by the then ascendant Royalists to “King Charles the Martyr.”
It and the Pantiles—and of course the Common—are the only vestiges of
the Tunbridge Wells of that time.
It is to Queen Anne that we owe the name of the Pantiles. She had
come here while still the Princess Anne, for the health of herself
and her ailing son, the Duke of Gloucester, and gave a hundred pounds
for paving the walk, so that no other little boy, duke or commoner,
should stumble there, as hers had done. When she returned, the next
season, her hundred pounds had been expended in some mysterious way
totally unconnected with pavements, and so, very rightly offended,
she left the place, never to revisit it, even though the authorities
at last hastened to lay the walk with those pantiles that gave it so
distinctive a title. Stone slabs, in 1793, replaced those red tiles,
and for a lengthy period the stupidity of the local governing body
rechristened the famous walk “the Parade,” but it has now reverted to
its original style.
XXVI
Tunbridge Wells of to-day bears not the slightest resemblance, apart
from these three landmarks of Church, Common, and Pantiles, to the
resort of long ago. It is unlike in appearance and manners. To-day
you see an overgrown town with suburban roads climbing up all the
hillsides, and continued, if you explore them, on the corresponding
descent. It is an effect of grey sobriety, for the greatest period of
its expansion was in the ’60’s and ’70’s, when plaster was prevalent;
and its chief hotel was built in the days before architects could
be made to understand that comfort is desired by guests more than
grandeur. To climb up flights of stairs to enter the front door is
a weariness, and bedrooms twice as lofty as they are broad or long
outrage one’s sense of proportion.
Socially, too, Tunbridge Wells of to-day is the antipodes of what it
was. The traveller of old who “took the waters,” presently arriving “by
the grace of God,” in his chariot, or by public coach, did no sooner
come up from Tonbridge within sight of the Spa, than he was assailed
by a swarm of touts who thrust their heads into the windows, eager to
bespeak his custom:
Soon as they set eyes on you, off flies the hat:
Does your honour want this? does your honour want that?
To-day you enter from the railway-station, and the only people who
take any interest in you are the cabmen. That is distinctly a gain,
for touts are an abomination; but the public life once insisted upon
by Nash is as distinctly a loss. The fact is that the English have no
genius for it, and the climate really forbids. Moreover the local
conditions are different. It is a great residential town now, and
visitors are in the minority.
[Illustration: THE PANTILES, TUNBRIDGE WELLS.]
Still you see the Pantiles, with the quaint colonnade and the
overshadowing limes, now grown very reverend trees indeed, but it
is not a scene of gaiety, and when on summer nights the place is
beautifully illuminated with coloured electric lights, and open-air
concerts are held there, it is a crowd of servants and of shopkeepers’
assistants that listens.
Alas! for the red-heeled, red-faced voluptuaries, the patched and
powdered beauties, the morris-dancers, the fiddlers! They have all
danced or hobbled off, and have been long since ferried over to the
other side of Styx. And where they leered and ogled and minced,
“protested,” and “stopped their vitals,” in their eighteenth-century
way, there are a few inquisitive tourists peering about in corners, and
really wondering if all those tales of eld are so much moonshine.
The waters of Tunbridge Wells and the Roman Catholic clergy have,
according to Mrs. Malaprop, one quality in common: both are
“chalybeate.” Perhaps they owed much of their old-time popularity to
being described as “salutiferous,” and certainly they were likely to
impress people more, and to do more imaginary good, under that title
than if merely “health-giving.”
But the good wrought by the water is undoubted. It will not mend
broken bones, nor set up an altogether shattered constitution; it is
not Lethean, and at a draught you do not forget sorrows; but it is
an excellent tonic, and—_experto crede_—good for incipient dyspepsia.
Modern scepticism looks upon the fine air of Tunbridge Wells, rather
than the water, as author of the beneficial effects upon visitors, and
so it is less taken than formerly. It is safe to say that the majority
of those who taste it are impelled by curiosity, and to all the taste
suggests ink.
You come past the Church of King Charles, with its sundial inscribed,
“You may Waste but cannot Stop me,” to the Pantiles and the spring.
The water is, by an old Act of Parliament, free to all, but there are
two granite basins: one, with a gigantic utensil like a pantomime
soup-ladle, with which, bending down, you scoop up the water, in
company with Lazarus and the vulgar herd; another where, in more
genteel fashion, you pay a penny and are handed a glassful by one of
the two old ladies known as “Dippers.” If you please, you can commute
your payments by subscribing 2_s._ a week, 3_s._ 6_d._ for two weeks,
or 30_s._ for a year. By that time the three grains of iron contained
in every gallon of the water should have strung the participant up
to concert-pitch, and have plated his teeth with a coating of iron,
unless he adopts the old custom of cleaning them with sage-leaves,
after drinking.
XXVII
No one would dream of describing Tunbridge Wells as a
“manufacturing town,” but it has, and has had for considerably over two
hundred years, a peculiar industry. Few are those who have not heard of
“Tunbridge ware,” a species of delicate inlay work in coloured woods,
which may be described as mosaic work, something in the nature of
tesselated pavement reduced to terms of wood; the tesseræ in this case
being very thin strips, fillets, and roundels applied in patterns to
work-boxes, inkstands, backs of brushes, and a large variety of fancy
articles.
Any attempt to describe the ware, or the process of its manufacture,
seems at the first blush a rather hopeless enterprise. We may, however,
give another analogy, and compare it with parquetry flooring in
miniature and in many colours.
That it is no mushroom fashion may be discovered by the visitor to
South Kensington, who in the Museum will discover a backgammon-board
designed by the Comte de Grammont and made for him in 1664. He
presented it to Mary Kirke, Maid of Honour to the Queen of Charles
the Second, during a royal visit to “the Welles.” This interesting
evidence of the antiquity of the ware is decorated with forget-me-nots,
interlacing the Count’s initials and those of Mary Kirke, and shows
that the art was even then fully developed.
Fashions change, and in all those years Tunbridge ware has had many
vicissitudes. In the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign a very large
trade was done in a cheap line of articles in light woods—commonly
sycamore—printed upon from transfers, not inlaid in any way, and thus,
strictly speaking, not the true ware at all. Examples of this period
are still to be met with in curiosity shops, with views, not only of
Tunbridge Wells, but of every other place then of popular resort, and
the sight of them brings faint reminiscences of times when girls wore
bonnets and book-muslin dresses and gentlemen still dared to appear in
public in white duck trousers. The ware of that age was, in fact, as
popular then as the little fancy china articles with local armorial
bearings are now.
That fashion passed, and the true manufacture regained its vogue. The
prominent makers for generations had been Fenner & Nye, established on
Mount Ephraim in 1720, succeeded in turn by Edmund Nye, and finally by
Thomas Barton, in 1863. Barton’s showrooms were in the Pantiles until
recent years, but the business, conducted on the old time-honoured
lines of making the best possible article and charging for it
accordingly, could not survive the modern rage for cheapness at the
sacrifice of excellence, and as Barton grew old the business declined
with him and finally gave place to another, where you can still
purchase Tunbridge ware in innumerable forms at popular prices, and be
perfectly satisfied, until it is compared with that of sixty years ago.
The public has no cause for complaint. It pays only for what it gets;
but there is, and can only be, the most superficial resemblance between
the costly work of a bygone age and that of the present era.
A partial knowledge of these things has led some writers to describe
this manufacture as a “doomed industry”; but, like so many “doomed”
people, institutions, and trades, it maintains an astonishing vitality,
and there is probably more Tunbridge ware made now than in the times
when an article cost twice as much.
[Illustration: TUNBRIDGE WARE.]
The methods employed are of some interest. Radiating, star-like
patterns are produced ingeniously by building up in long sticks
glued together around a central core, afterwards to be sawn off in
veneer-like strips: a hundred to a stick. These are then mounted on
to the articles to be decorated. In the case of more ambitious and
pictorial efforts, such as a view of the Pantiles (a favourite subject)
in coloured woods, the craftsman works to a coloured sketch, divided
up like a Berlin wool pattern. In such cases the little wooden cubes
are of necessity extremely minute. Mounted on to the wooden surface of
workbox or other article, the work has then to undergo many sandpaper
scrubbings, with sandpaper of increasing fineness, and is at last
polished to an exquisite finish.
To the true artistic eye these ingenious imitations of drawings or
paintings scarcely commend themselves, and Tunbridge ware finds its
best exposition in the boxes inlaid with squares of various woods, in
which you can see the grain and colour natural to each.
Great expense and care were formerly taken to secure beautiful
varieties of wood, and no fewer than eighty, English and foreign, were
in constant use. It was found that no wood naturally gave green or
silver-grey, and it was therefore necessary to procure those colours
artificially. Green was obtained from “decayed oak,” the fallen boughs
of oak-trees stained green by fungoid growths. To get grey, bird’s-eye
maple and Hungarian ash were steeped in the chalybeate waters of “the
wells”; and a beautiful white was produced by boiling holly.
XXVIII
The fine upland Common of Tunbridge Wells is one of the town’s greatest
assets. Extraordinary outcrops of rock occur on it, and away to where
it merges into Rusthall Common is that bourne of many a pilgrimage—the
famous Toad Rock: an immense mass of sandstone really very like a toad
squatting on its haunches, and not by any means of so uncertain a
shape as that of so many of those queer rocks in which you see just
what you please, like Hamlet’s cloud, “almost in shape of a camel,”
“like a weasel,” and finally “very like a whale.” The Toad Rock has not
so many imaginary incarnations, and looks only like a toad. In these
days it has been found necessary to protect it with a defensive iron
railing, but this precaution has not served to exclude the usual fools
who carve their folly deeply into everything capable of being marked
with a penknife.
[Illustration: THE TOAD ROCK.]
The natural gorge close by, known as Gibraltar Rocks, still is marked
by one of the houses built on the Common by a sentimental English
Government for the French priests exiled from France at the Revolution.
In addition, the Government made them an allowance for their
maintenance.
The population of Rusthall, to judge from the language and behaviour
of its boys and young men, must be in a very primitive stage of
civilisation. The stupid foulness and vileness of their conduct in the
neighbourhood of that public resort, the Toad Rock, any day and every
day deserve the attention of the police.
[Illustration: SCENE AT “HIGH ROCKS.”]
Tunbridge Wells is a neighbourhood of rocks, but none others approach
the weird scene at the spot appropriately called High Rocks, less than
two miles distant, on the way to Groombridge. It is _not_ the “Finest
Scenery in England,” as claimed by Mr. Thomas Coster, proprietor of the
“High Rocks Hotel,” who charges sixpence to enter; but it is highly
curious. Many ingenious and enterprising sightseers, chiefly active
cyclists, resenting the being clicked through a turnstile at sixpence
a head, take Mr. Coster and his encircling fences in the rear, and,
entering a little wood, insinuate themselves into his domain and see
his rocks for nothing. His rocks! On the whole, their enterprise has
my respectful admiration, for it seems absurd to treat Nature as if
she had made this scene in the infancy of the world for the purpose of
providing a showman with an income.
The writer of a guide-book published in 1810 describes the “High
Rocks” as “romantic scenery,” and says that, “combining with the wish
to please and be pleased,” the spot “tended to create an agreeable
relief to that tædium which will frequently encroach on a place of
public resort.” There is a specious plausibility about this which leads
the reader at first to idly agree; but the muzziness of thought and
woolliness of expression very soon lead one to the opinion that the
writer, although he may have had an inkling of what he meant when he
set out, very soon lost himself on the way.
[Illustration: THE MARQUIS OF ABERGAVENNY’S “A.”]
The High Rocks cover a space of about two acres, and consist of a great
wooded bluff hanging, cliff-like, over the road, and intersected in
innumerable directions with fissures, gullies, and ravines from fifty
to seventy feet deep. These ravines are crossed by numerous wooden
bridges, and ascended or descended by rustic stairs. There is the Bell
Rock, which gives forth a metallic sound when struck; the Warning Rock,
and all sorts of other rocks, fantastically named; and there are swings
and brake-loads of excursionists, and mazes. Altogether, the place is
pretty well exploited, and the penknife has been busy on every spot
within reach.
[Illustration: THE NEVILLE GATE, FRANT.]
A way to Hastings by Tunbridge Wells lay in coaching days through
Frant, Wadhurst, and Ticehurst, emerging upon the direct road again at
Stone Crouch. It is a wildly beautiful wooded district, passing through
a line of country where an immense upholstered letter A is noticeable
on almost every cottage, sometimes in company with the Neville
portcullis, indicating the ownership of the Marquis of Abergavenny in
the country-side. Near Frant an extraordinary gateway into the park of
Eridge abuts upon the wayside, flanked by his Bull’s Head crest and
adorned with the punning motto, _Ne vile celis_: “Wish nothing base.” A
proud motto, woefully smirched by Lord William Neville in recent years,
when he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for forgery.
XXIX
The main road is more quickly regained at Pembury Green, where the last
suburbs of Tunbridge Wells end.
Pembury Green is an old hamlet reared in modern times up to the status
of a separate parish, with a tall-spired church built where it has no
business to be—on the green that gives the place its distinguishing
name. There are plenteous evidences, in the number of inns and
Cyclists’ Rests, that Pembury Green is a favourite resort in the long
days of summer.
The number of refreshment places along the Hastings Road catering for
cyclists is more marked than even on that very much exploited highway,
the road to Brighton. Perhaps on a road so hilly as this those pushers
of the reluctant pedal require more frequent halts and more sustenance.
Most wayside inns nowadays express their readiness to entertain
wheelmen by exhibiting the modest announcement, “Accommodation for
Cyclists,” hinged on to their old signs; but, apart from these, the
keeping of “Cyclists’ Rests” along the main roads has become an
industry as congested as the close professions.
The natural history of Cyclists’ Rests affords interest to the
peripatetic philosopher. They range from the cheap boudoir-like kind, a
couple or so miles out from a town, where the articles most in demand
are weak tea and hairpins, down to the sometimes bare, sometimes grubby
little dens in remoter places, labelled in illiterate fashion,
“CYCLIƧT REƧT”
designed to suit the shallow pockets of the long-distance-riding club
cyclist; where, in discomfort, you eat off delf plates laid on tables
covered with slimy “American cloth,” and get a good “blow-out” and a
shakedown in an attic with precipitous floor and sloping roof for an
incredibly small sum.
The first variety are fully furnished for feminine cyclists with
materials for tea, with the hairpins already mentioned, with
chocolates, a carafe of weary-looking home-made lemonade with a lemon
stuck in the neck of it, the usual fizzy “minerals,” and sixpennyworth
of buns. Wonders may be wrought on a basis so slight.
The other kind is of sterner stuff. Who rides far must feed well. Tea
for the hard rider, no less than for the ambling lady cyclist, is
essential, but it must be tea with a tang to it, and plenty of it; and
it gets mixed, in course of feeding, with such meats as the “Rest”
affords, with the result—a medical expert would say—that the interior
of that cyclist is converted into a tannery, and his food turned to
leather by the tannic acid of his drink. And yet I never heard of a
healthy, active cyclist being inconvenienced, much less laid low, by
such immoral feeding.
[Illustration: THE “BLUE BOYS” INN.]
It is a solitary road beyond Pembury Green, varied only by a few
scattered houses, all the way to Lamberhurst. Kipping’s Cross is the
first of these intervals, and there stands the “Blue Boys” inn, with an
oast-house for only neighbour. The “Blue Boys” is practically dated by
its odd picture sign, showing two blue-jacketed postboys shaking hands
and lifting each a convivial glass, whether to their noble selves or to
George the Fourth, whose medallion portrait is below, cannot be said.