Charles G. Harper

STREATLEY—BASILDON—PANGBOURNE—MAPLEDURHAM—PURLEY

Beside the long rustic street of Streatley is the restored—nay, the rebuilt—church, with a new font and almost everything else new. The old font has been walled into the masonry at the junction of nave and chancel.

The street goes mounting towards the broad high road that runs closely neighbouring the river on this Berkshire side, between Wallingford and Reading. Between this and Wallingford we have only the two villages of Moulsford and Cholsey, and they lack interest. Cholsey is the “Celsea” of Domesday. Boating-men know Moulsford only as that place where the old waterside inn, the Beetle and Wedge, is situated. The queer sign has puzzled many town dwellers, but it presents no difficulties to country folk, for a “beetle” is well known to them as a heavy wooden mallet, used in splitting timber, and the “wedge” is the iron wedge inserted in the timber and struck by the “beetle.” The inn has, like most other Thames-side inns, been largely added to and altered; but old frequenters of the river have ardent memories of it and their morning “rum-and-milk.”

Does any one in these latter days take that old traditional Thames-side morning drink, “rum-and-milk,” that once most favoured of all up-river restoratives? Have we not, in “those dear dead days beyond recall,” as we lay in our more or less lavender-scented beds in some old-world waterside hostelry, been awakened by the clink of a trayful of glasses and heard a knock at the door, with the call, “Your rum-and-milk, sir”?

We had not ordered rum-and-milk at that untimeous hour, but as this was obviously the proper thing to be done, the custom of the country, so to say, we drank that strange drink—rather a heady and heavy drink, without question—and were promptly sent off to sleep again by it.

The charms of Streatley and of Streatley Hill have been sung by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, who is a kind of picnic and banjo poet-laureate of the Thames as it was in those famous riverside years, the ’eighties, when the charms of the river had not long since been discovered, and commercialism had not yet begun its reign: the years when Molloy and Cotsford Dick, and Marzials had just entered upon their song-writing and composing. Mr. Ashby-Sterry is not a Tennyson, but one cherishes an endearing picture of him, clothed in boating-flannels and a “blazer,” laurelled—if one may express it so—with bulrushes, and discovered seated in company with some cooling tipple, gently but firmly declining to perform any physical exertion: least of all that involved in climbing Streatley Hill, which is indeed a “breather.” Perhaps he is not even a little bit like that, really; but his writings are responsible for such a mental picture:

But to have done with all this, and to make our way to Basildon, which, although it is divided into Upper and Lower, is in the total of those parts but a small place. I do not know (nor apparently does any one else) from what Basil or Basileus—what leader of men—Basildon takes its name. That, like so much else, is lost among unrecorded things, but the world knows a something else more immediately to the point; and that is the fact that Charles Morrison of Basildon Park died in the early part of 1909, worth about six millions and three-quarters sterling. The estate was later sworn for probate at the remarkable figure of £6,666,666; an extraordinary array of numerals, almost exactly the Number of the Beast, “six hundred threescore and six,” mentioned in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation, multiplied by ten thousand.

The ornate gates of the noble demesne of Basildon Park look upon the road, and are very florid, with stone gate-piers surmounted by urns filled to overflowing with stony representations of most of the kindly fruits of the earth, and upheld by cupids. Basildon church, with a farm or two and the parsonage, lies down near the river in a tongue of meadow-land so cut off by the river on its north side and the railway on the south that it is, in effect, much more remote than many places hundreds of miles away. The high-road, like the railway, cuts across the base of this piece of land; and as only a narrow lane runs through it and simply ends at the church, there is no inducement for the ordinary wayfarer to venture this way. Strangers are rare down by that nook where Basildon church stands, almost hidden by trees, and I should not be surprised to learn that the few people who live there mark those days as special, and keep them in memory, when they chance to see a strange face. There are many remote corners along the shores of the winding Thames, but none more secluded than this of Basildon.

It is a small church that serves for the place, and the body of it appears to have been wholly rebuilt of late years. The tower, an eighteenth-century red-brick affair, is an almost exact counterpart, on a smaller scale, of the tower of Pangbourne church. Beside the massive polished granite tomb of the Morrisons stands a sculptured group of two boys represented as bathers standing on a rushy river-bank. This is the pathetic memorial of Ernest and Edward Deverell, aged sixteen and fifteen, who were drowned while bathing in the Thames, June 26, 1886.

The road on to Pangbourne gradually nears the river again, and touches it at what was until some twenty years since one of the loveliest reaches of the Thames, for here the stream is bordered by a long ridge of chalk hill, broken here and there into cliffs that used to shine whitely into the water. Keeley Halswelle painted an exquisite picture of this scene, and it was hung in the Royal Academy; and that is now the only thing left of it, for Shooter’s Hill—the name of this ridge—has been purchased by a highly-successful trader in what is satirically known as the “rag trade” (why is it that the drapery trade is so greatly affected by Welshmen?) who has not only set up for something in the way of a country gentleman here, with his ornate house and picture-gallery, and his gardens and hot-houses, but has, in addition, quite in the way of the businessman, made the purchase an investment by scooping out nine or ten sites from those wild riverside chalk-cliffs, and building on them a series of villas, described in the guide-books as “bijou residences.” So the quiet, ancient beauty of Pangbourne Reach is now a thing of the past, and instead of the white cliffs, the stream reflects red-brick.

Something has already been said, in the opening pages of this book, respecting the recent spoiling of Pangbourne village by the overbuilding in it: all brought about by the convenience of a main-line railway-station in the very midst of the place; and therefore nothing more may be written. The same remarks apply in degree to Whitchurch, at the other end of the long bridge that here joins the two banks.

There is a dull high road out of Pangbourne, and there is a delightful towing-path, crossing the mouth of the little Pang bourne, and going with a fine view across river to Hardwicke House, amid its beautiful lawns on the Oxfordshire side, and presently to Mapledurham Lock. Hardwicke House has associations with the troubles of Charles the First, and was greatly injured during the fighting about Reading.

Although there is no public ferry at Mapledurham Lock, boats there afford an opportunity of crossing the river; greatly, no doubt, to the chagrin of the Blounts, who own Mapledurham, and have not only distinguished themselves in modern times by seeking the aid of the law-courts to forbid fishing in the river at this point, but have so arranged that there is no inn at Mapledurham, and have placed every conceivable obstacle in the way of any one save themselves enjoying the scene. Notice-boards informing the stranger that this, that, and the other are “Private” start out at unexpected corners; and there is only wanting one touch to make this attitude thorough. The suggestion is hereby offered that, for thoroughly scaring away those insistent persons who do not entirely believe in such notices, there should be added to them, more Americano! “This means YOU.”

But there is reason in most things, and the reason for this uncompromising attitude is found, according to rumour, in the nearness of Mapledurham to Reading, which sends out numerous boating-parties at holiday times; and such parties, we all know, are not always discreet, either in word or deed.

The old mill of Mapledurham is, now that Iffley Mill has become a thing of the past, the most picturesque on the Thames. Near by it stands the humble little church, amid tall elms, with monuments of the Blounts and others, secluded from lesser folk in a side chapel. A curious small mural monument, with the representation of a dropped curtain, is to be seen here, to the memory of Captain Adrian Rose, born 1878, died 1908. He served in the Boer War.

The beautiful late Tudor mansion of the exclusive Blounts, built by Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower in 1581, stands a little way back from the river, and turns its front away from it. Like so many Elizabethan manor-houses, its plan is that of an elongated capital letter E, the upper and lower projecting limbs formed by the wings; the middle being the entrance. The view of it at some little distance down the mile-long avenue of stately elms is delightful, whether you see it under the mid-day sun, or by the mellow romantic afterglow of a summer evening. At either time the richness in colour of its old red-brick front, patterned in lozenge shapes by vitrified bricks of a darker hue, is evident. It is a house of some romance. Legends tell that on the death of a Blount, or prophetically before such an event—it is not quite clear which—an elm of the long avenue falls; by which it would seem that the owner of this avenue of many trees, a large proportion of them past their prime and prone (as elms especially are) to fall suddenly and without apparent cause, must sometimes receive a shock to his nerves, especially if he be superstitious; and as the Blounts have ever been Roman Catholics, it seems safe enough to deduce superstition in many of them.

The family have been seated here some four hundred years, and are kin of that Sir Walter Blount who was slain at Shrewsbury fight, in 1403; cut down by Douglas, who mistook him for King Henry. “A gallant knight he was,” says Hotspur, pointing out to Douglas his mistake, “his name was Blunt, semblably furnished like the King himself.”

As popish recusants, and as Royalists in the civil war, the Blounts have suffered sequestration, and have seen hostile soldiers quartered in their old house, and the Sir Charles Blount of that time was slain in the service of the King at Oxford in 1644.

A literary association illuminates their annals at a later period, the spinster Martha Blount, having been Pope’s “Stella” or “Patty,” a constant friend and correspondent, and the recipient at the poet’s death of his books, his plate, and £1,000. That Pope was not in sympathy with the rural surroundings of Mapledurham seems evident from his lines upon Miss Martha on one occasion returning hither

But then, that was the approved eighteenth-century way!

A long three miles leads direct from Mapledurham to Reading—a lovely road through woodlands, by way of Caversham; but Caversham spoils it all, at the end: Caversham, the cross-river suburb of Reading, where the new streets impinge upon the fair face of the country, and where the gasworks and the destructors, and suchlike evidences of civilisation abound, and crying children and angry mothers cry and spank. If I were a Blount and owned Mapledurham, I would not journey from it by way of Caversham, that is quite certain! The best way is undoubtedly by river, past delightful Purley; or by the road along the Berkshire bank, through Upper Purley, and past Tilehurst railway station.

Purley might well be thought to lie outside the strife of the wicked world. The “lea” down in which the village lies is so secluded that none others than those who live here, or have business in the place, ever come into it—unless they be stalwart or inquisitive explorers of the calibre—shall it be said?—of the present writer. The “village,” of a few rustic cottages, lies down below the high road, between the tall embankment of the Great Western Railway and the river. You may hear the trains numerously rushing by, swishing with a curious sound past the dense trees that fill this little nook and flourish upon the embankment itself, but you cannot well see them: only the arm of a tall signal-post wagging continually between the signal to proceed or to stop. The trains tell the villagers, plainly enough, that there is a busy world; and they can see it, plainly enough, when they go for their weekly marketing to Reading; but the business of it all passes by, out of sight, in the manner typified by those swiftly-moving trains.

There should be no ill in this place; but since they are human beings that live here, and not angels, there has been of late a good deal of trouble, well-known to local people in what was styled by the Berkshire newspapers of 1907-8 “The Purley Scandal.”

There need have been no scandal, so far as the outer world was concerned, had it not been for the action of the rector of the parish.

But let a summary of the case, extracted from one of the newspapers, here be given:

Here we see in working that truly British love of compromise, which has been aptly defined as a middle course by which neither party is satisfied.

The church of Purley lies quite remote, at the end of the scattered cottages, and through a woodland path. The body of it has been rebuilt, but the red-brick seventeenth-century tower remains, with a sculptured heraldic shield of the Bolingbrokes on its south face.