Charles G. Harper

GREAT MARLOW—COOKHAM—CLIVEDEN AND ITS OWNERS—MAIDENHEAD

Marlow town is well within sight from Bisham. It is very much more picturesque at a distance than it is found to be when arrived near at hand; and the graceful stone spire of its church is found to be really a portion of a very clumsy would-be Gothic building erected in the Batty-Langley style, about 1835. A fine old Norman and later building was destroyed to make way for this; and now the present church is in course of being replaced, in sections, by another, as the funds to that end come in. An interesting monument in the draughty lobby of the present building commemorates Sir Myles Hobart, of Harleyford, who, when Member of Parliament for Marlow, in 1628, distinguished himself by his sturdy opposition to the King’s illegal demands; and with his own hands, on a memorable occasion, locked the door of the House of Commons, to secure the debate on tonnage and poundage from interruption. For this he suffered three years’ imprisonment.

The monument, shamefully “skied” on the wall of this lobby, was removed from the old church. Hobart met his death in 1652 by accident, the four horses in his carriage running away down Holborn Hill, and upsetting it. A curious little sculpture on the lower part of the monument represents this happening, and shows one of the wheels broken. The monument is further interesting as having been erected by Parliament; the first to be voted of any of a now lengthy series.

In the vestry, leading out of this lobby, among a number of old prints hung round the walls, is an old painting of a naked boy, with bow and arrow, his skin spotted all over, leopard-like, with brown spots. This represents the once-famous “Spotted Negro Boy,” a supposed native of the Caribbean Islands, who formed a very attractive feature of Richardson’s Show in the first decade of the nineteenth century. We shall probably not be far wrong in suspecting Mr. William Richardson of a Barnum-like piece of showman humbug in putting this child forward as a “Negro Boy.” The boy, one cannot help thinking, was sufficiently English, but was a freak, suffering from that dreadful skin disease, ichthyosis serpentina. He lies buried in the churchyard.

There are a few literary associations in Marlow town, and by journeying from the riverside and along the lengthy High Street, to where that curious building, the old Crown Hotel, stands, facing down the long thoroughfare, you may come presently to the houses that enshrine them. Turning here to the left you are in West Street, otherwise the Henley road, and passing the oddly named “Quoiting Square,” there in the quaintly pretty old Albion House next door to the old Grammar School, lived Shelley in 1817. A tablet on the coping, like a tombstone, records the fact. He divided his time between writing the Revolt of Islam, and in visiting the then degraded, poverty-stricken lower orders of the town and talking nonsense to them. As no report of his conversations survives, we can only wonder if they were as bad as the turgid nonsense of that poem. Does any one nowadays ever read the Revolt of Islam, or know why Islam did it, or if, in so doing, it succeeded? In short, it will take a great deal of argument to convince the world that Shelley was not the Complete Prig of his age, and in truth the house is much more delightful and interesting for itself than for this association. In Shelley’s time it was very much larger than now, and comprised the two or three other small houses which have been divided from it.

At “Beechwood” lived Smedley, author of Frank Fairleigh and Valentine Vox, and on the Oxford road resided G. P. R. James, romantic novelist, whose romances were said, by the satirists of his methods, generally to commence with some such formula as—

“As the shades of evening were falling upon Deadman’s Heath, three horsemen might have been observed,” etc.

Marlow Weir is, to oarsmen not intimately acquainted with this stretch of the river, the most dangerous on the Thames, so it behoves all to give the weir-stream a wide berth in setting out again from Marlow Bridge; that suspension-bridge, built in 1831, which, like the neighbouring church, looks its best at a considerable distance. River-gossipers will never let die that old satirical query, “Who ate puppy-pie under Marlow Bridge?” the taunt being directed, according to tradition, against the bargees of long ago, who, accustomed to raid the larder of a waterside hotel at Marlow, were punished admirably by the landlord, who, having drowned a litter of puppies, caused them to be baked in a large pie, and the pie to be placed where it could not fail to attract the attention of the raiders, who stole it, and consumed it with much satisfaction, under the bridge.

Two miles below Marlow, past Spade Oak ferry, is Bourne End, on the Buckinghamshire side; a modern collection of villas clustered around a delightful backwater known as Abbotsbrook, and by the outlet of the river Wye—the “bourne” which ends here and gives rise to the place-name. It comes down from Wycombe, to which also it gives a name, and Loudwater.

Cookham now comes into view, on the Berkshire shore. Here the village is grouped around a village green; rather a sophisticated green in these days, and combed down and brushed up smartly since those times when Fred Walker began his career. Then the geese and ducks roamed about that open space, and in the unspoiled village; and old gaffers in smock-frocks and wonderful beaver-hats with naps on them as thick as Turkey carpets sat about on benches in front of old inns, and smoked extravagantly long churchwarden-pipes. The old gaffers have long since gone, and the Bel and the Dragon Inn has become a hotel, and Walker is dead and already an Old Master. You may see his grave in the churchyard, and read there how he died, aged thirty-five, in 1875. There is, in addition, a portrait-medallion within the church itself, which gives him a half-drunken, half-idiotic expression that one hopes did not really belong to him.

Behind the organ a curious mural monument to Sir Isaac Pocock, Bart., dated 1810, represents the baronet “suddenly called from this world to a better state, whilst on the Thames near his own house.” He is seen in a punt, being caught while falling by a personage intended to represent an angel, in tempestuous petticoats, while a puntsman engaged in poling the craft looks on, in very natural surprise.

From Cookham, where the lock is set amid wooded scenery, the transition to Cliveden is easy.

Clieveden, Cliefden, Cliveden—you may suit individual taste and fancy in the manner of spelling—looks grandly from the Buckinghamshire heights down on to the Berkshire levels of Cookham and Ray Mead. Perhaps the most beautiful view of all is from Cookham Lock. Ray Mead, that was until twenty years ago just a mead—a beautiful stretch of grass-meadows—is now the name of a long line of villas with pretty frontages and gardens, but deplorable names—“Frou-Frou,” “Sans Souci,” and the like—and inhabited, often enough, as one might suppose by the Frou-frous of musical comedy and their admirers.

Cliveden, sometime “bower of wanton Shrewsbury and of love,” and now residence of the highly respectable and remarkably wealthy Mr. William Waldorf Astor, looks in lordly fashion upon such. With the proceeds of his New York rent-roll that Europeanised American in 1890 purchased the historic place from the first Duke of Westminster, and has resided here and at other of his English seats ever since. Those who are conversant with American newspapers are familiar with the scream every now and again raised against this and other examples of American money being taken and spent abroad. The spectacle of that bird of prey raging because of the dollars riven from it is amusing, but the situation may become internationally serious yet, for when some great financial crisis arises in the United States and money is scarce, it is quite to be expected that the question of the absentee landlords will become acute, and talk of super-taxing and expropriation be heard. I believe this particular Astor is now a naturalised Englishman, and I don’t suppose him to be the only one. Suppose, then, that the Government of the United States at some future time seized the property of such, how would the international situation shape?

Cliveden, when it was thus sold, had not been long in the hands of the Grosvenor family; having been, a generation earlier, the property of the Duke of Sutherland, for whom the present Italianate mansion was built by Sir Charles Barry in 1851, following upon a fire which had destroyed the older house, for the second time in the history of the place. The original fire was in 1795. In the mansion then destroyed the air of “Rule, Britannia,” had first been played in 1740, as an incidental song in Thomson’s masque of Alfred, the music composed by Dr. Arne.

Boulter’s Lock, the water-approach to Maidenhead, is the busiest lock on the Thames, and now busier on Sundays than on any other day. How astonishingly times have changed on the river may be judged from an experience of the late Mr. Albert Ricardo, who died at the close of 1908, aged eighty-eight. He lived at Ray Mead all his long life, and was ever keen on boating. When he was a comparatively young man, he brought his skiff round to the lock one Sunday. His was the only boat there, and he was addressed in no measured terms by a man who indignantly asked him if he knew what day it was, and telling him, in very plain language, his opinion of a person who used the river on Sunday. Since then a wave of High Churchism and irreligion (the two things are really the same) has submerged the observance of the Sabbath, and aforetime respectable persons play golf on the Lord’s Day.

A quaint incident, one, doubtless, of many, comes to me here, in considering Boulter’s Lock, out of the dim recesses of bygone reading.

Says Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., in his entertaining book, Our River: “I came through the lock once simultaneously with H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge. He was steering the boat he was in, and I am sorry to say I incurred his displeasure by accidentally touching his rudder with my punt’s nose.”

Oh dear!

He does not tell us what H.R.H. said on this historic occasion; but a knowledge of the Royal Duke’s fiery temper and of his ready and picturesque way of expressing it leads the present writer to imagine that his remarks were of a nature likely to have been hurtful to the self-respect of the Royal Academician. But it is something—is it not?—to be able to record, thus delicately, by implication, that one has been vigorously cursed by a Royal Duke. Not to all of us has come such an honour!

And now we come to Maidenhead town, a town of 12,980 persons, and yet a place that was, not so very long ago, merely in the parishes of Cookham and Bray. (It was created a separate civil parish only in 1894.) Its growth, originally due to its situation on that old coaching highway, the Bath road (which is here carried across the river by that fine stone structure, Maidenhead Bridge, built in 1772, to replace an ancient building of timber), has been further brought about by the modern vogue of the river, and by the convenience of a railway station close at hand.

“Maidenhead” is, according to some views, the “mydden hythe,” the “middle wharf” between Windsor and Marlow. Camden assures us that the name derived from “St. Ursula,” one of the eleven thousand virgins murdered at Cologne. But St. Ursula and the eleven thousand maiden martyrs, who are said to have been shot to death with arrows, A.D. 451, are as entirely mythical as Sarah Gamp’s “Mrs. Harris.”

But there is plenty choice in the origin of this place-name. There are those who plump for “magh-dun-hythe,” the wharf under the great hill (of Cliveden). The place is found under quite another name in Domesday Book. There it is “Elenstone,” or “Ellington.” It is first styled “Maydehuth” in 1248; and it has been thought that the name is equivalent to “new wharf”; the wharf, or its successor, mentioned by Leland in 1538 as the “grete warfeage of tymbre and fierwood.”

We need not, perhaps, expend further space upon the town of Maidenhead, for it is almost entirely modern. Its fine stone bridge has already been mentioned, and another, and a very different, type of bridge, a quarter of a mile below it, now demands attention.

Maidenhead Railway Bridge, completed in 1839, one of those greatly daring works for which the Great Western Railway’s original engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was famous, is the astonishment of all who behold it. Crossing the river in two spans, each of 128 feet, the great elliptical brick arches are the largest brickwork arches in the world, and of such flatness that it seems scarcely possible they can sustain their own weight, even without the heavy burden of trains running across. Maidenhead Railway Bridge astonishes me infinitely more than the great bridge across the Forth, or any other engineering feats. Yet sixty years have passed, and the bridge not only stands as firmly as ever, but nowadays sustains the weight of trains and engines more than twice as heavy as those originally in vogue. Moreover, in the doubling of the line, found necessary in 1892, the confidence of the Company was shown by their building an exact replica of Brunel’s existing bridge, side by side with it. Yet the original contractor had been so alarmed that he earnestly begged Brunel to allow him to relinquish the contract, and although the engineer proved to him, scientifically, that it must stand, he went in fear that when the wooden centreing was removed the arches would collapse. A great storm actually blew down the centreing before it was proposed to remove it, but the bridge stood, and has stood ever since, quite safely. It cost, in 1839, £37,000 to build.