It requires the specialized knowledge of a district surveyor to determine where Slough ends and Salt Hill begins, although probably it would be a shrewd guess to say that the roads which cross the Bath Road in the midst of Slough, and go respectively left and right to Windsor and Stoke Poges, form the dividing line. For all practical purposes, however, the places are one. Salt Hill has decayed, rather than grown, while the town of Slough (unlovely name!) is almost wholly a creation of the railway. Not only strangers have noted the unpleasing name of the place, but some of the inhabitants even endeavoured to change it a few years ago. The proposition was to rechristen it “Upton Royal,” Upton being a hamlet near by, the “Royal” a bright idea of the local boot-lickers, who wanted to emphasize the fact of their proximity to Windsor. The project fell through.

Many of the crack coaches halted at Salt Hill, where, at the “Castle” or the “Windmill,” they found accommodation of the very best. Salt Hill, in fact, was a place which thrived solely on coaching, and the glories of it are now departed. A tragical event clouded over the fair fame of the “Castle” in 1773. It seems that on the 29th of March in that year, a number of gentlemen forming the Colnbrook Turnpike Commission met there, when the Hon. Mr. O’Brien, Capt. Needham, Edward Mason, Major Mayne, Major Cheshire, Walpole Eyre, Capt. Salter, Mr. Isherwood, Mr. Benwell, Mr. Pote, senr., and Mr. Burcombe attended and dined together. The dinner consisted of soup, jack, perch, and “eel pitch cockt” (whatever that may have been), fowls, bacon, and greens, veal cutlets, ragout of pigs’ ears, chine of mutton and salad, course of lamb and cucumbers, crawfish, pastry, and jellies. The wines were Madeira and Port of the very best quality; but, notwithstanding this elaborate spread, the company, we are told, ate and drank moderately, nor was there excess in any respect. Before dinner, several paupers were examined, and among them one most remarkably miserable object. In about ten or eleven days afterwards, every one of the company, except Mr. Pote, who had walked in the garden during the examination of the paupers, was taken ill, and five of them soon died. It was, at the time, supposed that some infection from the paupers had occasioned this fatality, more especially as Mr. Pote, who was absent from the examination, was the only person who escaped unaffected, although he had dined in exactly the same manner as the others.

Some persons have compared this affair with the mortality arising from the Black Assizes, but it should seem, by another account, that these unfortunate gentlemen had partaken of soup that had been allowed to stand in a copper vessel, and that, therefore, they died of mineral poisoning. They lie buried in the little churchyard of Wexham, two miles distant, where an inscription records the facts. That sad business quite ruined the “Castle” Hotel.

But all the Salt Hill hotels were ruined when the Great Western Railway was constructed. The first section was opened, from Paddington to Taplow, on June 4, 1838, and those old hostelries at one blow found most of their patrons taken from them. It is true that this disaster had been impending since 1833, when the route for the new railway was first surveyed; but after the victory of the opponents of the first Bill, when a public meeting was held at Salt Hill to rejoice in the defeat of the railway project, the innkeepers seemed to think that they could not come to much harm. They were, however, bitterly disillusioned.

It is curious, nowadays, to look back upon the time when the Great Western Railway was first built. The authorities of Eton College, together with the Court, had effectually driven the railway from Windsor and Eton, and the College people had also secured the insertion of a clause in the Company’s Act forbidding the erection of a station at Slough. Notwithstanding this, however, trains stopped at Slough from the very first. The Company did this by an ingenious evasion of the spirit, if not the letter, of their Parliamentary obligations. By their Act they were forbidden to build a station at Slough, but nothing had been said about trains stopping there! Accordingly, two rooms were hired at a public house beside the line where Slough station now stands, and tickets were issued there, comfortably enough. The Eton College authorities were maddened by this smart dodge, and applied for an injunction against the Company, which was duly refused.

This is not the only railway romance belonging to Slough, for the Slough signal-box has had a romance of its own. The cabin was erected in 1844, and one of the earliest messages the signalman wired to London by the then wonderful new invention of the electric telegraph, was intelligence of the birth of the Duke of Edinburgh. The following year a man named Tawell committed a murder at Salt Hill, and escaped by the next train to London; but information was telegraphed to town, and being arrested as he stepped from the carriage at Paddington, he was subsequently tried and hanged. The telegraphist warned the officials at Paddington to look out for a man dressed like a Quaker. It is a singular circumstance that the original telegraphic code did not comprise any signal for the letter “Q;” but the telegraphist was not to be beaten. He spelled the word “Kwaker.” Sir Francis Head has recorded how he was travelling along the line, months after, in a crowded carriage. “Not a word had been spoken since the train left London, but as we neared Slough Station, a short-bodied, short-necked, short-nosed, exceedingly respectable-looking man in the corner, fixing his eyes on the apparently fleeting wires, nodded to us as he muttered aloud, “Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell!”[2]