XI

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Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in 1792, says that “Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres, surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in circumference.” Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions built in the seventeenth century, of a debased classic type.

GIBBETS BY THE WAY

Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston’s time, and indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad. Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his “Britannia” of 1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later editor, who issued an “Ogilby Improv’d” in 1731, they still decorated the wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.

At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where the extra large and permanent gallows stood, like a football goal, at what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later years been persuaded to play.

Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall, the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon, resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. “T 180,” as he was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898, and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul’s Cathedral by the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised commercial circles.

The estate of Norbury Hall has since T 180’s release become “ripe for building,” and the mansion, the lake, and the beautiful grounds have been “developed” away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot will have faded.

Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, and above the white hillside villas of Sydenham and Gipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long body of the Crystal Palace; that bane and obsession of most view-points in South London, “for ever spoiling the view in all its compass,” as Ruskin truly says in “PrÆterita.”

I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphere of the building is stuffily reminiscent of half a century’s stale teas and buttered toast, and the views of it, near or distant, are very creepily and awfully like the dreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of such scriptural scenes as “Belshazzar’s Feast” and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects from Revelation.

STREATHAM.

At Thornton Heath—where there has been nothing in the nature of a heath for at least eighty years past—the electric trams of Croydon begin, and take you through North End into and through Croydon town, along a continuous line of houses. “Broad Green” once stood by the wayside, but nowadays the sole trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. At Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little vestige of the past left, in “Colliers’ Water Lane.” The old farmhouse of Colliers’ Water, reputed haunt of the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, was demolished in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, and the secret staircase it possessed was no doubt intended to hide fugitives much more respectable than highwaymen.

The name of that lane is now the only reminder of the time when Croydon was a veritable Black Country.

The “colliers of Croydon,” whose black trade gave such employment to seventeenth-century wits, had no connection with what our ancestors of very recent times still called “sea-coal”—that is to say, coal shipped from Newcastle and brought round by water, in days before railways. The Croydon coal was charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests that once overspread the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and was supplied very largely to London from the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the nineteenth.

Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the Croydon colliers famous. We are not to suppose that his name was really Grimes: that was probably a part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master collier, who in the time of Edward the Sixth made charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke and the grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to abolish the kilns. I think we may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled lawn-sleeves.

We first find Croydon mentioned in A.D. 962, when it was “Crogdoene.” In Domesday Book it is “Croindene.” Whether the name means “crooked vale,” “chalk vale,” or “town of the cross,” I will not pretend to say, and he would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate until 1750.

GROWTH OF CROYDON

By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still Croydon grows.

In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620 they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to be a “very obscure and darke place.” Archbishop Abbot “expounded” it by felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.

The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. It was the North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last few years; but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks “improvement”; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good Whitgift’s noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play monkey-tricks—when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.

Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, “The Hospital of the Holy Trinity,” inscribed high up on the wall, seems strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.

There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, the opposite side of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.

It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury and eloquent with the motto Qui dat pauperi non indigebit, the stranger has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old Aubrey quaintly puts it, “a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a college, by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late Archbishop of Canterbury.” The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation: twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each £40 and £30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital so long as of good behaviour, but “obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde of charmmynge, or witchcrafte” are punished by the statutes with expulsion.

THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.

The fourth side of the quadrangle is occupied by the Hall, the Warden’s rooms, and the Chapel, all in very much the same condition as at their building. The old oak table in the Hall is dated 1614, and much of the stained glass is of sixteenth century date.

But it is in the Warden’s rooms, above, that the eye is feasted with old woodwork, ancient panelling, black with lapse of time, quaint muniment chests, curious records, and the like. These were the rooms specially reserved for his personal use during his lifetime by the pious Archbishop Whitgift.

Here is a case exhibiting the original titles to the lands on which the Hospital is built, and with which it is endowed; formidable sheets of parchment, bearing many seals, and, what does duty for one, a gold angel of Edward VI.

These are ideal rooms; rooms which delight with their unspoiled sixteenth-century air. The sun streams through the western windows over their deep embrasures, lighting up so finely the darksome woodwork into patches of brilliance that there must be those who envy the Warden his lodging, so perfect a survival of more spacious days.

The Chapel, Hospital of the Holy Trinity.

A little chapel duly completes the Hospital, and here is not pomp of carving nor vanity of blazoning, for the good Archbishop, mindful of economy, would none of these. The seats and benches are contemporary with the building, and are rough-hewn. On the western wall hangs the founder’s portrait, black-framed and mellow, rescued from the boys of the Whitgift schools ere quite destroyed, and on the other walls are the portrait of a lady, supposed to be the Archbishop’s niece, and a ghastly representation of Death as a skeleton digging a grave. But all these things are seen but dimly, for the light is very feeble.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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