CROYDON TOWN HALL.

“On either side of the vestibule are rooms for Porter and telephone. Beyond are the hall and principal staircase, the shafts of the columns and the pilasters of which are of a Spanish marble, a sort of jasper, called Rose d’Andalusia; the bases and skirtings are of grand antique. The capitals, architrave, cornices, handrails, etc., are of red Verona marble; the balusters, wall-lining and frieze of the entablature of alabaster, and the dado of the ground floor is gris-rouge marble. The flooring is of Roman mosaic of various marbles, purposely kept simple in design and quiet in colouring. One of the windows has the arms of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and the other the Borough arms, in stained glass. Above the dado at the first floor level the walls are painted a delicate green tint, relieved by a powdering of C’s and Civic Crowns. The doors and their surroundings are of walnut wood.”

Very beautiful indeed. Now let us see the home of one of Croydon’s poorer ratepayers:

On one side of the hall are two rooms, called respectively the parlour and the kitchen. Beyond is the scullery. The walls of the staircase are covered with a sort of plaster called stucco, but closely resembling road-scrapings: the skirtings are of pitch-pine, the balusters of the same material. The floorings are of deal. The roof lets in the rain. One of the windows is broken and stuffed with rags, the others are cracked. The walls are stained a delicate green tint relieved by a film of blue mould, owing to lack of a damp-course. None of the windows close properly, the flues smoke into the rooms instead of out of the chimney-pots, the doors jam, and the surroundings are wretched beyond description.

Electric tramways now conduct along the Brighton Road to the uttermost end of the great modern borough of Croydon, at Purley Corner. Here the explorer begins to perceive, despite the densely packed houses, that he is in that “Croydene,” or crooked vale, of Saxon times from which, we are told, Croydon takes its name; and he can see also that nature, and not man, ordained in the first instance the position and direction of what is now the road to Brighton, in the bottom, alongside where the Bourne once flowed, inside the fence of Haling Park. It is, in fact, the site of a prehistoric track which led the most easy ways across the bleak downs, severally through Smitham Bottom and Caterham.

Beside that stream ran from 1805 until about 1840 the rails of that long-forgotten pioneer of railways in these parts, the “Surrey Iron Railway.” This was a primitive line constructed for the purpose of affording cheap and quick transport for coals, bricks, and other heavy goods, originally between Wandsworth and Croydon, but extended in 1805 to Merstham, where quarries of limestone and beds of Fuller’s earth are situated.

This railway was the outcome of a project first mooted in 1799, for a canal from Wandsworth to Croydon. It was abandoned because of the injury that might have been caused to the wharves and factories already existing numerously along the course of the Wandle, and a railway substituted. The Act of Parliament was obtained in 1800, and the line constructed to Croydon in the following year, at a cost of about £27,000. It was not a railway in the modern sense, and the haulage was by horses, who dragged the clumsy waggons along at the rate of about four miles an hour. The rails, fixed upon stone blocks, were quite different from those of modern railways or tramways, being just lengths of angle-iron into which the wheels of the waggons fitted: [image]. Thus, in contradistinction from all other railway or tramway practice, the flanges were not on the wheels, but on the rails themselves. The very frugal object of this was to enable the waggons to travel on ordinary roads, if necessity arose.

From the point where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at Wandsworth, along the levels past Earlsfield and Garratt, the railway went in double track; continuing by Merton Abbey, Mitcham (where the present lane called “Tramway Path” marks its course) and across Mitcham Common into Croydon by way of what is now called Church Street, but was then known as “Iron Road.” Thence along Southbridge Lane and the course of the Bourne, it was continued to Purley, whence it climbed Smitham Bottom and ran along the left-hand side of the Brighton Road in a cutting now partly obliterated by the deeper cutting of the South Eastern line. The ideas of those old projectors were magnificent, for they cherished a scheme of extending to Portsmouth; but the enterprise was never a financial success, and that dream was not realised. Nearly all traces of the old railway are obliterated.

The marvel-mongers who derive the name of Waddon from “Woden” find that Haling comes from the Anglo-Saxon “halig,” or holy; and therefrom have built up an imaginary picture of ancient heathen rites celebrated here. The best we can say for those theories is that they may be correct or they may not. Of evidence there is, of course, none whatever; and certainly it is to be feared that the inhabitants of Croydon care not one rap about it; nor even know—or knowing, are not impressed—that here, in 1624, died that great Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham. It is much more real to them that the tramcars are twopence all the way.

At the beginning of Haling Park, immediately beyond the “Swan and Sugarloaf,” the Croydon toll-gate barred the road until 1865. Beyond it, all was open country. It is a very different tale to-day, now the stark chalk downs of Haling and Smitham are being covered with houses, and the once-familiar great white scar of Haling Chalk Pit is being screened behind newly raised roofs and chimney-pots.

The beginning of Purley is marked by a number of prominent public-houses, testifying to the magnificent thirst of the new suburb. You come past the “Swan and Sugarloaf” to the “Windsor Castle,” the “Purley Arms,” the “Red Deer,” and the “Royal Oak”; and just beyond, round the corner, is the “Red Lion.” At the “Royal Oak” a very disreputable and stony road goes off to the left. It looks like, and is, a derelict highway: once the main road to Godstone and East Grinstead, but now ending obscurely in a miserable modern settlement near the newly built station of Purley Oaks, so called by the Brighton Railway Company to distinguish it from the older Purley station—ex “Caterham Junction”—of the South Eastern line.

It was here, at Purley House, or Purley Bury as it is properly styled, close by the few poor scrubby and battered remains of the once noble woodland of Purley Oaks, that John Horne Tooke, contentious partisan and stolid begetter of seditious tracts, lived—when, indeed, he was not detained within the four walls of some prison for political offences.

Tooke, whose real name was Horne, was born in 1736, the son of a poulterer. At twenty-four years of age he became a clergyman, and was appointed to the living of New Brentford, which he held until 1773, when, clearly seeing how grievously he had missed his vocation, he studied for the Bar. Thereafter his life was one long series of battles, hotly contested in Parliament, in newspapers, books and pamphlets, and on platforms. He was in general a wrong-headed, as well as a hot-headed, politician; but he was sane enough to oppose the American War when King and Government were so mad as to provoke and continue it. Describing the Americans killed and wounded by the troops at Lexington and Concord as “murdered,” he was the victim of a Government prosecution for libel, and was imprisoned for twelve months and fined £200. He took—no! that will not do—he “assumed” the name of Tooke in 1782, in compliment to his friend William Tooke, who then resided here in this delightful old country house of Purley. The idea seems to have been for them to live together in amity, and that William Tooke, the elder of the two, should leave his property to his friend. But quarrels arose long before that, and Horne at his friend’s death received only £500, while other disputed points arose, leading to bitter law-suits.

In 1801 he was Member of Parliament for Old Sarum; but how he reconciled the representation of that rottenest of rotten boroughs with his profession of reforming Whig does not appear.He was a many-sided man, of fierce energies and strong prejudices, but a scholar. While his political pamphlets are forgotten, his “???? ?????????; or, the Diversions of Purley,” which is not really a book of sports, is still remembered for its philological learning. It is a disquisition on the affinities of prepositions, the relationships of conjunctions, and the intimacies of other parts of speech. His other diversions appear to have been less reputable, for he was the father of one illegitimate son and two daughters.

His intention was to have been buried in the grounds of Purley House, but when he died, in 1812, at Wimbledon, his mortal coil was laid to rest at Ealing; and so it chanced that the vault he had constructed in his garden remained, after all, untenanted, with the unfinished epitaph:

JOHN HORNE TOOKE,
Late Proprietor and now Occupier
of this spot,
was born in June 1736,
Died in
Aged years,
Contented and Grateful.

Purley House is still standing, though considerably altered, and presents few features reminiscent of the eighteenth-century politician, and fewer still of the Puritan Bradshaw, the regicide, who once resided here. It stands in the midst of tall elms, and looks as far removed from political dissensions as may well be imagined, its trim lawn and trellised walls overgrown in summer by a tangle of greenery.

But suburban expansion has at last reached Tooke’s rural retreat from political strife, and the estate is now “developed,” with roads driven through and streets of villas planned, leaving only the old house and some few acres of gardens around it.