There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity associated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station, resided Mark Lemon, editor of Punch, who died here on May 20th, 1870. Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be converted into a grocer’s shop.

The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I lighted upon the statement of his residence here at one time, yet, after hunting up details of his life and of the battles he fought, after pursuing him through the classic pages of “Boxiana” and the voluminous records of “Pugilistica,” after consulting, too, that sprightly work “The Fancy”; after all this I find no further mention of the fact. It was fitting, though, that the pugilist should have his home near Crawley Downs, the scene of so many of the Homeric combats witnessed by thousands upon thousands of excited spectators, from the Czar of Russia and the great Prince Regent, downwards to the lowest blackguards of the metropolis. An inspiring sight those Downs must have presented from time to time, when great multitudes—princes, patricians, and plebeians of every description—hung with beating hearts and bated breath upon the performances of two men in a roped enclosure battering one another for so much a side.

It is thus no matter for surprise that the Brighton Road, on its several routes, witnessed brilliant and dashing turn-outs, both in public coaches and private equipages, during that time when the last of the Georges flourished so flamboyantly as Prince, Prince Regent, and King. How else could it have been with the Court at one end of it and the metropolis at the other, and between them the rendezvous of all such as delighted in the “noble art”?

Many were the merry “mills” which “came off” at Crawley Downs, Copthorne Common, and Blindley Heath, attended by the Prince and his merry men, conspicuous among whom at different times were Fox, Lord Barrymore, Lord Yarmouth (“Red Herrings”), and Major George Hanger. As for the tappings of claret, the punchings of conks and bread-baskets, and the tremendous sloggings that went on in this neighbourhood in those virile times, are they not set forth with much circumstantial detail in the pages of “Fistiana” and “Boxiana”? There shall you read how the Prince Regent witnessed with enthusiasm such merry sets-to as this between Randall and Martin on Crawley Downs. “Boxiana” gives a full account of it, and is even moved to verse, in this wise:

THE FIGHT AT CRAWLEY
BETWEEN
THE NONPAREIL
AND
THE OUT-AND-OUTER.
Come, won’t you list unto my lay
About the fight at Crawley, O!...

with the refrain—

With his filaloo trillaloo,
Whack, fal lal de dal di de do!

For the number of rounds and such technical details the curious may be referred to the classic pages of “Boxiana” itself.

Martin, originally a baker, and thus of course familiarly known as the “Master of the Rolls,” one of the heroes whom all these sporting blades went out to see contend for victory in the ring, died so recently as 1871. He had long retired from the P.R., and had, upon quitting it, followed the usual practice of retired pugilists, that is to say, he became a publican. He was landlord successively of the “Crown” at Croydon, and the “Horns” tavern, Kennington.

As for details of this fight or that upon the same spot from which Hickman, “The Gas-Light Man,” came off victor, they are not for these pages. How the combatants “fibbed” and “countered,” and did other things equally abstruse to the average reader, you may, who care to, read in the pages of the enthusiastic authorities upon the subject, who spare nothing of all the blows given and received.

This was fine company for the Heir-apparent to keep at Crawley Downs; but see how picturesque he and the crowds that followed in his wake rendered those times. What diversions went forward on the roads—such roads as they were! One chronicler of a fight here says, in all good faith, that on the morning following the “battle,” the remains of several carriages, phaetons, and other vehicles were found bestrewing the narrow ways where they had collided in the darkness.

The House of Hanover, which ended with the death of Queen Victoria, was not at any time largely endowed with picturesqueness, saving only in the gruesome picture afforded by the horrid legend which accounts for the family name of Guelph; but the Regent was the great exception. He, at least, was picturesque; and if there be any who choose to deny it, I will ask them how it comes that so many novelists dealing with historical periods have chosen the period of the Regency as so fruitful an era of romance? The Prince endowed his time with a glamour that has lasted, and will continue unimpaired. It was he who gave a devil-me-care connotation to the words “Regent” and “Regency”; and his wild escapades have sufficed to redeem the Georgian Era from the reproach of unrelieved dulness and greasy vulgarity.

The reign of George the Third was the culmination of smug and unctuous bourgeois respectability at Court, from whose weary routine the Prince’s surroundings were entirely different. Himself and his entourage were dissolute indeed, roystering, drinking, cursing, dicing, visiting prize-fights on these Downs of Crawley, and hail-fellow-well-met with the blackguards there gathered together. But whatever his surroundings, they were never dull, for which saving grace many sins may be excused him.

Thackeray, in his “Four Georges,” has little that is pleasant to say of any one of them, but is astonishingly severe upon this last, both as Prince and King. For a thorough-going condemnation, commend me to that book. To the faults of George the Fourth the author is very wide-awake, nor will he allow him any virtues whatsoever. He will not even concede him to be a man, as witness this passage: “To make a portrait of him at sight seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig, his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I could at this very desk perform a recognisable likeness of him. And yet, after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public dinner, there at races, and so forth, you find you have nothing, nothing but a coat and a wig, and a mask smiling below it; nothing but a great simulacrum.”

Poor fat Adonis!

But Thackeray was obliged reluctantly to acknowledge the grace and charm of the Fourth George, and to chronicle some of the kind acts he performed, although at these last he sneered consumedly, because, forsooth, those thus benefited were quite humble persons. It was not without reason that Thackeray wrote so intimately of snobs: in those unworthy sneers speaks one of the race.

One curious little item of praise the author of the “Four Georges” was constrained to allow the Regent: “Where my Prince did actually distinguish himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from Brighton to Carlton House—fifty-six miles.”[11]

So the altogether British love of sport compelled this little interlude in the abuse levelled at the “simulacrum.”