LATTER DAYS

A host of writers have written in praise—and rightly in praise—of that fine flower of many centuries of innkeeping evolution, the Coaching Inn of the early and mid-nineteenth century. Hazlitt, Washington Irving, De Quincey, are all among the prophets; De Quincey, ceasing for the while his mystical apocalyptic style, mournfully lamenting the beginnings of the end that came even so long ago as his day, which, after all, ended not so very long ago, for although he seems so ancient, he died only in 1859. He writes, in early railway times, of “those days,” the days in question being that fine period in coaching and innkeeping, the ’20’s of the nineteenth century.

“What cosy old parlours in those days,” he exclaims, “low-roofed, glowing with ample fires and fenced from the blasts of the doors by screens whose folding doors were, or seemed to be, infinite! What motherly landladies! won, how readily, to kindness the most lavish by the mere attractions of simplicity and youthful innocence, and finding so much interest in the bare circumstance of being a traveller at a childish age! Then what blooming young handmaidens; how different from the knowing and worldly demireps of modern high roads! And sometimes grey-headed, faithful waiters, how sincere and attentive by comparison with their flippant successors, the eternal ‘Coming, sir, coming,’ of our improved generation!”

They all tell the same tale; those whose privilege it was to witness the meeting of the old order and the new.

“It was interesting,” says Mr. Locker-Lampson, writing of old times, “as the post-chaise drew up at the door of the roomy and comfortable hostel where we were to dine or sleep, to see Boniface and his better half smilingly awaiting us—Us in particular!—waiter and chamber-lasses grouped behind them. The landlady advances to the carriage-window with a cordial, self-respecting, ‘Will you please to alight.’ I remember that the landlord, who announced dinner, sometimes entered with the first dish and placed it on the table, bowing as he retired. Why, it all seems as if it were but yesterday! Now it is gone for ever.”

Yes, irrevocably gone. Most of the old inns are gone too, and in their place, only too frequently, the traveller finds the modern, company-owned hotel, with a foreign manager who naturally takes no interest in the guests he, as a matter of fact, rarely sees, and with whom no guest could possibly foregather. In the modern barrack hotel the guest must necessarily be impersonal—one of a number going to swell the returns. No one quite willingly resigns himself to being a mere number; it is, indeed, one of the greatest of the convict’s trials that he has lost his name and become identified only by a letter and a row of figures. Just in the same way, when we stay at hotels our self-respect is revolted at being received and dismissed with equal indifference, and there are many who would gladly resign the innovations of electric light and hydraulic lifts for that “welcome at an inn” of which Shenstone speaks. The philosophy of these regrets must, in fact, be sought in that illuminating phrase, “Us in particular.” We travellers are unwilling to be thought of merely as numbers identical with those of our bedrooms, and we like to believe, against our own better judgment, that the old-fashioned hosts and hostesses were pleased to see us; which of course, in that special sense, was not the case. But a little make-believe sometimes goes a great way, and we need never, unless we have a mind to distress ourselves, seek the tongue of humbug in the cheek of courtesy.

The landlord of a good coaching house was a very important person indeed. Not seldom he was a large owner of horses and employer of labour; a man of some culture and of considerable wealth. He was not only a good judge of wine and horseflesh, but of men and matters, and not merely the servant, but the self-respecting and respected friend, of the gentry in his neighbourhood. He was generally in evidence at his house, and he or his wife would have scorned the idea of appointing a manager to do their work. In those days, and with such men along the road, it was an established rule of etiquette for the coming guest to invite his host to take a glass of wine with him and to exchange the news. But the type has become quite extinct, and even their old houses have been either demolished or else converted into private residences. Such hosts were Mr. and Mrs. Botham, of the “Windmill” at Salt Hill; or the long succession of notable landlords of the “Castle” at Marlborough, on the Bath Road; such were Clark, of the “Bell,” Barnby Moor, and Holt of the “Wheatsheaf,” Rushyford Bridge, on the Great North Road,—to name but those.

They were men, too, of considerable influence, and, when equipped with determination, wielded a certain amount of power, and brought great changes to pass; as when Robert Lawrence, of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, by dint of great personal exertions, brought the line of travel between London and Dublin through Shrewsbury and Holyhead, instead of, as formerly, through Chester. He died in 1806, and the curious may yet read on his mural monument in St. Julian’s Church how he was “many years proprietor of the ‘Raven’ and ‘Lion’ inns in this town,” and that it was to his “public spirit and unremitting exertions for upwards of thirty years, in opening the great road through Wales between the United kingdoms, as also for establishing the first mail-coach, that the public in general have been greatly indebted.”

Almost equally forceful were some of the old-time proprietors of the “George” at Walsall. In 1781 Mr. Thomas Fletcher, one of an old and highly respected family in that town, gave up the “Dragon” in High Street and built the great “George Hotel.” He even procured an Act of Parliament by which the present road from Walsall to Stafford was made, thereby bringing Walsall out of a by-road into the direct line of traffic. He also caused the Birmingham road to be straightened and widened, and gradually brought coaching and posting through the town. His successors, Fletcher and Sharratt, were equally energetic. In 1823 they remodelled the “George,” giving it the classic-columned front that confers a kind of third-cousin relationship to the British Museum, with unappetising and gruesome thoughts of dining on fried mummy and kippered parchments. The columns, which are still very solemnly there—or were, a year ago—came from the Marquis of Donegall’s neighbouring seat of Fisherwick Hall, demolished about that time, and the placing of them here was celebrated by an inaugural feast, “the colonnade dinner,” presided over by Lord Hatherton, a great patron of the house.

Those wonder-working innkeepers also, in 1831, promoted the Bill by which the present Birmingham road through Perry Bar was made, superseding the old route by Hamstead and Handsworth church.

Unfortunately, those fine old innkeepers, whatever else they were, were not usually cultivators of the art of literary expression, and did not write their memoirs and reminiscences. Yet they could, had they chosen, have told an interesting tale of men and matters. Consider! They were in the whirl of life, and often knew personages and affairs, not merely by report, but at first hand. What would not the historian of social England give for such reminiscences? They would open the door to much that is now sealed, and would clothe the dry bones of mere facts with romance.

One such innkeeper, Mr. J. Kearsley Fowler, who kept the “White Hart,” Aylesbury, in the last few years of its existence, has, however, left us something by which we may see, described at first-hand, the life and surroundings of a first-class old coaching and posting inn between 1812 and those middle years of the ’60’s, when a few branch-road coaches were yet left, and the Squire and Agriculture were still prosperous.

He tells us, of his own knowledge, that the innkeepers had by far the largest amount of capital invested in the country towns, where, as men generally of superior manners and education, from their constant association with the leading nobility, clergy, and magistracy, they took a prominent position, both socially and politically, the leading houses being the head quarters, respectively, of Whigs and Tories.

The “White Hart” at Aylesbury was generally believed to have dated back to the time of Richard the Second, and in the time of the Wars of the Roses to have been the rendezvous of the White Rose party, while the “Roebuck” was affected to the Red Rose.

Until 1812 the “White Hart” retained its fine mediÆval, three-gabled frontage, with first floor overhanging the ground-floor, and the second overhanging the first. Elaborately carved barge-boards decorated the gables. In the centre of the front was a great gateway with deeply reeded oaken posts and heavy double doors, which could be closed on occasion; but, in the growing security of the land, had scarce within the memory of man been shut to. Within was a spacious courtyard, partly surrounded by a gallery supported on stout oaken pillars and reached by a staircase. From this gallery, as in most other mediÆval hostelries, the bedrooms and principal sitting-rooms opened. The “Coffee Room” and “Commercial Room” were at either side of the entrance from the street: the “Commercial Room” itself having, before the days of “commercials,” once been called “the Change,” and used, as asserted by local tradition, as the place where the principal business transactions of the town were conducted, over suitable liquor.

On the side opposite was the room called the “Crown,” where the collectors of customs and excise, and other officials periodically attended. In the “Mitre,” an adjoining room, the Chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln, and the “Apparitor” of the Archdeacon had of old collected, for three hundred years, the dues or fees of the Church. Another room, the “Fountain,” was perhaps originally a select bar. Running under the entire frontage of the house was the extensive cellarage, necessarily spacious in days when every one drank wine, and many deeply.

At the end of the yard was the great kitchen, and beyond it large gardens and a beautiful, full-sized bowling-green. Gigantic elms, at least three centuries old, bordered the gardens, which were further screened from outside observation by dense shrubberies of flowering shrubs, laburnums, lilacs, mountain-ash, acacias, and red chestnuts. Ancient walnut-trees and shady arbours completed this lovely retreat.

But this was not all. Beyond this very delightful, but merely ornamental, portion was an orchard stocked with fine apple- and pear-trees: codlins, golden and ribston pippins, Blenheim orange, russets and early June-eatings, Gansell’s bergamot pear, and others. Three very fine mulberry-trees, at least three centuries old, and of course a varied and extensive stock of bush-fruit, were included in this orchard, and in addition there was the kitchen-garden.

In the orchard were the cow-houses and piggeries, and the hospital for lame or ailing horses. A mill-stream ran at the bottom, and in the midst of it was a “stew,” a shallow pond for freshwater fish, in which was kept an “eel-trunk,” a strong iron box about four feet long and two feet wide and deep, perforated with holes. The lid of this contrivance was fastened with lock and key, and was under the charge of the man-cook, who was head of the servants. When eels were required for table, the trunk would be hauled up to bank by a strong iron chain, and emptied.

The stables had stalls for about fifty horses, and over them were lofts for hay, straw, and corn. Harness-rooms, waiting-room for the postboys, and an “ostry,” i.e., office and store-room for the ostler, were attached, together with chaise and coach-houses. The establishment of the “White Hart”—and it was typical of many others in the old days—covered from five to six acres.

The staff of such a house was, of course, large. Besides the innkeeper and his wife, both of them working hard in the conduct of the business, there were housekeeper, barmaid, man-cook, waiter and under-waiter, kitchenmaid, scullerymaid, chambermaid, laundress, housemaid, nurse, boots, ostler, tap-boy, first-turn postboy, and generally an extra woman: sixteen persons, whom the innkeeper had to lodge and feed daily, in addition to his guests.

The “White Hart” was re-fronted in a very plain, not to say ugly, manner in 1813, and finally demolished in 1863. Not even that most lovely and most famous feature of it, the celebrated “Rochester room,” was spared. This was a noble apartment, built as an addition to the back of the house in 1663 by the Earl of Rochester, as a return for a signal service rendered by the landlord in that time—perilous to such Cavaliers as he—the Commonwealth. It seems, according to Clarendon, that the Earl and Sir Nicholas Armour came riding horseback into the town one night and put up at the “White Hart,” then kept by a landlord named Gilvy, who was affected strongly in favour of Cromwell and all his doings. The local magistrate, hearing of the visit of the Earl, sent secretly to the innkeeper requesting him to detain the travellers’ horses the next morning, so that neither of them should be able to leave, pending an inquiry upon their business; but the thing was not done secretly enough. Probably one of the servants of the inn told those two guests of something ominous being afoot; at any rate, the Earl had Gilvy up and questioned him, and, telling him how probably the lives of himself and friend were in his hand, gave him forty Jacobuses and suggested that they should, without a word, depart that night. Clarendon expresses himself as unable to decide whether the gold or the landlord’s conscience prompted his next action. At any rate, Gilvy conducted the two fugitives from the inn at midnight “into the London way.” They reached London and then fled over sea, while the landlord was left to invent some plausible story to satisfy the Justice of the Peace, who in his turn was suspected by Cromwell of being a party to the escape.

At the Restoration, the landlord received a brimming measure of reward. He was thanked by the King, and the Earl built for him that noble room, forty-two feet long, by twenty-three wide, that was the pride and glory of the “White Hart” for just two hundred years. It was panelled from floor to ceiling in richly carved oak, set off with gilding, and embellished with the figures of Peace and Concord and the initials C R, while the ceiling was painted with nymphs and cherubim by Antonio Verrio.

Nothing has more changed from its former condition than the old inn which has become the modern hotel. The “George,” the “Crown and Anchor,” the “Wellington,” or the “King’s Head,” had an individuality which was never lost. There was a personal kind of welcome from the landlord and the landlady that simulated the hospitality of a friendly host and hostess, mingled with the attention of a superior sort of body-servant. You were not handed over to a number and a chambermaid, like a document in a pigeon-hole tabulated by a clerk; but the hostess herself showed you your rooms, and begged you to put a name to anything you might fancy. There was no general coffee-room then, save for commercial travellers and such social gentlemen as preferred even inferior company to solitude. There was no table d’hÔte dinner other than the ordinary, between twelve and two, which was chiefly made for the convenience of travellers by the stage-coach, who halted here for change and refreshment. Even the ladies who might be on the road were served and kept apart from the, perhaps, doubtful gents below; and mine host himself brought in the first dish and set it on the table of the private room, which was as much de rigueur then for ladies as the copper warming-pan and the claret with the yellow seal, or the thick, deep red luscious port of old, ordered by the knowing for the good of the house.

In the country the pretty little inn, with its honeysuckled porch and scrambling profusion of climbing roses up to the bedroom windows, had an even more home-like character in its methods of dealing with its guests. Here the servants stayed on for years, till they grew to be as much part of the establishment as the four-poster hung with red moreen and the plated sconces for candles. And here everything was of perfect cleanliness, and as fresh as fragrant. The eggs and milk and butter were all sweet and new. Generous jugs of cream softened the tartness of the black-currant pudding or the green-gooseberry tart. The spring chickens and young ducklings had been well fed; the mutton was home-grown and not under five years; the beef was home-grown too, and knew nothing of antiseptic preparations or frozen chambers; and the vegetables came direct from the garden, and had been neither tinned nor carted for miles in huge waggon loads, well rammed down and tightly compressed. And all the meat was roasted before an open fire, diligently basted in the process, till the gravy lightly frothed on the browned skin, and the appetising scent it gave out had no affinity with the smell of fat on heated iron, which for the most part accompanies the modern roast in the modern oven. The linen invariably smelt of lavender or dried rose-leaves, of which big bags were kept among the sheets; but the washing apparatus was poor, and the illumination was scanty. Wax candles in silver or plated branched candlesticks, that vaguely suggested churches and sacraments, shed a veritably “dim religious” glimmer in the sitting-room, and appeared expensively under the form of “lights” in the bill—mistily suggestive of food for hungry cats.

Yet the old country inn had, and still has—for it is not wholly extinct—its charms that weigh against any little defect.

Of all this quasi-home life which belonged to the old inn of the past, the hotel of the present has not a trace. For certain forms of luxury the modern hotel is hard to beat. Thick carpets deaden the footsteps of stragglers through the corridors, and your boots, invariably kicked into infinities by midnight guests, do not—as they do in the older houses—fly noisily along the bare boards. The rooms are lighted with electric light, but usually set so high as to be useless for all purposes of reading or working. In the drawing-room are luxurious chairs of all shapes and sizes; in the reading-room papers of all colours, to suit here the red-hot Radical and there the cooler Conservative. The billiard-room attracts the men after dinner as—if in the country—the tennis-ground or the golf-links had attracted them through the day. The telephone does everything you want. Carriages, theatres, quotations, races, a doctor if you are ill, a motor-car if you are well—nothing within the range of human wants that can be ordered and not chosen comes amiss to the telephone and its manipulators. All the rough edges of life are smoothed down to satin softness. All the friction is taken away. A modern hotel is as the isle of Calypso or the Garden of Armida, where all you have to do is to make known your wants and pay the bill.

But it has not one single strain of Home in it. Home is the place where the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you are a document in a pigeon-hole—a number, not a person—an accident, not substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management. You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. Dinner is, of course, fixed, and you take it in masses together: or so took it, for in late years, especially in the first hotels of London, a revulsion of feeling has led to the long tables being abolished, and small ones installed, where, almost privately amid the throng, you and your little party may dine. As a rule the waiters are Swiss and the meat is foreign, the cook is a Frenchman and called a chef; and the materials are inferior. The vegetables are tinned, and oysters, lobsters, salmon, and hare in May follow suit. The sauces are all exactly the same in one hotel as in another, and much margarine enters into their composition. Electric bells emphasise the monotonous ordering of the whole concern, where as little character is expressed in the ring as in the number it indicates; and speaking-tubes sound in the corridors, like domestic fog-horns or railway whistles, calling the chambermaids or waiters of such-and-such a floor to listen to their orders from below. Wherever you go you find exactly the same things—the same order, the same management, the same appliances and methods. You arrive without a welcome, you leave without a farewell. Your character is determined according to the tips you give on parting, and an hour after you have gone your personality is forgotten. But, above all things, Heaven save us from falling ill in the modern hotel. No one cares for you, and no one even has the decency to make a pretence of doing so.

Sometimes, however, if you go somewhat out of the season, and before the rush of visitors begins, you get to a certain degree behind the scenes, and learn a little of the heart and humanity of the management. The chambermaid has time to have a little chat with you in the morning, and the head waiter gives you bits of local information both interesting and new. The manageress is not too busy for a few minutes’ gossip across the counter which separates her from the hall, and screens her off in a sanctuary of her own. And you may find her cheerful, chatty, kindly, and willing to please for the mere pleasure of pleasing.

In the monster hotels of London and the great cities, while there may yet be a “season”—a period of extra pressure and overcrowding—there is no such slack time as the giant caravanserais of holiday resorts experience.

The pioneer of the many-storeyed, “palatial” hotels, gorgeous with marble pavements, polished granite columns, lifts and gigantic saloons, was the “Great Western Railway Hotel” at Paddington.[11] Since that huge pile set the fashion, hundreds of others, huger and more magnificent, have been built at Charing Cross, Euston, St. Pancras, Marylebone and other London termini, with big brothers—in every way as big and well-appointed—in provincial towns. They are the logical outcome of the times, the direct successors of the coaching and posting inns that originally came into existence to supply the wants, in food and lodging, of travellers set down at the places where the coaches stopped. The final expression of the coaching hostelry is still to be seen in London, in instructive company with one of the largest of the railway hotels, in the Strand, where the “Golden Cross,” built in 1832, looks upon the “Charing Cross Hotel” of the South-Eastern Railway.

The management of a great modern hotel is no easy thing. It demands the urbanity of an ambassador, the marketing instincts of a good housewife, the soldier’s instinct for command, the caution of a financier, and a gift for judging character. All these things—natural endowments, or the result of training—must go to the making of an hotel-manager who has, perhaps, a couple of hundred people on his staff, and hundreds of guests, many of them unreasonable, to keep satisfied.

It has lately become a commonplace to say that cycling and the motor-car have peopled the roads again. The old coaching inns have entered upon a new era of prosperity by reason of the crowds of cyclists who fare forth from London along the ancient highways, or explore, awheel, the neighbourhoods of provincial towns. The “last” coach-driver, coach-guard, and post-boy, killed off regularly by the newspapers, still survive to witness this new cult of the wheel, and the ultimate ostlers of the coaching era, a bit stiff in the joints, shaky at the knees, and generally out of repair, have come forth blinking, from the dark and cavernous recesses of their mouldering stables, all too large now for the horses that find shelter there, to take charge of the machines of steel and iron and rubber that will carry you infinite distances without fatigue.

There are elements of both fun and pathos in the sight of an old ostler cleaning a muddy bicycle in a coach-yard from which the last coach-horses departed nearly two generations ago. As a boy, he started life in the place as a stable-help, and had scarce finished his novitiate when the railway was opened and the coaches dropped off one by one, after vainly appealing to the old-fashioned prejudices of their patrons to shun the trains and still travel by the highways. How he has managed to retain his place all this time goodness only knows. Perhaps he has been useful in looking after the horses that work the hotel ’bus to and from the station; and then the weekly market-day, bringing in the farmers with their gigs and traps from outlying villages, is still an institution. For such customers old George had, no doubt, the liveliest contempt in the fine old free-handed days of coaching; but this class of business, once turned over cheerfully to second- or third-rate inns, has long been eagerly shared here.

To watch him with a bicycle you would think the machine a sensitive beast, ready to kick unless humoured, for as he rubs it down with a cloth he soothes it with the continuous “’ssh-ssh, ’ssh” which has become involuntary with him, from long usage; while if indeed it can’t kick, it succeeds very fairly in barking his shins with those treacherous pedals. All the persuasive hissing in the world won’t soothe a pedal.

As for the motor-cars which are now finding their way into the old inn-yards, the old ostler stands fearfully aloof from them, and lets the driver of the motor look after the machine himself. The New Ostler, who will be produced by the logic of events in the course of a very few more years, will be an expert mechanic, and able to tittivate a gear and grind in a valve of a motor-car, or execute minor repairs to a bicycle, just as readily as an ostler rubs down or clips a horse.