Eric Parker

Growing London.—Cigars by Dulwich Valley.—Edward Allen, Actor, Bear-baiter, Dog-fancier and Founder of a College.—Godd's Guift.—Dulwich buttercups.—Dr. Johnson.—A Prayer in a Library.—Merton.—Wimbledon Camp.—A Miser's grave.—An opportunity for a duel.—Groans for George Ranger.—Memories of the Windmill.

Nothing is more capricious than a vast town pushing out into the country. No law binds it; no power can resist it; it will not be tempted, or denied; only one future can certainly be prophesied for it, that where it comes it will remain. Looking at London and its surroundings on a new map and an old, it is an arresting thing to trace—almost to watch—the growth of the inexorable black ink on what a decade or two before was inviolate white. There is nothing orderly about it, nothing mathematical. London does not grow as the circles spread from a splash in a pond, nor regularly and certainly as geologists say stones grow in the soil—a fascinating and rather dreadful secret of growth. London grows suddenly by fits and starts. Once, perhaps, the town crept out quietly, a field at a time, a new road in a twelvemonth. Now it catches great parks and manors. But which way it will go out to catch them you cannot guess. It may walk threateningly, and it may leave alone, as it has left the deepest of hayfields alone in Kent much nearer London than in Surrey. One rule, perhaps, it keeps relentlessly; it will never leave country between London old and London new. The Londons join at once.

Ruskin, in PrÆterita, shows you London striding by Herne Hill to Croydon. Herne Hill should be a hill with a heronry on it, but the name is new; it was King's Hill when John Speed made his map in the days of James I. But Herne Hill was in the country when Ruskin knew it. Norwood was a hill; Dulwich was a valley. "Central in each amphitheatre, the crowning glory of Herne Hill was accordingly, that, after walking along its ridge southward from London through a mile of chestnut, lilac, and apple trees, hanging over the wooden palings on each side—suddenly the trees stopped on the left, and out one came on the top of the field sloping down to the south into Dulwich valley—open field animate with cow and buttercup, and below, the beautiful meadows and high avenues of Dulwich; and beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood hills; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going down to the left, always so warm that invalids could be sheltered there in March, when to walk elsewhere would have been death to them; and so quiet, that whenever I had anything difficult to compose or think of, I used to do it rather there than in our own garden. The great field was separated from the path and road only by light wooden open palings, four feet high, needful to keep the cows in. Since I last composed, or meditated there, various improvements have taken place; first the neighbourhood wanted a new church, and built a meagre Gothic one with a useless spire, for the fashion of the thing, at the side of the field; then they built a parsonage behind it, the two stopping half the view in that direction. Then the Crystal Palace came, for ever spoiling the view through all its compass, and bringing every show-day from London a flood of pedestrians down the footpath who left it filthy with cigar ashes for the rest of the week: then the railroads came, and expatiating roughs by every excursion train, who knocked the palings about, roared at the cows, and tore down what branches of blossom they could reach over the palings on the enclosed side. Then the residents on the enclosed side built a brick wall to defend themselves. Then the path got to be insufferably hot as well as dirty; and was gradually abandoned to the roughs, with a policeman on watch at the bottom. Finally, this year, a six foot high close paling has been put down the other side of it, and the processional excursionist has the liberty of obtaining what notion of the country air and prospect he may, between the wall and that, with one bad cigar before him, another behind him, and another in his mouth."

Dulwich valley, and cows and buttercups—it has still an uneasy echo of the town. Somewhere, surely, there always broods over Dulwich the spirit of the founder of its college. He is the Londoner of Londoners, and the oddest combination of characters that ever left a name as pious benefactor of a school. Edward Allen, or Alleyn as his college spells him, was to begin with an Elizabethan actor. He was one of a company of strolling players before he was twenty; he was twenty-two when he had somehow made himself a "gentleman," to be so described on a deed of gift; and when he was twenty-six, he was such an actor that Ben Jonson compared him to Roscius and Cicero, and Thomas Nash wrote that "Not Roscius or Aesope, those tragedians admired before Christ was borne, could ever performe more in action than famous Ned Allen." Perhaps he made his money as an actor-manager; perhaps he married money, for his wife was the daughter of a pawnbroker (who was also a theatre-proprietor and one of the grooms of the Queen's chamber); perhaps he began lending money early in life himself. He and his father-in-law, when James succeeded Elizabeth, were made chief masters of "his Majesty's games of Beares, Bulls and doggs"; they had a menagerie in the Paris Gardens at Southwark where they kept wolves and lions; they worried bulls and had dog-fights, and showed "pleasant sport with the horse and ape and whipping of the blind beare." Money rolled in, with the apes and the bears and the loans, and in October, 1605, Allen, by this time full esquire, bought the manor and lands of Dulwich for £4,900. Eight years later he left Southwark for Dulwich, and set about founding his college.

Aubrey has a quaint legend of the foundation. How should an actor found a college? The devil was in it somewhere. Tradition told "that Mr. Alleyne, being a Tragedian, and one of the Original Actors in many of the celebrated Shakespear's Plays, in one of which he play'd a Daemon, with six others, and was in the midst of the Play surpriz'd by an Apparition of the Devil, which so worked on his Fancy, that he made a Vow which he perform'd at this Place." That was the beginning of Dulwich College, according to one story; according to another, it was only because Allen had begun so earnestly, and tied himself up by so many legal contracts that he did not repent of his vow and take back all he had given. That was when, a widower of fifty-seven, he wanted to marry a girl of twenty. She was John Donne's daughter Constance, and perhaps Donne felt bound to ask for liberal settlements. However, the settlements were arranged somehow, and the college was founded. The "colledge of God's gift" was his name for it, and as its founder he described himself as "chief master, ruler and overseer of all and singular over games of beares, bulls, mastive doggs and mastive bitches." His blood-relations were to be Master and Warden, if possible, and so, for many years, they were.

One of the statutes explains the name "God's gift." There were to be twelve poor scholars, chosen partly by merit and partly by chance. When a place became vacant three or four children were to be elected by the parish vestries, and of these two were to be chosen by the Master and Warden, and then the two were to draw lots:—

Another gift followed Allen's. When Sir Francis Bourgeois died early in the last century he left his fine collection of pictures to the school. The gallery is open to the public; but a description, in the space I have here, could be no more than a list of names.

Dulwich still has some of its fields and buttercups; the playing fields are a pleasant oasis which is the last vision of sunlight and grass for the traveller on the Chatham and Dover railway before plunging into the murk of the Penge tunnel. Of its neighbours to the west, Streatham clusters about a tangle of railways; Streatham, which was deep country for Dr. Johnson, knocked down, in 1863, the house and cut up the park that Dr. Johnson knew when they belonged to the Thrales. He would not recognise the church—the church to which he bade farewell with a kiss—it has been rebuilt. The library, which, if it were standing to-day with the books that Johnson read, would be the most sought for room in Surrey, went, of course, with the house. Eighty years before it fell Johnson had parted from it with a prayer. "Help me," he prayed, "that I may, with humble and sincere thankfulness, remember the comforts and conveniences which I have enjoyed at this place; and that I may resign them with holy submission, equally trusting in Thy protection when Thou givest, and when Thou takest away." That was the library which was destroyed only forty-five years ago. But Streatham, when it knocked down the Thrales' house, had very good authority for parting with all it had of Dr. Johnson. Mrs. Thrale would not have minded. She sold all the letters Dr. Johnson wrote her for a matter of five hundred pounds.

Between Streatham and Wimbledon London strides out in patches. It has not yet taken in Mitcham, which has a fine green with memories of great Surrey cricket, and which grows all manner of scented flowers, lavender and mint and rosemary and everything old-fashioned for herbalists and perfumers and ladies' sachets and linen-chests. But Merton, north-west towards Wimbledon, has been caught fast. Merton church, in which Nelson used to worship, and which has his hatchment on the wall, above fine cross beams of oak, stands among brand-new roofs and roads. Opposite the church is the forlornest thing; a house which once was Sheridan's, and which is now the warehouse of a shop, and hangs in its hall and rooms printed calico. The windows are broken and cobwebby, the garden is a ruin, but the calico, which you may buy at a shop in the town, is fresh and very brightly printed. Francis Nixon, the founder of Merton's calico-printing, which is quite an industry, lies in the churchyard.

And so, by a ring from east to west, where London joins the Surrey countryside, we come to Wimbledon; Wimbledon old and new, as old as a camp which may have been Saxon, as young as yesterday's new villa. The camp, it is true, exists no longer. It has had more learned essays written over it than any in Surrey; it has been claimed as belonging to Cassivelaunus, it has been argued to be a Roman camp, and it has been urged that it marks the site of a battle between Saxon and Saxon for the possession of Surrey. It was a war camp, pretty certainly, from its shape, which was almost exactly circular. But you can see the shape no longer. Wimbledon was unfortunate enough to see its famous camp fall into the hands of a Mr. Sawbridge Erle Drax, and he, in 1875, dared to level its dykes with the ground, to cut down its mound, and fill in its ditch. Of acts of wanton and insolent destruction, this stands supreme in the history of the county.

Wimbledon has held a great house, and has seen royal progresses which cost the lord of the manor a fortune. Thomas Cromwell was one of the lords of the manor, and after him came Catherine Parr: but the great days were those of the Cecils. Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's treasurer, lived at intervals at the Rectory House, and some of Elizabeth's summer excursions came to Wimbledon; she stayed with her treasurer and with his son. But the Cecil who belongs most to Wimbledon is not the treasurer whose nod summed up the wisdom of a Parliament, nor any Lord of Burghley; but a younger son who was a soldier and a sailor. He was Admiral and Marshal-General of the forces sent by James I. and Charles I. against the Spaniards; he was made Lord Wimbledon, and his memory on the records of the army of his day is that his name of Cecil was punned into General Sit-still when he was a soldier of almost foolhardy personal daring, and that he re-introduced into the army the "old English march." There was "one certaine measure," a royal warrant informs us, which had been lost "through the negligence and carelessness of drummers," although it had been "by the approbation of strangers themselves, confessed and acknowledged the best of marches." This march, at the instance of Lord Wimbledon, was beaten in the king's presence at Greenwich in 1610 and ordered to be exactly and precisely observed by all drummers in the kingdom of England and principality of Wales, without any addition or alteration whatsoever. We do not hear it in these days of battles without drums and colours; but we do not fight much better, perhaps, without the drums.

The old Wimbledon church was demolished; the new church was built in 1786. It has many monuments, but the grave which fascinates is the tomb neither of a great statesman nor a good man. It is apart in a far corner; over it is laid a huge slab of black stone, perhaps half a foot thick, and the stone tells you that under it lies the body of "John Hopkins, Esquire, familiarly known as Vulture Hopkins." Misers have had hard things said of them often enough; of Hopkins Pope wrote that "he lived worthless, but died worth three hundred thousand pounds," and, reflecting on the "Use of Riches," Pope made a couplet on his funeral:—

"When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend
The wretch who living saved a candle's end."

But those legends belong to paper and books. They are less easily destroyed than an epithet engraved on a stone; but who of deliberation would carve an insult, as this is carved, for a dead man?

Wimbledon will never belong to the town so long as it keeps its common. It is the wildest thing near London. It is almost as wild and lonely a place to-day as when in Georgian and early Victorian days statesmen and noblemen chose it as a fashionable and convenient ground for duelling. The common has seen more than one historic duel. The Duke of York and Colonel Lennox met there in 1789; the Duke received the Colonel's fire, and the ball grazed his hair, but he did not fire in return. Pitt fought a duel with a member of Parliament on Putney Heath north of the common in 1798; each fired twice at twelve paces and hit nothing. Sir Francis Burdett and Mr. John Paull fought in 1807, wounded each other and went back together to London in the same carriage. Canning and Castlereagh fought in 1809, and Grattan, two years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, received Lord Londonderry's fire and himself fired in the air. Another Grattan could meet another Irish peer to-day, and if they chose their places well, nobody would hear a pistol at all. The bracken and the heather slope into dells and valleys which would shelter three duels in a morning; you could deliver a salvo and hardly scare a nursery maid.

But Wimbledon's longest acquaintance with firearms was in the days before the National Rifle Association moved to Bisley. Queen Victoria fired the first shot on July 2nd, 1860, when she pulled a scarlet cord and scored a bull's-eye with a Whitworth rifle; a red and white flag was shown in an instant, you read, and "three points were scored to the Queen of England." The last shot was fired in 1889. I went to that meeting as a schoolboy, and am even now filled with an awe that belongs to spacious days, remembering that we were told that on the last evening the whole camp was to give three great groans for "George Ranger," the Duke of Cambridge, whose duty it had been to declare the common unfitted for the distant probings of misdirected Martini-Henry bullets. Those concerted, resentful, thousand-throated groans seemed a tremendous nightly business; there were camp-fires, one imagined, from which the circular groan would ascend, a rumble which should expel a ministry, unseat a prince. Not very much came of the groaning, I suppose; certainly the Volunteers liked the Bisley ranges, next year, much better. But the old windmill, which looked on in its time at thirty full meetings, still surely misses the week when the dells and the long stretches of heather rattled from the first gun to sunset with the crackle of Martinis and match rifles. The windmill watches red-coated golfers to-day, playing to some of the prettiest greens in the south of England; but the days for the windmill were when the tents were white about the heather, and when they sold Stewart's Verniers where to-day a more leisured generation misses short putts.