Eric Parker

Mortlake.—The Boat Race.—A duel.—Putney-by-the-sea.—Punch and Judy.—Kennington.—Gallows and faggots.—The proper way to subscribe to a Cricket Club.—Camberwell Beauties.—The Tradescants and their Dodo.—Mr. Jeffery Saffery.—The old Surrey Side.—The Tabard.—The Old Road.

The Surrey side begins, perhaps, if it begins anywhere definitely, at Mortlake, where the Boat-race ends. By Kew and Richmond the Thames runs for pleasure-boats, gigs and skiffs with shining oars. Below Mortlake the river hears the forge and the dockyard; torpedo-boats drive out into the tide; it is different water, London water, under their bows. The four miles of the Thames of the Boat-race mark the gradual change. On a rough day the two eights ride through waves which are less like a river than a sea; and perhaps the rough water has made some of the best history of the race. When Cambridge sank in 1859 she was waterlogged early in the race; she could not have won, but the steamers following the eights prevented her even from passing the winning-post, by swamping her with their wash. Oxford won, but Cambridge's was an equal honour. The crew rowed on as the boat went under the water; and the name that will always belong to that race is that of a future Lord Justice, Mr. A.L. Smith. Cambridge and Mr. A.L. Smith went on rowing in the water, knowing that Mr. Smith could not swim. On another rough day, thirty-nine years later, the race was lost and won by the toss; the Cambridge boat filled at the start, and Oxford rowed in out of the wind. Other historic races belong to the curve of the river above Barnes Bridge; three in particular, in 1886, 1896, and 1901, when the crew that was behind at Barnes Bridge passed the other crew at the bend of the river and won. Of other historic races, perhaps the wins of the two crews in which a Goldie turned the fortunes of his University will always possess peculiar glories. The first Goldie, in 1870, ended a series of nine Oxford wins. Another Goldie, in 1899, helped Cambridge to end another series, also of nine. The name and the two nines in the date surely made the feat inevitable.

The river water does not change, but the banks have altered from grass and reeds to concrete and stone. It was a mile or so from Barnes Bridge, in a field near Barn Elms (but who could guess where?) that the second Duke of Buckingham fought and shot Lord Shrewsbury. The Duke left behind him one of the wickedest lives of the most dissolute Courts of English history; but he left nothing viler than the name of Lord Shrewsbury's Countess, who rode in boy's clothes as a page to the duelling ground, and then held her seducer's horse while he shot her husband. They left him dying and rode back together. That was in 1667; an earlier and a kindlier association of Barn Elms is a resident who afterwards died at Chertsey, Abraham Cowley; later came Jacob Tonson, bibliophile and publisher of Pope and Dryden. And it was at Barn Elms, too, that the Kit-Kat Club, the thirty who dined at Christopher Kat's in the Strand, and bound themselves to uphold the Protestant succession, met and dined and looked at their portraits painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. The Kit-Kat portraits are now at Bayfordbury, near Hertford, and for the last fifteen years Barn Elms has housed, not publishers or painters, but polo players. The Ranelagh Club was born to help Hurlingham over the water provide grounds for the youngest of the great games naturalised in England. Nine years later Barnes welcomed another club, Roehampton, which added three more grounds to the four of Hurlingham and Ranelagh.

The Boat-race finishes at Mortlake; it starts at Putney, and Putney is the headquarters and the rendezvous of many clubs and rowing men. The Surrey bank from Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses, boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by brimming tides, sometimes broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return of the practising crews, and to watch the blue-scarved oarsmen in and out of the boathouses and the balcony windows. There is somewhere an air of the sea-side about that stretch of gravel and open river bank; it is the sunshine on the varnish of the boats, perhaps, or a smell of tar in the wind, or of salt from the weeds that the tides leave dry; or is it the banjo of the occasional nigger blacked to get pence from the waiting crowd? On a September day a year or two ago, when Cambridge within a week was to race Harvard, I saw on that strip of road one of the very last of the genuine London Punch-and-Judy shows. Toby, of course, had gone; dogs may sit no more in frills to cadge for coppers. But the rest of it was correct enough; the chequered canvas, of the proper shade of blue, draped the wooden frame discreetly at the right moment; there was the old interval of suspense, the old, the piercing squeal, the dexterous cock of the red legs over the balcony; the crocodile came and the hangman, and the devil; I watched them all. So did two of the Harvard crew, and did not know their luck. Nothing of English pride stirred in the blood of those two stalwart young men; they walked off even before the turn of the hangman.

East of Putney the river is a thoroughfare of London, and the names along the Surrey side are London names. Lambeth Palace has already included itself in Mrs. E.T. Cook's Highways and Byways in London, and so has Vauxhall, and the church of St. Saviour's, Southwark, the finest of all churches which once looked over Surrey fields. But Kennington, no matter how near it lies to London omnibuses and London tube railways, can never be anywhere but in Surrey; Kennington with its memories of the 'Forty-five, and the Chartists, and, a much stronger link with county history than mere memories of the past, Kennington Oval, the visible, flat, noble cricket ground which stands for the story of all Surrey cricket of the past half century. The Oval is scarcely half a mile from Vauxhall Bridge and the river; but it is the centre of the county for those who watch Surrey cricket.

Once the Oval was part of Kennington Common; even in 1845 the solid road which circles the ground was no more than a ditch and a quickset hedge. But a hundred years before 1845! Cricket, even then, was a game in Surrey. Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, and father of George III, was introducing his favourite pastime to the nobles and the gentlemen. In 1737 Kent played Surrey and London on Kennington Common, and round the pavilion set up for the Prince of Wales there was so great a crush of spectators that a poor woman fell and had her leg broken. The Prince gave her ten guineas. That was a cricketer. And yet, within eight years, Kennington was back among the vilest barbarities of the Middle Ages. The 'Forty-five was to set a mark of ferocious savagery in Kennington annals hardly surpassed by Tyburn. The Earl of Kennington (that, with the nickname of 'Butcher,' was one of the titles of the Duke of Cumberland) had sent to gaol in Southwark nine officers whom he had taken prisoner at Carlisle, fighting for Charles Edward Stuart. They were ordered for execution, and on July 30, at eleven o'clock in the morning, were taken on three sledges to Kennington Common. The gallows were there, the block, the faggots. The prisoners were allowed to pray among themselves. Then they were pinioned and placed in the cart under the gallows; the fires were lighted, the cart moved away. Before they were dead they were cut down, beheaded, disembowelled and their hearts burned in the fire; the executioner, throwing in the heart of the last, who was no more than a boy, cried 'God save King George!' Part of the crowd answered with a shout; the rest looked on in sorrow. The boy who suffered with the elder men was James Dawson, and Shenstone wrote a ballad on his death. He had been engaged to be married to a young girl, who insisted on seeing her lover's last moments. When all was over, she threw herself back in the coach, called to him that she followed him, and as she spoke, died.

Another gathering on Kennington Common might have had more wholesale consequences. The Chartists met there in 1848. Feargus O'Connor was their leader, and he and the petition which the delegates were to take to the House of Commons went out in two large cars. The petition went first, drawn by four horses, and piled up like bales of cotton; the car was decorated with flags, banners, and mottoes, and so were the horses. Then came O'Connor and the delegates, equally superb in bunting. They drove down Holborn and across Blackfriars Bridge, and on Kennington Common an enormous crowd, between 15,000 and 50,000, the different accounts say, received the banners and the delegates with loud cheers. But no bloodshed followed. O'Connor was informed that the crowd could not be allowed to march to the House of Commons, where, indeed, they would have found the Duke of Wellington with cannon. The Chartist leader made two eloquent speeches, and the chairman declared the meeting at an end. The delegates' horses were whipped up so hurriedly that the delegates fell to the bottom of the cart; three cabs drove up and took charge of the bales of petitions, and the meeting was at an end. One detail which the contemporary historian gives of the finish has a fascinating echo half of Ainsworth, half of Dickens. "The horses became restive and began to kick. Then was distinctly heard from many quarters the peculiar cry of the young London thieves." What was it like? Can anybody do it to-day?

The great crowds at Kennington to-day come to see better sights than carts and banners. Surrey cricket has focussed itself at Kennington; rather curiously, it has happened that Surrey plays cricket to-day on no other ground. Kent and Sussex, two neighbours, play their county matches on three grounds or four; Surrey, which has traditions at Mitcham and Dorking, has shrunk back to Kennington only. And Kennington, long ago, was nearly lost to cricket. A year after the Chartists had crowded over the Common, the County Club was in debt for £70. The story of the paying of the debt and the revival of the club has the real ring. The club met and were in despair; they could not hope, with such a debt, to play matches. The Bishop of Tasmania, in his entertaining little History of Kennington, tells (in 1889) the story:—

"The meeting almost decided to break up the club; and I suppose, had such a vote been carried, the Oval would have been at once built over and some very happy memories of Kennington would never have existed at all. It is to the present Lord Bessborough that we owe the continuance of Cricket upon the Oval. He was Vice-President at the time, and suggested that the £70 should be paid off by allowing six gentlemen to become Life Members by paying down £12 apiece. A gentleman present next said 'who would pay £12 to be a Life Member of a bankrupt Club?' 'I will,' said Old Mr. Cressingham, one of the oldest members: and 'I will,' said five others, of whom Mr. Ponsonby was one. Lord Bessborough, in writing of this memorable meeting, adds—'Looking back to that distant day I fear I have been a bad bargain to the Club by becoming a Life Member for £12.'"

Nothing of the country and little of the past belongs to Kennington's neighbours. Stockwell, which perhaps sees a hansom as often as a motor-car, once named as a native one of the greatest of English racehorses. Camberwell, when willows grew about a village stream, long since dry, named a butterfly; but Camberwell Beauties, though they sleep sometimes in Surrey woodstacks, and flaunt their white-laced wings in Surrey sunshine perhaps twice in a summer, fly no more by brooks in Camberwell. Perhaps in the old days the Tradescants, who lived near Vauxhall, used to catch them. The Tradescants, father and son, were great naturalists and collectors, and at their house they got together the museum of rarities which after their death came to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. John Tradescant the son made a list of them, and though Oxford ungratefully hid the collection in an outhouse and only discovered it again in 1882, many of the curiosities he mentions move undergraduates to surprise to-day. In the original list are strange fowls. 'Some kindes of birds, their egges, beaks, feathers, clawes, and spurres' begin the list of chapters, and then come a crocodile and an 'egge given for a dragon's egge,' and 'Easter egges of the patriarchs of Jerusalem.' 'Two feathers of the phoenix tayle' I do not remember at Oxford, nor 'a cherrystone holding ten dozen tortoiseshell combs, made by Edward Gibbons.' But I think the Ashmolean collection still holds the 'flea chains of silver and gold, with 300 links apiece, and yet but an inch long,' and, of course, the Oxford dodo's skin is famous. It was not a dodo, though, to John Tradescant. It was a 'dodar, from the island of Mauritius: it is not able to flie, being so big.' The wrong thing about it all is that the name of the Tradescants ought to be associated with the collection, and not the name Ashmole. It was never Ashmole's to give to Oxford. Ashmole was a rich and greedy neighbour, and though Tradescant left his museum to his widow and after her death to Oxford, he, the polite Ashmole, bullied Mrs. Tradescant until she signed a paper stating that she had begged him to take the museum for his own. She would have signed anything, poor lady, to get rid of him. She suffered so much from persecution from the generous donor of her husband's museum to Oxford, that she drowned herself in a pond; a few months before having signed a statement that she had 'caused a great heap of earth rubbish to be laid against his garden wall'—doubtless she caused nothing of the sort—'so high that on the 1st day of August last, in the night, by the help thereof, it is strongly presumed that thieves got over the same and robbed the said Mr. Ashmole of 32 cocks and hens.'

Easternmost of Surrey in London, Rotherhithe lies about the docks of the Pool. The Pool should have a book to itself, and will not go into mine; but of Rotherhithe ashore there is a record which deserves keeping. Aubrey, or his later editor, gives a list of the Rotherhithe residents who contributed to the rebuilding of St. Mary's church, and the names, sorted and classified, should be set aside for a future Dickens. Here are a few of them:—Bloice, Figgins, Cuthbert Finkle, Gollop, Cronker, Shadrick Lifter, Walter Mell, Mr. Jeremiah Rosher, Mr. Jonas Shish, Mr. Nathaniel Stiffon, Mr. Matthias Wallraven, Mr. Scroggs, Mr. Jeffery Saffery, Mr. Volentine Teed.

Bermondsey, which has kept the Tooley Street of the Three Tailors, but elsewhere preserves names only instead of stones, has memories of one of the three Surrey Abbeys. It was founded as a priory for Cluniac monks by Alwin Child, a citizen of London, in 1082, and it became an Abbey some three hundred years later. Bermondsey Priory had a church of some note, for in it was a crucifix which the old chronicles describe vaguely as having been found near the Thames. The crucifix attracted special pilgrimages, and when the monasteries were ended, it disappeared. 'There was the pictor of Saynte Saviour that had stood in Barmsey Abbey many yeres in Southwarke takyn down,' a diarist writes at the time. All that remains of the church and crucifix is the name, which has come to St. Saviour's, or the church of St. Mary Overie—the style now is to call it Southwark Cathedral. St. Saviour's belongs to London highways, as I have said, but I may take for Surrey the lines, not already quoted for London, I think, which are set on the tomb of Richard Humble, Alderman of London and ancestor of Wards and Dudleys. The tomb has busied many pens, the verses remain to be read—are they too well known to be written out again?

Like to the damask rose you see
Or like the blossom on the tree,
Or like the dainty flower of May,
Or like the morning of the day,
Or like the sun or like the shade,
Or like the gourd which Jonas had,
Even so is Man whose thread is spun,
Drawn out and cut, and so is done!
The rose withers, the blossom blasteth,
The flower fades, the morning hasteth,
The sun sets, the shadow flies,
The gourd consumes, the man he dies.

Beaumont wrote the lines, legend says; perhaps wrongly, but they have the Elizabethan life and ring.

If one had to choose a dozen square yards of London to sum up the Surrey side, where should they be? For me, there could be no choice. One spot would demand the first, the only place. It would be where Waterloo Bridge touches the Surrey shore; where you may look south to a Surrey hill by Sydenham, and north to half the panorama of London, from St. Paul's to Westminster Abbey. There, on the first few yards of the bridge, above the little hill which shrinks the wide roadway into a neck and stops overladen drays like a wall, blows the aura of all London that crowds south of the river, all Surrey that belongs to the London Thames. The business of the town and the country mingles with the business of the river and the sea. An afternoon in December, the month of months to know London in, is the time to be there. Up stream from the Nore on an east wind rides the damp of salt and of estuary fogs; about you are the steam of sweating horses and the pungent clinging scents of malt and hops and brewing; up on a yellow tide under the arches of the bridge swings a string of barges, piled with bales of hay. A flock of pigeons sways and wheels in the sky, drops to the roofs, settles with a clatter, sails up into the sky again. Black-headed gulls, in their winter suits of dove-colour and white, walk about the muddy edge of the rising tide, drift on the stream like torn paper, soar and hang in the wind above the bridge, peering this way and that for the fish and bread the Londoners give them; or late in the afternoon wing quiet journeys into unknown spaces of western light. Beyond the bridge the lights dot orange sparks in the films and shades of great buildings and the[Pg 439-440] Embankment roadway. That is pure London, and London, too, is most of the Waterloo Road, with its new hospital, and the roar of the trains from the junction, and the old curiosity shops with the foreign names, and the wig-makers, and the cheap furniture spoiling in the rain. But Surrey is there, too; a shop that shows cricket bats, and another that has fruit-ladders, and, above all, the little shops that offer boxes of pansies and delphinium roots and hyacinth bulbs all the seasons round to Surrey men leaving London behind them in the evening. Surrey recollects that she is not quite London in the Waterloo Road; she plays cricket and plants pansies.

That would be the Surrey side I should choose, with the magic of the tide water about it and somewhere, however faint, the scent of the Surrey gardens. But the old, the oldest Surrey side? That belongs to the river-shore south of London Bridge, where once, too, Londoners could cross from crowded wood and brick to walk among Surrey hawthorn and Surrey daisies. The roar and the soot of the Borough have set that strip of country deep in London, hardly divided by the water. But it was there, when Chaucer's nine-and-twenty pilgrims lay at the Tabard inn, that Surrey began for Londoners and for all who had come to the 'dere and sweete citye' of which Chaucer sings to journey south from the Thames on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The Tabard inn is no more; the fire that swept over Southwark ten years after the fire of London destroyed the building Chaucer knew. The piety of a later day raised another Tabard, perhaps like the old Tabard with the same galleries and balustrades to look down from upon pilgrims and minstrels and monks and fools. But that Tabard inn became the Talbot in a careless age, and as the Talbot it was razed to the ground forty years ago, when nobody minded what became of the old inns and churches and the things best worth keeping in old Surrey. The Tabard has gone, but the ancient road remains. Smoke and stone are about it, where once it stretched out bare among green fields; but the fields are there, for those who can see them, behind the veil of smoke, and through them a wayfarer may still travel with the Knight who loved freedom and courtesy, the Monk shaking his belled bridle, the Ploughman on his mare, and the dainty fingered Prioress with her eyes as grey as glass, riding to join other pilgrims travelling east to Canterbury by the old road.