Eric Parker

A Georgian village.—The Kembles.—A prophetic lament.—Wey no more.—The Brooklands bucket.—Exiles.—Riddles of spelling.—A royal palace.—The Duchess's Monkeys.—Oatlands cedars.—Portmore Park.—St. George's Hill.—The Leveller's Beanfields.

There is a pleasant melancholy in trying to imagine a Georgian Weybridge. Fanny Kemble describes the village as she saw it as a girl, before the railway came. Then, in the twenties, it was "a rural, rather deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former residence of the Duke of York." Eighty years have gone, and the deserted-looking village has spread into a town and suburbs covering more than a square mile of ground; Portmore Park has vanished; Oatlands is a hotel. The railway has created one more residential neighbourhood.

Fanny Kemble first came to Weybridge as a fifteen-year-old school-girl, and spent three summers with her family at Eastlands, a little cottage, still to be seen, on the outskirts of the village, of which she has written some amusing reminiscences. Charles Kemble, the actor, her father, used to come down from Saturday to Monday, but had no great appreciation of country life, or, perhaps, rather of the cottage, which was too small for him; "he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too long and too large, for every room in the house." But Fanny Kemble herself and her mother enjoyed the country to the full. Mrs. Kemble had a passion for fishing, and she and her children used to spend her days on the banks of the Wey, apparently with the slightest possible success.

A curious relic remains of the Kembles' Weybridge holidays. This is to be seen in the Eastlands' cottage garden, and is a semi-circular heap of earth or sand planted with trees and shrubs. Once, when it was much larger and higher, it was "the Mound," and was the favourite playground of the Kemble girls and boys. It grew out of a huge heap of sand which the landlord refused to move, and which Mrs. Kemble therefore planted and cut into shape with a walk round the top. Naturally enough, tradition has grown up round this heap of sand. Fanny Kemble was a famous actress, and lived here as a child; therefore this mound was a theatre. It is locally known indeed as "the theatre." But I can find no evidence that it was ever used as anything of the kind; certainly Fanny Kemble never refers to it as a theatre, nor as anything else but a "domestic fortification" and a "delightful playground." To her it is always "the Mound."

If that charming and brilliant lady could revisit these glimpses of the moon, what would she say of that infinitely larger "mound" and its surroundings in the new motor track, with which it is Weybridge's unhappy fate to be linked to-day? Nearly a square mile of quiet meadow and forest and hill slashed and scarred and scarped into a saucer of cement; acres of pine and cedar and oak and rhododendron smashed and sawn to fragments; the roar of thundering Napiers and Hotchkisses, where once the reed-warblers climbed the meadowsweet and cuckoos called from the willows—how would she have addressed the originator of that staring blatant racecourse? Strangely enough, she saw something of the kind befall her beloved Weybridge pinewoods sixty-seven years ago, and wrote of it in her diary. She was staying as a guest at Oatlands, and found one of her favourite walks among the Brooklands trees destroyed. Her outcry is prophetic:—

Well, she could not do that now. Let an ornithologist poet lament the change:—

By Brooklands hill but since a year
Untrod the meadows lay,
Unspanned through musk and meadowsweet
Ran olive-bright the Wey.
Blackbirds about that wind and wild
Carolled a roguish choir,
From willow green to willow grey
Kingfishers shot sapphire!
There gay and far the Surrey sun
Spread cowslips far and gay,
Lit wide the orchid's purple flame,
The white fire of the May;
And thither stole a happy boat
To hear the ringdoves coo,
To mark again the drumming snipe
Zigzag the April blue:
To watch the darting dragon-flies
Live pine-needles awing—
O Brooklands meadow, there we knew
You first knew all the spring!
And then—the change! Spade, engine, pick,
The gangers' myriad Hun,
A thousand branches' banished shade,
Flat glare of sand and sun.
From pine and stream to steam and stone,
From peace to din and pain,
From old unused to new unuse,
But never Wey again!

The motor course led to at least one interesting discovery. When the picks were hard at work in the sand, and day and night were enlivened by steam-engines and casual labourers sleeping off their wages in other people's summerhouses, there went about a word of a great find. A pot of copper had been found, some said; of coppers, said others; of Roman gold coins, there was a rumour, and all the coins exchanged for beer. Perhaps some coins were found; what certainly was found was a beautifully made bronze bucket, buried deep below clay and sand in a bed of gravel. It has been classified by the experts as belonging to a Venetian workshop of the seventh century B.C.—actually the early days of the Tarquins. Prehistoric traffic between Britain and Italy may not be an entirely new idea, but the bucket opens a new chapter.

A few years after the Kembles had given up their cottage Weybridge had other brilliant visitors. The French Revolution of 1848 drove abroad thinkers and writers and a royal family, and Weybridge saw most of them. John Austin, author of The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, settled with his wife at a sober, red brick building near the church, and there they were visited by Lavergne, and Victor Cousin and de RÉmusat and Guizot: BarthÉlemy St. Hilaire wrote to Mrs. Austin in 1854—"I assure you that Weybridge is the place in England I love best." There were royal exiles at Claremont near Esher, then, and they came to mass at the Roman Catholic chapel which fronts the common; Louis Philippe and Queen AmÉlie, and the Duchess of Orleans and the Comte de Paris; there is a monument in the chapel to the Duchess of Nemours, who died at Claremont in 1857. Tot luctuosis domus Aurelianensis addita funeribus is the inscription, and the glorious beauty of the white marble lights the chapel; she was only thirty-four.

Weybridge's church is modern, but the registers and churchwarden's accounts are old and amusing. The following items, taken at random from the lengthy and exact copy made by Miss Eleanor Lloyd in the Surrey ArchÆological Collections, are pleasant riddles of spelling:—

The political events which brought the ringers joy and shillings seem to have been the peace of Ryswick and the return of Charles I, then Prince of Wales, from his journey to Spain in search of a princess. Weybridge would have always followed royal doings with interest, for Weybridge history, bound up with its oldest and greatest mansion, goes back to the kings almost of the middle ages. On the ground, or near it, which now belongs to the Oatlands Park Hotel, Henry VIII built one of his finest palaces: Elizabeth followed her father and hunted deer in the park; James I added to the palace a silkworm room for Anne of Denmark, planted mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, and bred pheasants to please himself; Charles I killed his stags and encroached on private ground to kill more; his youngest son, Prince Henry of Oatlands, was born in the palace. But Charles was the last English king to hunt at Oatlands. After the Civil wars the land was disparked, and the palace fell into ruins. To-day hardly a vestige remains. Old drawings show it to have been a large, straggling building with one great court and a number of smaller yards and quadrangles, turreted and gabled and quaint with tall and delicate chimneys. The oddest neighbour for Weybridge of to-day! It is not always difficult to re-people an old house, even if it has been greatly altered, with the ghosts of great men who have walked its passages and worked in its rooms. But among the newness and smallness of modern building plots there is nothing so hard as to conjure the ghost of a great palace, vibrating with the energy and the obsequiousness, the simplicities and the intrigues of a hunting King and his Court.

Georgian days brought another being as a visitor. Oatlands came to the seventh Earl of Lincoln in 1716, and he built himself a house on the higher ground overlooking a fine stretch of water and many miles of Thameside country. From his son, who had inherited the dukedom of Newcastle, this house was bought by the Duke of York in 1794, but was burnt down the same year, and the royal Duke rebuilt it. He and his duchess lived there until 1820, when she died. It must have been a curious household. George III brought Queen Charlotte there, and the Court with her; Georgian wits and beauties gathered in the duke's dining-rooms and played cards in his grottoes. Charles Greville was often at Oatlands, and Sheridan and Beau Brummell and Horace Walpole; Mrs. Gwyn came there, and Mrs. Bunbury, Oliver Goldsmith's "Jessamy bride" and "Little Comedy." Both were buried in Weybridge old church. Samuel Rogers, in his Table-talk, gives a quaint picture of the household:—

The Duke of York died in 1827, and thirty years later Oatlands became a hotel. The building was greatly altered, but the grounds still keep some untouched memorials of the past. One is an extraordinary grotto, built by the Duke of Newcastle, and used by the Duke of York and his friends, according to local tradition, as a card-room, plentifully supplied with wine bottles. It is lined with a profusion of crystal spar and sea shells; it contains a deep bath, bashfully presided over by a statue of Venus, and the steps leading up to the door are paved with horses' teeth picked up on the battlefield of Waterloo. How the Duke of Newcastle accomplished this feat it is difficult to imagine, for he died in 1794. Perhaps they belonged to other horses, or perhaps the gallant Duke of York made the addition. He was Commander-in-chief, and the grisly relics may have been sent him as a present.

Another relic of the dead is the cemetery in which the Duchess of York used to bury her cats and dogs and monkeys. There may be, perhaps, thirty or forty little tombstones, each with a name.

Oatlands Park preserves a not very trustworthy legend. In the grounds stand a number of magnificent cedars, and one of them bears a notice by which you are informed that it was one of the first cedars of Lebanon planted in England and was placed where it stands by Prince Henry of Otelands. Neither statement quite fits the facts. If Prince Henry of Oatlands planted the cedar, he must have done so either before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (in which case he would have been hardly three years old, for he was born in 1639), or else in the summer of 1660, the year of the Restoration, and the year in which he died. As a matter of fact, cedars were hardly known at the time, for John Evelyn in his Sylva, published in 1664, only mentions them as unsatisfactory seedlings, difficult to grow; and the earliest cedar planted in England is probably the Enfield cedar, which may have been set in the ground by Dr. Uvedale, master of the Grammar-School, about that date. There are, in any case, much finer cedars than the Oatlands Park trees in adjoining private gardens. Probably all of them were planted by the Earl of Lincoln or the Duke of Newcastle early in the eighteenth century.

Another of Weybridge's links with royalty is not quite so reputable. Portmore Park is the name for a large slice of the town which lies near the river, thickly built over with villas and cut up into new roads. Once there stood in it Ham House, which with its park was given by James II to his mistress Catherine Sedley, notorious at least as much for her wit as her features. She herself, even with the brilliant eyes which were pretty nearly all she had of good looks, could not understand the king's infatuation. "It cannot be my beauty," she said; "for he must see that I have none; and it cannot be my wit; for he has not enough to know that I have any." Whatever the attraction may have been, he made her Countess of Dorchester and gave her Ham House, and she very prudently married David Colyear, first Lord Portmore. The gates of her park survive her; the house has disappeared.

One great estate still remains, and on its hill the oldest settlement of the neighbourhood. The generosity of the Egerton family throws open to the public, in the woods of St. George's Hill, some hundreds of acres of pine forest and heather. On the summit of the hill stands a large prehistoric camp, where neolithic Wey-siders in Wey beaver-fur and buckskin entrenched their wives and their cattle. There are fifteen or sixteen of these ancient British camps in Surrey or just over the border; this is the largest, and the height and strength of its earthworks are admirable. It is more than three-quarters of a mile in circumference, and since it is obviously a camp, has naturally been set down as CÆsar's. But that is the fate of anything old which looks like a fortification—part of the traditional method of assigning otherwise inexplicable phenomena to their proper agents. Camps are all CÆsar's, Cromwell made all the ruins, and all geological wonders belong to the devil.

St. George's Hill, or rather the low-lying ground on the Cobham side of it, was once the scene of a curious agricultural experiment. In the late days of the Parliamentary wars the Levellers sent some thirty men, under leaders named Everard and Winstanley, to seize part of the common land and plant roots and beans. Fairfax sent two troops of horse after them, and the captured Everard made him a speech, in which he claimed that he had had a vision instructing him to dig and plough the earth for the benefit of the poor, and that his mission was to help his oppressed fellow-Israelites back to their rights over all landed and other property. The Digger-Socialist did not give Fairfax much more trouble, for the irate commoners, refusing to be delivered from bondage, drove the Levellers from their common and pulled up the roots and beans.

The Levellers have their poet, and he made them a song with a fine lilt. Here are the first three stanzas:

You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The wast land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging does disdaine, and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all.
With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now,
Your freedom to withhold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.
Stand up now, Diggers all.

Although not one of the highest of Surrey hills, St. George's Hill provides a series of delightful glimpses of distant scenery through the trees. Windsor Castle stands up like a battleship on the horizon to the north-west, twelve miles away: west lie the rolling open spaces of Chobham Common and Bagshot Heath; south-west Guildford and Godalming stand over the shining valley of the Wey; Ranmer Church spire marks Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a shell; the scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and bluebells of May, and the crimsons and purples of June's profuse rhododendrons.