Eric Parker

Old Woking.—Behind the Veil.—A Royal Palace.—Necropolis.—When not to dig a grave.—"Lumpy" Stevens.—The Ripley Road.—The Anchor and the Talbot Dog.—An Open Box.—Teal by Twilight.—Ockham.—Seven Streams.—Newark.—Jackdaws two shillings the Dozen.—The Wisley Garden.—Byfleet.—A Ghost in Velvet.

In whatever way you may choose to travel through Surrey, it is difficult to avoid making Woking a centre and a rendezvous. All the trains stop there; at least, I cannot remember ever passing through the station without stopping, either to change trains, which generally takes three quarters of an hour, or to wait in the station until it is time to go on again, which usually takes eleven minutes. I never found anything else to do at Woking, unless it were at night, when the railway lights up wonderful vistas and avenues of coloured lamps. Then the platform can be tolerable. Once when I had a long time to wait I walked out to the church which stands rather finely on the ridge north of the railway. I thought then it was Woking church: it belongs to Horsell. It was that Woking, the Woking of the station, which for many years I imagined to be the only Woking in Surrey. One did not wish for another.

But there is another Woking, and it is as pretty and quiet as the railway Woking is noisy and tiresome. It stands with its old church on the banks of the Wey two miles away, a huddle of tiled roofs and old shops and poky little corners, as out-of-the-way and sleepy and ill-served by rail as anyone could wish. I found it first on a day in October, and walked out from the grinding machinery of the station by a field-path running through broad acres of purple-brown loam, over which plough-horses tramped and turned. It was a strange and arresting sight, for over the dark rich mould there was drawn a veil of shimmering grey light wider and less earthly than any mist or dew. The whole plough land was alive with gossamer; and Old Woking lay beyond the gossamer as if that magic veil were meant to shield it from the engines and the smoke.

Old Woking, indeed, lies in country deep enough to forget the railway altogether, and to take to the water as the highway. The Wey wanders in and out by the village, and half-a-mile away at Send the Navigation canal joins the Wey proper, as the little river has come to be called to distinguish it from the canal. The canal cuts businesslike corners and straight lines when the Wey, having plenty of time to spare, wants to wander an extra two or three miles about a field. From Send to Weybridge or to Guildford, down stream or up, by the canal towing-path or by boat, is a delightful journey in spring or summer. As good a round as can be taken walking is from Woking through Send by Newark Priory, Pyrford and Wisley to Byfleet, where the railway can be joined or the journey continued to Weybridge or back to Woking. But there are, of course, twenty ways of seeing the little villages that cluster round the Wey so closely in this corner of Surrey, either on foot or by boat, or rowing and walking both.

But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it passed through the hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters, Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all events, a further token of gratitude, he was to wind a call in Woking Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in Surrey built or lived in by an English king,—even by the friend of a king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to destroy.

A persistent association hangs to the name of the town by the station, undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Plaza-toro, "likes an interment." Much of the land near the town is owned by a company which, while it builds villas for the living, especially those who find advantages in a fast train service, has named itself Necropolis, which is grim enough for anybody living or dead. But the Necropolis Company, whether it knows it or not, did not found the tradition. That stands to the record of an old grave-digger interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button at the top, not much unlike the top of an asparagus; of these he sometimes finds two or three in a grave." He was "sure it was not a fern-root" and had with diligence traced to its root; and since he had satisfied himself of its grisly origin, he knew better than to dig a grave near where the root grew.

On the maps Send looks like a single tiny village, south of Woking by half a mile. It is in reality a large parish, and since the name is corrupted simply from Sand, it is natural enough to find it dotted all round the neighbourhood with other names tacked on to it—Sendholme, Sendgrove, Sendhurst, Send Heath, and Sendmarsh. The names are scattered only less widely than the parish itself. The church stands a mile from the little hamlet of Send, on the banks of the Wey, like the churches of Pyrford and Woking, and the ruins of the great Priory of Newark, to which Send Church and her chapel at Ripley both belonged. The three villages with their churches are still, perhaps, not much larger than they were two or three hundred years ago; the Priory is shattered; only the village with the chapel has grown.

By Send churchyard stands the bole of a mighty elm, riven and iron-bound. I like to imagine that it may have been climbed by one of the great Surrey cricketers of the old days of the Hambledon Club. Edward Stevens, the famous "Lumpy," was born at Send, and spent his boyhood there till he went to Chertsey and became, as John Nyren describes him, one of the two greatest bowlers he ever saw. "Lumpy" got his queer name either because he was, in Nyren's words, "a short man, round-shouldered and stout" or, according to another tradition, because at one of the dinners of the Hambledon Club he ate an apple-pie whole. Surely he must have been "Lumpy" before, besides after, that achievement. Yet another story has it that he was given his name because of some trick in his bowling. Certainly his methods were not what we should call exactly orthodox to-day. It was the privilege of visiting elevens in his day to choose the pitch on which the match should be played, and that was "Lumpy's" opportunity. Nyren explains his plan:—

There is an unkind legend which speaks of "Lumpy" as a bit of a smuggler in his young days, but Nyren, at all events, never believed it, for he ends by declaring handsomely that "he had no trick about him, but was as plain as a pike-staff in all his dealings." "Lumpy," whether he smuggled or not, certainly has his niche in cricket history. It was to him that the wicket owes its third stump. In a match played in 1775 on the Portsmouth Artillery Ground, between five of the Hambledon Club and five of All England, "Lumpy" three times sent the ball between the last Hambledon man's stumps without bowling him, and after the match, which Hambledon won in consequence, the number of the stumps was increased from two to three.

Send lies deep among the fields, counting itself fortunate, perhaps, that it is not on the Ripley road, a mile away. Ripley itself, perhaps, owes its fortune, even if it owes more besides, to the road which it has named. The story belongs to all the villages of a great highway. The coaches brought their heyday, the railway spoiled it, the bicycle re-made it, and now the village is being re-decorated by the motor-car.

The Ripley road, for the two days in the week when it is most used, is a place to avoid. Yet it can be beautiful, and there is an approach to it hardly equalled near any other highway in the county. The late Mrs. Buxton, of Foxwarren Park, above Wisley Common, for years permitted the public to walk and drive through her private grounds away from the high road, and that generous lady's permission has been continued by her successor. The carriage drive runs by oaks and bracken through which pheasants rustle, past a strange, tall column of black wood—a totem-pole brought from Queen Charlotte's Islands; then it rises to the edge of a ridge overlooking a wide and level stretch of pinewood and heather. In August, when the ling is out with the bell-heather, and the pines stand deep in fern and rushes, no lovelier carpet spreads under any Surrey hill. The road runs a white thread through it—a road best viewed from afar. The weight of wheels has ground the surface to powder.

Ripley itself, but for the traffic, would be the prettiest village on the road. A long string of low-roofed houses lines the highway; little white gabled cottages offer tea and refreshment; two old inns share most, I suppose, of the custom of fasting travellers. The Anchor, an inn of many gables, has fixed itself in the affections of bicyclists since the days when they rode velocipedes, and its black-beamed walls and passages hold drawings of strange souls mounted on wheels which would have scared Ixion. The Talbot, which was once the Dog (but a talbot is a dog always), is a house of imposing squareness. You may see the dog painted above the door, a liver-and-white fox-terrier, all proper. Opposite the inns stretches Ripley green, a broad and shining level with many memories of Surrey cricket, and in particular of "Lumpy" Stevens, of Send.

The motor-car has brought prosperity, even if it is a prosperity that can soil. But the tarnish washes off in night and rain. Ripley may look its best early on a Saturday morning, before the flood rushes down the road. When the little village lies clean and fresh in the sun, and the inns are busy with white tablecloths and cooking potatoes, and the children sit on the edge of the green before the dust comes, there is a sense of orderly bustle and of waiting for a day of hard work and good money that is pleasant enough.

One building only has suffered from the business of the road. The little church stands behind arches and canopies of clipped yew, its walls almost touching the highway. It is an interesting little building, though much altered from its oldest form; the chancel has the remains of clustered pillars, and a beautiful string-course of Caen stone running round it. But those have not been the only attractions to visitors. When I was there I noticed that the oak collection-box by the door stood with its lid propped open. The caretaker happened to be in the church, and I showed it to her. "Oh yes," she said in a matter-of-fact tone, "we have to keep it like that. It has been robbed so often that we prop it open, so as to prevent people putting anything in." The church door still remains as wide open as the box. It would be a pious act for some passing motor-car—or a collection from many—to present the little church with a stronger box. Such continued hospitality, so vilely abused, deserves a return.

Two miles up the road lies the Hut Pond, opposite an inn that serves many tables. There is no quiet on the pond in the business of the day, but I was once on it on an October evening, and as the sun went down the sky filled suddenly with teal. Bunches of teal wheeled and circled in the cold twilight, whizzed down among the rushes, darted up again and round over the pines, then shot down again and settled, splashing quietly in the sedge.

Ockham village, with its church and park, is south-east of Ripley by a mile or so. The charm of Ockham church lies in its tower, its east window, and its deep and happy site among the oaks and elms of Ockham Park. The church lies some hundred yards from the road, under the windows of the manor-house, a building which cannot be said to owe anything to the taste or consistency of successive architects. The tower is thirteenth century, buttressed, mottled into cool greys and pinks, and heavy with ivy. But the chief decoration of Ockham Church is its thirteenth century, seven-lancet east window, and in the carving of the capitals of its slender columns of black Sussex marble. There is some quaint Flemish glass in one of the south windows; but the church is spoiled by an extraordinarily ugly little chapel built on the north side as a mausoleum for the family of the Kings. The first of the line of these Kings was one Peter, the son of an Exeter grocer. He came up to London, soon made his mark as a lawyer, and died Lord Chancellor. There are several of his descendants buried with him, and their coronets hang above the arch of the chapel. They add a peculiar tawdriness; but the chapel itself, with its dull blue paint, and the strange, bath-like sarcophagus below Rysbrach's statues of the first Lord King and his lady, is the main offence.

Ockham itself, even with that humming white highway not a mile distant, is untouched and unspoiled: nothing more than a half-dozen or so of half-timbered or brick cottages and farm-buildings, rain-bleached and creeper-veiled, and fronted with some of the prettiest and brightest gardens in Surrey. One of the sleepy little buildings bears the legend "County Police," forbidding in new blue enamel. What should anyone do with police in Ockham?

But Ockham, perhaps, lies a little too far from the old waterway to join the group of villages and churches which cluster along this winding stretch of Wey. Still it belongs to Ripley, if not to Ripley's group along the river. Rivers, here, would be the better word, for the Wey has hardly yet made up its mind as to its right channel north of Woking, and by Ripley runs actually in seven streams almost parallel with one another, some of them cut artificially, but others tiny remnants of the broad watercourse which once rolled through Surrey to the sea. No doubt it was this abundance of water which first attracted the founder of Newark Priory, whose ruins stand almost in the centre of the seven streams. The monks must have had plenty of choice of fishing.

Newark Priory is generally supposed to have been founded as a house of Black Canons by Ruald de Calva and his wife Beatrice de Sandes in the reign of Richard I. But Ruald de Calva as a fact only re-founded or endowed the house, which was founded long before, probably by a Bishop of Winchester. Its older name was Aldbury, and Newark—or Newsted, as it was once called—which for us is an aged ruin, was Aldbury rebuilt with a new church and a new name. It is in some ways a rather uninteresting ruin. Of the tracery of the windows, or any of the lighter and more delicate architectural work, not a stone remains. I believe much of the more easily used stone-work found its way into the building of neighbouring houses, perhaps into the paving of the roads. But it has a certain bluntness and gauntness of its own, standing solid and stark in the plain meadowland of the Wey. Perhaps if one were to "visit it by the pale moonlight" it would take on darker graces and dignities. As it is, there is somewhere about it an air of protest; it is like a ghost that cannot get back before daylight. Horses gallop about the rough field under its walls; boating parties wonder why it should be thought worth while to fence it off with wire. Once I caught an echo of the real Newark, late on a dark and stormy afternoon, when a sudden snipe rose at my feet out of one of the half-dry Priory stewponds. That wild cry must have been familiar enough to the old monks wandering by the stream in search of a likely run for perch or pike.

The "very old castle" which Frank Buckland, the naturalist, mentions in the following note, taken from his edition of White's Selborne, must surely be Newark Priory, which is now a happy (and I think unmolested) home of jackdaws:—

The Canal and the Wey by Newark lie in some of the quietest and wildest country in Surrey. It is not the wildness of Thursley Common, or the quiet of the pinewoods; but it is the sunny peace of a waterway almost deserted, of unploughed, rushy meadows, of waterside paths and thickets that fill in April and May with a tide of bird life which stays here, and elsewhere passes or is hardly seen. A May morning on the Wey Canal rings with singing. You can count scores of cuckoos gliding in the sun and calling from the budding branches; woodpeckers laugh from oak to oak; plovers tumble in the wind; herons flap up lazily at a bend in the stream, and flap lazily down again; snipe cut high arcs in the blue and drum down from the sailing clouds; perhaps from the very heart of the thicket the nightingale bursts into a pulsing riot of song. Surrey varies extraordinarily widely as a shelter and a nesting ground for birds, but most of its birds, I think, know the Wey Canal.

Of the seven streams which surround Newark Abbey the northernmost runs under the little hill on which stands Pyrford Church. Pyrford itself, on its outskirts, unhappily, is beginning to hear Woking. The Woking builder's hammer is already ringing under its trees. But the heart of Pyrford hitherto remains untouched. A cluster of red-brick farm-buildings, a footpath over meadows of buttercups, a score of arching elms, and a little shingle-spired Norman church on a knoll above the stream—Pyrford is one of the smallest and sweetest of Weyside villages. Few churches have so strong an impression of an untouched past. In plan it is scarcely altered from its Norman design of the twelfth century; and it stands on its knoll overlooking the meadows away to the great Priory of which it was a chapel, the Priory in ruins, and itself with hardly a stone loosened for nearly eight centuries. The roof is later than the walls, but there is a fascination in staring up at the old oak timber. It was the same vista of retreating beams of mighty wood on which the eye of the Newark priest droning from the altar must have rested; perhaps for his sleepy congregation there was the same glimpse of ivy tendrils creeping in under the eaves, and on drowsy afternoons in May the same chatter and hiss of nesting starlings. From the scanty scraps of the paintings on the wall you can only guess vaguely at the texts of the old Sunday sermons: manna falls in the wilderness; Moses brings water out of the rock; probably the congregation listened with most eagerness to the third, the death of Jezebel.

Donne, the poet, perhaps knew the paintings well. In the days when he was still unforgiven by Sir George More of Loseley for having run away with his daughter Anne, he and his bride lived for some years as the guests of Sir John Wolley, Queen Elizabeth's secretary, at Pyrford Park. May it not have been the seven-streamed Wey by Pyrford which gave him his stanzas for The Bait, his parody of Marlowe?

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.
Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset
With strangling snare, or windowy net.
Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes' wandering eyes.
For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait;
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas! is wiser far than I.

Two miles further down the Canal—perhaps nearly four by the Wey itself—stands another little church, almost, like Pyrford and Woking, on the edge of the stream. Wisley church is the tiniest of the little group between Send and the Thames, but is not otherwise remarkable. The village is not much more than a farmhouse and a noble barn; perhaps Wisley is better known for its pond and its garden. The garden, unhappily, is almost a thing of the past. Experiment and officialdom have settled heavily on its sandy soil, and the wilder charm of the old pleasance has left it. A few years ago, when its late owner, Mr. Wilson of Weybridge, was alive, it was a delight to many hundreds of visitors, whom the owner generously allowed to share in his pleasure in rare and beautiful flowers. He had collected into a few acres of ground, protected by ingeniously laid out plantations, an almost incredible variety of plants, especially flowering bulbs, and in his woods and ponds, besides, had tried to establish other curious and interesting wild life. Bird-boxes fastened to the trees were to tempt tits and nuthatches; in the reeds of the ponds great bull-frogs used to squat croaking, and little green frogs climbed the leaves above them. To-day that is hardly more than a memory. When the owner died the garden was bought by Sir Thomas Hanbury and presented to the Royal Horticultural Society. The society came down from Kew upon the fold; and on the open ground beside the old garden, tangled and unhappy, set down a row of superb glasshouses, planted a number of specimen fruit trees, and devoted itself forthwith to up-to-date research and education on the most approved lines of modern scientific arboriculture and hybridisation in hothouses.

Last of the little bunch of Weyside churches is Byfleet, with a belfry built on some magnificent oak beams. Byfleet Manor House used to be a royal hunting lodge, and was given with the right of free warren by Edward II to Piers Gaveston. Its last royal owner was James the First's queen, Anne of Denmark, and it was probably she who built the massive walls and the forecourt of the garden of the present home. But the manor house itself is early Georgian; and though it has had some ugly additions, it still stands square and strong behind its fine old gateway. James is supposed to have planted the Scotch firs in the garden, to remind Queen Anne of the home she left behind her in the north.

Such a building would be sure to have some quaint traditions. It is known locally as the King's House, and there is a legend that Henry VIII was nursed there. He may have been, but not in the present building. It has no regular ghosts, but Miss Frances Mitchell, writing on the history of the Manor in the Surrey ArchÆological Collections, tells us that Anne of Denmark is said to have been seen moving through the lower rooms; and there is a very dim tradition of a dwarf in purple velvet who wanders in the forecourt. A third legend, in which the rustic historian apparently confuses Anne of Denmark with the last Stuart Queen, relates that Queen Anne came to Byfleet and from a neighbouring hill watched Marlborough win the battle of Blenheim.