Eric Parker

Surbiton trains.—Thames Ditton.—Parks for trotting ponies.—A forlorn garden.—The Dandies' FÊte.—Graveyard poetry.—The Pleasance of a Ferry.—Giggs Hill cricket.—Ditton Tulips.—Hampton Bridge.—A dreary road.—Walton.—The Scold's Bridle.—John Selwyn and the Stag.—Terror at an elephant.—William Lilly, astrologer.

Surbiton is a growth of seventy years, and was born when the railway came. Once it was called a suburb of Kingston; now it has suburbs of its own. Tramways join it to London; the railway empties Surbiton into London every morning and pours London back again in the evening. Nearly seventy trains a day stop at Surbiton on their way down from Waterloo; nearly eighty stop on their way up. It must be quite inspiriting to lose your train, and to know that you have only three minutes to wait; or to catch the train before your train, or to choose which you will have of two trains. Until you realise these figures, it is difficult to understand why so many people are rushing about late for the train in Surbiton station. They are catching the train before.

But Surbiton is not all villas; or perhaps it is, and it would be truer to say that what is not villas within hail of the station is not Surbiton. Thames Ditton lies rather more than a mile away, and Long Ditton, between Thames Ditton and the railway, straggling, too, beyond the railway. Thames Ditton is rapidly becoming rich and prosperous. A few years ago it was a little, twisting main street, a ferry, an inn or two, and a church, and was flanked by two fine properties, Ember Court and Boyle Farm. Now the villa-builder has got to work, and the old estates are being sliced up into acres and half acres. Ember Court was once a manor belonging to Henry VIII, who hunted over it; later, it was the property of Sir Arthur Onslow, the first Speaker of the House of Commons who earned the title "Great." It is now a racecourse; trotting ponies and American "machines" dash and flash where Mr. Speaker sauntered staidly, and theatre bills flare at the entrance gates. Boyle Farm has fared little better. Once it was the Duchess of Gloucester's, wife of George the Third's brother; a century later, Lord St. Leonards, Lord Chancellor in Lord Derby's first and shortest-lived Ministry, had it. Now the park is criss-crossed with brand new yellow roads. I walked through it while it was still ringing with the builder's hammer; and straying off the gravel, suddenly found myself in the forlornest little place possible—a formal garden, box-trimmed, tiny, deserted; the narrow, carefully-planned beds nothing but weeds, the summerhouse at the side a ruin. A park cut to pieces looks as if it were in anguish. But a garden cries.

The river at Thames Ditton in 1827 saw a festival which was doubtless considered one of the most prodigious affairs of the season. Five young bloods, of whom two were the Lords Castlereagh and Chesterfield of the day, subscribed £500 each to organise an enormous water party, to which, presumably, everybody was invited who was worth inviting. It was a superb occasion, with illuminations, quadrilles on the lawn, singers from the opera, covers for five hundred people, and all adornments proper to such gaiety. Afterwards it came to be known as the Dandies' FÊte, and Tom Moore wrote a set of verses about it, which, perhaps, reflect fairly accurately the wit of the company. Here are nine lines out of many:—

"Accordingly, with gay Sultanas,
Rebeccas, Sapphos, Roxalanas—
Circassian slaves, whom Love would pay
Half his maternal realms to ransom;—
Young nuns, whose chief religion lay
In looking most profanely handsome!
Muses in muslin—pastoral maids,
With hats from the Arcade-ian shades;
And fortune-tellers—rich, 'tis plain,
As fortune-hunters, form'd their train."

Moore sent the verses to Mrs. Norton; she, perhaps, was a Circassian or a nun.

But Thames Ditton has had its own poet. He has been dignified by the criticism of Charles Lamb, and his accomplishment was the composing of epitaphs. "What is the reason," Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1810, "we have no good epitaphs after all?"

The church itself, or at all events the squat and tiny tower, has not altered much since Lamb saw it. But the epitaphs have gone. Search among the ivies and yews of the shady little churchyard will discover a number of flat, weatherworn slabs of stone, but the verses and the signatures have vanished. Fire and the wastepaper man are the common lot of poets, but this "Swan of Thames" has come to his end by rain and hobnails. The only Swan that remains is the inn, whose sign sits comfortably above the front door, white and bright. Few Thames-side inns have a prettier outlook, or look prettier from the river. Sunlight on shining brown boats and quivering willows is a frequent memory of Thames waters, but the Swan lies also opposite a ferry, and a ferry has a hundred fascinations. Old fashioned rowing, running water, hailings and signallings, quiet motion, thriving business, new arrivals; it is all the cheerfullest of riverside traffic. None of the pleasanter services of travel can be more directly rendered and directly paid for than being ferried across a river.

Of Surrey village greens, the Thames Ditton Ground at Giggs Hill has had much to do with Surrey cricket. Giggs Hill cricket has not always been of the most scientific kind, but who shall say it was less enjoyed for that? An old Giggs Hill cricketer tells us how the pitch used to be prepared for a match. "I remember," he says, "seeing the late Harry Stowell with an old beer barrel fixed on a trolley and filled with water, wheeling it across the wicket. He would well douse the pitch, and after running a small garden roller he had borrowed up and down a few times the wicket was ready." This proceeding took place the day before the match, so that batting must occasionally have been a venturesome business. In those days a match meant what it still means in some villages, an adjournment in the evening to the neighbouring inn, a supper, beer, and songs. How many old inns still keep the name "The Jolly Cricketers," and how many for little reason! In later days, Thames Ditton cricket has become scientific enough. The Giggs Hill ground has sent to the Oval cricketers like H.H. Stephenson, who was making centuries for the county in the sixties; in modern times the great Maurice Read, whom Mr. John Shuter has described as having "started a new order among cricket professionals," learned his cricket at Thames Ditton. But the greatest of all Thames Ditton cricketers is, of course, Tom Richardson. He was actually born at Byfleet, but played as a boy at Giggs Hill.

Thames Ditton's sister, Long Ditton, is probably known by sight by thousands of people who do not know its name. You are looking at the best of Long Ditton when you see Barr's nursery gardens from the train window. There is hardly a month in the year, except in the deep of midwinter, when the Ditton Hill gardens are not full of blossom. They are never more glorious than in May and early June, when the long parterres glow with the tall, late-flowering tulips. Of all flowers which have been added to English gardens in the last twenty years, the great thirty inch tulips seem to me the finest. A giant daffodil can be superb, but it always looks like a giant. But these tulips have the grace of slightness and the majesty of height; their open chalices burn with the heat of jewels and the depth of the heart of wine; and here are ten thousand of them. Perhaps the daffodils, earlier in the year, light the gardens with a fresher lustre; but the tulips have the colour and the glow. Railways have the good luck to run by many nursery gardens; the tulips at Ditton Hill would help the South Western to challenge any line.

On the other side of Thames Ditton ferry lies Hampton Court Park, a noble stretch of ordered green. From the ferry to Hampton Court Bridge is a mile by river, and nearly twice as much by road, which runs through East Molesey. There is little of interest in either of the Moleseys, East or West, but it is worth walking a dull mile or two to look down stream from the Bridge over Henry VIII's palace, with its yews and elms, dark and stately, in the garden beyond the imposing walls. There is a far more comprehensive view of Hampton Court to be had from the railway or the river, but it is still a fine pile of brick seen down stream from the Bridge. Up stream, Hampton Church stands a mile away at the bend of the river, grey in the sunshine; between the church and the bridge is the lock, bright with boats in summer, and the weir, tumbling down a roar of green water to make roach-swims and barbel-swims for patient fishermen. In the road to the left you may catch sight or sound of one of the London coaches, with its white-hatted driver and painted panels, well named the Vivid. Molesey's roads carry away many of the motor cars that run to Hampton Court; but the old Vivid still jangles hopefully after them.

North and west of Molesey runs the ugliest road in Surrey. It begins with the paling running round the Hurst Park racecourse, and it goes on between the ramparts of enormous reservoirs. To stand on the edge of one of these great basins of water (it is strictly forbidden to do so) is to get a new meaning of desolation. They are horribly deep—you can see how deep if you stand above one which is half empty; the sides slope so steeply that if you fell in you could never climb out again, and they are the loneliest stretches of water conceivable. No bird has any need that brings him to water that has no shelter and no food. Once I watched a sunset in November across one of these reservoirs. When the sun sank low the water blackened; the wind drove little waves slapping with foam against the stone bank; a single sea-gull swept up out of the dark and fled away down wind like a scrap of torn paper; it was the most solitary ending a day could have.

The reservoirs by Molesey stretch far back from the river. Nearer the river the birds find them more hospitable. I remember a day in October when I stood watching the martins making one of their last halts on the way south over the reservoirs on the river bank at Surbiton. It was a pouring wet afternoon, there was a high wind, and the rain drove bubbles in the ruffled water and half blotted the greens and greys of blown willows and the russet of thorn berries on the far side of the river. A short trolley line ran down a stone pier from beside the road to the edge of the water, where a barge with a bright brown sail waited; the smoke from a clinker fire built in a pierced bucket swept fitfully about the pier; grimy men loaded a car on the trolley line. Over the grey-blue water hundreds of house-martins dipped and darted and chattered; my umbrella blew inside out, a few scared birds near me tossed up into the sky and fell down again, joining the hundreds circling and curtseying in the wind and the rain.

The road from Molesey runs west to Walton-on-Thames, where you strike the river high enough to find it running through something like real country. Walton has an interesting old manor house and a Norman church a good deal spoiled by restorers. In the vestry, preserved in a cabinet made out of an old beam from the belfry, is a relic of days when women talked too much—a scold's or gossip's bridle. It is a sort of cage shaped to fit the head and made of steel, which time has rusted and blackened. A kind of bit is arranged to go into the scold's mouth and hold her tongue, and according to those who have been voluntarily bridled—nobody can remember a scold in Walton—it answers its purpose admirably. When the bit is in and the bridle properly padlocked the most vixenish can only utter inarticulate murmurs.

Among some curious old brasses in the church is one which commemorates, "John Selwyn 'gent,' Keeper of her Matis Parke of Oteland vnder ye right honorable Charles Howward Lord Admyrall of England his good Lord and Mr." He died on March 22, 1587, and his brass illustrates a remarkable incident. John Selwyn, dressed in a most workmanlike costume like a Scots gillie with a ruff, is shown riding on the back of a stag, into whose throat he is plunging a great hunting-knife. Two stories explain the picture. One, told in the Antiquarian Repertory, is that Selwyn, "in the heat of the chase, suddenly leaped from his horse upon the back of the stag (both running at that time with their utmost speed), and not only kept his seat gracefully in spite of every effort of the affrighted beast, but, drawing his sword, with it guided him toward the Queen, and coming near her presence, plunged it in his throat, so that the animal fell dead at her feet." Another version told locally is that the stag was charging Queen Elizabeth when the keeper rode up, leapt on its back and killed it, but was killed by the stag as it fell. It does not seem impossible. Against the story of the keeper being killed in rescuing the Queen, Mr. F.W. Smith, a local authority, has urged that Queen Elizabeth would hardly have been hunting six weeks after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and also when the Armada was almost on its way. But nobody in England, certainly not Drake, ever stopped doing anything because the Armada was coming, and as for hunting six weeks after the death of Mary Queen of Scots, that would be nothing out of the way for Queen Elizabeth. A huge oak, thirty feet in girth, is spoken of as the tree under which the stag was killed at the Queen's feet, but nobody could tell me where it was. There are many superb oaks in the gardens in Walton and Weybridge. Once the whole district was included in Windsor Park.

Hidden in a group of obscure cottages stands the old manor-house, partly preserved as a curiosity, partly as an addition to a garden. The house was not improved by an experience for some years as a tenement dwelling, crowded with more families than it should have held. It was rescued from that indignity by its present possessor, Mr. Lowther Bridger. Heavy beams, oak panels, and a fine chimney-piece remain, relics of the Stuart days when John Bradshaw, President of the Council, had the house. Tradition, certainly wrongly, says that Bradshaw signed Charles's death-warrant in the hall. Bradshaw, no doubt, signed it at Westminster. But the association of his name would be enough for village gossip. "The place where they cut off the king's head," is a variant of the story.

Above Walton Bridge are Coway Stakes, where Julius CÆsar is supposed to have crossed the Thames in pursuit of Cassivellaunus, king of the Catuvellauni. The British chief drove sharpened stakes into the bed of the river, to block the ford, and built a palisade along the bank, where he waited for the enemy. They came on, cavalry and infantry, in spite of the stakes. The Catuvellauni would have met them, but fled in horror at the sight of an armoured elephant.

A great cricketer is buried in Walton churchyard, and a great astrologer in the church. The cricketer was Lumpy Stevens, whom we met at Send. The astrologer was William Lilly, author of a yearly publication, Merlinus Anglicus Junior, a sort of Old Moore's Almanac. The prophecies of storms, fires and disasters were as dull reading then as they are now, but one or two entries in his Life and Times, written by himself, are illuminating, especially his record of family amenities, thus:—

Lilly got into trouble with the Parliament men later. He had predicted a town in conflagration, and when the Fire of London occurred in 1666 he was accused of having caused it. He had to appear before a Parliamentary committee specially sitting on the matter, but he was able to satisfy the chairman that he had nothing to do with the fire. He admitted that he had drawn mysterious designs of persons in winding sheets and digging graves, which were to foretell the plague, and of towers and houses on fire, which might have meant the city of London blazing; but he had never fixed the exact year for these things to happen. So the committee let him off. If he had lived till the next century, when William the Third's horse had thrown his rider, and the Jacobite toast was "the little gentleman in black velvet," Lilly could have pointed with pride to other cabalistic drawings in his Merlin One shows a mole walking about under a dragon; another, a mole attacking a crown.