Eric Parker

The Widest Street in Surrey.—A lucky find.—Barbara Villiers.—Pepys at the Wells.—Nell Gwynne.—Aldermen and lazy ladies.—Epsom's fall.—A knavish apothecary.—Baron Swasso, his house.—Miss Wallin, bone-setter; bone-setter, Mrs. Mapp.—Epsom re-made at the table.—Eclipse.—The Road to the Derby.—The Ring round the Gibbet.—Catherine-wheels, Motor-cars, Kites, Pills.—Lord Rosebery.—Lord Lyttelton's ghost.

Epsom is the centre of the country between the great railway lines. It has its own railway, but it is midway between the lines that run express trains to Brighton and Southampton: Epsom's own expresses only run for two weeks in the year, when the races come round. For the other fifty weeks Epsom is a quiet town of villas, once a village, now nearly a suburb like Esher or Weybridge. Lord Rosebery sometimes lives near the town, at Durdans, and deplores the large numbers of lunatics who are brought to live near the town always. But Epsom is only occasionally ruffled by the lunatics, and has developed a dangerously good train service.

Epsom has the widest and breeziest main street of any Surrey town, and you do not guess the reason until you read the history of the town pretty closely. The story of Epsom, until the two great races that belong to its downs were founded over Lord Derby's wine, is the story of its wells. Before Epsom Salts there was hardly an Epsom to give them a name. There may have been a tiny village where the church stands, but that would be all; the rector preached to a few cottagers. Then, one hot summer day in 1618, the lucky thing happened. Henry Wicker, trying to water his cattle on the common, found a small hole with a spring in it; he enlarged it, and took the cattle to the water, but could not make them drink. Then the doctors were told about it. They used it first, as Pownall the local historian tells you, "as a vulnerary and abstersive," and healed wounds with it; then some labourers accidentally drank it, and Epsom's fortune was made. The doctors agreed; Epsom salts were bitter, diluent, absorbent, soluble, cathartic—everything that salts should be. In two years the wells were enclosed with a wall; in twenty years France and Germany had heard of Epsom, and distinguished foreigners obediently paced the common. But the great days were still to come. As yet few buildings had grown up close to the Wells, merely "a shed to shelter the sickly visitors." Then came the year 1670, when Charles II gave Barbara Villiers his palace of Nonsuch two miles away. She, as careless of a king's gift and as avaricious as a king's mistress should be, turned the palace into cash, and out of its demolished walls the local builder piled up houses by Epsom Wells.

One of Epsom's inns was already built, the King's Head—perhaps the Old King's Head near the church, or an inn on the same site. Pepys was there in 1667, and gives us a glimpse of Nell Gwynne, though she was at Epsom to amuse herself, and was not one of Pepys's party. Pepys went on July 14th (Lord's day); he got up at four in the morning, and talked to Mrs. Turner downstairs while his wife dressed, and got angry with Mrs. Pepys because she was so long about it. They were off in the coach by five, with bottles of wine and beer, and a cold fowl, and talked all the way pleasantly, Pepys writes, and so came "to Epsom, by eight o'clock, to the well; where much company, and I drank the water: they did not but I did drink four pints. And to the town, to the King's Head; and hear that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them; and keep a merry house." Lord Buckhurst had just persuaded Nell Gwynne to leave the King's playhouse for a hundred pounds a year and his company: she was to act no more, which saddened Pepys. However, she was back at the playhouse next month, jeered at by the graceful Buckhurst and as poor as ever. She was less exacting than Barbara Villiers: she never had a palace to sell.

When Nonsuch was built up again into Durdans and other houses near the Wells, then came the full tide. Epsom was completed. About the year 1690, Pownall dates the climax: Mr. Parkhurst, lord of the manor, built a ball-room seventy feet long, and the inns sprang up on all sides. "Taverns at that time reputed to be the largest in England were opened; sedan chairs and numbered coaches attended, there was a public breakfast, with dancing and music every morning at the Wells. There was also a ring, as in Hyde Park; and on the downs races were held daily at noon; with cudgelling and wrestling matches, foot races, &c., in the afternoon. The evenings were usually spent in private parties, assemblies or cards; and we may add, that neither Bath nor Tunbridge ever boasted of more noble visitors than Epsom, or exceeded it in splendour, at the time we are describing." So Pownall praises the great days; but they have not left a glamour about Epsom, as the days of Nash and Brummell have shed on Bath.

Why has Epsom so broad a main street? In the great days the open way was narrower. Down the centre of the road as we see it Mr. Parkhurst planted a long walk of elms, and there they stood from James the Second's day till the nineteenth century. Then Sir Joseph Mawbey, lord of the manor, cut them down and sold the timber. He made a good bargain too; for the townpeople were grieved at losing their trees, and to quiet them he promised to give £200 to help build a market-house, but he never did it, and kept the cash. The trunks of the fallen trees must have made a pleasant prospect for the New Inn, the fine red-brick building which in Parkhurst's day was built for a tavern, and which still stands, but has now fallen to shops. But in the days when the city aldermen brought their wives to show off their finery, and the young sparks threw their money about at Epsom, what a bustling, handsome, pursy, turtle-soup sort of place the Wells must have been. John Toland, writing in 1711, describes Epsom Wells at their height. Eudoxa is his mistress, and to Eudoxa he pictures all Epsom's charms. I quote a few passages from a long letter:—

"Here are two bowling-greens with raffling shops and musick for the ladies' diversion, as at Tunbridge; but the ladies do not appear every day on the walks as there. Here you see them, on Saturdays, in the evening, as their husbands come from London; on Sundays at church, and on Mondays in all their splendour, when there are balls in the Long-rooms; and many of them shake their elbows at Passage and Hazard with a good grace."

Surely they never forgave Toland for writing that. Here he writes on the ladies' husbands:—"By the conversation of those that walk there, you would fancy yourself to be this minute on the Exchange, and the next at St. James's; one while in an East India factory, and another while with the army in Flanders, or on board the fleet in the Ocean; nor is there any profession, trade, or calling that you can miss of here, either for your instruction or diversion."

Thus does Toland, unkinder than Pownall, set out the glories of Epsom without comparing them to Bath. But what could be better than the luxury of it all? "You would think yourself in some enchanted camp, to see the peasants ride to every house with the choicest fruits, herbs, roots and flowers; with all sorts of tame and wild fowl, with the rarest fish and venison, and with every kind of butcher's meat, among which Banstead-down mutton is the most relishing dainty. Thus, to see the fresh and artless damsels of the plain, either accompanied by their amorous swains or aged parents, striking their bargains with the nice court and city ladies, who, like queens in a tragedy, display all their finery on benches before their doors (where they hourly censure, and are censured), and to observe how the handsomest of each degree equally admire, envy and cozen one another, is to me one of the chiefest amusements of the place. The ladies who are too lazy, or too stately, but especially those who sit up late at cards have their provisions brought to their bedsides, where they conclude the bargain with the higler; and then—perhaps after a dish of chocolate—take another nap, till what they have thus purchased is got ready for dinner."

One single attraction Toland admits Epsom never had—it lacks a river. "One thing is wanting—and happy is the situation that wants no more; for in this place notwithstanding the medicinal waters, and sufficient of sweetes for domestic use, are not to be heard the precipitant murmurs of impetuous cascades. There are no purling streams in our groves, to tempt the shrill notes of the warbling choristers, whose never-ceasing concerts exceed Bononcini and Corelli."

That was in 1711; Epsom never saw better days in spite of the lack of those miraculous concerts. And in 1715 it had all come to an end. Epsom's glories tumbled like a pack of cards. It was the fault of one man: Pownall has gibbeted the rascal; Epsom fell through the "knavery of Mr. John Livingstone, an apothecary." Mr. Livingstone may have been a knave, but he was also evidently a fool. He began admirably, as a doctor with a speculative eye should do, by building a large house with an assembly room for dancing and music, "and other rooms for raffling, diceing, fairchance (what a perversion of terms!) and all sorts of gaming; together with shops for milliners, jewellers, toymen, etc." He was quite a heathen, for he planted a grove, and he made a bowling-green, and then spoiled it all by sinking a well, putting a pump to it, and calling the place the New Wells. The new water was neither diluent, nor absorbent, nor cathartic, nor anything else that water at a watering-place should be, and the visitors found out the difference. But the end was the maddest thing of all. Somehow or other, John Livingstone got a lease of the old wells, the real, genuine spring. Then he locked up the old wells, and tried to make money with the new. It killed the watering-place.

But Epsom revived—to relapse and revive again. First, it was brought to life again by the South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she was not so crazy. Miss Wallin was a bone-setter: she could put in a man's shoulder without help, and she was not to be imposed upon. Once a cheat came to her with his head done up in a bandage, and asked her to set his dislocated wrist for him; it was not dislocated, and he wanted to show Miss Wallin up as an impostor. She saw through that, and dislocated his wrist on the spot, telling him to go back to the fools that sent him. Such a woman should have been kept at Epsom; she was worth more than mere cathartic waters. But Epsom could not keep her; she desired more than anything else in the world to marry one Mr. Hill Mapp, who did not and would not live at Epsom. She pursued him, always with an eye on the church, and Mapp capitulated; but they were married in London. Epsom took back Mrs. Mapp, but she could not live for ever.

After Mrs. Mapp, the end came quickly. Sea-bathing finished the little town altogether; "the modern delightful practice of sea-bathing," as Pownall puts it with tolerance. He does not give up hope, even in 1825; he hopes that the medical profession will still give the wells a trial, and believes that the waters will be found worthy. After that he comes to the consideration of Epsom's races.

Water ended Epsom in 1715; wine began Epsom again in 1780. A party of gentlemen, drinking at Lord Derby's table at Lambert's Oaks, a house on the high ground above the town, lifted their glasses to the glories of horse-racing. They founded two races, one, in 1779, for three-year-old fillies; another, in 1780, for three-year-old colts and fillies. They named the races after their host and the house where they drank, and Epsom was made again. The Derby and the Oaks became national institutions. Before that roystering party, the downs had seen racing, but had not seen a racing crowd. Charles II had run his horses on Epsom and Banstead downs; perhaps his horse now and then bore away the silver bell, which was the first and simple prize when horses began racing. Queen Anne may have entered a colt or two at Epsom: her consort, Prince George of Denmark, loved horse-racing and drank Epsom waters. Greatest of all memories of the Turf, Eclipse lived for years by Epsom downs, and won poor little races for an obscure commoner. He would have won any race he could have been asked by a king, but it was the fate of the finest racehorse ever foaled to live before the Derby was founded, and before he could race another horse worthy to pass the starting post with him. Pownall, in his History of Epsom, has a pleasant passage extolling Eclipse's merits. He writes in 1825: he has studied, he tells us, Lawrence's History of the Horse and Bingley's British Quadrupeds, and this is the result:—

"Eclipse was withheld from the course till he was five years of age, and was first tried at Epsom. He had considerable length of waist, and stood over a large space of ground, in which particular he was an opposite form to the flying Childers, a short backed, compact horse, whose reach lay in his lower limbs; but, from the shape of his body, we are inclined to believe that Eclipse would have beaten Childers in a race over a mile course with equal weights. He once ran four miles in eight minutes, carrying twelve stone, and with this weight Eclipse won eleven King's plates.[A] He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur; nor was he ever for a moment distressed by the speed or rate of a competitor; out-footing, out-striding, and out-lasting (says Mr. Lawrence) every horse which started against him."

Eclipse, like Homer, had many birthplaces. Mr. Theodore Cook, who has written authoritatively of him where others have guessed or accepted tradition, has been informed of more than seven; and, in collecting details of relics of the great horse, he has been supplied with evidence that Eclipse possessed no fewer than six "undoubted" skeletons, nine "authentic" feet, sufficient "genuine" hair to have stuffed the largest armchair in Newmarket, and "certified" portions of skin which would easily have carpeted the yard at Tattersall's. There never was such an omnipresent animal.

After 1780, the horse-racing crowd grew. In Pownall's time, when the Derby and Oaks had not been established forty-five years, the Derby attracted some sixty subscribers, and the Oaks about forty, of fifty guineas apiece, and Epsom was full to overflowing. The watering-place has become a circus. The race week brings down all London. "At an early hour in the morning, persons of all ranks, and carriages innumerable, are seen pouring into the town at every inlet. All the accommodations and provisions that the surrounding villages can supply are put in requisition." The royal family would come to look on; sixty thousand spectators, Pownall thinks, met on the downs.

But Pownall has nothing to say of the road. The road must have been the thing to see; not as we see it to-day, when motor cars start for the course before lunch instead of before breakfast, and luxurious railway trains draw decadent race-goers to Tattenham Corner. In the real Derby days all racing men that were men drove to Epsom, early in the morning, by the road. Four-in-hand coaches travelled level in the pack and the dust by costermongers' donkeys; at every inn there were touts and tipsters, haunting creatures with secrets of betting; they knew what would win outright and what would certainly lose; the Duke's trainer had whispered to them, the swindling Captain had tipped them the wink; you merely had to pay for the knowledge. Wayside strips of green were turned into cocoanut shies, wherever a man might wish to shy at nuts; clowns on stilts stalked in chequered blue; bare-legged boys and girls turned amazing Catherine wheels. There was the hill to finish with by the course, and the plaudits of the crowd for him who took his team up in spanking style. They still drive four-in-hand coaches up the hill; but the motor-horn follows the coach-horn.

Frith has made the Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite, billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster, double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and Handsome Jack contrasted in the pig's skin; and, ye Centaurs! what seats were there!" It must have been a sight for proper men to see. Not the veriest tailor would walk on Derby day. He "would mount a mis-teached hippogriff, and risk the chance of a purl, rather than not show at the covert-side." Who, indeed, would not bestride a steed when he might meet the Assassin and the O'Bluster in the ring? But there were others:—

At the time we write of, "Old Crutch," too, with his scaffolding under his arm, and disabled limb dangling like a loose girth from his rosinante's side, a quadruped equalling the Dollar's mount in beauty,—might have been seen side by side with Lord Chesterfield, on his thoroughbred, and addressing him in all the Timbobbinish horrors of his frightful vernacular. My lord was then in the zenith of his good looks and humour, and was, moreover, so well upon Cotherstone, that he saw graces in Old Crutch's physog, with the charming "thousand to forty" he hoped to draw him of on the Tuesday prochain,—that he joked and rattled with the uncouth old cripple in undisguised merriment. With these might have been noticed the elegant form of Lord Wilton, on his roan, shaded again by a round-shouldered knave from Manchester, with ungloved hands and snub nose, who had "potted the crack" for his special line of action. His yeoman Grace of Limbs, fresh and hearty as a summer gale, mounted on his Blue-eyed Maid, loomed in stalwart manhood by the side of some pallid greek or city trader, having a word of greeting and jollity for all alike, for he was there for the sake of sport, and had no anxiety beyond his "pony."

The Heavies, as Thornhill of Riddlesworth, Sir Hercules Fitzoutlawe, and poor fatty Sutherland, together with my Lord Miltown, from his not being particularly adapted for an equestrian display, appeared in their several chariots on the outskirts of the ring, an occasional lull in the wordy tumult permitting the Irishman's lisping scream to penetrate the dense and agitated circle, in his praiseworthy efforts to do business. Old Crocky, too, was there, mounted on a subdued wretch of the horse-species, tenanted, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, by the evil spirit of some defunct croupier, and ready to "return on the nick" as usual. In this "mess tossed up of Hockley-Hole and White's," in addition to our foregoing inventory, were dukes and butchers....