Eric Parker

Mr. Stiggins at the Marquis of Granby—A Ruin.—The battle of Dorking.—Real fighting.—The Table and Cellar.—Water-souchy, a delicious dish.—Wild cherries.—Dorking snails.—Sandy kine.—Women without roses.—Shrove Tuesday football.—Dorking's glory.—Jupp at Cotmandene.—An earthquake.—Giant and Dwarf.

Dorking has twice had history made for it, and travellers come to visit the scenes. It was in the bar of the Marquis of Granby at Dorking that Sam Weller met his mother-in-law, and watched the reverend Mr. Stiggins make toast and sip the pineapple rum and water, and advised Mr. Weller senior as to the best method of treating Shepherds with cold water. Pilgrims cross the Atlantic to visit the Marquis of Granby. No Dorking inn bears the name, nor ever has; but Americans will tell you that the Marquis is only a name Dickens invented to cover the identity of the White Horse, which fronts the cobbles of Dorking High Street with its gables and white and green paint much as it must have done in the time of Dickens. Dickens himself, in All the Year Round—he did not sign the article, but in that paper none but he might have written of that inn—conceived "the Markis" to be the King's Head, in the old days a great coaching house on the Brighton Road. It stood at the corner of High Street and South Street, and in South Street to-day you may still gaze at its unhappy walls and windows. The old lattices are boarded up, smashed with stones; the rooms are empty. When the post office came to stand at the corner, the King's Head became a tenement house; afterwards a ruin.

The Battle of Dorking took place on the ridge north of the town in 1871, and resulted, after the invasion, in the conquest of Great Britain by Germany. It all came about perfectly simply. A rising in India had taken away part of our army; war with the United States over Canada had taken another 10,000 troops, and half of what were left were dealing with a Fenian revolution in Ireland. Germany put to sea and sank our fleet with torpedoes, a new and dreadful engine of war; then the German army landed and the end came at once. At least, it would have come, if Sir George Chesney, who described the battle of Dorking in Blackwood's Magazine, had prophesied truly. He lived till 1895, to see more than twenty years after his battle pass without an invasion; but the battle, for some of his readers, became a very real thing. The late Louis Jennings, in his Field Paths and Green Lanes, tells us that he had a friend who, believing most people to have very hazy notions of history, was in the habit of saying, "Of course you remember the battle of Dorking? Well, this was the very place where it was fought!" He was seldom contradicted.

The real history of Dorking has traditions of the table and the cellar. Dorking fowls perhaps first came to the neighbourhood with the Romans, and poultry and Dorking have been associated ever since. The true Dorking fowl is a large, well-feathered bird, and walks on five toes instead of lesser fowls' four. He has always been a great fowl for the table and historians have written about him since the days of Columella. Thus a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, in 1763:—

The Dorking cooks knew well what to do with the sea-fish when they got them from Brighton. Dorking was famous for a particular way of making water-souchy, a delicious dish of various fishes, of which Mr. J.L. AndrÉ in the Surrey ArchÆological Collections, has preserved the recipe rescued from an 1833 cookery book 'by a Lady':—

It looks rather vague, but the "Gentlemen's Dorking Club" used to assemble every other Thursday from June to November to discuss the tench and flounders at the Red Lion, and the King's Head used even to attract diners-out from London, especially Dutch merchants, who were particularly fond of the admirable dish. Wine, too, was grown in the town. There was a particular kind of wild cherry, of which Aubrey was told by John Evelyn that it made a most excellent wine, little inferior to the French claret; it would even keep longer. With the cherry wine, perhaps, you would have eaten Dorking snails. They were large, white snails, which some said were brought to the Downs by the pilgrims, others thought were introduced from Italy by the Earl of Arundel, Lord Marshal of England; Lady Arundel used to cook and eat them. They roamed the Downs by Box Hill and other chalky places, and are still to be found there. Perhaps the Romans brought them, but they are not peculiar to Surrey and Sussex; I have found them on chalk in Hertfordshire, and I have heard of them on the Cotswolds.

Such good fare should have built up the constitutions of Dorking people. But it was not so in Aubrey's time, for he picks out the Dorking men and women as weaker and paler than others. He liked to see women with rosy faces:—

One, at least, of the old customs of the town survived until very recent memory. Now it has died out with the rest. From Mr. J.S. Bright's History of Dorking I learn that the office of constable has lapsed; the places of the 'Beggar-poker' and the 'Ale Taster' have been taken by the local police. Parish funds are no longer dispensed at the close of church service. The poor on St. Thomas's Day used to go out 'Gooding'; to-day they plead no more. The Ditchling Singers, which were the Dorking Waits, no longer keep Christmas. On the 29th of May, sacred to King Charles II of blessed memory, an oak bough used to hang from the church tower; the tower is bare throughout the year. Guy Fawkes has been burned for the last time; the Jack in the Green dances no longer in cowslips and buttercups on the first of May. One ancient rite alone persisted until the other day. Every Shrove Tuesday, in dim remembrance of the great carnival which in ancient, pre-Reformation days, preceded the rigours of Lent, mummers made the circuit of the town. In the afternoon all the shops were shut and boarded up, and a game of football, started at the church gates, rioted up and down the main street. In the Southern Weekly News, an account describing the game of 1888 says that just before midday a procession of men grotesquely attired was formed, headed by a man bearing three footballs on a triangular frame, over which was the motto:—

"Kick away both Whig and Tory,
Wind and water Dorking's glory."

The Town Crier started the game, kicked off the first ball at two o'clock, and stopped it at six. But that was in 1888. Twenty years have changed the Crier's duties. Fines and the police have stopped the old custom altogether.

Fifty years ago the Dorking cricket ground at Cotmandene was hardly less well known than the Oval. Two Dorking cricketers belong to the glorious days of Cotmandene. Henry Jupp was born in the town, and Tom Humphrey at Mitcham, but both kept public-houses in Dorking, and both played great cricket for the county. Many stories are told of Jupp, who was a favourite with the crowd, but one of the oldest belongs to Cotmandene. The match was for his benefit, and he was batting. Playing back at a ball, he trod on his wicket, and a bail fell. He picked up the bail, replaced it, and was reminded that he was out. "Out! At Dorking! Not me!" Nor did he go out, but made a hundred instead.

Another of Dorking's inhabitants made history in a different way. Brayley's History of Surrey was printed throughout in Dorking, and Ede, the printer, is said to have spent over £10,000 in the printing. What he made out of it is doubtful; he had made the £10,000 by his three businesses as printer, chemist, and perfumer.

The real Dorking, apart from its battles over and to come, is sufficiently happy to have had very little history. The Danes sacked it, tradition says: they cannot have had much plunder. Julius CÆsar marched through it, perhaps, if there was a Dorking then; the Roman road, at all events, the great Stone Street, which is still an English road by Ockley to the south, drove through the corner of Dorking churchyard. Another event of the dark days was an earthquake in 1551, in which, according to Henry Machyn's Diary, "pottes, panes, and dysys dounst and mett fell downe abowt howse and with many odur thyngs." But an earthquake which could do nothing more than make pots, pans and dishes dance is hardly an earthquake at all.

Perhaps its greatest event of historical times was a funeral. On the 23rd of December, 1815, Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was buried at Dorking with the pomp and pageantry of a king. The procession left St. James's Square in London at nine in the morning; the coach and six horses of the Duke of Sussex and twenty carriages followed it; they reached Dorking at five. Deputy Garter King of Arms, Norroy King of Arms, three heralds and three pursuivants attended in tabards of state; Deputy Garter, after the service, proclaimed the Duke's styles and titles:—

The Most High, Mighty, and Most Potent Prince,
Charles Howard, Duke of Norfolk,
Earl Marshal,
And Hereditary Earl Marshal of England,
Earl of Arundel Castle,
Earl of Surrey, Earl of Norfolk, Earl of Norwich,
Baron Mowbray,
Baron of Howard, Baron of Segrave,
Baron Brurese of Gower,
Baron Fitzalan, Baron Warren, Baron Clun,
Baron Oswaldestre, Baron Maltravers,
Baron Greystock, Baron Furnival, Baron Verdon,
Baron Lovetot, Baron Strange,
And Premier Baron Howard of Castle Rising,
Premier Duke, Premier Earl, Premier Baron of England,
And Chief of the Illustrious Family of the Howards.

The parish registers add little that can have stirred the world. Eleven years after the earthquake, on February 28, 1562, "Owyn Tonny was christened; who (a later hand adds), scoffing at thunder, standing under a beech was stroke to death, his clothes stinking with a sulphurious stench, being about the age of twenty years or thereabouts."

Another entry is more personal. De Foe, perhaps, who lived near Dorking, and knew two Dorking giants, might have liked to see the parish register side by side with a note in his "Tour." The "Tour" gives two measurements of the giants:—

"At this place lived another ancient gentleman and his son, of a very good family, Augustine Bellson, Esq.; the father measured seven feet and a half, and allowing that he might have sunk for his age, being seventy-one years old; and the son measured two inches taller than his father."

From the Parish Register, 1738, May 16: "Richard Madderson, aged 29 years, and was not above three feet and three inches high; but in thickness grown as much as any other person. He was all his life troubled with an inward griping distemper, of which he at last died very suddenly."

Thus the quiet life of Dorking in the quiet centuries. The days before the repeal of the Corn Laws, with the introduction of machinery for hand labour, saw the usual terror and the usual threats. "Captain Rock" and "Captain Swing" signed the letters which were sent to Dorking farmers; special constables were sworn, the windows of the Red Lion were broken, and once, on November 22, 1830, a van drawn by four horses took Dorking prisoners to the county gaol. Cavalry patrolled the town by night; but that November saw the end of Dorking's nearest knowledge of modern war.