Eric Parker

Beddington Hall.—Careful Dissipation.—The Polite Verger.—A punning epitaph.—Actaeon and Artemis for sale.—Carshalton pools.—A dry well.—William Quelche's Apology.—The rudeness of a doctor.—Carshalton's greatest man.—Fighting and spelling.

According to the historians, the springs of the Wandle rose under the walls of Croydon Palace. Croydon has seemingly decided that they shall rise further off, and the Wandle suddenly appears, full flowing, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. You can walk along its bank and watch young Croydon transfer minnows from muddy water to jampots. A mile from the town stands Beddington Hall, now an orphan asylum which sends red-cloaked children out for walks into Croydon, but once the country mansion of the great family of Carew. Nicholas Carew built a house at Beddington in the reign of Edward III, but it was Sir Francis Carew, rebuilding it under Elizabeth, who first brought greatness to Beddington. He entertained the Queen there twice, and the orange garden was famous for many generations of Carews. When Aubrey saw the trees at the end of the seventeenth century, he wrote that they were 'planted in the open ground, where they have throve to admiration for above a whole century; but are preserved, during the winter season, under a moveable Covert.' The hard frost of 1739 killed them.

A later Sir Nicholas Carew rebuilt much of the house, but retained the hall. He was an exact and particular person, and never let his careful dissipation prevent him from keeping a precise record in his account book. One of his pocket-ledgers has found its way into the British museum. Here are some extracts of his expenses:—

Sept. ye 25th 1706. I bought a P^r of Coach Horses 4 years old come five and gave four and thirty pounds for y^m.—N. Carew.

He had a nice taste in wines and tea, and was properly generous to musicians and servants:—

I have met with occasional difficulties in trying to enter Surrey churches, but Beddington, which is one of the most finely decorated, offered the most prolonged opposition of all. I arrived there about three o'clock in the afternoon, and finding the doors locked, inquired of one who emerged from a stoke-hole where I might get the keys. I might not get them, he replied; the church was being cleaned. But might I not just look round, having come a long way to see the church? I might not: she was cleaning the reredos. Might not one who wished to write about the church enter while she was cleaning the reredos? One might not; much had been written of the church already. Would he be so good as to direct me to the rectory? He would, and did; and as I walked away shouted after me that the rector was certainly out. But I found him in, and very courteous to a stranger; and I learned that, as I had hoped, the rule was that the church should be opened every day. He gave me his card, and wrote a message on it, and with the card I went back to the church. The verger had disappeared. He was neither in the churchyard nor the stoke-hole. A stonemason working in the churchyard came to my assistance. The verger was in the church and would doubtless open the door if I knocked. I knocked. Nothing happened. The stonemason knocked; indeed, he knocked a great deal. I begged him to stop knocking, for passers-by stayed to see what this thing might be, but he was thoroughly interested, and went on knocking. Perhaps he knocked for a quarter of an hour. A young girl came up to tell us that the door would certainly open before half-past four, for that was tea-time. Just then the door opened, and before it was shut again in our faces I just had time to brandish the card. He replied at once—he would let me in by another door. He did so; he never asked to see the card, but went on industriously with his sweeping.

Perhaps no building in Surrey has been more carefully restored than Beddington church, nor more richly decorated. The chancel with its frescoes and mosaics, and the carved and painted roof are probably as fine as anything of the kind in any parish church. But is the result attained the result aimed at? The richness, the glamour of gold and purple and rare woods and stones are there, as they must have been in Solomon's temple. But to me the simplicity and cool quiet of aisles and white pillars sometimes seem to forsake such gorgeousness and glow.

There are many interesting monuments and brasses in the church, especially in the Carew chapel, where Carews of Beddington have lain since the fifteenth century. The strangest memorial is the punning epitaph on the steward to Sir Nicholas Carew. He died in 1633, and his name was Greenhill, which inspired his commemorator with a motto for his brass, "Mors super virides montes," and ten curious lines:—

"Vnder thy feate interrd is here
A native born in Oxfordsheere,
First, Life and Learning Oxford gaue;
Surry to him his death, his graue.
He once a HILL was, fresh and GREENE;
Now wither'd is not to bee seene.
Earth in Earth shovel'd up is shut,
A HILL into a Hole is put.
But darkesome earth by powre divine
Bright at last as ye Sonne may shine."

A mile further west, beyond Wallington, which in spite of embracing villadom still keeps an old inn and a pretty, shaded green, is Carshalton. Carshalton begins magnificently. In the spacious days of King George the First there was designed for Carshalton Park a superb dwelling, which Leoni was to have built for the lord of the manor (he built the Onslow house in Clandon Park). But the house was never built. The gates remain. They formerly guarded the green glades of a deer park. Now they stand forlornly cheek by jowl with new yellow brick. Actaeon, from one great pillar, gazes on less divine pictures than a goddess bathing; Artemis, on the other pillar, drapes herself for unseeing eyes. A papered notice-board lolls against the superb ironwork of the gates. Hunter and huntress, pillars and wrought iron, are for sale.

Few villages in Surrey are prettier to-day than they were forty years ago. Carshalton is hardly a village, but is it less pretty than it used to be? Let Ruskin decide, from the opening of The Crown of Wild Olive.

"Twenty years ago" (he writes in 1870) "there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic, in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandel, and including the low moors of Addington, and the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of the hand which 'giveth rain from heaven'; no pastures ever lightened in spring-time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness,—half-hidden—yet full-confessed. The place remains (1870) nearly unchanged in its larger features; but with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning,—not in Pisan Maremma—not by Campagna tomb,—not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore,—as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of the English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying, or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with the white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes; which, having neither energy to cart away, nor decency enough to dig into the ground, they thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in a little pool behind some houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria, and bricklayer's refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond: and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men with one day's work could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm; and every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled only of angels, from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor, I suppose, will be; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of English waters."