The Hastings Road And The "Happy Springs Of Tunbridge - free ebook by Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

THE Hastings Road

AND THE “HAPPY SPRINGS OF TUNBRIDGE” By Charles G. Harper ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR London Chapman &amp; Hall, Ltd. 1906 [ All rights reserved ] PRINTED AND BOUND BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY....

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PREFACE

The Road to Hastings is hilly. Not, perhaps, altogether so hilly as the Dover Road, and certainly never so dusty, nor so Cockneyfied; but the cyclist who explores it finds, or thinks he finds, an amazing amount of rising gradient in proportion to downhill, no matter which way he goes. Sevenoaks town, the matter of twenty miles down the road, is certainly preceded by the long, swooping down-grades of Polhill; but the lengthiest descent, by mere measurement in rods, poles, and perches, is only an

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I

The road to Hastings is measured from what, in these times, seems the unlikely starting-point of London Bridge, and is identical with the Dover Road as far as New Cross, where it turns to the right and goes through Lewisham, the Dover Road continuing by Deptford and Blackheath. Few would now choose such a starting-point for a journey to Hastings, but there is reason in most things, and when this road was first travelled there was a very special reason for this choice. London Bridge was, until 17

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II

The history of coaching on the Hastings Road will never be fully written. There are too few materials for it. None of the great critics of coaching—men of the eminence of “Nimrod” or “Viator Junior”—ever wrote about the Hastings Road, for it was a road of many pair-horse coaches, and “pair-horse concerns” were considered beneath the notice of those lofty writers. Even the Royal Mail was a “pair-horse concern,” and was looked down upon accordingly. It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, an

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III

With the dawn of the nineteenth century the service of coaches between London and Hastings begins to take some definite shape. In 1807 Robert Gray, of the “Bolt-in-Tun,” Fleet Street, horsed the Hastings Mail, and continued for many years. In 1828 it was jointly run by Gray and by Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross.” Being only a “pair-horse” mail, it was, like its fellows in the same category, very slow. The Brighton, Portsmouth, and Hastings mails were, in fact, the three slowest in t

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IV

The electric tramcars that nowadays take you all the way to Lewisham from Westminster Bridge for threepence, and occupy incidentally forty minutes in performing the journey of six miles, travel on the average at the same speed as those old coaches; but, of course, this not very brilliant rate of progression is determined by the crowded traffic of Walworth and Camberwell. When New Cross is reached, and the comparative solitudes of St. John’s, they bring you at a good twelve miles an hour along th

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V

How many, or how few, of Lewisham’s myriads ever idly speculate whence came the name of the place? According to authorities who are now, in these more scientific times, largely discredited, it comes from Anglo-Saxon words meaning “the dwelling among the meadows,” or the leas—the “leas home”—and was anciently spelled Levesham and Lewesham. Just a few vestiges of this ancient rurality remain, in the strips of meadows—now converted into what are shaping as beautiful parks—that fringe the course of

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VI

The streets of Lewisham the long end, in the present year of grace, a little beyond Rushey Green, where a side-road comes in from Forest Hill and Catford Bridge. Shall we pluck the rushes of Rushey Green, wander awhile in the groves of Forest Hill, or gather primroses by the river’s brim at Catford Bridge? God bless you, ye innocent, there are no forests but forests of chimneys at Forest Hill, and the rushes of Rushey Green have long been replaced by macadam and York stone pavements; and althoug

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VII

It is a long, long rise from South End to Bromley, which stands among the breezy heights near Keston and Hayes. Half way up it there are still traces of the deep dingle that gave the spot the name “Holloway,” by which it was known to the road-books of the coaching age. It was an ominous place, suitable for the footpad’s leap in the dark upon the traveller’s back, and those wayfarers who were obliged to pad the hoof alone through Holloway when night was come wished they had eyes in the back of th

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VIII

Bromley, in the days when it was only a small thing, was in the diocese of Rochester. It has long since been transferred to Canterbury, and the manor that had belonged to the Bishops of Rochester ever since the eighth century, when it was given to them by King Ethelbert, was sold with the palace into private hands in 1845. Those who will may see the exterior of it to this day, but it is not the palace that the Norman Gundulf built, nor even that whence Bishop Warner escaped, for it was several t

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IX

The interior of the church is injured by the galleries built round it, to accommodate a crowded congregation, and is otherwise of little interest; the tombs of the Bishops of Rochester consisting merely of a mangled relic of that supposed to be for Richard de Wendover, who died in 1350, and the slab and the tablet, respectively, to John Yonge, 1605, and Zachary Pearce, 1774. But in the pavement near the font, covered with a mat, is the ledger-stone marking the resting-place of Dr. Samuel Johnson

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X

The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are a part of every civilisati

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XI

The road in the neighbourhood of Lock’s Bottom seems, in the old days, to have been particularly dangerous. It ran, in the middle of the seventeenth century and for long afterwards, through a wide district of unenclosed common-land, and was just one of those lonely highways where the footpads and highwaymen had matters very much their own way. An unpleasant adventure of this sort happened just here, beside a vanished landmark once known to wayfarers as the “Procession Oak,” to John Evelyn, the d

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XII

Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old “George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the public-house kind,

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XIII

At Pratt’s Bottom there is an interesting parting of the ways. The straight road on to Sevenoaks, by way of Polhill, is modern, having been made in 1836. Before that time the route lay up along by the dangerously acute turning to the right, where the old toll-house stands, to the weary ascent of Rushmore, or Richmore Hill, and to Knockholt Pound. Ogilby, in his “Britannia” of 1675 shows a map of this road to “Nokeholt,” as he calls it, with “Ye Porcupine inne” on the right-hand, near the summit;

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XIV

The present road to Sevenoaks from Pratt’s Bottom is closely neighboured by the South Eastern Railway, running in a deep chalk cutting and then disappearing in the grim mouth of Polhill Tunnel, one and-a-half mile long. The mephitic breath of the tunnel, bellying sulphureously out and flying in noisome wisps over the road, would be a good converting agent for those who, believing in eternal punishment and the Pit, have not yet ordered their lives accordingly; and you who look down there think it

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XV

That the village of Riverhead belongs very largely to Lord Amherst is obvious enough, in the highly ornate terra-cotta tablets on the houses, bearing a gigantic A crowned with an earl’s coronet and ensigned with a shield charged with three spears. Also the “Amherst Arms,” with its sign exhibiting two Red Indians and the motto, “Constantia et Virtute,” proclaims the lordship. Riverhead is a pretty little village, with a puzzling number of branching roads, situated at the foot of the long steep ri

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XVI

The long, long ascent to Sevenoaks, which crowns a ridge seven hundred feet above the sea-level, does not lack beauty, lined as it is for a considerable distance with hedgerow elms. But it puts on another kind of beauty at night, for as you come past the railway-station, and look down in the darkness upon the galaxy of red and green signal lights, it seems like a lavish Arabian Nights display of rubies and emeralds spread out there, in the black cutting. The name of the railway-station, on the o

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XVII

When you know Sevenoaks well, have learned its geographical situation, and have inquired into its surroundings, you will begin to perceive that it was once very humbly dependent upon the great historic residence of Knole, whose park it on one side fringes. Knole divides with the not far distant Penshurst the reputation of being the finest baronial pile in England. If their ancient lords could return to Penshurst and Knole they would still find there many of the buildings and appointments they kn

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XVIII

The long street of Sevenoaks acts, as it were, the office of screen to the leafy glades, the hills and dells of Knole Park, to which you come along an alley between the houses. It is an extremely large park, and in many places peculiarly beautiful. To set down in this place its acreage and its circumference of six miles would convey a very dim impression of its proportions, but if we say it is two-thirds the size of Richmond Park its extent will be more generally understood. The house itself—if

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XIX

No armed guard meets you now: only a porter. There are many kinds of porters. There is the fish-porter of Billingsgate; there are also the railway-porter and the warehouse-porter, to name none others; but it is unthinkable to class the porter of Knole with these. Porters, I should suppose, by the etymology of their name, to be bearers of burdens, carriers, humpers of grievous loads; but this dignified person is rather of the bank-porter variety, own brother to those of the Bank of England, and c

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XX

The Dukes of Dorset were not merely men with titles; they were ducal Dukes, who lived up to their strawberry-leaves, and had a ducal way with them; were dukes first and men a very long way after. There are none such now. The mould is broken, the recipe forgotten, the pattern mislaid. How sad! That must be a degenerate age whose dukes are so uncharacteristic of their order; whose aldermen, who macerate on charcoal biscuits, are lean dyspeptics, talk art criticism, and shudder at the idea of a ban

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XXI

And so, farewell Knole, mausoleum of a departed condition of things, treasure-house of art and tradition, puppet-show for the summer throng. One looks for it, topping the sky-line, expectantly, and leaves it with regret; unlike those two tramps seen and heard on this very road by the present writer. One of them listlessly noticed its towers and gables. “Wot’s thet?” he asked his mate: not that he was interested, but for the sake of something to say. How can you be interested in anything when you

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XXII

The road to Hastings, or to Rye, was the beneficiary of a bequest left in 1526 by James Wilford, a successor of those “pious benefactors” who from the earliest times, for the good of their souls less than for love of their kind, had been wont to repair highways, build bridges and causeways, and perform the like services, either by direct gifts or through the intermediary of the Church. Of the practical piety of James Wilford I think there can be little doubt. In the times when he lived, Reformat

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XXIII

The town of Tonbridge lies in the valley of the Medway, and the river itself runs through what is now the centre of the borough. Originally, however, the town was situated on the north bank only; and all that portion—now an intimate part of the place—over the bridge was in the open country. There are but two bridges across the Medway nowadays, one large and one other very small; but in the early days of Tonbridge there were no fewer than five, for if you look at the maps you will perceive the Me

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XXIV

The general impression of Tonbridge (which elects to spell its “ton” with an “o,” in contradistinction from the “u” of Tunbridge Wells) is one of meanness and squalor. There is the fine Grammar School at the entrance to it, and handsome estates surround the town, but that impression lasts, and seems rather to be intensified by the gradual widening of the High Street and the replacing of the picturesque old houses by flashy modern buildings. That highly sketchable old inn, the “Chequers,” remains

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XXV

The father of Tunbridge Wells was Dudley, Lord North, a dissolute young nobleman, who in 1605 “fell into a consumption,” and was advised by his doctors to try the country air and that remedy at the present moment so much talked of but little practised, unless empty pockets and the lack of credit compel—the “simple life.” Suffering from “the pleasures of town,” as to whose nature we need not inquire too closely lest we be shocked, my lord resorted to Eridge, on a visit to Lord Abergavenny. But th

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XXVI

Tunbridge Wells of to-day bears not the slightest resemblance, apart from these three landmarks of Church, Common, and Pantiles, to the resort of long ago. It is unlike in appearance and manners. To-day you see an overgrown town with suburban roads climbing up all the hillsides, and continued, if you explore them, on the corresponding descent. It is an effect of grey sobriety, for the greatest period of its expansion was in the ’60’s and ’70’s, when plaster was prevalent; and its chief hotel was

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XXVII

No one would dream of describing Tunbridge Wells as a “manufacturing town,” but it has, and has had for considerably over two hundred years, a peculiar industry. Few are those who have not heard of “Tunbridge ware,” a species of delicate inlay work in coloured woods, which may be described as mosaic work, something in the nature of tesselated pavement reduced to terms of wood; the tesseræ in this case being very thin strips, fillets, and roundels applied in patterns to work-boxes, inkstands, bac

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XXVIII

The fine upland Common of Tunbridge Wells is one of the town’s greatest assets. Extraordinary outcrops of rock occur on it, and away to where it merges into Rusthall Common is that bourne of many a pilgrimage—the famous Toad Rock: an immense mass of sandstone really very like a toad squatting on its haunches, and not by any means of so uncertain a shape as that of so many of those queer rocks in which you see just what you please, like Hamlet’s cloud, “almost in shape of a camel,” “like a weasel

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XXIX

The main road is more quickly regained at Pembury Green, where the last suburbs of Tunbridge Wells end. Pembury Green is an old hamlet reared in modern times up to the status of a separate parish, with a tall-spired church built where it has no business to be—on the green that gives the place its distinguishing name. There are plenteous evidences, in the number of inns and Cyclists’ Rests, that Pembury Green is a favourite resort in the long days of summer. The number of refreshment places along

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XXX

Hops are grown in the neighbourhood of Lamberhurst almost as extensively as around Maidstone itself, which every one knows to be the metropolis of the cultivation. The hop-gardens are the vineyards of England, and so marked a feature that it surprises the inquirer who learns that the brewer’s hop was not introduced to this country until the reign of Henry the Eighth. “Hops and heresy came in together,” the Roman Catholics were wont to remark. There is no certainty about hops, and a hop-grower wi

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XXXI

Those who would find Lamberhurst church must diligently seek it, for it lies quite away from the village, on the hill-top, beside the manor-house, which you approach past a long line of pyramidical yew-trees, so like those of toy Noah’s Arks that you look instinctively for their wooden stands. Like most manor-houses in Kent, this is styled the “Court Lodge.” The Court Lodge itself is a stone building of considerable age, with the desolating gaunt exterior of a workhouse; and the church, standing

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XXXII

Restrictions upon sight-seeing in this neighbourhood are particularly severe. On the rising ground out of Lamberhurst, for example, lies Scotney Castle, a lovely, sequestered ruin partly surrounded by a great, lake-like moat, and only a little less romantic than Bodiam itself. To reach it you go past a very modern lodge and along a half-mile of wooded drive, chiefly of laurels and sweet chestnuts. But permission is granted on only one day of the week, doubtless in the hope that the precise day w

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XXXIII

Weird oast-houses of a gigantic size raise their lofty cowls against the sky-line outside Lamberhurst, and, with their vanes decorated with images of the Kentish Horse, look like the architecture of Nightmare. Half a mile onwards, an old toll-house, added to in later years, has the appearance of a lodge. Beyond it, the road has at some distant period been raised from a very deep dingle, as may be judged from the farm in the neighbouring hollow, and from the Bewl Bridge, under whose arch the litt

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XXXIV

Hurst Green is a large hamlet, and an offshoot of Etchingham; created by the road travel of the last hundred years. It is in two most distinct parts: one unmistakably Georgian, the other just as distinctly Late Victorian, shading off into Early Edwardian. Although one continuous street, divided only by a cross-road, the two parts of Hurst Green are very different in appearance, and look so antagonistic that it would not be surprising to learn that the inhabitants of either will have no dealings

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XXXV

Returning to Hurst Green, and resisting the temptation to turn aside for the purpose of seeing the farmhouse called “Squibs,” we come presently to Silver Hill, an eminence described by Horace Walpole, who in 1752 travelled Kent and Sussex with Mr. Chaloner Chute on antiquarian pilgrimage: “The roads grew bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all darkness, our guide frightened beyond all frightfulness. However, without being at all killed, we got up, or down—I forget which, it was so dark

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XXXVI

It would be unthinkable to leave Robertsbridge without visiting its mother church of Salehurst; or, when there, to return without having seen Bodiam Castle, two miles onward. Salehurst Church stands picturesquely above the Rother, on the opposite bank from the Abbey. On the north side of it there stands an aged stone recording the incredible age of one “Peter Sparkes, who died October 8th, 1683, aged 126 years.” He is referred to in the registers of Wadhurst as “being above 126 years old by his

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XXXVII

The story is still told at Robertsbridge, and with appropriate awe, how a ploughman on Taylor’s Farm, Mountfield, ploughed up £1,100 worth of gold, and sold it for five shillings, as old brass. That happened so long ago as 1862 and the tale has lost nothing, since then, in the re-telling. Mountfield was long a place of pilgrimage after that event, and the ploughmen on its fields drove the share deeper than ever they had done before; but if they made any more discoveries they were wise enough to

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XXXVIII

Out of Robertsbridge and the Rother valley the road ascends steeply to John’s Cross, where the old coach-road bears to the left in a circuitous route to Battle, by Vine Hall and Whatlington, three-quarters of a mile longer than the absolutely straight modern highway. The “John’s Cross” inn, the old toll-house, and a few cottages sum up the hamlet, and the rest of the way to Battle is of almost unbroken loneliness, except for the railway level-crossing, mid-way. If, before we come into the town o

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XXXIX

The Pope, Alexander the Second, placing his ghostly terrors at the disposal of William, declared Harold an usurper, and William the lawful heir. Thus early had Englishmen to remember Rome for a disservice. It then remained only for William to collect his forces for an invasion of England. He set about the work with business-like promptitude and a settled determination which, by comparison, make the great Napoleon’s projected invasion of over seven hundred years later seem like the wayward fancy

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XL

William “the Conqueror,” as history styles him, never so styled himself. His astute mind thrust such a warlike thing into the background. He had only come to claim his own, and was unfortunately obliged to fight for it against the perjurer! One can almost in imagination hear the pietistic snuffle of a Pecksniff in this mixture of legal and religious motives. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. Bayeux Tapestry. It was about October 5th that Harold reached London. He lay there six days, awaiting the promised r

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XLI

The Normans spent the night after a very different fashion—in prayer and in the confession of their sins—for they knew that many must fall on that eventful day. The Bishops of Coutances and Bayeux received their confessions, and recorded their vows on this Friday night that if they were spared on the morrow they would fast on Saturdays for the remainder of their lives. William, for his part, registered a solemn vow that if he gained the victory he would found a great church on the battlefield, i

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XLII

The battle began about nine o’clock in the morning, the Norman army marching from Hastings by the spot where Crowhurst Park is now seen, to Telham Hill, the “Hetheland” of the chroniclers. Here the Norman knights put on their armour, and here William made his vow that if victory were given him he would build a great abbey on the spot where he saw the emblazoned English banner of the Fighting Man flung proudly upon the morning breeze. His army then advanced to the attack, the archers on foot in t

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XLIII

The battle was over, after more than nine hours’ continued fighting; and now William’s tent was pitched upon the spot where the English standard had been planted. There he supped, and there, amid the thousands of dead and dying, he slept. On the morrow the mutilated body of Harold was found; but neither the bribes nor the entreaties of his aged mother, Gytha, who had now lost all her sons in battle, could induce William to yield it to her or any other. The perjurer, the excommunicate, he swore,

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XLIV

And then it stood in this noble situation for well over four hundred and fifty years, growing in architectural splendour and worldly wealth, but decaying in religious life and morals, in common with all other monasteries. Its income was equal to £10,000 per annum of our money: the Abbot entertained guests of the noblest, and the brethren’s indiscriminate charity made Battle a centre for all the “mighty beggaris, sturdye vagrantes, idle mychers, and foule cozeners” in Sussex. It was rotten-ripe a

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XLV

All these things are enclosed within the massive walls and the great Gateway that face the open market-place of Battle town as though the Abbey itself were still perfect behind them. Once a week great crowds of visitors come from Hastings, by rail, by waggonette, or a-foot, and pay their sixpences to be conducted over the place. They see the wooden beam projecting from the walls of the Gatehouse, and learn that it was a gallows; they are bidden look through the windows of the modern drawing-room

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XLVI

Over Telham Hill to Starr’s Green, past Crowhurst Park, where an ancient tumulus peeps over the palings, lies the way to Hastings. On the left-hand is the beautiful, but neglected, Beauport Park, fast going back to wildness. Here a fork in the road is furnished with a signpost directing both ways to Hastings. This puzzler for strangers is explained by the right-hand and shorter route being the “New London Road,” made when St. Leonards came into existence, and that to the left the “Old London Roa

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XLVII

The story of his life is a strange one. He tells how, as the third son, and most unwelcome addition to his parents’ growing family, he was, at the age of eighteen months, given away by his father and mother to a recently widowed and childless aunt, as eager to adopt, as his unnatural parents were keen to be rid of him. The aunt was Maria (Leycester) Hare, widow of his uncle Augustus; and thus, in the similarity of Christian names at least, there was a peculiar appropriate ness in this adoption,

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XLVIII

Beyond Holmhurst comes the long-drawn parish of Ore, heralded by its modern church, rather overloaded with ornament. It replaces the old church of St. Helen, lying hidden away to the right, across a field and within a belt of trees. Augustus Hare thought the ruins of the old church “rather picturesque”: an instance of how an everyday familiarity may blunt appreciation, for they are picturesque without any minimising qualification. To the active and enterprising it is no difficult matter to climb

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XL

Rising from amid the trees immediately before you, at the entrance to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street, is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of the church, but its tower is

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LI

All Saints’ Street is the most picturesque in the old town. Its houses are for the most part ancient, and rarely are two alike. Many are gabled, some lean heavily forward or against their neighbours, others have latticed casements and great heavy timber frames; few are those that are not sketchable, and in between them goes the long narrow street, deep down below the raised pavements, towards the sea. The most picturesque of these ancient tenements, and perhaps also the oldest, is certainly the

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LII

But sketchable at every turn is the Stade: the very reverse of St. Leonards, whose formal houses and formal people no one would choose to sketch or interest one’s self in. Here is the “Dolphin” inn, the “House for sea-wonders,” with an amazing fish from some distant clime hanging, very goggle-eyed and finny, and very dry, by the door; and, no doubt, stranger sights within. Beside it are “Tamarisk Steps.” Who is there would not, for sheer love of their names, explore Tamarisk Steps and Tackleway,

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LIII

On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those chalk cliffs themselves. It is a long, a circuitous, and an arduous climb to the eyrie where that battered stronghold is perched, and although superior persons scorn and abuse the lift that brings you swiftly and without toi

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LIV

Modern Hastings, like Brighton, dates its rise from the ultimate quarter of the eighteenth century, and its emergence from the status of a fisher town is due to the same prime cause: the discovery by the medical profession of fresh air and sea-bathing as specifics for that mysterious eighteenth-century malaise , “the vapours,” and all manner of other ailments. No royal favour, however, helped Hastings; only the recommendations of Dr. Baillie in the first instance, and secondly the fine brisk air

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LV

I am told that Hastings discourages the “tripper,” and that no longer do cheap day-tickets for weekdays or Sundays prevail. He is discouraged because he brings his nose-bag with him, because his children grow fretful and annoy the select, and because he brings no trade into the town and is off again by nightfall. Thus, paradoxically, he is required not to come because he goes so soon. But perhaps the delays and the peculiar methods of the railways serve more certainly to discourage that variety

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