Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 10

But what must make The stoutest quake, And all with Horror gape, At one strange Birth, This Cow cast forth Eight Calves in human Shape.

For in this Cow Each did somehow A Tenement possess, How big this Beast Must be at least From hence, Sirs, ye may guess.

The Crew march'd out, An horrid Rout, No Bear's Cubs could be bolder!

Each calf did vote, And swear by Rote He was a good Freeholder."

One, at least, of Haslemere's members was more than a mere party politician. General James Edward Oglethorpe, who was defeated on the occasion of the Cow's remarkable parturition, was the son of a former member, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, and sat for Haslemere from 1722 till he was beaten at the poll. He was the great philanthropist of his day; he was the generous and active friend of imprisoned debtors; he was the founder of the colony of Georgia, and a general who held a position with 650 men against 5,000 Spaniards. It was General Oglethorpe who obtained an inquiry by Parliament into the management of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. A friend of his named Castell had been thrown into the Fleet for debt, and because he could not pay the warder's dues had been shut in a house where the small-pox was raging: he took the disease and died.

Oglethorpe was thoroughly roused, and the inquiry held into the gaol system of the country was the beginning of his work for debtors and prisoners. Later, he got Parliamentary sanction and large sums of money to found a colony of emigrant debtors in the New World, made friends with the Creek and the Choctaw Indians, fought the Spaniards, and planted the roots of his little settlement so firmly that he lived to see Georgia acknowledged by the Mother Country as a sovereign independent State.

Some years ago there was an exhibition of Old Haslemere held at the Museum, of which Mr. Swanton very kindly gave me particulars. One of the pictures lent by Mr. J.W. Penfold, an old, if not the oldest, inhabitant, shows General Oglethorpe with the accompanying note:-"General James Oglethorpe. Died 30th June, 1785, Aged 102, said to be the oldest General in Europe. Sketched from life at the sale of Dr.

Johnson's books, February 18, 1785, where the General was reading a book he had purchased without spectacles. In 1706 he had an Ensign Commission in the Guards, and remember'd to have shot snipes in Conduit Mead, where Conduit Street now stands." The compiler of the note may have been right about the snipes, but he was wrong about the General's age, for he was no more than 96. But the admirable caution of the phrase "said to be"

remains on record.

When Haslemere was finally deprived of its two members, the local reformers were jubilant. One of them, in _The Burial of the Boroughs_, printed at Petersfield in 1832, burst into verse:--

"Old Borough-bridge is broken down, In spite of its proud pier; And Seaford, too, is just dry'd up, And so is Hasle-mere.

It is not strange they've d.a.m.n'd Newport, It is such cursed trash; And where's the gourmand would complain For kicking out Salt-ash.

Toll, toll: these Boroughs ne'er will be By us through life forgotten; Nor will their patrons when they lie, Just like their Boroughs, rotten."

After the burial of the rotten boroughs came the railway, and a long time after the railway the artists and authors. Most of them climbed further, up to Hindhead, but Haslemere kept a few. Mrs. Allingham painted the Haslemere fish-shop and other village scenes, though she lived nearer Witley than Haslemere. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle played cricket for Haslemere till he went up the hill: Dr. George Macdonald built a house on the London road: the Whympers we have met. Tennyson's memorial is in the church, but Tennyson's was a Suss.e.x home, on Blackdown.

Shottermill joins Haslemere on the west, and has had its own author.

George Eliot wrote much of _Middlemarch_ in a cottage near the church.

Fishermen know Shottermill, for its hillsides are ladders of small ponds, in which tens of thousands of trout have been bred for other, wilder streams. The Surrey Trout Farm began its existence in one of these chains of ponds; its farmers breed their Loch Levens and rainbows now, I think, in another chain. What is the _metier_ of a trout farm?

Who shall decide? There are fishermen who would never knowingly throw a fly over a trout that had been hand-fed with chopped horseflesh; and there are other fishermen who, if there were no trout farms, would never have anything to fish for. The ponds have their own fascination; not, perhaps, at meal-times, when the water is lashed to froth by the darting, gleaming bodies--that is too greedy a business. But when a pa.s.ser-by on a spring morning sees a pound fish fall back into the water with a meditative flop, he may pay the pond the compliment of wishing himself elsewhere. One accompaniment of a trout farm he may hope to escape--the sight of a dead kingfisher. Without wire netting, kingfishers find out the young fry only too quickly, and a dead kingfisher spoils all pleasure for a fisherman.

And so, from Haslemere by a rough path up the hill, or through Shottermill by a straight main road, or a shady lane grown over with almost every tree of hedgerows and woods, we come to Hindhead. There are many ways to the top, and these, though in some ways the most convenient, are not the best. But the best, which is to reach it by the old Portsmouth road from Thursley, can be kept for later in the day. The worst way to see Hindhead is to follow the motor-cars up the main road.

The motor-cars see the road, but never Hindhead at all.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Brookbank Cottage, Shottermill, where George Eliot lived for a time._]

Hindhead is the most superb and the most disappointing thing in Surrey.

A quarter of a century ago it was wild moorland; then Professor Tyndall proclaimed that since he could not go to the Bel Alp, he would go to the next best place, and from that day the hill has changed to streets, villas, and hotels. London arrives every Sat.u.r.day: London swarms on Sunday. But you can still see, or can guess, something of the grandeur and loneliness of the place; best, perhaps, on the east and the northern slopes towards Thursley; most fully, alone on the highest point, Gibbet Hill.

Hindhead, before the town came there, had a grisly sound in the name.

The Hindhead murder has grown from a sordid case of robbery and killing into one of the great crimes of English local history. Nothing would have seemed less likely to the murderers. Probably not one of them could read or write; perhaps any sensible calculation of the chances of escape was beyond them; possibly they never planned the murder at all. Their crime, in a sense, was paltry; if it had never been discovered, there would have been no further consequences; no one but the murdered man, so far as can be told, was injured; the man was never missed nor owned by a friend. The murder of a king reshapes history; an a.s.sa.s.sinated Minister may change a Const.i.tution; the killing of this man, apparently, mattered to no single living soul. Yet his murderers, in all their clumsiness and ignorance, contrived a crime which should be talked of daily for a century, and should have its separate, distinct record in stone when a thousand plots and pa.s.sions of regicides and usurpers should be as clean forgotten as if their record had never stained blank paper.

Where is the permanent quality? Perhaps it is murder isolated, set exactly in the light which means and belongs to murder, in the atmosphere in which all imagination of murderers moves and hides. It was at night, it was in a wild place, with the horror of a great height about it; the corpse was stripped, the man was nameless. He was a sailor, walking from London to Portsmouth on September 23rd, 1786, to look for a job. He had money in his pocket; at Esher he fell in with three men, also on the road to Portsmouth, but without money; he paid for food and drink and lodging for them, and he was last seen alive with them at the Red Lion near Thursley. Perhaps the men were followed--one account says they were watched--perhaps the finding of the body was by chance. Two cottagers, coming after them over the highest stretch of the hill, saw below them, white in the dim light, on the slope of the Punch Bowl round which the road runs, the dead body as they thought of a sheep. One climbed down and saw what it was. Pursuers rushed down the road at Sheet, near Petersfield, the three were caught, trying to sell the dead man's clothes. They were tried at Kingston, and hanged in chains on the highest point of Hindhead; and there their bodies swung in the wind over every coach that drove from London to Portsmouth.

The old Portsmouth road ran over the summit of the hill. The new road, cut in 1826, winds lower down, and on the lower road the stone stands to commemorate the crime. It was moved by the Ordnance Survey from the higher ground, heedless of the warning engraved on it. On one side runs the inscription:--

ERECTED

In Detestation of a barbarous Murder Committed here on an unknown Sailor, On Sep^r. 24^th, 1786, By Edw^d. Lonegan, Michael Casey, and Ja^s. Marshall, Who were all taken the same day, And hung in Chains near this place.

The back of the stone informs us that it was erected by order and at the cost of James Stillwell, of Cosford, 1786, and that he lays a curse on "the man who injureth or removeth this stone." However, that had no effect on the Ordnance Surveyors.

The gibbet stood for years. Gilbert White writes to Thomas Barker from Selborne on New Year's Day, 1791:--

The thunder storm on Dec. 23 in the morning before day was very aweful: but, I thank G.o.d, it did not do us the least harm. Two millers, in a wind-mill on the Suss.e.x downs near Good-wood, were struck dead by lightning that morning; and part of the gibbet on Hind-head, on which two murderers were suspended, was beaten down.

Local art has depicted the scene; four original oil-paintings grace the walls of the Huts Hotel. Than the drawing of the stage-coach in full gallop up to the gibbet in the dead of night, nothing could be well more frightful.

Louis Jennings's description, in _Field Paths and Green Lanes_, of the Portsmouth road as he saw it in 1876, is worth reading at Hindhead on a summer day:--

It is with surprise that in this lonely waste one sees, between the Devil's Punch Bowl and the top of the hill, a fine, broad, and well-kept road; nor is that surprise diminished when you come upon it, and find that it is as hard and smooth as any road in a private park can possibly be. There are very few marks of wheels to be found upon it, but abundant traces of sheep. This is the main Portsmouth road, and to any one who knows what the roads are in country places, and even in large towns, throughout the United States, this splendid thoroughfare must seem one of the greatest curiosities in England; for the traffic of London Bridge might be driven along it, and even in this steep and wild country it is kept in the most perfect order. I declare that I stood looking at that road in amazement for pretty nearly quarter of an hour, and I am inclined to think that if I had stayed there till now I should not have seen anybody or anything coming along it in either direction. Will the tide of English summer travel ever again turn towards England itself?

The tide turns every Sat.u.r.day and Sunday. But besides the tide, for which policemen set traps along the level road, Hindhead maintains a colony of its own. The western side of the hill and Grayshott on the Hampshire slope are almost a town. Grayshott lies actually in Hampshire, but geographically it belongs to Hindhead; so do Waggoner's Wells, a string of ponds rather like the Shottermill trout hatchery, but set much more prettily among trees.

Of Hindhead it is as true as of other places with magnificent views, that you must live on the spot to be sure of getting them. It is only the greatest good luck that allows a casual visitor full measure of the splendour of clear air all round him, north, south, east, and west. Even if it is clear to the south it may well be misty to the north, and, of course, the angle of the sunlight makes all the difference to the sharpness with which this or that detail of scenery stands out from its surroundings. In one respect the view from the highest point of Hindhead is never perfect. To the south-east, on a neighbouring slope, the pine trees that crest the ridge block out the downs over Brighton and Newhaven. It is a pity, for only from the tower on Leith Hill, not on Leith Hill itself, is there another view in the south-east of England with so wonderful an expanse of country seen clear away to the horizon.

St. George's Hill is blocked with trees, so is St. Anne's; Leith Hill is almost clear, but from Hindhead, until those unlucky pines grew up, you could see pretty nearly thirty miles on any side. Not that the Devil's d.y.k.e and the downs beyond cannot any longer be seen from Hindhead; you can get a fine view of them a mile away to the north, from the old Portsmouth road, on the other side of the new road, but from that point the view is not nearly so fine on the other sides. The hill is not so high. On Gibbet Hill you are 895 feet above sea level according to the ordnance map; if you have no map, you can consult a bra.s.s disc which has been erected on the plateau, which gives you also other interesting information. All the distances to the neighbouring towns are marked, for instance, with the direction in which they lie as the crow flies--an admirable idea, due to the generosity of Mr. T.W. Erle of Bramshott Grange, brother of the Sir William Erle who put up the granite cross which stands close by. It will be safer, in future, perhaps, to trust to the ordnance map rather than the disc for the exact figures, for some of them have already been nearly rubbed out, and c.o.c.kney names have been scratched on the bra.s.s. There they remain, the only gibbet on Gibbet Hill.

Prose-writers have had much to say about Hindhead, among them the late Grant Allen, who pleased a not very exacting public with the not always accurate natural history of "Moorland Idylls," and shocked it with Hill-top novels. But I think no poet has written of the hill, unless it is Charles Kingsley, who surely had climbed Hindhead and looked out on the view from its bracken and heather when he wrote _Airly Beacon_. It was one of the first poems he made after coming to Eversley, and it breathes the scent of June fern in the air and sun:--

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the pleasant sight to see Shires and towns from Airly Beacon, While my love climbed up to me!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the happy hours we lay Deep in fern on Airly Beacon, Courting through the summer's day!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh, the weary haunt for me, All alone on Airly Beacon, With his baby on my knee!

Of other writers, Mr. Baring-Gould has come nearest to catching the spirit of the moorlands and the breeze that sometimes drifts up over Hindhead from the great glen which local myth has named the Devil's Punch Bowl. The _Broom Squire_ is strangely unsatisfactory as a novel, or I find it so, with its entire needlessness and inconsequence of plot.

But it has something in it of the heather and the wind, of the sand of Thursley and the steam of the Punch Bowl on a wet day; and you may still meet broom squires if you like to wander down into the deep of the glen.

The best broom squire is, I think, Kingsley's, in _My Winter Garden_:--

"The clod of these parts is the descendant of many generations of broom squires and deer stealers; the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the Queen's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life 'hits the keeper into the river,' and reconsiders himself for a while over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults, and I have mine.

But he is a thoroughly good fellow nevertheless. Civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; a far shrewder fellow too--owing to his dash of wild forest blood from gipsy, highwayman, and what not--than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South Saxon of the chalk downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth: but when he grows old a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Devil's Punch Bowl, from Gibbet Hill._]

Perhaps broom squires belong more properly to Thursley and the moors.

They are a disappearing race, and I have met few of them. But their cottages, some of then mantled with ivy, some of them broken and tumbling, some empty altogether, stand along the slopes of Highcombe Bottom, which is the glen of the Punch Bowl, and dot themselves here and there by the sandy lanes to the north. Compared with the loneliness of some of these lanes, the wildest tract of Hindhead is a garden. The flowerless, silent shade of a lane by Highcombe Bottom in August, when no birds are singing, is the most solitary thing in the countryside.

But on Hindhead there is always wild life moving. I have seen strange visitors there; as strange as any were a brood of pheasants, almost on the highest ridge. Or perhaps even odder hill-dwellers are the tadpoles which swarm in the summer in the little pools on the highest ridge itself. What should frogs be doing on Hindhead? Perhaps they are toads.

But the happiest and the most graceful of all living things on Hindhead are the swifts. To me, indeed, they are a part of the place; they belong to that hot clear air over the height of the downs, to the sense of immense distance of green fields spread south to Chanctonbury Ring and north to Nettlebed by Henley. I never think of Hindhead without two sights of summer; of children wandering over the hillside with their lips stained with bilberries; and the swifts sailing in royal circles high in the blue or screaming in pursuing companies, close and low over the roadway down the hill.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Post Office, Churt._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Red Lion, Thursley._]

CHAPTER XIII

THURSLEY AND THE MOORS

Painters among heather.--The Devil's Jumps.--The Devil redivivus.--Cobbett at Thursley.--A superb belfry.--The Sailor's Grave.--Pig-iron and hammers.--The natterjack at eve.--A plank for bellringers.--Witley fifty years hence.--Mehetabel in the church.