Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 14

Both eyes and ears received a like delight, Enchanting music, and a charming sight.

On Philomel I fixed my whole desire, And listened for the queen of all the quire.

Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing, And wanted yet an omen to the Spring.

So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung."

It must remain a problem to discover why such verse should be a.s.sociated with the singing of nightingales. Perhaps the nightingales dislike the a.s.sociation; at all events, I am told that they have deserted St. Anne's Hill. If they have, it is a strange conclusion to the years of close protection which a former owner of St. Anne's Hill extended to her birds. The late Lady Holland would never have a singing bird killed nor a nest touched in all her grounds, and if one of them was found dead in any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide, nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners gladly laid aside their guns. The very next spring the rookery was firmly established, and has cawed its paeans ever since.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Byway near Weybridge._]

CHAPTER XVII

WEYBRIDGE

A Georgian village.--The Kembles.--A prophetic lament.--Wey no more.--The Brooklands bucket.--Exiles.--Riddles of spelling.--A royal palace.--The d.u.c.h.ess's Monkeys.--Oatlands cedars.--Portmore Park.--St. George's Hill.--The Leveller's Beanfields.

There is a pleasant melancholy in trying to imagine a Georgian Weybridge. f.a.n.n.y Kemble describes the village as she saw it as a girl, before the railway came. Then, in the twenties, it was "a rural, rather deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former residence of the Duke of York." Eighty years have gone, and the deserted-looking village has spread into a town and suburbs covering more than a square mile of ground; Portmore Park has vanished; Oatlands is a hotel. The railway has created one more residential neighbourhood.

f.a.n.n.y Kemble first came to Weybridge as a fifteen-year-old school-girl, and spent three summers with her family at Eastlands, a little cottage, still to be seen, on the outskirts of the village, of which she has written some amusing reminiscences. Charles Kemble, the actor, her father, used to come down from Sat.u.r.day to Monday, but had no great appreciation of country life, or, perhaps, rather of the cottage, which was too small for him; "he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too long and too large, for every room in the house." But f.a.n.n.y Kemble herself and her mother enjoyed the country to the full. Mrs.

Kemble had a pa.s.sion for fishing, and she and her children used to spend her days on the banks of the Wey, apparently with the slightest possible success.

A curious relic remains of the Kembles' Weybridge holidays. This is to be seen in the Eastlands' cottage garden, and is a semi-circular heap of earth or sand planted with trees and shrubs. Once, when it was much larger and higher, it was "the Mound," and was the favourite playground of the Kemble girls and boys. It grew out of a huge heap of sand which the landlord refused to move, and which Mrs. Kemble therefore planted and cut into shape with a walk round the top. Naturally enough, tradition has grown up round this heap of sand. f.a.n.n.y Kemble was a famous actress, and lived here as a child; therefore this mound was a theatre. It is locally known indeed as "the theatre." But I can find no evidence that it was ever used as anything of the kind; certainly f.a.n.n.y Kemble never refers to it as a theatre, nor as anything else but a "domestic fortification" and a "delightful playground." To her it is always "the Mound."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Weybridge._]

If that charming and brilliant lady could revisit these glimpses of the moon, what would she say of that infinitely larger "mound" and its surroundings in the new motor track, with which it is Weybridge's unhappy fate to be linked to-day? Nearly a square mile of quiet meadow and forest and hill slashed and scarred and scarped into a saucer of cement; acres of pine and cedar and oak and rhododendron smashed and sawn to fragments; the roar of thundering Napiers and Hotchkisses, where once the reed-warblers climbed the meadowsweet and cuckoos called from the willows--how would she have addressed the originator of that staring blatant racecourse? Strangely enough, she saw something of the kind befall her beloved Weybridge pinewoods sixty-seven years ago, and wrote of it in her diary. She was staying as a guest at Oatlands, and found one of her favourite walks among the Brooklands trees destroyed.

Her outcry is prophetic:--

"O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of the Earl of Lovelace, then Lord King), if I was one of those bishops whom you do not love, I would curse, excommunicate and anathematize you for cutting down all those splendid trees and laying bare those deep, leafy nooks, the haunts of a thousand _Midsummer Nights'

Dreams_, to the common air and the staring sun. The sight of the dear old familiar paths brought the tears to my eyes, for, stripped and thinned of their trees and robbed of their beauty, my memory restored all their former loveliness. On we went down to Byefleet to the mill, to Langton's through the sweet, turfy meadows, by hawthorn hedges musical as sweet...."

Well, she could not do that now. Let an ornithologist poet lament the change:--

By Brooklands hill but since a year Untrod the meadows lay, Unspanned through musk and meadowsweet Ran olive-bright the Wey.

Blackbirds about that wind and wild Carolled a roguish choir, From willow green to willow grey Kingfishers shot sapphire!

There gay and far the Surrey sun Spread cowslips far and gay, Lit wide the orchid's purple flame, The white fire of the May;

And thither stole a happy boat To hear the ringdoves coo, To mark again the drumming snipe Zigzag the April blue:

To watch the darting dragon-flies Live pine-needles awing-- O Brooklands meadow, there we knew You first knew all the spring!

And then--the change! Spade, engine, pick, The gangers' myriad Hun, A thousand branches' banished shade, Flat glare of sand and sun.

From pine and stream to steam and stone, From peace to din and pain, From old unused to new unuse, But never Wey again!

The motor course led to at least one interesting discovery. When the picks were hard at work in the sand, and day and night were enlivened by steam-engines and casual labourers sleeping off their wages in other people's summerhouses, there went about a word of a great find. A pot of copper had been found, some said; of coppers, said others; of Roman gold coins, there was a rumour, and all the coins exchanged for beer. Perhaps some coins were found; what certainly was found was a beautifully made bronze bucket, buried deep below clay and sand in a bed of gravel. It has been cla.s.sified by the experts as belonging to a Venetian workshop of the seventh century B.C.--actually the early days of the Tarquins.

Prehistoric traffic between Britain and Italy may not be an entirely new idea, but the bucket opens a new chapter.

A few years after the Kembles had given up their cottage Weybridge had other brilliant visitors. The French Revolution of 1848 drove abroad thinkers and writers and a royal family, and Weybridge saw most of them.

John Austin, author of _The Province of Jurisprudence Determined_, settled with his wife at a sober, red brick building near the church, and there they were visited by Lavergne, and Victor Cousin and de Remusat and Guizot: Barthelemy St. Hilaire wrote to Mrs. Austin in 1854--"I a.s.sure you that Weybridge is the place in England I love best."

There were royal exiles at Claremont near Esher, then, and they came to ma.s.s at the Roman Catholic chapel which fronts the common; Louis Philippe and Queen Amelie, and the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans and the Comte de Paris; there is a monument in the chapel to the d.u.c.h.ess of Nemours, who died at Claremont in 1857. _Tot luctuosis domus Aurelianensis addita funeribus_ is the inscription, and the glorious beauty of the white marble lights the chapel; she was only thirty-four.

Weybridge's church is modern, but the registers and churchwarden's accounts are old and amusing. The following items, taken at random from the lengthy and exact copy made by Miss Eleanor Lloyd in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, are pleasant riddles of spelling:--

_s. d._

1622. Pd for a gally slabs seate for y^e parson 00 01 00

1623. Pd for drinke for the Ringgers upon the Prince came out of Spain and at other tymes 00 02 08

Pd for 23 Bush.e.l.ls of Lyme and five Bush.e.l.ls of hare 00 11 08

1655. Paid for an hower gla.s.s 00 00 06

1658. Rec^d of John Durling for breach of y^e Saboth 00 05 0

Rec^d of several bargemen for breach of y^e Saboth 14 08 6

1659. Rec^d of Adlms Barg for Breach of the Saboth 04 00 0

Rec^d for the Church gra.s.s being praised: besides X^s worth taken away 07 00 0

Edward Ginger Junior carried away the gra.s.s worth X^s

1667. Item given to the ringers one gunpowder treson day 0 1 0

Item for expenses in going twice to the Justices w^th the fanattick 0 2 0

Item for Inditing Robert Hone for takinge in an Inmate and Rich for not c.u.minge to Church for the s.p.a.ce of that month for y^e fes for the same 0 9 4

1669. paid for buring a pore man that dyed brocklands farm 0 2 6

1671. Rest due to the parrish for the gra.s.s this yeare 1 2 9 Mils Bucklands bill not being holy aloud

1697. gave to John Born for a foxes hed 00 03 04

Sept. ye 16 gave ye ringers for Joy of ye pees 00 04 00

for a botel of wine 00 03 02

1701. payd for 3 botells of winde 00 08 03