Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 16

At Anningsley Park, two miles away, lived Thomas Day, author of _Sandford and Merton_; Thomas Day, who took a foundling child of thirteen and named her Sabrina, and educated her to be his wife--a position which she, at an age to marry, refused. His fate was perverse to the end. He taught himself to dance, wooing another lady who spurned him; and, teaching himself to ride, he was thrown and killed.

CHAPTER XIX

CHOBHAM AND BISLEY

Euclid in Surrey.--Chobham.--Bagshot Rhododendrons.--Vultures of the Road.--The Golden Farmer.--Catching the Small-pox.--A contented Family.--The Queen's Bon-graces.--A Gentle Hermit.--Prize fights.--Bisley.--Donkeytown.--A wilful brook.

Half of north-west Surrey belongs to the soldiers. Chobham Common, Bagshot Heath, Chobham Ridges, Bisley, Pirbright, York Town, and Camberley contain among them pretty nearly all the camps, colleges, training grounds, and rifle-ranges that do not belong to Aldershot over the Hampshire border. The whole aspect of the country is military; rural outlandishness has been drilled into rigidity and pattern. The roads run as straight as if the Romans had driven them--and, indeed, some of them in the neighbourhood are Roman roads; the face of the hills and heather commons is scored with roads like figures of Euclid, triangles, oblongs, radii, rhomboids, every kind of road which enables you to go from one place to another in the shortest s.p.a.ce of time possible; which, for that matter, is a thing you frequently wish to do. n.o.body wants to linger on a road as straight as a gunshot.

Camberley, perhaps, is as good a centre as any for exploring this part of Surrey; but the border of the county is intersected with such a network of railways that it is easy to get to Bagshot or Camberley or Frimley from almost anywhere and to join the railway again where you please. One of the best walks is from Chertsey over Chobham Common to Windlesham and Bagshot, and then over Chobham Ridges down into Frimley.

Bisley is most easily visited from the railway, as thousands visit it--or rather the rifle range--every July.

Chobham Common is at its best in July, when the heather is out. But it has a day in May, under a hot sun, which is, in some ways, more distinct. The scent and the glow of the heather belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are spa.r.s.e patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking across at a group of pines edging the horizon you sometimes get a setting of black, yellow, and blue, which belongs peculiarly to this corner of Surrey. Chobham Common and its heather have often been compared to Scotland, and I can never catch the likeness. The heather is there, and the scattered pines like some of the Lowlands; but the wind is a southern wind, and never blows like Stevenson's wind on the moors "as it blows in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure." Beyond all, there is nowhere the Scottish horizon of hills.

Windlesham lies on the western edge of the Common, and straggles over a dozen short, crooked roads--an oasis among parallelograms. Once it had a reputation for growing bog-myrtle, as you may learn from Aubrey:--

"In this Parish, at Light-Water-Moor, grows great store of a plant, about a foot and a half high, called by the inhabitants Gole, but the true Name is Gale; it has a very grateful smell, like a Mixture of Bays and Myrtle, and in Latin it is called Myrtus Brabantica; it grows also in several places of this healthy Country, and is used to be put in their Chests among their Linnen."

Perhaps it may still be put there. Such a plant must have been a favourite with an excellent housewife buried in the churchyard, whose epitaph attracts wandering readers:--

She was, but words are wanting to say "What,"

Think what a wife should be, and she was "That."

If Aubrey were making another perambulation of Surrey to-day, he would forget the Windlesham bog-myrtle when he had seen the Bagshot rhododendrons. To imagine Bagshot without rhododendrons is to think of Mitcham without lavender, Epsom without salts, Farnham without hops. The other name that goes naturally with rhododendrons is Waterer, and the Waterer nurseries have the magic of gardens of fairy tales. Even in winter, on a sunny day, an Italian air blows through those tall thuias and cypresses, down those dark aisles of shining green. But in May and June, when the rhododendrons glow from pearl to crimson, and the azaleas light long stretches of flaming chrome and orange, the gardens take a glory that belongs to no other flowers.

In the days of the stage-coach Bagshot was a thriving village with an inn, perhaps the King's Arms of to-day, where thirty coaches a day changed horses. That rich traffic drew the vultures of the road, and Bagshot Heath was one of the most dreaded stretches of highway in England. d.i.c.k Turpin is said to have used the King's Arms and the Golden Farmer further down the road; it was the Golden Farmer in his day, and an unimaginative age has turned the farmer from Golden into Jolly. It is a pity, for "Jolly Farmer" means no more than White Lion or a dozen other names, but to "Golden Farmer" there belongs a story. There was a highwayman of Bagshot Heath who never would rob a purse of banknotes; he would touch nothing but gold. At Frimley at the same time lived a farmer, who never paid his debts in anything but gold. The golden farmer one day was recognised as the golden highwayman, and the inn stands close by the spot where they hanged him in chains.

Bagshot has had dealings with Stuart and other princes hunting the deer and putting up at the inns. Both the Charleses used to hunt in Bagshot Park. Once there was a pretty princes' quarrel. It was at one of the Bagshot inns that the Duke of Buckingham, at the height of his wild career, had the coolness to turn Prince Rupert's horses out of the stables and put in his own. Rupert complained to the King, and the Duke of York backed him; but Charles decided for Buckingham. Twenty years or so later, John Evelyn was at a Bagshot inn with Pepys, and went to call on a Mrs. Graham at her house in Bagshot Park. It was "very commodious and well-furnished, as she was an excellent housewife, a prudent and virtuous lady." She begged him to stay to dinner and sleep the night; she told him all about her children--how the eldest was ill with the small-pox but going on pretty well, and the others running about among infected people so as to catch the disease and get it over while they were young. Evelyn quite approved; he had had small-pox in his own family, and knew something about it.

The house in Bagshot Park was made even more commodious some forty years ago, as a residence for the Duke of Connaught.

In the Ordnance Maps, Bagshot Heath is placed south of Bagshot; in the old maps of the county, the Heath lies to the north and north-east, and would merge into what is now Chobham Common. It must have covered many more miles than the maps allow it to-day. Chobham Ridges stretch from its south-west corner, a long, sandy scar of three miles, overlooking the Bisley rifle ranges and the desert ground behind them. You are sure to be invited to admire Chobham Ridges, and no doubt twenty years ago it was fine wild country. But frequent notice-boards observing that when the red flag is flying it is dangerous to walk any further, barbed wire, excavations of gravel, and sand trampled by cavalry horses into a paste like wet coaldust may temper the warmest enthusiasm. A hideous foreground can do something to spoil even a fine view, and the view from the Ridges is certainly wide and wild. The finest view I have had from Chobham Ridges was a thunderstorm driving down over Brookwood. It was a gusty, rainy day, and the rolling white and grey clouds and the lines of driven hail rode down the sky like a charge.

I once met, on Chobham Ridges, a pleasantly contented family. In front of a sort of bivouac of bent poles covered with cloths sat an old, weatherbeaten man, tailor-fashion, making a straw beehive. Another beehive, finished, with a straw handle, lay at his side. A wood fire smoked and sputtered a yard or two away; on a flat wooden barrow near were rough cooking utensils and a dark tabby cat; two small boys, one of them with not much more on him than a large pair of trousers, brought wood and bracken for the fire. It was raining, but I was wished good afternoon with the utmost cheerfulness. Were those his boys? They were; they generally went with him. Was there a good sale for beehives round there? There was a pretty good sale; this one, with a handle, he should try to sell for two shillings; he might have to take less; a farmer let him have the straw. Yes, he was known about there. That was the boys'

cat; it generally went with them. What was that noise in the tent? That was a pair of kittens; yes, the boys liked to have them; they generally had kittens. One of them picked up the cat, upside down, with obvious affection.

Chobham itself lies five or six miles away from Chobham Ridges, south by a mile even from Chobham Common. Long before you come into the village you catch sight of the church spire, with its lead covering washed by the rain to a brilliant whiteness. Rising above the red tiles of the village into a blue sky it looks as if it had been painted yesterday.

The church has been largely rebuilt, but has some fine Norman pillars, and contains besides the tomb of the great Nicholas Heath, once Archbishop of York. He was Lord Chancellor of England under Queen Mary, and a sound Papist. When Elizabeth came to the throne he resigned, but remained "so much in the Queen's Bon-graces," as an old writer puts it, "that she visited him once a Year through his Life, believing his mistaken Piety sincere."

Two miles behind the Ridges is Frimley, with an old inn and a church to which Americans come often. Bret Harte lived his last years at a house on the hillside near, and is buried in the churchyard. But the Bret Harte of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ and _The Heathen Chinee_ does not, of course, belong to Frimley; those were earlier successes which he never equalled later.

The village politician ought to flourish at Frimley. On a board near the church I found a warning against a crime which must be becoming rarer.

"Notice is hereby given that any person or persons found damaging the parish pump will be prosecuted," it ran, but the pump I did not find.

In Aubrey's day, Frimley had the gentlest of hermits. He fled from the changes and chances of the Parliamentary wars, and led the simplest possible life in the wilds. Aubrey describes his cottage:

"At the end of this Hundred, I must not forget my n.o.ble friend, Mr.

Charles Howard's Cottage of Retirement (which he called his Castle), which lay in the middle of a vast Heathy Country, far from any Road or Village in the _Hope_ of a healthy Mountain, where, in the troublesome Times, he withdrew from the wicked World, and enjoyed himself here, where he had only one Floor, his little Dining Room, a Kitchen, a Chapel, and a Laboratory. His utensils were all of Wood or Earth; near him were about half a Dozen Cottages more, on whom he shew'd much compa.s.sion and Charity."

Frimley is a convenient stopping-place at which to join the railway. A walk for another two miles or so would bring the curious in the history of the prize ring, if any still remain, to a cla.s.sic spot on the Hampshire border. It was in a meadow half a mile from Farnborough station, selected because it would be easy to step out of one county into the next and so avoid the police, that Tom Sayers fought the huge American-Irishman Heenan, in almost the last great prize-fight fought in England. The fight came off on April 17, 1860; the most extraordinary care had been taken to keep the secret of the place of meeting, and the accounts of the proceedings, when one remembers that it all took place in the mid-Victorian quiet which was producing the _Idylls of the King_ and _Adam Bede_ are nearly unbelievable. Two monster trains carried twelve hundred spectators, peers, members of Parliament, magistrates, officers, clergymen, and gentlemen from London Bridge at dawn. Three pounds each was the price of the tickets. n.o.body except two or three in the secret knew till that morning where the fight would be; the police, mounted and on foot, lined the railway from London Bridge for sixteen miles, all armed with cutla.s.ses. The trains "turned off," as the account in _Bell's Life in London_ puts it, at Reigate, took water near Guildford, and ran into Farnborough station "after a most pleasant journey through one of the prettiest countries in England, which, illumined by a glorious sun, and shooting forth in vernal beauty, must have inspired all with intense gratification." Thus _Bell's_ eloquent reporter. Thirty-seven rounds were fought, in most of which Sayers was knocked down; his right arm was bruised and useless; Heenan could only see out of one eye. They were stopped at last, and in a few minutes Heenan was blind. _Bell's Life_ next morning came out with a special eight-page edition, the two centre pages twelve columns of tiny print--nearly 30,000 words--describing every detail of the fight, the men, and the history of boxing in general. There were some protests by sentimental people against the brutality of the thing, and _Bell_, professing a vigorous belief in this particular form of "muscular Christianity," remarks reflectively that "the whole country is not yet converted to the right way on the subject of pugilism."

Bisley, which lies on the other side of Chobham Ridges, opposite to Frimley, is, as I have said, best reached by rail; indeed, there is little inducement to any one to reach it in any other way. Twenty years ago Bisley was a tiny village. It is now a vast rifle range. The name has become shifted from the little group of cottages and the quaint church standing among the cornfields half a mile away to the huge common enclosed by the National Rifle a.s.sociation, where every year in July the great shooting prizes are won and lost. Bisley is in many ways unique. It carries on the traditions of Wimbledon, which were greater than any other rifle meeting. It can show more targets and better ranges than any other range; it attracts rifle-shots from every British possession on the face of the globe, and for a week the rain of bullets sent into the sandy banks behind the targets is almost ceaseless.

Perhaps the most remarkable sight of the "Bisley week" is the second stage of the shooting for the King's Prize, when three hundred compet.i.tors are "down" at the same time opposite a hundred targets in a row, and when the shooting is not over until 6,300 separate shots have been fired, signalled, and chalked on the blackboards by the range-markers. But the great occasion is, of course, the final stage; when the winner is chaired and cheered, and asked the usual ridiculous questions about smoking and drinking. Through all the week of the meeting the camp is a gay sight, with its white tents and flaring bunting, and the pennons blowing all down the long ranges to measure the wind for p.r.o.ne riflemen. "Lying p.r.o.ne on the back," by the way, is a phrase which creeps into many newspapers during Bisley week. It would clearly not do to speak of a "supine" rifle-shot.

One would think that the noise of a rifle-range would make the neighbourhood intolerable. But even with the wind blowing to you from the range, a few hundred yards almost silences the sound of the range. I have walked on the common between Bisley itself and the range, when firing for the King's Prize was in full progress, and was merely conscious of an echo chattering uneasily in the trees.

There have been plenty of ways of spelling Bisley. Busele, Buselagh, Bushley, Busheley, Busley, Bussley, Busly, and Bisleigh are a few of them; there are probably variations. The church has a fine old wooden porch, with an old yew opposite it; but the door is locked, and visitors are not allowed to look over the church unaccompanied. My guide was courteous and obliging; but why should any one be given all this trouble? There is a famous well near, named after St. John the Baptist, the water of which was once used for all the christenings. It is not very easily found, and the local harvesters could tell me nothing about it; but I discovered it near a farmhouse a few hundred yards south-west of the churchyard. Aubrey says that the dedication of the well made him curious to try it with oak-galls, which turned the water purple. Why should the name have impelled him to this particular curiosity? Aubrey was always testing wells with oak-galls, presumably for iron. Like many other famous wells, the water of this spring has always been said to be "colder in summer and warmer in winter" than any other spring in the neighbourhood.

Some of the names in this part of Surrey are curious. Cuckoo Hill, on the borders of Bagshot Heath, is pretty enough, and so is Gracious Pond, north-west of Chobham, though the Pond, which was once "great" and "stocked with excellent carp," is probably much smaller than it was.

Brock Hill, near Cuckoo Hill, is of course the hill of badgers, and Penny Pot ought to be, if it is not, a memory of good ale. But Donkeytown! Who would live at Donkeytown? It is, however, quite a flourishing little community, though probably it will be eventually embraced by its larger neighbour, West End, which is the nearest village to Bisley to the north, and the largest. Looking at the map, it is a little difficult to understand why the cheaper forms of village building should spread in this part of the county, which, so to speak, leads nowhere: but possibly the presence of the Gordon Boys' Home has created fresh needs which must be supplied locally. The large buildings, which cost some 24,000, were set up here in 1885, and are a home for 200 boys.

Between Bisley and Chobham runs a road with rather an odd feature. For a short distance near Chobham village the little Hale Bourne, into which the Windle Brook has here grown, runs beside it, dark and full, but almost invisible under its overarching alders and dog-roses. Just as it leaves the roadside it is joined by a strange companion. Another little stream, coming down from the north, runs into the Hale Bourne after travelling the last hundred yards of its course over the whole breadth of a road. The road, which is of gravel, and regularly used, is hard and level, and the stream turns it into a bed, perhaps eight or nine feet across. The natural course would seem to be to dig the stream a bed of its own by the side of the road; but local ingenuity has preferred to send the traveller dryshod over a stile through the field at the side of the stream, which duly proceeds in the Ordnance map down the road it has chosen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Horsell Church._]

CHAPTER XX

THE WEY VILLAGES

Old Woking.--Behind the Veil.--A Royal Palace.--Necropolis.--When not to dig a grave.--"Lumpy" Stevens.--The Ripley Road.--The Anchor and the Talbot Dog.--An Open Box.--Teal by Twilight.--Ockham.--Seven Streams.--Newark.--Jackdaws two shillings the Dozen.--The Wisley Garden.--Byfleet.--A Ghost in Velvet.

In whatever way you may choose to travel through Surrey, it is difficult to avoid making Woking a centre and a rendezvous. All the trains stop there; at least, I cannot remember ever pa.s.sing through the station without stopping, either to change trains, which generally takes three quarters of an hour, or to wait in the station until it is time to go on again, which usually takes eleven minutes. I never found anything else to do at Woking, unless it were at night, when the railway lights up wonderful vistas and avenues of coloured lamps. Then the platform can be tolerable. Once when I had a long time to wait I walked out to the church which stands rather finely on the ridge north of the railway. I thought then it was Woking church: it belongs to Horsell. It was that Woking, the Woking of the station, which for many years I imagined to be the only Woking in Surrey. One did not wish for another.

But there is another Woking, and it is as pretty and quiet as the railway Woking is noisy and tiresome. It stands with its old church on the banks of the Wey two miles away, a huddle of tiled roofs and old shops and poky little corners, as out-of-the-way and sleepy and ill-served by rail as anyone could wish. I found it first on a day in October, and walked out from the grinding machinery of the station by a field-path running through broad acres of purple-brown loam, over which plough-horses tramped and turned. It was a strange and arresting sight, for over the dark rich mould there was drawn a veil of shimmering grey light wider and less earthly than any mist or dew. The whole plough land was alive with gossamer; and Old Woking lay beyond the gossamer as if that magic veil were meant to shield it from the engines and the smoke.

Old Woking, indeed, lies in country deep enough to forget the railway altogether, and to take to the water as the highway. The Wey wanders in and out by the village, and half-a-mile away at Send the Navigation ca.n.a.l joins the Wey proper, as the little river has come to be called to distinguish it from the ca.n.a.l. The ca.n.a.l cuts businesslike corners and straight lines when the Wey, having plenty of time to spare, wants to wander an extra two or three miles about a field. From Send to Weybridge or to Guildford, down stream or up, by the ca.n.a.l towing-path or by boat, is a delightful journey in spring or summer. As good a round as can be taken walking is from Woking through Send by Newark Priory, Pyrford and Wisley to Byfleet, where the railway can be joined or the journey continued to Weybridge or back to Woking. But there are, of course, twenty ways of seeing the little villages that cl.u.s.ter round the Wey so closely in this corner of Surrey, either on foot or by boat, or rowing and walking both.

But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it pa.s.sed through the hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters, Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all events, a further token of grat.i.tude, he was to wind a call in Woking Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in Surrey built or lived in by an English king,--even by the friend of a king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to destroy.

A persistent a.s.sociation hangs to the name of the town by the station, undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Plaza-toro, "likes an interment." Much of the land near the town is owned by a company which, while it builds villas for the living, especially those who find advantages in a fast train service, has named itself Necropolis, which is grim enough for anybody living or dead. But the Necropolis Company, whether it knows it or not, did not found the tradition. That stands to the record of an old grave-digger interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small b.u.t.ton at the top, not much unlike the top of an asparagus; of these he sometimes finds two or three in a grave." He was "sure it was not a fern-root" and had with diligence traced to its root; and since he had satisfied himself of its grisly origin, he knew better than to dig a grave near where the root grew.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _View from the Bridge, Woking._]

On the maps Send looks like a single tiny village, south of Woking by half a mile. It is in reality a large parish, and since the name is corrupted simply from Sand, it is natural enough to find it dotted all round the neighbourhood with other names tacked on to it--Sendholme, Sendgrove, Sendhurst, Send Heath, and Sendmarsh. The names are scattered only less widely than the parish itself. The church stands a mile from the little hamlet of Send, on the banks of the Wey, like the churches of Pyrford and Woking, and the ruins of the great Priory of Newark, to which Send Church and her chapel at Ripley both belonged. The three villages with their churches are still, perhaps, not much larger than they were two or three hundred years ago; the Priory is shattered; only the village with the chapel has grown.

By Send churchyard stands the bole of a mighty elm, riven and iron-bound. I like to imagine that it may have been climbed by one of the great Surrey cricketers of the old days of the Hambledon Club.

Edward Stevens, the famous "Lumpy," was born at Send, and spent his boyhood there till he went to Chertsey and became, as John Nyren describes him, one of the two greatest bowlers he ever saw. "Lumpy" got his queer name either because he was, in Nyren's words, "a short man, round-shouldered and stout" or, according to another tradition, because at one of the dinners of the Hambledon Club he ate an apple-pie whole.

Surely he must have been "Lumpy" before, besides after, that achievement. Yet another story has it that he was given his name because of some trick in his bowling. Certainly his methods were not what we should call exactly orthodox to-day. It was the privilege of visiting elevens in his day to choose the pitch on which the match should be played, and that was "Lumpy's" opportunity. Nyren explains his plan:--

"He would invariably choose the ground where his b.a.l.l.s would _shoot_, instead of selecting a rising spot to bowl against, which would materially have increased the difficulty to the hitter, seeing that so many more would be caught out by the mounting of the ball.

As, however, nothing delighted the old man like bowling the wicket down with a shooting ball, he would sacrifice the other chances to the glory of that achievement. Many a time have I seen our General twig this prejudice in the old man when matched against us, and chuckle at it. But I believe it was almost the only mistake he ever made, professional or even moral, for he was a most simple and amiable creature."