Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 34

Cruikshank draws the scape-thrift roystering over punch and churchwardens' pipes. The careful and thrifty farmer is in another picture. He has no pipe, and he talks kindly to his wife, and dandles his son on his knee. There is a large ale-jug on the table, and he has had a capital dinner.

t.i.tsey, a mile and a half away under the downs, is not a village at all; just a modern church outside t.i.tsey Park, and a cottage opposite the church which was once an inn, and could swing a sign now if it wished; the frame is there. Once the church stood inside the park. That was when t.i.tsey Place belonged to the Greshams, the ancestors of its later owners, the Leveson-Gowers. Sir John Gresham, looking one day in 1776 at the old church, decided that it was too near his house: it was only thirty-five feet distant. With the insolence of the day, he knocked it down, and the modern church stands obediently outside the gates. But t.i.tsey Park has made amends. When the late Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower was at t.i.tsey he brought to light, and described in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, the foundations of a Roman villa discovered in the Park, almost touching the old road used by the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The foundations were interestingly complete, and from the ground near were dug coins, pottery, and a bronze mask. To-day the villa may be visited, but it is overgrown by weeds and elder bushes, and the visible remains are of scanty walls and tumbled pillars; rabbits, I think, see most of it.

From t.i.tsey you may climb a steep road and find Tatsfield church, separated from its scattered village, clean on the edge of the steep hill. Tatsfield church, which is old and small, stands nearly eight hundred feet above the weald, and its little churchyard, with a path in it leading to no gate, but only to a hedge, lends a curious sense of a garden. The stretch of Suss.e.x and Kent to the south is freer and wider than any other Surrey church sees; but Tatsfield, like other places with a fine view, suffers continual loss in cloudy weather. When I was last there the church stood alone on the brow, over unguessable depths of grey mist.

CHAPTER XLI

DULWICH TO WIMBLEDON

Growing London.--Cigars by Dulwich Valley.--Edward Allen, Actor, Bear-baiter, Dog-fancier and Founder of a College.--G.o.dd's Guift.--Dulwich b.u.t.tercups.--Dr. Johnson.--A Prayer in a Library.--Merton.--Wimbledon Camp.--A Miser's grave.--An opportunity for a duel.--Groans for George Ranger.--Memories of the Windmill.

Nothing is more capricious than a vast town pushing out into the country. No law binds it; no power can resist it; it will not be tempted, or denied; only one future can certainly be prophesied for it, that where it comes it will remain. Looking at London and its surroundings on a new map and an old, it is an arresting thing to trace--almost to watch--the growth of the inexorable black ink on what a decade or two before was inviolate white. There is nothing orderly about it, nothing mathematical. London does not grow as the circles spread from a splash in a pond, nor regularly and certainly as geologists say stones grow in the soil--a fascinating and rather dreadful secret of growth. London grows suddenly by fits and starts. Once, perhaps, the town crept out quietly, a field at a time, a new road in a twelvemonth.

Now it catches great parks and manors. But which way it will go out to catch them you cannot guess. It may walk threateningly, and it may leave alone, as it has left the deepest of hayfields alone in Kent much nearer London than in Surrey. One rule, perhaps, it keeps relentlessly; it will never leave country between London old and London new. The Londons join at once.

Ruskin, in _Praeterita_, shows you London striding by Herne Hill to Croydon. Herne Hill should be a hill with a heronry on it, but the name is new; it was King's Hill when John Speed made his map in the days of James I. But Herne Hill was in the country when Ruskin knew it. Norwood was a hill; Dulwich was a valley. "Central in each amphitheatre, the crowning glory of Herne Hill was accordingly, that, after walking along its ridge southward from London through a mile of chestnut, lilac, and apple trees, hanging over the wooden palings on each side--suddenly the trees stopped on the left, and out one came on the top of the field sloping down to the south into Dulwich valley--open field animate with cow and b.u.t.tercup, and below, the beautiful meadows and high avenues of Dulwich; and beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood hills; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going down to the left, always so warm that invalids could be sheltered there in March, when to walk elsewhere would have been death to them; and so quiet, that whenever I had anything difficult to compose or think of, I used to do it rather there than in our own garden. The great field was separated from the path and road only by light wooden open palings, four feet high, needful to keep the cows in. Since I last composed, or meditated there, various improvements have taken place; first the neighbourhood wanted a new church, and built a meagre Gothic one with a useless spire, for the fashion of the thing, at the side of the field; then they built a parsonage behind it, the two stopping half the view in that direction. Then the Crystal Palace came, for ever spoiling the view through all its compa.s.s, and bringing every show-day from London a flood of pedestrians down the footpath who left it filthy with cigar ashes for the rest of the week: then the railroads came, and expatiating roughs by every excursion train, who knocked the palings about, roared at the cows, and tore down what branches of blossom they could reach over the palings on the enclosed side. Then the residents on the enclosed side built a brick wall to defend themselves.

Then the path got to be insufferably hot as well as dirty; and was gradually abandoned to the roughs, with a policeman on watch at the bottom. Finally, this year, a six foot high close paling has been put down the other side of it, and the processional excursionist has the liberty of obtaining what notion of the country air and prospect he may, between the wall and that, with one bad cigar before him, another behind him, and another in his mouth."

Dulwich valley, and cows and b.u.t.tercups--it has still an uneasy echo of the town. Somewhere, surely, there always broods over Dulwich the spirit of the founder of its college. He is the Londoner of Londoners, and the oddest combination of characters that ever left a name as pious benefactor of a school. Edward Allen, or Alleyn as his college spells him, was to begin with an Elizabethan actor. He was one of a company of strolling players before he was twenty; he was twenty-two when he had somehow made himself a "gentleman," to be so described on a deed of gift; and when he was twenty-six, he was such an actor that Ben Jonson compared him to Roscius and Cicero, and Thomas Nash wrote that "Not Roscius or Aesope, those tragedians admired before Christ was borne, could ever performe more in action than famous Ned Allen." Perhaps he made his money as an actor-manager; perhaps he married money, for his wife was the daughter of a p.a.w.nbroker (who was also a theatre-proprietor and one of the grooms of the Queen's chamber); perhaps he began lending money early in life himself. He and his father-in-law, when James succeeded Elizabeth, were made chief masters of "his Majesty's games of Beares, Bulls and doggs"; they had a menagerie in the Paris Gardens at Southwark where they kept wolves and lions; they worried bulls and had dog-fights, and showed "pleasant sport with the horse and ape and whipping of the blind beare." Money rolled in, with the apes and the bears and the loans, and in October, 1605, Allen, by this time full esquire, bought the manor and lands of Dulwich for 4,900. Eight years later he left Southwark for Dulwich, and set about founding his college.

Aubrey has a quaint legend of the foundation. How should an actor found a college? The devil was in it somewhere. Tradition told "that Mr.

_Alleyne_, being a Tragedian, and one of the Original Actors in many of the celebrated _Shakespear's_ Plays, in one of which he play'd a Daemon, with six others, and was in the midst of the Play surpriz'd by an _Apparition_ of the _Devil_, which so worked on his Fancy, that he made a Vow which he perform'd at this Place." That was the beginning of Dulwich College, according to one story; according to another, it was only because Allen had begun so earnestly, and tied himself up by so many legal contracts that he did not repent of his vow and take back all he had given. That was when, a widower of fifty-seven, he wanted to marry a girl of twenty. She was John Donne's daughter Constance, and perhaps Donne felt bound to ask for liberal settlements. However, the settlements were arranged somehow, and the college was founded. The "colledge of G.o.d's gift" was his name for it, and as its founder he described himself as "chief master, ruler and overseer of all and singular over games of beares, bulls, mastive doggs and mastive b.i.t.c.hes." His blood-relations were to be Master and Warden, if possible, and so, for many years, they were.

One of the statutes explains the name "G.o.d's gift." There were to be twelve poor scholars, chosen partly by merit and partly by chance. When a place became vacant three or four children were to be elected by the parish vestries, and of these two were to be chosen by the Master and Warden, and then the two were to draw lots:--

"The manner of drawinge of the said lot shall be thus: Two equal small rowleses of paper to be indifferently made and rolled up, in one of which rolls the wordes 'G.o.dd's Guift' are to be written, and the other rowle is to be left blank and so put into a boxe; which boxe shalbe thrice shaken up and downe, and the elder person of those two that are elected to drawe the first lot, and the younger person the second; and whiche of them draweth the lott wherein the wordes 'G.o.d's Guift' are written shalbe forthwith admitted."

Another gift followed Allen's. When Sir Francis Bourgeois died early in the last century he left his fine collection of pictures to the school.

The gallery is open to the public; but a description, in the s.p.a.ce I have here, could be no more than a list of names.

Dulwich still has some of its fields and b.u.t.tercups; the playing fields are a pleasant oasis which is the last vision of sunlight and gra.s.s for the traveller on the Chatham and Dover railway before plunging into the murk of the Penge tunnel. Of its neighbours to the west, Streatham cl.u.s.ters about a tangle of railways; Streatham, which was deep country for Dr. Johnson, knocked down, in 1863, the house and cut up the park that Dr. Johnson knew when they belonged to the Thrales. He would not recognise the church--the church to which he bade farewell with a kiss--it has been rebuilt. The library, which, if it were standing to-day with the books that Johnson read, would be the most sought for room in Surrey, went, of course, with the house. Eighty years before it fell Johnson had parted from it with a prayer. "Help me," he prayed, "that I may, with humble and sincere thankfulness, remember the comforts and conveniences which I have enjoyed at this place; and that I may resign them with holy submission, equally trusting in Thy protection when Thou givest, and when Thou takest away." That was the library which was destroyed only forty-five years ago. But Streatham, when it knocked down the Thrales' house, had very good authority for parting with all it had of Dr. Johnson. Mrs. Thrale would not have minded. She sold all the letters Dr. Johnson wrote her for a matter of five hundred pounds.

Between Streatham and Wimbledon London strides out in patches. It has not yet taken in Mitcham, which has a fine green with memories of great Surrey cricket, and which grows all manner of scented flowers, lavender and mint and rosemary and everything old-fashioned for herbalists and perfumers and ladies' sachets and linen-chests. But Merton, north-west towards Wimbledon, has been caught fast. Merton church, in which Nelson used to worship, and which has his hatchment on the wall, above fine cross beams of oak, stands among brand-new roofs and roads. Opposite the church is the forlornest thing; a house which once was Sheridan's, and which is now the warehouse of a shop, and hangs in its hall and rooms printed calico. The windows are broken and cobwebby, the garden is a ruin, but the calico, which you may buy at a shop in the town, is fresh and very brightly printed. Francis Nixon, the founder of Merton's calico-printing, which is quite an industry, lies in the churchyard.

And so, by a ring from east to west, where London joins the Surrey countryside, we come to Wimbledon; Wimbledon old and new, as old as a camp which may have been Saxon, as young as yesterday's new villa. The camp, it is true, exists no longer. It has had more learned essays written over it than any in Surrey; it has been claimed as belonging to Ca.s.sivelaunus, it has been argued to be a Roman camp, and it has been urged that it marks the site of a battle between Saxon and Saxon for the possession of Surrey. It was a war camp, pretty certainly, from its shape, which was almost exactly circular. But you can see the shape no longer. Wimbledon was unfortunate enough to see its famous camp fall into the hands of a Mr. Sawbridge Erle Drax, and he, in 1875, dared to level its d.y.k.es with the ground, to cut down its mound, and fill in its ditch. Of acts of wanton and insolent destruction, this stands supreme in the history of the county.

Wimbledon has held a great house, and has seen royal progresses which cost the lord of the manor a fortune. Thomas Cromwell was one of the lords of the manor, and after him came Catherine Parr: but the great days were those of the Cecils. Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's treasurer, lived at intervals at the Rectory House, and some of Elizabeth's summer excursions came to Wimbledon; she stayed with her treasurer and with his son. But the Cecil who belongs most to Wimbledon is not the treasurer whose nod summed up the wisdom of a Parliament, nor any Lord of Burghley; but a younger son who was a soldier and a sailor. He was Admiral and Marshal-General of the forces sent by James I. and Charles I. against the Spaniards; he was made Lord Wimbledon, and his memory on the records of the army of his day is that his name of Cecil was punned into General Sit-still when he was a soldier of almost foolhardy personal daring, and that he re-introduced into the army the "old English march." There was "one certaine measure," a royal warrant informs us, which had been lost "through the negligence and carelessness of drummers," although it had been "by the approbation of strangers themselves, confessed and acknowledged the best of marches." This march, at the instance of Lord Wimbledon, was beaten in the king's presence at Greenwich in 1610 and ordered to be exactly and precisely observed by all drummers in the kingdom of England and princ.i.p.ality of Wales, without any addition or alteration whatsoever. We do not hear it in these days of battles without drums and colours; but we do not fight much better, perhaps, without the drums.

The old Wimbledon church was demolished; the new church was built in 1786. It has many monuments, but the grave which fascinates is the tomb neither of a great statesman nor a good man. It is apart in a far corner; over it is laid a huge slab of black stone, perhaps half a foot thick, and the stone tells you that under it lies the body of "John Hopkins, Esquire, familiarly known as Vulture Hopkins." Misers have had hard things said of them often enough; of Hopkins Pope wrote that "he lived worthless, but died worth three hundred thousand pounds," and, reflecting on the "Use of Riches," Pope made a couplet on his funeral:--

"When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend The wretch who living saved a candle's end."

But those legends belong to paper and books. They are less easily destroyed than an epithet engraved on a stone; but who of deliberation would carve an insult, as this is carved, for a dead man?

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Golf House and Windmill, Wimbledon Common._]

Wimbledon will never belong to the town so long as it keeps its common.

It is the wildest thing near London. It is almost as wild and lonely a place to-day as when in Georgian and early Victorian days statesmen and n.o.blemen chose it as a fashionable and convenient ground for duelling.

The common has seen more than one historic duel. The Duke of York and Colonel Lennox met there in 1789; the Duke received the Colonel's fire, and the ball grazed his hair, but he did not fire in return. Pitt fought a duel with a member of Parliament on Putney Heath north of the common in 1798; each fired twice at twelve paces and hit nothing. Sir Francis Burdett and Mr. John Paull fought in 1807, wounded each other and went back together to London in the same carriage. Canning and Castlereagh fought in 1809, and Grattan, two years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, received Lord Londonderry's fire and himself fired in the air. Another Grattan could meet another Irish peer to-day, and if they chose their places well, n.o.body would hear a pistol at all. The bracken and the heather slope into dells and valleys which would shelter three duels in a morning; you could deliver a salvo and hardly scare a nursery maid.

But Wimbledon's longest acquaintance with firearms was in the days before the National Rifle a.s.sociation moved to Bisley. Queen Victoria fired the first shot on July 2nd, 1860, when she pulled a scarlet cord and scored a bull's-eye with a Whitworth rifle; a red and white flag was shown in an instant, you read, and "three points were scored to the Queen of England." The last shot was fired in 1889. I went to that meeting as a schoolboy, and am even now filled with an awe that belongs to s.p.a.cious days, remembering that we were told that on the last evening the whole camp was to give three great groans for "George Ranger," the Duke of Cambridge, whose duty it had been to declare the common unfitted for the distant probings of misdirected Martini-Henry bullets. Those concerted, resentful, thousand-throated groans seemed a tremendous nightly business; there were camp-fires, one imagined, from which the circular groan would ascend, a rumble which should expel a ministry, unseat a prince. Not very much came of the groaning, I suppose; certainly the Volunteers liked the Bisley ranges, next year, much better. But the old windmill, which looked on in its time at thirty full meetings, still surely misses the week when the dells and the long stretches of heather rattled from the first gun to sunset with the crackle of Martinis and match rifles. The windmill watches red-coated golfers to-day, playing to some of the prettiest greens in the south of England; but the days for the windmill were when the tents were white about the heather, and when they sold Stewart's Verniers where to-day a more leisured generation misses short putts.

CHAPTER XLII

THE SURREY SIDE

Mortlake.--The Boat Race.--A duel.--Putney-by-the-sea.--Punch and Judy.--Kennington.--Gallows and f.a.ggots.--The proper way to subscribe to a Cricket Club.--Camberwell Beauties.--The Tradescants and their Dodo.--Mr. Jeffery Saffery.--The old Surrey Side.--The Tabard.--The Old Road.

The Surrey side begins, perhaps, if it begins anywhere definitely, at Mortlake, where the Boat-race ends. By Kew and Richmond the Thames runs for pleasure-boats, gigs and skiffs with shining oars. Below Mortlake the river hears the forge and the dockyard; torpedo-boats drive out into the tide; it is different water, London water, under their bows. The four miles of the Thames of the Boat-race mark the gradual change. On a rough day the two eights ride through waves which are less like a river than a sea; and perhaps the rough water has made some of the best history of the race. When Cambridge sank in 1859 she was waterlogged early in the race; she could not have won, but the steamers following the eights prevented her even from pa.s.sing the winning-post, by swamping her with their wash. Oxford won, but Cambridge's was an equal honour.

The crew rowed on as the boat went under the water; and the name that will always belong to that race is that of a future Lord Justice, Mr.

A.L. Smith. Cambridge and Mr. A.L. Smith went on rowing in the water, knowing that Mr. Smith could not swim. On another rough day, thirty-nine years later, the race was lost and won by the toss; the Cambridge boat filled at the start, and Oxford rowed in out of the wind. Other historic races belong to the curve of the river above Barnes Bridge; three in particular, in 1886, 1896, and 1901, when the crew that was behind at Barnes Bridge pa.s.sed the other crew at the bend of the river and won.

Of other historic races, perhaps the wins of the two crews in which a Goldie turned the fortunes of his University will always possess peculiar glories. The first Goldie, in 1870, ended a series of nine Oxford wins. Another Goldie, in 1899, helped Cambridge to end another series, also of nine. The name and the two nines in the date surely made the feat inevitable.

The river water does not change, but the banks have altered from gra.s.s and reeds to concrete and stone. It was a mile or so from Barnes Bridge, in a field near Barn Elms (but who could guess where?) that the second Duke of Buckingham fought and shot Lord Shrewsbury. The Duke left behind him one of the wickedest lives of the most dissolute Courts of English history; but he left nothing viler than the name of Lord Shrewsbury's Countess, who rode in boy's clothes as a page to the duelling ground, and then held her seducer's horse while he shot her husband. They left him dying and rode back together. That was in 1667; an earlier and a kindlier a.s.sociation of Barn Elms is a resident who afterwards died at Chertsey, Abraham Cowley; later came Jacob Tonson, bibliophile and publisher of Pope and Dryden. And it was at Barn Elms, too, that the Kit-Kat Club, the thirty who dined at Christopher Kat's in the Strand, and bound themselves to uphold the Protestant succession, met and dined and looked at their portraits painted by Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller. The Kit-Kat portraits are now at Bayfordbury, near Hertford, and for the last fifteen years Barn Elms has housed, not publishers or painters, but polo players. The Ranelagh Club was born to help Hurlingham over the water provide grounds for the youngest of the great games naturalised in England. Nine years later Barnes welcomed another club, Roehampton, which added three more grounds to the four of Hurlingham and Ranelagh.

The Boat-race finishes at Mortlake; it starts at Putney, and Putney is the headquarters and the rendezvous of many clubs and rowing men. The Surrey bank from Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses, boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by br.i.m.m.i.n.g tides, sometimes broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return of the practising crews, and to watch the blue-scarved oarsmen in and out of the boathouses and the balcony windows. There is somewhere an air of the sea-side about that stretch of gravel and open river bank; it is the sunshine on the varnish of the boats, perhaps, or a smell of tar in the wind, or of salt from the weeds that the tides leave dry; or is it the banjo of the occasional n.i.g.g.e.r blacked to get pence from the waiting crowd? On a September day a year or two ago, when Cambridge within a week was to race Harvard, I saw on that strip of road one of the very last of the genuine London Punch-and-Judy shows. Toby, of course, had gone; dogs may sit no more in frills to cadge for coppers. But the rest of it was correct enough; the chequered canvas, of the proper shade of blue, draped the wooden frame discreetly at the right moment; there was the old interval of suspense, the old, the piercing squeal, the dexterous c.o.c.k of the red legs over the balcony; the crocodile came and the hangman, and the devil; I watched them all. So did two of the Harvard crew, and did not know their luck. Nothing of English pride stirred in the blood of those two stalwart young men; they walked off even before the turn of the hangman.

East of Putney the river is a thoroughfare of London, and the names along the Surrey side are London names. Lambeth Palace has already included itself in Mrs. E.T. Cook's _Highways and Byways in London_, and so has Vauxhall, and the church of St. Saviour's, Southwark, the finest of all churches which once looked over Surrey fields. But Kennington, no matter how near it lies to London omnibuses and London tube railways, can never be anywhere but in Surrey; Kennington with its memories of the 'Forty-five, and the Chartists, and, a much stronger link with county history than mere memories of the past, Kennington Oval, the visible, flat, n.o.ble cricket ground which stands for the story of all Surrey cricket of the past half century. The Oval is scarcely half a mile from Vauxhall Bridge and the river; but it is the centre of the county for those who watch Surrey cricket.

Once the Oval was part of Kennington Common; even in 1845 the solid road which circles the ground was no more than a ditch and a quickset hedge.

But a hundred years before 1845! Cricket, even then, was a game in Surrey. Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, and father of George III, was introducing his favourite pastime to the n.o.bles and the gentlemen. In 1737 Kent played Surrey and London on Kennington Common, and round the pavilion set up for the Prince of Wales there was so great a crush of spectators that a poor woman fell and had her leg broken. The Prince gave her ten guineas. That was a cricketer. And yet, within eight years, Kennington was back among the vilest barbarities of the Middle Ages. The 'Forty-five was to set a mark of ferocious savagery in Kennington annals hardly surpa.s.sed by Tyburn. The Earl of Kennington (that, with the nickname of 'Butcher,' was one of the t.i.tles of the Duke of c.u.mberland) had sent to gaol in Southwark nine officers whom he had taken prisoner at Carlisle, fighting for Charles Edward Stuart. They were ordered for execution, and on July 30, at eleven o'clock in the morning, were taken on three sledges to Kennington Common. The gallows were there, the block, the f.a.ggots. The prisoners were allowed to pray among themselves.

Then they were pinioned and placed in the cart under the gallows; the fires were lighted, the cart moved away. Before they were dead they were cut down, beheaded, disembowelled and their hearts burned in the fire; the executioner, throwing in the heart of the last, who was no more than a boy, cried 'G.o.d save King George!' Part of the crowd answered with a shout; the rest looked on in sorrow. The boy who suffered with the elder men was James Dawson, and Shenstone wrote a ballad on his death. He had been engaged to be married to a young girl, who insisted on seeing her lover's last moments. When all was over, she threw herself back in the coach, called to him that she followed him, and as she spoke, died.

Another gathering on Kennington Common might have had more wholesale consequences. The Chartists met there in 1848. Feargus O'Connor was their leader, and he and the pet.i.tion which the delegates were to take to the House of Commons went out in two large cars. The pet.i.tion went first, drawn by four horses, and piled up like bales of cotton; the car was decorated with flags, banners, and mottoes, and so were the horses.

Then came O'Connor and the delegates, equally superb in bunting. They drove down Holborn and across Blackfriars Bridge, and on Kennington Common an enormous crowd, between 15,000 and 50,000, the different accounts say, received the banners and the delegates with loud cheers.

But no bloodshed followed. O'Connor was informed that the crowd could not be allowed to march to the House of Commons, where, indeed, they would have found the Duke of Wellington with cannon. The Chartist leader made two eloquent speeches, and the chairman declared the meeting at an end. The delegates' horses were whipped up so hurriedly that the delegates fell to the bottom of the cart; three cabs drove up and took charge of the bales of pet.i.tions, and the meeting was at an end. One detail which the contemporary historian gives of the finish has a fascinating echo half of Ainsworth, half of d.i.c.kens. "The horses became restive and began to kick. Then was distinctly heard from many quarters the peculiar cry of the young London thieves." What was it like? Can anybody do it to-day?

The great crowds at Kennington to-day come to see better sights than carts and banners. Surrey cricket has focussed itself at Kennington; rather curiously, it has happened that Surrey plays cricket to-day on no other ground. Kent and Suss.e.x, two neighbours, play their county matches on three grounds or four; Surrey, which has traditions at Mitcham and Dorking, has shrunk back to Kennington only. And Kennington, long ago, was nearly lost to cricket. A year after the Chartists had crowded over the Common, the County Club was in debt for 70. The story of the paying of the debt and the revival of the club has the real ring. The club met and were in despair; they could not hope, with such a debt, to play matches. The Bishop of Tasmania, in his entertaining little _History of Kennington_, tells (in 1889) the story:--

"The meeting almost decided to break up the club; and I suppose, had such a vote been carried, the Oval would have been at once built over and some very happy memories of Kennington would never have existed at all. It is to the present Lord Bessborough that we owe the continuance of Cricket upon the Oval. He was Vice-President at the time, and suggested that the 70 should be paid off by allowing six gentlemen to become Life Members by paying down 12 apiece. A gentleman present next said 'who would pay 12 to be a Life Member of a bankrupt Club?' 'I will,' said Old Mr. Cressingham, one of the oldest members: and 'I will,' said five others, of whom Mr. Ponsonby was one. Lord Bessborough, in writing of this memorable meeting, adds--'Looking back to that distant day I fear I have been a bad bargain to the Club by becoming a Life Member for 12.'"

Nothing of the country and little of the past belongs to Kennington's neighbours. Stockwell, which perhaps sees a hansom as often as a motor-car, once named as a native one of the greatest of English racehorses. Camberwell, when willows grew about a village stream, long since dry, named a b.u.t.terfly; but Camberwell Beauties, though they sleep sometimes in Surrey woodstacks, and flaunt their white-laced wings in Surrey sunshine perhaps twice in a summer, fly no more by brooks in Camberwell. Perhaps in the old days the Tradescants, who lived near Vauxhall, used to catch them. The Tradescants, father and son, were great naturalists and collectors, and at their house they got together the museum of rarities which after their death came to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. John Tradescant the son made a list of them, and though Oxford ungratefully hid the collection in an outhouse and only discovered it again in 1882, many of the curiosities he mentions move undergraduates to surprise to-day. In the original list are strange fowls. 'Some kindes of birds, their egges, beaks, feathers, clawes, and spurres' begin the list of chapters, and then come a crocodile and an 'egge given for a dragon's egge,' and 'Easter egges of the patriarchs of Jerusalem.' 'Two feathers of the phoenix tayle' I do not remember at Oxford, nor 'a cherrystone holding ten dozen tortoisesh.e.l.l combs, made by Edward Gibbons.' But I think the Ashmolean collection still holds the 'flea chains of silver and gold, with 300 links apiece, and yet but an inch long,' and, of course, the Oxford dodo's skin is famous. It was not a dodo, though, to John Tradescant. It was a 'dodar, from the island of Mauritius: it is not able to flie, being so big.' The wrong thing about it all is that the name of the Tradescants ought to be a.s.sociated with the collection, and not the name Ashmole. It was never Ashmole's to give to Oxford. Ashmole was a rich and greedy neighbour, and though Tradescant left his museum to his widow and after her death to Oxford, he, the polite Ashmole, bullied Mrs. Tradescant until she signed a paper stating that she had begged him to take the museum for his own. She would have signed anything, poor lady, to get rid of him. She suffered so much from persecution from the generous donor of her husband's museum to Oxford, that she drowned herself in a pond; a few months before having signed a statement that she had 'caused a great heap of earth rubbish to be laid against his garden wall'--doubtless she caused nothing of the sort--'so high that on the 1st day of August last, in the night, by the help thereof, it is strongly presumed that thieves got over the same and robbed the said Mr. Ashmole of 32 c.o.c.ks and hens.'

Easternmost of Surrey in London, Rotherhithe lies about the docks of the Pool. The Pool should have a book to itself, and will not go into mine; but of Rotherhithe ash.o.r.e there is a record which deserves keeping.

Aubrey, or his later editor, gives a list of the Rotherhithe residents who contributed to the rebuilding of St. Mary's church, and the names, sorted and cla.s.sified, should be set aside for a future d.i.c.kens. Here are a few of them:--Bloice, Figgins, Cuthbert Finkle, Gollop, Cronker, Shadrick Lifter, Walter Mell, Mr. Jeremiah Rosher, Mr. Jonas Shish, Mr.

Nathaniel Stiffon, Mr. Matthias Wallraven, Mr. Scroggs, Mr. Jeffery Saffery, Mr. Volentine Teed.

Bermondsey, which has kept the Tooley Street of the Three Tailors, but elsewhere preserves names only instead of stones, has memories of one of the three Surrey Abbeys. It was founded as a priory for Cluniac monks by Alwin Child, a citizen of London, in 1082, and it became an Abbey some three hundred years later. Bermondsey Priory had a church of some note, for in it was a crucifix which the old chronicles describe vaguely as having been found near the Thames. The crucifix attracted special pilgrimages, and when the monasteries were ended, it disappeared. 'There was the pictor of Saynte Saviour that had stood in Barmsey Abbey many yeres in Southwarke takyn down,' a diarist writes at the time. All that remains of the church and crucifix is the name, which has come to St.

Saviour's, or the church of St. Mary Overie--the style now is to call it Southwark Cathedral. St. Saviour's belongs to London highways, as I have said, but I may take for Surrey the lines, not already quoted for London, I think, which are set on the tomb of Richard Humble, Alderman of London and ancestor of Wards and Dudleys. The tomb has busied many pens, the verses remain to be read--are they too well known to be written out again?

Like to the damask rose you see Or like the blossom on the tree, Or like the dainty flower of May, Or like the morning of the day, Or like the sun or like the shade, Or like the gourd which Jonas had,