The Bath Road Part 3

These little figures were represented as clad in a peculiar Dutch-like uniform; the boy, I think, blue, and the girl a quite painful orange, whenever they repainted her, which was seldom. This was, in fact, some sort of charity school, and it was as dismal a place as all charitable inst.i.tutions were apt to be in our grandfathers' time, when it was criminal to be poor, and eleemosynary establishments, in consequence, were designed as much like prisons as might well be.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KENSINGTON HIGH STREET, SUMMER SUNSET.]

At the time of which I speak it was quite necessary to go to London to do any save the most ordinary shopping, and if one had told the "oldest inhabitant" that a time was presently coming when it would be possible not only to order, but to purchase and take away on the instant, from Kensington shops the rarest and most costly things that the heart of man (or woman either, for that matter) could desire, that ancient individual would have thought he was being told fairy tales.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "OLDEST INHABITANT."]

I knew that oldest inhabitant, who has been long since gathered to his fathers. His was a quaint figure, and he was stored with many reminiscences. He could "mind the time" when Gore House was occupied by the Countess of Blessington, and when Louis Napoleon, then a young man about town, was a frequent visitor to that somewhat Bohemian establishment. Also he remembered the first 'bus to make its appearance in Kensington. For myself, I certainly remember the time here when omnibuses were few and far between. Now there are generally half a dozen waiting at any time you like to mention by St. Mary Abbot's, which has become, in omnibus slang, "Kensington Church," while the pavements are thronged by fashionable crowds all day long and every day. Not least remarkable is the long row of bicycles drawn up against the kerb opposite the aforesaid emporia, in charge of a diminutive boy in b.u.t.tons, the patrons of these great shops being inveterate "bikists."

[Sidenote: _THE NEW KENSINGTONS_]

Now that towering hotels and flats have been built in Kensington High Street, the old-time distinction of the "Old Court Suburb" is fast becoming obliterated, and there are more Kensingtons than were ever dreamed of years ago. North Kensington, and South and West Kensington--which, shorn of these would-be aristocratic aliases, are just Notting Hill, Brompton, and Hammersmith--were just so many orchards and market-gardens not so many years ago; and I declare that it is not so long since there was an orchard in Allen Street, off the High Street, where red-brick flats now stand, while, in that chosen realm of flatland, Earl's Court, the cabbages and lettuces grew amazingly. Cromwell Road was not built at the time to which my memory harks back, and where the ornate Natural History Museum now stands there was a huge gravel-pit, in which were many ponds and swamps, where wild gra.s.ses grew and slimy newts increased and multiplied greatly. Gore House, which had been Lady Blessington's, was still standing in the early years of my recollection, and the Albert Hall, which now occupies the site of it, was, consequently, undreamt of. The last use to which it had been put was to be converted, by Alexis Soyer, into a huge restaurant for the millions who frequented the Great Exhibition of 1851, which I do _not_ recollect, thank goodness!

[Sidenote: _KENSINGTON HOUSE_]

There were other landmarks in the Kensington of my youth which have long since been swept away. For instance, where Victoria Road joins the Gore there was a tall archway leading to a hippodrome, or horse repository.

Where it stood there is now an extremely "elegant"--as they used to say when I was younger--hotel. Even greater changes have taken place where the Gore joins the High Street. Where that collection of palatial houses called Kensington Court now stands, there stood years ago a huge old brick mansion which in its last days experienced some strange vicissitudes of fortune, among which its last two changes--into a school for young ladies, and finally into a lunatic asylum--were not the least remarkable. There was in those days a most dreadful slum at the back of this mansion, known locally as the "Rookery." Londoners should know the history of Kensington Court and its site, and how Baron Albert Grant, in the heyday of his financial success, pulled down the old mansion, and built himself on its ruins a lordly (and vulgar) pleasure-palace, which he called "Kensington House." The memory of it springs fresh to this day, and it requires little effort to recall the place as it stood, in all its pristine pretentiousness, until 1880, or thereabouts. It was built by the redoubtable Baron to shame Kensington Palace, which it exactly faced, and if gilt railings, fresh white stone, and big plate-gla.s.s windows may be said to have put the old Palace out of countenance, then Kensington Palace was shamed indeed, but only with that very questionable kind of shame which overtakes the poor patrician confronted by a swaggering, pursy millionaire. At any rate, Kensington Palace is avenged, for not one stone now remains of that pretentious house. It lay back some little distance from the road, from which it was screened by a tall iron railing, with gilded spikes and globular gas-lamps at intervals, of a type closely resembling those in use on the Metropolitan and District Railways. It is not a lovely type, but it is one still greatly favoured in the suburbs of Clapham and Blackheath.

This ornate palisade of cast-iron, which pretended to be wrought, once pa.s.sed, a gravel drive led up to the house. Ah, that house! It possessed all the flamboyant glories of Grosvenor Gardens and more, and was of a style called variously by the building journals of that day, French or Italian Renaissance. "Renaissance" is a term which, like charity, covers a mult.i.tude of sins, and if you want to cloak a collection of architectural enormities, why, you term it Renaissance, and, by implication, insult the great French and Italian masters of the New Birth. It needs not to trouble about the details of that house, save to say that polished granite pillars were well to the fore, and that portentous Mansard roofs in fish-scale lead coverings, with spikes, finished off its sky-line. For long years Kensington House remained unlet, because of the immense sums its up-keep would have entailed. Millionaires, South African and other varieties, were not so plentiful years ago as they are now. So, after some years of forlorn waiting for the occupier who never came, Kensington House, never once inhabited, was at last demolished, and its materials sold. It is said that the grand marble staircase went to grace the gilded salons of Madame Tussaud's waxen court, and certainly the spiky railings, with their gas-lamps, were sold to furnish an imposing entrance to Sandown Park Racecourse, where they may be seen to this day by the cyclist who wheels through Esher, down the Portsmouth Road.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THACKERAY'S HOUSE, YOUNG STREET.]

[Sidenote: _JOHN LEECH_]

There still stands, off High Street, the grimy double-bayed house, now numbered 16, Young Street, but formerly No. 13, in which Thackeray wrote "Vanity Fair;" but most others of the old literary and artistic haunts of the "Old Court Suburb" have been demolished. "The Terrace"--that long row of old-fashioned houses extending from Wright's Lane westward--was pulled down but six years ago. Those houses were not beautiful, but they were at least pleasingly old-fashioned, and in No. 6 lived and died John Leech, an early victim of that peculiarly modern malady, "nerves." Some amazingly up-to-date shops now occupy the spot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "WHITE HORSE." TRADITIONAL RETREAT OF ADDISON.]

Long ago, the other old-fashioned houses on this side of the road lost their forecourt gardens, over which other shops were built; and beyond the memory of any one now living there stood a little country inn at the corner of what is now the Earl's Court Road; a rural retreat called the "White Horse," to which Addison withdrew from the cold splendours of Holland House opposite. He had contracted an unhappy marriage with the Countess of Warwick, the mistress of that splendid mansion, which happily yet remains; but stole away to this more congenial haunt, and drank his intellect away.

Beyond this, all was country road, in the coaching days, until Hammersmith was reached. The first outpost of that now unsavoury place was a rural inn called the "Red Cow," opposite Brook Green.

IX

[Sidenote: _THE "RED COW"_]

The "Red Cow," pulled down December, 1897, rejoiced once upon a time in the reputation of being a house of call for the peculiar gentry who infested the suburban reaches of the great western highways out of London.

It was not by any means the resort of the aristocracy of the profession of highway robbery; but a place where the cly-fakers, the footpads, and the lower strata of thievery foregathered to learn the movements of travellers and retail them to the fine gentlemen who, mounted on the best of horses, and clad in gorgeous raiment, occupied the higher walks of the art at a safer distance down the road. The house was built in the sixteenth century, and was a quaint, though unpretending roadside tavern with a high-pitched, red-tiled roof. It possessed vast stables, for it was situated, in early coaching days, at the end of the first stage out of London. It may well be imagined, then, that the stable-yard was a scene of constant excitement in the good old days, for here were kept a goodly supply of strong roadsters for the coaches running to Bath, Bristol, Wells, Bridgewater, and Exeter, and here the elegant samples of horseflesh which had brought the coaches at a spanking pace from the "Belle Sauvage,"

on Ludgate Hill, were changed for animals who could do the rough work of the country roads. They were not particularly fine to look at--especially those used on the night coaches--and it was often a matter of surprise that they were able to keep up the pace required, and that the greasy old harness stood the strain. It has been said that in one of the old-fashioned rooms of the "Red Cow" E. L. Blanchard wrote his "Memoirs of a Malacca Cane." In the last thirty years or so of its existence the "Red Cow" was a favourite pull-up for the waggoners from the market gardens, who in the small hours of the morning rumbled past with piled-up loads of fruit, vegetables, and flowers for Covent Garden, and halted on their return for a refresher of bread and cheese and beer. Then, too, the hay-carts used to halt here, and the sight of them, with the horses drinking from the old wooden water-trough beside the kerb-stone, underneath the swinging sign, was like a picture of Morland's come to life, and agreeably leavened that general air of fried-fish, drink, and dissipation which lingers in the memory as the most characteristic features of modern Hammersmith.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "RED COW," HAMMERSMITH. DEMOLISHED 1897.]

The travellers who were whirled through this place in the Augustan age of coaching were soon in the country again, on the way to Turnham Green, along the Chiswick High Road. That fine broad thoroughfare is now bordered by an almost continuous row of modern shops, erected, many of them, where barns and ricks stood less than ten years ago. Such was the appearance of "Young's Corner," indeed, until quite recently. That corner, let it be said for the information of those not well acquainted with the topography of the western suburbs, is the spot where the road from Shepherd's Bush joins the highway. Let it further be placed on record, before "historic doubts" have had time to gather about the origin of the name, that it derives from a little grocer's shop kept at the north-east angle of that junction of the roads within the recollection of the present writer, by one Young, who has probably been long since gathered to his fathers, for his Corner knows him no more, and a house-agent's shop, a brand-new building (like all its neighbours), stands where the now historic Young sold tea and sugar, and (let us hope) waxed prosperous in days gone by.

[Sidenote: _TURNHAM GREEN_]

Turnham Green lies ahead: a place historic by reason of a preliminary skirmish in the Civil War between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and the residence in the early part of the century of a peculiarly heartless murderer. The pa.s.sengers by the two-horsed "short-stages" which in the first half of this century travelled from London to the outlying villages and halted at the "Pack Horse and Talbot," doubtless were curious regarding Linden House, near by, notorious from a.s.sociation with Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, author and poisoner. He was born at Chiswick in 1794, and was a grandson of Dr. Ralph Griffiths of Turnham Green. He began life by serving in the army, but presently took to literature as a profession, and wrote voluminously in the magazines of that day. As an author, although possessed of a sprightly wit, he would long since have been forgotten had it not been for the sensational career of crime upon which he entered in 1824. In that year he forged the signatures of his trustees, in order to obtain possession of a sum of 2259. He induced his uncle, Mr. G. E. Griffiths, of Linden House, to receive him there as an inmate. Within a few months his relative died, poisoned with nux vomica, and Wainewright came into possession of his property. In 1830 he persuaded a Mrs. Abercromby, a widow lady, to take up her abode with him and his wife at Linden House. She came with her two daughters and was promptly poisoned with strychnine. After this he removed from the neighbourhood, and embarked upon a further series of murders in London. Eventually detected, he was convicted and transported for life to the Australian colonies, where he is credibly said to have poisoned others. Murder by poison was, in fact, an obsession with this man, although he was sufficiently sane and sordid to select victims whose deaths would bring him pecuniary advantage. Wainewright's _metier_ in literature was chiefly art criticism, and his style narrowly resembles that of a revolting person, now ostracised from Society, who also dabbled in Art and actually wrote and published an "appreciation" of the poisoner some few years since.

Linden House was pulled down some fifteen years ago, and its site is marked by the modern villas of Linden Gardens. The recollection of it brings a train of reminiscences.

X

[Sidenote: _SUBURBAN CHANGES_]

Reminiscences are soon acc.u.mulated in these times. It needs not for the Londoner to be in the sere and yellow leaf for him to have known many and sweeping changes in the pleasant suburbs which used to bring the country to his doors, and the scent of the hawthorn through his open window with every recurring spring. For myself, I am not a lean and slippered pantaloon, on whose head the snows of many winters have fallen. The crow's-feet have not yet gathered around the corners of my eyes; and yet I have known many rural, or semi-rural, villages around the ever-spreading circle of the Great City which in my time have been for ever engulfed in the on-rolling waves of bricks and mortar. It is no effort of memory for me, or for many another, to recall the market gardens, the orchards, the open meadows, and the fine old seventeenth and eighteenth century red-brick mansions, each one enclosed within its high garden walls, with the jealous seclusion of a monastery, which occupied the sites where the streets of Brompton, Earl's Court, Fulham, Walham Green, and Putney now stretch their interminable ramifications, and are accounted, justly enough, as London. Tell me, if you can, what are the bounds of London, north, south, east, or west. Does from Forest Gate on the east, to Richmond on the west, span its limits in one direction? and from Wood Green on the northern heights, to Croydon on the south, encompa.s.s it on the other? They may in this year of grace, but where will the boundary of continuous brick and mortar be set ten years hence? and where will then be the pleasant resorts of the present-day wheelman? They will all be ruined, and not, mark you, ruined from the commercial point of view, for the coming of the builder spells riches for the suburban freeholder, whose land, in the slang of the surveying fraternity, has become "ripe." These rustic places are, nevertheless, ruined from the point of view of the lover of the picturesque, and when he sees the old mansions going, the meadows trenched for foundations, and the lanes widened and paved by the newly const.i.tuted vestry, he groans in spirit. I am, for instance, especially aggrieved at the workings of modernity with Turnham Green.

I went to school there in the days when London was remote. We used to talk of "going up to London" then. Do any of the present-day inhabitants of Turnham Green, I wonder, speak thus? I imagine not. Turnham Green was then as rural as its name sounds now. The name, alas! is all that remains of its rurality, save, indeed, the two commons, the "Front" and "Back," as they are called. No one now remembers, I suppose, that the so-called "Back Common" is really Turnham Bec, even as the open s.p.a.ce at Tooting remains Tooting Bec to this day. It is so, however, and it is only through this corruption that what is really and truly the original green of Turnham Green is dubbed the "Front Common." You see the humour of it?

[Sidenote: _THE NEW SUBURB_]

Turnham Green remained countrified until the railway came and took a slice off the so-called "Back Common," and built a station, and thus established the first outpost of Suburbia. Then another railway came, and took another slice, and a School Board filched another piece; and then great black boards, with white letters, began to be planted in the surrounding orchards, setting forth how "this eligible land" was to be let on building lease. Presently men who wore corduroys and waistcoats with sleeves to them, and leather straps round their trousers below the knees came along, and, with much elaborate profanity, built what were, with much humour, termed "villas" there. Streets of them, and all alike! After this, a tramway was made along the high-road, starting at Hammersmith, and ending at Kew Bridge. That tramway was amusing to us schoolboys, so long as the novelty of it lasted. Our school--it had the imposing name of Belmont House--faced the high-road, and it was our greatest delight of summer evenings to throw pieces of soap at the outside pa.s.sengers of the trams from the bedroom windows. The expenditure of soap was tremendous, and sometimes those "outsiders" were hit, whereupon there was trouble! There was a gloomy old mansion opposite our school, called "Bleak House," and we used to think it was the veritable "Bleak House" of d.i.c.kens's story. We know better now. It still stands, but a furniture warehousing firm have built warehouses on to it, and it is no longer romantically gloomy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBIN HOOD AND LITTLE JOHN.]

The school has gone, too, where I learnt, and promptly forgot, Latin and Greek; and a row of shops, with big plate-gla.s.s windows and great gas lamps, have taken its place; and where we construed those dead (and deadly) languages, the linen-draper's a.s.sistant measures out muslins and calicoes. I have walked along these pavements during the last few days, and have noted more changes. There used to stand, beside the road, on the right hand as you go towards Gunnersbury, a little wayside "pub," with bow windows, and a bent and hunch-backed red-tiled roof. It was called the "Robin Hood," and an old-fashioned wooden post, supporting the swinging sign, stood on the kerb-stone, beside a horse-trough. I remember the sign well, for it had quite an elaborate picture painted upon it, representing Robin Hood and Little John. I can see quite clearly now that the artist of this affair obtained his ideas from the pictorial diplomas of the Ancient Order of Foresters; but, at the time, I thought it a very fine painting.

The feathered hats impressed me very much indeed, although I always used to wonder why those two magnificent fellows hadn't pulled up their socks.

It was some time before I discovered that they were not socks, but the big bucket boots of romance. They have pulled this old house down, and have built a glaring, flaring, gin-palace on the site of it, just as they did some five years ago to the old "Roebuck," not far off. The sign is gone, too, and wayfarers are no longer invited, if Robin Hood is not at home, to take a gla.s.s with Little John. What would happen, I often speculated, if both those heroes were away? Would, one take a gla.s.s, in that case, with Friar Tuck or Maid Marian?

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "OLD WINDMILL."]

[Sidenote: _OLD SUBURBAN INNS_]

There is an old inn still standing in this same high-road--most appropriately, by the way, situated next door to the Police Station, which, in its time, has extended hospitality to many a bold "road agent"

who found his living on the Bath and Exeter Roads. The "Old Windmill" is a shy, retiring house which lies modestly some way back from the line of houses fronting the road. It has an open gravelled s.p.a.ce in front, and a swinging sign on a post, which, together with an immense sundial on the front of the house, proclaims that the "Old Windmill" dates back to 1717.

These are vestiges of the time when the Chiswick High Road was bordered by hedges instead of houses. The house, although it wears a certain old-world air, can scarce be called picturesque. The huge sundial just mentioned, with its mis-spelled legend, "So Fly's Life Away," gives it an interest, and so does the record of how one Henry Colam was arrested here one night toward the close of last century, on the charge, "For that he did molest and threaten certain of His Majesty's liege subjects upon the highway, in company with divers others, still at large." Henry had, as a matter of fact, "with divers others," attempted to rob the Bath Mail near this spot. He failed in his enterprise, but Bow Street had him all the same, and it does not require a very vivid imagination to conjure up a picture of his end.

Another old inn, which still stands at Turnham Green, although greatly altered, has a history not to be forgotten.

[Sidenote: _TREASON AND TREACHERY_]

At the "Old Pack Horse" (not by any means to be confounded with the "Pack Horse and Talbot," a quarter of a mile nearer on the road to London) a.s.sembled parties of the conspirators who, headed by their two princ.i.p.als, named, oddly enough, Barclay and Perkins,[1] plotted the a.s.sa.s.sination of King William the Third, on February 15, 1696. They were authorized by the exiled James the Second to do the deed, and had planned for forty of their band to surround the King's carriage as he returned from one of his weekly hunting expeditions from Kensington Palace to Richmond Park. His coach, they knew, would pa.s.s along a narrow, mora.s.s-like lane from the waterside on to Turnham Green, near where the church now stands, and they were well aware that, as it could at this point proceed only at a walking pace, William would fall an easy victim. It chanced, however, that there were traitors among their number, who informed the King's friends, so that on two succeeding Sat.u.r.days, while they were expecting him, he remained at Kensington. Many of the band were arrested, and six suffered the penalty of high treason.

The spot where the proposed a.s.sa.s.sination was to have been consummated is now known as Sutton Lane. At the corner of this suburban thoroughfare, where Fromow's Nursery stands, the fate of England was to have been decided.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "OLD PACK HORSE."]

The "Old Pack Horse" has been somewhat modernized of late years by additions built out on the ground floor, but it remains substantially the same building at which Jack Rann, the famous "Sixteen-string Jack" of highway romance, may have taken a last drink with which to screw up his courage just before setting out to rob Dr. Bell, the chaplain to the Princess Amelia, in Gunnersbury Lane, near by. "Sixteen-string Jack" was hanged for that job in 1774.

He was peculiarly unfortunate, for Turnham Green and Gunnersbury were veritable Alsatias then, and those who travelled here should not have mentioned so ordinary a happening as having their purses taken. Indeed, it was so usual an occurrence that Horace Walpole tells us of a certain Lady Brown who, visiting here, always went provided with a purse full of bra.s.s tokens for the highwaymen. Imagination, conjuring up a picture of a Turpin or a Claude du Vall riding away with a pocketful of guineas which, on arriving home, he discovers to be counterfeits, provokes a smile.