The Brighton Road Part 21

Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his first fight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.]

He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended from a thoroughly Suss.e.xian stock. The name of Sayers is well known throughout Suss.e.x, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died, in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.

At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads, on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PATCHAM.]

Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays, and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain; for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle Ages, the few cottages cl.u.s.ter about it as of yore, and only those who lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand years.

x.x.xIII

From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of the "deans." North and South of the Downs are two different countries--so different that if they were inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely England, but the same county of Suss.e.x. It is a wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter.

But it is a sunny land, where the gra.s.sy shoulders of the mighty downs, looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.

[Sidenote: THE DEANS]

The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Suss.e.x seaboard you will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean, by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course "Dean-ton") near Newhaven, Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are strung along these last miles into Brighton--Pangdean and Withdean. Most of these show the same characteristics of cl.u.s.tered woodlands in a sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little cottages. Time and circ.u.mstance have changed those that do not happen to conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first "dean" is one of these nonconformists.

Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility, standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.

Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other circ.u.mstance, a "dean" is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very n.o.ble woodlands, too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old toll-house.

Not so _very_ old a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807, was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for another term of years. It and its legend "NO TRUST," painted large for all the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit, were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying at Patcham Gate, and yielded their "tuppences" with what grace they might.

On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still with difficulty be spelled the inscription:

Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES, who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening, November 7th, 1796.

Alas! swift flew the fatal lead, Which pierced through the young man's head.

He instant fell, resigned his breath, And closed his languid eyes in death.

All you who do this stone draw near, Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.

From this sad instance may we all, Prepare to meet Jehovah's call.

It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and "agin the Government"; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even middle-aged blood.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD DOVECOT, PATCHAM.]

Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he was "unfortunately shot," he, with many others of the gang, was coming from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves, careful only to make good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales, who, met by a "riding officer," was called upon to surrender himself and his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that Daniel was "too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before," so he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery rhyme, was made of "lead, lead, lead," Daniel was killed. Alas! poor Daniel.

An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham, st.u.r.dily built of Suss.e.x flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully b.u.t.tressed.

[Sidenote: PRESTON]

Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of Thomas a Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other "kick the beam."

x.x.xIV

It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.

It is Brighton's ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.

Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good, and went through a middle period when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its newer mean. But that period has pa.s.sed. What remains of the age of George the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste, become almost archaeologically interesting, and the newer Brighton approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the twentieth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.]

The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even if those characteristic semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that, and Brunswick t'other: all names a.s.sociated with the late Georgian period.

The Old Steyne was in Florizel's time the rendezvous of fashion. The "front" and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction, but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.

[Sidenote: BRIGHTON]

Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in the company of the Thrales and f.a.n.n.y Burney, declared the neighbourhood to be so desolate that "if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope." At any rate it would have needed a particularly stout tree to serve Johnson's turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.

Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to Johnson's as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being construed into praise by the townsfolk. "Of all the trees," says he, "I ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent beach at Brighton."

But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever have been admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpa.s.ses belief. Its cost, one shrewdly suspects--it is supposed to have cost over 1,000,000--was what appealed to the imagination.

That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one recognises as the "Marquis of Steyne" in "Vanity Fair," admired it, as a.s.suredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, "A good idea of the building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners."

That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste.

Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the work of William the Fourth in 1832.

The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style, would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to justify the Prince's taste.

But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to 5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of 161,000--the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PAVILION.]

One of the best stories connected with the Pavilion is that told so well in the "Four Georges":

"And now I have one more story of the baccha.n.a.lian sort, in which Clarence and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts.

"The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolly a.s.sociates, there figures a great n.o.bleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in Suss.e.x.

"The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to drink wine with the Duke--a challenge which the old toper did not refuse.

He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank gla.s.s for gla.s.s: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first gentleman of Europe proposed b.u.mpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers filled a great gla.s.s for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink.

'Now,' says he, 'I will have my carriage and go home.'

"The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof where he had been so generously entertained. 'No,' he said; 'he had had enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave the place at once, and never enter its doors more.'