The Brighton Road Part 8

The major part of these grievances was adjusted by the Act of 1868, abolishing all Church rates, excepting those levied under special Acts; but the eyesores will not be redressed until the temples are pulled down and rebuilt.

Brixton appears in Domesday as "Brixistan," which in later ages became "Brixtow"; and the Brixton Road follows the line of a Roman way on which Streatham stood. Both the Domesday name of Brixton and the name of Streatham are significant, indicating their position on the stones and the street, _i.e._, the paved thoroughfare alluded to in "Brixton causeway,"

marked on old suburban maps.

The Brixton Road, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a pretty place. On the left-hand side, as you made for Streatham, ran the river Effra. It was a clear and sparkling stream, twelve feet wide, which, rising at Norwood, eventually found its way into the Thames at Vauxhall. Its course ran where the front gardens of the houses on that side of the road are now situated, and at that period every house was fronted by its little bridge; but the unfortunate Effra has long since been thrust underground in a sewer-pipe, and the sole reminiscence of it to be seen is the name of Effra Road, beside Brixton Church.

The "White Horse" public-house, where the omnibuses halt, was in those times a lonely inn, neighboured only by a farm; but with the dawn of the nineteenth century a new suburb began to spring up, where Angell Road now stands, called "Angell Town," and then the houses of Brixton Road began to arise. It is curious to note that the last of the old watchmen's wooden boxes was standing in front of Claremont Lodge, 168, Brixton Road, until about 1875.

There is little in the Lower Brixton Road that is reminiscent of the Regency, but a very great deal of early suburban comfort evident in the old mansions of the Rise and the Hill, built in days when by a "suburban villa" you did not mean a cheap house in a cheap suburban road, but--to speak in the language of auctioneers--a "commodious residence situate in its own ornamental grounds, replete with every convenience," or something in that eloquent style. For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon Marche, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-b.a.l.l.s on the gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! Solid comfort resides within those four-square walls, and reclines in saddle-bag armchairs, thinking complacently of big bank balances, all derived from wholesale dealing in the City, and now enjoyed, and added to, in the third and fourth generations; for these solid houses were built a century ago, or thereby. They are not beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of good yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted with age, and spa.r.s.ely relieved, it may be, with stucco pilasters picked out with raised medallions or plaster wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably permanent--and large. They are, indeed, of such s.p.a.ciousness and commodious quality that an auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing those characteristics to houses which do not possess them feels a vast despair possess his soul when it falls to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And yet I think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building plots for what we now understand by "villas"--a fate that has lately befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour thirty or forty little modern houses--why, then an unwonted respect is felt for it and its kind.

[Sidenote: BRIXTON HILL]

Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of the Budd family, all scarabei and cla.s.sic emblems of death, prominent at the angle of the roads--a _memento mori_, ever since the twenties, for travellers down the road.

Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well as joy and everything else human, pa.s.ses, is one in shape like a biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton Hill, accompanies name and date:

O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here; The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale From this sad turf whene'er he reads the tale, That one so young and lovely--died--and last, When the sun's vigour warms, or tempests rave, Shall come in summer's bloom and winter's blast, A Mother, to weep o'er this hopeless grave.

An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in 1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight a.s.signations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton snores.

On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here, unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this hill-top, and London seemed far away.

And so to Streatham, once rightly "Streatham, Surrey," in the postal address, but now merely "Streatham, S.W." A world of significance lies in that apparently simple change, which means that it is now in the London Postal District. Even so early as 1850 we read in Brayley's "History of Surrey" that "the village of Streatham is formed by an almost continuous range of villas and other respectable dwellings." Respectable! I should think so, indeed! Conceive the almost impious inadequacy of calling the Streatham Hill mansions of City magnates "respectable." As well might one style the Alps "pretty"!

But this spot was not always of such respectability, for about 1730 there stood a gibbet on Streatham Hill, by the fifth milestone, and from it hung in chains the body of one "Jack Gutteridge," a highwayman duly executed for robbing and murdering a gentleman's servant here. The place was long afterwards known as "Jack Gutteridge's Gate."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Streatham Common]

Streatham--the Ham (that is to say the home, or the hamlet) on the Street--emphatically in those Saxon times when it first obtained its name, _the_ Street--was probably so named to distinguish it from some other settlement situated in the mud. In that era, when hard roads were few, a paved way could be, and very often was, made to stand G.o.dfather to a place, and thus we find so many Streatleys, Stratfords, Strattons, Streets, and Stroods on the map. Those "streets" were Roman roads. The particular "street" on which Streatham stood seems to have been a Roman road which came up from the coast by Clayton, St. John's Common, G.o.dstone, and Caterham, a branch of the road to _Portus Adurni_, the Old Sh.o.r.eham of to-day. Portions of it were discovered in 1780, on St. John's Common, when the Brighton turnpike road through that place was under construction. It was from 18 to 20 feet wide, and composed of a bed of flints, grouted together, 8 inches thick. Narrowly avoiding Croydon, it reached Streatham by way of Waddon (where there is one of the many "Cold Harbours"

a.s.sociated so intimately with Roman roads) and joined the present Brighton Road midway between Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond, at what used to be Broad Green.

[Sidenote: DOCTOR JOHNSON]

There are no Roman remains at twentieth-century Streatham, and there are very few even of the eighteenth century. The suburbs have absorbed the village, and Dr. Johnson himself and Thrale Place are only memories. "All flesh is gra.s.s," said the Preacher, and therefore Dr. Johnson, whose bulky figure we may put at the equivalent of a truss of hay, is of course but an historic name; but bricks and mortar last immeasurably longer than those who rear them, and his haunts might have been still extant but for the tragical nearness of Streatham to London and that "ripeness" of land for building which has abolished many a pleasant and an historic spot.

But while the broad Common of Streatham remains unfenced, the place will keep a vestige of its old-time character of roadside village. A good deal earlier than Dr. Samuel Johnson's visits to Streatham and Thrale Place, the village had quite a rosy chance of becoming another Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham, for in the early years of the eighteenth century it became known as a Spa, and real and imaginary invalids flocked to drink the disagreeable waters issuing from what quaint old Aubrey calls the "sower and weeping ground" by the Common. Whether the waters were too nasty, or not nasty enough, does not appear, but it is certain that the rivalry of Streatham to those other Spas was neither long-continued nor serious.

Streatham is content to forget its waters, but the memory of Dr. Johnson will not be dropped, for if it were, no one knows to what quarter Streatham could turn for any history or traditions at all. As it is, the mind's-eye picture is cherished of that grumbling, unwieldy figure coming down from London to Thrale's house, to be lionised and indulged, and in return to give Mrs. Thrale a reflected glory. The lion had the manners of a bear, and, like a dancing bear, performed clumsy evolutions for buns and cakes; but he had a heart as tender as a child's, and a simple vanity as engaging, beneath that unpromising exterior and those pompous ways. Wig awry and singed in front from his short-sighted porings over the midnight oil, clothes shabby, and linen that journeyed only at long intervals to the wash-tub, his was not the aspect of a carpet-knight, and those he met at the literary-artistic tea-table of Thrale Place murmured that he was an "original."

He met a brilliant company over those teacups: Reynolds and Garrick, and f.a.n.n.y Burney--the readiest hand at the "management" of one so difficult and intractable--and many lesser lights, and partook there of innumerable cups of tea, dispensed at that hospitable board by Mrs. Thrale. That historic teapot is still extant, and has a capacity of three quarts; specially chosen, doubtless, in view of the Doctor's visits. Ye G.o.ds! what floods of Bohea were consumed within that house in Thrale Park!

They even seated the studious Johnson on horseback and took him hunting; and, strange to say, he does not merely seem to have only just saved himself from falling off, but is said to have acquitted himself as well as any country squire on that notable occasion.

But all things have an end, and the day was to come when Johnson should bid a last farewell to Streatham. He had broken with the widowed Mrs.

Thrale on the subject of her marriage with Piozzi, and he could no longer bear to see the place. So, in one endearing touch of sentiment, he gave it good-bye, as his diary records:

"Sunday, went to church at Streatham. _Templo valedixi c.u.m osculo._" Thus, kissing the old porch of St. Leonard's, the lexicographer departed with heavy heart. Two years later he died.

This Church of St. Leonard still contains the Latin epitaph he wrote to commemorate the easy virtues of his friend Henry Thrale, who died in 1781, but alterations and restorations have changed almost all else. It is, in truth, a dreadful example, externally, of the Early Compo Period, and internally of the Late Churchwarden, or Galleried, Style.

It is curious to note the learned Doctor's indignation when asked to write an English epitaph for setting up in Westminster Abbey. The great authority on the English language, the compiler of that monumental dictionary, exclaimed that he would not desecrate its walls with an inscription in his own tongue. Thus the pedant!

There is one Latin epitaph at Streatham that reads curiously. It is on a tablet by Richard Westmacott to Frederick Howard, who _in pugna Waterlooensi occiso_. The battle of Waterloo looks strange in that garb.

But Latin is frequent here, and free. The tablets that jostle one another down the aisles are abounding in that tongue, and the little bra.s.s to an ecclesiastic, nailed upon the woodwork toward the west end of the north aisle, is not free from it. So the shade of the Doctor, if ever it revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quant.i.ty, although it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.

XI

Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in 1792, says that "Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres, surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in circ.u.mference." Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions built in the seventeenth century, of a debased cla.s.sic type.

[Sidenote: GIBBETS BY THE WAY]

Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston's time, and indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad.

Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his "Britannia" of 1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later editor, who issued an "Ogilby Improv'd" in 1731, they still decorated the wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.

At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where the extra large and permanent gallows stood, like a football goal, at what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later years been persuaded to play.

Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall, the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon, resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. "T 180," as he was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898, and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul's Cathedral by the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised commercial circles.

The estate of Norbury Hall has since T 180's release become "ripe for building," and the mansion, the lake, and the beautiful grounds have been "developed" away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot will have faded.

Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, and above the white hillside villas of Sydenham and Gipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long body of the Crystal Palace; that bane and obsession of most view-points in South London, "for ever spoiling the view in all its compa.s.s," as Ruskin truly says in "Praeterita."

I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphere of the building is stuffily reminiscent of half a century's stale teas and b.u.t.tered toast, and the views of it, near or distant, are very creepily and awfully like the dreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of such scriptural scenes as "Belshazzar's Feast" and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects from Revelation.

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

At Thornton Heath--where there has been nothing in the nature of a heath for at least eighty years past--the electric trams of Croydon begin, and take you through North End into and through Croydon town, along a continuous line of houses. "Broad Green" once stood by the wayside, but nowadays the sole trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. At Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little vestige of the past left, in "Colliers' Water Lane." The old farmhouse of Colliers' Water, reputed haunt of the phenomenally ubiquitous d.i.c.k Turpin, was demolished in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, and the secret staircase it possessed was no doubt intended to hide fugitives much more respectable than highwaymen.

The name of that lane is now the only reminder of the time when Croydon was a veritable Black Country.

The "colliers of Croydon," whose black trade gave such employment to seventeenth-century wits, had no connection with what our ancestors of very recent times still called "sea-coal"--that is to say, coal shipped from Newcastle and brought round by water, in days before railways. The Croydon coal was charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests that once overspread the counties of Surrey and Suss.e.x, and was supplied very largely to London from the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the nineteenth.

Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the Croydon colliers famous. We are not to suppose that his name was really Grimes: that was probably a part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master collier, who in the time of Edward the Sixth made charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke and the grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to abolish the kilns. I think we may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled lawn-sleeves.

We first find Croydon mentioned in A.D. 962, when it was "Crogdoene." In Domesday Book it is "Croindene." Whether the name means "crooked vale,"

"chalk vale," or "town of the cross," I will not pretend to say, and he would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate until 1750.

[Sidenote: GROWTH OF CROYDON]

By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose spiritual needs might surely have anch.o.r.ed them to the spot, but by the promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still Croydon grows.

In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620 they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to be a "very obscure and darke place." Archbishop Abbot "expounded" it by felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.