It has been said, by whom I know not, that “prefaces to books are like signs to public-houses; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind of entertainment to be found within.” But this preface is not to be like those; for it would require an essay in itself to give a comprehensive idea of the Dover Road, in all its implications. A road is not merely so many miles of highway, more or less well-maintained. It is not only something in the surveyor’s way; but history as well. It is life, touched at every point.
The Dover Road—the highway between London and that most significant of approaches to the Continent of Europe—would have been something much more in its mere name had it not been for the accident of London: one of the greatest accidents. It would have been considered a part of the great road to Chester and to Holyhead: the route diagonally across England, from sea to sea, which really in the first instance it was.
For the Dover Road is actually the initial limb of the Watling Street: that prehistoric British trackway adopted by the Romans and by them engineered into a road; and it would seem that those Roman engineers, instructed by the Imperial authorities, considered rather the military and strategic needs of those times than those of Londinium; for London was not on the direct road they made; and it was only at a later date, when it was grown commercially, they constructed an alternative route that served it.
It would be rash to declare that more history has been enacted on this road than on any other, although we may suspect it; but certainly history is more spectacular along these miles. Those pageants and glittering processions are of the past: they ended in 1840, when railways were about to supplant the road; when the last distinguished traveller along these miles, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, came up by carriage to wed Queen Victoria.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
February, 1922.
| London Bridge (Surrey side) to— | |
| MILES | |
| Borough (St. George’s Church) | ½ |
| Kent Street | ¾ |
| Newington (“Bricklayers’ Arms”) | 1 |
| New Cross | 3¼ |
| Deptford | 4¼ |
| Blackheath | 5 |
| Shooter’s Hill | 8¼ |
| Shoulder of Mutton Green | 9¼ |
| Belle Grove | 9½ |
| Welling | 10¼ |
| Crook Log | 10¾ |
| Bexley Heath | 11¼ |
| Crayford (Cross River Cray) | 13¼ |
| Dartford (Cross River Darent) | 15 |
| John’s Hole | 16¼ |
| Horn’s Cross | 17 |
| Greenhithe | 18 |
| Northfleet | 20¼ |
| Gravesend (Jubilee Tower) | 22 |
| Milton | 23 |
| Chalk Street | 23½ |
| Gad’s Hill (“Falstaff” Inn) | 26¼ |
| Strood (Cross River Medway) | 28¼ |
| Rochester (Guildhall) | 29 |
| Chatham (Town Pier) | 30 |
| Rainham | 34 |
| Moor Street | 34¼ |
| Newington | 36¾ |
| Key Street | 38 |
| Chalk Well | 39 |
| Sittingbourne (Parish Church) | 40 |
| Bapchild | 41¼ |
| Radfield | 41¾ |
| Green Street | 42½ |
| Ospringe | 45½ |
| Preston | 46½ |
| Boughton-under-Blean | 49 |
| Boughton Hill | 50 |
| Dunkirk | 51¼ |
| Harbledown | 54 |
| Canterbury (Cross River Stour) | 55¼ |
| Gutteridge Gate | 57 |
| Bridge (Cross River Stour) | 58¼ |
| Halfway House | 62¾ |
| Lydden | 65¾ |
| Temple Ewell | 67½ |
| Buckland | 69 |
| Dover | 70¾ |
Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history, nor one so crowded in every age with incident and associations. The writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to keep his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to take to his heels at any moment.
And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road, and demand attention! Cæsar’s presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp of the legionaries along Watling Street on moonlit nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the record of their doings would occupy; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian.
How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarrassing the accumulated wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest justice in this one volume! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the telling of this story; and for the proper presentation of its pageantry, for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon these seventy miles of highway, the rugged-wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of Thomas Hardy’s rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command one might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of the Dover Road; while, with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of their art, Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be fashioned that would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration of all. Without these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compass of these covers the doings of sixty generations?
The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters of a mile long.
If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with coach-travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne’s “Foreign Mail,” which left the General Post-Office in Saint Martin’s-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes later at the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road.
If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the “Express,” which, starting from the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the journey in nine hours; or else by the “Union” coach, which, travelling at an equal speed, left the “White Bear,” Piccadilly, at 9 a.m. Not that these were the only choice. Coaches in plenty left town for Dover; the “Eagle,” the “Phœnix,” Worthington’s Safety Coaches, the “Telegraph,” the “Defiance,” the “Royal Mail,” and the “Union Night Coach,” starting from all parts of London. The famous “Tally-ho Coach,” too, between London and Canterbury, left town every afternoon, and did the fifty-four miles in the twinkling of an eye—that is to say (with greater particularity and less vague figure of speech) in five hours and a half; while Stanbury and Rutley’s fly-vans and wagons conveyed goods and passengers who could not afford the fares of the swifter coaches between the “George,” Aldermanbury, and Dover at the rate of six miles an hour.
Besides these methods of conveyance, numerous coaches, vans, omnibuses and carriers’-carts plied between the Borough and Chatham, Rochester and Strood; or served the villages between London and Gravesend. Indeed, at this period, we find the crack coaches, the long-distance mails, starting from London city, leaving to the historic inns of Southwark only the goods-wagons, the short-stages, and the carriers’-carts. In 1837, also, you could vary the order of your going to Dover by taking boat from London to Gravesend, Whitstable, or Herne Bay, and at any of those places waiting for the coach. The voyage to Herne Bay took six hours, and the coach journey from thence to Dover occupied another four, the whole costing but ten shillings; which, considering that you could get horribly sea-sick in the six hours between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays.
The traveller of this time would probably select the “Express” from the “Golden Cross,” because this was a convenient and central starting-point from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was well-aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called at every tavern where the coach stopped—and at a good many where it had no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic hue, and a plum-coloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what Shakespeare would call a “purple-hued malt-worm.” He shaved scrupulously. A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed, and his talk, which consisted of “Gee-hups,” biting repartees administered to passing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely professional.
Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the approved fashion.
And the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty years previously.
So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and passing close under the projecting clock of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The view was eminently picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring Monument with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick and shovel. In previous ages there were gates both at the London and the Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen Elizabeth’s time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilised kingdom as that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore’s bloodstained castle.
THE “GEORGE.”
“Bridge Foot” was the name of the Southwark end of London Bridge. It was a narrow lane leading to Southwark High Street, paved with knobbly stones and walled in with tall houses. Bridge Foot is a thing of the past, and London Bridge Station stands on the site of it. “High Street, Borough,” too, is very different from not only mediæval days, but even from coaching times. The many old inns that used to front toward the street, dating their prosperity back to the twelfth century, and their fabric to some time subsequently to the fire of 1676, are nearly all either utterly demolished, or are put to use as railway receiving offices. The “Queen’s Head” is gone; the “George,” most interesting of all that remain here, is threatened; the “Spur” is left, little changed; the “Half Moon” is still the house for a good chop or steak and a tankard of ale; but the “White Hart,” where is it? Where the “Tabard,” the “King’s Head,” the “Catherine Wheel,” the “Boar’s Head,” the “Old Pick my Toe,” or the “Three Widows”? In vain will the curious who pay pilgrimage to Southwark seek them. There still are many cavernous doorways, stone-flagged passages, and great courtyards; but nothing more romantic than railway vans is to be seen in the most of them, and the yard where Sam Weller was first introduced to an admiring public is quite gone.
The most romantically named of the Southwark inns now left is undoubtedly the “Blue Eyed Maid,” so named, possibly, in connection with Tamplin’s “Blue Eyed Maid” coach that used to run between Southwark and Rochester in the twenties. The building, though, does not share the romanticism of its name. Near it, let into the seventeenth-century brick frontage of No. 71, High Street, is the old sign of the “Hare and Sun,” the trade-mark of Nicholas Hare; and this, together with the stone half-moon sign in the yard of the “Half Moon Inn,” is the sole relic of the many devices that once decorated the street. The hop trade has taken almost undivided possession of the place nowadays. The Hop Exchange is over the way, and hop-factors are as frequently to be met with here as diamond-merchants in Hatton Garden; and with their coming the old-fashioned appearance of Southwark High Street is gone.
Even when Hogarth painted his “Southwark Fair,” in 1733, the street was suburban, and in the distance, seen between the crowds gathered round old St. George’s Church, are the hills and dales of Kent. The church was pulled down in the following year, and the present building put up in its place. The fair was suppressed in 1762.
At that time, Kent Street was the only way to the Dover Road, and, even then, the dirt and over-crowding in that notorious thoroughfare were phenomenal. Englishmen were ashamed of this disgraceful entrance into London, and one whose duty lay in bringing a representative foreigner from Dover to London craftily contrived that he should enter the Metropolis at night, when the dirty tenements of Kent Street, by which their carriage would pass, would be hidden in darkness. When Newington Causeway was made, and direct access gained to the Old Kent Road, the horrors of Kent Street were no longer to be braved by travellers. The street is here still, but somewhat civilised, and now called “Tabard Street”; but to “give a bit of Kent Street” is yet understood to mean language for which Billingsgate has also been long renowned.
A singular structure standing in Tooley Street, and visible for a very great distance up or down the river, was the so-called “Telegraph Tower,” which was burned down in the great fire of August, 1843. It had at one time been a shot-tower, and had always completely dwarfed its next-door neighbour, St. Olave’s Church. It was very ugly, and so its loss was a distinct gain; but with its disappearance went all recollection of the old system of signalling that had no rival before the electric telegraph was introduced in 1838.
OLD TELEGRAPH TOWER, TOOLEY STREET.
This system was introduced in 1795, at the suggestion of the Rev. Lord George Murray, afterwards Bishop of Saint David’s. He proposed to the Admiralty to erect signal-posts or towers on the heights between London and the coast, and upon experiments being made, it was found easily practicable to send messages in this way to our ships in the Downs. That year, then, witnessed the establishment of a line of telegraph-towers between the Admiralty and Deal, with a branch to Sheerness. The original apparatus of revolving shutters was in use until 1816, when it was changed for a semaphore system, resembling very closely that in use upon railways at the present day, the chief peculiarity being that, instead of only two movements of the semaphore arms, each one could be made to assume six different positions. Some old prints of the Admiralty buildings in Whitehall show a telegraph-station of this kind upon the roof, with the little wooden cabin in which were stationed the men (generally four) whose duty it was to read through telescopes the signals from the nearest station, and to work the shutters or semaphores above their own. One of these stations has given the name of “Telegraph Hill” to that knoll at Hatcham, by New Cross, which was opened as a public park so recently as April, 1895. From hence was signalled news of Nelson and Trafalgar, of Wellington and Waterloo; here worked the arms that carried orders from the Admiralty to the admirals in the Downs to sail east or west; to proceed home or fare forth to foreign stations; to summon Courts Martial, and to put the sentences of those stern drum-head tribunals into execution.
The Southwark of Chaucer’s time was a very different place. For one thing, it was a great deal smaller. The year in which his Canterbury Pilgrims were supposed to set out has generally been fixed at 1383, and at that time the whole country had only recently been smitten with three great pestilences, which had carried off nearly half the population of England. London numbered probably no more than thirty thousand inhabitants. Southwark was comparatively a village; a village, too, not with the odious surroundings of later years, but a pleasant spot over the water from the City, where great prelates had their palaces, and whence a short walk of five minutes or so would bring you into the open country, and among the fragrant hedgerows of the Kent Road. No picture exists of Southwark as Chaucer saw it, but when an ingenious Dutchman—one Antony van der Wyngrerde—made a drawing of Southwark and London Bridge, in 1546, this historic part of the “Surrey side” was still distinctly rural. Orchards and pleasant gardens are seen clustering round St. George’s Church, and stretching away to the site of the present Kent Street, and bosky woods flourished where the tall wharves of Bankside are crowded together. Where are those orchards, woods, and gardens now? Where is Winchester House, the grand palace of the Bishops of Winchester, that looked upon the river? Where its neighbour, Rochester House? Where, too, is Suffolk House, the princely residence of the Dukes of Suffolk? Gone, all of them, like the morning dew; and the only recognisable object in Van Wyngrerde’s drawing is the tower of St. Mary Overie’s Church that still, as “St. Saviour’s,” rears its four pinnacles above the Southwark of to-day.
The most famous of all the inns of Southwark was the “Tabard,” famous not only as an ordinary house of good cheer, but as a hostelry immediately under the protection of the Church, whereto resorted many good folk bent on pilgrimage. The Abbot of Hyde Monastery at Winchester was the owner of the ground upon which the original “Tabard” was built, and he built here not only an inn (which it is to be supposed he let out) but also a guest-house for the brethren of Hyde, and all others of the clergy who resorted to London to wait on the Bishop of Winchester, whose grand palace stood close by. In 1307 did the Abbot of Hyde build the “Tabard,” and Chaucer gave it immortality in 1383. At that time the landlord was the Harry Bailly of the “Canterbury Tales”; a real person, probably an intimate friend of Chaucer’s, and Chaucer’s description of him is most likely to be a careful portraiture of the man, his appearance, his speech, and his ways of thought.
He was a considerable person, this host. He was a Member of Parliament, and his name is an index of his importance, for Bailiff of Southwark his ancestor, Henry Tite, or Martin, had been made in 1231, and himself held the position through so long a line of grandfathers and great-grandfathers that their name had become merged in that of his civic office. So Chaucer’s description we know to be very truth, so far as his worth and position are concerned:—
A seemly man our hostè was withal
For to have been a marshal in a hall.
A largè man was he, with eyen steep,
A fairer burgess is there none in Chepe;
Bold of his speech, and wise, and well ytaught;
And of manhóod lackèd righte nought,
Eke thereto he was right a merry man.
This explains the host’s sitting at supper with his guests, even with such gentlefolk as the knight and his son, the squire, and with the Lady Abbess. Thus is he able to take charge of and assume leadership over his party on the road to Canterbury, and to reprove or praise each and all, according to his mind.
The “Tabard” is, of course, only a memory now, and, indeed, so often had it been patched and repaired, that but little of the original could have been standing when the great fire of Southwark, in 1676, swept away many of the old inns. But the “Talbot,” as it was called in later times, stood until 1870 on the site of the older building, and was itself so venerable that many good folks were used to believe it to have been the veritable house where those old-time pilgrims lay before setting out on their journey.
To that shrine of St. Thomas crowds of pilgrims flocked from every part of the Christian world. Rich and poor, high and low alike, left court and camp, palace or hovel. The knight left his castle, the lady her bower; the merchant his goods, the sailor his ship; and the ploughman forsook his tillage to partake in the blessings that radiated from Becket’s resting-place in Canterbury Cathedral. From such varied ranks of society are Chaucer’s pilgrims drawn. A knight whose manhood had been spent in battle at home or in Palestine is at their head. He had been present at the taking of Alexandria; had fought with the Germans against Russia, and had campaigned in Granada against the Moors. Yet his is a meek and Christian-like deportment, and he is in truth a very perfect, gentle knight. With him is his son, the squire, a boy of twenty, who had already made one campaign against the French, and had borne himself well, both in battle and in the tourney. Love deprives him of his sleep, and for love he writes sonnets and attires himself in smart clothes, broidered over with flowers like a May meadow. In attendance on this love-lorn swain is a yeoman clad in Lincoln green and bristling with arms. Sword and buckler, a dagger in his belt, with bow and arrows complete his equipment. Following upon these comes firstly Madame Eglantine, a lady prioress whose noble birth is seen both in her appearance and in the nicety with which she eats and drinks. With a sweet, if rather nasal, tone she chants portions of the Liturgy, and speaks French by preference; but it is the French, not of Paris, but of “Stratford-atte-Bow.” So high-strung is her sensibility that she would weep if she was shown a mouse in a trap, or if her little dog was beaten with a stick. She wears—somewhat inconsistently, considering her religious profession—a brooch bearing the inscription, Amor vincit omnia.
THE “SPUR” INN.
Next this dainty lady comes a fat monk of the Benedictine Order, whose shaven crown and red cheeks are as smooth as glass, and whose eyes shine like burning coals, both by reason of lust and good living. He is dressed in a fashion no holy monk should affect, for the sleeves of his robe are trimmed with the finest fur, and a golden love-knot pin holds his hood in place. Clearly ring the bells on his horse’s bridle; hare-hunting and a feast off a fat swan are more to him than the rule of St. Benedict and all the holy books in his cell. Beside this disgrace to his religious profession is a mendicant friar who is no whit better than his fellow, for he can sing tender songs to his harp, treats the country-folk in the taverns, and knows well how to please the women with timely gifts of needles and knives. Follow these a merchant and two learned men. Well does the merchant know the rate of exchange, and better still does he know how to secure his own interest. Not so the clerk of Oxenford, hollow-cheeked and lean, dressed in threadbare clothes and riding a bare-ribbed horse. As yet he is unbeneficed; but his books are his only joy. His fellow is a law serjeant in good practice, and at his heels comes the Franklin, a representative of a very large class who held land of their own, but were not of gentle birth.
A lower social stratum is represented by a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, and a tapster; all of consideration in their own grade, and likely to become aldermen some day. As wealthy as any is the miller, a big-bodied fellow, with a spade beard, red, like a fox, and as cunning. He well knows how to take a share of the corn his customers bring him to grind. He wears a white coat and a blue hood; plays on the bagpipes, and tells stories fitted to make the young and innocent blush. The wife of Bath is every whit as indelicate. She has been married five times, and of love, says Chaucer, “she knew the oldè dance.” Therefore she is privileged. A shipman from Dartmouth has with him a bottle of Burgundy stolen from his captain’s cabin, from which he thinks it no sin to drink when on pious pilgrimage. A doctor of physic, a cook, a poor parson, a ploughman, a reeve, or estate agent, a manciple, and two disgraceful characters—a summoner and a pardoner—make up the total of the company. The summoner has a fiery face, which nothing but abstinence from drink will assuage; and the pardoner is totally without conscience or morals of any kind. He makes a good living by selling pardons from the Pope, and gets more by the sale of relics in one day than the parson can earn in two months.
When these pilgrims rode forth on that April morning—nine and twenty of them—from the “Tabard,” to seek Becket’s shrine, they started from the ultimate suburb of London. Picture that, Londoners of to-day, who find streets unceasing until Blackheath is gained, and no true roadside country this side of Gravesend! The thymy air then blew in at the casements of the many inns of Southwark, and the views thence extended over fields and meadows where countless chimneys now pollute the sky. Some way down the Kent Road ran a little stream across the highway—“Saint Thomas à Watering” the ford was called, and here the pilgrims made their first halt—
And forth we riden a litel more than pas,
Unto the watering of Saint Thomàs,
And then our host began his hors arrest.
Saint Thomas’s Road marks the site of this stream, and the “Thomas à Becket” inn perpetuates a house of call for wayfarers; but the fame of all these things—of the heretics, the cutpurses, the varied thieves and beggars who were executed here, with their quarters stuck on poles by the ford by way of warning, is lost in the latter-day commonplace of the Old Kent Road.
Yet, at this place, which was something more than a mere water-splash, and the Golgotha of this road out of London, many met their end through being born a little in advance of their time. This was, and is yet, a criminal offence; but it is no longer capital. If, for example, the unfortunate John Penry, Welsh scholar and graduate alike of Oxford and Cambridge, religious reformer and prime mover in the “Martin Marprelate” tracts, directed against the Episcopal bench, had but been born fifty years later, he would have been honoured, instead of meeting here an ignominious end. He was hanged at St. Thomas à Watering, May 29, 1593, and was a victim to the vengeance of my lords spiritual in general, and of Archbishop Whitgift in particular.
There are milestones on the Dover Road. Of course. Mr. F’s aunt, in Little Dorrit, knew something about them, but not much. Her knowledge was general, not particular. We read in Chapter XXIII:—
“A diversion was occasioned here by Mr. F.’s aunt, making the following inexorable and awful statement: ‘There’s milestones on the Dover Road.’ Clennam was disconcerted by this. ‘Let him deny it if he can,’ continued the venomous old lady. He could not deny it. There are milestones on the Dover Road.”
We will not grow excited about this incontrovertible fact. But not many people can say where the first milestone from London on this highway is to be found. Although, in fact, it is at the end of the first mile from the south side of London Bridge, no one in these days would suspect such a relic of surviving in London streets. It stands where the Old Kent Road begins, on the left-hand side as you go south, with an iron plate on it, proclaiming this to be “1 mile from London Bridge.” The stone, greatly battered, stands prominently, on an elevated kerb. Just because we associate milestones with country roads and hedgerows, we look upon this, standing in that crowded urban region, as curious; but when it was first set up, this was on the very verge of the country.
We have heard much of the Old Kent Road in recent years. People who never so much as suspected the existence of it, grew familiar with its name, in the refrain of a comic song dealing with costermongers. The music-halls in 1891 reverberated with the name. But that is all done with. The Old Kent Road is not to be described in a phrase, nor thought of as the coster’s paradise. It is in fact a road of many aspects.
But how to catalogue the kinds of them that dwell here? It cannot well be done. Shopkeepers of every kind and degree; private residents of a more than average decent respectability; publicans, the landlords of public-houses of a prodigious bigness; family doctors—these are the more salient classes of the Old Kent Road. The coster? you ask. Nay, but he does not “inhabit” here. He (shall I phrase it thus?) pervades the road—the “road,” bien entendu, not the houses that line the road—and it is only on Saturday nights, when frugal housewives fare forth, cheapening necessary provisions, that you who seek shall find him, with his booths and shallows, his barrows and crazy trestles; his naphtha-lamps flaring gustily, his voice raucous, his goods striking both eye and nose in no uncertain manner. At such times the kennel becomes a busy mart, where you may purchase most articles of daily food at a price much below the current quotations in shops. Here a shilling possesses the purchasing power of a half-crown expended in the West End, and at this bon marché the artisan’s table is fully furnished forth for a sum which would give the dwellers in mid-London pause.
I have said that the Old Kent Road is eminently respectable; and so it is. But it is also (the natural sequence of respectability) not less eminently dull. It is only when Saturday evening comes, with its street-market commencing as the light dies out of the sky, that this long road becomes really interesting. Then it takes on an aspect of mystery, and is filled with flickering lights and shadows from the yellow gas-lamps and the gusty naphtha-flares that illuminate the dealings of Mr. ’Enery ’Awkins with his clients; and I am quite sure that, if Rembrandt was living now, he would choose such a time and place as the best subject for a picture in all London. One spot in especial he would select. Taking a tramcar from the “Elephant and Castle,” he would ask the conductor to set him down by the bridge that crosses the Grand Surrey Canal, where the great gasometers of the South London Gas Company rear themselves high in air above mean houses and third-rate shops. Arrived here, he would select, as the best point of view, the broad entrance of a large public-house, outside of which the omnibuses stop in their career between the Borough and New Cross; and it is very likely that the thing which happened to me while sketching here would also befall him; that is to say, some short-sighted or dull-witted old lady would probably dig him in the ribs with the ferrule of her umbrella, and say, “Young man, how long before your ’bus starts?” And, after all, I suppose one must not be satirical at the expense of that very worthy person the British matron; for, to a superficial glance, a sketch-block may be not unlike an omnibus way-bill; and who but a mad impressionist would see sketchable material in an ugly gasometer? And who other than a reckless Bohemian would be so far indifferent to public opinion as to sketch outside a gin-palace?
SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD KENT ROAD.
The Old Kent Road of from seventy to eighty years ago presented a very different aspect from that with which those are familiar who travel nowadays up and down its great length in tramcars. It was distinctly rural. The few houses that were to be seen here in coaching days were chiefly inns, with swinging signs creaking, and horse-troughs lining the roadside, and the “Kentish Drovers,” that now wears much the same appearance as any other London public-house, was a veritable rustic house of call for countrymen driving their sheep and cattle to London markets. “The Bricklayers’ Arms” (a ’scutcheon, needless to say, unknown to heraldry), “The World Turned Upside Down,” the “Thomas à Becket,” and the “Golden Cross,” at New Cross, were scarcely less rural. It was at the “Golden Cross” that Pitt and Dundas, overtaken on the road from Dover to London by bad weather, put up for the night, and drank seven bottles of port before they went to bed.
Imagine, though, the condition of the roads, and locomotion upon them, when two Cabinet Ministers could think it not only convenient, but merely prudent, to halt for the night when so near London as New Cross! The Londoner who can take ’bus, tram, or train, and reach the City in less than half-an-hour, can scarce picture the necessity which faced those distinguished travellers.
When the old coachmen had got through New Cross Gate, which stood where the “Marquis of Granby” occupies the junction of the Deptford and Lewisham roads, they found themselves in the country, with Deptford, a busy but small and compact place, yet some distance ahead. Also, they had entered the county of Kent. Nowadays, it is difficult for the uninstructed to tell where New Cross ends or Deptford begins, for there is never a break in the houses all the way, while the street presents no attractions whatever; and even though the “good view of part of the Greenwich Railway, the carriages of which may be seen in motion to and fro” (a view which the local guide-book, published in 1837, considered worthy a visit from London), remains to this day, together with several other railways to keep it company, one does not find crowds of visitors hanging on the delirious delights of the several New Cross stations.
The Deptford of to-day is no place for the pilgrim. Instead of reminiscences of Kenilworth and Queen Elizabeth, of Drake and Peter the Great, it is rich in “stores” and “emporiums.” A workhouse stands where Sayes Court afforded shelter under its roof, and amusement in its gardens, for the Czar; the Trinity House of Deptford Strond has been removed to Tower Hill; and perhaps the most remarkable thing in modern Deptford is the Foreign Cattle Market. And yet here Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake, in 1581, on that good ship the Golden Hind, in which he had “compassed the world”; and here, on a site now occupied by cattle and by business premises, was the greatest dockyard in England at the most interesting period of English naval history.
It was at Deptford, they say, in 1593, that Christopher Marlowe, that bright particular star of poesy, was slain, while yet in his thirtieth year. We know too little of him, and no portraiture has come down to show us what manner of man this was who wrote divinely and lived (if we may believe the scribes) sottishly, after the manner, indeed, of the fraternity of his fellow-dramatists. It should seem, by some contemporary accounts, that he was killed by a rival in the affections of some saucy baggage; but there were not wanting those who asserted that the poet was assassinated by some myrmidon of the Church, whose priests he lost no opportunity of reviling. To lend some colour to this, there remains a pamphlet, printed in 1618, entitled—what a title!—“The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath Against Hard-hearted and Stiff-necked Sinners.” It says, “We read of one Marlowe, a Cambridge Scholler, who was a poet and a filthy play-maker; this wretch accounted that meeke servant of God, Moses, to be but a conjuror, and our Sweet Saviour to be but a seducer and deceiver of the people. But harken, ye brain-sicke and prophane poets and players, that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities, what fell upon this prophane wretch; having a quarrell against one whom he met in the street in London, and would have stab’d him; but the partie perceiving his villany prevented him with catching his hands, and turning his own dagger into his braines; and so blaspheming and cursing he yeelded up his stinking breath. Marke this, ye players that live by making fools laugh at sinne and wickedness.”
Leaving “dirty Deptford,” that being the contumelious conjunction by which the place has generally been known, any time these last hundred years or so (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its well-merited title, whether good or ill), the road ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some fine old mansions which, having been built in the days of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges, and having long housed the aristocracy who at one time frequented the place, became afterwards the homes of rich City merchants. Finally, when the “schools for young ladies” are gone which now occupy them, and give so distinct a scholastic air to this suburb, they will doubtless disappear amid a cloud of dust and the clinking of trowels, while on their sites will rise the unchanging pattern of suburban shops!
Blackheath is one of the finest suburbs of London; a town girt round with many particularly beautiful outskirts. Strange to say, it has not been spoiled, and though thickly surrounded with houses, remains as breezy and healthful as ever; perhaps, indeed, since highwayman and footpad have disappeared, and now that duels are unknown, Blackheath may be regarded as even more healthy a spot than it was a hundred years ago.
The air which gave Bleak Heath its original name, and nipped the ears and made red the noses of the “outsides” who journeyed across it on their way to Dover in the winter months, is healthful and bracing, and is not so bleak as balmy in the days of June, when the sun shines brilliantly, and makes a generous heat to radiate from the old mellow brick wall of Greenwich Park that skirts the heath on its northern side. Outside the gate of that steepest of all parks stood Montagu House, whence the Earl of Chesterfield wrote those famous letters to his son—letters whose precepts, if carefully and consistently followed, would have infallibly sent their recipient to the Devil. Montagu House is gone now, pulled down long ago, and the site where the worldly Dormer wrote, pointing out to his son the way to perdition, is now a part of the Heath. Gone, too, is the garden where the phenomenally vulgar and undignified Princess Caroline of Wales, who lived here from 1797 to 1814, might have been seen, and was seen one morning, sitting in the grounds in a gorgeous dress, looped up to the knees, to show the stars with which her petticoats were spangled: with silver wings on her shoulders, and drinking from a pewter pot of porter, after the use and wont, between the acts, of the pantomime fairies of Drury Lane.
GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.
With this Princesse au café chantant disappears the last vestige of royalty hereabouts, and Greenwich, lying down beyond the Park, has only dim memories of Henry the Eighth, and Queen Elizabeth, who was born in the palace of Placentia beside the Thames. If you venture into the Park, and stand upon Observatory Hill, you can at once glimpse London and gain an idea of how plebeian Greenwich has become. But its history is not yet done, and on this very spot, in 1893, a chapter of it was made by a foreign Anarchist who blew himself up in the making; and when the park keepers came and gleaned little pieces of him from the November boughs, the incident shaped more picturesquely than any other happening on this spot that I can think of.
villeins