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Title: The Manchester and Glasgow Road — Volume II. (of II) - This Way to Gretna Green
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes:
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See further note at the end of the book.
THE MANCHESTER AND
GLASGOW ROAD
CONTENTS
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
INDEX
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
=The Portsmouth Road=, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.
=The Dover Road=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.
=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.
=The Holyhead Road=: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
=The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road=: The Great Fenland Highway.
=The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road=: Sport and History
on an East Anglian Turnpike.
=The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road=: The Ready Way to
South Wales. Two Vols.
=The Brighton Road=: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
=The Hastings Road= and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.” Cycle Rides
Round London.
=A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.=
=Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore.= Two Vols.
=The Ingoldsby Country=: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby
Legends.”
=The Hardy Country=: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
=The Dorset Coast.=
=The South Devon Coast.=
=The Old Inns of Old England.= Two Vols.
=Love in the Harbour=: a Longshore Comedy.
=Rural Nooks Round London= (Middlesex and Surrey).
=Haunted Houses=: Tales of the Supernatural.
=The North Devon Coast.=
[_In the Press._
[Illustration: WAITING TO CHANGE.
[_By J. F. Herring._
]
THE
MANCHESTER
AND
GLASGOW ROAD
_THIS WAY TO GRETNA GREEN_
By CHARLES G. HARPER
_ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR, AND FROM
OLD-TIME PRINTS AND PICTURES_
Vol. II.—MANCHESTER TO GLASGOW
[Illustration: Guard]
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1907
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW
Manchester—
(Cross River Irwell.)
MILES
Salford 185-3/4
Pendleton 186-3/4
Irlam-o’-th’-Height 187-3/4
Pendlebury 188-1/2
Clifton 190
Kearsley Moor Church 192-1/4
Farnworth 193-1/4
Moses Gate 194
Bourndon 195
Bolton (Deansgate) 196-1/4
Dorfcocker 198-1/4
Boot Lane 198-3/4
Heaton 199-1/2
Horwich 201-1/2
Smithy Bridge 202-1/2
(Cross Lancaster Canal.)
Chorley 207-1/4
Clayton Green 211-1/4
Bamber Bridge 213-1/4
Walton-le-Dale 215
(Cross River Ribble.)
Preston 217
Cadley Moor 219-3/4
Broughton 221-1/4
Barton 222-3/4
Bilsborough 223-1/4
Brock’s Bridge 225-1/2
(Cross River Wyre.)
Claughton 226-1/2
Catterall 227-1/4
(Cross River Wyre.)
Garstang 228-3/4
Scorton 231
Bay Horse Station 233-1/2
Galgate 235-3/4
Scotforth 238-1/2
Lancaster 239-1/2
(Cross River Lune.)
Slyne 242-1/2
Bolton-le-Sands 243-1/2
Carnforth 245
Burton-in-Kendal 249-3/4
End Moor 255-1/4
(Cross River Kent.)
Kendal 261
Watchgate 265-3/4
Boroughbridge 271
Shap 276-3/4
Thrimby 280
Clifton 284-1/2
Lowther Bridge 285-1/2
(Cross River Lowther.)
Eamont Bridge 286
(Cross Eamont River.)
Penrith 287
Salkeld Gate 291-1/2
High Hesket 296-1/4
Low Hesket 297-3/4
Carleton 302-1/2
(Cross Petterill Brook.)
Carlisle (Clock Tower) 305-1/4
(Cross River Eden.)
Stanwix 306
Kingstown 308
Blackford 309-1/4
West Linton 311-1/4
(Cross River Line.)
Arthuret 313-1/4
Longtown 313-3/4
(Cross River Esk.)
The Border 317-1/4
(Cross River Sark)
Springfield 317-1/2
Gretna Green 318-1/2
Graham’s Hill 321
Kirkpatrick 322
Ecclefechan 328
Lockerbie 333-3/4
Dinwoodie Green 338-3/4
Johnstone Bridge 340-1/4
(Cross River Annan.)
Beattock 347-3/4
Moffat 349-3/4
Elvanfoot Bridge 362-1/2
(Cross River Clyde.)
Crawford 365
(Cross River Clyde.)
Abington 368
Denighton Bridge 370
(Cross a Branch of the Clyde.)
Douglas Mill 377-1/4
Lesmahagow 383-1/4
Larkhall 391-1/2
Hamilton 395-1/4
Bothwell Bridge 396-3/4
(Cross River Clyde.)
Bothwell 397-1/2
Uddingston 399-3/4
Tolcross 403
Glasgow (Glasgow Cross) 405-3/4
CARLISLE TO GLASGOW (EXCHANGE) DIRECT, BY TELFORD’S NEW ROAD,
AVOIDING LONGTOWN, SPRINGFIELD, AND MOFFAT.
Carlisle 305-1/4
Glasgow Cross 399-1/4
Glasgow Exchange 400-1/4
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
WAITING TO CHANGE (_After J. F. Herring_) _Frontispiece_
PAGE
THE BUILDING OF MANCUNIUM (_From the fresco by Ford
Madox Brown_) 7
MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM DEANSGATE 17
MANCHESTER TOWN HALL 61
HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD 79
PRESTON: TOWN HALL, HARRIS PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND
SESSIONS HOUSE 99
LANCASTER 109
LANCASTER SANDS (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 127
EAMONT BRIDGE 177
CARLISLE 207
SOLWAY MOSS (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 215
“A FALSE ALARM ON THE ROAD: ’TIS ONLY THE MAIL!”
(_After C. B. Newhouse_) 223
“ONE MILE FROM GRETNA: THE GOVERNOR IN SIGHT, WITH
A SCREW LOOSE” (_After C. B. Newhouse_) 231
THE DUMFRIES COACH (_After C. B. Newhouse_) 255
THE GLASGOW MAIL (_After James Pollard_) 275
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
The Hall, Chetham’s School 13
Miserere Seat, Manchester Cathedral: The Pedlar and
the Monkeys 19
The “Bull’s Head,” Salford 25
The “Sun” Inn, Poet’s Corner 65
The “Old Man and Scythe” 71
Town Hall, Bolton 74
Firwood: Birthplace of Crompton 76
Rivington Pike 85
Rivington Pike from the Road 87
Darwen Bridge and Walton-le-Dale 89
“Teetotal” 102
Garstang 105
“A fair mark, my Lord” 113
Javelin-Man 114
Lancaster Castle 115
Map of the “Over-Sands” Route 121
Carnforth 133
The Buckstone 135
The Market Cross and Pillory, Burton-in-Kendal 136
The “Duke of Cumberland” Inn, and Farleton Knott 137
Kendal Castle, and the Road into Kendal 138
Castle Dairy 145
Boroughbridge, Shap Fell 153
Sign of the “Greyhound,” Shap 155
Shap Abbey 156
Clifton 161
Sepulchral Slab of Udard de Broham 166
Brougham Castle 168
Countess Pillar 169
Yanwath Hall 170
Askham Hall 172
King Arthur’s Drinking Cup 174
The Giant’s Grave 184
Old Doorway, Penrith 186
Thiefside 188
East End, Carlisle Cathedral 195
St. Alban’s Row 203
Map of Old and New Roads from Carlisle to
Gretna Green 211
Arthuret Church 213
The Road past Solway Moss 217
Filial Affection (_After Rowlandson_) 221
Sark Bar 227
The Deaf Post-Boy (_After Cruikshank_) 233
Gretna Hall in the Old Days 241
The Old Smithy, Gretna Green 247
Gretna Green 251
Ecclefechan: Showing Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle 265
Old Tablet at Ecclefechan 267
Broken Bridge 285
“Brig o’ Clyde” 289
Hamilton Palace 292
Bothwell Bridge 295
Trongate 305
The Arms of Glasgow 309
Glasgow Cathedral and the Necropolis 311
The Oldest House in Glasgow 317
“Dixon’s Blazes” 321
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
I
London Road Railway Station nowadays marks the beginning of central
Manchester. Hitherto the long, long approach, although busy and
crowded, has been, if not a thought suburban, at least busy chiefly on
the retail scale. Here, however, where the railway brings travellers
in from London, you see Manchester as the great city of immense
warehouses: the place that no longer manufactures but deals in bulk and
by wholesale with the goods produced in a dependent circle of towns.
From London Road you come immediately into Piccadilly, which is not in
the least like the Piccadilly in London; and there you find yourself
at the very hub of Manchester’s hurly-burly. There is perhaps not much
significance in all this to the commercial man who travels down by
express from London, and merely rouses himself from his newspaper to
alight and then to take a cab from this railway terminus to one of the
others, or to his business appointments; but to trace the road down
from London on a bicycle and thus enter Manchester is to understand
the great metropolis of cotton as it really is in relation to the
rest of the country. To such a traveller the noise, the crowds, the
furious energy, and the great sooty piles of buildings are not a little
terrible. There is much good modern architecture in Manchester’s
streets, but a black cloak covers it all. And yet the sky, though
generally overcast, for the climate of Manchester is tearful, is not
scored with smoke-wreaths, and factory-chimneys are not a feature of
Manchester itself. The sooty deposit comes insensibly in the air from
the outer ring of towns, and although it is not evident in the sky,
it very soon tones down brick and stone and terra-cotta to one dull
monotone. For all the rain that washes the city, it does not suffice
to cleanse away its coating of soot. The blackness of Manchester is
the first characteristic that impresses itself upon the stranger.
It greatly impressed the first Shah of Persia who visited England:
Nasr-ed-din, who came in 1873, and afterwards wrote an account of
his travels. “The City of Manchester,” he wrote, “by reason of its
exceeding number of manufactures, has its houses, doors, and walls
black as coal, and the complexions, visages, and the dress of people
are all black. The whole of the ladies of that place at most times wear
black clothing, because no sooner do they put on white or coloured
garments, than they are suddenly black!”
[Sidenote: _BLACK MANCHESTER_]
This not without its picturesque exaggerations, and the citizens of
Manchester will hardly recognise themselves in that inky complexion,
but it will serve as a traveller’s tale, and puts a keener edge on the
unsharpened blade of truth. The blackest blackness of all, however,
is that of the great Infirmary building, in Piccadilly, whose sable
hue is own brother to darkest night. Only long years have brought it
to this richness of tint. Art could not produce such a black; dull,
light-absorbing as it is, the building looks like an etching against
the sky, and its Doric architecture in this coating would probably
astonish any ancient Greek who might be privileged to revisit the
earth and see what modern times had made of ancient models. But the
Infirmary, ill-placed in these days amidst the roar of the streets, is
presently to be removed, and this, the finest site in the city, is to
be the home of an Art Gallery and Public Library.
There are statues on the broad pavement in front of the Infirmary,
and very fine ones too. But the latest addition to their number, that
of Queen Victoria, is not a success. Manchester people do not—and
rightly they do not—like it. The bronze seated figure of the Queen is
a poor copy by Onslow Ford of the well-known statue by Alfred Gilbert
at Winchester, and is set in a great canopied chair-like throne that
forms a ridiculous object, seen along the street, resembling a gigantic
grandfather’s-chair. The figure is the very picture of senility. Was
Onslow Ford, after all, a bitter satirist of the age and of the Empire?
The horrible thing looks as though he had successfully striven to
typify the decay that had set in during the last years of the Victorian
Era: that glorious, world-moulding era of which the second Jubilee, in
1897, was really the monument and epitaph. Here you see the tired, aged
face, the hands nervelessly holding orb and sceptre; and you cannot
but think that this is really typical of that time. Given another ten
years of Victorian recluse rule, with old-established abuses clustering
around a long-occupied throne, cobwebbed methods hugged jealously,
outrageous Prime Ministers, whether of the Old Man Eloquent type or
the equally harmful man of the Blazing Indiscretions, and the slowly
built Empire would swiftly have sped down the road to disintegration. A
more fitting monument than this for modern Manchester, which lives in
the present and for the future, would be a statue of the patriot King,
under whose rule in the new century the nation and the Empire shall,
please God, have a new birth.
[Sidenote: _THE PROGRESS OF A PEOPLE_]
Piccadilly gives place to Market Street, and then to Victoria Street,
and Deansgate, which, although it forms one of the approaches to the
Cathedral, is not named after any decanal dignitary but from a dene
or dean—_i.e._ a hollow—once sloping to the confluence here of the
rivers Irwell and Irk. Here, by those affronted rivers, once troutful
streams but now of Stygian blackness, and running in tunnels and under
innumerable bridges, is the very core of Manchester, whose long story
contains little of the doings of kings and queens, or of the romantic
ways of feudal lords; but is compact of a much more romantic and human
interest: the story of the striving upwards of a people, through the
disheartening chances of the centuries. It is not given to the casual
wayfarer to perceive this romance, envisaged as it is in the grim and
grimy outskirts, or in the everyday crowding and turmoiling of the
central traffic; but it is there, nevertheless, and I, for one, refuse
to treat of Manchester in particular, or of the road in general, in
mere terms of topography; for the road, and the places to which it
conducts, take in their compass the entire interests and sympathies of
mankind: the blood and tears, the joys and sorrows of the ages.
II
Ancient Manchester centred about the parish church, afterwards
collegiate, now the Cathedral, and about the manor-house that is now
Chetham’s Hospital. It is still, although its pavements are crowded,
and although it is neighboured by the great Exchange and Victoria
railway stations, a place of narrow streets whose singular names
would themselves be sufficient evidence of antiquity, even though
every house in them were rebuilt. No modern authority would entitle
a thoroughfare “Hanging Ditch” or “Smithy Door,” but such are the
names here, together with Long Millgate, Hunt’s Bank, and Withy Grove.
Rural names, most of them, and you would quest in vain for the olden
watermill in Millgate, and withies grow no more in Withy Grove than
hazels in the Hazel Grove of which you already know.
[Illustration: THE BUILDING OF MANCUNIUM.
[_From the fresco by Ford Madox Brown._
]
This spot where Cathedral and Hospital stand, and where the narrow
streets with odd names plunge up and down and twist round unexpected
corners, is indeed of a very high antiquity. One thousand eight hundred
and thirty years ago, according to generally received opinion—that is
to say, in A.D. 78—the Romans, in the reign of Agricola, came to this
site, where now the tide of modern Manchester flows most strongly.
They found a red, rocky bluff where is now Hunt’s Bank, overlooking
the confluent rivers, and all around were forests and swamps, and
doubtless the hoary ancestors of those withies after which Withy Grove
was in later mediæval times named. The sole representative nowadays
near Manchester of those ancient abounding swamps is Chat Moss, now
a very negligible bog indeed, but even so recently as early railway
days a formidable phenomenon to be reckoned with. But the rocky ledge
overlooking Irk and Irwell was not unoccupied. A tribe of Britons had
established themselves there; very securely, no doubt, against foes
of their own calibre, but when the Romans came and found the situation
desirable, their day was done.
[Sidenote: _MANCUNIUM_]
No account survives of the taking of that palisaded camp of the
Britons. We know nothing of what happened to the aborigines, and it
is so remote a speculation that I am quite sure no one in modern
Manchester has ever given the matter a moment’s thought. Nor did any
Roman historian narrate how many of the Empire’s tall soldiers sank
under the weight of their armour and perished in the morasses at the
taking of what is said to have been styled by the British _Maencenion_.
The Romans, in their usual way, Latinised the native name for the
place, and thus, from what they called _Mancunium_, springs, after many
intermediate changes, “Manchester.”
We know nothing of all these doings, but the building of _Mancunium_
is strikingly pictured in the first of the series of beautiful and
interesting frescoes by Ford Madox Brown in the Manchester Town Hall,
and with as certain and matter-of-fact a touch as though it had been
drawn from personal observation. It was the Pre-Raphaelite way. In
the picture you see the toiling slaves, working on the massive walls
enclosing the Roman city; a helmeted centurion on the topmost windy
height directing their operations. I do not know which impress me most,
the cast-iron folds of his wind-blown cloak or the gigantic muscles
of his bare legs, standing out like penny rolls. They were a great
people, the Romans, and their muscular calf-development was apparently
astounding.
The early “historians” of Manchester were, however, not content with
such history as this, and loved to tell a tale of the marvellous:
how their city originated with a giant, Sir Tarquin, among whose
peculiarities was that of having a little child every morning for
breakfast, just as a modern might take anchovy, on toast. At last
he was slain by Sir Lancelot de Lake, one of King Arthur’s knights,
whereupon the population, relieved of this check upon it, began to
increase, and here we have now, after the passing of sixteen or
seventeen centuries, an assemblage, including Salford, of about three
quarters of a million souls. An ancient carved wooden boss in the
ceiling of the committee-room of Chetham’s Hospital alludes to this
legend, and displays a giant head devouring an infant.
[Sidenote: _THE MANOR_]
And so we pass on to the Norman period, and to the time when the family
of Greslet, or Gresley, acquired the manor of Manchester from that
great personage, Roger of Poictou, to whom a manor more or less, in all
the great tract of the country that was his between the Ribble and the
Mersey, was a small matter. For centuries the Gresleys retained their
holding, which passed from them at last by the marriage of Joan Gresley
to one of the West family. Thenceforward, the Wests, ennobled as Barons
de la Warre, owned the manorial rights of Manchester, until 1579, when
they sold them for £3,000 to one John Lacy, who in his turn, in 1596,
sold to Nicholas Mosley, alderman of London, at a mere £500 profit.
After holding the manor for two hundred and forty-five years, the
Mosley family, in the person of Sir Oswald Mosley, sold it to the newly
created Corporation of Manchester for £200,000. It was a huge sum, but
Sir Oswald was scarcely wise in his generation.
Strange though it may seem in a place to outward appearance so modern
as Manchester, the old manor-house of the Gresleys and the De la
Warres still survives in the very centre of the great city. It is,
indeed, identical with none other than the range of buildings long past
occupied as Chetham’s Hospital and Library adjoining the Cathedral, and
here is the later story of it.
The last of the Manchester De la Warres was a man with an enthusiasm
for the religious life. In 1373 he became rector of Manchester, and in
1422 refounded the parish church that is now the Cathedral, making it
collegiate, and giving his baronial hall, hard by, for the purposes
of his College of priests. That establishment was disestablished and
disendowed in the time of Edward the Sixth, and the College buildings
granted to the Earl of Derby, who used this ancient manorial residence
as his town house. His successor, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth,
re-endowed the College, which was again suppressed in the dawn of the
Commonwealth era, when the church became a Presbyterian meeting-house.
Then it was that Humphrey Chetham, Manchester’s most famous benefactor,
already planning the establishment of a free school, saw the College
buildings, standing empty and forlorn, ready to his hand. He died in
1653, and so did not live to see the beginning of his school; but
by his will of 1650 had appointed trustees for the purchase of the
College, and at last, in 1658, his school of “Chetham’s Hospital”
was opened. He directed that, “Ye boys shall be taught ye reading,
ye writing, ye summes, and all kinds of ye ingenuitie,” and his will
continues to be observed on the same spot, and in the identical
buildings, to this day; the Chetham scholars even wearing the self-same
picturesque but neat costume they wore when the institution was
founded: dark-blue cloth jacket and knee-breeches, with silver buttons,
and a queer little muffin-shaped cap.
[Sidenote: _CHETHAM’S SCHOOL_]
[Illustration: THE HALL, CHETHAM’S SCHOOL.]
The Hospital and Library buildings suffer shockingly as to their
exterior by the sooty atmosphere, but the various interiors are
wonderfully interesting, intrinsically, and additionally from their
situation amid such circumstances as those of a gigantic commercial
city wherein cloistered buildings, reasonably to be expected at Oxford
or Cambridge, are not looked for. The group of buildings has survived
three uses: as manor-house of the baronial period; as the home of a
religious fraternity; and for two hundred and fifty years as a school.
The old hospitium, or guest-house, is the boys’ dormitory, where a
hundred neat little cots are to be seen in long perspectives: the
ancient kitchen that furnished curious, and often nasty, dinners
to the ancient lords of the place and supplied the priests of the
College with their not too cloistral meals—save for very shame their
abstinent Friday fare of fish—is still in use, and sends forth the
most appetising scents about midday; and the refectory is now partly
the Governor’s quarters; while the Baronial Hall, where De la Warres
held their very considerable state, is now the dining-hall. It is a
noble apartment, this ancient hall, with its walls of thick masonry,
its Gothic windows, and timbered roof. A bust of Chetham is placed on
the wall over what was once a fireplace replacing the more ancient
central hearth or brazier in the middle of the Hall. Electric lighting
replaces older methods of illumination, and everywhere reveals with
fine effect ancient panelling, painted devices and pictures. Over
the cloister walks, in what was in the period of the collegiate
establishment the priests’ dormitory, Chetham’s Library is housed in
ancient presses greatly resembling those in the Bodleian at Oxford and
the University Library at Cambridge. What was once the Warden’s room of
the priestly establishment is now the Reading Room. To read scholarly
books, to engage in the pursuit of curious knowledge in the Reading
Room of Chetham’s Library is surely a wonderful privilege, for in this
exquisite room, richly panelled in oak, with striped black-and-white
plaster and timbered roof, and with gorgeously coloured and gilt wall
paintings, the notorious Dr. Dee, Warden of the College in Elizabethan
times, entertained among others Sir Walter Raleigh; and no doubt gazed
into his mystic crystal globe here, on his guest’s behalf, to see what
the future held in store for that courtier, warrior, explorer, and
adventurer. Did it reveal nothing of that grim cell in the Tower where
that unfortunate man was to spend years of captivity? Did no inimical
shadows wax and wane in that crystal, to warn him that Tower Hill and
the headman’s axe would cut his thread?
[Sidenote: _CHETHAM’S LIBRARY_]
If historic associations sufficed to bring eloquent writing into
being, then what is now the Reading Room should be the parent of much
literature; but the student resorting hither will have the place very
much to himself, save for occasional parties of gaping visitors shown
round by a Chetham’s schoolboy, for Chetham’s Library is rich rather
in black-letter tomes, and in works that research feeds fat upon, than
in current literature. One would not wish this cloistral seclusion
amended. To find in Manchester, whose every byway seethes with life, a
corner not already occupied, a spot where you can hear the ticking of
a clock, is too delightful to be forgone. There is, indeed, only one
other spot in Manchester where something the same conditions prevail,
and that is the great palatial building of Ryland’s Library, where
inestimably rare books, manuscripts, and bindings are to be found.
Manchester Cathedral adjoins Chetham’s Hospital. Cathedral though it be
now, by virtue of the creation of the modern Bishopric of Manchester,
the building is but a glorified parish church, and not any of the many
additions made to it of recent years suffice to render it anything
else. It remains, as it were, an incidental and not essential feature
of the great city.
I suppose—the intense rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool being
a thing to reckon with in so many directions—Manchester will not long
remain content with this condition of affairs, especially since it
has become known that the new Liverpool Cathedral, rising now from
its foundations, is to outrange all others for size. The stranger to
Manchester would certainly never imagine that the church he perceives,
immediately outside the Exchange station, was of Cathedral rank; and
indeed it is so only by reason of modern ecclesiastical arrangements,
made expedient by the growth of great modern industrial communities.
[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM DEANSGATE.]
[Sidenote: _MISERERES_]
[Illustration: MISERERE SEAT, MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL: THE PEDLAR AND THE
MONKEYS.]
Manchester was in the diocese of Lichfield until 1541, when it was
transferred to Chester; but since 1847 it has been an independent
see. Manchester people have had amply sufficient time to realise this
added dignity, but the stranger fails altogether to assimilate the
idea, and although he perceives the Bishop to be full-fledged—except
that he is a “Lord” Bishop only by election—cannot help observing that
his Cathedral is but a suffragan. It would be an imposing building in
a smaller place, but here it is dwarfed by the neighbouring railway
stations and the towering piles of warehouses. It looks, as already
remarked, nothing more than a parish church, and a very black parish
church, too. It is chiefly of Perpendicular Gothic, but little of the
exterior is really old, the tower having been rebuilt in 1868, and
many features added since. The beauty of the church is chiefly within.
It is a dark interior, but the nave, with its tall slender columns
of red sandstone, is particularly graceful. This is no place for an
architectural history of the structure, but at least the ancient carved
miserere seats may be mentioned, particularly as they are among the
finest in the country, for craftsmanship and fertility of invention.
Like—yet how unlike!—the pictorial advertisements of a patent medicine
which here shall be nameless, “every picture tells a story,” and much
entertainment may be derived from these quaintly humorous designs.
The three legs of Man, shown upon one, allude to the connection of
the Stanleys, Earls of Derby (who were Kings of Man), with the “old
church,” as Manchester men still affectionately style the Cathedral.
An elephant with a castle on his back is seen on another, but the
elephant’s legs are jointed like those of a horse, and obviously the
designer knew little of the structure of elephants. Another subject
is that of the fox walking off with a goose. Two others display
the twin sports of bull-and bear-baiting. A very humorous example
displays a pedlar, fallen asleep by the way, robbed by monkeys, who
are taking the trinkets and clothing out of his pack, and trying them
on, while one other is busily searching in his hair for the usual
game that monkeys in the Zoological Gardens may any day be observed
seeking. Another very elaborate carving represents a sow playing the
bagpipes, and a group of little pigs dancing to the music. A pilgrim
engaged in drinking and accidentally letting fall the jug, is a scene
unfortunately mutilated. A game of backgammon in an inn; the execution
of the fox by owls and rooks; the hare’s revenge, where the hare is
seen to be roasting the hunter on a spit; and a stag-hunting scene
complete the set. In this last, the hunt is represented as at an end,
or “done”; and probably is intended as a pun upon the name of the first
Warden of the College, Huntingdon.
III
The history of Manchester is chiefly the history of the textile
industries. There was a mill for the manufacture of woollen cloth
in Manchester so early as the time of Edward the Second, and in the
succeeding reign a settlement of Flemish weavers further increased the
trade. In the reign of Henry the Eighth, Manchester was described as
“the fayrest, best builded, quickliest, and most populous toune of all
Lancastershire,” and “well-inhabited, distinguished for trade, both in
linens and woollens”; but the cotton industry, introduced at the close
of the sixteenth century, became no great thing until another two
hundred years had passed.
[Sidenote: _WARS AND TUMULTS_]
In the meanwhile history was enacted. Early in the Cromwellian wars
Manchester declared for the Parliament, and the Royalists besieged what
was then the walled town twice, unsuccessfully. But these were only
passing incidents. Everywhere in England at that time crop-headed men
of sour visage and in subfusc garments warred with ringleted men of
a cheerful countenance and ungodly conversation, wearing clothes of
extravagant cut and colour. The one side fought for Parliament, the
other for King, but the quarrel really was deeper than that. It was
a conflict of ideals. But they fought it out elsewhere with greater
fierceness and expenditure of blood, and Manchester went on as best it
could with its fated function of providing linen for all the godly and
ungodly, whether Royalists or Republicans, who had the wherewithal to
buy.
Again Manchester was to know something of warfare, for Prince Charles
and his Highlanders came in November, 1745. The sympathies of the town
were largely with him, the bells of “t’owd church” were rung, and a
great illumination lit the streets—as great illuminations were then
understood: modern Market Street, with the shops lit of an evening,
would probably reduce that illumination to a sorry flicker. Three
hundred Manchester men marched south with Prince Charlie, under the
command of Colonel Townley. Within a week they were marching back, and
when they were come to Manchester again they found local sentiment
sadly changed: the mob harrying their rear on the retreat to Preston.
Colonel Townley and some of his ill-fated men were hanged on Kennington
Common.
What the trade of Manchester was, and how goods were brought to and
despatched from it in old times, may be seen from Aikin’s description
in 1795:
“When the Manchester trade began to extend, the chapmen used to keep
gangs of pack-horses and accompany them to the principal towns with
goods in packs, which they opened and sold to shopkeepers, lodging
what was unsold in small stores at the inns. The pack-horses brought
back sheep’s wool, which was bought on the journey and sold to the
makers of worsted yarn at Manchester, or to the clothiers of Rochdale,
Saddleworth, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. On the improvement of
turnpike roads, wagons were set up and the pack-horses discontinued;
and the chapmen only rode out for orders, carrying with them patterns
in their bags. It was during the forty years from 1730 to 1770 that
trade was greatly pushed by the practice of sending these riders all
over the kingdom.”
Such enterprise would not have been possible at an earlier period, for
the turnpike roads surrounding Manchester date only from 1750: the
earliest was the Preston to Lancaster turnpike, constructed under the
Act of that year. Tolls were taken, on the Preston to Garstang section,
until February 1st, 1875, and on the Garstang to Lancaster portion
until November 1st, 1882. The way out of Manchester, on to Bolton, was
turnpiked in 1752, and tolls ceased to be taken on November 1st, 1871.
[Sidenote: _NO ROADS: OLD ROADS_]
From the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century the roads
of Lancashire were less roads than slushy lanes, very narrow and full
of ruts, mud, and water. Even the main route through to Scotland was
no better, and had then but little need to be, for wheeled conveyances
were almost entirely unknown. Pack-horses, as we have seen, conveyed
what goods were ever sent, but for all practical purposes most
communities were self-contained. Their wants were few and simple, and
were easily supplied from their own resources; while persons obliged to
travel made their way on horseback; only those of robust physique and
in good health being able to undertake such journeys, and glad enough,
amid the difficulties of the way, to find here and there a stretch of
lane roughly paved with rude slabs of local millstone grit.
But if the ways were incredibly foul, the inns at the end of each day’s
journey went some way towards compensating the fatigued horseman for
his labours. The Lancashire inns were then, according to Holinshead,
writing in 1577, exceptionally good, each guest being “sure to lie in
clean sheets wherein no man hath lodged.” Evidently the innkeepers
looked to make their profit out of the “entertainment” they supplied
for man and beast, for the horseman’s bed cost him nothing, but “if
he go on foot, he hath a penny to pay.” Mere public-houses, of the
complexion of drink-shops, were not tolerated in Manchester and
Preston; for at Manchester it was forbidden to brew or sell ale unless
the brewer or vendor could make “two honest beddis,” while Preston
was even more strict: lodgings for four men and four horses being the
irreducible minimum.
The old “Seven Stars” inn in Withy Grove is ancient enough to have come
under this ordinance, which must have affected also the picturesque old
house now styled the “Wellington,” in the Market Place, and the even
more picturesque “Bull’s Head,” in Greengate, Salford.
With the growth of trade referred to by Aikin, between 1730 and 1770,
Manchester’s interests comprehended the whole of the kingdom, and its
trade was greatly helped by the demand that by this time was growing
for good roads, not alone here, but generally throughout the country.
Road improvements, made possible by Turnpike Acts, began to be frequent
from about 1710, and were very numerous and important between 1730 and
1770, when 420 Acts were passed. In this period business grew so heavy
that pack-horses did not suffice to carry the increasing bulk of goods,
and wagons came more and more into use; while the press of affairs
was such that principals found it necessary to visit London and other
centres at more frequent intervals. It was thus that the Manchester
and London Flying Coach was established, in 1754.
[Sidenote: _BEGINNINGS OF EXPORT_]
In 1760 the exportation of cotton goods began; for, with the first
tentative application of machinery to weaving, production had increased
beyond the possible consumption of the country. The first improvement
upon the primitive form of handloom weaving was the invention of the
fly-shuttle, in 1738. This contrivance doubled the weaver’s powers; but
it was followed in 1768 by the invention of the “spinning-jenny,” by
James Hargreaves, which increased production eight-fold.
[Illustration: THE “BULL’S HEAD,” SALFORD.]
The population of Manchester and Salford had by this time grown to
close upon 40,000, and the local needs had increased in like degree.
But still, although much had been done to improve roads throughout the
country, and in Lancashire, those immediately around Manchester itself
were still so bad in 1760 that although coal was mined at Worsley, less
than ten miles away, it could not be brought into the town by wheeled
conveyance, but had to be carried by long lines of pack-horses, in
loads of 280 lb. Coals were cheap at the pit mouth—usually 10_d._ the
load—but the carriage cost, as a rule, a shilling more.
Inventions do not burst upon a world that has felt no need for them.
The need may not have been more than blindly felt, but the necessities
of the ages have, nevertheless, been supplied as they have arisen.
In this, almost more than in anything else, the thinking man sees an
ordered scheme of existence which, in other directions, the brutalities
and injustices of an imperfect world would seem to deny.
[Sidenote: _THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL_]
At this time, the consumption of coal was growing so fast in
Manchester, and the difficulties of marketing it were so great that the
wealthy Duke of Bridgewater, owner of the pits at Worsley, conceived
the idea of enriching himself still further, and at the same time
helping the growth of Manchester, by means of constructing a canal from
Worsley, by which coals could be carried cheaply and expeditiously.
It was necessary to secure the support of the people of Manchester,
before he could present a Bill to Parliament for this purpose, and
he accordingly undertook, if the canal were made, to sell his coal
at 4_d._ per hundred in the town—less than half the usual price—or
to charge not more than half-a-crown a ton freight. The Bill was
introduced and passed in 1759, without opposition, and by July 1761
the canal was opened. This first section of what eventually became
the great Bridgewater Canal, extended to Runcorn in 1773, was the
first step towards the making of modern Manchester, and was rendered
possible only by the homely genius of James Brindley, the self-taught
engineer, whose works were justly considered marvels in their day. He
designed and originated all the novel and ingenious contrivances that
were features of the undertaking, and did it all on wages not exceeding
a guinea a week, a rate of pay he continued to receive for years of
unremitting toil, until his death. The canals at length brought the
Duke an income of £80,000 a year, but at Brindley’s untimely death in
1776 the stingy peer owed him some hundreds of pounds, on account of
salary, which he was so incredibly mean as not to pay.
This enterprise was remarkable in more than the engineering
difficulties overcome. Several canals had already been made in various
parts of the country by deepening and straightening the channels of
streams and rivers, and the first ship canal was that constructed in
1566, on the Exe, from Topsham to Exeter; but the Bridgewater Canal
was the first to be dug in dry ground. Its extension across country,
to the Mersey at Runcorn, was undertaken for the purpose of cheapening
and expediting traffic in raw and manufactured cotton and other goods,
between Manchester and Liverpool, and was thus the precursor, by a
hundred and twenty years, of the Manchester Ship Canal, which aims
to make Manchester a port entirely independent of its great seaboard
neighbour.
The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in
Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of
them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there
has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves
was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar
machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a
poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life
as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. In 1768 his cotton-spinning
machine, which performed the work of sixteen or twenty men, was set
up at Preston, and in 1707 was patented. His first spinning-mill was
erected at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, and was entirely successful.
In 1786 he was knighted, and in 1792 he died, leaving a fortune of
close upon half a million sterling.
The fickleness and waywardness of fortune are proverbial, but nowhere
else so marked as in the struggles of inventors. In 1779, eleven years
after Arkwright had set up his spinning-jenny, Samuel Crompton, of
Hall-i’-th’-Wood, near Bolton, invented the hybrid “Spinning Mule,”
combining the useful features of Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s machines.
He was an exceptionally poor man, and partly earned his living by
playing the violin at the Bolton theatre.
[Sidenote: _THE FACTORY SYSTEM_]
A great step forward was Cartwright’s power-loom, invented in 1785,
and the Government in 1809 granted him £10,000, in recognition of his
usefulness to the advancement of commerce. With the same year that
witnessed Cartwright’s invention, steam was first employed in weaving,
by Boulton and Watt, and the history of the cotton industry has been,
since that day, a long record of improvements, until nowadays factories
are equipped with the most beautiful and complicated contrivances—the
outcome of a hundred and seventy years of invention—that seem
themselves almost sentient and understanding.
IV
This long succession of mechanical improvements brought immense wealth
to the manufacturers and helped to tide England’s credit over the
exhausting years of the American Rebellion and continual Continental
wars; but it brought the original foul blight of the factory system,
which replaced the spinning once done in cottage homes. Industry was
stived up in overcrowded workshops, the slums came into existence, and
under-paid, over-worked, and cruelly treated child-labour characterised
the days before the passing of the Factory Acts.
A distinguished Spaniard, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, visiting
England in 1807, and coming to Manchester, was truly horrified by what
he saw here. It seemed to him that “a place more destitute of all
interesting objects than Manchester it would not be easy to conceive.
In size and population it is the second city in the kingdom, containing
about fourscore thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded
together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened
with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without
their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where
you hear from within the everlasting din of machinery; and where,
when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of
their prayers.” Here you perceive the conflict of ideals between a
priest-ridden country and a land of commerce: with the telling of beads
pre-eminent in the one, and the counting of gold equally prominent in
the other.
Espriella and his companions saw all the sights. They were taken to one
of the great cotton manufactories and were shown a number of children
at work there, the guide dwelling with satisfaction and delight on the
infinite good resulting from employing infants at so early an age.
“I listened,” says our horrified traveller, “without contradicting
him, for who would lift up his voice against Diana at Ephesus!” and
he left “with a feeling at heart which makes me thank God I am not an
Englishman.”
“There is,” he continues, “a shrub in some of the East Indian islands
which the French call _veloutier_; it exhales an odour that is
agreeable at a distance, becomes less so as you draw nearer, and when
you are quite close to it, is insupportably loathsome. Alciatus himself
could not have imagined an emblem more appropriate to the commercial
prosperity of England.”
[Sidenote: _CHILD LABOUR_]
“The guide remarked that nothing could be so beneficial to a country as
manufactures. ‘You see these children, sir,’ said he. ‘In most parts of
England poor children are a burden to their parents and to the parish;
here the parish, which would else have to support them, is rid of all
expense; they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and
by the time they are seven or eight years old, bring in money. There is
no idleness among us: they come at five in the morning; we allow them
half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work
at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never
stand still.’
“I was looking, while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with which
the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery,
half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion; and when he
told me there was no rest in those walls, day or night, I thought that
if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene
worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.
“‘These children, then,’ said I, ‘have no time to receive instruction.’
“‘That, sir,’ he replied, is the evil we have found. Girls are employed
here from the age you see, till they marry, and then they know nothing
about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking or boil a potato.
But we are remedying it now, and send the children to school for an
hour after they have done work.’
“I asked if so much confinement did not injure their health.
“‘No,’ he replied, ‘they are as healthy as any children in the world.
To be sure, many of them as they grow up go off in consumption, but
consumption is the disease of the English.’”
This was not merely a temporary state of affairs, but an evil which
came into being with the factory system, and grew steadily with its
growth. Nor was it confined to any particular district. Not only in
Lancashire, but everywhere that mills and factories were working, did
the scandals of child-labour disgust Englishmen who did not happen to
be mill-owners, and surprise and horrify foreigners, who at one and
the same time saw England proposing to liberate the negro slaves, and
permitting white slavery, almost as gross, in “the land of liberty.”
[Sidenote: _CRUEL PRACTICES_]
The things that Espriella saw in 1807 were the things, infinitely
aggravated by the further extension of the factory system, that
prevailed in 1832, when the scandal grew to such proportions that
petitions were presented from all classes to Parliament, praying that
legislation should be undertaken to end it. This movement resulted in
a Factory Commission that revealed many unsuspected things. Not only
were the factory owners guilty of working their miserable child-hands
almost incredible hours, under the most dreadful conditions; but the
parents, who practically sold their children into this slavery, were
guilty equally with them.
The report of the Factory Commission is a voluminous affair of many
hundreds of folio pages. Many of those pages of evidence taken on
oath disclose curiously varying ideas of what constituted cruelty in
punishment, or excessive hours of labour for children. For example, a
child ten years of age employed at Wigan was punished for being late at
the factory, as many others were, by being forced to work with a rope
round her neck, to which a 20-lb. weight was attached. There were those
who did not regard this as anything at all out of the way, and declared
the children so punished did not mind it. We can only wonder they did
not say more, and insist that the victims rather enjoyed this torture.
Mary Hooton, the mother of the girl, acknowledged that she told the
overlooker to beat her.
Humphrey Dyson, giving evidence as to the practice of a factory at
Manchester, stated that the overlooker made a whip of a piece of
leather about three inches wide and about half a yard long, and cut
into fingers at the end. This was set into a wooden handle with a brass
hook. With this instrument of torture the overlooker “punished” the
children at his discretion. In many instances, mothers, superior to
the Mary Hooton type, came and took these away and destroyed them, but
the overlooker made others.
The wages of these child-workers, it seemed, ranged from one shilling
and sixpence to four shillings a week, and these, according to a speech
made in the House of Commons, were the conditions under which those
scanty wages were earned:
“The following were the hours of labour imposed upon the children and
young persons. Monday morning, commence work at six o’clock: at nine,
half an hour for breakfast; begin again at half-past nine, and work
till twelve. Dinner, one hour; work from one till half-past four.
Drinking (afternoon meal), half an hour; work from five till eight;
rest, half an hour; work from half-past eight till twelve, midnight;
an hour’s rest. One in the morning till five, work; half an hour’s
rest; work, half-past five till nine; breakfast, half an hour; work,
half-past nine till twelve. Dinner, one hour. Work, one till half-past
four. Drinking, half-past four till five. Work again from five till
nine on the Tuesday evening, when the gang of adult and infant slaves
were dismissed for the night, after having toiled thirty-nine hours,
with nine intervals for refreshment, but none for bed.
“Wednesday and Thursday were occupied with day work only. From Friday
morning till Saturday night, the same labour as that of Monday and
Tuesday was repeated.”
[Sidenote: _MANCHESTER, A CENTURY AGO_]
The mill-owners, of course, felt outraged when Parliament passed the
first Factory Act, and when the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and subsequent
legislation, designed to put an end to the scandal of women being sent
underground to work, and to rescue children from conditions hardly less
horrible than those of negro slavery, was under discussion, Bright and
Cobden characterised the proposals as “harassing the manufacturers,”
and as “a blow at liberty.”
V
Manchester was a place of especial unrelieved grimness in the early
years of the nineteenth century. It had ceased to be a picturesque
overgrown village, and was assuming the earlier and more forbidding
aspect of an industrial town. It was, of course, compared with the
widespreading city of to-day, a small place, and the surrounding
country came close up to its centre, and is said to have been not
unpleasing. But the toil and the striving were then unrelieved by any
urban graces. There was no “Society” at Manchester, but a great deal
of discontent existed and short commons were then the rule. Manchester
was regarded in those days of depression, after the close of the great
Continental wars, as a dangerous place; and here, indeed, Radicalism
was born, of injustice and hunger. “Manchester! your Royal Highness,”
exclaimed the fastidious Beau Brummell, in horror, to the Prince
Regent—“only think of Manchester!” when his regiment was ordered
there. He sped swiftly away and sold out of the Army, rather than be
banished to a benighted place where the correct set of a cravat was
unknown, and not considered especially worth knowing.
Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great
cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of
national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of
Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial
expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is
perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in
England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the
chilling nip of bad; caused by influences almost wholly beyond control.
[Sidenote: _POLITICAL AGITATION_]
The years immediately following Waterloo and the close of the great
and long-continued wars with Napoleon were lean years in Lancashire in
particular, and in England in general, and discontent was rife. The
price of bread was high, employment was scarce and threatened by the
continual introduction of labour-saving machinery. The outlook of all
the wage-earning classes was very grim, and the position was further
inflamed by agitators, who very speedily put a political complexion
upon the economic crisis. It was the era before Reform, when all
political power was frankly held by the classes and the wealthy. The
people were not enfranchised, and were taught by mob orators to believe
that there lay the secret of the ills and disabilities they suffered.
To possess a vote was held up as an ideal which, when reached, would
be the solution of all grievances. It was probably not declared in
so many words that enfranchisement would bring more work and better
paid, nor that the voting-power would enable the working-men to vote
away the employment of the labour-saving machinery they dreaded;
but so much was implied. Riots, more or less serious, took place
sporadically, throughout the country, where the people were almost
starving; for, side by side with scarcity of employment, the price of
bread was extravagantly high, in consequence of a succession of bad
harvests bringing up the price of corn to an unprecedented figure.
The Government at length became seriously alarmed at the troubles.
There had been destructive riots in 1816, in Spitalfields, when a mob
of 30,000 had broken into shops and houses, and burned and pillaged.
Nottingham, Preston, Bury, and many other places were scenes of mob
rule. In 1818 the Manchester operatives had broken the factory-windows,
and had to be dispersed by Dragoons; and in the same year there were
riots at Barnsley. The year 1819 opened with the demagogue, “Orator
Hunt,” being thrashed by Hussars in the theatre at Manchester, where,
it was said, he had hissed the playing of “God Save the King”; and it
was declared that the turbulent Reformers of Glasgow proposed marching
upon London. At the same time a Reform meeting held at Birmingham was
dispersed, a constable being shot by workmen endeavouring to rescue one
of the arrested speakers.
It must be admitted that the classes were not conciliatory. Their
representatives in high places scorned the masses as the “swinish
multitude,” and did not propose any political changes.
[Sidenote: _MASS MEETING_]
Still, the methods of the mob-rulers were extremely provocative and
alarming. Whatever else they were, or were not, Hunt and Bamford,
leading spirits among the Reformers, were intelligent men, and should
have been able to forecast the probable effect the drilling of the
multitude would have upon the Government. It was very well to argue
that the drilling that went on at night was merely intended to enable
great bodies of men to march to and from mass-meetings in order.
The leaders were philosophical Radicals, and did not for a moment
contemplate force, and their followers were very generally of the
same mind; but we may easily see into the mind of Governments, which
themselves only employ drilling to one end: that of reducing brute
force to a scientific form of defence and attack; and undoubtedly
these exercises, even without arms, were alarming, for who was to tell
whence weapons might not be procured at any given moment. In short, the
Administration imagined the country to be on the brink of revolution:
a thing not so wildly improbable when meetings were enlivened by
banners bearing the inscriptions, “Annual Parliaments,” “Universal
Suffrage,” and “No Corn Laws”; and when that offensive emblem, a Cap
of Liberty, carried on a pole, was prominent. The authorities imagined
themselves face to face with an organised attempt at a subversion of
the Constitution, and, in that belief, it behoved them to be on their
guard.
“Orator Hunt” and Samuel Bamford, who had already, in 1817, been
arrested on suspicion of high treason in connection with the Reform
movement, were active in the agitation of 1819. They had drilled
thousands of men in readiness for a peaceful mass-meeting to be held
in the small open space then called “St. Peter’s Field,” at the end of
Mosley Street, Manchester, on August 16th, and the whole countryside
was agog with excitement and the wildest rumours. Rustic folk, going
home in the darkness, had heard the words of military command, “face
right,” “face left,” “right wheel,” “left wheel,” and so forth, and
extravagant notions of what was afoot very naturally spread. In
readiness for the day, the magistrates enrolled a force of special
constables, and a strong force of Yeomanry and military was kept near
at call.
In from Middleton marched Bamford, at the head of 6,000 men, to “St.
Peter’s Field,” and from other quarters came many columns; so that
by the time appointed for the opening of the meeting in that narrow
space of two or three acres, some 80,000 persons were assembled. The
police held a warrant for the arrest of Hunt on a charge of seditious
assembly, but, in the face of this huge crowd, declared themselves
unable to execute it, and called upon the magistrates for military
assistance. A more tactful method would have been to wait until the
close of the meeting, when Hunt could probably have been easily
secured; but tact is not a common possession.
[Sidenote: _PETERLOO_]
Close by was a force of one hundred and forty of the Manchester and
Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, hidden away in Pickford’s yard, and to them
was entrusted the task of driving a way through the crowd, to seize
Hunt. It was an unfortunate choice, for the Yeomanry were, to a man,
master manufacturers, whose interests had been assailed violently
by the mob. The regular troops near at hand would have been less
prejudiced, and would have acted more gently; but the Yeomanry charged
into the midst of the masses of people laying about them with the
edge and point of their swords. Many inoffensive persons, men, women,
and children, were cut and slashed and trampled down; but the crowd
was so tightly packed that it could not have given way if it would,
and the Yeomanry were not only stopped, but began to be severely
handled; which, after all, was no more than they deserved. Then Hulton,
prominent among the magistrates, lost his head, and ordered up the
Hussars to the aid of the Yeomanry. People were ridden down by the
hundred, the platforms were stormed, the banners torn down, and the
field cleared. Vast crowds of weeping and cursing fugitives, many
of them wounded, fled from the scene and out of Manchester into the
country: afraid of arrest. Eleven people lay dead, thirty dangerously
wounded, and forty “much injured.” Hunt, Bamford, and others were
arrested. Thus ended the great Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field. It
was only four years from the time when Waterloo had been fought, and
the people speedily found the name of “Peterloo” for this Yeomanry and
Hussar victory. It was alternatively, with facile alliteration, known
as the “Manchester massacre.” The site is now St. Peter’s Square, and
on a portion of the ground stands the Free Trade Hall.
One cannot feel overmuch sympathy with the political agitation of that
time. The history of all politics, in all ages, and still in progress,
tells us that you succeed only in abolishing one tyranny to replace it
with another: destroying the tyranny of aristocracy to replace it with
that of wealth, which in its turn is overthrown by the worse tyranny
of Socialism and the impossible doctrine of the essential equality of
man. That which dominates will inevitably tyrannise, whether it be the
strong over the weak, the aristocrat over the plebeian, or the wealthy
over the poor; and sympathy with the downtrodden is a little blighted
when it is realised that, when the poor grow rich and the humble
powerful, they, too, begin to hector and to brow-beat. The cotton
operative, rising by innate capacity from the position of a wage-earner
to that of an employer, finds the centre of his interests shifted, and
throws in his lot with the class to which he has won his way.
The necessity for Parliamentary and constitutional reform was
acknowledged by Pitt, Earl of Chatham, so far back as 1782; and
“radical reform”—_i.e._ reform going to the root of things—was demanded
by the country in 1797-8; but it was left to agitators to bring the
question of reform so greatly into disrepute that, in common speech, we
hear always of a thing being “radically wrong”; never, by any chance,
“radically right,” although the alliterative ease of either form is
equal to the other.
The “Manchester School” of politics, founded in 1838 by Cobden and
Bright, was a very virulent type of Radicalism, and, in some of its
tenets, a singular creed for a commercial community of manufacturers
and exporters to profess. It was nurtured on an agitation for the
repeal of the Corn Law, and on a passion for Free Trade; it advocated
peace-at-any-price, and regarded the Colonies with hatred. “It will be
a happy day,” said Cobden, “when England has not an acre of territory
in Continental Asia.” In these extraordinary aspirations John Bright
shared to the full.
[Sidenote: _THE LITTLE ENGLANDERS_]
To reconcile the political creed of John Bright with his practice as
a manufacturer is one of those tasks whose difficulties approach the
impossible. He was an Apostle of Little Englandism: the passionate
author of the phrase “Perish India!”; the ardent visionary of a day
when “England” should cease to mean anything but this isle. What an
ideal on which to dwell! Said he: “It may be a vision, yet I will
cherish it.” He had what he termed the “noble vision” of Canada
surrendered to the United States:
“From the frozen north to the glowing south, from the stormy waves
of the Atlantic to the calmer waters of the Pacific main, I see one
people, speaking one language, owning one law and holding one religion,
and over all the flag of freedom, a refuge for the oppressed of every
nation and of every clime.”
The “flag of freedom” was, if you please, the Stars and Stripes, and
that “refuge for the oppressed” the land whose people are smarting
under the tyrannies of the Trusts, and of the municipal disciples
of the gospel of graft, as severely as any people ever suffered in
the “oppressed” nations of Europe. At any rate, these are articles
of belief to which few are now found to subscribe. That, with such
aspirations as these, Bright could not endure the idea of Home Rule for
Ireland, and so in 1886 broke with Gladstone and joined the Unionist
party, is one of those extraordinary and illogical changes of front to
which the careers of modern politicians of all shades of thought have
so accustomed us that there are no surprises left.
[Sidenote: _A “MANCHESTER MAN”_]
Demagogues and silver-tongued orators have been the curse in modern
times of this country. They and their audiences, grown drunken on their
own wild words, have thrown over all consistency. In Bright you had
a Radical politician opposed to the holding of an Empire, yet, as a
manufacturer and exporter of cotton goods, having his interests largely
bound up with the retention of our dependencies. It seemed honesty at
the expense of sanity. But less honest was Bright’s bitter objection
to any State interference with the factories. In 1836 he resented any
attempt to control the hours of labour, and wrote a counter-blast to
Fielden’s “Curse of the Factory System.” To the last, he opposed the
reduction of factory hours. In 1861 he attributed the evils attendant
upon over-production, in which he himself was engaged, to anything but
their real cause; but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten
that, although himself a heavy loser by the Cotton Famine, he nobly
championed the cause of the North in its darkest hours. Looking
back upon things accomplished since he entered the political scene,
his Radicalism seems to have been singularly diluted with Whiggism:
inevitable, no doubt, from his position as a large employer of labour.
As a Quaker, he was for Disestablishment; being a landowner, he
endeavoured to bring about the abolition of the Game Laws; he was, as
we have already seen, bitterly opposed, throughout his life, to State
regulation of factories. He denounced Chartism, of which most of the
points of reform demanded have long since been conceded, and, in reply
to the demands of the factory hands for better payment, invented the
comprehensive generality that “with bad trade, wages cannot rise”;
tracing all evils to the Corn Law, that effectual red-herring drawn
across many trails. Always the Corn Law, until its abolition in 1849.
It was responsible for almost everything ill, short of earthquakes.
Bright opposed compulsory education—for that would probably educate
the factory hands into discontent with their station; and was eager
to extend the cultivation of cotton in India. When that project did
not meet with the support he expected, and when his protest against
the Indian protective duties failed to open India to cotton goods free
of duty, “Perish India” became more than ever a pious wish. Perhaps
one of his greatest mistakes was his contempt for the bogey of Papal
aggression; not such a mere illuminated turnip on a post as he and his
contemporaries believed. Rome stalks through the land, aggressive, at
this day.
VI
Many versions exist as to the origin of the expression, a “Manchester
man,” but it is evident enough that the phrase, like that of a
“Lancashire lad,” is a natural alliterative growth. The most widely
accepted story, however, is that which tells of a coachman, who, asked
“Who has ta gotten in t’ coach, lad?” replied, “Wha, then, ther’s a
gentleman fra Liverpool, a man fra Manchester, a chap fra Bolton, an’ a
felly fra Wigan.”
A Lancashire boy’s definition of a gentleman should not at this point
be forgotten. It was given many years since, and was, “one what weers
at watch, an’ ligs by hisself.” So now we know that gentility, in these
days of cheap watches and a prejudice against sharing a bed, may be
within the reach of all.
It is no small thing to be a “Manchester man.” The name has a
self-reliant ring about it that fits the men of Manchester like a
glove, whatever may be the fitness of the other descriptions, or of
that other which tells of “Oldham roughs.”
The Manchester manufacturer of about 1750, as described by
contemporaries, was a humble person, of the greatest simplicity,
working like a journeyman among his hands; beginning the day before
six o’clock in the morning and ending it proportionably earlier, as
the habits of the time and the primitive means of artificial lighting
dictated. He both produced the goods and warehoused them, and his
combined warehouse and factory was also his home. He not only worked
with his weavers, but sat at meals with them, and all helped themselves
out of a common bowl of water-porridge, and a dish of milk. No one
among the manufacturers had such a thing as a “private residence,”
and speech was indeed so simple that none of them probably would have
understood the term unless put in more homely English.
So much for the mid-eighteenth century cotton-spinner. Let us see
how his descendant of about 1866 appeared to his contemporaries. A
writer in a popular magazine of that date, holding forth more or less
eloquently on the characteristics of Manchester men and Liverpool
gentlemen, described a “Liverpool gentleman” as a magnificent person
who traded beyond his means and abused his credit, finally, when the
inevitable crash came, compounding with his creditors on the basis of
three shillings in the pound, and continuing his splendid life with
almost undimmed splendour. But a “Manchester man,” according to this
apologist, when he breaks, breaks utterly, and, surrendering his all,
starts again from below. How these distinctions have borne the test of
time I will not pretend to say. At that period, according to this same
writer, the typical Manchester man was an imaginary person he chose to
style “John Brown.” Putting aside the fact that there is no true or
exclusive Lancashire ring about the name of Brown, we will pass on to
the career of this typical person, as figured in that bygone writer’s
keen imagination.
John Brown was originally a poor lad in a cotton mill. His father and
mother were—the Lord alone knows whom, for his known career began with
his being found as an infant one winter’s night on a doorstep, wrapped
in a flannel petticoat marked “J. B.” The foundling was taken to the
workhouse and was fed, clothed, and educated at the public charge,
finally being sent, as a lad, to the nearest cotton factory, where,
by his ability and industry, he speedily rose to be a foreman. He
married, early, one Mary Smith, who was captured and enslaved by his
noble whiskers, and (being probably well versed in penny novelettes,
in which the infants of the aristocracy are not uncommonly abandoned
on doorsteps) secretly thought him of gentle blood. John Brown, like
the Industrious Apprentice in the moral tales, continually rose higher,
and became a cotton-spinner on his own account, and a wealthy man, with
a magnificent villa at Higher Broughton, or some other place at that
time still semi-rural. He knew nothing of Art, but, as it seemed to
be the conventional thing for a man in his position to do, he bought
pictures, chiefly, it must be confessed, on the basis of so much per
square foot. He rose at six, was at the mill by eight o’clock; and had
dinner at midday in town. He was home to tea, which he took with his
“owd wumman” in the back-kitchen, leaving the magnificent dining-room
for uncomfortable state occasions. He was in bed by nine o’clock.
I do not know if any wealthy Manchester commercial men of the late
’sixties recognised themselves in this effort of the imagination; but
at any rate it would not hold good nowadays. I do not perceive, at
the present time, actually or imaginatively, any great cotton-spinner
taking tea in the back-kitchen or retiring at 9 p.m., and, although the
art patron idea vigorously survives, it is music that pre-eminently
distinguishes Manchester in its higher recreations: Liverpool being
really the greater art centre, devoted, above all things of culture, to
the pleasing of the eye rather than of the ear.
[Sidenote: _MATTER-OF-FACT_]
To the typical Manchester man of that time, birth and gentility were
nothing. He was, above all things, unsentimental and matter-of-fact,
and provokingly literal. It was a Manchester man who, when a passage of
poetry was read from Coleridge, declared that the reading, “The swallow
was a-cold,” was incorrect, and should be “had a cold.”
“Day is breaking” remarked some one to a cotton-spinner. “Let it
break,” he replied, “it owes me nothing.”
It was an inhabitant of some town jealous of Manchester—and there are
plenty of them—who declared that a Manchester man, viewing Nelson’s
bloodstained coat and waistcoat at Greenwich Hospital, would feel
little patriotic emotion. He wonders first what cloth they were made
of. It is a cruel saying, but it has at least this foundation: that
Little Englandism and the old Manchester School of politics were
one. _Were_ one, for the Manchester School of Bright and Cobden is
dead and its corpse dishonoured. It is true that what looked like a
mental aberration overtook Manchester and the country in general at
the election of 1906, but that was, here at any rate, not so much
political conviction as your straightforward, forthright Lancashire
man’s indignation at the want of honesty, the pitiful pettifogging,
that characterised the Balfour Administration. There was, moreover, a
feeling that the country had not been fairly treated in 1903, when Lord
Salisbury resigned his office into the hands of his nephew. The policy
of “keeping it in the family,” as though the governance of the country
were a prerogative of the Cecil family, was very rightly resented, even
to Manchester’s overwhelming rejection of the chief pettifogger himself.
VII
Ten millions of people inhabit the manufacturing districts of which
Manchester is the centre. It is at once the wealthiest and the poorest
district in England, where wealth has an increasing tendency to
accumulate in the hands of the few, and where, according to official
returns, there are, at the other extreme, more paupers than anywhere
else in the land, with the single exception of Middlesex, including
London. The inevitable reverse to the medal of great commercial
prosperity is wretched poverty existing side by side with it. It
is only in poor agricultural, non-manufacturing countries that
poverty is comparatively happy and endurable. If there is a remedy
for such a state of things in the industrial centres, no one has
yet found or applied it. There is always a large proportion here of
the classes it has become the fashion to style “submerged,” and in
times when prosperity wanes it increases so as to include most of the
wage-earners, and to bring the smaller shopkeepers to the verge of
ruin. Many of these periods of depression have been beyond human power
to foresee or to avert, but others have been induced by the action of
the manufacturers, in competition with one another. But in almost every
instance of hard times the nearest remedy has been sought, on one side,
or the other, in the strike or the lock-out. Lancashire is the home of
these crude remedies.
[Sidenote: _OVER-PRODUCTION_]
Next to the shortage, or the high price, of raw material, or the
slackness of trade, the greatest evil is that of the glutted market,
caused by over-production, hardly possible before the days of
machinery; an evil which is most often caused by the competition of
manufacturers, who continue to manufacture, each one in the hope that,
whoever else suffers, he at least will not. Over-production has in
the past been carried on to such an extent that goods have had to be
sold in bulk for very considerably lower than the cost of manufacture.
Selling at a heavy loss, the manufacturers have sought the nearest
means handy to reduce their deficit; and this has usually been found in
the reduction of wages, rather than in decreasing the output. A five
or ten per cent. reduction has generally brought about a strike, which
has, before now, been welcome to great firms, in affording an excuse
for ceasing to manufacture at a ruinous loss. To provoke a strike on
these terms has been the only way out of an impossible situation;
and the indignant workpeople have thus, instead of embarrassing the
masters, unwittingly saved them from bankruptcy. The middle course is
the expedient of “short time.”
These are large and serious questions, happily not of late years
pushed forward by circumstances so greatly as of yore; but once very
prominent indeed. The literature of cotton-spinning and strikes is a
very extensive one, and written upon largely by no less an authority
than Mr. John Morley, who is of opinion that “some of them (the
manufacturers) are idle, some are incompetent, and some of them
are blackguards.” This is severe criticism indeed to pass upon as
enterprising and as upright a body of commercial men as it is possible
to find in England: men, too, not so long since, generally of his own
brand of politics. They do not seem the words of a philosopher.
The greatest period of over-production was that culminating in the
gorged markets of 1861. The years 1859-60 had been times of “terrific
prosperity,” in which new mills had sprung up numerously, and had, in
common with the older, been working overtime. In the beginning of 1861
there were 2,270 factories in Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire,
working at high pressure. As a result of the supposition that those
good times would last, manufacturers strained every nerve to work
their plant and their hands to their utmost capacity, and in doing so
produced such a bulk of goods that by their own efforts they brought
prosperity to an end. India and China, the great markets for shirtings
and yarn, were full up, and ceased to be buyers; and all the while,
the warehouses of Manchester were bursting with an increasing stock of
unsaleable goods. The result was “short time” in October 1861. Even had
there been no war in America, bad times would have come; but with the
opening of the civil war between North and South, the Cotton Famine of
1862-3, brought about by the cessation of the supply of raw cotton from
the Southern States, brought wealthy cotton-spinners to the verge of
ruin, and misery and starvation to hundreds of thousands. Every one in
the manufacturing districts suffered, for the classes are dependent one
upon another. To manufacturers, workpeople, shopkeepers, professional
men, the Cotton Famine was a very grim reality. By December 1862, no
fewer than 247,000 hands were out of employment, and more than half
that number on “short time.” The huge number of 234,000 were in receipt
of poor-relief, and the average poor-rates for the manufacturing
districts rose from 7-5/8_d._ in the £, to 2_s._ 2-1/2_d._ The Relief
Funds subscribed amounted to over £2,000,000, and the trade losses due
to the Cotton Famine were calculated at £70,000,000.
[Sidenote: _THE COTTON FAMINE_]
The newspapers of that dreadful time were full of pen-pictures of the
Famine, and they are readily to be referred to, but no good purpose
would be served by recounting those sad tales. Yet, in spite of all
their sufferings, in spite of having everything to gain from the
success of the South, the essential sturdiness, independence, and
honesty of the Lancashire people’s character kept their original
opinions firm: that the North was right in fighting against slavery.
It was essentially the people’s opinion. Knowing something themselves
of slavery in the days before the Factory Acts, they were sympathetic,
and were solid for the North. Other classes were, at best, divided, and
England as a whole was for the South.
Manchester long ago ceased to be a cotton-manufacturing centre. The
growth of the industry, the growth of the city, and the increase of
rent, rates, and taxes within it, all led to Manchester becoming the
metropolis of cotton, in which it is no longer worked up from the raw
material, but where the finished product is warehoused. Warehouses,
and not factories, are the prominent buildings of “Cottonopolis”;
which is now a city of merchants and middlemen, and the metropolis of
the Lancashire industrial towns, where all professions and trades are
represented. To see the cotton mills, you need go to Stockport, Bolton,
Blackburn, Oldham, and Preston: but whenever they suffer, Manchester
will share in their trials.
The magnitude of the cotton-spinning trade is too great to be readily
grasped. In the comparatively early stages of its history, in the years
1793-1824, the value of the total exports was £365,000,000, or an
average of, say, twelve millions sterling a year, and that of the raw
material imported £128,000,000. In 1887, the total value of the annual
exports had risen to £70,957,000; or, in other words, it had grown
almost six-fold.
[Sidenote: _ENGLAND’S BRAIN-CENTRE_]
There were then 700,000 operatives, and a sum of £29,400,000 was paid
annually in wages. According to the returns for 1905, the exports of
cotton goods in that year were valued at £92,000,000, showing an annual
increase since 1887 of considerably over a million sterling a year. And
still the tide of commercial prosperity is rising; no fewer than eighty
new cotton mills having been built in Lancashire in the eighteen months
comprising 1906 and the first half of 1907: with the result that there
is more work to be done than hands to do it. When in due course the
usual over-production ensues, and the scarcity of labour is replaced by
lack of work, the bulk of misery and suffering will be proportionately
increased; and should there ever come another Cotton Famine, the
horrors of 1863 will fade into comparative insignificance.
VIII
[Sidenote: _THE MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL_]
“What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” That is
a political byword, not always supported by events; but if we enlarge
the scope into a plenary comprehension of affairs, the truth of it
becomes much more evident. Railways, in the opening of the Manchester
and Liverpool Railway, August 26th, 1830, the first in England,
originated in Lancashire, and spread from it; and canals, although the
first was made elsewhere, at Manchester first became of importance. The
opening of the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal in 1761, and that of the
Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, mark the beginnings of two different
eras: the second of the two freighted with no one yet knows what
tremendous possibilities. Manchester is a port, and has become so by
an exertion of local patriotism not equalled elsewhere. When shares in
the proposed Ship Canal were offered in the financial world and no one
would find the capital, the future of the project looked hopeless. The
powers for its construction, granted by Act of Parliament, were nearly
lapsing, and the promoters were reduced to stumping the surrounding
country and holding meetings to advertise the scheme. In that dark hour
many working-men of Manchester put their savings into the Company, and
the Corporation itself became very largely concerned in it. When the
success of the issue appeared assured, the giants of finance plucked
up a little courage, the situation was saved at the eleventh hour, and
the Canal became at last, after an expenditure of fifteen millions and
a quarter sterling, an accomplished fact. It has only recently yielded
any return upon that huge expenditure, but the direct access to the sea
it gives has enormously increased Manchester’s wealth and importance.
The useful and the beautiful, we are told, are one, but the Manchester
Ship Canal is not a beautiful object. Its waters are black and smell
to Heaven on hot days, and the great locks, swing-bridges, and the
like, although wonderful engineering feats, are not improvements upon
the landscape. But they have a majesty of their own, and if you
voyage down the Ship Canal, duly holding your nose, you will be much
impressed. You will be even more impressed if you don’t hold it. A
succession of docks, lairages, grain elevators and coal-shoots lines
this Acherontean tideway: everything equipped with machinery that
performs marvels in a quiet, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. And
the great ocean-going steamers come surging slowly up to Manchester,
bellowing for the swing bridges to swing open, and crowds of interested
idlers, and the impatient traffic, held up at the flung-up bridges,
look upon the sight with never-satiated gaze. It is a perennial wonder,
a sensation that never stales.
In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken
Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. Time was, and not so long
since, when the park railings, along the Chester Road, at the outskirts
of Manchester, disclosed broad stretches of wooded lawns, sloping to
the Irwell, but it is now as though some magician’s wand had waved
away the trees and the lawns and in one act had replaced them with
a close imitation of the East India Docks, where skyscraping blocks
of fireproof warehouses and mazes of railway sidings form amazing
evidences of what the Canal has already done for Manchester. It has
certainly “done for” any lingering rural fringe.
I well remember in the long ago being dumped down by the railway in
Manchester, as a stranger, with no friends in the great city, and with
that dim sense of locality only a railway journey can give. Coming by
road into any such place, you bring topographical continuity with you,
and know where the grim houses end and the smiling country begins; but
to be set down solitary in midst of these miles of streets, and then
on some leisure day to essay the enterprise of walking out to where
the last house fronts upon the fields, and to walk on and on, and
never seem to come any nearer the fringe of the frowning houses, is an
experience whose horror only De Quincey could hope to portray. London
is larger, but its streets have a more varied interest. Here, away
from the midst of Manchester, whose central architecture is ornate,
if black, the mean, featureless streets sear your very soul. It was
before the days of electric tramways, and I walked on and on, and still
on, without coming to the end of Manchester, and then at Old Trafford,
obsessed with a dread of it all, walked back; thinking, rather wildly,
did it ever come to an end.
Having since then come to it and left it by several roads, I am now
fully informed as to its limits, and, with that knowledge, the houses
look a little kindlier, the streets do not seem quite interminable. But
I am still impressed with the extraordinary length to which the paved
roads and lanes—paved with granite setts—run. There is a lane—a country
lane, for it is bordered with hedges—which I found when exploring the
neighbourhood on a bicycle, and that lane went on and onwards, ever
winding, for miles, and always, although extraordinarily lonely, and
with never a house nor a wayfarer, paved with granite setts which it
must have cost a considerable fortune to lay there. It began in the
neighbourhood of Warburton and ended at a misbegotten place called
Broad Heath, and still it was more than six and a half miles to
Manchester. I was never before so genuinely astonished in all my life.
At Old Trafford are the Botanical Gardens, once admirably placed, but
now as incongruous as though, say, St. James’s Park were set beside
the Commercial Road. Manchester amused itself in a genteel way there;
but to see how Manchester can intensely enjoy itself after a spell of
dogged work, the Belle Vue Gardens, Longsight, should be visited at
holiday time. The place is the, superlatively _the_, popular resort,
and is Hampstead Heath, Rosherville, and the Crystal Palace combined.
[Sidenote: _THE FENIANS_]
There is no end to describing Manchester: it is so vast and so varied,
and its story presents so many chapters. One might say something of the
Fenian outrage of September 18th, 1867, when Sergeant Brett, in charge
of the prison-van conveying prisoners to Belle Vue Gaol, was shot in
the Hyde Road by a desperate gang of forty armed men endeavouring to
release the criminals, Kelly and Deasy. Of those arrested, Allen,
Larkin, and O’Brien were sentenced to death, and hanged at the New
Bailey Prison, Salford; figuring since in the perverted Irish Valhalla
of heroes as “the Manchester Martyrs.”
[Illustration: MANCHESTER TOWN HALL.]
In another glance at Manchester the great Town Hall, in Albert
Square, demands notice, not merely because it cost considerably over
a million pounds, but because it is one of the chief architectural
embellishments of the city. Opened in 1877, it was, like many other
modern public buildings here, the work of Alfred Waterhouse. The style
is an enriched Early English and the exterior stately to a degree. But
what shall we say of the beautiful but dark interior, with its maze
of corridors, its unexpected steps up and steps down? The stranger to
Manchester, however, must needs entrust himself to the perils of that
wilderness, for in the very fine and striking series of twelve fresco
paintings by Ford Madox Brown he will find not only a justification
of pre-Raphaelite methods, allied with some fine colouring and some
very quaint drawing, but an illuminating pictorial commentary upon the
history of the city.
[Sidenote: _BACK STREETS_]
It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts
here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the
last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all
unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel
Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance
with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled
Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader
for the statement that angels do not inhabit Angel Meadow, any more
than they do Seven Dials in London. Culture does not linger here.
There is oblique testimony to this in a recent resolution of the Watch
Committee to supply a police-constable with a new “set of teeth, to
take the place of those he has lost in the discharge of his duty.”
They were the celestials of the Angel Meadow district who knocked the
constable’s teeth out. Hallelujah! The place is not so far from the
Cathedral and the Strangeways Gaol, but neither the promise of present
punishment that the gaol holds forth for evil courses, nor the hope
of Heaven for the repentant that the Cathedral typifies, suffices to
blanch the scarlet sins of Redbank, or to win the inhabitants of Angel
Meadow to a better life.
If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that
the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see
eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets
sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder
odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The
back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature
their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In
fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely
dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less,
of one another.
IX
In despair at picturing Manchester in brief—for it is not to be done—I
will devote some pages to a few words as to coaching times, and then
conclude. Little can with advantage be said of those times, because
the inns to and from which the coaches and waggons came and went are
nearly all of the past, and because old inns of any kind are rare in
Manchester nowadays. The ancient “Seven Stars” in Withy Grove is,
however, not only much older than the oldest coach, but looks it too,
in its timbered gables and stout walls, and is even of age remote
enough for it to be claimed that the Collegiate Church itself is junior
to it. Nay, it even pretends to be the “Oldest Licensed House in Great
Britain.” Near it is the equally picturesque and ancient “Old Rover’s
Return.” The “Bull’s Head,” in a neighbouring alley, with the finely
moulded head of a bull by way of sign, has convivial memories and
associations with early postal times, and there stands a grotesquely
out-of-plumb timbered and lath-and-plastered old tenement in Long
Millgate that was once the “Sun” inn, the place where Ben Brierley and
his fellow dialect-poets found inspiration in the chimney-corner. The
initials “W. A. F.” and the date 1647, are found upon the old building,
but it is obviously at least a century older than that. No longer an
inn, it is still known as “Poets’ Corner,” and in its rather vague
celebrity the curio-dealer who now occupies the premises doubtless
finds his account.
[Illustration: THE “SUN” INN, POET’S CORNER.]
[Sidenote: _THE “BRIDGEWATER ARMS”_]
The foremost coaching inn at Manchester was the “Bridgewater Arms,”
near the corner of High Street and Market Street. To it came the Royal
Mail. In later years H. C. Lacy removed to grander premises, at the
corner of Mosley Street and Market Street: a house that had in its
day been a fine private mansion, and then still had the advantage of
possessing a very large, well-stocked garden in the rear. He styled
this house the “Royal Hotel and New Bridgewater Arms,” and to it came
as well as the Mail, the “Defiance” and other smart coaches. It has
long since disappeared, and the present “Royal Hotel” stands on the
site; but the old original “Bridgewater Arms” still exists, although
now, and for many a year past, occupied as warehouses. The initials
B. I. M. and date 1736 are on a spout-head that looks down upon
Bridgewater Place, the narrow alley upon which the warehouse fronts. It
is a fustian warehouse in these days, but a poetic tribute by a former
guest of the house, torn from the arms of his lady-love, remains,
scratched on the glass of an upper window. He had his own ideas of
where capital letters and punctuation should occur:
Adieu, ye streams that smoothly flow;
Ye vernal airs that gently blow;
Ye fields, by flowing spring arraid;
Ye birds, that warble in the shade.
Unhurt From you my soul could fly,
Nor drop one tear, nor heave one sigh;
But forced, from C(elia)’s charms, to part,
All joy, forsakes my drooping heart.
1797
This enriched pane is very carefully preserved from injury by being
covered with wire, and thus the lover’s lament will probably remain so
long as the house stands.
The “Peacock,” resorted to by the “Peveril of the Peak”; the “Swan,”
where the “Independent” pulled up; the “Star,” rendezvous of the
“Manchester Telegraph,” are now merely names; and the times they
belonged to are perhaps more thoroughly forgotten at Manchester than in
any other city. Looking upon the maze of branching tramlines and the
hundreds of swiftly running electric cars that begin at five o’clock in
the morning and do not cease until after midnight, and are driven more
recklessly and at a greater speed than elsewhere, you clearly perceive
that Manchester has no time for the past and not much leisure to expend
upon the present.
X
[Sidenote: _THE HUNDRED OF SALFORD_]
Crossing the Irwell by Blackfriars Bridge, Salford is reached; a
distinction, so far as the pilgrim is concerned, without a difference.
Just as, to outward appearance, London and Southwark, and Brighton and
Hove are one, so are Manchester and Salford. But in local politics they
are all separate and independent, and if an observant eye is turned
upon the very tramway cars here, it will be seen that there is not
only a Corporation of Manchester but a Corporation also of Salford;
and, if the comparative gorgeousness of the Salford tramcars were any
criterion, Salford should be the more important place of the two. Their
comparative rank is, however, to be judged by the fact that a Lord
Mayor heads the Town Council of Manchester and a Mayor that of Salford;
but the curious anomaly still exists that Manchester stands in the
Hundred of Salford, and thus the larger is, in that respect at least,
included within the smaller. This singular anachronism is a relic of
those very ancient times when the Hundreds were formed. In that era
Manchester itself was a place largely lying in ruin, the result of
Norse fire and sword, and Salford, sprung up on the other side of the
river, away from the scene of desolation, bid fair to be its successor
in all the ages.
The thunder of railway trains overhead, and the crash and rumble of
heavy-laden lorries along the road, accompany the explorer along
his way through Salford. But there is an oasis in all this at the
Crescent, where the Irwell, in one of its far-flung loops, approaches
and the extensive Peel Park appears. Beyond this again comes unlovely
Pendleton, and then the Bolton Road and Irlam-o’-th’-Height—that is to
say, Irwellham-on-the-Hill—not so romantic in appearance as in name.
Here the road rises to those always grim uplands extending to Bolton
and giving that place its old name of Bolton-le-Moors: more grim now
than ever, for here is the great coal-field that has made Manchester
possible.
Passing through Pendlebury, with the old Duke of Bridgewater’s
collieries of Worsley away to the left, we plunge into the district
of coal-pits at Clifton, where the hoisting-gear of the Clifton Hall
Colliery, the marshalled coal-waggons, the rails across the road, and
the spoil-banks where starved vegetation takes a precarious hold, make
a desolation beside the way. On the left are the sullen moors, with
perhaps a solitary cow grazing in one of the few remaining fields, just
to emphasise the change that has come over the scene; while on the
right, far down, flows the Irwell, amid a curious medley of beautiful
country, ancient halls and manor-houses, and innumerable collieries and
mills whose chimney-stacks spout smoke and steam over all the valley.
When a steady rain comes down, on windless days, and diffuses the
mingled steam and smoke over the landscape in a grey, woolly mass of
vapour, the scene is weird in the extreme; while a wet day at Kearsley
or Farnworth, places of grey houses and drab shops, is a desolation
in which even the public-houses that have superseded the inns fail to
radiate a meretricious cheerfulness.
[Sidenote: _MOSES GATE_]
Moses Gate, now a kind of succursal to Bolton, and with a railway
station of its own, was once a toll-gate on the turnpike road. Who was
Moses, except perhaps the pikeman, I do not know, nor does any one
locally evince the least curiosity. The name is accepted as a matter
of course, together with the unlovely circumstances; but railway
passengers passing to more favoured places are as a rule extremely
amused by it.
Bolton was formerly surrounded by “dreary and inhospitable” moors,
but the stranger may doubt their ever being as dreary as the present
surroundings of the great black, squalid, and unbeautiful town. In
the very far-off days when those surrounding moors first saw this
settlement, it was “Bothelton,” from the word “Botl,” which means a
homestead. There are several “botl,” “bothal” and “bottle” prefixes
or terminations of place-names in these northern counties: notably
Walbottle, near Newcastle, situated on the Roman wall; and “Bothel”
occurs near Morpeth and in the neighbourhood of Keswick. “Bootle” has a
similar origin.
At last the name became worn down to Bolton: “Bolton-le-Moors,” to
distinguish it from Bolton-le-Sands, on Morecambe Bay; but it is many a
long year since this distinguishing mark was last used.
[Illustration: THE “OLD MAN AND SCYTHE.”]
[Sidenote: _END OF THE EARL OF DERBY_]
There was once a time when Bolton was a cleanly little town that
manufactured woollen cloths, fustian, and dimities, under idyllic
conditions. Those industries were in full progress when the quarrels
of King and Parliament broke rudely in upon the scene, in 1644: the
Parliamentary party having garrisoned the place, which, unfortunately
for itself, was a walled town. On came Lord Strange, afterwards Earl
of Derby, from Wigan, with a force to take it by assault, but he was
repulsed with heavy loss, and withdrew; the garrison being afterwards
reinforced from Manchester, and its strength brought up to 3,000. Again
the assault was pressed, and this time the Lord Strange was aided by
Prince Rupert with 10,000 men. Two hundred devoted Cavaliers crept up
under the walls, while treachery, it was said, admitted the cavalry.
The storming of Bolton that ensued was one of the bloodiest affairs of
the war, and few were spared from the fury of the Royalists. More than
seven years later, the then Earl of Derby suffered for the excesses
he, with Prince Rupert, permitted on this occasion; for, having
been captured at the Battle of Worcester, he was brought to Bolton
and beheaded on October 15th, 1651, at the Market Cross in Church
Gate, opposite the “Old Man and Scythe” inn: with a grim fitness on
the scene of the bloodshed himself had approved. An inscription on
the front of the house narrates how “In this ancient hostelry James
Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby, spent the last few hours of his life
previous to his execution.” The house, built in 1636, was indeed a
portion of his extensive Bolton property. Whatever the original sign
of the house, the present is doubtless an allusion to the famous
exploit of William Trafford of Swithamley, whose pretence of being an
idiot saved his property from being plundered by the Puritan soldiery.
They discovered him wielding a flail in his barn, and monotonously
repeating “Now thus,” and so, unable to make him comprehend anything,
they left. Beneath the threshing-floor where this supposed “natural”
was gibbering lay his chief valuables. His trick is alluded to in the
sign of the “Old Rock House” inn at Barton, near Manchester, where he
is represented in a counter-charged suit, alternately red and white,
and with his flail, inscribed “Now thus.” Here at Bolton, while the
chequered red and white dress, somewhat resembling that of a jester, or
fool, is retained, and while he wears a similar fool’s cap, his flail
has in the course of years become a scythe.
The “original” heading-axe that decapitated the bloody Earl, who richly
deserved his fate, is shown in the inn, which is merely a public-house,
together with the chair he sat upon. But a chair also purporting to be
the identical one is among the relics at the Earl of Derby’s seat at
Knowsley, where there is probably another heading-axe. The only way out
of this awkward _impasse_, to please every one, is to suggest that,
being an important personage, he was given two chairs to sit upon and
was executed twice, by two executioners! One can say no fairer than
that.
[Sidenote: _BOLTON_]
The “Old Man and Scythe,” it should be added, looks in the
illustration a highly picturesque half-timbered building: but it is
really commonplace brick, and the “timbering” is but a product of the
house-painter’s brush.
At “Bowton,” more than anywhere else along the road, you hear the
Lancashire talk, and the people of the town are as rough-and-ready
as any in the county, both in manners and in appearance. Even in
Lancashire they talk of a “rough Bolton chap,” and as less refined than
the people of Wigan, St. Helens, or Widnes; which is very like Walworth
reflecting upon the lack of culture in Whitechapel. A good deal of this
apparent brusqueness and rudeness is, however, more apparent than real.
The Londoner, come from a place where a great deal of insincerity, and
even callousness, is hidden by the veneer of conventional behaviour,
is startled and shocked by the forthright manners and the very
frank speech of Bolton and other manufacturing towns, but there is
a heartiness about the people there is no mistaking. That typical
character, “John Blunt,” has certainly peopled Lancashire with his kin.
The clogs still clatter on the pavements of Bolton, and shawled girls
are yet to be seen going to and from the mills, but even in the last
fifteen years Bolton has grown enormously, not only in population
but towards a higher standard of life. Yet, to this writer at least,
the thought of Bolton will ever recall the odour of fried fish; for
it was on a winter’s evening, long ago, that he first came into the
grim town. Fried-fish shops filled the air with a revolting reek, and
everywhere along the pavements walked those who without ceremony ate
their suppers out of newspapers. High above, yellow in the dark sky,
like bilious eyes, glowered the illuminated dials of the Town Hall
clock, while ever and again the quarters chimed and the hours growled
out.
[Illustration: TOWN HALL, BOLTON.]
Bolton is especially proud of its Town Hall, which was opened in
1873, and was the first of those immense buildings, of a monumental
character, that of late years have been built in hundreds of towns,
less to fill a need than to please the vanity of mayors and aldermen.
No wonder, when municipalities build palaces for themselves, and house
every department royally and regardless of cost, the rates go mounting
ever higher.
[Sidenote: _BOLTON TOWN HALL_]
The Town Hall of Bolton, designed in a composite classic style, is,
in most of its circumstances, a good deal more imposing than useful.
A weary flight of steps leads lengthily up to the colonnaded portico,
and although it looks magnificent, is, practically, a sorrow to all who
have often to scale it.
A clock-tower, 220 feet in height, surmounts this elephantine building,
which cost £170,000, and has so imposing an appearance that it has
been the parent of many others; the design having been so admired
that it was closely copied in every detail by Leeds, Portsmouth, and
other towns; Paddington also proposing to build itself one upon the
same model. But the Bolton parent of them all has become very grim;
being, by reason of the smoke from the two hundred or so lofty factory
chimneys of the town, “as black as your hat.”
XI
[Illustration: FIRWOOD: BIRTHPLACE OF CROMPTON.]
The most interesting places in Bolton are—to speak in paradox—just
outside it. On the Bury road, where the electric tramcars race, you
may with some difficulty find the little turning at Firwood, where
the humble birthplace of Samuel Crompton still stands. Along the main
road the modern houses march prosaically on to Bury, but down this
little turning, which descends steeply and has the most extravagantly
uneven paving anywhere in the neighbourhood, you find a nook very much
in the condition of the whole countryside in Crompton’s day. Always
excepting, of course, the big cotton-mill that stands here. Looking
down towards Bolton there are still fragments of woods and tangled
brakes—fir-woods, or others—but on the skyline, as ever in Lancashire,
are factory chimneys, wreathing fantastic smoke-trails. Among the three
cottages here, Crompton’s early home is identified by a stone tablet
inscribed—
Birthplace of
SAMUEL CROMPTON.
Born Decr. 3rd, 1753.
I look at that humble, stone-built cot with something of reverence. It
did not, however, witness his bringing-up, for when he was but five
years of age, his parents removed to Hall-i’-th’-Wood, an ancient
mansion from which the owners had migrated to a more modern residence.
Here the Cromptons farmed in a small way, and here Samuel’s father
early died.
[Sidenote: _HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD_]
Hall-i’-th’-Wood (the Lancashire pronunciation may be written down
“Hauleythwood”) stands in a situation still romantic, in the parish
of Tonge, one mile from Bolton, on the Blackburn road. The great and
ancient woods of oak that once surrounded the old house are gone since
then, but the Eagley Brook yet comes foaming down in little cascades
amid the rocks of the picturesque gorge above whose crest the Hall is
situated; and there are patches of woodland remaining to inform the
scene with sylvan beauty. It is, frankly, a surprise, set as it is at
the very edge of the roaring traffic of a high road with shops where
housewives are bidden by leather-lunged butchers “Buy, buy, buy”: and
as delightful as surprising.
The Hall in the Wood is not only interesting as the place where Samuel
Crompton invented the Spinning Mule: it is one of the finest examples
among the many ancient Halls of Lancashire, and is singularly varied
in its architecture; having been built in two separate and distinct
periods, and in each period of entirely different materials. It was
one Lawrence Brownelow who built the original half-timbered portion,
in 1591, as appears by the initials of himself and his wife Bridget,
and the date,
B
L B
1591
carved on a stone mantel. In 1637 the
property was sold to Christopher Norres, woollen-draper, of Bolton,
who was succeeded by his son, Alexander, a partisan of King Charles in
the Civil War. Norres escaped lightly from the victorious Parliament,
with a fine of £15 and the taking of the Covenant and other oaths; and
then settled down here, building the stone wing that bears the date
1648. With him, however, ended the Norres reign, for his daughter Alice
married a John Starkie, whose descendants resided here until near the
middle of the eighteenth century. Their punning heraldic cognisance,
six storks for Starkie, may still be seen, done in plaster.
[Illustration: HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD.]
[Sidenote: _SAMUEL CROMPTON_]
It was a neglected and dilapidated old house to which the Cromptons
came in 1758. For economical reasons—the window-tax then prevailed—all
the unnecessary windows, and some that really were necessary, had
been bricked up, rain came through the roof, and rats ran unchecked
from room to room. There, in a house a world too large for them, the
widowed Mrs. Crompton and her little lad lived upon the proceeds of a
small farm and the insignificant gains she made from spinning yarn,
by hand, as all yarn then was spun. Samuel helped in the spinning,
much, it may be supposed, against his will; and in the drudgery of it
his inventive powers were wakened, in the direction of labour-saving.
Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny of 1768 and Arkwright’s invention were new
when he began to plan, and his machine took the form of an improvement
combining the principles of both. He was twenty-one years of age
before he began the work, and not until five years were gone had
he completed it. The times were not propitious for inventors, bands
of infuriated weavers roaming the districts round about, destroying
everywhere the spinning-jennies that they imagined were depriving them
of work; and Crompton was obliged constantly to take his model to
pieces and hide it in the garret roofs of his wind-swept, rat-haunted
home. But at length the weavers’ fury spent itself, and then he could
experiment without fear of house and model being wrecked. Then,
however, arose a newer danger. Crompton, it became gradually known,
had a wonderful new machine in the old place, and many were those who
sought in some way to surprise the secret of it, among them the crafty
Arkwright, inventor and man of business too: an unusual combination of
talents that Crompton, unfortunately for himself, did not possess. In
the result, the secret was given away for a miserable pittance, and
not even patented. Factories were equipped with his invention, and
manufacturers combined to subscribe, as an act of grace, a hundred
guineas that should, multiplied a thousandfold, have been his by
right. In 1812, Crompton found that the number of spindles worked on
his principle totalled five millions. In that year a reward seemed
almost within his grasp, for a vote of £20,000, in recognition of his
services was proposed, and was to have been submitted to Parliament
by Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister; but that very day, in the
act of carrying a memorandum to that effect in his hand, Perceval
was assassinated by Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons,
and the proposal was not renewed. But by the intervention of some
friends a memorial to Parliament was prepared, which was signed by the
principal manufacturers of the kingdom, with the result that the sum
of £5,000 was granted to him. Let us here observe the exquisite humour
of the thing. The “principal manufacturers” had become such, and had
amassed great wealth by aid of Crompton’s mule, but they meanly went to
Government, and thus taxed the whole nation for a sum themselves should
have raised.
With this sum Crompton established his sons in the bleaching business;
but the establishment failed, and the inventor was again in straitened
circumstances. A second subscription was raised, and a life annuity
purchased for Crompton, producing about £63 per annum. He enjoyed it
only two years, for he died in 1827, aged seventy-three, and was buried
in Bolton parish churchyard.
The last stroke of cynic fortune was not dealt until 1862, when the
hapless inventor had been thirty-five years in his grave. Then the town
of Bolton, whose manufacturers had, living, denied him a livelihood,
set up a statue to the man who had made their town, and twenty other
towns, great and prosperous. Among those present at the unveiling, and
shrinking in his poverty from the robed and finely apparelled magnates,
was Crompton’s surviving son, then aged seventy-two, and in the poorest
circumstances. Palmerston eventually sent him a dole from the Royal
Bounty Fund.
[Sidenote: _RELICS OF CROMPTON_]
If the spirits of the departed can know what goes forward in the world
they have left, there must be bitter ironic laughter in the Beyond.
Plundered and neglected in life, Crompton is tardily honoured in death.
The darkling, mouldering old Hall has, through the munificence of Mr.
W. H. Lever, been purchased from the representatives of the Starkie
family, finely restored, stored with personal relics of Crompton, and
presented, as a lasting memorial, to the town of Bolton. It is open,
freely, every day. There you see Crompton’s old violin, his Bible,
and chair, and a model of his Spinning Mule. But there is much else
besides. Old portraits and old prints decorate the panelled walls, and
ancient furniture fills the room. Panelling has been brought from an
ancient house at Hare Street, near Buntingford, and a finely moulded
plaster ceiling copied from the “Old Woolpack” inn, Deansgate, Bolton,
pulled down in 1880. From the stone-flagged terrace of the garden you
look across to Bolton itself and the clustered chimneys whose murk
affronts the sky.
XII
There are two ways out of Bolton, to Chorley and Preston; known
severally as the Chorley Old and New Roads. The old road ascends
windy heights, and although still a practicable highway, is of such a
character that any traveller—not being a professional explorer of old
roads—who finds himself on it, and perceives the new road going flat,
below, is deeply sorry for himself. The way into this old road is by
the group of houses called Dorfcocker—where the “Tempest Arms” displays
the Tempest cognisance and their motto, “Loywf as thow Fynds”—and along
Boot Lane. Thence comes a steep steady ascent past the “Bob’s Smithy”
inn and the cottages of Scant Row—well-named in its meagre, hungry
look—to the “Horwich Moorgate” inn with the subsidiary title of the
“Blundell Arms.” Did any authority compensate these unfortunate inns
when the traffic was diverted into the “New” road? Let us hope so, for
the doing of it deprived them—not of a livelihood, else how could they
have continued to live?—but certainly of all save the merest means of
existence. There remains yet a look about the “Moorgate” inn which
tells you that not always did it rub meanly along on selling beer to
rustics or mill-hands. Alas!
[Sidenote: _THE RESERVOIRS_]
Henceforward, having reached the summit, and not wishing to remain on
this wind-swept height, it is necessary to descend: that is obvious
enough. But not easily is that descent made. To Avernus the transition
is reputed to be easy and comfortable: to Horwich, where the old and
new roads join, it is martyrdom, especially if it be undertaken on a
cycle. And so descending, cautiously and with alternate prayers and
curses, over the agonising pits and gullies in the neglected setts of
the Chorley Old Road, to the only less fearful surface of the Chorley
New Road at Horwich, we come at the two hundredth mile from London to
the great lake-like reservoirs of the Liverpool Waterworks, formed in
1848, stretching for a long way alongside the road, and occupying the
site of Anglezarke Moor. To a height of 1,545 feet rises the sullen
mass of Rivington Pike, in the background, crowned with its masonry
beacon. There are at least two dozen other reservoirs of different
sizes up there, in the vast gloomy moors where the Pike presides:
reservoirs in solitudes looking down upon the circle of busy towns
comprising Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Blackburn, and Preston, and supplying
their needs.
[Illustration: RIVINGTON PIKE.]
The great reservoirs beside the road, fenced from it by an ugly dwarf
wall and iron railing, are full of fish, and in most respects like
natural lakes; but the scenery, bold though it be, is scrubby and
hard-featured, and the scant trees look to those used to the softer
and more luxuriant vegetation of the south, starved. But if one has
courage sufficient to follow the waggonette-loads of beanfeasters from
Bolton, who favour these scenes, there will be found a quite charming
wooded glen and waterfall at Dean, beyond Rivington village.
[Illustration: RIVINGTON PIKE FROM THE ROAD.]
[Sidenote: _MILES STANDISH_]
That, however, is by no means the way to Chorley; but rather a side
dish: albeit a good deal more appetising than the main road itself.
Chorley was in Leland’s time, the matter of four hundred years ago,
down in doleful dumps. “Chorle,” he notes, painstaking traveller
that he was, “wonderful poor, having no market.” This is where your
modern Chorleian smiles the smile of conscious worth, for the place
is the antithesis of what it was then and is wonderfully rich and
populous. At the same time, I do not find anything at all to say about
it, except that continual tale of cotton-mills, supplemented here
by calico-printing. There is an ancient parish church, with relics
of St. Lawrence, its patron saint, brought from Normandy in 1442 by
Sir Rowland Standish, and enclosed doubly behind glass and an iron
grille; and with the elaborate canopied pew of the Standish family of
Duxbury Park, near by. The Standishes number among their ancestors such
diverse characters as that loyal squire, John Standish, who helped to
dispatch Wat Tyler; and the much more famous Miles Standish, “a blunt
old sea-captain, a man not of words, but of actions,” who, born in
1584, sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the _Mayflower_,
in 1620. The Chorley parish register of baptisms in 1584, in which his
name should occur, is defaced, lending some support to the theory that
his claim to be the rightful heir to the Duxbury estate was feared by
his contemporary relatives, who are in this manner suspected of seeking
to invalidate it. Whatever his prospects of success, he relinquished
them in sailing for New England, where he became the best-known of
those early colonists, and has found apotheosis in Longfellow’s
_Courtship of Miles Standish_. The poet represents him as the elderly
widowed Governor of Plymouth, in love with Priscilla, and, at once too
shy and too busy to do his own love-making, despatching his youthful
secretary, John Alden—himself in love with Priscilla—to woo her, “the
loveliest maiden in Plymouth,” by proxy. Poor John went on his mission,
as he was bid, and loyally fulfilled it. But without avail. Miles, in
John’s arguments, appeared to every advantage. He was a great man, the
greatest in the colony, and heir to vast estates; a gentleman, like
all the Standishes, with a silver cock, red-combed and wattled, for
arms, and all the rest of it. But these great gifts were nothing to
Priscilla, who no more than any other girl could endure love-making by
deputy, and, seeing the true condition of affairs, asked, “Why don’t
you speak for yourself, John?”
A monument, 120 feet in height, stands on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, to
the memory of this stout but bashful sailor, and when the elements are
kindly forms a conspicuous landmark. But rain is your portion in these
latitudes, which perhaps is the reason why the present writer, not
alone in this disability, failed to find that “Sea View” of which the
sign of a wayside inn on the road from Chorley to Preston speaks. But
after all, rain or shine, that is no wonder, for measured on the map,
across the flattest of country, it is seven miles thence to the sea.
Hard by, on the right hand, is Whittle-le-Woods—there should
be elements of humour in the name to Americans, that nation of
whittlers—celebrated (a strictly local celebrity) for its alkaline
springs, sovereign, so they say, for rheumatic affections, but more
potent, it would appear, in brewing, for “Whittle Springs Ale”—a kind
of stingo—obtrudes upon you, on sign and hoarding, all the way into
Preston.
Clayton Green is an outlying settlement of Clayton-le-Woods, one of
the several unimportant villages in the neighbourhood with that
foreign conjunction. There is nothing whatever to be said of Clayton
Green, which has a place in my memory only as the spot where, in an
inclement summer, I stood sheltering under the dripping trees at the
entrance to a park, and saw, as I shivered there in the cold wet blast,
a hundred-legged insect happily crawl into his warm, snug crevice
between the stones of the dry walling, out of the miserable day. And
the cold wind blew, the rain, fell, and the motors swashed by in the
ankle-deep slush of the muddy road, and it was yet over five miles to
the outskirts of Preston.
[Illustration: DARWEN BRIDGE AND WALTON-LE-DALE.]
[Sidenote: _BAMBER BRIDGE_]
Bamber Bridge, where you see, not the rustic bridge across the
tributary of the Ribble that conferred the name upon the place, but
instead a very busy and dirty railway level-crossing, is now; a
something in the likeness of a busy town of cotton-spinning mills.
Beyond it, the road comes to the Ribble itself, and to Darwen Bridge,
rebuilt in 1901, the latest successor of the original bridge built in
1366 and rebuilt in 1752.
[Sidenote: _PARSON WOODS, OF CHOWBENT_]
Walton-le-Dale, the village on the right, looks a peaceable place
enough, and it has little history, but it came very near being the
scene of a bloodstained struggle between Catholics and Presbyterians in
the Old Pretender’s rising of 1715. Nearly the whole of the Catholic
gentry of Lancashire had turned out to aid the Pretender’s forces,
and the rebellion was almost on the point of changing from a dynastic
conflict and a clash between Whig and Tory ideals into the very much
more serious matter of a religious war. The rising of the Tories and
the Catholics stirred to furious antagonism the Whigs and the Low
Churchmen, but most of them blew off their rage in violent language.
Not so the valiant Boanerges of the dissenting chapel of Chowbent, near
Bolton, who not only breathed fire and slaughter, but took the lead
of eighty among his congregation, whom he marched off to the front;
the front being the passage of the Ribble, over against Preston. There
the embattled minister—this valiant Parson Woods, “General Woods”
as they called him—posted his men to withstand the crossing of the
river, and was said to have drawn his sword and sworn he would run
through the body the first man who showed signs of timidity. Having
arrived there, armed only with what Baines, the Lancashire historian,
calls “implements of husbandry”—what a beautiful phrase, covering the
ungainliness of the poor crooked scythe and spade!—in front of a strong
force of rebels, armed with implements of war, they doubtless were
timid; but the bold advance of General Wills saved the situation, and
Parson Woods had no excuse to embrue his hands in gore. But King George
the First, recognising his earnestness, sent a gratuity of £100, which
Woods promptly divided among his men; they in their turn handing it
over towards rebuilding their chapel.
For the rest, there remains but to remark upon this singular epitaph,
dated 1685, in Walton-le-Dale church, before we have over the bridge
into Preston:
“Here lyeth the body of a pure virgin, espoused to the man Xt Jesus,
Mrs. Cordelia Hoghton, whose honorable descent you know. Know now her
ascent.”
XIII
Crossing the Ribble and looking backwards, the view along the dale to
where Walton stands is charming; but with the extraordinary expansion
of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, and the building here of
many new mills, it seems like to be an expiring charm of scenery.
Already the mills have come across from the north to the south bank of
the river.
Preston has always been known as “proud.” The old rhyme ran:
Proud Preston,
Poor people,
High church,
Low steeple.
But the rhyme long since went out of date. One would hesitate to
declare that Preston is in any sense poor, while certainly the reproach
of its church having a low steeple has been removed these many years
past; for the spire of St. Werburgh is a particularly fine and lofty
one, rising to a height of 303 feet. If it be necessary to find an
origin for that supposed pride of Proud Preston, I should look for it
in the fact that the town has always been the capital of the Duchy
of Lancaster, and not in the story of its ladies once considering
themselves too superior to mate with the commercial men of the
neighbourhood.
“Proud Preston” occupies a proud position, on lofty ground overlooking
the Ribble and its extensive flats. Its name, “Priest’s Town,” derives
from the site having been the property of a Benedictine priory once
situated here, but before the time of the priory, it was named
“Amounderness,” from the ridge, or ness, then, even more than now, a
striking object across the levels. Penwortham, on the opposite side
of the river, was in that early period the chief place, for there
stood the great castle of the Earls of Chester, giving security to
peaceable folk against the incursions of the Scots; but when the county
of Lancaster was made a Duchy, and the defence centred at Lancaster,
Penwortham decayed and Preston grew populous. The unwisdom of this move
across the river to a site without strong defences was immediately made
apparent, for no sooner had Preston grown into an important town than
the Scots, under Robert Bruce, came and burnt nearly the whole of it.
[Sidenote: _PROUD PRESTON_]
Charters to the number of fifteen, ranging from the time of Henry
the First to that of Charles the Second, have been conferred upon
Preston; mostly in recognition of its importance as capital of the
Duchy of Lancaster; and desirable privileges, such as the right of gaol
and gibbet, tumbril and pillory, were added, so that Preston might
deal, quite independently of Lancaster, with cases arising here, that
demanded those engines of justice.
Still, it was ever a prosperous and busy town, as the antiquity of its
guilds proves; and suffered considerable loss in the Parliamentary
war, when it was the scene of two struggles between Royalists and
Roundheads. The first was in 1643, when the townsfolk were divided in
opinion, and fighting took place in the streets: the second in 1649,
when a Royalist army, commanded by Sir Marmaduke Langdale and the
Duke of Hamilton, was driven from Clitheroe to Ribbleton Moor, on the
outskirts of the town, by Cromwell, with a numerically inferior force.
The next taste of warlike times was in 1715, which was like to be a
very serious time for Preston; for in the Jacobite rebellion that made
this year memorable, the townsfolk figured more than a thought too
prominently as well-wishers to the cause. English rebels, as well as
Scotch, made this incursion from Scotland something new in the moving
annals of such things. In olden times the Scots had come from the north
as enemies; now the Old Pretender, “James the Seventh of Scotland and
Third of England,” was proclaimed at the market-cross with every mark
of approval, and the hospitality of the townsfolk and the smiles of the
young ladies were extended to those who, it was thought, were presently
to upset “the Elector” in London.
[Sidenote: _THE REBELLION OF 1715_]
This kindly reception wrought disaster to the rebels. They had
reached Preston on November 9th, but, instead of marching onward and
fighting, idled away the precious days in feasting and flirting: and,
as it proved, these hospitable burgesses and pretty girls formed what
military strategists might call a “containing force” really helpful
to the Royal armies hurrying up to meet the rebels, who were caught
in Preston town, as neatly as possible. The invaders had numbered two
thousand, but it is typical of the mismanagement of this ill-fated
rebellion that ever since October 6th, when the Northumbrian Jacobites
had assembled at Rothbury, their counsels had been divided. Later, when
they had joined forces with a body of Scottish rebels, and had marched
along the Borders, and so down into Lancashire, there was little
authority and no discipline. The Scots wanted to fight in Scotland,
and the English, for their part, declined to conduct the revolt there.
So, grumbling and dissatisfied, they came south, under the leadership
of Forster of Etherston, elected “General,” but a person of no native
capacity or acquired military knowledge, and simply one of the famous,
long-descended Northumbrian Forsters; famed less on account of their
merits than that they had existed in Northumberland so long, and owned
so many of its acres.
Disheartened by the feebleness of the invasion, five hundred of the
insurgents left, and marched away home again. The remaining fifteen
hundred were reinforced at Preston by the Roman Catholic gentry of
Lancashire, their servants and tenantry, to the number of twelve
hundred, but they appear to have been an embarrassment rather than of
use.
Towards Preston, by way of Manchester and Wigan, came General Wills,
on behalf of King George. His force numbered only a thousand men, and
had the invaders been commanded by a soldier, or even by a civilian
of ordinary courage and determination, it is possible the rebellion,
of 1715 might have been successful. But Forster was a pitiful fellow.
He did not even place Preston in a proper state of defence. It was
not a walled town, and barricades were hastily run up on Wills’s
approach being made known; but no advantage was taken of the excellent
defensible position in advance of the town, where the road ran in a
hollow way, and where the bridge across the river in itself could have
been successfully held by few.
[Sidenote: _ESCAPE OF FORSTER_]
Forster, on hearing of Wills’s march, did certainly a more
extraordinary thing than ever any other military commander is reported
to have done on the approach of the enemy: he went to bed! I believe
we could have respected him more had he run away. How it was that the
other leaders, the Earls of Derwentwater and Kenmure, merely roused
him from his couch, and did not take stronger measures, is a mystery.
Better, perhaps, had they done so; for although the barricaded town
repulsed the attack made by Wills on the 12th, and indeed inflicted
severe loss upon him, Forster agreed to surrender unconditionally, and
delivering Lord Derwentwater and Colonel Macintosh as hostages, did
actually deliver up the town on the 15th. Meanwhile, the Lancashire
Roman Catholics had run away, and none saw the going of them.
Fighting at Sheriffmuir and elsewhere in Scotland followed before the
rebellion was crushed, but the surrender at Preston marked the end
of this incursion upon English soil. Fourteen hundred prisoners were
taken, many of considerable standing. Some among them being half-pay
officers, were treated as deserters, and were summarily shot: hundreds
were consigned to Chester Castle and afterwards sold into slavery
overseas; but those who had been the moving spirits were taken to
London. Among them were the egregious Forster, Lords Derwentwater,
Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carnwath, Widdrington, Wintoun, and Nairn. They
reached London on December 9th; riding horseback from Highgate with
their arms tied behind their backs, to the sound of the drum: a mock
“public entry,” to satirise the hopes they had expressed, in a happier
hour, of a triumphal procession into London.
On the whole, the Government acted with leniency. Derwentwater and
Kenmure were executed, twenty-two rebels were hanged in Lancashire,
and four in London; but Lord Nithsdale, exchanging clothes with his
wife, fled from the Tower, and others were permitted to escape, or were
pardoned after an interval.
Forster escaped from Newgate by an ingenious ruse, only possible
in days when prisons were conducted very much like hotels. He had
inveigled Pitts, the Governor, into his room and the two sat drinking
wine there while Forster’s servant locked the head-gaoler’s attendant
in the cellar. Forster then left the room, ostensibly for a moment,
but did not return, and the Governor, alarmed, arose to find himself
locked in. Already, while he was vainly shouting and thumping upon the
thick oak door, Forster and his trusty servant had enlarged themselves
from gaol, and were making for Rochford on the Essex coast, whence they
embarked for France.
Forster took no further part in public affairs, but travelled to Italy,
and died at Rome in 1738. Had he shown generalship at Preston equal to
this of his flight, all might have gone well with the Pretender.
The rebellion of 1745 came nearer success than this of thirty years
earlier, but we do not find Preston harbouring and encouraging the
rebels of that time, to anything like the same extent. The gaiety of
Preston was not, this time, for them. But what, after all, did that
gaiety amount to? A great deal, perhaps, judged by the standard of the
wild Highlanders, come but lately from their solitary glens; but very
little, it would seem, reckoned from an English standpoint, if the
business then done by the sole wine-merchant of the town may serve for
comparison. It would appear that the merchant who supplied Manchester
lived at Preston, as the resort of the gentry, and was rarely asked to
supply more than a gallon of wine at a time: and that a time which did
not commonly stint itself in drink.
It was a very small place in those days, and numbered little more than
6,000 inhabitants; but when the factory system was introduced into
the cotton manufacture, it grew rapidly, and is now a great town of
more than 113,000 people. Nothing else so vividly shows us how far
removed we are from those days, in circumstances and spirit, than the
simple juxtaposition of those eloquent figures, which speak far more
eloquently than the most impassioned descriptive writing.
[Illustration: PRESTON: TOWN HALL, HARRIS PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND SESSIONS
HOUSE]
[Sidenote: _PRESTON TOWN HALL_]
There remains a certain stateliness in the streets and houses
of Preston: an aristocratic “county town” environment that not
all the expansion of industrialism has been able to engulf: an
eighteenth-century appearance that calmly declines to be hustled out of
existence. The refinements of life, in so far as they are reflected by
many dainty tea-shops and restaurants, are not lacking at Preston; but
let the stranger come into the town on a Saturday night, and he will
see another phase of existence, for then the place is typical of all
Lancashire towns on that supreme marketing occasion. The streets are
thronged with the people of Preston and all the villages round about:
it is a marketing and pleasuring saturnalia, wherein the brilliantly
lighted shops, the barrows, and the shows compete for the custom of
thousands of good-humoured mill-hands whose weekly wages are burning
holes in their pockets.
Preston Town Hall was long pre-eminent among the town halls of
Lancashire, and a source of peculiar pride to the townsfolk, but others
have since eclipsed it. Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, it looks like
an instalment of St. Pancras station, in London, also designed by him,
unaccountably mislaid in the provinces. Manchester, the biggest town,
holding, _bien entendu_, all the tricks, has rightly gone Nap on town
halls, and has won the game. Even in Preston its pre-eminence has since
been challenged, for in the self-same square there stands the immense
building of the Harris Institute and Public Library, designed in the
Ionic order of architecture: a very severe Greek contrast with the gay
Early English of the Town Hall. But there are even later competitors,
the Sessions House and the Post Office, to challenge attention.
Of these two, the first is in the present fashionable Eclectic
Renaissance, while the Post Office is the product of the Office of
Works, and of no style at all. The great square in which these various
buildings stand is, therefore, nowadays very much an exhibition of
architectural methods, incongruous and mutually destructive.
[Illustration: “TEETOTAL”]
Outside Preston, probably not one person in a thousand knows how the
word “teetotal” sprang into popular use. It is said to have been, to
all intents and purposes, deliberately invented by “Dicky Turner,” a
reformed drunkard, who, speaking at a meeting held in September, 1833,
at the Old Cockpit, declaimed vehemently against the arguments of the
moderate drinkers, and insisted upon total abstinence. “I’ll have nowt
to dee wi’ this moderation botheration pledge,” he said: “I’ll be reet
down out—an’—out tee—tee—total for ever and ever.”
“Well done,” shouted the meeting, and the word was adopted, with
enthusiasm.
[Sidenote: “_TEETOTAL_”]
It bore no reference to tea, as often supposed, nor was it the result
of a stuttering attempt at the word “total”; for Turner was not a
stutterer, but was well known as a coiner of words, at any emergency;
to say nothing of being a perpetrator of what in an Irishman would be
called “bulls”: of which the following is a supreme example. Speaking
in furtherance of the temperance movement, he said, “We will go with
our axes on our shoulders and plough up the great deep, and then the
ship of temperance shall sail gallantly over the land.”
A stone in St. Peter’s churchyard, to his memory and to that of
fellow-workers in their cause, is inscribed
Beneath
this stone are
deposited the Remains of
RICHARD TURNER,
_author of the word_ TEETOTAL,
as applied to abstinence from
all intoxicating LIQUORS,
who departed this life on the
27th day of October, 1846,
Aged 56 years.
Here—where _did_ you get that hat?—you see the fearsome spectacle
(according to modern ideas) that Dicky Turner presented.
It will be observed that in this claim to the origin of “teetotal”
there is a qualification not generally admitted. This reservation is
generally overlooked, but is important. He was indeed only author of
the word in its application to total abstinence, for it was at that
time well known in Ireland, and is to be found in the writings of De
Quincey and Maginn. But every tale is good until the next is told,
and in another version “teetotal” is said to have originated in a
general signing of a pledge of moderate drinking: those who signed and
were prepared for total abstention adding a T, for “total,” to their
signatures.
To conclude with Preston, it was here that the inspiration was given to
Focardi, then an unknown and needy sculptor, for his group, long since
famous, “You Dirty Boy!”
Lodging in a humble purlieu of the town, he witnessed the scene of the
old woman scrubbing the writhing urchin and rubbing the soap into him,
and realising the humorous possibilities of such a group, secured the
two as models and at once set to work. He could not have foreseen the
price of £500 at which the statuary was purchased, nor the world-wide
advertising celebrity it was given, in pictures and in replica
terra-cotta statuettes, by the proprietors of Pears’ soap.
XIV
[Sidenote: _GARSTANG_]
The twenty-two miles between Preston and Lancaster are more remarkable
for the excellence of the road than for the interest of the way. When
you have achieved the pull-up past Gallows Hill—or what was once known
by that name—where numbers of the rebels of 1715 expiated their error
of judgment, and have come to where the tramways cease, the road
becomes undulating, and is neighboured, first on one side and then on
the other, by the railway and the Lancaster Canal. At Hollowforth what
looks like an ancient gateway was built in 1853 from the stones of an
old obelisk formerly standing in Preston market-place. The little river
Wyre is twice crossed, at Brock’s Bridge and Garstang. At Myerscough,
where the pull-up was formerly very trying for horses, the inscription
may be read:
To relieve the sufferings
Of animals labouring in our service
The steep ascent of this hill
Was lowered
At the expense of Mary and Margaret Cross
of Myerscough,
A.D. 1869.
This deed of mercy appeals to every
Passer-by, that he too show Mercy to
The creatures God has put under his hand
[Illustration: GARSTANG.]
Garstang, that stands rather finely on the road, with its old “Royal
Oak” inn and ancient market-cross, hinting, not remotely to those who
care for these things, of better days, was in fact once a market-town.
But Garstang has outlived its ancient importance. Time was when it
owned a Mayor and Corporation, who proudly dated back to 1314. Even
in 1680 it was sufficiently important to win a renewal of its ancient
charter of incorporation, but it has long lost any relics of its old
state. The interfering besoms of the Local Government Board swept away
the Mayor and his subordinates in 1883, and presented Garstang instead
with a nice new Town Trust. It all sounds very improving and wonderful,
but the plain man suspects only the difference between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee in all this; with, of course, the inevitable legal charges
for making the wonderful change.
In the days when Garstang did a large cattle trade, that singular
seventeenth-century character, Richard Braithwaite, who styled himself
“Drunken Barnaby,” came staggering through, with his usual skinful, on
his way from Lancaster.
Thence to Garstang, pray you hark it,
Ent’ring there a great beast market;
As I jogged along the street
’Twas my fortune for to meet
A young heifer, who before her
Took me up, and threw me o’er her.
There are two jokes belonging to Garstang. One is the parish church,
situated a mile and a half away, in a lonely situation, and the other
is the railway that here crosses the road. To-day, those of the
inhabitants upon whose hands time hangs heavily haunt the street with
fell intent to inflict the Great Railway Joke upon the unsuspecting
stranger who, maybe, halts to examine the cross. They fix him, as did
the Ancient Mariner the Wedding Guest, with their glittering, or
rheumy, eye, as the case may be, and with hoarse voice and pointing
finger ask him if he sees that railway. Assured that he does, comes
then the answer, with weird chuckles: “the longest railway in England,
the ‘Garstang and Not End.’” Now the “Garstang and Knott End Railway”
is probably the very shortest, being not quite seven miles in length:
hence this stupendous funniment. Where it does end, however, is at
Pilling. Some day, when the long-projected five-miles’ extension to
Fleetwood, and a junction with the railway there, is accomplished, the
joke will be extinct and the humour of Garstang dowsed in blackest
night.
[Sidenote: “_BAY HORSE_”]
Beyond Garstang, the Bleasdale Fells appear, away to the right. The old
importance of the road, before the railway that now runs so swift and
frequent a service, is seen in the various inns on the way. There are
the “New Holly,” “Middle Holly,” and “Old Holly,” or “Hamilton Arms,”
inns. The “New Holly,” at Forton, replaces an older house of the same
name, still standing, at Hollins Hill, on the left, on the old road
that went out of use in 1825. Even the wayside “Bay Horse” railway
station takes its name from an inn that was once a change-house for the
coaches. In 1825 the “Bay Horse” inn was closed, and re-opened in 1892.
Galgate and Scotforth demand no notice, except that the former is
thought to have obtained its name from “Gael-gaet,” a passage for the
Gaels, or Scots, and that the name of Scotforth carries a similar
meaning. For we are come now within hail of the land that was in the
old times always seething in Border raids: the district that Lancaster
Castle, at the easy passage of the Lune, was built to defend.
XV
Lancaster is a fine name, if it is but pronounced as it should be; but
the traveller who may chance to be something of a connoisseur in fine
old place-names is a little shocked to find the town locally known as
“Lankystir” and the county as “Lankyshire.” The old stirring history of
the place wilts and droops in that horrible pronunciation.
There is, after all, a very great deal in a name. A “Lancashire man”
has a commercial sound: you detect the chink of coin in it, and it has,
in truth, a modern appropriateness, for Lancashire is nowadays nothing
if not commercial. Call him, however, a “Lancastrian,” and he becomes
at once to the imagination an embattled warrior worthy of figuring,
with all the circumstances of chivalry, in the Wars of the Roses.
[Illustration: LANCASTER.]
[Sidenote: _THE NORMAN WAY_]
There are still some few traces of the Roman antiquity of Lancaster,
in the castle—the castle on the river Lune, that gave the place its
name—but it is in Norman and mediæval circumstances that it chiefly
figures. The castle, the very beginning and origin of Lancaster, stands
on a bold hill rising above the Lune in so convenient a situation for
defence that Nature might almost have thoughtfully provided it for
the purpose, and represents the stronghold built by Roger of Poictou,
who held all Lancashire from William the Conqueror. Exactly how much
of the once formidable Roman castrum he found here cannot be known,
for the Normans were more intent upon conquering and securing their
military successes with fortresses, than upon preserving antiquities.
The cult of the antique was, in fact, not yet born; and when, about
1094, the great Roger began to build the grim keep that still remains
the chief feature of Lancaster Castle, he spared nothing in the way
of Roman altars and sculptured relics that might in any way serve
his turn. To him and his builders they were relics of old, forgotten
things, already dead and damned with Paganism and the Roman rule, some,
six hundred years: as remote a period, for example, as from our day
backwards to that of Edward the Second, which seems to ourselves no
inconsiderable space of time.
So into the foundations of his immensely thick castle walls, and
into the rubble core of them went many Roman inscribed stones that
antiquaries would now dearly prize. Adrian’s Tower, with the Well
Tower, was built originally in Roman times: the first so early as A.D.
125, and the Well Tower in A.D. 305, by Constantius Chlorus. Roger,
the Norman, seems to have repaired and added to these. In Roman times
the basement of Adrian’s Tower was a place where the corn for the
garrison was ground. Later it became a bakery, and has since 1892 been
a museum. In the excavations of 1890, an old floor and a considerable
deal of rubbish were removed, to a depth of eight and a half feet,
revealing the original level. In the course of these works a portion
of the Roman millstone for grinding corn was discovered, and here it
remains, in company with such diverse objects as a Roman altar, found
in the foundations of the Shire Hall in 1797; some pikes captured from
the Scottish rebels of 1715, forbidding festoons of fetters, and a
“madman’s chair,” fitted with bolts and chains, as used at the time
when the dark lower chambers of the keep served the purpose of county
lunatic asylum, and, together with the fearful treatment accorded the
lunatics, served only to confirm them in their lunacy. There are indeed
some very fearful things in this old fortress, place of judgment, and
prison of Lancaster Castle, which has been everything, from the home of
kings down to debtors’ prison and county gaol.
As Shire Hall, Sessions House, Assize Courts, and gaol it still
remains. Prominent among the gruesome sights of the castle are the
dungeons in the Well Tower, one below the other, in the basement, where
prisoners lay in darkness, secured to the floor by the iron rings that
still remain. The roof of the upper dungeon bears witness to the method
of its construction. The earth having been first spread with a strongly
made layer of wattled osiers, liquid cement was then run over them, and
in drying formed a compact mass.
The earth was then easily excavated beneath the ingeniously constructed
roof. Some few of the osiers still remain in it.
[Sidenote: _MALEFACTOR-BRANDING_]
More modern resources of justice are seen in the Drop Room, and in the
Crown Court itself, where, at the back of the dock, may yet be seen
the “Holdfast” and the branding-iron once used in branding malefactors
with an M on the brawn of the left thumb. The operation was performed
in Court and the success of it announced by the Head Gaoler in the
formula, “A fair mark, my Lord!”
[Illustration: “A FAIR MARK, MY LORD.”]
The tragical memories of Lancaster Castle range from mediæval deeds
of blood down to the executions of prisoners taken in the Jacobite
rebellions, and to the merely sordid executions since it has been a
gaol. From 1799 to 1889, when the castle ceased to be a gaol for the
whole of Lancashire, no fewer than 228 criminals were hanged here.
He is a fortunate visitor who comes to Lancaster at the opening of
Assize (unless he comes for trial), for old times live again in
the pageant of the Judges’ reception by the Javelin-men, in their
costume of blue and yellow, who escort them to their lodgings, and
stand attendant in Court at the opening of the commission of Oyer and
Terminer.
The impressive approach to Lancaster Castle is by way of John o’
Gaunt’s gateway, one of the many works added by that historic
personage, Shakespeare’s “time-honoured Lancaster,” when his father,
Edward the Third, created him Duke of Lancaster and raised Lancashire
in consequence to the condition of County Palatine. The “time-honoured”
one himself stands in effigy in a niche over the door-way. One would
like to think the statue contemporary with him, but the guide-books,
from which no derogatory secrets are hid, tell the disappointing tale
that it dates only from 1822.
[Illustration: JAVELIN-MAN.]
[Illustration: LANCASTER CASTLE.]
[Sidenote: “_HORSESHOE CORNER_”]
John o’ Gaunt is not to be avoided in Lancaster, castle or town. He
is, indeed, to be found pretty well all over the country, for he was
not merely Duke of Lancaster (although that was no small matter), but
owned manors in almost every part of England. Moreover, from him sprang
the House of Lancaster, the Red Rose, whose struggles with the Yorkist
White Rose form so long and bloody a series of chapters in English
history. Here, in Lancaster, from “John o’ Gaunt’s Chair,” the topmost
turret of the castle keep, down to Horseshoe Corner, the great Duke is
everywhere, and figures on picture-postcards, china, and silver spoons
with a fine impartiality. Horseshoe Corner is an otherwise commonplace
crossing of streets where, in the middle of the roadway, a horseshoe is
inserted. It is the representative, at this long interval of time, of a
shoe cast by John o’ Gaunt’s horse on the spot, and is renewed every
seven years.
St. Mary’s Church, adjoining the castle, and separated from it only
by that sad spot on the terrace where criminals were hanged in the
times of public executions, is a fine bold structure of Perpendicular
character, and possibly a good deal might be said of it in the
architectural way; but it interests me chiefly as containing a memorial
brass, now very much the worse for wear, to Thomas Covell, Governor of
the castle forty-eight years, Coroner forty-six years, and six times
Mayor of Lancaster. He died in 1639, aged seventy-eight, and is the
subject of the following encomiastic verse:
Cease, cease to mourne, all teares are vaine to aide,
Hee’s fledd, not dead; dissolved, not destroy’d.
In Heaven his soule doth rest, his bodie heere
Sleepes in this dust, and his fame everie where
Triumphs; the towne, the country farther forth,
The land throughout proclaimes his noble worth.
Speake of a man soe kinde, soe courteous,
So free and every waie magnanimous,
That storie told at large heere doe you see,
Epitomiz’d in briefe: Covell was hee.
He is represented standing, with hands clasped in prayer; a long robe,
open in front, disclosing his tall military jack-boots.
[Sidenote: _A GOOD-FELLOW GAOLER_]
No merrier fellow than the good Covell ever presided over dungeon and
little-ease. Prisoners who were fortunate enough to be consigned to
Lancaster Castle used it as a country house; and, so that they fairly
gave their parole to return, went and came very much as they pleased.
Some of them, that is to say. Popish recusants were sure of the best
attention, and the Bishop of Carlisle, writing with some heat upon the
subject, declared “they have liberty to go when and whither they list;
to hunt, hawk, and go to horse-races.” Enjoying life himself, Covell
was kindly disposed to others of like temperament. To Burton, however,
one of the Puritans who was sent to Lancaster Castle to have his ears
cropped, this high-spirited Governor was a “beastly man.”
“Drunken Barnaby” was not of that opinion. Doubtless the two drank many
a noggin together; Barnaby writing him down—
A Jaylor ripe and mellow
The world hath not suche a fellow.
John Taylor, the so-called “Water Poet,” who on his “Pennyless
Pilgrimage” to Edinburgh and back levied toll on many men’s hospitable
tables, tells how
The Iayler kept an Inne, good beds, good cheere,
Where, paying nothing, I found nothing deere;
and in short he was very much, in the amateur way, what his brother was
professionally, who kept the “George” inn, in the town; and, strange to
say, his wife was no less hospitable than himself.
We are not accustomed to think of Lancaster as a seaport, but it
was once much more important in that way than Liverpool itself. To
be sure, that was long ago, but not so very, very long: no further
back, indeed, than the time of Charles the First, who, in levying what
has been called the “objectionable” tax—but what tax is not, to the
taxee?—of Ship Money, assessed Lancaster at £30, Liverpool at £25, and
Preston at £20. What Manchester has laboriously and expensively done
in its Ship Canal might more easily and cheaply be effected by Preston
and Lancaster, lying nearer the sea: and doubtless a time will come—but
with that we have no concern. Meanwhile there are salmon in the Lune,
as wanderers along the riverside by Crook o’ Lune may discover, and
Lancaster as yet knows nothing of great commercial docks. With modern
developments, however, the Town Council has felt the need of a borough
motto. “Time-honoured Lancaster” was suggested, but the Heralds’
College, sticklers for accuracy, pointing out that this referred to
John o’ Gaunt and not to the town, suggested “Luck to Loyne” instead;
and accordingly, “Luck to Loyne” it is.
The finest view of Lancaster is from the Skerton Bridge crossing the
river Lune at a point where the castle and the old church of St. Mary
group finely on the castle hill, and rightly form the most prominent
objects, historical as they are. Unfortunately for the view, railway
developments have done a good deal to destroy its majestic simplicity.
A railway bridge of the most atrocious lattice-girder type, crossing
from the point known by the curious name of “Green Ayre,” cuts the
finest picture in half, and a number of sidings have abolished the
verdant banks of the Lune for a good distance and form undesirable
neighbours to the embowered beauty of Ladies’ Walk.
Skerton Bridge, which takes the road out of Lancaster to Carlisle, in
1900 replaced the old Lune Bridge built in 1788, which itself replaced
a much older structure.
[Sidenote: _OILCLOTH_]
But the commercial spirit has seized historic Lancaster, and factories
of various kinds thrust their chimneys into the sky. Oilcloth-making
by hand was started in a small way many years ago, in an old shed
rented by a journeyman house-painter, Williamson by name. The
enterprise quickly prospered and grew into a wealth-producing wholesale
business. The journeyman painter’s son is now Baron Ashton, much to
the dissatisfaction of many jealous folk who gave his father a job in
the days of small things. It is a romance of industry, and has helped
to change the appearance of Lancaster, the quiet, grave country-town
of yore. There was until recent years a bleak and barren upland known
as Lancaster Moor, overlooking the town: it is now transformed, with
trees and shrubs, as the “Williamson Park.” A huge new Town Hall is
also a Williamson product, and overlooking all Lancaster and dwarfing
the importance of the old castle itself, a mammoth bugbear of a thing
called the “Ashton Memorial” arrests the eye from far and near, like a
St. Paul’s dome on the hilltop. Entering Lancaster from the north, you
can no more miss seeing it than you could miss seeing St. Paul’s from
Ludgate Hill. American tourists ask, in their picturesque way, “Who in
thunder built it?” and they are told that it is built to the honour and
glory of the Williamson family. It arouses terrible thoughts of what
may yet be in store for the historic places of Old England, when each
ennobled maker of wall-papers, drain-pipes, and the like shall feel
that the merits of his race demand advertising as prominently as his
wares.
XVI
The suburb of Skerton, on the north side of Skerton Bridge, leads to
the hamlet of Slyne, perched on a hill overlooking Morecambe Bay. The
place-name “Slyne” looks as unpleasant in print as do the personal
names of Silas, Matthias, or Jabez, and the meaning of it, as of the
similar place-names “Slindon” and “Slinfold,” in Sussex, seems to have
escaped research. A quaint old manor-house, now a farm, with an odd
doorway inscribed
G
C M
1681,
stands facing the road, and with the
old “Cross Keys” inn, dated 1727, comprises nearly all there is of
Slyne. Here comes the left-hand turning to Hest Bank, on the shore of
Morecambe Bay, whence old travellers, greatly daring, took a short cut
across the treacherous quicksands at low water, to Grange and Cartmel,
instead of going the roundabout way of Carnforth and Milnthorpe.
Lancashire is here cleft into two separate and distinct portions,
Lonsdale south of the sands, and Lonsdale north; a great wedge of
Westmorland coming in between.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE “OVER-SANDS” ROUTE.]
[Sidenote: _LAKELAND_]
The geography of the district surrounding Lancaster is by no means
simple. It is a country bordering upon the sea, which here and there
advances into the land, in the shapes of great sandy bays and long,
tongue-like estuaries of short but turbulent rivers that, taking their
origin as mountain-torrents amid the gloomy heights of the eternal
hills and mountains of Lakeland, have their sudden moods, dictated by
the melting of the snows, and by rain-storms. The distant landscape
in the neighbourhood of Lancaster is always closed in by mountain
heights, and the flat shores of Morecambe Bay look the more flat, and
the far-off fells appear the more rugged, in these several contrasts.
A considerable number of these little rivers come pouring down from the
Lakes to the sea: the Lune, the Kent, the Keer, the Winster, the Leven,
the Crake, and the Duddon. The road on to Kendal and Carlisle avoids
all the estuaries, and goes uneventfully onwards; but travellers who
wished to pass expeditiously between Lancaster, Furness, and Ulverston
had no choice but to make their perilous way “Over Sands,” across the
inner bight of Morecambe Bay, at low tide. The alternative was the
unwelcome, and anciently the dangerous, one of going the extravagantly
long way round by Milnthorpe, Crosthwaite, and Newby Bridge, under
Whitbarrow, where the treacherous Mosses, almost as dangerous as the
sands of the seashore, spread, and where the lawless and desperate
cattle-reivers lurked. Confronted with these problems, old-time
wayfarers generally chose the sands.
[Sidenote: “_OVER-SANDS_”]
The story of “Lancaster Sands,” as they are often called, is romantic
and melancholy. The hazardous crossing was made between Hest Bank and
Kent’s Bank, a distance of eleven miles, over a wet sandy waste that is
twelve feet deep in sea-water, at high tide. In these days of railway
travel, and since 1864, when the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway was
opened, the Over-Sands route is less frequently used, and principally
by farmers’ carts and by inquisitive tourists; but in all the earlier
centuries it was necessary, and great pains were taken to ensure, so
far as might humanly be, the safety of travellers across.
The sands are first mentioned by Tacitus, in his history of the second
campaign waged by Agricola against the Western Brigantes, the tribes
inhabiting Furness and the northern detached district of Lancashire
now known as North Lonsdale. The Romans, with their usual combined
thoroughness and prudence, appear to have made causeways crossing the
estuaries of the Kent, the Leven, and the Duddon, considerably inshore
from the exposed Over-Sands route and somewhat on the route of the
present railway bridges; but traces of their handiwork are now very few.
The next historical reference is not met with until 1325, when the
Abbot of Furness petitioned the King that his jurisdiction might be
extended in this district, to comprehend the Leven Sands, which were
so dangerous that many travellers, sixteen on one occasion, and six
on another, had been overtaken by the tide, and drowned. His petition
was granted, and the Abbot established, on an island half-way across
the estuary, a little chapel in which the monks prayed all round the
twenty-four hours for the safety, or for the souls, as the case might
be, of those who sought to cross. It is, however, scarce to be supposed
that the Abbey privileges would have been thus extended had the aid
to travellers been merely that of prayers. A more practical note was
the addition of a lighthouse, or beacon tower, to the chapel, combined
with the readiness of the monks to guide strangers. Since 1820, the
guide across Leven Sands has received an annual salary of £22 from the
Duchy of Lancaster, with a grant of three acres of land. He enjoys, in
addition, under the provisions of the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway
Act of 1851, a further £20 a year, in compensation for loss of fees
caused by the opening of the railway; for although he is a public
official, he commonly received gifts and free-will fees from those he
guided across in pre-railway days.
The more lengthy journey, from Hest Bank to Kent’s Bank, was under the
especial care of the Priory of Cartmel, which from an early period
maintained an official guide who was paid out of a grant made to the
Priory from Peter’s Pence for the especial purpose of performing this
public service. Travellers here also had the benefit of the monks’
prayers, which in truth they often needed.
This very necessary office of guide did by no means fall into decay
with the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry the Eighth.
Provision was made by the expenses being charged to the Duchy of
Lancaster: “the Carter over the Kent,” as the guide was called, being
paid £20 per annum by the Receiver-General, and the guide across
the shorter passage of the Keer being paid £10. The Carter no doubt
performed his duty, but the Sands every now and then claimed their
victims. Thus, in the registers of Cartmel may be read the following
tragical entries:
[Sidenote: _TRAGEDY_]
“_1576, Sept. 12._ One young man buryed, which was drowned in the
brodwater.”
“_1582, Aug. 1_, was buryed a son of Leonard Rollinson, of Furness
Fell, drowned at the Grainge, the 28th daye of July.”
“_1610, Feb. 4_, John ffell, son of Augustine, of Birkbie, drowned on
Conysed Sands.”
“_1630, Aug. 10_, Wm. Best, gent., drowned on Melthorp Sands.”
The registers of Cartmel alone testify to over 120 persons having lost
their lives while crossing the channels of these treacherous shores.
The race of secular guides across the Kent began, after the surrender
of Cartmel Priory, with Thomas Tempest. Son succeeded father in the
office, but they seem soon afterwards to have become Carters; probably
having adopted the name from their official title.
The poet Gray, touring the Lake Country in 1769, relates a pathetic
story of a family overtaken by the mists half-way across the Sands: “An
old fisherman told me, in his dialect, a moving story, how a brother of
the trade—a cockler, as he styled him—driving a little cart with his
two daughters (women grown) in it, and his wife on horseback following,
set out one day to cross the Sands, as they had been frequently used to
do (for nobody in the village knew them better than the old man did).
When they were about half-way over, a thick fog rose, and as they
advanced they found the water much deeper than they expected. The old
man was puzzled. He stopped, and said he would go a little way to find
some mark he was acquainted with. They stayed awhile for him, but in
vain. They called aloud, but no reply. At last the young women pressed
their mother to think where they were, and go on. She would not leave
the place. She wandered about, forlorn and amazed. She would not quit
her horse and get into the cart with them. They determined, after much
time wasted, to turn back, and gave themselves up to the guidance of
their horses. The elder woman was soon washed off, and perished. The
girls clung close to their cart, and the horse, sometimes wading and
sometimes swimming, brought them back to land alive, but senseless
with terror and distress, and unable for many days to give an account
of themselves. The bodies of the parents were found the next ebb, that
of the father a very few paces distant from the spot where he had left
them.”
[Illustration: LANCASTER SANDS.
[_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._
]
The story is still remembered how, in the days when coaches crossed
Grange Sands at low water, an outside passenger lost his portmanteau
and excitedly jumped down after it, becoming half-engulfed in the
treacherous quicksands. He would probably have perished, had the guard,
used to the place, not come to his rescue, and pulled him out, with a
resounding “cluck,” similar to the noise made when drawing a cork.
[Sidenote: _TRAGEDIES THE OF THE SANDS_]
But a more serious affair was that of 1811, when the Over-Sands
coach, the Lancaster stage, was overturned in the Kent Channel, through
the horses turning restive. They brought the coach to a stop, and the
current washing away the sand under the wheels of one side, the whole
affair turned completely over. It was very nearly a tragedy, for there
were fifteen passengers, inside and out, flung floundering in the
sand and water at a very dangerous place. A young lady, floating on
voluminous clothes down the Channel, was grabbed by the guard, and the
passengers huddled together on the side of the overturned coach; but
all the loose luggage was swept away and lost, and two pointer dogs
were drowned. The passengers were brought to land on the backs of the
coach-horses, the last being taken off none too soon; for the coach was
gradually sinking, and was eventually completely engulfed in the sands.
A narrow escape was that of Major Bigland, who was crossing one dark
evening in his gig from Lancaster, intending to reach Cartmel. He drove
towards the sea instead, and only by extreme good fortune managed to
land near Conishead. A post-chaise was lost and the postboy and one of
the horses drowned near Hest Bank in 1821, and in 1825 the Lancaster
coach was blown over, midway, and a horse drowned. The passengers were
only with difficulty saved. In 1832 the identical coach was sunk in a
quicksand. Much later, in 1846, nine merry holiday-makers, returning
from the Whitsun fair at Ulverston, drove into a treacherous spot near
Black Scar, on the Leven Sands, and were all immediately drowned: and
a similar disaster occurred to a party of seven farm-hands crossing
the Kent Sands to Lancaster in 1857, the year the Furness Railway was
opened, and the Over-Sands coach discontinued. In every case, the
bodies were easily found; lending point to the grim story told of an
ancient mariner who, asked if guides were ever lost on the sands,
answered with simplicity: “I never knew any lost. There’s one or two
drowned, now and again, but they’re generally found when the tide goes
out.”
[Sidenote: _THE TIME OF CROSSING_]
About 1785 a coach was started between Ulverston and Lancaster, going
daily across the sands. The scene at its crossing was curious. The
Carter, on horseback, headed it, and in its wake generally followed a
number of carts and other country vehicles, forming a procession not
unlike an Eastern caravan crossing the deserts of Arabia. The Carter’s
guidance was absolutely necessary, for although the track might at
every ebb be beaten out by a multitude, the incoming tide inevitably
obliterated every trace of it, and the channels were constantly
shifting. A contemporary account says: “The Carter seems a cheerful and
pleasant fellow. He wore a rough great-coat and a pair of jack-boots,
and was mounted on a good horse, which appeared to have been up to the
ribs in water. When we came to him, he recommended us to wait till the
arrival of the coach, which was nearly a mile distant, as the tide
would then be gone further out. When the coach came up, we took the
water in procession, and crossed two channels in one of which the water
was up to the horses’ bellies. The coach passed over without the least
difficulty, being drawn by fine, tall horses. Arrived at the other
side, the Carter received our gratuities and we rode on, keeping close
to a line of rods which have been planted in the sands to indicate the
track. The channel is seldom two days together in the same place. You
may make the chart one day, and before the ink is dry it will have
shifted.”
A sufficient testimony to the dangers of the sands is found in the fact
that those who have known them best have ever been the ones to most
dread them and the “cruel crawling tide” that with the shifting of
the wind can readily change from a crawl to a hissing seething gallop
across the perilous flats.
It is the shout of the coming foe,
Ride, ride for thy life, Sir John;
But still the waters deeper grew
The wild sea foam rushed on.
The proper time to attempt the crossing is five hours after high water,
but even then only in fine weather. A strong sea-breeze will bring the
flood in, fully an hour before the tide-tables; while after heavy rains
the crossing is impossible, owing to the flood-water from the rivers
permeating the sands in every direction and converting the whole route
into one vast quicksand. Never at any time should the stranger attempt
the passage without competent assistance.
The dangers of the Lancashire coast were illustrated once more at
the very moment of these lines being written, in the inquest held,
September 1907, on John Richardson, a farm-labourer who was engulfed
in the quicksands at Broadfleet Bridge, Pilling, near Garstang. While
walking on the sands, he sank to the waist, and being far from any
human habitation, his cries could not be heard; with the result that he
met a fearful death by slow drowning, as the cruel tide crept up across
the lonely shore.
Turner’s picture of the coach crossing the sands is dramatic, but
nothing in the way of drama is enacted there now. It is a grey and
sullen scene. On the skyline to the left is the tall ugly tower at
Morecambe, and dimly on the right the mountains of Lakeland. The London
and North-Western Railway runs along the shore, at its Hest Bank
station cutting off proper access, and only by the rarest chance is the
Over-Sands route now taken.
XVII
[Illustration: CARNFORTH.]
[Sidenote: _THE BUCKSTONE_]
The village of Bolton-le-Sands, standing on the Lancaster Canal, and
near the shore, is a small place of many inns—the “Blue Anchor,” “Black
Bull” and others—and an old church, surrounded and almost overhung by
trees. Succeeding it is Carnforth, growing almost while you wait, in
the new-found prosperity of its ironworks, where a goodly quantity
of the hæmatite ore of the adjoining Furness district is smelted.
Beyond it, in a choice of routes to Kendal, by Milnthorpe or by
Burton-in-Kendal, we take the second, past the “Longlands” inn; where
traces of an older road to Kendal are to be found. A mile onward, a
considerable stretch of it, on the left hand of the present highway,
exists as a deserted lane, very narrow here and there, and overgrown
with grass. In general, however, farmers have gradually abolished it
and added it to their pastures, and even this surviving stretch is
in process of being similarly swallowed and digested. Portions of it
are not without their romantic aspects: as where a huge granite crag,
called from time immemorial “the Buckstone,” stands in the hedgerow
and recalls the trials of travellers in a bygone age, when roads
were little better than winding tracks and sign-posts did not exist.
They went, those palpitating travellers, as directed, “past the
Buckstone,” standing for centuries as sure a landmark as anything in
this countryside. And now it is forgotten, except by the farming and
field-folk and those whose business or pleasure is in the byways and
the hedges. Many surrounding houses and natural objects are named after
the wild deer that once roamed the district: among them Roanad Hill,
and Hilderstone and Deerslack farms.
From the Buckstone you see the rugged terraced hill of Farleton Knott,
styled by the county historian “the Gibraltar of Westmoreland,” and,
down beneath, the clustered houses of Burton-in-Kendal; but before you
reach that decayed town the old road is cut off and a modern lane leads
on the right into the highway, past Dalton Park, through whose grounds
the old road ran its winding way. Still, a few yards within the Park
wall, may be seen, amid the trees, a rude milestone bearing nothing
by way of inscription save the figure “10.” This, if you please, was
the curt way of informing travellers that they were ten miles from
Lancaster. It is obvious that old-time wayfarers had to bring some
native understanding with them.
The old boundary of Westmoreland and Lancashire, somewhat varied
in recent times, is seen marked on a brass plate on the way to
Burton-in-Kendal, opposite a group of old cottages standing in a hollow
beside the modern raised road. The place is called Heron Syke, and the
deep hollow and surviving fragment of old road illustrate the ancient
name, indicating a marshy place with a brook, once frequented by herons.
[Illustration: THE BUCKSTONE.]
[Sidenote: _WESTMORELAND_]
And here we are in Westmoreland. Authorities have not yet done
disputing whether it was originally “Westmoreland,” or “Westmereland,”
for the moors and the meres, _i.e._ the lakes, are equally prominent in
the county; and, by the same token, there is no settled spelling of the
name, “Westmoreland”; with two “e’s” or with one. The one “e” appears
to be now the more favoured of these versions, but, for my part, I
plump for the more romantic-looking old style.
The old wool-market of Burton-in-Kendal is extinct, and that is a
very quiet uneventful place nowadays, in which a narrow street of
grey stone houses opens into a little square where the granite pillar
of a market-cross, reared upon three steps, stands, bearing witness
to an importance otherwise not only past, but almost forgotten. The
market-cross was by way of being stocks and pillory as well, for the
steps were fitted with contrivances by which petty offenders were
literally “laid by the heels.” There were two pairs of them, as the
inquisitive may readily see: and there, thus securely fastened, the
rogues and vagabonds of Burton’s busier days were exposed to gibe,
insult, and missile.
[Illustration: THE MARKET CROSS AND PILLORY, BURTON-IN-KENDAL.]
On the night of April 30th, 1812, some evil-disposed persons placed
no fewer than eleven gates across the road between Lancaster and
Burton-in-Kendal, with intent to upset the mail; which indeed only
narrowly escaped. These scoundrels were never caught.
Burton is, or was, a loyal place, and does what it can to celebrate
national events. It cannot, in the very nature of things, with the
slender resources at its command, do much, and its high-water-mark of
effort is seen in a very ordinary gas-lamp, erected to commemorate the
wedding of the Prince of Wales in 1863.
[Illustration: THE “DUKE OF CUMBERLAND” INN, AND FARLETON KNOTT.]
[Sidenote: _FARLETON KNOTT_]
Farleton Knott—most hills in these parts are “Knotts”—strikingly
overhangs the road to Kendal, rising in grey scarps, ridges, and
terraces above a level stretch, where the humble old whitewashed “Duke
of Cumberland” inn stands beside the lonely way. This is followed, at
a considerable interval, by Crooklands inn, with the church of Preston
Patrick on the right, and the hamlet of End Moor, all seated in, or
overlooking, a green and fertile valley, where a silvery beck winds
away in shining loops. The scene, with its rich grass and fine trees,
might be in one of the bolder parts of Surrey, rather than in the north.
[Illustration: KENDAL CASTLE, AND THE ROAD INTO KENDAL.]
Now Kendal is approached, its ruined castle surmounting a rounded
green hill and thrusting out ragged walls almost in the likeness of
some rocky outcrop. Kendal Castle seems to have been so threatening
a fortress—and it still looks especially formidable from the north,
whence most of its possible enemies could come—that no one appears ever
to have attacked it. They went round the other way, if another way
could be found, or—better still—stopped at home.
[Sidenote: _KENDAL_]
At Kendal was born the much-married Katherine Parr, whose family at
the time were lords of the castle. Thirdly, she was married by Henry
the Eighth, and was so fortunate as to survive him. How little she
regretted that Royal husband we may judge by the fact that, two months
after his death she married, fourthly an old flame, Admiral Lord
Seymour of Sudeley, and then, a year later, died, aged thirty-six.
On the Milnthorpe road, a mile short of Kendal, stands the little
manor-house of Collin Field, a halting-place for the night often used
by that formidable lady, Ann, Countess of Pembroke, on her journeys
between her various residences. It was purchased in 1660 by her
secretary, George Sedgwick, who long lived there and occupied his
leisure in writing of his great mistress. The house is an admirable
specimen of the semi-fortified smaller residences of that age.
XVIII
And so into Kendal, across the river.
Kendal, originally Kirkby Kendal, _i.e._ Kirk-by-Kent Dale, is indeed
very much among the waters, for here the river Kent, reinforced by
tributary streams pouring down from the misty fells, foams down in
weirs, and is crossed, in highway and byway, by no fewer than three
bridges. There is good fishing for the “gentle” angler in these waters.
Though why “gentle” and where the gentleness is more than I can
comprehend. For sport, the angler baits his cruel line and, if sport
be good, he, himself an exemplar of “nature, red in tooth and claw,”
hooks, with his fiendish barb, some unfortunate trout or grayling in
the gills.
The streets of Kendal are mostly “gates,” as Stramongate and Strickland
gate, and were once picturesque, in the stern way of these northern
latitudes; but Kendal, in these days a highly prosperous agricultural
town, and in a favourable position at the gate of the Lake Country, is
being greatly rebuilt, and looks, to those who hurry by, little removed
from the common run of provincial towns. Motor-tourists to and from the
Lakes do not deign to halt at Kendal, and he who does may notice, any
day of summer and autumn, a veritable procession of cars hurrying to
and from those resorts and regarding Kendal as an unwelcome incident,
containing inhabitants and dogs, which are to be run over only at risk
to car and purse.
The great church of Kendal lies low, by the river, and is great,
not in height, nor in any imposing architectural design, but in the
sheer ground-space it covers. It has no fewer than five aisles, and
by consequence of them looks squat. It is a kind of Westmoreland
Westminster Abbey, the place of sepulture of barons and squires
innumerable from the castle on the hill yonder and from the country
round about. Their private chapels, where Parrs and Bellinghams,
Stricklands, Howards, and others lie, are now not a little the
worse for wear, and no longer private; and their mortuary glories
obscured. But to one of the old school of county historians or patient
genealogists, the interior of Kendal church would be, in the way of
hatchments, heraldic carvings, and flatulent epitaphs, the study
of years. More to my purpose are the strange incidents and the odd
inscriptions of the place.
[Sidenote: “_ROBIN THE DEVIL_”]
There hangs, for example, in the once private chapel of the dead and
gone Bellinghams a helmet with a story. Once, it seems, in the days
when Cavalier and Roundhead fought out their dispute, there flourished
a family of Philipsons in the Windermere district, with a notorious
person, Major Robert Philipson, at their head: so wild and reckless
that he was commonly known as “Robin the Devil.” It is hardly necessary
to add that he was not a Puritan. This rumbustious character, greatly
incensed that the Puritans should have established themselves in the
town, under one Colonel Briggs, set out one Sunday with a number of
horsemen, to kill the colonel in church. Happily for Briggs, he had
not attended service that day, and Philipson, rampaging with drawn
sword over the building, was baulked of his prey: although it does not
seem quite certain that Robin would have been fortunate had Briggs
been present, for even without their commander the people present made
him run, and in his haste to go his helmet was knocked off against an
archway. He did not stop to recover it, but made off as quick as he
could go. So much for your daredevils. The helmet was hung up as a
trophy. But Smelfungus, the antiquary, who must for always be spoiling
the best stories with his dry facts, tells us that the helmet is really
a portion of the funeral armour of Sir Roger Bellingham, suspended over
his tomb.
Among the interesting items in Kendal Church are pieces of an ancient
cross, dated about A.D. 850, and the monument to over one hundred and
fifty officers and men of the 55th (Westmoreland) Regiment, who fell
in that most stupid of blunders, the Crimean War, from which none,
save the Army contractors, ever reaped any advantage. Here, too, is a
Chinese “Dragon Flag,” captured at Chusan, and deposited in the church
in 1874.
[Sidenote: _REPARTEE_]
Here, also, is a monument to the unfortunate Sir Augustine Nichols,
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, poisoned when on circuit at Kendal
in 1616. But the most curious object in Kendal Church is the epitaph
upon a former vicar, the Reverend Ralph Tyrer, B.D., who died in June
1627. The curious rhymes of which it is composed are said to have
been written by himself; but, however that may be, it is certain
that whoever was the author of them was keenly desirous of puzzling
posterity. He has done it effectually, too. He has set out, in his
rugged and uncouth way, that—
London bred me, Westminster fed me,
Cambridge sped me, My sister wed me,
Study taught me, Living sought me,
Learning brought me, Kendal caught me,
Labour pressed me, Sickness distressed me,
Death oppressed me, The grave possessed me,
God first gave me, Christ did save me,
Earth did crave me, Heaven would have me.
“My sister wed me”: that is the crux of the matter; but it does not
appear that this is to be taken seriously, in its ordinary meaning. As
to the real interpretation, we are offered at least two stories: the
one that his sister, finding him too busy or too diffident a man to do
his own wooing, conducted his courtship for him and provided him with a
wife of her own choosing. In that case, she dared much. The alternative
theory is that the word “sister,” as used here, is intended to bear an
academical meaning, and to indicate that he was educated at Cambridge
but admitted _ad eundem_ afterwards to the “sister University” of
Oxford.
The people of Kendal were turbulent folk in the old days, and varied
the humdrum existence of woollen manufacture and the printing of
cottons by rioting: keeping up their reputation in this sort until the
early years of the nineteenth century, when the first Parliamentary
election was excuse sufficient for an outbreak. The making and the
dyeing of the once famous “Kendal green” cloth is a thing of the past,
and peace is now the characteristic of Kendal, but the reputation of
the neighbourhood for incisive wit remains, in the ancient story of the
horseman who asked a countryman the time o’ day. “Twelve o’clock,” said
the man, looking at that rural chronometer, the sky.
“Twelve!” exclaimed the traveller. “I thought it was more.”
“Did y’ever know it to be moor nor twelve?” rejoined the man, turning
away.
The traveller, struck with this unusual rustic facility for repartee,
sent his servant after him, to know if he would like a situation as a
jester.
“Here, fellow,” said the servant, “my master wants to know if you would
like a place as fool.”
The reply was disheartening: “Does he want two on ’em, then, or are you
going to leave?”
The turbulent people of Kendal no doubt acquired their character from
the old-time circumstances of the place, ever subject to incursions of
Scottish raiders. Sturdy independence, and a readiness to hold their
own, thus become traits in these men of the dales and fells. Something
of the ancient trials of Kendal town may yet be seen, behind the modern
smug facing of shops in the older streets, where houses and cottages
are built around courtyards approached only by narrow alleys easily to
be defended, in case of attack.
The last occasion when these old defences seemed like to prove
again useful was in 1745, when Prince Charlie, in memories of whose
enterprise this road is so rich, came with his ill-disciplined
following. But nothing serious happened: the Prince stayed the night
in Stricklandgate, at the old mansion still standing, numbered 93,
and rested there again on his retreat. Next day came the Duke of
Cumberland, in hot pursuit, and he also halted at the old house,
pleasantly remarking that they had entertained his cousin there, the
day before. I suspect the more or less unwilling host of Prince and
Duke, in fear of consequences, explained, as politely as he could, that
he entertained whom he must.
[Illustration: CASTLE DAIRY.]
[Sidenote: _CASTLE DAIRY_]
There is, after all, singularly little pictorial quality in Kendal. The
old town-house of the Bellinghams, in Stramongate, built in 1546, still
exists, although the family is extinct; but it turns the commonplace
front of an ironmonger’s shop to the street. Indeed, old Kendal is
only to be pictured in that fine rugged building, the Castle Dairy,
in Wildman Street. It is supposed to have been the dairy of the old
castle, and still contains a few of the many ancient and curious relics
found in old cupboards and secret places in its immensely thick walls,
together with some fragments of stained glass bearing the arms of the
Stanleys, Earls of Derby. But the curious genealogy of the Saxon kings,
and the old illuminated Roman mass-book, have been removed to the
Public Library.
XIX
Between Kendal and Penrith, a distance of twenty-six miles, is situated
the bleakest and most trying stretch of country in all the distance
from London and Glasgow. It is the district of that high-perched
table-land, 1,400 feet above sea-level, dreaded by the old coachmen,
and the passengers too, as “Shap Fell.” All the weather of Westmoreland
is brewed amid the inhospitable altitudes of Stainmoor and Shap Fell,
which are, in addition, afflicted with the local phenomenon known as
the “Helm Wind.” This, perhaps fortunately for travellers, is not a
winter’s gale, but a playful blast that characterises the days of May
and June. When the tourist reads that it is strong enough to overturn
horses and carriages, and that the noise of it may be heard twenty
miles off, like thunder, or the roar of a cataract, he entertains
serious thoughts of accomplishing this stage of his journey by rail.
The Helm Wind derives its name from the “helm,” or cap, of light clouds
that rests immovably for hours in the sky at the time of its blowing.
It blows across the fells of Westmoreland and Cumberland, rushing down
their steep sides and lashing the waters of the Lakes into furious
waves and driven spray.
The ascent to this not very promising region begins by a gentle rise
at Mint Bridge, one mile from Kendal. It continues, with increasingly
steep gradients, but with two short intervals of down gradient, for
nine and a half miles, when the summit is reached. Although Shap Fell
has so ugly a name, the rise at no point exceeds 1 in 10. It is rather
the long-continued character of the ascent to the exposed summit that
makes the road remarkable.
[Sidenote: _COACHING INCIDENTS_]
The coaching accidents on this stage were remarkably few. The
principal happening of this kind was when a country mail was upset at
Kirbythore Bridge, on Hucks Brow, owing to the horses shying at a quite
inoffensive water-wheel. The coach fell eight feet, and a horse was
killed, but there the damage ended. A stalwart Yorkshire wool-stapler,
who was riding outside, was flung off and made to perform a complete
somersault, but he alighted safely on his feet, and just in time to
catch, at “mid-off,” a parcel which shot with wondrous velocity out of
a woman’s arms, and proved on inspection to be a baby. He said, dryly,
when they congratulated him on his fielding, that “a stray baby isn’t
generally a good catch for a man.”
It was only right and proper that on such a road as this amateur
coachmen were few. It would, indeed, have sounded a higher note of
propriety had there been none at all. With regard to the mails,
the Post Office regulations, not only on this road, but on roads
in general, strictly forbade coachmen allowing amateurs to drive,
and expected the guards to interpose, to prevent anything of the
kind. On one occasion, when young Teather, of Teather & Son, the
mail-contractors, had taken the coachman’s place, and was about to
drive his own horses, a half-indignant and half-terrified passenger
seized the reins because the guard would not veto the arrangement. What
would have happened to that guard for not fulfilling his instructions
to the letter we do not know, for there happened to be a change
of Government at the time, and when the guard somewhat impudently
desired to know which of the two Postmasters-General—the in-coming or
retiring—he was to address in his defence, the matter was allowed to
drop.
One of the few privileged amateurs was Mr. James Parkin, who generally
worked on Teather’s ground out of Penrith, towards Carlisle. He was one
of those who would drive only the best of teams, and so gave up when
the railways encroached and the horses on the shorter journeys became
inferior. He was wont to say he did not care to be a “screw-driver.”
He was a very steady but slow-going whip: too slow for the Mail, and
lacked energy to make his horses slip along over the galloping ground,
where really scientific coachmen always made up for lost time. The
guard, in fact, was perpetually holding up his watch, admonishing him
to “send ’em along.”
Ramsay of Barnton was a good enough whip when the cattle were good, but
he liked to choose his ground. Nightingale, the great coursing judge of
that day, was the one to “take a coach through the country.” He took
the horses as they came,—kickers or jibbers—and, thanks to his fine
nerves and delicate handling of the ribbons, kept his time to a second.
[Sidenote: _COACHMEN_]
Parson Bird was also said to be “well up to his work,” and was so
good-hearted a fellow that when the regular coachman from Keswick to
Kendal broke his leg, he took his place for six weeks, and collected
the fees for him. A story is told of a lady giving the parson-coachman
half-a-crown at the end of the journey one afternoon, and being
introduced to him at a ball the same evening at Kendal. He at once
asked for a dance, but she was highly indignant that a coachman should
so presume. However, the matter was explained, and to such satisfaction
that not only did she dance, but eventually became Mrs. Bird.
Among the regular coachmen, John Reed took a very high place. He was
a stout and a very silent man: all for his horses and nothing to his
passengers. He drove the Glasgow Mail from Carlisle to Abington, never
tasted ale or wine, and never had an accident. This was the more
remarkable as Mr. Johnstone of Hallheaths, owner of Charles XII.,
horsed the Mail along one stage with nothing but thoroughbreds; and,
had they “taken off,” not even Reed, strong-wristed though he was,
could have held them in.
John Bryden was the very reverse of John Reed, and full of jollity
and good stories on the box. The two Drydens were even more dashing
in their style: one had the art of teaching his horses to trot when
most men would have had them on the gallop; the other was a wonderful
singer. Whenever the Mail reached a long ascent and he had to slacken
speed, he would beguile the way with “She Wore a Wreath of Roses,” or
“I Know a Flower within my Garden Growing,” in a rich tenor that would
have secured him a good concert-room engagement in these times.
Another notable coachman was “Little Isaac Johnson.” He kept on the box
for thirty-five years, and never had an accident. He was supreme with a
kicking horse, and always took care to make him his near-side leader.
When such an one was put there, he could punish him more severely, and
liked to hit restive animals inside the thigh. He could “fairly wale
them up,” if they continued to rebel.
The Telfers were coachmen of the same severe school, and well known
over Shap way. Jem Barnes, on the other hand, was fat and lumbersome
and lacked fire; so that people _did_ say he had his sleeping-ground
as well as his galloping-ground. But, one night, at least, when he was
driving north over Shap Fell, there was little chance of sleeping. He
had on that occasion not only to gallop at all the snow-drifts, but
to put a postboy and a pair on in front. The pole-hook broke in midst
of the blinding, snow-wreathed journey, and the hand of his almost
namesake, Jem Byrns, the guard, was nearly frozen to the screw-wrench
when he brought out a spare pole-hook and fastened it on. The snow was
falling in flakes as large as crown-pieces all the while, and the
only comic relief was the voice of a “heavy swell” issuing from the
box seat, beneath a perfect tortoise-shell covering of capes and furs,
“_What are you fellows keeping me here in the cold for, and warming
your own hands at the lamp?_”
[Sidenote: _PEDIGREE_]
George Eade, another of this distinguished company, was very deaf, but
with hearing enough to be cognisant of a great many objurgations from
Mr. Richardson, of the “Greyhound” at Shap, for taking it out of his
horses. One day Richardson came out and was particularly bland—nothing
to complain of at all—but George, unable to distinguish anything, and
concluding he was on the old subject, had his back up in an instant.
“_Hang you!_” said he, “_I’m not before my time; I’ll bet you_ £5 _of
it; look at my watch!_”
Jack Pooley was a great character. When he retired from the box, he
joined the Yeomanry and entered his horse for a cavalry plate at a
race-meeting. Two of the conditions of entry were that it must never
have won £50, and also must be half-bred. Some objections being raised,
it became necessary to examine him before the committee. To the
first question, whether his horse had ever won £50, he replied, “No,
indeed! but he’s helped to lose many a fifty—he ran three years in an
opposition coach.” The next question was, “What is he by, Mr. Pooley?”
“By?” said Jack. “I should say he was by a shorthorn bull, he’s such a
devil of a roarer.” The answers, we are told, were considered eminently
satisfactory.
The mail-coachmen on the Shap and Penrith stage were for some time
afflicted with a mare that stopped with every one of them in turn at
the end of two miles. At last they all wearied of her, and orders
were issued that if she refused again, she was not to be brought back
alive. On this fateful journey she started, and, according to her use
and wont, suddenly sulked and sat down on her haunches in the middle
of the road, like a dog, with her fore-legs straight out in front. The
coachman, armed by the contractor with power of life or death, did not
proceed to tragical extremities. He got down, took a rail out of the
hedge, and struck her nine times below the knees with the flat side of
it. This treatment proved effectual, not only for that journey, but for
all time, and she was docile and willing ever after.
How bravely and doggedly the mails and stages battled on winter nights
against the howling blasts of Shap and Stainmoor, sometimes contending
with snowstorms and drifts in which not only the coachman and guard,
but the passengers also, bore a hand at the snow-shovels and dug and
delved until hands and feet, previously numbed with cold, glowed again!
How anxiously, when that digging and delving seemed almost ineffectual
and the drifts impassable, did they strain their vision to catch a
glimpse through the murky night, filled with driving snowflakes for the
cheerful lights of that roadside inn, the “Welcome into Cumberland,”
telling travellers accustomed to this road not only of comfort
available at hand, but of a farewell to the terrors of Westmoreland and
approach to the sheltered little town of Penrith.
XX
At four miles and three-quarters from Kendal, at Watchgate, the finest
view opens, along Sleddale. Beyond it comes the “Plough” inn, with
pictorial sign and the couplet—
He that by the Plough would thrive,
Himself must either hold or drive.
a statement to which farmers do not unanimously subscribe.
[Illustration: BOROUGHBRIDGE, SHAP FELL.]
[Sidenote: _HUCKS BROW_]
Beyond this again comes Hucks Brow, the end of the first stage out of
Kendal, and Forest Hall, which, with the Abbey Farm at Shap, forms one
of the two largest sheep-farms in Westmoreland. Another rise of a
mile and a half, and a steep descent leads to Boroughbridge, a hamlet
where an ancient bridge spans a mountain stream and is neighboured by
a few cottages and the “Bay Horse” inn. From this point the final and
most trying ascent is made. An old road goes winding away in the valley
below, past Hausefoot Farm, but it has long ceased to be of any but
strictly local use.
The road across Shap summit is built upon peat bogs, and needs constant
repair. The boggy nature of the foundation is not apparent to the
casual wayfarer, but may readily be discovered by standing beside it at
the passing of a motor-car, when it very perceptibly shakes.
At the descent from the summit towards Shap village, the old road
crosses to the right hand, and away to the right, half a mile across
the moors, the hotel of Shap Wells is seen, rising from its wooded
hollow.
Dr. Granville, who wrote a work on English spas in 1845, came in due
course to Shap Wells, and remarks justly upon the wild and remote
situation of the wells and the hotel, but he does not lay any stress
upon the truly awful ancient-egg flavour of the medicinal waters,
which, if their medicinal virtues be in proportion to their taste,
must needs be very remarkably curative. He talks rather of the colour
scheme of the water, than of _bouquet_, and waxes eloquent on its
bluish, opalescent hue. He was here in the height of summer, and found
at the hotel a “lady sitting at a roasting fire (of which by-the-by I
was glad to partake also) on the 6th of August.” But notwithstanding
the curious taste and flavour of the waters, the hotel is greatly
frequented. It is not the waters, but the bracing air, that now forms
the attraction.
[Sidenote: _SHAP_]
The village of Shap, although itself of no mean altitude, seems quite
sheltered after the four miles’ run down from the summit. Still stands
the old “Greyhound” inn of coaching days, as you enter the village.
And not only of coaching days, but of times earlier, as the tablet
over the door, dated 1703, proclaims. This was the inn, doubtless, at
which Prince Charlie called, on his way, and found the landlady a “sad
imposing wife.” The weird greyhound sculptured on the tablet somewhat
resembles the Saxon idea of a horse, as carved on White Horse Hill, in
Berkshire.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “GREYHOUND,” SHAP.]
Shap is a large village, with cattle-market, and an odd squat building
styled a “market cross,” now used as a parish room, but it is chiefly
famous among tourists for its Abbey, which exists only in scanty ruin,
a mile away, in a lonely situation: lonely, that is to say, except for
its great Abbey Farm. You approach it over a sheep track down and
across a narrow bridge built by the old monks so well that it stands
soundly to this day and does not let my Lord Lonsdale through when he
drives visitors across in his big motor-car, to see the ruined tower,
practically all that remains of the Abbey. Shelter was more to the
point when I came here, chased by rain-storms and thunder-storms that
spouted and rumbled among the hills, and I know more of the kindly
hospitality of the farm than of the antiquities of the Abbey, which,
after all, are few beyond broken columns and the stone coffins of
departed and forgotten abbots and brethren. The Abbey was resigned in
1541 by Richard Evenwode, the last Abbot. Its revenue was then £154 per
annum, a good deal in those days. To-day black-faced, horned Scotch
mountain-sheep roam the Abbey lands.
[Illustration: SHAP ABBEY.]
Hackthorpe village, with an old hall, now a farmhouse, beside the road,
brings us to the neighbourhood of Lowther Castle and its beautiful
park, seat of the Earl of Lonsdale. The mansion itself, built by Smirke
in 1808, is magnificent, in the sense that it is huge and was costly to
build and is princely in its appointments, but it is not a castle nor
is it Gothic architecture, although the architect who designed it, and
the second Lord Lonsdale, for whom it was designed, fondly imagined it
to be so.
[Sidenote: _THE “BAD LORD LONSDALE”_]
The wicked Lowther, the “bad Lord Lonsdale,” _i.e._ the first Earl
(1736-1802), once haunted this superstitious countryside, after he
had run his earthly course with sinful _éclat_, and was a dreaded
“boggle”—which is Westmoreland and Cumberland for “ghost.” This once
notorious character, “this brutal fellow,” as Boswell styled him, was
eccentric to a degree, and actually acknowledged himself to be “truly a
madman, though too rich to be confined.” One of his eccentricities was
the keeping of wild horses, instead of deer, in his park at Lowther.
Too rich and powerful to care a rap what was thought of him, he drove
about in gloomy, out-of-date majesty in an ancient mildewed carriage
drawn by shaggy, unclipped horses. The entry of this equipage into
Penrith, where he owned most of the property and, politically speaking,
all the inhabitants, was regarded with awful expectation of what he
would do next, and was feared almost as much as the coming of some
mediæval judge armed with a commission to try rebels.
In life representative of the worst and coarsest feudal barons of
the Middle Ages, he was held in still greater terror in his death.
The awe-stricken rustics long continued to tell how he was with
difficulty buried, and how, while the clergyman was praying over him,
his mischievous disembodied spirit very nearly knocked the astonished
cleric from his desk. Disturbances at the Hall and noises in the
stables followed, and men and horses had no rest. The Hall became
almost uninhabitable, and out of doors there was constant danger of
meeting the noble but malignant spook, either driving in his ghostly
“coach and six,” or walking along the dark roads. In a desperate
case of this kind, a Catholic priest was thought to be essential as
a spirit-layer. The Established Church would not serve, and as for
Dissenters—bah! The priest came and prayed, but Jemmy was obstinate and
stood a long siege, and when conjured by all that was holy, was only
willing to be banished to the Red Sea—to which troublesome spirits are
rusticated, as a sort of spiritual Botany Bay—for a year and a day.
This was not considered good enough. The district had experienced too
much of him in life, and ardently wished to be shot of his ghost for
good and all, and so the priest was urged to pray for all he was worth,
which he did, finally overpowering the tyrant. Instead of transporting
him to the Red Sea, he was laid under the great rock of Walla Crag,
Haweswater, for ever!
[Sidenote: _PEEL TOWERS_]
It is at Clifton, just south of Penrith, that the real Borderland
begins. We are still thirty-five miles short of the actual border-line,
but we have come now within the “sphere of influence” (as
international politicians might now phrase it) of the old mosstrooping,
cattle-lifting, and plundering and burning rascals from the Scottish
side, who ever and again came across the Solway in well-mounted bands
that numbered perhaps twenty, or perhaps five hundred, and often swept
the countryside clean of stock; returning as swiftly as they had come,
and leaving burning homesteads behind them. Those times have left
plentiful traces, still plain to see, in the old domestic architecture
of mansion and farmstead. Castles we have here, as elsewhere, but this
borderland is the country of the peel-tower. In ages when the south of
England lived in security, and men no longer built homes that were half
fortresses, these oft-raided northern counties still lived in constant
and well-founded apprehensions, and every one who had anything to lose
had his own stronghold, in the little peel-tower that was, according to
circumstances, his entire home, or a considerable part of it. Many of
the peel-towers remain, as uninhabited ruins: others form the central
portion of houses and mansions since enlarged. At Clifton stands such a
one.
It is a fair type of the defences once absolutely necessary. You see
the care taken to build strongly, with thick walls that no swiftly
moving band of raiders could have leisure to demolish; and you see,
too, that it was equally impossible to burn. The ground floor was not
only exceptionally solid, but it had no entrance from without, and was
reached only by a trap-door in the floor above.
So soon as the farmer or the squireen of those days had taken alarm, he
drove his stock into the barmkin, or enclosure, attached to his tower
of refuge, and, summoning all his family and securing his valuables,
ascended with them by a ladder to the first floor, and, withdrawing the
ladder after him, awaited events. For defence he had a store of heavy
stones on the leads above the second floor; or from the narrow-slitted
windows could shift to shoot arrows, or fling hot water, boiling tar,
or domestic sewage upon enemies who came near enough.
But the cattle were still in danger, and the men of the house were
usually concerned to garrison the tower with the women and children,
and to give fight, if the odds were not overwhelming, outside; and many
a Westmoreland and Cumberland farmer has died in protecting his stock.
Clifton should be marked on maps with the conventional crossed swords
indicating the site of a battle, for it was here, on the evening of
December 18th, 1745, that the Battle of Clifton Moor, the last ever
fought on English ground, was decided. It is true that, judged by the
standard of killed and wounded, it was no great affair, but it probably
gave a final turn to the fortunes of the Young Pretender. It was fought
midway in the panic-stricken retreat from Derby, and was a rearguard
action, covering the retirement of the main body upon Penrith and
Carlisle. Some two thousand Highlanders made a stand here, in the muddy
road and fields, in advance of the village, as the sun went down, and
the Duke of Cumberland’s force, consisting chiefly of Kerr’s, Bland’s,
Montagu’s, Kingston’s, and Cobham’s dragoons, attacked them in the
growing darkness.
[Illustration: CLIFTON.]
[Sidenote: _THE BATTLE OF CLIFTON_]
The rebel cavalry were off at once. According to the account of Lord
George Murray, on the Scottish side, “our horsemen, on seeing the
enemy, went to Penrith”: an innocent phrase, which rather obscures the
prudent, if inglorious, fact that they “bunked,” as a schoolboy would
say, or “did a guy,” as the slangy would remark: leaving the Highland
infantry to do the best they could. It was a haphazard hurly-burly that
ensued. No one could see any one. The Highlanders were quite invisible,
and the English dragoons only to be seen by the gleam of their buff
belts in the darkness. Mr. Thomas Savage, a Quaker, whose house was
in the thick of the encounter, was anxious for himself, and for his
cattle, which interposed between the combatants, but he had really
little cause for alarm; for both sides fired so high and so wide that
not even a cow was killed, and after all the shooting and the hacking
was done, and the rebels had fled, leaving the more or less stricken
field in the possession of the enemy, it was found that but twelve (or
according to one account, five) Highlanders had been killed and some
forty to seventy made prisoners. On the English side, eleven dragoons
were killed, and twenty-nine wounded. Many a railway accident has
wrought more havoc.
The registers of Clifton church bear witness to this event, in the
following entries:
“The 19th of December, 1745, Ten Dragoons, to wit, six of Bland’s,
three of Cobham’s, and one of Mark Kerr’s Regiment, buried, who was
killed y^e evening before by y^e Rebels in y^e skirmish between y^e
Duke of Cumberland’s army and them at y^e end of Clifton Moor next y^e
town.”
“Robert Atkins, a private Dragoon of General Bland’s Regiment, buried
y^e 8th Day of January, 1746.”
This last was obviously one of the wounded.
The Duke of Cumberland wanted a lodging for the night, and stayed
accordingly in the house of Mr. Savage, who, during the progress of
the affair, had locked himself in, while his daughter-in-law hid in
the kitchen cupboard. The Quaker’s account of the Duke was, “pleasant
agreeable company he was—a man of parts, very friendly, and no pride
in him.”
[Sidenote: _A CHARMED LIFE_]
None came so well out of that fight as Colonel Honeywood of Howgill,
who seems to have been a host in himself, and would have done even
better had it not been for an accident by which even the bravest of
the brave might be brought ingloriously to earth. His prowess was
vouched for by a Highlander, who, asked how his people got on, quaintly
replied: “We gat on vary weel, till the lang man in the muckle boots
cam ower the dyke, but his fut slipped on a turd, and we gat him down.”
The Highlanders nearly did for the “lang man,” for they gave him three
sword cuts on the head, and then left. He seems to have lived a charmed
life, for he was at that time invalided home from Continental warfare,
in which, at the Battle of Dettingen, he had received no fewer than
twenty-three broadsword cuts and two musket balls.
His hurts do not seem to have permanently harmed him, for he lived
forty years longer.
XXI
In the lowlands beneath Clifton stands Brougham Hall, and near it
Brougham Castle, both beside the Eamont river. A good deal of the Hall
is ancient, but most of the exterior, recased in a baronial way, looks
like (what it is) an academic attempt at recovering the architectural
style of the fourteenth century. When it is said that the work was
done in the early part of the nineteenth century, it will be supposed,
with a good deal of truth, that the result is dull and lifeless.
Anciently the seat of the Broughams, it came at length to the Bird
family, from whom the property was purchased in 1727 by the grandfather
of the Lord Brougham who was Lord Chancellor and a great political
figure in the days of George the Fourth, William the Fourth, and Queen
Victoria. Dr. Granville, travelling hereabouts in the middle of the
nineteenth century, sampling medicinal spas, looked upon the Hall with
awe, as the residence of that statesman.
The Doctor cherished a remarkable veneration for that able, but
eccentric personage, and was perhaps the only person to do so. Says
he, “Like the Château de Vernet, Brougham Hall, when the grave shall
have swept away prejudices and political animosities, will be visited
by thousands, eager to behold the _château_ of the English Voltaire;
he who, to the encyclopædic knowledge and pungent wit of the French
philosopher, joined the impassioned and fiery eloquence of Mirabeau.”
Thus the enthusiastic Granville.
[Sidenote: _LORD BROUGHAM_]
Eloquence? Brougham could tear a passion to tatters with any one, but
he ranted. It is true that the post-boys used to drive the chaises of
travellers in these regions somewhat out of the direct road, in order
to glimpse the residence of Lord Brougham; but those travellers viewed
the place, and Brougham himself, with curiosity, just as one might an
Icelandic geyser, to which, indeed, he is not inaptly to be compared.
His spoutings were as plentiful and as hot.
Not every one looked upon Brougham with awe, as the caricatures of his
grotesque physiognomy prove. Jemmy Anderson, a well-known post-boy in
this district, was not abashed by him; but then post-boys venerated no
one. It was in the days when the future Lord Chancellor was still Mr.
Henry Brougham, Q.C., that Jemmy Anderson drove him, post, from Shap
to Penrith, and “took him down” an unwonted peg. Jemmy jogged quietly
along at about seven miles an hour, mounted upon an almost broken-down
wheeler, until the fiery spirit within the post-chaise could stand it
no longer. Letting down the front window the future Lord Chancellor
vociferated: “Post-boy, I shan’t give you a farthing, for you have
driven me like a snail.” “Indeed,” replied the shrewd Cumbrian,
“thee wunna gie me a farden, wunna thee? Then ah’ve coomed far enow
for nowt!” With that he slowly dismounted and began to detach his
horses from the chaise, until an appealing voice from within led to a
compromise, by which the angry lawyer, who had been specially retained
to appear in a _cause célèbre_ at Penrith, capitulated, and upon paying
his money down—upon which the offended post-boy insisted—Jemmy Anderson
was persuaded to finish the stage.
The Brougham family, still owning the Hall, trace their descent from
Saxon times, and one of their ancestors, referred to as “Brum,”
fortified his residence here so long ago as 1284.
[Illustration: SEPULCHRAL SLAB OF UDARD DE BROHAM.]
An early ancestor was Udard De Broham, a crusader, who died in 1185.
“His soul is with the saints, we trust”; but his skull, ravished from
his grave in Brougham Church, grins from its glass case in the Hall,
and his trusty sword, that had been buried with him, is near by. It was
in 1846, when repairs were in progress at the church, that the skeleton
of Udard was discovered, beneath the inscribed slab pictured here, a
mere two feet deep. He had been laid here cross-legged and spurred on
one heel. With him had been buried a fragment of glass of Phœnician
manufacture, blue inside, but externally patterned in black and white
stripes not unlike the striped peppermint sweets still dear to rural
youth. This was considered a talisman, or luck-compelling object, in
the superstitious age in which Udard flourished, and was doubtless
brought by him from Palestine and buried with him as his most prized
possession.
Nine ancient De Brohams in all were discovered at this time, including
the remains of Gilbert, son of Udard, a man of gigantic size, who died
in 1230. A curious enamelled metal circlet, of beautiful workmanship,
and in perfect preservation, lay beside him; and his grave was duly
rifled of it.
[Illustration: BROUGHAM CASTLE.]
[Sidenote: _ANN CLIFFORD_]
But Brougham Castle is finer than the Hall, or than memories of De
Brohams. Brougham derives its name, down the long alleys of time, from
_Brovacum_, a Roman station in these outposts of the Roman dominion,
thickly studded with such. And a military post of the first importance
it continued to be until the time of Henry the Fourth. Normans built
the keep of the old castle, and the families of Vipont and De Clifford
added to it, and held the marchlands against the Scots, or warred for
or against their sovereigns, with more or less success, until their
line ended in a woman: the famous Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset,
Pembroke, and Montgomery, who was as good a man as any. She was born
in 1590, and enjoyed length of days and strength of mind during the
whole of them, dying at last in 1676. Marrying twice, and unhappily on
both occasions, she was twice widowed, and left with an only daughter.
Upon her second widowhood she retired to these scenes of her youth,
and busied herself in rebuilding her ancient and ruined castles of
Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon Tower, Pendragon, and Brough;
together with the restoration of numerous churches, and the erection of
monuments to various people, including herself. She was as ceaseless
and busy a builder as old Bess of Hardwick herself, and an imperious
and masterful old lady who even withstood Cromwell. He declared he
would ding down her castles as soon as she built them up, but she
merely replied that they would be rebuilt every time, and Cromwell was
obliged to give in. “Let her build an she will, for me” he said, and
build she accordingly did. She is described as having been a “perfect
mistress of forecast and aftercast,” who “knew well how to converse of
all things, from predestination to slea-silk;” and she certainly was
tenacious of her rights, or what she conceived to be her rights; being
as remarkable a litigant as she was a builder. By all accounts, she was
nothing less than an unmitigated terror, and the plain man, who reads
of her autocratic ways, is apt to think that the unhappiness of her
marriages was felt by her husbands a good deal more than by herself.
[Sidenote: _THE CASTLE-BUILDER_]
We know a great deal about this extraordinary woman, for among her
activities was the writing, at tremendous length, about herself and her
ancestors; and in those pages she dwells with an amusing complacency
upon the early beauties of her face, her form, and mind.
[Illustration: COUNTESS PILLAR.]
It was in 1652 that she so thoroughly repaired Brougham Castle, making
it afterwards her principal residence; but the day of castles was done,
and, as she really must have foreseen, her works were left, after her
death, to decay. Her only daughter had married the Earl of Thanet, who
in 1728 caused the most part of Brougham Castle to be demolished, and
the materials sold. And here it stands to-day, a roofless shell.
“Thys made Roger” are the words boldly carved over the gateway; telling
us that the first Lord Clifford was the great builder of the castle.
His grandson added largely to it; and a mighty place it must have
been. Cliffords of Brougham and a dozen other strongholds dared with
impunity what smaller men would have been ruined to attempt the tenth
part of; and the messengers of Kings, sent with formidable sealed
documents, have been set down to dine at Brougham Castle upon the wax
and parchment of the commands they brought, and have made a hearty, but
involuntary, meal upon those unappetising materials under the grim eyes
of my lord, without wine to wash them down or condiment to flavour them
withal.
[Illustration: YANWATH HALL.]
And now the scene is merely the subject for an artist; and a beautiful
subject, too. The old ruins stand in an ideal situation, in an
undulating grassy meadow, sloping towards the sparkling Eamont, framed
in with trees, and with distant mountains closing in the scene.
[Sidenote: _COUNTESS PILLAR_]
Such is the present condition of the old Countess Ann’s pride; but
something of her passion for commemoration remains, not so far away,
in the monument known in all this countryside as the Countess Pillar;
built by her in 1656. It is adorned with her arms and those of allied
families, and bears this inscription:
This Pillar was erected Anno 1656 by ye Rt. Hono^{ble} Anne Countess
Dowager of Pembrook, daughter and sole heire of ye Rt. Hono^{ble}
George, Earl of Cumberland, for a memorial of her last parting
in this place with her good and pious mother, ye Rt. Hono^{ble}
Margaret, Countes Dowager of Cumberland, ye 2^d of April, 1616,
in memory whereof she also left an annuity of four pounds, to be
distributed to ye poor within this parrish of Brougham euery 2^d day
of April for euer vpon ye stone table here hard by.
LAUS DEO.
The Eamont, the Eden, and the Lowther were well guarded, as the
fortified houses by the fords still prove. Yanwath Hall, an ancient
home of the Threlkelds, is a fine example of a peel-tower added to
and elaborated into a residence. It is one of the earliest and most
interesting, having been built midway in the fourteenth century. The
original tower, strong in its walls, six feet thick and embattled,
stands fifty-five feet high and looks down into a courtyard, the
barmkin, or inner bailey, where the ancient oaken, iron-banded, and
studded doors and windows guarded by thick stanchions show how
concerned the old owners were for their personal security in insecure
times.
[Illustration: ASKHAM HALL.]
[Sidenote: _ASKHAM HALL_]
Cliburn, Sockbridge, and Barton Kirke were all fortified houses,
disposed by these rivers like the castles upon a chess-board. Finest
of these old fortified mansions is the romantically situated and
picturesquely designed Askham Hall, now the rectory of Lowther, but
situated in Askham village. It stands high above the wooded Lowther,
foaming down among its rocks under Lowther Park, and was originally
the castellated seat of the Sandford family. The front is dour and
forbidding enough, and the interior, although oak panelled and
converted into a residence after the ideas that were modern two
hundred and fifty years ago, does not commend itself as a cheerful
residence. But the additions made at the side by Thomas Sandford
in 1574 are exquisitely sketchable. They comprise a gatehouse and
outbuildings enclosing a courtyard. The drip-moulding over the archway
is in a peculiar style, resembling a cable; its ends finished off in
the likeness of ammonites. Over the arch are the Sandford arms, with
those of Crackanthorpe and Lancaster of Howgill, and this inscription,
done in letters run oddly together:
Thomas · Sandford · Esqvyr,
Forthys · payd · meatahyr[1]
The · year · of · ovr · Savyore
XV · hvndreth · seventyfovr.
The Sandfords ended at last, after three hundred years, in 1680.
XXII
Returning to the road from these quests, the Lowther is crossed at
Lowther Bridge. Beside the river and immediately skirting the road, is
the earthwork known as “King Arthur’s Round Table,” an ancient raised
platform whose purpose can only be guessed at. Not King Arthur, but
the Norse settlers, are held to have been the originators of it, as
the stage whereon their rude displays of arms were held: in particular
a duel known as “holmegang,” a species of gladiatorial combat in
which the opponents were armed with knives, bound together, and then
compelled to fight to the death. Such are the fearful memories of this
now peaceful scene. On the opposite side of the road, within a belt of
trees, is an arena ascribed to the no less tragical rites of the Druids.
[Illustration: KING ARTHUR’S DRINKING CUP.]
King Arthur is further celebrated in a huge circular red sandstone
tank standing in the yard of the “Crown” inn, adjoining. It is known
locally as “King Arthur’s Drinking Cup,” and has a capacity of about
eighty gallons, sufficient to quench the thirst, not merely of King
Arthur, but of a megatherium. But quite apart from any wildly absurd
legends, the thing is astonishing in these days of zinc cisterns. Who
so painfully scooped this tank out of a solid block of stone, and when,
and how long the work occupied him, are alike unknown.
[Sidenote: _EAMONT BRIDGE_]
On the embankment enclosing the prehistoric camp there has been placed
in the last few years a monument, in the shape of an Iona cross, to the
patriotism of four natives of Eamont Bridge. But let the inscription on
the cross itself tell the tale: “At that crisis in the history of the
Empire, when volunteers were invited for active service in the South
African War, this village of Eamont Bridge sent four: John Hindson,
William Todd, and Arthur Warwick, of the 24th Coy. (Westmoreland and
Cumberland) Imperial Yeomanry, and William Hindson, of the Volunteer
Coy. of the Border Regt. Of these John Hindson and William Todd were
killed in action at Faber’s Put, 30th May, 1900. This monument was
erected by public subscription on this historic spot granted by Lord
Brougham and Vaux, 1901. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._”
The old bridge, built in 1425, spanning the Eamont River, has given its
name to the village that has in the course of years sprung up here.
It is a small, scattered place, but some of the houses are old, and
several bear inscriptions. “Omne solum forti patria est,” says one,
with initials “H. P.” and date “1671” appended. “H. P.” was evidently a
student of Ovidius Naso.
The road over Eamont Bridge is very steep and narrow and the ascent
beyond it steeper still; so that the stranger, observing the fury with
which the drivers of the excursion wagonettes and motor chars-a-banc
take the ascents and descents on their wild way to and from Penrith
and Ullswater, confidently expects an accident “while he waits.”
But whether it be skill, or luck, the accidents do not happen, and
expectant strangers, to have their expectations realised, would have to
wait on the spot until the moss grew on them.
According to the writers of guide-books, there may be found, carved
on the parapet of the bridge, the hospitable phrase, “Welcome into
Cumberland.” You, in fact, in crossing it leave Westmoreland for
Cumberland, and, having read so much of this kindly sentiment, you
seek diligently for the inscription. Alas! in vain. There is not, nor
was there ever, anything of the kind. Instead, what meets your eye is
an inn whose sign, “The Welcome into Cumberland,” is adorned with a
representation of pipes and punch-bowl, and with a weird picture of
a Personage—he must be a Personage, for he wears frock-coat and silk
hat—effusively greeting a Highlander arrayed in full Highland fig. Each
looks astonished at the other, and the pilgrim of the roads, gazing
fascinated, is astonished at both. This, then, is the “Welcome,” and
one by no means so disinterested as you were led to expect. Another
vanished illusion!
[Illustration: EAMONT BRIDGE.]
Even the inn bears its moral tag, for over the door you read
“Struimus in Diem, sed Nox venit,” with the date “MDCCXVII,” and the
names of Nathan and Elizabeth Gower. One “R. L. Wharton” appears to
have endorsed the sentiment (having duly inquired what the Latin meant)
and subscribed his name and the date 1781, in approval.
XXIII
[Sidenote: _PENRITH_]
Penrith derives its name, originally Pen-rhydd; “the red hill,” from
Beacon Hill, 937 feet high, under whose shelter this place of narrow
and huddled streets lies. The Beacon Hill was in the old days a
protection to the surrounding country, for from its crest flared those
warning flames that advised many a mile of threatened Westmoreland of
the approach of the invading Scots.
But although Penrith is sheltered by its great godfather hill, it was
never at any time effectually protected against the invader. Carlisle,
eighteen miles away to the north, was its great bulwark, and if that
fortified city fell, or were cleverly avoided, then the case of Penrith
was sorry indeed, as in the notable instance of 1345, when the Scots,
numbering 26,000 men, came pouring across the Border, and burnt the
town and many neighbouring villages; taking prisoners with them, on
their return, as many hale and hearty men as they could find, to be
sold as slaves to the highest bidders. Such was life on the Borders in
the fourteenth century, and, reading these things, we are inclined to
agree with Taylor the “Water-poet’s” conclusion:
Whoso then did in the Borders dwell
Lived little happier than those in Hell.
The next year, the remaining inhabitants of Penrith, graciously
permitted by the King to protect themselves, built a communal castle,
and each townsman, so far as was possible to him, rebuilt his own
dwelling-house in a strong and defensible way. Hence the grim,
thick-walled houses that even now line many of the narrow streets.
That the Castle was at least once rebuilt seems certain. One of these
rebuildings was that by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, before he
became that inimical character of history, Richard the Third, was
Governor of these marches, and resided here in every circumstance of
magnificence. Now the place is a ruin, a condition it owes to the
Penrith people themselves, who early in the time of Queen Elizabeth
considered they had a more pressing need for a prison than for a
fortress, and accordingly with thirty loads of stone, erected a very
secure, if not very comfortable, gaol. At the same period, Robert
Bartram, a merchant of the town, built himself a house from the same
materials; and there it stands to this day in the churchyard, inscribed
“R. B., 1563.”
There is thus nothing pictorial in the bare, roofless red walls of
the Castle. It has little, or no story, and stands in the unromantic
neighbourhood of the railway station, in a lofty situation on a hilltop
above the town.
[Sidenote: _THE “GLOUCESTER ARMS”_]
The Duke of Gloucester, although he rebuilt the Castle, is chiefly
associated with a much more sheltered situation, in the town itself.
There were intervals between the acts of even Richard the Third’s
melodrama, when, turning from battle, and from compassing the death of
his relatives, he sought repose and refreshment, and he found them here
in what must have been the exceedingly comfortable quarters of what
was once Dockwray Hall, an ancient building that stands in the square
called Great Dockwray, and is now, in memory of him, the “Gloucester
Arms” inn.
The old house does not wear so prepossessing an exterior as, under
these historic circumstances, it should. That is largely due to its
stucco facing, painted the colour of decaying liver. The only exterior
sign of the house being anything out of the ordinary is the carved
and emblazoned shield over the door, displaying the arms of Richard
himself, supported by two white boars with gilded manes. Another
doorway has a shield with three greyhounds, “in pale, courant,” as
a herald would say, and the inscription “I. W., 1580:” the initials
standing for “John Whelpdale,” who made extensive alterations to the
building.
The pilgrim who sups not merely on gross food and drink, but feeds the
finer tissues of his being on historic scenes and antique panelled
rooms, will find much delight in the “Gloucester Arms.” He may sleep
where that gory Richard slept—and, it may be hoped, with a better
conscience, and may look upon a banqueting-hall, now unfortunately
subdivided, wherein our ancestors feasted on swans and other curious
dishes long obsolete, washed down with nasty drinks unknown to the
present age.
Equally interesting is the old “Two Lions” inn near by. It looks out
up the street in a shy manner, being hidden upon a narrow entry, in
a fashion that to a southron seems a strangely retiring pose for an
ancient mansion of the landed classes; a complexion from which, in
fact, the house has, since ancient times, declined. Time was—in the
reign of the more or less good Queen Bess, to be precise—when what is
now the “Two Lions” was the “town house” of Gerard Lowther, a notable
member of the always rich and powerful Lowther family; and little
though the exterior may attract, there is a very wealth of interest
within. The fireplace of the hall has three heraldic shields, and the
banqueting-room, now the smoking-room, has an enriched plaster ceiling,
dated 1585 and displaying ten shields of the arms of Lowthers and
allied families. In an upstairs room is another ceiling heraldically
adorned with the arms of Lowther and Dudley, dated 1586, and with
the initials of Gerard Lowther himself and Lucy, his wife. More to
the purpose of the smaller tradesmen of Penrith, who are the chief
frequenters of the “Two Lions,” is the fine bowling-green—bowling
rhyming with “howling,” in the speech of the older folk—at the back of
the house.
[Sidenote: _PENRITH CHURCH_]
There is not much left of the ancient church of Penrith, beside its
Gothic tower, for the body of the building dates only from 1722, and
is in a classic style that seems rank heresy in a place so historic
as this. Not even the monolithic Ionic columns of red marble that
decorate the interior, nor the ornate gilded chandeliers presented
by the Duke of Portland, in recognition of the loyalty of Penrith in
1745, can compensate the stranger for the loss; although, to be sure,
the townsfolk are inordinately proud of them. But there are many
ancient monuments in the church, and some interesting fragments of
stained glass that have escaped destruction. Among them is represented
golden-haired Cicely Neville, youngest of all the two-and-twenty
children of Henry Neville, Earl of Westmoreland. This is that “Proud
Cis of Raby” who was wife of Richard, Duke of York, and mother of
Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third. Here, too, is seen a plaguey
ill-favoured stained-glass “likeness” of Richard the Second, with hair
of an unpleasant canary-yellow and a couple of chin-sprouts of the same
colour.
[Illustration: THE GIANT’S GRAVE.]
[Sidenote: _THE “GIANT’S GRAVE”_]
Still upon three sides of the church-tower you see sculptured the
“bear and ragged staff” device of the great Earl of Warwick, the
King-maker, who in his time was lord of Penrith, and rebuilt the upper
stage of the tower; but undoubtedly the chief interest—and mystery—of
the spot is the so-called “Giant’s Grave,” in the churchyard. No one
knows who rests here, but for choice it is the grave of a chief
among those Scandinavian settlers who established themselves in these
northern counties in the tenth century. Legend, of course, steps
in to explain that of which archæology is ignorant. The invincible
hardihood of legends is such as to command the astonished respect of
the calmest mind; and here we are bidden by old folk-lore to look upon
the grave of one Sir Hugh Cæsarius, a man of colossal proportions,
but as big-hearted, metaphorically, as he was high, who cleared the
surrounding Inglewood Forest of the wild boars that were a terror to
the people, at some period not specified. The tall grey sandstone
pillars that stand over his grave, at a distance apart of fifteen feet,
are supposed to mark his height, and are covered with Runic devices,
greatly defaced and pitifully weather-worn. Rude hunch-backed stones
between them are popularly supposed to represent the backs of boars.
These hoary relics had a narrow escape of being totally destroyed by
those who pulled down the old church; and the work of breaking them
into pieces had already begun when the indignant people of the town
stopped it. The clamps marking where the broken pillars were mended are
clearly to be seen. A stone, really the head of an ancient cross, near
by, is said to mark the place where the giant’s thumb is buried.
Penrith has suffered much in its time from wars and tumults, but it
was afflicted in a dreadful manner by a great plague which almost
depopulated the neighbourhood between September 1597 and January 1599,
as an inscription in the church relates. In Penrith itself 2,260 people
died, and in Kendal 2,500.
The chief streets of the town have been much modernised, but some old
landmarks reward the diligent. The “Prince Charles Restaurant,” a
baker’s shop, occupies the mansion where the Young Pretender lodged,
and some old Penrith merchants’ houses remain: notably one in Angel
Lane, on whose front the old local passion for remembrance, that
usually finds expression in dates, initials, and improving maxims,
develops into family history and epitaph, as thus:
This acquir^d by Rob^t Miers
Merc^t, who was inter^d the
19^{th} of May 1722 His Wy^s
Marg^t and Ann Sep^{br} ye 19
rebuilt in y^e y^r 1763 Sep^{br} ye
30 by W. M.
This is mysterious, beyond hope of solution.
On the building now an infants’ school is the inscription “WIL.
ROBINSON, CIVISLONDANNO 1670,” oddly spaced, and over the entrance
to an alley the initials “R. E. L. 1697,” with sculptured shears
above; probably a relic of the Langhorn family, cloth-merchants, whose
earliest memento in this sort is the inscription “T. E. L. 1584.”
[Illustration: OLD DOORWAY, PENRITH.]
XXIV
[Sidenote: _TO CARLISLE_]
The Boer War of 1899-1902 has left a wayside memorial at the approach
to Penrith, and another, in the shape of a beautiful bronze statue,
personifying Victory conferring honour upon the fallen, stands by
Middlegate, as you leave for the north. “Scotland Road,” confronting
you, indicates the not far distant Border, and then, at the “White Ox”
inn, the ways divide: on the right the Old Carlisle Road, on the left
the new. Very steep and rough goes the old road for one mile. Prince
Charlie marched it, and has my heartfelt sympathy. After passing the
“Inglewood” inn, which seems forlornly to wonder what has become of the
traffic, it rejoins the existing highway—which runs along the traces of
an ancient Roman road—at Stony Beck. To the left hand, near Plumpton
station, are some traces of the Roman station of _Voreda_, known as
Castlesteads, or Old Penrith. It has yielded many relics. Of the
ancient Inglewood Forest, and the alarming wild boars that frequented
it, there are no signs, and the road—as excellent a road as one would
wish to find—goes with little incident away into Carlisle itself,
the Petterill Brook on the left hand. The “Pack Horse” inn stands at
the cross-road to Lazonby, where Salkeld toll-gate once stood, and
then, two miles from High Hesket, on the left hand, rises the hill
known suggestively as Thiefside: the thieves in question, no doubt,
the old horse-thieves, cattle-raiders, and moss-trooping vagabonds of
the Border. High Hesket is a tiny wayside village of the rough stone
houses, generally whitewashed, that henceforward are the feature of
the road, through Cumberland and into Dumfriesshire. The church of
High Hesket, quite a humble little building, with bellcote in lieu
of tower, stands, shamefaced in a coating of compo, by the way, near
another dilapidated old “White Ox” inn, once busy with the traffic of
a bygone day. The motor-cars disregard it, or merely halt for that last
indignity to an inn, a pail of water wherewith to cool their engines.
Dropping downhill to Low Hesket, the road comes quickly to Carleton and
then, by the frowzy street of Botchergate, into the midst of Carlisle.
[Illustration: THIEFSIDE]
[Sidenote: _CARLISLE_]
Carlisle was the first and stoutest bulwark gainst the northern foe,
and maintained that character for close upon sixteen hundred years,
from the remote time of the Roman dominion until the union of the
kingdoms under James the First. The place, standing as it does upon a
rocky bluff, overlooking the levels of the Solway and the Eden, was,
it would almost seem, intended by Nature for this office, and here
accordingly the Roman wall of Hadrian was traced, running from sea
to sea, from Wallsend near Newcastle, to Carlisle, and ending on the
Solway Firth at Bowness. Here they found an early Celtic settlement,
“Caer Lywelydd”; but it was not the site of Carlisle, but rather
Stanwix, its northern suburb, on the opposite bank of the Eden, that
formed the Roman military station of _Luguvallum_, _i.e._ the “station
on the wall.” What is now Carlisle was the civil settlement. When
the Romans withdrew, to defend their decaying Empire nearer home,
_Luguvallum_, peopled with half-breed Romano-British, who could not
retire with them, made for years a hopeless fight with the savages
out of Scotland on the one hand, and with the Saxons on the other.
The Saxons, as almost everywhere else, prevailed in the end, and the
town became in their tongue, “Caer Luel”; whence the transition to
“Carlisle” is one of the easiest.
Carlisle, the great mediæval fortress-town, owes its origin to Rufus.
The mighty Conqueror, who subdued most other portions of this land,
rested short of Westmoreland and Cumberland, which had then for one
hundred and twenty years been accounted Scottish soil; but it was under
his generally despised son that these broad lands were won back for
England; and the Scottish King Malcolm, invading England on the east
coast, in revenge, was slain in 1093, at Alnwick. Peace, however, was
not to reign upon these contested lands for yet many a century; but
what could be done was accomplished, and Carlisle Castle arose, a grim
Norman keep, upon the highest apex of the town. It was in after years
enlarged and strengthened, and the strong walls of the city connected
with it; and to-day, although the factory-buildings and the smoky
chimneys in a distant view of Carlisle show, readily enough, that the
city is now a place of commerce, the Norman castle-keep still darkly
crowns the scene, sharing its pre-eminence only with the Cathedral.
But in spite of its castle and the stout town walls, Carlisle has been,
many more times than can readily be counted, the scene of warfare, and
was often sacked and burnt. It was thus ever a place of arms. In all
the country round about, men went armed to the plough, and the great
lords held their lands from the King under the strictest obligations to
military service, and were captained by the Lord Warden, whose duties
included the firing of beacons and the mustering of all men between the
ages of sixteen and sixty. Small tenants held their fields and farms
under the name of “nag-tenements” and “foot-tenements,” and were bound,
according to their degree, to fight mounted or on foot.
When the enemy crossed the Border, there was a stir in the city of
Carlisle, like that which accompanies the overturning of an ant-heap.
The muckle town-bell was rung, the citizens assembled under arms, and
the women manned the walls (if the expression may be allowed) with
kettles, boiling-water, and apronfuls of stones.
There was no worse time in this long history than the reign of Henry
the Eighth. War with Scotland had brought to that country the crushing
defeat of Flodden, where, in the words of the Scottish lament, “The
flowers of the forest were a’ weed awa”; but the result was anarchy in
the Borders, where thousands of lawless men lived, whom no man could
restrain. The Warden’s office was then no light task, and a Scot on
the English side, or an Englishman on the Scottish, went in momentary
danger of his life. Every man was required to explain his presence, and
in the streets of Carlisle none might speak, without leave, to a Scot,
and none of that nationality was permitted to live in the city.
[Sidenote: _RAIDERS_]
Carlisle Castle remained at this period, and for long after, a strong
place, but nothing is more astonishing than the ease with which raiders
often surprised even the stoutest castles. Let us take, for instance,
the affair of the “bold Buccleuch” and Kinmont Willie, in the times
of Queen Elizabeth. The borders had long been free from war on the
larger scale, but the moss-trooping, reiving forays survived in much of
their early severity, in spite of the amicable appointment of English
and Scottish Lords Wardens, who were supposed to restrain the lawless
folk on either side of the debateable lands between the marches. The
Wardens’ Courts were strictly conducted in the districts of the Solway,
and those assembled at them were guaranteed from violence on either
side. But in 1596, when the Court assembled at Kershopeburn to settle
grievances in connection with the great raids of the Armstrongs, who
had come across from Scotland to the number of three thousand and
lifted all the stock for miles around, the feelings of the English were
raw. A notable man among these cattle-thieves was this same “Kinmont
Willie,” and the English sorely longed to take vengeance upon him. At
the Court, he was protected by the rules of that assemblage, but in
riding away he was reckless enough to go off alone, and what might have
been expected happened. He was captured and consigned to a dungeon in
Carlisle Castle.
All the Scottish side of the Border was immediately in an uproar at
this violation of agreements, and Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Keeper
of Liddesdale, was moved to apply for the raider’s release. Buccleuch
was a law-abiding person, and would probably have been glad enough to
see Kinmont Willie properly hanged on his own side, but this breach of
the understanding between the Wardens was an outrage not to be endured.
[Sidenote: _SIEGE OF CARLISLE_]
Lord Scrope, the English Warden, informed him the affair was so
important that it must be referred to the Queen; and she in turn
ignored it altogether. Buccleuch therefore determined, at whatever
cost, to rescue the prisoner, who would otherwise soon have been
hanged, and he put himself at the head of two hundred and ten desperate
spirits who at night crossed the Esk and silently drew near to
Carlisle, two hours before peep o’ day. They had brought with them,
on horseback, scaling ladders for the castle walls, and pickaxes, and
made a breach by the postern-gate. What were those sentinels doing, who
were not alarmed? Sleeping, doubtless. At any rate, the garrison knew
nothing until Buccleuch’s men had forced an entrance. The dungeon where
the prisoner was immured was known, and he was brought forth, chains
and all, and hurried away. The whole party were speedily off again, and
into their own country, before pursuit was properly organised.
The last raid took place actually in 1601, when the kingdoms were
united by the accession of James the First, and while he was at
Berwick, journeying to London. Several hundreds of Scots then came
plundering past Carlisle, and many were captured and duly hanged.
James, anxious to unite the kingdoms in reality, ordered that the name
of “the Border,” standing for centuries of warfare, should give place
to “the midlands,” but the new style does not seem ever to have come
into general use; and the coming of the Stuarts meant in after years
much more trouble for Carlisle and its surroundings; for it was in
1644-5 that the city endured the longest and most severe siege in its
history. It was held for the King, and beleaguered for eight months
by the Scottish General, Leslie. The citizens paid dearly for their
loyalty, and were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and rats. Hungry
folks chased errant cats hazardously across roof-tops, in view of the
besiegers, who took long shots at them; and even hemp-seed became so
dear that only the wealthy could afford it. Money current in the city
was coined from silver plate; but there was so little food to purchase
that, as a diarist of the time wrote, “the citizens were so shrunk
from starvation, they could not choose but laugh at one another, to see
their clothes hang upon them as upon men on gibbets.”
It was upon the surrender ending this memorable siege that Carlisle
Cathedral suffered so greatly. The visitor who first sets eyes upon the
venerable pile finds himself bewildered by its unusual proportions,
and has some difficulty in distinguishing which end is east and which
west. He has been used, everywhere else, to see the nave of a cathedral
much longer than its choir, and to see the building stretching away
westward from the central tower five and six times the length of the
eastern, or choir, limb. Here, however, when he has definitely settled
his bearings, he perceives the choir to be more than thrice the length
of the nave.
This present odd aspect of the Cathedral, looking as though it had been
twisted bodily round, is entirely owing to the fury with which the
soldiery fell upon it, after the siege. Where there were once eight
bays to the Early Norman nave, there are now but two: the rest all went
as so much rough stone wherewith to repair the walls of the city and
to erect guard-houses: a curious reversal of its early use, for it was
from the ancient Roman wall that these stones came in Norman times.
[Illustration: EAST END, CARLISLE CATHEDRAL.]
[Sidenote: _THE STEEL THAT MAKES AFRAID_]
But Carlisle was not done with trouble, even in the sacrilege of 1645.
It escaped in 1715, for the rebels avoided coming to clashes with a
fortified city; but it came to know intimately of the much more nearly
successful rebellion of 1745. But what use are battlemented walls of
stone, if they be manned with faint hearts? After all the brave doings
of “merry Carlisle,” it is sad to think how low the martial spirit
had sunk by 1745, when the militia, assembled in the city, declined
to fight the rebels under Prince Charlie. A bold front would have
compelled the invaders to leave Carlisle alone; but the broadswords
of the Highlanders had so much of what military historians term
“moral effect” that the militiamen positively refused to run the risk
of being cleaved by that terrible cold steel. Poor Colonel Durand,
in command—if we may still call that a command which will not obey
orders—might rave, and implore, and even weep, but it was useless, and
the city was surrendered. Prince Charlie was in camp at Brampton, eight
miles away, and it must have been a proud moment for him—if a sorry
humiliation for some—when mayor and corporation went out to him and
on their knees offered the keys of the gates. The next day the Prince
entered in triumph, on a milk-white horse, one hundred pipers piping
before him. It must have been a fearful moment—for those who did not
love the bagpipes.
George the Second, at St. James’s, began to reconsider his position
at hearing of this signal failure of his sworn protectors, and many
excellent, though time-serving, people in high places began to explain
away the disagreeable things they had said of the Stuarts. But in a
few weeks, as we know, the Highlanders were retreating; and, trimming
their sails anew, politicians and witlings were repeating again their
protestations of loyalty to the House of Hanover, and refurbishing that
old quotation from Revelation, chapter xvii. verse 11, first current
in 1715, by which they affected to believe that James the Second of
England and Seventh of Scotland, and his son, the Pretender (_de jure_
James the Third and Eighth) were the subjects of prophecy: “And the
beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven,
and goeth into perdition.”
An ingenious find, it must be allowed, and sufficient, providing no
one else could refer to Revelation and find another quotation, a little
destructive of the first. But such an one was actually to hand in
the preceding verse, which very curiously says, “And there are seven
kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come;
and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.” There were those
excellent Whigs who, reading this, were not entirely happy until events
demonstrated that the rebellion was absolutely hopeless.
The Duke of Cumberland with ease retook the city, and captured with
it Prince Charlie’s devoted rear-guard: the brave Colonel Townely and
his 120 men of the Manchester Regiment, together with over two hundred
Highlanders, and some few Frenchmen. They were lodged in the Cathedral,
and thence taken in a long melancholy procession to London, there,
according to their degree, to be beheaded as gentlemen, or hanged like
common malefactors. They rode, tied hand and foot, or walked, roped
together, the whole bitter way.
[Sidenote: _THE CASTLE DUNGEONS_]
The Duke was not greatly impressed with the military value of the
castle. He called it “an old hen-coop,” but it held securely enough
the other miserable prisoners who were sent into Carlisle after
Culloden. Four hundred of them awaited their doom in the grim dungeons,
throughout the hot weather of 1746, and in October the executions
began. Ninety-six fell to the hangman, and others were transported
beyond seas. In batches of half-a-dozen or a dozen at a time, they
were called forth from their captivity and drawn on hurdles to that
Hanoverian Golgotha, Gallows Hill, south of the city, where they were
hanged and afterwards quartered, in the bloody-minded old way; their
heads afterwards set upon poles over the Scotch Gate.
You may see relics of that savage time, even now, in the cell fashioned
in the thick eastern wall of the keep: the prison occupied by Macdonald
of Keppoch. He whiled away the tedium of imprisonment by decorating the
walls with designs, executed with a nail, and there they still remain.
At this day Carlisle Castle is a somewhat shabby military depôt. The
outer bailey is a parade-ground skirted with barracks, and the inner
ward and keep are War Office storehouses. But it is in the unexpected
modern surroundings of the public library that the most tragical
memento of that time brings the hazards of rebellion with greatest
vividness before you. This is a plaster cast of a monument erected to
Dr. Archibald Campbell in the Savoy Chapel, London. The Chapel was
largely destroyed by fire in 1864, and with it the marble monument.
The unfortunate doctor was a non-combatant who acted as surgeon to the
rebels at Culloden, and escaped abroad from that disastrous field. He
returned, after seven years, to his Scottish home, thinking he might
then safely do so; but was informed against and executed.
XXV
[Sidenote: _CARLISLE COACHING_]
The greatest figure in the coaching world up north was Teather, who was
principal contractor for mails and stage-coaches in all that lengthy
territory of 166 miles between Lancaster and Glasgow. The careers
of the Teathers reflect the fortunes of the road. John Teather, the
father, was originally landlord of the “Royal Oak,” Keswick, which does
not stand on the main route to the north; but he left the comparative
obscurity of that Lakeland town for the bustling activities of
Carlisle, and from that strategic coaching position worked the coaches
sixty-five miles south to Lancaster, and 101 miles north, to Glasgow.
Eight mails entered and left Carlisle daily, and seven stage-coaches;
and eighty horses were kept for the proper working of them. Teather and
his son managed this important business: the younger succeeding to it
in 1837 and, in the general wreck brought about by railway extension,
living to end where his father had begun, as landlord of the “Royal
Oak” at Keswick.
With the coming of the nineteenth century, some steps were taken to
make Carlisle a port. It was thought that a ship-canal from a place
called Fisher’s Cross on the Solway, to Carlisle, a distance of twelve
miles, would make the ancient city a place of commercial importance;
and accordingly the canal was cut, 1819-23, at a cost of £90,000, and
Fisher’s Cross was dignified by the new name of “Port Carlisle.” The
enterprise never paid its way, any steps that might in after years
have been taken to improve the position being rendered impossible by
the coming of railways; while the irony of fate long ago overtook the
canal, in its conversion into a railway.
It was in December 1846 that the first railway ran into Carlisle from
the south. This was the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, long since
absorbed into the London and North-Western. In September 1847 the
Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to Moffat, carried on the new methods
another stage, and in the following February it was further extended to
Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was necessarily the death-blow of the coaches
along the main route. My old friend, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of Walsall,
who remembers that time, travelled from Carlisle to Glasgow by the
last mail-coach. He went to the “Bush” hotel and booked a seat for the
occasion.
The bookkeeper remarked, when he gave his name, “I think I have often
booked you before, sir, have I not?”
“Yes,” the traveller replied.
“Then, sir,” rejoined the clerk, refusing the money, “Mr.——”—mentioning
the name of the hotel-keeper—“will feel it a pleasure if you will
accept a seat, and order anything you please, at his expense.”
My friend declared that was the most gentlemanly-dying mail he ever
knew.
The “Bush” has since been rebuilt, but at Corby Castle, some two miles
away, in what was once the “Haunted Room,” there hangs in a frame an
interesting pane of glass from one of its windows, inscribed by no less
notable a traveller than Hume, the historian, with the satirical verse,
reflecting upon the “Bush,” the Cathedral, and Carlisle in general:
Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl;
Here godless boys God’s glories squall;
Here heads of Scotchmen guard the wall,
But Corby’s walks atone for all.
Sir Walter Scott saw this in 1825, and humorously remarked in a letter
to his friend Morritt upon “Hume’s poetical works.”
[Sidenote: _A RAILWAY CENTRE_]
The reason that made Carlisle in early days the key of military
dispositions, and in later times so important a coaching centre, acted
even more powerfully in making it the busy centre of many railway
systems that it is to-day. Carlisle has ever stood squarely in the
way of those who would pass on the west between England and Scotland.
To-day, the rival railways all run into one joint station: and there
the London and North-Western, the Midland, and their respective allies,
the Caledonian, the North British, and the Glasgow and South-Western,
after many a Parliamentary battle in the past, compose their
differences.
The chief coaching-business was ruined thus early, but the branch
coaches yet remained, and the last coach—that to Edinburgh by
Hawick—did not leave Carlisle on its final journey until August 31st,
1862. Coaching history, however, is as little illustrated in Carlisle
by visible remains as the ancient story of the place, for while the
“Bush” has been rebuilt, the rival inn, the “Crown and Mitre,” in
Castle Street, has declined to the state of a coffee-tavern, and the
“Blue Bell,” in Scotch Street, has obviously seen its best days.
If you seek frowning gateways, embattled walls, and the like,
sufficient to clothe the stirring story of Carlisle, you will be
freezing in the cold shade of disappointment, for the streets of
Carlisle are wide, many of the houses are modern, and railways are very
much to the fore. The Cathedral is obscurely placed, and almost the
only picturesque nook is the alley called St. Alban’s Row. Even the
old upping-blocks that used to stand so plentifully by the kerbstones
for the convenience of horsemen, and were a feature of Carlisle, have
disappeared. Only the odd names of the streets and alleys occasionally
remain: among them Rickergate, Whippery, and Durham Ox Lane.
[Illustration: ST. ALBAN’S ROW.]
[Sidenote: _“MERRY” CARLISLE_]
Carlisle of to-day has a commercial reputation. It makes hats and
whips, and textile fabrics, to say nothing of dye-works, where the
citizens of Carlisle are prepared (at a price) to dye for their
country. The manufacture of gingham, too, the secret of it stolen long
ago from Guingamp, its native place, in Brittany, occupies a good
deal of attention, and the production of biscuits and cardboard-boxes
makes up the tale of the city’s activities. But Carlisle, for all
these developments, looks a poor place, and by no means a merry. All
the fun ceased when raiding and murdering went out of date, and the
only merry-making nowadays to be seen and heard is not indigenous. It
is to be found at the great Carlisle Joint Station, at unseasonable
hours, and is provided, free, gratis, all for nothing, by travelling
theatrical companies bound for Scotland. For two generations past,
the low comedians of the companies have whiled away the weary waiting
sometimes to be done on Carlisle platforms, and astonished the tired
porters by dancing Scotch reels and sword-dances, accompanied by
fiendish yelps, or have expressed a desire to have a “willie waucht,”
to “dee for Annie Laurie,” to be “fou the noo,” or anything else
supposedly Scottish. It is one of the most cherished conventions of
the theatrical profession on tour.
This great joint railway station—the Citadel Station, as it is
called—is neighboured by two enormous mediæval-looking drum towers of
red sandstone, restorations of two of the same character built in the
sixteenth century. They look none the less gloomy because they serve
merely the purpose of Assize Courts, instead of fortifications. You
must needs pass between them on entering Carlisle from the London road,
and they are among the first things to dispel any idea the stranger may
have brought with him that Carlisle is really “merry.”
There is that about the modern appearance of Carlisle which
irresistibly reminds one of a ragged urchin clothed in some full-grown
man’s trousers. Many things are too large for its circumstances. Two
prominent things among the many that suggest this comparison are the
unnecessary electric tramways and the noble Eden Bridge, carrying the
road across the river to Stanwix. The bridge, built a hundred years
ago, is monumental, and even the lamp-standards, designed for it at the
same time, are fine. But the over-head trolley-wires are an offence
to the spirit of the thing, and the city of Carlisle cares so little
for it that ugly electric light standards are placed at intervals, and
the fine old iron lamps that might so easily and handsomely have been
adapted, now serve no useful purpose.
XXVI
[Sidenote: _THE WALL_]
Crossing to Stanwix, we are at last on the Border, for here ran the
Roman wall, on its way from Wallsend, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, to
Bowness, dividing the civilisation of that time from the unknown
savagery further north. Built about A.D. 121, at the instance of the
Emperor Hadrian, it kept the painted, skin-clad “Picts” in their own
wild country for over three hundred years, and employed a considerable
garrison to patrol it and exercise a continual vigilance along those
bitter, wind-swept miles. Many a gallant centurion, condemned to
mounting guard in these ancient marches, has doubtless in the long ago
leant over the ramparts of the Wall, and gazing into the shaggy forest
and brushwood beyond, called down curses upon the “forward policy” in
Rome, that pushed the limits of Empire into the frozen north, before
the southernmost provinces were fully settled. Here was no society, and
no glory in fighting with savages to be compared with that to be gained
in campaigns against the armies of Carthage or of Greece.
Here, at this wall-fortress of _Convagata_, there was, at any rate,
the neighbourhood of _Luguvallum_, apparently well-settled, but the
solitary life of these wardens of old Rome in the lonely mile-castles
of the wall must have been so exceedingly dull that the dangers of an
occasional Pict raid would be welcomed.
Even in times so comparatively modern as the beginning of the
seventeenth century the Border was little known. Camden spoke of the
northern reaches of this road, before he visited Cumberland in 1607, as
a part of the country “lying beyond the mountains toward the Western
Ocean,” and was greatly exercised with the hazards of even nearing
these remote fastnesses. He approached the Lancashire people with “a
kind of dread”; but, trusting to the protection of God, determined at
last to “run the hazard of the attempt.” He did indeed come to the
Border, but found, in exploring the Roman Wall dividing England and
Scotland, that the Wall was not only a division between two countries,
but marked the confines of civilisation. He accordingly returned,
shivering with apprehension, leaving his projected work incomplete.
[Illustration: CARLISLE.]
Stanwix, site of _Convagata_, obtains its name from the “stone way”
the Saxons found here. Truth to tell, modern Stanwix is a sorry spot
on which to meditate upon the departed colonial fortunes of Imperial
Rome, for the Wall is gone and Stanwix church and churchyard stand upon
the site of the fort. A precious ugly church, too, it is that has been
built here: Early English only by intention; with a dismally crowded
churchyard around it. A pathetic story is told by one of the epitaphs:
“Here lie the mortal bodies of five little sisters, the much-loved
children of A. C. Tait, Dean of Carlisle, and of Catherine, his wife,
who were all cut off within five weeks.” They died during an epidemic
of scarlet-fever, in 1856. A memorial window to them is in the north
transept of the Cathedral. “A. C. Tait” was, of course, Archibald
Campbell Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.
But if Stanwix be so ugly and commonplace, the scenery in which it is
placed is extremely beautiful. The greater, then, the crime of those
who have made it what it is. There is a lovely steep grassy descent,
plenteously wooded with noble trees, that falls away from the ridge of
Stanwix down to the Eden, and thus skirts the river for a mile or more.
“Rickerby Holmes” is the name of this beautiful feature. From this
point you gain the finest view of Carlisle.
[Sidenote: _THE BORDER_]
It is a flat, featureless country that stretches north from Stanwix
across the nine miles to the Border-line. Miserable villages that are
merely collections of gaunt cottages little better than hovels, often
built of “dubbin,” _i.e._ clay and straw, occur at intervals. Nearly
all of comparatively modern date, they point unmistakably to the fact
that it is not so very long since to live in the Debatable Land was
hazardous, and not to be thought of by the law-abiding. Very well
indeed for moss-trooping vagabonds and cow-stealers, but not for the
responsible, or those who wished for a quiet life.
Passing Goslin Syke, where a marshy stream crosses the road, we come to
Kingstown, where the road branches right and left. On this, the last
stage to the Border, this parting of the ways meant much to eloping
couples, bound for Scotland and marriage immediately on reaching
Scottish soil.
The geography of Gretna and the Border is, so far as roads are
concerned, somewhat involved, and requires careful explanation. Up to
1830, when the wide-spreading sands of the Esk were bridged, the way
for coaches and all road-traffic lay circuitously through Longtown
to the right of where the fork of the roads now occurs; but in that
year the New Road, or the “English Road,” as it was commonly called,
was opened, causing much interference with what the inhabitants of
Springfield had almost come to regard as their “vested rights.” For, as
the accompanying plan will show, Springfield lay directly on the route
into Scotland; and Gretna Green merely to one side of it. But here
again it behoves the historian to be careful and not rashly to assume
that the early marriages were made at Springfield, and should therefore
have been named after it. As a curious matter of fact, this village
did not come into existence until 1791, when it was built by the then
landowner, Sir William Maxwell, who named it from a farm standing
there. It was then, and for long after, the home of people professing
to be weavers, but really, almost without exception, a set of drunken
Border blackguards who, when not helplessly intoxicated, were smugglers
and poachers and wastrels generally, and, living in the marches of the
two countries, respected the laws of neither.
Springfield, immediately after its rise, took away most of the
marrying business of Gretna, being nearer the magical dividing-line.
[Illustration: MAP OF OLD AND NEW ROADS FROM CARLISLE TO GRETNA GREEN.]
[Sidenote: _THE LONGTOWN ROAD_]
Blackford, on the Longtown road, is of the one unvarying pattern here,
and is followed by the hamlet of West Linton, by the river Lyne,
where a cottage or so, a farm, and the whitewashed “Graham’s Arms,”
with its motto, “N’Oublie,” stand stodged in the mud. Fir-trees and a
laurel-bordered road then lead to the by-way where Arthuret church,
standing solitary, serves for churchless Longtown, half a mile distant.
In Arthuret churchyard there is shown a broken cross, said to mark the
grave of Archie Armstrong, the famous Court fool of James the First
and Charles the First. James brought him south, from the Border, where
he had early distinguished himself as a sheepstealer in Eskdale; and
his impudence and invincible effrontery brought him a long period of
success at Court. But at last he overreached himself, in his enmity
to Archbishop Laud. On one occasion, saying grace at Whitehall, he
exclaimed, “Great praise to God and little laud to the Devil,” and all
the Court sniggered; but when, in 1637, he met Laud at a time when
the Scots were rising against the Archbishop’s attempts at dictation
in religious matters, and asked, “Wha’s fool the noo?” the jester’s
licence had grown beyond endurance, and he was dismissed. He lived
many years longer, and earned the reputation of an extremely usurious
lender of money, to whom no sharp practices came amiss. The cross
shown as marking his resting-place is really a portion of an ancient
Scandinavian monument.
[Sidenote: _SIR JAMES GRAHAM_]
Another character, very notorious in his day, lies in the churchyard:
Sir James Graham of Netherby, who was Home Secretary in 1844, when the
correspondence of Mazzini and other political refugees was opened at
the General Post Office by his direction, and read. Graham received
his orders from the Earl of Aberdeen, Minister for Foreign Affairs,
but it was Graham himself upon whom the whole of the public obloquy
fell, and he remarked, in the true spirit of prophecy, that all else he
had done would be forgotten, and he would be remembered only by this
wretched incident. It surely is a pitiful thing and a real tragedy of
the public service that an honourable gentleman who in private life
would have scorned to do anything mean should go down in history as the
man who violated the sanctity of private correspondence.
[Illustration: ARTHURET CHURCH.]
There are no architectural graces in Longtown. Each house is like its
fellow and every street resembles every other street. How then do the
strayed revellers, returning home “fou,” find the way to their especial
domiciles? An attempt to subdue the stark angularity of Longtown,
though not to give its streets variety, is seen in the somewhat recent
planting of the roads with trees.
Many people suppose the river Esk at Longtown to be the division
between England and Scotland. The supposition is reasonable enough,
for the actual divisor, the Sark, four miles further on, approaching
Springfield, is a very insignificant stream in appearance. The
political and the social significances of it were, however, of very
serious import indeed.
Solway Moss is passed on the way. Turner has made it the subject of one
of the finest plates in his _Liber Studiorum_, and has imported into
the view some mountains that are not there, together with some weather
which, fortunately for the present writer, was equally absent when he
passed this way.
[Illustration: SOLWAY MOSS
[_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._
]
[Sidenote: _BATTLE OF SOLWAY MOSS_]
Solway Moss is marked on the maps with the conventional crossed swords
that indicate a battle. It was not an epoch-making battle that was
fought here, November 24th, 1542, but it was one of the most complete
of English victories, and the story of it is compact of a peculiar
terror. The Scots had crossed the Border in force, and were proceeding
on their usual lines of fire and pillage, to the assault of Carlisle,
when they were met at Arthuret by an army under Sir Thomas Wharton, the
stout Warden of the West Marches. The English onset disorganised the
invaders, who fled in the gathering darkness. Ten thousand fugitives
lost their way, and found themselves with the flowing tide upon the
fatal Solway Sands. Some flung away their arms and struggled through,
thousands were drowned, and many surrendered to women. Meanwhile, the
main body, pursued by the English, wandered in the other direction
across the Esk and plunged into the bog of Solway Moss, and were
swallowed up, slain, or taken prisoners. “Never,” says Froude, “in
all the wars between England and Scotland, had there been a defeat
more complete, more sudden, or more disgraceful.” James the Fifth of
Scotland died on December 14th, heartbroken at the disaster. It was a
complete English revenge for the defeat they had suffered at the Sark,
hard by, in 1449, nearly a hundred years before.
[Illustration: THE ROAD PAST SOLWAY MOSS.]
Turner therefore does right in so romantically treating the subject,
and I am merely a pictorial reporter, setting down only what I see.
But at any rate, while Turner might dissuade the pilgrim, with his
storm overhead and his fathomless bog beneath, whence apparently some
wretches are just escaping with their lives, you see by the modern
sketch that there is at least a hard high road running by.
Having come now to the Sark, and across it into the long street of
Springfield, and by the same token into Scotland, it is necessary to
tell at length the story of “Gretna Green” marriages. It could scarce
be told in more forbidding surroundings, for Springfield is one long
street of gaunt, unrelieved commonplace, and neither the once notorious
“Queen’s Head” inn on the right, nor the “Maxwell Arms” on the left,
helps to relieve it in the least degree. But the devil’s in it if
love can’t throw a rosy tinge over even such a scene, and doubtless
Springfield looked entrancing to some.
XXVII
The popularity of Gretna Green elopements dated from the passing of
Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754, by which it was
declared that “Any person solemnising matrimony in any other place than
a church or public chapel, without banns, or other license, shall,
on conviction, be adjudged guilty of felony, and be transported for
fourteen years, and all such marriages shall be void.”
[Sidenote: _FLEET MARRIAGES_]
This measure was expressly designed to put an end to the long-continued
and growing scandals of the so-called “Fleet marriages,” which had
first attracted attention in 1674. The Fleet marriages, performed by
the chaplains of the Fleet Prison, in London, led to many abuses. Made
on the spur of the moment, between the prisoners there, incarcerated
for debt or other misdemeanours, and the visitors permitted free access
under the lax discipline of that time, the most fearful alliances
were perpetrated by wholesale. Drunken prisoners, dissolute women,
and parsons who richly deserved being unfrocked were the actors in
these scenes, almost exactly matched by the similar clandestine
marriages performed on application, at all hours of day or night, by
the chaplains of the Savoy, and by the clerical owners of proprietary
chapels in Mayfair.
These marriage-merchants earned amazing incomes, the still-existing
records of a Fleet parson’s fees in 1748 showing that in the month
of October alone he received no less than £69 12_s._ 9_d._ for his
services. At the Fleet, on March 25th, 1754, the day before Lord
Hardwicke’s Act became law, there was a grand winding-up of the
business, when 217 marriages were celebrated.
The penalty provided by the Act was not, under the existing
circumstances, too severe; for, in view of the evils wrought by those
practices, it was necessary to provide the greatest discouragement
possible to this traffic. Much more then than now, a marriage, once
performed, was irrevocable. Divorce courts, for redress of matrimonial
injuries, were unknown, and the drunken and the reckless who had taken
part so lightly in a Fleet marriage were held to their bargain for life.
But the Act, beneficent though it was, did not pass without great
opposition, and even when it became law, its operation was confined
to England; with the result that the only difficulty in the way of a
clandestine marriage that should be sufficiently legal was that of
making a journey out of England; whether across the English Channel to
Calais, or into the Isle of Man, or across the Border into Scotland,
was immaterial. The Isle of Man was for a brief period a favourite
place, but the House of Keys, the legislature of that isle, in 1757
passed an Act forbidding marriages other than by banns or special
license, with a penalty identical with that provided by the English Act
for clergymen who should infringe it; while any layman performing any
such ceremony was very roughly dealt with: the penalties in his case
being—
1. To be pilloried.
2. To lose his ears.
3. To be imprisoned until the Governor saw fit to release him, on
payment of a fine not exceeding £50.
After the passing of this Act we hear little or nothing of clandestine
marriages being celebrated in the Isle of Man.
The Channel Islands, and particularly Guernsey, were then occasionally
favoured, but the difficulties of access prevented them ever becoming
popular with the love-lorn, who very generally, while prepared to
suffer many things, drew the line at sea-sickness.
[Illustration: FILIAL AFFECTION.
[_After Rowlandson._
]
[Sidenote: _BORDER ELOPEMENTS_]
The Border, in fact, was destined to be, above all others, _the_
place to which eloping couples sped. “When Britain first at Heaven’s
command, arose from out the azure main,” she was sealed to a high
destiny; and when the Border was set between the kingdoms of England
and Scotland, it seems, at different times and periods, to have been
provided for the express purpose of affording a refuge and a living
for moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, and the generally lawless people of
the frontiers. It was thus quite in keeping with old Border history
that, when brute force went out and legal enormities took its place, it
should be the refuge of eloping lovers, of whom a very large proportion
were fortune-hunting scamps running away with silly, sentimental
schoolgirls.
The flight into Scotland afforded exceptional facilities, for marrying
across the Border has ever been (and still is) the simplest of affairs;
the chief difficulty being still, as Lord Eldon long ago observed, to
find out what does _not_ constitute a marriage in Scotland. My lord
himself spoke as doubly an expert, for he was not only the great legal
authority of his time, but himself had been married across the Border.
Indeed, Lord Deas was of opinion that mere consent, even in the absence
of witnesses, constituted lawful wedlock, just as in those primitive
days when the man only went to the woman’s home and took her to his
own. Pope Innocent III., who does not appear to have been so innocent
as his name would imply, in 1198 put an end to this simple plan.
Preposterous although it may seem, the difficulty in Scotland is, not
to get married, but how not. The mere verbal acknowledgments exchanged,
“This is my wife,” “This is my husband,” are all-sufficient, and
equally binding as the most formal marriage-license ever issued by a
bishop to his “dearly beloved”; and even words spoken in jest, without
any wish or desire that they should be seriously considered, are
binding. It is not to be supposed that novelists have remained ignorant
of these quaint customs, and indeed Gretna Green in particular, and
the Scottish marriage-laws in general, give point to Wilkie Collins’s
“Man and Wife,” Mrs. Henry Wood’s “Elster’s Folly,” and J. M. Barrie’s
“Little Minister,” among other novels.
[Illustration: “A FALSE ALARM ON THE ROAD: ‘TIS ONLY THE MAIL!”
[_After C. B. Newhouse._
]
[Sidenote: “_HAND-FASTING_”]
Bound intimately up with these affairs, and thought to have originated
these singularly loose methods, was the old Scottish custom of
“hand-fasting,” still practised in the opening years of the nineteenth
century, but with the increase of education, and still more the growth
of comfort, then fast dying out. These barbaric customs, resembling in
degree some old Welsh observances, mattered little to a peasantry sunk
in ignorance, but with the growth of wage-earning and of property, and
the consequent sense of responsibility, they could by no possibility
survive. “Hand-fasting” was the selection, on approval, of a wife or
husband, who would live together for one year on trial. If mutually
satisfactory at the close of the year, they became man and wife for
good and all; if not, they parted, and were free to choose again.
Children, if there were any, were the charge of the non-content partner.
The Border must have seemed a Heaven-provided resort to couples bent
on evading Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, but, strangely enough, the
sufficient virtue of the first step across the dividing-line was not
at first generally recognised, and fleeting lovers were originally not
content until they had come, post haste, to Edinburgh, where, in the
Canongate, they found a crowd of blackguardly scoundrels idling about
in greasy and tattered Geneva gowns and pretending to be clergymen, who
did their business for them at any prices the circumstances seemed to
warrant, from a shilling and a glass of whiskey, up to five guineas.
Thus were the runaway Lord George Lennox and Lady Louisa Ker, daughter
of the Earl of Ancrum, married, in 1759.
Thus, although even so early as 1753, the year before the Marriage Act
became law, a “Gretna Green wedding” was performed by Joseph Paisley,
the first “Gretna Priest,” it was not until 1771 that the marrying at
Gretna Green grew such a recognised institution that registers began to
be kept.
Gretna stands to all the world for runaway matches, but although by far
the most popular place, it was by no means the only one. Any spot on
the long lonely seventy miles of Border served the same purpose, and
Lamberton Toll, north of Berwick, and Coldstream were not without their
advantages, especially from Newcastle-on-Tyne, to which they lay quite
handy. The future Earl of Eldon, who ran away as a lad with his Bessie
Surtees, got married at Lamberton or at Coldstream.
On this West Coast, however, on the “new” road to Gretna, the actual
crossing of the Border is at the passage of the little river Sark, half
a mile before you come to that more famous hamlet. Although Gretna is
pre-eminently famed, and Springfield, just short of it, comes second in
popular estimation, a very good case might be made out for giving Sark
Bar prominence in this strange history.
[Illustration: SARK BAR.]
[Sidenote: _THE FATEFUL TOLL-HOUSE_]
It is nothing but an old toll-house on the north, or Scottish side of
the river. But there’s the rub. It is the first spot on Scottish soil,
and much virtue accordingly attached to it. The name of Gretna obscured
those of all other places in the minds of strangers, but those on the
spot, together with every post-boy between Carlisle and the Border,
knew better; and those runaways who were so hard-pressed that the extra
half-mile on to Springfield or Gretna meant all the difference between
success and failure had cause to bless Sark Toll Bar, or Alison’s Bank
Bar, as it is sometimes called. This was an inimical spot to parents
and guardians, and a sad disillusion to all pursuers. Here fathers, hot
on the heels of fugitives, were commonly foiled in the very cynthia of
the minute. At the moment of triumphantly thinking they would, in that
further half-mile, overtake their prey, Simon Beattie, the toll-keeper,
was spiriting the fluttering young things into his innocent-looking
whitewashed toll-house, and in the presence of the necessary two
witnesses, including the grinning post-boy, was asking them the simple
questions that sufficed: “Were they single?” and “Did they wish to
become man and wife?” It was all over by the time the foaming enemy
was cursing and kicking outside the barred and bolted door; and when
Beattie unbolted it and introduced the newly-wed, there was nothing to
do but try and look pleasant, or perhaps in extreme cases give young
hopeful a horse-whipping; which, after all, was scarce politic.
Simon Beattie, between four o’clock on a Saturday morning and the
Sunday evening following, in November 1842, married no fewer than
forty-five couples at Sark Toll Bar, and his successor, John Murray,
in one night performed the same office for sixty-one. No wonder Murray
thought it possible to amass a fortune here. He reared the “Sark Bar”
inn close by, on the English side of the Sark, but he had not finished
it when Lord Brougham’s Act, of 1856, ruining all these fugitive
proceedings, came into operation; and there was an end of his hopes.
[Sidenote: _RAILWAYS AND GRETNA GREEN_]
But it was evidently in existence in 1852, for it is referred to in
an article in _Household Words_ of that year, written by Blanchard
Jerrold, who describes how he left Carlisle by train and came to
Gretna station, where he alighted and found a couple who alighted at
the same time being “addressed eagerly by one or two men of common
appearance. Are these individuals making offers for the conveyance
of the couple’s luggage? The station-master looks on at the warm
conference with a sardonic grin; and with a quick twitch of the head,
draws the attention of the guard to the interesting group. The train
goes forward, and the conference breaks up. One of the men conducts
the lady and gentleman to a little red-brick hotel close by; and the
others retire discontentedly. I inquire about this rivalry, and am
informed that it is a clerical contest. The little red-brick hotel is
the property of Mr. Murray, who also inhabits the famous toll-bar which
is on the Scotch bank of the stream. Thus this sagacious toll-keeper
pounces upon the couples at the station; removes them to his ‘Gretna
Hotel,’ and then drives them down a narrow lane, and over the bridge
to the toll-bar, where he marries them. In this way it appears Murray
has contrived to monopolise five-sixths of the trade matrimonial. It is
to be observed, however, that there is a Gretna station, and a Gretna
Green station, and that the latter is the point which deposits happy
couples opposite Gretna Hall.”
Competition was evidently most extraordinarily keen for it to have gone
the length of inducing a Border marriage-monger to build an hotel on
the English side of the Sark, and for his agents and others to have
wrangled and disputed for business on a railway platform, like so many
cab-touts. The romance of Gretna obviously departed, leaving only the
sordid dregs, when the Glasgow and South-Western Railway was made,
1848-50, and linked up with Carlisle and the whole of England.
Painters and engravers found the romance of Gretna greatly to their
minds, and numerous pictures exist of scenes upon the road, and at
Gretna itself. Two of the most striking are those by C. B. Newhouse,
showing “A False Alarm on the Road: ’Tis only the Mail,” and “One
Mile from Gretna: The Governor in sight, with a Screw loose.” In the
first we see the love-lorn ones, halted in front of a wayside inn, the
post-boys running out with fresh horses, while with a rush the Royal
Mail suddenly dashes by. They think for the moment they are overtaken,
but sink back with the heartfelt ejaculation, “’Tis only the Mail.”
In the second picture we have the post-boys whipping and spurring on
the frantic horses, and the prospective bridegroom standing up in
the chaise, holding out a further inducement to speed, in the shape
of a bag which, by the size of it, would appear to contain a modest
competency for life. On the summit of a distant hill the governor’s
chaise appears to have met with an accident, and the chase is virtually
over.
The “Deaf Postilion,” pictured by George Cruikshank, seems to have been
a real person, and the incident he illustrates to have really happened.
He was stone-deaf, and when furiously driving an anxious couple towards
the goal of their hopes, failed to notice that, in the lurching and
plunging of the chaise, the springs had broken, leaving the body
behind, while he hastened on, blissfully unconscious of the disaster,
with the fore-carriage.
[Illustration: “ONE MILE FROM GRETNA: THE GOVERNOR IN SIGHT, WITH A
SCREW LOOSE.”
[_After C. B. Newhouse._
]
XXVIII
[Illustration: THE DEAF POST-BOY.
[_After Cruikshank._
]
[Sidenote: _INN AND REGISTRAR’S OFFICE_]
In the merry days of the road, Springfield was alert. The two inns, the
“King’s Head” (as it was then) and the “Maxwell Arms,” combined the
parts of registrar’s office and hostelry: the innkeepers doubling the
characters of “priests” and hosts: while at Gretna Green itself stood
Gretna Hall, a most comfortable, and indeed aristocratic, hotel. But,
indeed, any one could, would, and did marry all who asked, anywhere.
There was absolute Free Trade in it; only some were sharper than others
to turn the privilege to account. Even women might perform the simple
formula, although it does not appear that a woman ever did.
The inns, of course, took the pick of the business; for the convenience
of coming, tired out with the long-continued excitement of being
pursued out of one country into another, to be married and refreshed
under one roof was so obvious that it need not be insisted upon.
Prices, naturally enough, varied. They ruled low or high, according to
whether you appeared to be poor or wealthy, moderately leisured, or in
a frantic haste, and marriages have been “celebrated”—the circumstances
would hardly permit the use of the word “solemnised”—for the sake, at
one extreme, of a glass of whiskey and a pleasant word, and, at the
other extremity, for so high a fee as £100, and “D—n you, be quick
about it!” There have even been times when the offer of that sum has
not availed; not, we may be sure, because the keen-witted natives stood
out for more, but solely on account of the excruciating circumstances.
You are required to imagine such a case: the hour midnight; the more or
less innocent folk of Springfield and Gretna asleep. A chaise, driven
at a headlong gallop, appears, closely followed by exultant parents.
The village is awake in a trice, for it sleeps always with one ear
cocked; and rival “priests” are hurrying on their clothes, as quick as
may be, eager to earn a fee, which, judging from the circumstances,
should be a substantial one. And even as they hurry, they hear a
hoarse, despairing voice exclaiming in the empty street, “A hundred
pounds to the man who marries me!” It is the expectant bridegroom; but
before they can reach him and his bride-elect, the pursuers have come
up, and snatched the lady away.
[Sidenote: _THE “BLACKSMITH” LEGEND_]
The “blacksmith” is a myth, deriving, no doubt, from the more or
less poetic idea of indissoluble bonds being forged. There were no
blacksmiths’ forges here then, and despite old prints showing couples
being married over the anvil, with post-boy looking on, no blacksmith
seems ever to have been known as a “priest.” That term was, of course,
absolutely an indefensible assumption; but there is this excuse,
perhaps, for the “blacksmith” idea. It seems that, among those who
conducted weddings, was one “Tom the Piper,” properly Thomas Little,
of the “Maxwell Arms” inn, who, with his son, hit upon the attractive
title of the “Gretna Wedding” inn, and hung out a painted sign
representing the afterwards famous smithy scene.
Paisley, already mentioned as the first “priest,” was nothing more than
a drunken Border thief and ne’er-do-well. Colonel Hawker, writing of
him in 1812, says: “I should mention that the old man who officiated
for nearly forty years, at £40, £50, and sometimes £100 a job, never
was a blacksmith. Old Joe Paisley, for that was his name, was by trade
a tobacconist. He was a very large, heavy man, and might have died
worth a great deal of money; but from being an intolerable drunkard and
a very unsteady fellow, his money went as lightly as it came, and after
he had solemnised the marriages and dismissed his ‘couple of fools’
they could not possibly be more eager to follow their avocations than
his reverence was to trudge off to a whisky-house.”
In 1791 Paisley, who up to that time lived in a cottage on the Green,
removed to Springfield, a little nearer the Border, where he took the
“King’s Head” inn. With his removal his business largely increased.
He was long an object of curiosity to travellers. At the time of
his death, about 1814, he was an overgrown mass of fat, weighing at
least thirty-five stone; and was grossly ignorant in his mind and
insufferably coarse in his manner. Although an habitual drunkard, he
was seldom or never seen “the worse for” drink, and was accustomed
during the last forty years of his life to drink a Scots pint, equal to
three English quarts, of brandy a day.
[Sidenote: _JOE PAISLEY_]
On one occasion a fellow spirit, one “Ned the Turner,” sat down with
him on a Monday morning to an anker of strong cognac, and before the
evening of the succeeding Saturday they kicked the empty cask out of
the door; neither of them having been drunk, nor had the assistance of
any one in drinking. Paisley was celebrated for his stentorian lungs
and almost incredible muscular powers. He could with ease bend a strong
poker over his arm, and had frequently been known to straighten an
ordinary horse-shoe in its cold state.
It was told of him that he had once, when two couples at the same
time required his services, married the wrong brides and bridegrooms.
They were dismayed, but not Paisley, “Weel, then, ye can jist soort
yersels,” said he. He was no ideal Cupid’s officer, for he was used
cynically to remark that, although well paid for performing marriages,
his fortune would be made in a week if he could with equal ease
pronounce divorces.
We are not to suppose that eloping pairs just went off quietly to the
Border and were allowed to take their time on the journey. Not at all;
and they usually, knowing that parents and guardians would soon be
swiftly on their track, made what haste they could. Whether pursuers
or pursued first reached the Border made all the difference, for
although the Scots law would not help parents and guardians forbidding
the ceremony, it was always possible for the choleric father of a
sentimental young lady to seize her and to give young Lochinvar the
taste of a horse-whip.
Some of the races for Gretna Green were so near that the betting on
the contendants was even amongst the excited spectators of the chase.
A pedestrian on the English high-road within a mile of the Scotch
boundary would be overtaken by a light travelling chariot, drawn at
the rate of sixteen miles an hour by four of the fleetest post-horses
that the host of Carlisle’s chief inn could afford. Each postilion
would give his whip-hand horse a cut with his whip at every bound of
the infuriated creature, whilst as frequently he plunged his spurs into
the reeking flanks of the animal he bestrode. And as the riders passed
him at their perilous speed, pale as death in their faces, whilst they
flogged and spurred like jockeys at the finish of a neck-and-neck
Derby, he would see the bridegroom’s head at the front window of the
vehicle, and hear him screaming frantically, “Go it! Go it! We are
getting away from them! Fifty guineas to each of you if we get there
in time!” Another five minutes and the pursuers—two red-faced elderly
gentlemen, whirled along at the same mad pace in a similar chariot,
drawn by equally fleet horses—would dash past him. “How far ahead?
Shall we catch them?” “Five minutes before you—not more.” The response
would scarcely have been shouted out when the spectator would see the
chase ended abruptly by the fall of a horse, the breaking of a trace,
the upset of the carriage, or some other mishap that might just as well
have befallen the fugitives and given the victory to their pursuers.
[Sidenote: _ROBERT ELLIOT_]
The oldest-established and most famous “priest” after Paisley was
Robert Elliot, who married Paisley’s grand-daughter, Ann Graham, at
the beginning of 1811, and lived at the former “King’s Head” from
that date. When he published his “Memoirs” in 1842, he claimed that
he had for the twenty-nine years past been the “sole and only parson
of Gretna Green”; an impudent falsehood disproved by the existence to
this day of the registers kept by David Lang, who from 1792 until 1827
married a great number of people and was particularly famous as having
married Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Miss Ellen Turner, whom he abducted
in 1826. David Lang had been in his youth an itinerant draper. On his
journeys southward, through Lancashire, he was spirited away by the
Press Gang, to serve aboard His Majesty’s ships. After many adventures,
including that of being captured by Paul Jones, the pirate, he settled
down here, and was in the course of time succeeded by his son, Simon,
who died in 1872, and was described by Blanchard Jerrold, who visited
Gretna in 1852, as “a spare old man, dressed with some pretensions to
gentility.” He in turn was succeeded by his son, William Lang, who
was the local postman, and had some faint claims to be considered
a “priest”; whatever such claims may be worth in a place where, as
already shown, any one has an undisputed right to marry any one else.
Elliot, however, was by way of being a literary character, and in
history writ about Gretna Green bulks large, because of his printed
spoutings: the printed word being, even among those who ought to
know better, sacred. The sheer truth of it is that, at one and the
same time, there were no fewer than four prominent establishments
devoted to the marrying trade. The fact is scarcely remarkable, when
we consider the number of them that committed matrimony at Gretna or
Springfield; at that time averaging four hundred annually. Elliot was
but one. He gives a return of the numbers he married, beginning in 1811
with 58, and ending in 1840 with 42. His busiest years were from 1821
to 1836, and the busiest 1824 and 1825, when he married 196 and 198
couples. In all, he married no fewer than 3,872 couples.
[Sidenote: _JOHN LINTON_]
Elliot, in his “Memoirs,” has a view of his inn, which he, with
characteristic effrontery, styles “The Marriage House.” Now if there
was pre-eminently one marriage-house far and away superior to any
other, it certainly was that of Gretna Hall, built in 1710 by one of
the Johnstone family, whose elaborately sculptured coat of arms still
remains over the doorway, even though the Johnstones vanished more
than a century ago, and though in the interval the property has many
times changed hands, and has been an inn and has reverted again to
the condition of a private residence. It was about 1793 that Gretna
Hall became an inn: a very superior inn, indeed, with three avenues
approaching it: an inn where the neatest of “neat post-chaises” were
kept, and where the coaches halted. So it remained until 1851. John
Linton became landlord of Gretna Hall in 1825, and ruled for twenty-six
years. He had been valet to Sir James Graham of Netherby, and was
generally considered a superior man. He did not personally marry his
guests, who were naturally gleaned from the front rank of fugitives;
but generally employed David Lang, and when that worthy died replaced
him by one who was by trade a shoemaker, and thus perhaps predisposed
to join two ardent souls together. He paid his journeymen small sums
for their journey-work, just as your dignified clergy pay curates for
their labours. Notwithstanding this personal abstention on Linton’s
part, he was generally known as “the Bishop.” The nickname at once
shows the superior estimation in which he and his establishment were
held, and carries an implied satire upon Right Reverend Fathers in God.
An account rendered by John Linton to his guests would be a curiosity,
if itemised. A handsome sum was, doubtless, set down for being married,
among the insignificant items for food and lights. Although he did not
officiate, he kept the registers of marriages at his house; and they
are still in existence at Annan.
[Illustration: GRETNA HALL IN THE OLD DAYS.]
[Sidenote: _THE WAKEFIELD CASE_]
A marriage that was really an abduction, and, as such, became a
matter of extraordinary notoriety, to match the amazing audacity of
the man who perpetrated it, was that of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and
Ellen Turner, in 1826. The form of marriage was performed at Gretna
Hall, on March 8th. Wakefield was at the time a widower, aged thirty.
He had been educated at Westminster School, and by the influence of
his first wife’s family had been given an appointment at the British
Legation in Turin. This he resigned, and was living on his wits in
Paris when he chanced to hear of Miss Turner, a beautiful girl sixteen
years of age, and heiress to a great fortune. She was the daughter of
a wealthy merchant—afterwards M.P. for Blackburn, 1832-41—living at
Pott Shrigley, in Cheshire, and was at the time at a boarding-school
in Liverpool. Wakefield invented an ingenious and plausible story
for marrying the girl and so securing her money. Coming to England,
he called at the school in Liverpool with a letter purporting to be
in her father’s handwriting, stating that he was ill and she was to
return home in company with the bearer of the letter. No suspicions
were awakened, and the girl was allowed to depart with him. During
the journey by post-chaise, Wakefield, who seems to have been a
scoundrel of wonderful address, told her that her father’s illness was
really assumed, and that he was then, a ruined man, flying from his
creditors to Scotland. They were to meet him at Carlisle and cross the
Border together. At Carlisle, of course, no father was to be found,
and Wakefield then declared that affairs were so serious that only
a marriage with himself would save her parent from the horrors of a
debtors’ prison. If she married him, he would at once advance her
father £60,000. The story seemed of the crudest and most unconvincing
kind, but it imposed upon Ellen Turner, and she agreed, in order to
save her father, to marry Wakefield at Gretna.
The day following the marriage, Wakefield hurried her with him across
England, and to Calais. From that strategic point he proposed to
communicate with the girl’s father, and come to terms, but Wakefield
very soon found himself arrested by the French police and sent over to
England, to stand his trial at the Lancaster Assizes, for abduction,
Mr. Turner in the meanwhile claiming his daughter.
Wakefield and a brother who had aided him were awarded the very light
sentence of three years’ imprisonment apiece. In the following month
the marriage was annulled by a special Act of Parliament. A curious
point was raised during the trial, Serjeant Cross, for the prosecution,
stating that “Had the offence been committed on English ground, the
defendants would in the course of the law have been condemned to an
ignominious death.”
Wakefield afterwards emigrated to Australia, and in 1838 acted as
secretary to Lord Durham, in Canada. Apologists have stated that he
redeemed his early faults by usefulness in the Colonies, but to most it
will seem that he was an extremely dangerous man, only too leniently
dealt with. He died in 1862.
XXIX
[Sidenote: _THE EARL OF WESTMORELAND_]
Elliot’s most romantic clients were the Earl of Westmoreland and Miss
Child, who eloped in 1782. The father of the young lady was the famous
London banker, whose great fortune, and the prospect of marrying it,
dazzled the Earl quite as much as the beauty of his daughter and
heiress. She fell in love with the noble suitor, whose proposal did
not, however, commend itself to the banker. “Your blood, my lord, is
good,” said he, “but money is better”; and he refused his consent. But
the disappointed suitor was not disheartened, and the lovers eloped
in a four-horse chaise; his canny lordship having arranged beforehand
for relays of horses all the way: prudently, at the strategic point of
Shap, hiring every horse to be found there. Mr. Child, enraged, lost
no time in following. Using every effort that money could procure,
he at last came up with the fugitives changing at High Hesket; and,
leaping from his chaise, drew a pistol and shot one of the leaders
of their conveyance. At the same moment, one of the Earl’s servants
ran behind Mr. Child’s carriage and cut the leather braces suspending
the body. The Earl and his love proceeded with three horses, with the
father pursuing. Not for long, however, for presently the body fell
over, and pursuit became a laggard and hopeless rearguard. One hundred
guineas was the fee paid to the fortunate Elliot by the Earl. Mr. Child
died within a year of the affair, it is supposed from disappointment
and anger at his daughter’s disobedience. Rowlandson has, in his
caricature, “Filial Affection,” drawn a more or less close commentary
upon this incident. The banker took excellent care that neither of them
should have his money, which he devised to any issue of the marriage.
Lady Westmoreland died in 1793, leaving six children, and the Earl
married again, at which one is instinctively revolted.
The elder daughter of Lord and Lady Westmoreland, Lady Sophia Fane,
inherited the fortune, and married the Earl of Jersey; and their
daughter, the Lady Adela Corisande Maud Villiers, followed the example
set by her grandparents; eloping in 1845, at the age of seventeen, with
the youthful Captain Ibbetson, of the 11th Hussars. It was a November
night when the ardent pair flitted from the lady’s home at Middleton
Park, Bicester. They did not patronise Elliot, but went to Gretna Hall.
They reached Mr. Linton’s establishment on the 6th, and were duly
married, as the surviving register shows. Lady Adela died fifteen years
later, but Captain Ibbetson survived until 1898.
Jack Ainslie, of the “Bush,” Carlisle, was a sworn enemy to parents
and guardians. He was perpetually signing his name as a witness to
marriages, and was in fact quite a consulting counsel to love-lorn
squires and damsels. To have him, in his yellow jacket, on the near
wheeler was worth as many points to them as it was for attorneys to
retain a leading K.C. When pushed hard, Jack knew of cunning bye-lanes
and woods to hide the pursued couples in, and had occupation-roads
across farms, and all that sort of geography, at his fingers’ tips.
On one occasion he altogether surpassed his previous doings. He had
driven a runaway couple to Longtown, and as he thought they were taking
it rather too easily, strongly advised them to cross the Border and get
married before they dined. They were weary and would not be advised,
and so he took his horses back to Carlisle and thought them “just poor
silly things.”
He had not long returned before the girl’s mother and a Bow Street
officer dashed up to the “Bush” in a post-chaise. There was not a
second to lose, and so Jack, saying not a word to any one, jumped on a
horse and galloped to Longtown. He had barely time to see the dawdlers
huddled into a post-chaise, and to take his seat and clear the “lang
toun” when the pursuers loomed in sight. The pursuit was so hot that
the only way was to turn sharp down a lane. From it they saw the enemy
fly past towards Gretna and so on to Annan, where they found themselves
at fault and gave up the pursuit. The coast being thus cleared, Jack
would stand no more nonsense, but saw his couple duly married and
witnessed before he went back to Carlisle. The signatures of that
marriage were always looked at with a certain sad interest, for the
bridegroom was killed the next year, at Waterloo. This was Jack’s
“leading case.” He was long remembered as a “civil old fellow, perhaps
five feet seven if he was stretched out, and with such nice crooked
legs.”
One of the most remarkable of these runaway weddings was that of
the old and widowed ex-Lord Chancellor, Erskine, to Sarah Buck, his
housekeeper, an elderly widow with a numerous family of children, who
accompanied them.
[Illustration: THE OLD SMITHY, GRETNA GREEN.]
[Sidenote: _LORD ERSKINE_]
“In the year 1818,” says Elliot, “as near as I can remember, Lord Chief
Justice Erskine came to Gretna in a chaise and four horses, dressed
in woman’s clothes, accompanied by an elderly lady and four children.
When I first saw them, I took the elderly lady for the mother of the
children, and the learned Lord for the grandmother. He asked me many
questions relative to Gretna marriages, all of which I answered him as
I would a female, until by chance I espied a button of his waistcoat
through the opening of a neckerchief which he wore over his breast.
After he found that I had discovered his sex, he smiled but made no
remark. He afterwards changed his dress, and I married him to the
female whom he had brought with him. I asked him why he had come in
female attire; he answered that he had his own reasons for it. He gave
me twenty pounds, and again resumed his female dress. Twelve months
after, at the instigation of his sons by a former wife, he wished to
divorce her by Scots law, but found, upon trial, that he could not.”
Erskine was not the first great lawyer, by very many, to exhibit
a practical uncertainty as to the law, however certain he might
theoretically be. He made no further attempt to upset the legality of
the marriage, and in December 1821 a son, christened Hampden Erskine,
was born to this odd couple. Erskine died, in his seventy-third year,
in 1823.
[Sidenote: _CULMINATING ROMANCE_]
Among the more famous clients of the canny marriage-mongers of Gretna
were the heroic Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, and Miss Katharine
Barnes, in 1812. On their heels came Viscount Deerhurst, son of the
Earl of Coventry, whose fee to the “priest” was £100. Very late in
Gretna’s history came the marriage of Lord Drumlanrig, heir to the
sixth Marquis of Queensberry, and Miss Caroline Clayton, in 1840.
The lady’s father, General Clayton, had objected to the marriage, on
account of her youth, for she was only nineteen at the time; and the
couple decided to hie over the Border on the first opportunity. This
soon offered, and, discarding the time-honoured post-chaise, they rode
horseback all the way, reaching their haven on May 25th. This gallant
cavalier became seventh Marquis of Queensberry, and was accidentally
shot in 1858, at Kinmont, when out rabbiting. The Marchioness long
survived him, and died so recently as February 1904.
The circumstances of the elopement of Lady Rose Somerset, daughter of
the seventh Duke of Beaufort, in 1846, with Captain Francis Lovell,
show that the old hazards were passing. They took railway tickets, and
so, without foam-flecked horses or anxious post-boys, came to Gretna.
But by far the most romantic incident in those annals of “over the
Border” elopements was the marriage of Miss Penelope Smyth on May
7th, 1836, at Gretna Hall to Charles Ferdinand Bourbon, Prince of the
two Sicilies and Capua, brother and heir-presumptive to Ferdinand the
Second, King of Naples. The whole affair reads like the vapourings
of some extravagant novelist of the old _Family Reader_ type. Miss
Smyth was a beautiful Exeter girl, and additionally attractive to an
impecunious Prince in the fact of possessing a fortune of £20,000.
The circumstances of her being in Italy do not appear, but she seems
to have been married to the Prince at Lucca, and again at Rome. They
fled from Italy to avoid the fury of the King of Naples, who denied the
legality of the union, and claimed that no marriage could be contracted
by a Prince of the Blood Royal without the consent of the reigning
sovereign. The Prince appears to have relied upon the affection of his
sister, the Queen Regent of Spain, to smooth matters over, but was
rebuffed at Madrid, the Queen refusing to receive either him or his
bride. They then left for Paris, and afterwards for England, after a
third ceremony had been performed, and flew to this inevitable refuge,
the Border. Then, coming to London, they applied for a license at
Doctor’s Commons.
Of the virtuous intentions of this anxious and much-married couple
there can be no possible doubt whatever, and the part of “villain of
the piece” is taken by the bold bad “Bomba,” the notorious King of
Naples, who acted to perfection the character of tyrannical brother. He
instructed the Sicilian Ambassador to protest against the license being
issued, and it was accordingly refused. The dauntless couple were then
married in the ordinary way, by banns, at St. George’s, Hanover Square.
The virtuous lived happily ever after, and the wicked met with the
retribution that, by all the canons of dramatic art, was to be
expected, for the kingdom of Naples was abolished in 1861, and with it
went King Bomba and all questions of succession.
[Illustration: GRETNA GREEN.]
[Sidenote: _GRETNA HALL IN 1852_]
The contributor to _Household Words_ in 1852, found John Linton dead,
and the glory of Gretna Hall already departed; but Mrs. Linton was
there, and he seems to have been provided with a not unpalatable
dinner, while some few good cigars remained. But it was not for dinner
or for cigars he came. He wanted some juicy facts for his article. He
got some, but they were not so _very_ juicy. Everything, you see, spoke
of the Past, and he was reduced to being shown the “registers,” which
the widow Lang very jealously displayed to him. They were wrapped in
an old silk handkerchief, and when they were untied and he would have
handled them, the suspicious old dame gently repulsed his hand, and
turned over the leaves herself for his inspection.
Everywhere in the house, vanished visitors had scrawled their names,
despite the notice, “Please not to write on the walls, windows, or
shutters,” pasted on the looking-glass of the dining-room. Scrawled on
a window-pane was the frank confession, perhaps made in disillusioned
after years, “John Anderson made a fool of himself in Gretna, 1831”;
and in a greasy visitors’ book he found the usual ribald remarks.
With the prevailing air of desolation heavy upon everything, he asked
how long it was since the last marriage had been celebrated there,
expecting a reply in terms of years; but the landlady turned to the
maid who was laying the cloth, and said, “Was it Tuesday or Monday
last, that couple came?” The maid said it was “Monday.”
Oh! what a surprise.
Gretna Green itself is a small place, and to-day a dull one, too. The
Hall, situated in its private grounds, is just a country mansion. No
longer do the officers from Carlisle garrison “come once a week to be
married,” as the lady there pleasantly suggested to me; and no one
will accost the stranger and hint that it is a fine day for a wedding.
_Eheu! fugaces._
XXX
[Sidenote: _THE DUMFRIESSHIRE “AUXENT”_]
The Dumfries coach branched off at Gretna, but nowadays only an
occasional motor-car halts in the village, its driver perplexed by the
multiplicity of roads, and, if he be a Southron, no less perplexed by
the broad Dumfriesshire accent in which his inquiries are answered.
For, of a sudden—as suddenly as the dividing-line between the two
countries—Scotch have succeeded to English people. At Longtown even,
the people are English; here and henceforward Scottish talk and
Scottish physiognomies, if not the national dress, are prominent. There
is no mingling, to this day.
I do not suppose the Dumfriesshire folk will realise the existence of
their Doric. They will be like the friends of that farmer who went
southwards and on returning home complained that the “Enklish” made
“remairks” about his speech. ‘Mon,’ said they, ‘we didna ken ony o’us
had ony auxent at a’.’
Scotland was of old an almost unknown land to the English, and indeed
it largely so remained until Queen Victoria’s preference for North
Britain brought about a fashionable exploitation of Caledonia; but such
ignorance as that of the lady who declared she “never went to Scotland
because the crossing made her sea-sick” cannot ever have been common.
Thomas Kirke, who surely, from his name, should himself have been
a Scot, published in 1679 a “Modern Account of Scotland” which was
either a joke (in bad taste) or an attempt to exploit this ignorance.
“Scotland,” he wrote, “is compared to a louse, whose legs and engrailed
edges represent the promontories and buttings-out into the sea, with
more nooks and angles than the most conceited of my Lord Mayor’s
Custards; nor does the comparison determine here; A Louse preys upon
its own Fosterer and Preserver, and is productive of those Minute
Animals called Nitts; so Scotland, whose Proboscis joyns too close to
England, has suckt away the nutriment from Northumberland.”
Thomas Kirke, it will be observed, did not love Scotsmen. But he could
be a good deal more abusive than the specimen already quoted.
“_Nemo ne impune Læcessit_,” he continues: “true enough: whoever deals
with them shall be sure to smart for it.... The thistle was nicely
placed there, partly to show the ‘fertility’ of the country, Nature
alone producing plenty of these gay flowers; and partly as an emblem
of the people, the top thereof having some colour of a flower, but the
bulk and substance of it is only sharp, and poysonous pricks.”
[Illustration: THE DUMFRIES COACH.
[_After C. B. Newhouse._
]
[Sidenote: _USEFUL INFORMATION_]
A good deal of fine, unreliable information may be culled from the
classic pages of Thomas Kirke. Thus, “Scotland is from Scota, daughter
of Pharaoh, King of Egypt. That the Scots derived from the Egyptians is
not to be doubted, from divers considerable circumstances: the plagues
of Egypt being entailed upon them: that of Lice (being a Judgment
unrepealed) is an ample testimony. These loving animals accompanied
them from Egypt, and remain with them to this day, never forsaking them
(but as Rats leave a House) till they tumble into their Graves. The
Plague of Biles and Blains is hereditary to them, as a distinguishing
mark from the rest of the World, which (like the Devil’s cloven hoof)
warns all men to beware of them. The Judgment of Hail and Snow is
naturalized and made free Denizan here, and continues with them from
the Sun; first ingress into Aries, till he has passed the 30th degree
of Aquary.
“The Plagues of Darkness was said to be thick darkness, to be felt,
which most undoubtedly these people have a share in: the darkness being
appliable to their gross and blockish understandings (as I had it from
a scholar of their own Nation).
“Woods they have none: that suits not with the frugality of the people,
who are so far from propagating any, that they destroy those they had
upon this politick State Maxim, that Corn will not grow on the land
pestered with its Roots, and their branches harbour Birds, Animals
above their humble conversation, that exceeds not that of Hornless
Quadrupedes; marry, perhaps some of their houses lurk under the shelter
of a plump of trees (the Birds not daring so high a presumption)
like Hugh Peters Puss in her Majesty, or an Owl in an Ivy-Bush. Some
fir-woods there are in the High-lands, but so inaccessible, that they
serve for no other use than Dens for those ravenous Wolves with 2
hands, that prey upon their neighbourhood and shelter themselves under
this Covert; to whom the sight of a stranger is as surprizing as that
of a Cockatrice. The Vallies for the most part are covered with Beer or
Bigg, and the Hills with Snow.
“If the air was not so pure and well-refined by its agitation, it would
be so infected with the stinks of their Towns and the steam of the
Nasty Inhabitants that it would be pestilential and destructive.
“The people are Proud, Arrogant, Vainglorious boasters; Bloody,
Barbarous and Inhuman Butchers. Couzenage and Theft is in perfection
among them, and they are perfect English-haters. Their spirits are so
mean that they rarely rob, but they take away life first. Lying in
Ambush, they send a brace of bullets through the traveller’s body, and
to make sure work they sheath their Durks in his liveless trunk.
“Their cruelty descends to their Beasts, it being a custom in some
places to feast upon a living Cow. They tie it in the middle of them,
near a great fire, and then cut collops off this poor living beast, and
broil them on the fire, till they have mangled her all to pieces: nay,
sometimes they will only cut off as much as will satisfy their present
Appetites, and let her go till their greedy Stomachs call for a new
supply: such horrible cruelty as can scarce be paralleled in the whole
world.”
[Sidenote: _MANNERS AND CUSTOMS_]
“The Highlanders talk only Erse, the Lowlanders understand and talk
English, but they are so currish that if a stranger enquires the way in
English they will certainly answer in Erse, and find no other language
until you force it from them with a Cudgel.”
Let us hope, for the travellers’ own sakes, that they did not take this
advice. But let us follow Mr. Kirke indoors. This, according to him,
was a Scottish interior: “To enter a kitchen is to enter Hell alive:
the stew and stink enough to suffocate you,” while “Musick they have,
but not the Harmony of the Spheres, but loud Terrene noises, like the
bellowing of beasts: the loud Bagpipe is their chief delight.”
As for the inns: “Change-houses they call them, poor small cottages,
where you must be content to take what you find, perhaps Eggs with
Chicks in them, and some Long Cale; at the better sort of them a dish
of chop’d Chickens, which they esteem a dainty dish, and will take it
unkindly if you do not eat very heartily of it.”
Oddly enough, he says nothing of porridge. But St. Jerome attributed
the heresy of Pelagius to his feeding upon oatmeal porridge, which
may perhaps be responsible for more religious difficulties than we
are aware of. The heresy of Pelagius (whose real name was Morgan,
and himself therefore presumably a Welshman), was divided into six
points, chief of them being what one is tempted to characterise as the
“common-sense” view that Adam’s sin was confined to his own person. The
daring Pelagius was condemned, A.D. 418, as an heretic, but he lived
on, notwithstanding, to the age of threescore years and ten: a jolly,
fat man, by all accounts, and of distinctly anti-celibate views.
It is rarely, nowadays, you see a plaid, and not often a kilt. Nowhere
is the sight now seen that once astonished travellers: the sight of
countryfolk walking barefoot, carrying shoes and stockings in their
hands, for sake of economy, until they reached the outskirts of a
town, where, for sake of appearance, they put them on. The once poor
country has grown a great deal beyond that. But kilts formed the only
wear at the time of the rebellion of 1745, when one unhappy detachment
of rebels found them rather embarrassing. An English subaltern, in
command of a few men, had the good fortune to secure a numerically
superior body of rebels, and was sorely at a loss what to do with them
on the march to Carlisle; being afraid that they would on their way,
finding themselves more powerful, turn upon his small force and wreak a
terrible revenge. The happy idea struck him of having the waist-bands
of the prisoners’ kilts cut before the march was begun: and thus they
went; the Scotsmen being too busily engaged in holding their petticoats
up to be in any way dangerous.
Only on festive occasions is the kilt in evidence, in all its barbaric
varieties of tartan. The Royal Stuart tartan is an eye-searing affair
of bright red, with a pattern of green, black, blue, and white stripes,
calculated to make an æsthete faint. The Macmillan tartan would please
the old negress who wanted “nothing startling: just plain red and
yellow.” It is bright yellow with a plaid pattern in light red. One
of the Macdonald clans sports a nice thing in red with bright green
patterns. Such a taste in dress seems oddly at variance with the grey,
Calvinistic religious temper of Scotland, and a direct challenge to
dull northern skies.
[Sidenote: _PRACTICAL SCOTS_]
To argue from this old love of colour in dress a corresponding delight
in flowers would be a mistake, for rural Scotland has few indeed of the
English type of cottage, with clustered roses and jessamine and a very
wealth of colour in its old-fashioned garden. All through Dumfriesshire
and Lanarkshire, eighty-five miles along the road to Glasgow,
the country cottages are merely un-ornamental living-boxes, and
flower-gardens are vanities not indulged in. Perhaps we see in this,
again, the Scottish practical character that has advanced Scotland so
far along the road to material wealth, has made Glasgow what it is, and
has set Scotsmen in commanding positions.
The proverbial tenacity of the Scot has fathered many good stories,
of which that of the farmer returning from market is one of the best.
Attacked by three burly ruffians for sake of the gold he was supposed
to be carrying, he fought desperately, felling one of his assailants
with a blow that knocked him senseless, until at last a well-delivered
butt in the stomach laid him low; whereupon the footpads went
thoroughly over his pockets. But searching diligently though they did,
all they could find was a sixpenny-piece, instead of the expected
wealth.
“My goodness!” exclaimed one of them, feeling his bruised face, “if
he’d had eighteen-pence he would have killed the three of us.”
The pawky “canny” qualities of the Scots were never more admirably
illustrated than on that occasion in the football season of 1905, when
the visit of the New Zealand team, known as the “All Blacks,” was under
arrangement. The Glasgow authorities had not at the time arrived at
anything like a proper idea of the New Zealanders’ qualities, nor of
the great assemblage of spectators that any game in which they were
engaged would attract; and so they cautiously refused the offer of half
the gate-money and stipulated for a guarantee of £50 or so, conceding
the “gate” to the visitors.
An agreement was arrived at upon that basis, but as the season advanced
and the extraordinary triumphs of the New Zealanders elsewhere made
it abundantly evident that the “gate” at the Glasgow match would
be phenomenal, the Glaswegians made heroic attempts to alter the
arrangement—without success.
An incredible number of saxpences went bang over that affair, for the
Glasgow folks received £50 and paid over £1,000, taken at the gates.
And the New Zealanders won the game, in addition to pouching the
boodle. Scotland was sair humeeliated the day, ye ken, and showed
it sourly. The New Zealanders came without a welcome into the city,
were “booed” in the field, and left amid something like a hostile
demonstration.
XXXI
[Sidenote: _MERKLAND CROSS_]
There is nothing at all of the “Caledonia stern and wild” description
of scenery along these first few miles. The country becomes pleasantly
undulating, villages are placed here and there along the road, and
a railway runs companionably by, with the stream of Kirtle Water
neighbouring it. Kirkpatrick is the first village. Beyond it the
old road of pre-Telford days goes off to the right, for nearly two
miles, and joins the modern road again at Merkland, passing an ancient
granite boundary-cross surrounded by holly-bushes. A very great deal
of highly untrustworthy “history” may be acquired about this cross by
him who seeks wayside information. At the roadside smithy, hard by,
the blacksmiths tell you it is the memorial of a man who was shot from
Robgillt Tower—or “Toe-er,” in the local pronunciation. Whether the
man who was shot was worth the memorial is more than any one can say,
but the shot itself certainly would deserve a monument. A long shot,
indeed, for it is a good mile away to Robgillt Tower! Bonshaw Tower,
closer at hand, seems more likely. Another story, very popular in the
neighbourhood, is that the men of this district sold their wives here.
Passing Kirtlebridge and its railway station, and crossing Kirtle Water
and Mein Water, we come by some very pretty woodland and parklike
scenery, to Ecclefechan: a very celebrated place now, and a place of
pilgrimage since Thomas Carlyle died, in 1881. For Ecclefechan was the
native village of that latter-day prophet, hero-worshipper, and apostle
of work.
But there lies to the left of the road at the approach to Mein Water
and the park of Burnfoot, a little-known Carlyle landmark that should
be noted. The little graveyard of Pennersaughs contains the tombs of
his grandfather and great-grandfather, among others.
A great deal of argument has been expended upon the meaning of
Ecclefechan. “Ecclesia Fechanis” is said to be the origin of the name;
but who St. Fechan was, who is supposed to have founded the original
church here, is more than any one is prepared to definitely say. The
sceptical stoutly declare him a myth: a saintly “Mrs. Harris”; while
Welshmen might declare that “Ecclefechan” is “Eglwys vychan,” _i.e._
“Little Church,” and none would be able to prove himself correct.
[Illustration: ECCLEFECHAN: SHOWING BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.]
[Sidenote: _CARLYLE’S BIRTHPLACE_]
Carlyle once, in a memorable outburst, declared that “the picturesque”
to him was “a mere bore,” and that “simple knolls and fields, with
brooks and hedges among them,” were best of all for his taste. If
this was genuine, and not sheer Carlylean perversity, why then
Ecclefechan, his native village, was the ideal birthplace, for it is
the mere negation of beauty and the picturesque. Yet it has a certain
interesting quality. It has “character.” For you could not pick out any
individual house and point to its comeliness, but although Ecclefechan
is in its component parts made up of precisely the same materials as
fifty other Annandale villages, there is a distinctive personality in
it which would be evident even if the stimulating association with
Carlyle were not present. A rushing burn goes down one side of the
street and the swifts fly and scream overhead. Among the unassertive
white-faced and grey houses is one with an archway and above it a
quaint window of quasi-Jacobean character. It is the dwelling-house
built by Thomas Carlyle’s father and uncles about 1791, and over the
doorway is the plain inscription, “Birthplace of Carlyle, 4 Dec. 1795.”
Beside the doorway itself stands a boulder-stone, now graven with a
characteristic Carlylean quotation: “That idle crag”; and always,
above the shrilling of the swifts, you hear the murmur of the stream a
few feet away: “the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by.”
“The arch-house,” as it is known locally, was built with that central
archway for the convenience of those three mason-brothers, James,
Frank, and Tom, in storing the materials of their trade. There they
reared their several families.
“This umbrageous Man’s nest,” Carlyle styles it: and a very well-filled
nest it was, too. To-day it is freely open to all comers, and many and
diverse are those who come here. In the year ending August 31st, 1905,
the house was visited by 1,700 people, who gazed with reverence, with
curiosity, or with mere vacuity of mind—after their several sorts—upon
the humble interiors.
“And is this really the room in which Carlyle was born?” asked one in
that first category, a good many years ago, in an awestruck voice.
“Aye,” said the gudewife, who to be sure did not rightly comprehend the
inner meaning of all this hero-worship; “an’ oor Maggie was born here,
too.”
Homeric laughter, doubtless, at this, in that place where the literary
immortals foregather.
[Sidenote: _IN THE BIRTHPLACE_]
Professor Wilson, “Christopher North,” and his fellow-contributors
to the _Edinburgh Review_, claimed to cultivate literature on a
little oatmeal, but the claim might better be made for the author
of “Frederick the Great” and “Sartor Resartus.” Plain living and
high-thinking, you cannot fail to see, formed his life. A very
simple-living, homely man indeed, as all his intimate belongings
clearly show. His plain, commonplace inkstand, with the last pen he
used, his simple writing-table with its original table-cloth, his
tobacco-jar, together with a tobacco-cutter with which he sliced
his own tobacco, are all of the least expensive kind, and, looking
upon them, I feel vicariously ashamed for the modern authors of
“masterpieces” who, according to the literary journals of the day,
cannot feel “inspired” unless they are lapped round with every luxury.
Carlyle’s felt hat is enclosed under glass: his straw hat hangs
upon the wall, and you may put it on your own head. Most people do.
Prominent among the many tributes to his genius is the great laurel
wreath sent in 1895 by the German Emperor to mark the centenary of his
birth. It was, of course, primarily a tribute to the hero-worshipping
author of “Frederick the Great.”
[Illustration: OLD TABLET AT ECCLEFECHAN.]
Carlyle himself lies in the dour little graveyard of Ecclefechan, among
his kin and away from his wife, whose grave is in the roofless nave
of Haddington Abbey. Like most Scottish kirkyards, the gates of it are
chained and locked.
“Entepfuhl” as Carlyle in “Sartor Resartus” styles Ecclefechan, is
proud of him, largely, I suspect, because it perceives that the world
beyond Annandale thinks so much of “Tam Carl.” There is a “Resartus
Reading Room,” rather shabby with decrepit chairs, themselves sadly
wanting reseating, or, better still, renewing altogether.
An oddly designed old house-tablet recently uncovered from the many
coats of plaster and whitewash that had long concealed it, is now a
feature of the house adjoining the Carlyle birthplace, and is perhaps
the only curious item in the village.
There is a railway station nowadays at Ecclefechan, but the village
is probably a quieter place than it was in Carlyle’s early days, when
the Glasgow Mail dashed by, and the local coaches enlivened the street
twice a day. For one thing, the station lies at a considerable step
away, up along what was the new road when Telford made it, so long ago,
and called new to this day.
It is a kind of mild hog’s-back ascent out of Ecclefechan and so
along the six miles to Lockerbie, passing on the way the farmhouse
of Mainhill, where Thomas Carlyle’s father at the age of fifty-seven
started to be a farmer, striving there ten years, from 1815 to 1826.
Then comes the beautiful park of Castlemilk, seat of the Jardine
family, followed by Milk Bridge crossing the river of that name, and
the smart suburban entrance to Lockerbie.
[Sidenote: _LOCKERBIE_]
The town of Lockerbie is a thriving place, of a neatness and
cleanliness altogether remarkable: a change indeed from the time when
this rhyme was possible:
Lockerbie is a dirty place,
A kirk without a steeple,
A midden set at ilka door—
But a cantie set o’ people.
New in appearance, with a modern Town Hall in a florid version of
the Scotch baronial style, and an air of abounding prosperity. Here,
in this considerable place of shops, the Southron who knows not
Scotland first discovers what the Scottish nation can do in the way of
scones, seed-cakes, plum-cakes, baps, and bannocks, to say nothing of
shortbread. It is a liberal education, in its especial way.
Five miles north of Lockerbie, Jardine Hall is passed, with the
haunted ruin of Spedlin’s Tower away across the park. In another
mile, at Dinwoodie Green, the road again divides into old road and
new. The old road, running to the right hand, through the town of
Moffat, over Ericstane Brae and down to Elvanfoot Bridge, a distance
of twenty-three miles, is an excellent road still, but it ascends
rugged and mountainous heights, while the “new road,” avoiding Moffat
altogether, is at its highest altitude 500 feet below the summit of the
old. Between the two roads on the way to Moffat runs the river Annan,
and here and there are glens that at different times gave shelter to
Covenanters and horse-stealing rascals. Wamphray Glen was one of the
fastnesses of the Johnstones: the locality having from time immemorial
been rich in Johnstones and Jardines. There was a Johnstone who lived
in the old days at Lockerbie, in one of the numerous defensible towers
of the district. He bore a more or less knightly part in the battle of
Dryfe Sands, hard by, while at home his gentle lady with her own fair
hands dinged in the head of Lord Maxwell with the castle keys.
The new road continues, with few features on the way, on a gradual
rise, to Beattock, crossing the Annan at Johnstone Bridge, a pretty
wooded scene, with wayside post-office. Beattock was important in the
old coaching days, for here, beside the road, in a spot otherwise
lonely, stood Beattock Inn. Two miles down the road was Moffat. There
was nothing else but that change-house for mail-coach and stage.
The house remains even now, but no longer an inn, and adjoining it
stands the Beattock station of the Caledonian Railway, which abolished
coaching on this road over fifty years ago.
Nowadays there is no house of public entertainment in all the thirty
miles between Lockerbie and Crawford, on this modern road avoiding
Moffat, except the refreshment room at Beattock station: the village
that has in latter days sprung up here being quite innocent of anything
of the kind.
XXXII
[Sidenote: _THE CARLISLE AND GLASGOW ROAD_]
The town of Moffat, down below, had no place in the scheme of Telford’s
Carlisle and Glasgow Road. It had very little importance in the
councils of the Post Office; Glasgow, Carlisle, Manchester, and London
being places whose needs far outweighed any local discontent; and the
new road went straight away from Beattock, leaving the little town
aside.
[Sidenote: _RE-MAKING THE ROAD_]
Before the beginnings of coaching, when Glasgow made its need of direct
and speedy communication with the south heard, the London mail went by
mounted post-boys, through Edinburgh. At that time the road to Glasgow
went through Moffat and steeply up over Ericstane Brae, where it was
improved or “turnpiked,” about 1776, but improved, it would seem, in
no very substantial manner, for it is recorded that “seventy carts of
merchants’ goods” using it weekly had caused it to fall into disrepair.
Such remained the condition of affairs when mail-coaches were
established elsewhere, and gave the growing commercial city of Glasgow
hopes of acquiring a direct service of its own. Such a service meant
much to the Glasgow of that day, already grown commercially important.
It was pointed out to the Post Office that already, since 1776, the
Glasgow and Carlisle Diligence had found it possible to travel this
route; and what was possible to private enterprise should be possible
also to Government. To induce the Post Office to establish a mail by
this route, through Carlisle, the Glasgow merchants and the Chamber of
Commerce went so far as to subscribe handsomely to eke out the slender
pay offered contractors, and on this basis the mail was established in
June 1788. But the Post Office was not content. The road in general was
rough and stony, and the Secretary was for ever threatening to withdraw
the coach, if the worst places were not repaired. In 1795, Provost
Dunlop was informed that the Carlisle and Glasgow mail might have to
be discontinued in favour of the old route by Edinburgh, involving a
loss of one whole day. Glasgow appealed to the Government to stay this
threatened calamity, and to repair the road south of Elvanfoot. It was
pointed out that Lord Douglas had expended £4,000 on the road between
Lesmahagow and the Hassockwell Burn, near the Devil’s Beef Tub, and
that the city had already done much for it. The road, it was added,
was not, after all, a local highway, but part of the great national
route, north and south, and, as such, rightly the especial charge of
the Government. Going through the wild, little-travelled watershed
between Clyde and Annan, it could never be adequately repaired from the
proceeds of any tolls it was possible to charge. It was further urged
that the Government had itself impoverished the road, the mail-coaches
being by law exempt from all tolls, and thus being able to carry
passengers more cheaply than the stage-coaches, which paid heavily,
and, unable to compete on equal terms, had, between 1788 and 1795, been
driven off the route. Thus the turnpikes lost their dues at every turn.
To all this the Post Office turned a deaf ear. The Department knew
perfectly well how greatly Glasgow appreciated the expediting of its
mails by one day, and was convinced that its merchants would make
considerable sacrifices to retain the advantage. The Department was
entirely correct. An Act was obtained, at the instance of the Glasgow
Chamber of Commerce, empowering the Evan Water Trustees to make and
maintain a new road over the watershed, in place of the old road at
Ericstane Brae, described in the Act, George the Third, c. 21, 1798, as
“very steep and hazardous for all wheel carriages, and dangerous for
travellers.”
But it was one thing to “empower” the Trustees to do this, and quite
another, and not so easy an one, to find the money. It was eventually
raised by subscriptions. The merchants of Glasgow, the public
institutions of the city, and a number of English mill-owners between
them subscribed £6,000, and the road was begun; firstly from Elvanfoot
to Summit Level, and thence down Evan Water to Beattock, there
joining the Edinburgh, Moffat, and Dumfries turnpike; and secondly, a
continuation of this road by a diagonal line across the level Dale of
Annan to Dinwoodie Green, eleven miles south of Moffat, on the Glasgow,
Moffat, and Carlisle turnpike.
The works, as already said, were begun, and the first section, from
Elvanfoot to Beattock, was completed in 1808; but then the funds became
exhausted, and the Dumfriesshire people, who had been expected to do
the rest, would not, or could not, do it. So the road had to go, after
all, round by Moffat; turning sharply to the left at Langbedholm, two
miles north of Beattock, and thence made its way by the Chapel Brae
to Moffat, and south, as before, by Wamphray, Woodfoot, and Dinwoodie
Green.
[Illustration: THE GLASGOW MAIL.
[_After James Pollard._
]
Even this half-realised plan was preferable to the rugged round by
Ericstane Muir; but no sooner was the new road made than the old
question of repairs was again raised. The tolls were insufficient to
pay expenses, and the wear and tear of the elements and the traffic
could not be made good. What it was like in 1812 we learn from the
writings of Colonel Hawker, who, travelling this way at that time,
describes it as having been mended with large soft quarry-stones, at
first like brickbats, and afterwards like sand. Bad as this was, it
was the best that could be done with the resources available; and
the Post Office continued hard-hearted, Hasker, the Superintendent
of Mail Coaches, threatening continually to withdraw the mail and
send it round by Edinburgh. In 1810, the various Trusts concerned
had approached Parliament for a redress of their grievances, without
result, but at last, in 1813, an Act was passed repealing the exemption
of mail-coaches from toll in Scotland, where the population was (it
was at length conceded) scanty, and tolls yielded a miserably small sum.
[Sidenote: _CHECK AND CHECKMATE_]
But the Post Office had as many turns as an old and often-hunted
dog-fox, and, declining to be baulked, violated the spirit of this
concession by an ingenious trick. What had been given by the Act, the
Department took away again by the simple expedient of raising the
postage on letters to Scotland by one halfpenny each, aggregating an
increase of £6,000 per annum. It was quite like a game of chess.
To this move the Scottish Trusts replied by raising their tolls against
the mails, with the result that the Post Office was made to pay £12,000
per annum more. They cried metaphorically, if not actually, “Check!”
The next move was with the Superintendent, who responded by taking off
a number of the mails, by way of warning to Glasgow.
Checkmate!
This was, of course, very interesting as a trial of strength and
endurance, but was, after all, a little unworthy, and scarcely the way
to conduct the business of a nation. The fact, indeed, seems to have
been soon realised, for the Government, on December 7th, 1814, took
the whole matter up, and the Treasury instructed Telford to “make a
proper survey, plan, and estimate” for amending the whole course of the
road between Carlisle and Glasgow, and to report to a special House of
Commons Committee. Telford surveyed the road, and in 1815 reported:
“The existing declivities, direction, and construction are so bad
that for many years the road has been with difficulty kept open.” He
submitted detailed plans for its improvement, and assured the Committee
that they would, if adopted, shorten the distance, then 102-1/2 miles,
by nearly 9 miles, and the time occupied in travelling by at least the
equivalent of 9 more.
Hasker’s evidence before the Committee showed that the Post Office
seriously contemplated sending the mail by Edinburgh—a six-hours’
longer journey each way.
A commendable feature of those times was that when it did at last
come to a Committee being appointed, results were very soon shown. On
June 28th, 1815, not long after Telford’s report had been received,
the Committee in its turn reported unanimously that his plan ought to
be carried out, and that the Government should grant substantial aid
towards the cost, estimated at £80,000. A year later—July 1st, 1816—an
“Act for a grant of £50,000 for the Road from the City of Glasgow to
the City of Carlisle” was passed; the work to be managed by the already
existing Commissioners of Highland Roads and Bridges. Voluminous
reports, with plans, exist, among the Parliamentary papers of that age,
showing how the work progressed to its completion; and the traveller of
to-day who explores the districts between Carlisle and Glasgow will see
for himself, in the contrast between the extravagant gradients of the
old road in the neighbourhood of Moffat, and the easy rise and fall of
Telford’s new stretches of highway, how thoroughly the work was done.
XXXIII
[Sidenote: _MOFFAT_]
Moffat, in these days a neat and quiet townlet relying upon the waters
of its Sulphur Well for its prosperity, lies in a hollow of the
mountains. As to which is the neater and cleaner of the two—Lockerbie
or Moffat—I will not be so rash as to hazard an opinion, but no one
is likely to dispute the fact that “Moaffet” is the quieter. For one
thing, this quietude is one of its principal assets, and although it
has a railway station, the fact of its being merely the terminus of
a two-mile branch from Beattock will be sufficient to prove that the
quiet is not greatly disturbed by trains.
There is nothing very striking in the appearance of Moffat, beyond this
remarkable neatness and the breadth of its High Street; the centre of
the town, in its mingling of shops and villas, and the ever-present
spaciousness, indeed, resembling the ordinary suburbs of less restful
places. But one singular object that has claims neither to antiquity
nor beauty, stands in midst of the broad street and tells the stranger
that Moffat and its neighbourhood are celebrated for something else
than a medicinal spa and a great hydropathic establishment. This is
the Colvin Fountain, presented to the town by William Colvin, of
the neighbouring Craigielands, and surmounted by the effigy of a
contemplative-looking ram, in allusion to the sheep-farming that has
given prosperity to the district.
The Auld Kirk of Moffat, belonging to an era very different from this,
stands appropriately secluded in the old kirkyard that is locked and
barred against casual entry. The Auld Kirk is in ruins, and that is
appropriate too; for what bond of sympathy can there be between the
rather smug, self-satisfied character of the modern hypochondriacs who,
metaphorically (and sometimes actually) lapped in cotton-wool, now
resort to Moffat, and the stern Covenanters who were dragooned in the
surrounding braes and on the inclement fells, and passed a night in
prison in the Auld Kirk, before being conducted to the small mercies
awaiting them in Edinburgh? No: the historic building is rightly left
alone to its memories.
But this thorough locking of the old churchyards in Scotland is a
little revolting to an Englishman. It seems to emphasise, to the point
of callousness, the fact that the day of the dead is indeed done; and
hints that they not only have no part in the world, but none in the
thoughts of their own kin.
Here lies the great road-reformer, John Loudon Macadam, and few are
those who, turning aside to seek his epitaph, trouble further to have
the gates unlocked. Macadam was born at Ayr in 1756, and died at
Duncrieff House, Moffat, in 1836, after having made an imperishable
name in the annals of the road, and contributing a new verb, “to
macadamise,” to the language.
[Sidenote: _BURNS_]
Situated on one of the two roads from Carlisle to Edinburgh, Moffat had
of old-time a goodly number of inns. Among them the “Annandale Arms”
and the “Spur” were immediate competitors. There are Burns associations
with the “Spur,” but much more intimate ones with the “Old Black Bull”
inn, which remains very much the same plain whitewashed stone house it
was in the poet’s day. The tale is told how he, with some cronies, was
drinking in a window-seat of the inn when they saw two ladies ride by
on horseback; one of them so pretty and so small that she was known as
“one of the Graces in miniature.” “Odd,” said one of the public-house
loungers, “that one should be so little and the other so big”;
whereupon Burns wrote on a window-pane:
Ask why God made the gem so small,
And why so huge the granite?
Because God meant mankind should set
The greater value on it.
A very pretty compliment to the little lady, but uncommonly hard, by
implication, on the full-sized one. The pane of glass was long ago
removed, and is supposed to be now at Dumfries.
The famed Sulphur Well is situated a mile and a half away from Moffat,
in a Swiss-like châlet on a rugged hillside 300 feet above the town.
Some walk to it, others ride, and for two-pence you can drink as much
of the almost incredibly nasty water as you please. The first tumbler
is, to taste and smell (it smells like “election eggs” or assafœtida),
more than enough for the strongest stomach, and seems to be brewed in
an inner laboratory of the infernal regions. But the second glass—if
you are ill enough or courageous enough to take a second—seems not
so bad, and visitors by degrees become perfect gluttons for it. The
water is a specific for rheumatism and gout, among other things, and
was known so long ago as 1633, when Rachel Whiteford, daughter of the
parson of Moffat, benefited by it. In 1659, Dr. Matthew McKaile, of
Edinburgh, wrote a pamphlet in Latin about its virtues, and thereafter
the fame of the Well has taken care of itself. But the invigorating air
of the mountains has, no doubt, at least an equal share in restoring
many of the invalids to health.
The rugged and forbidding scenery around Moffat culminates on the
Edinburgh Road at the gloomy hollow of the hills called the “Devil’s
Beef Tub,” which is said to have acquired its name from this being a
favourite place among the cattle-thieves of yore to hide their stolen
cattle. The “Beef Tub” is really a deeper and more rugged version of
the “Devil’s Punch Bowl” on the Portsmouth Road. Sir Walter Scott,
who romantically says “It looks as if four hills were laying their
heads together to shut daylight from the dark, hollow space between
them,” tells in “Redgauntlet” how a prisoner being marched past the
spot, breaking from his guards, escaped by throwing himself down and
_rolling_ to the bottom.
[Sidenote: _TRAGEDY OF THE SNOW_]
This wild country was the scene of a mail-coach tragedy on February
1st, 1831, when the Dumfries and Edinburgh mail was snowed up at
Moffat. Eager to perform their duty, the driver and guard procured
saddle-horses and flung the mail-bags across them, but a few minutes’
effort proved that it was impossible to proceed with the horses,
and the two undaunted men sent them back to Moffat, and went on by
themselves, afoot. It was an enterprise of the most hopeless kind,
impossible to be accomplished. They sank down exhausted, near this
gorge, and perished in the snow. Their bodies were found, a week later,
and the mail-bags they had carefully hung upon a wayside snow-post,
hard by.
To-day, in the old kirkyard of Moffat, two stones to the memory
of these brave men, “faithful unto death,” may be found, with the
inscriptions:
Erected by Subscription in 1835.
Sacred to the Memory of James MacGeorge, Guard of the Dumfries
and Edinburgh Royal Mail, who unfortunately perished at the age
of 47, near Tweedshaws, after the most strenuous exertions in the
performance of his duty, during that memorable snowstorm 1st February
1831,
and
In memory of John Goodfellow, Driver of the Edinburgh Mail Coach,
who perished on Errick Stane in a snowstorm on 1st February 1831, in
kindly assisting his fellow-sufferer, the Guard, to carry forward the
Mail-Bags.
The local _Courier_ newspaper of the time, with more truth than
feeling, described the act of these devoted servants of the Post
Office as “an exaggerated sense of duty.”
If you go far enough past the Devil’s Beef Tub and Tweedshaws, where
the river Tweed rises, you come, along this old road to Edinburgh, to
the “Crook” inn, where the poet Campbell had a curious experience.
Taking a generous glass of toddy, he went to bed. Presently there came
a knock at the door, and there entered the pretty maiden who had given
him supper. “Please, sir, could ye tak’ a neebour into your bed?”
“With all my heart,” exclaimed the poet, starting up gaily.
“Thank you, sir; for the Moffat carrier’s come in, a’ wat, and there’s
no’ a single other place.”
This was not what the poet expected. Up came the big reeking man, and
exit the little woman.
XXXIV
The old Glasgow road, that goes up from Moffat past Meikleholmside,
and so across Ericstane Muir, is everything a road should not be. It
is steep, narrow, exposed, and rugged, and, except as an object-lesson
in what our ancestors had to put up with, is a very undesirable route
and one in which no one would wish to find himself. It has not even the
merit of being picturesque.
The road that Telford made continues onward from Beattock in more suave
fashion. It follows the glen of Evan Water for nine miles, and the
three of them—road, river, and Caledonian Railway—go amicably side by
side under the hills, to Beattock Summit and down to Elvanfoot, where
the Elvanfoot Inn of other days now stands as a shooting-lodge.
[Illustration: BROKEN BRIDGE.]
Elvanfoot Bridge, that carries the road over the Evan (_i.e._ Avon)
Water, looks down upon a pretty scene of rushing stream, boulders, and
ferns, or “furruns,” as a Scotsman would enunciate the word.
[Sidenote: _A SMASH IN THE DARK_]
It was here, late on the tempestuous and rainy night of October 25th,
1808, that the most terrifying and dramatic accident of any that ever
befell the mail coaches occurred. It is not without due thought and
choice of words that we have called it dramatic, for the happening
was precisely of that thrilling spectacular character cherished by
theatrical managers whose public demands sensation.
The Evan Water was in flood this black and boisterous night, and,
raving in its stony bed, tore furiously at the newly rebuilt bridge
that spanned the torrent. Down through the wild obscurity from the
heights above Douglas Mill came the mail from Glasgow for Carlisle, and
no sooner did the horses place foot upon the bridge than it collapsed,
as suddenly and completely as any stage property. It was near ten
o’clock, the insides had composed themselves to that semblance of sleep
which coach travellers could command, and the outsides had wrapped
themselves up in their greatcoats, and had so fixed their minds upon
more pleasant circumstances than riding in the rain on a cold October
night, that they were practically oblivious of their surroundings,
when they were suddenly plunged, with the coach, coachman, horses, and
guard, into the foaming water underneath the broken arch. There were
two outside passengers: one a City merchant named Lund, the other a Mr.
Brand of Ecclefechan. Both were instantly killed. The four insides, a
lady and three gentlemen, were more fortunate, and escaped with bruises
and a fright. The horses suffered severely, the leaders being killed
in falling, and one of the wheelers crushed to death, as it lay below,
by falling stones from the crumbling arch. The coach and harness were
utterly destroyed, and Alexander Cooper, the coachman, although found
protected from being washed away by two huge boulders, only survived
by a few weeks the injuries his spine had received. The guard, Thomas
Kingham, was found with his head cut open, but soon recovered. He
always considered his escape from being killed was due to his not
having strapped himself into his seat on that fatal night, so that,
instead of being involved with the coach, he was shot clear of it, into
the water.
It was due to the presence of mind shown by the lady passenger that the
down mail, at that moment due to pass this tragical spot, did not meet
the fate that had already overtaken this unfortunate coach. She had
found a temporary refuge on a friendly rock rising amidst the surging
water, and crouching there, saw the lamps of the oncoming coach glaring
through the mist and rain. Shrieking at the highest pitch of her voice,
she fortunately attracted the attention of the coachman, who drew up on
the very verge of destruction.
[Sidenote: _MODESTY OUT OF PLACE_]
The first care of the guard belonging to the new arrival was to
rescue this lady from her position. Hugh Campbell was not like the
conventional heroes of the theatre, who make nothing of grasping the
heroine round the waist, and, striking an attitude, so removing her to
a place of safety with an air suggesting a whimsical combination of a
Chesterfield and a bold bad bandit. No, he set about the task with a
modest diffidence which somewhat exasperated the lady herself. Climbing
down with the broken reins lashed together, so that those above could
haul her up, he asked doubtfully, “Whaur will I grip her?”
“Grip me whaur ye like,” said she, “but grip me sicker”; and he
accordingly tied her up securely and she was hoisted to the road above,
without more ado.
The down mail returned to Moffat with a heavy and mournful load,
including the dead and injured passengers of the up coach. The only
uninjured horse was led behind.
For many years the bridge was not properly mended, funds being scarce
on these roads; and the mail, slowing for it, lost five minutes on
every journey. The part that fell may still be traced by the shorter
lime stalactites hanging from the repaired arch. It is still known as
“Broken Bridge,” in addition to “Milestone Brig,” from the milestone on
it, marking the midway distance between Carlisle and Glasgow: “Carlisle
47-1/2 miles. Glasgow 47 miles.”
The Caledonian Railway, approaching this scene, crosses the Evan Water
on a bridge which looks as though a Norman consulting architect had
been raised from the dead to design. It passes in a shallow cutting
over a scrubby moor, protected against being embedded in winter’s snows
by a close palisade of timber on either side.
The road now, with Crawford in the distance, sharply bends, and crosses
the infant Clyde at New Bridge.
Crawford, situated in a wide strath, or green vale, where several
streams join the Clyde, is a scattered village whose white houses
show pleasantly at great distances. It is a favourite place among the
wealthier Glasgow folk who like rural holidays. The New Crawford Inn of
coaching days, a substantial, mansion-like building, opened in 1822,
on the completion of this portion of Telford’s new road, is still in
business as the “Cranstoun Hotel.” The old road, from Elvanfoot, goes
straighter than the new one to Abington, but with severe gradients;
while the new continues its even way alongside the river, to Abington,
where it bids good-bye to the Clyde altogether, until Bothwell is
reached.
[Illustration: “BRIG O’ CLYDE.”]
[Sidenote: _ABINGTON_]
Abington is a typical Scottish anglers’ resort: just a tiny place
with an inn, a post-office, a few cottages, and a fine park or two;
very neat, very still, and looking very expensive and exclusive. A
gamekeeper, or an angler in waders, with rod and creel, are almost the
only figures seen here, in the road.
Beyond Abington, the river and the rail alike turn aside and leave
the road to solitude. Not even Telford’s road-engineering genius
could abolish the ghastly pull-up over the bleak and beastly moor
that stretches between this point and Douglas Mill. You deceptively
descend to it, to Denighton Bridge, crossing a little stream that comes
down the valley from Crawfordjohn, but then rise to an exposed lonely
plateau, bleaker than Shap and without its interest. Down at Denighton
Bridge, where the view ranges along the gloomy valley wherein the
Covenanters skulked and the troopers of Montrose hunted them, the sheep
graze and the lambkins frisk in spring. Even a wet and cold cyclist
(who is not easily amused) must shriek with laughter at the antics of
the lambs, which are a good deal funnier than those of any low comedian
I have ever seen. No need to encore them either, for they continue all
day, or at least until, exhausted with laughter, you depart, to face
the muir above.
Heaven send the traveller who travels here by his own efforts has fine
weather and a following wind, otherwise his progress is slow martyrdom
along eight miles of shivery loneliness, and thrice welcome is the
longed-for descent to Douglas Mill.
The Douglas Water runs in a deep and beautifully wooded valley at
Douglas Mill, where the wayside Douglas Mill Inn stood in the coaching
era, and where, behind an imposing gravelled sweep, the entrance to the
beautiful park of the Earl of Home is seen. For five miles another
stretch of old road goes to the right, across Broken Cross Muir, as
far as Lesmahagow: the new road pursuing an eventful course, past the
Newfield Inn.
Lesmahagow, _i.e._ the Court, or Place, of Mahego, an early Gaelic
saint, was once the site of an Abbey. It is now a small, but
prosperous, town, looking very new and neat, in spite of the fact that
it is situated on the edge of the Lanark coal-field. The traveller
who pursues a dogged way along the road, and looks to neither right
nor left, will know nothing of Lesmahagow, which lies slightly to the
left hand; and I am sure he will not miss much. But, in the crossing
of old and new roads here, at the bridging of the little river Nethan,
and with the railway passing near by, a singular complexity of ways is
produced.
[Sidenote: _THE LANARKSHIRE COALFIELD_]
From this point, on to the very outskirts of Glasgow, the great
industrial districts of Lanark display their activities before the
traveller in no uncertain manner. Passing Blackwood, the centre of the
colliery district is reached at Larkhall, and miners, going to and
from work, are the chief wayfarers. The coal of the Lanarkshire pits
is of an inferior kind, and by no means well-suited for domestic use,
burning dull, and apt to fly in explosive red-hot embers on to carpets
and hearth-rugs. But it is not a gassy coal, and the miners are able to
go to their work with naked lights. Hence the little oil-lamp which,
strung to his cap, is the mark of every Lanark coal-getter.
[Illustration: HAMILTON PALACE.]
Hamilton, the capital of all this district, is a very considerable
town, and an odd mixture of ducal dignity and striving industrialism.
It stands at the gates of the Duke of Hamilton’s great park, and
jostles that dignified place in a way that would make the hermit Dukes
of Bedford faint with horror. But the Dukes of Hamilton, who are
Douglases, and of much more distinguished lineage than the Russells, do
not seem greatly to suffer from this contact with the world: although,
to be sure, the magnificent Alexander, tenth Duke, found the old
streets of the town so close to his residence that the colliers and the
weavers of the place could easily observe his domestic affairs. This
was too much, not merely for a Duke: even so comparatively grovelling
a thing as an ordinary squire would have refused to put up with it:
and so the too-neighbourly street, and even the old Tolbooth, were
purchased. The Tolbooth stands, even now, in the park, and the front
walls of the otherwise demolished houses, with doors and windows filled
up, form an odd boundary-wall.
[Sidenote: _THE MAGNIFICENT DUKE_]
The tenth Duke was magnificent indeed. He knew what was due to his
strawberry-leaves, and, being a man of immense wealth, saw that he
got his due accordingly. A great deal is possible to a man with
eighteen titles and five residences, and millions of money to properly
support them. He added expensively to the Palace in 1828 and not only
beautified it and filled it with wonderful collections of art and
literature, but expended £130,000 on a grand mausoleum, so that he
might be adequately housed in death. He even imported the black marble
sarcophagus of an ancient Egyptian monarch; who, however, appears to
have been of shorter stature than the princely Duke Alexander, for the
thing was a misfit, and when at length his Grace was gathered to his
fathers, his body had to be doubled up, in a very derogatory way. The
immense collections in Hamilton Palace were at length sold in 1882,
by an extravagant and impecunious successor of Duke Alexander, and
realised £400,000 at auction.
The park and the mausoleum may be seen at due seasons, and sometimes
the miniature castle of Châtelherault, built in 1732, in imitation of
the castle in France whence the Dukes of Hamilton take their French
title of Dukes of Châtelherault.
Hamilton town is a cheery place, with colour and ornament in its new
buildings: very different from the lowering streets of Glasgow, which
we are now nearing. In its present prosperous condition, many old
buildings are being removed, but the passer-by will note a quaint
tablet over an old house in the chief street, with three moustached
lions’ heads, the initials “A. S.” and the inscription:
The . airt . of . weaving . is . renouned . so .
that . rich . nor . poor . without . it . cannot . go .
A very broad and well-kept stretch of road leads from Hamilton to
the Clyde at Bothwell Bridge: the famous Brig where the battle so
immediately disastrous to the Covenanters was fought, June 22nd,
1679. The bridge representing the one that spanned the river so long
ago was built in 1826, and neither it nor the road resembles the old
circumstances of the place in any but the remotest degree. The road
across Bothwell Brig when the battle was fought was steep and but
twelve feet wide. The Covenanters lost the day entirely through the
internal dissensions among their own forces. Each officer wanted to be
commandant, and while they were bitterly wrangling about this point,
up came the Royalist forces under the Duke of Monmouth and “bloody
Claverse,” otherwise Graham of Claverhouse, the “bonnie Dundee” of the
famous ballad. The Covenanting army was well placed for defence, and
the day might, in other circumstances, have gone in their favour,
but as it was, they were defeated, with a slaughter of three hundred.
Twelve hundred prisoners were taken. Of these, some were executed: many
were shipped to the plantations in Barbadoes. Thus was avenged the
initial Royalist defeat by the hands of the Covenanters at Drumclog, on
the 1st of June.
It was not until 1903 that the tall obelisk now standing the north side
of the bridge was erected, to commemorate the Covenanters who fought
and fell “in defence of civil and religious liberty, for Christ’s Crown
and Covenant.”
[Illustration: BOTHWELL BRIDGE.]
[Sidenote: _BOTHWELL_]
The red ruins of the ancient castle of Bothwell stand in the
neighbouring park belonging to the Earl of Home. The little town of
Bothwell, with its finely rebuilt church, fringes the road: in the
churchyard a highly decorative monument of terra-cotta and mosaics
to the memory of Joanna Baillie, the poet, with quotations in praise
of the scenery around Bothwell. The scenery is still (what is left of
it) fine, but since the day when Joanna Baillie wandered in Bothwell’s
braes, and corresponded with Sir Walter Scott, the suburbs of Glasgow
have swept over the scene; and henceforward the way to Glasgow is not
rural.
Yet although Glasgow is, in its population, the “second city of the
Empire,” coming next after London, it is by no means the centre of so
great a number of smaller townships as Manchester, and by consequence
the approach, along crowded streets to the centre of the city, is
not so lengthy. Bothwell, at the very furthest, is the limit, and is
nine miles from the Exchange at Glasgow. Laurel Bank and the suburb
of Uddingston follow, and to this fringe in these days the electric
tramways extend. To these marches of the city succeed Broomhouse and
some busy outlying collieries of the Lanarkshire coal-fields, Mount
Vernon railway station, and Tolcross. It was at the approach to
Tolcross, soon after the mail-coach to London had been established,
that a desperate attempt to wreck and rob the mail was made. The road
at that time passed through a small fir wood, where a strong rope was
stretched across the highway and securely fastened at either end to
tree-trunks, at the height of the places usually occupied by coachman
and guard; but, as it happened, a slow-moving hay-waggon came along
first, instead of the more quickly moving van, and the waggoner got
rather a surprise.
XXXV
[Sidenote: _GLASGOW CROSS_]
At Tolcross, the traveller has at last arrived at Glasgow, and enters
there, into the wealthy city, by the meanest of back-doors. Tolcross
and its lengthy continuation, Gallowgate, are one long-drawn slum, and
so conduct shamelessly to the very heart of things: the junction of
Trongate, Saltmarket, and High Street, where stands the old centre of
the city in coaching days, Glasgow Cross.
Here Glasgow is at its busiest, and the hurrying crowds look as though
they had little time for sentiment. Yet the Glasgow people have, of
course, an interest in Sir Walter Scott, and some there are who can
point out to the stranger the house, once an inn, in King Street,
turning out of Trongate, which Scott once frequented. It was perhaps
the original of the “Luckie Flyter’s Hostelry” in _Rob Roy_. The
pilgrim will be bidden look at the iron ring to which Sir Walter, in
common with many another traveller, secured his horse.
But there is little enough of this sort of thing: railways old and
railways new; railways above and railways below, and electric tramcars
on the surface, are the chief things in evidence.
Here you see the Cross station of the underground railway, cheek
by jowl with the old equestrian statue of William the Third, that
tells you, without more ado, of Glasgow’s old Whiggish complexion of
politics: the tall steeple of the old Tolbooth, and straddling the
sidewalk, the tower of the Tron Church. The Tron itself (it was a
public weighing-machine) went very long ago, together with the pleasant
custom of nailing to it the ears of those tradesfolk who gave short
weight.
Between this point and Candleriggs were found the principal coach
offices. From Walker’s coach-office at the “Tontine,” the mail-coach
for London started at about 1 a.m., called at the Post Office in
Glassford Street for the bags, left there at 1.15, pulled up again at
the “Tontine” for the way-bill, and then was off in earnest, its five
lamps glaring through the darkness. Its first considerable pull-up was
at Beattock Inn, where breakfast before a blazing fire, off Finnan
haddock, chops, ham and eggs, baps and buttered toast made amends to
the passengers for much. Such, until the beginning of 1848, were the
initial circumstances of the long journey to London.
The coaching inns of Glasgow were distributed in the Gallowgate, the
Cross, and Argyle Street. Chief among these was the “Saracen’s Head,”
a large building, for its era, with a frontage of one hundred feet to
Gallowgate. Greatly admired at the time of its being built, in 1754,
it was, according to modern ideas, a singularly grim and hard-featured
frontage of stone that greeted travellers who halted here, at what was
then by far the foremost hostelry in the city of Glasgow.
[Sidenote: _THE “SARACEN’S HEAD”_]
It stood hard by where the East Port in the Gallowgate marked the
ancient limits of the city in that direction, and owed its origin
to the expansion of Glasgow following upon the more settled times
that ensued after the suppression of “the Forty-five.” The Glasgow
magistrates caused the old Gallowgate Port to be removed in 1749, and,
in their zeal for extending the city, spared nothing; demolishing the
neighbouring fourteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace, and desecrating
the chapel and kirkyard of St. Mungo without the walls. In 1754 they
advertised their readiness to sell the old kirkyard for feuing, and
offered especial inducements to any speculative person who would
undertake the establishment of an hotel, then felt to be greatly
needed in Glasgow; where, up to that period, only inns of a doubtful
character, and of an insanitary condition that admitted of no doubts
whatever, existed. The speculator was duly forthcoming, in the person
of Robert Tennent, landlord at the time of the “White Hart” inn, in
the Gallowgate, who on November 24th, 1754, purchased the land of the
kirkyard, on the understanding that he built an hotel according to
plans to be agreed upon. As an extra inducement, the vendors threw into
the bargain the stones of the demolished Archbishop’s Palace, and from
them the “Saracen’s Head” was accordingly built.
Tennent immediately began to build, and reared his hotel on the site
of the kirkyard; grubbing up and destroying without scruple the
gravestones of the old burgesses of two hundred years earlier. By
December 1755 he had completed the building and removed from the “White
Hart”: advertising in the _Edinburgh Courant_ of December 18th that his
new house was a “convenient and handsome new inn,” built by himself at
the request of the magistrates of Glasgow. He took the opportunity of
acquainting “all Ladies and Gentlemen” that he had “36 Fire Rooms now
fit to receive lodgers. The Bed-chambers are all separate, none of them
entering through another, and are so contrived that there is no need of
going out of Doors to get to them. The Beds are all very good, clean,
and free from Bugs”—which obviously was not commonly the case, or there
would have been no need for him to lay stress upon the fact.
Notwithstanding the peculiar advantages of his house—its independence
of Keating or his predecessors, and the convenience of guests not
being obliged to walk out of doors to reach their bed-rooms—Tennent’s
speculation was a failure, and on February 3rd, 1757, he died, heavily
in debt. His creditors, at a loss what to do with the house, let it
to his widow at a rent of £50 a year. When she died, in 1768, it was
sold to James Graham, of the “Black Bull,” who carried it on, with much
success, until his death in 1777. But although he was so successful
with the “Saracen’s Head,” he was unfortunate in other directions and
died bankrupt. He was succeeded by his widow, who in 1791 married one
Buchanan, who seems to have been rather a wild person, and indeed
himself went bankrupt in 1791, dying two years later.
In 1792 the “Saracen’s Head” was purchased by William Miller; who,
later, converted it into shops and tenements.
The sign of the house was an enormous half-length picture of a turbaned
Saracen, with goggling eyes, represented as fiercely drawing his
scimitar, and habited in a claret-coloured gown, decorated with a red
sash.
This house was exceptionally famous as a literary landmark. In October
1773, Johnson and Boswell stayed two nights, on their return from the
Hebrides; the poet Gray is thought to have met the brothers Foulis,
the famous Glasgow printers, and to have concluded arrangements here
for their edition of his poems, including the famous _Elegy_; Dorothy
Wordsworth, in her “Journal,” under August 22nd, 1803, tells how
pleased she and her brother were at last to leave the weary coach and
find themselves in “the quiet little back parlour” of the “Saracen’s
Head.”
The magistrates, in that age a convivial set of men, delighted to
assemble in the “Magistrates’ Room,” and their capacity for drinking
deep may be judged from the size of the famous punch-bowl of the
establishment, which held five gallons. Adorned with the City arms, it
was usually brought in, shoulder-high, by the landlord himself, and
with great ceremony placed before the Chairman and the magistrates, who
were probably themselves carried home at a later stage of the session,
or left sleeping off the effects under the table. The bowl has for many
years been lost sight of. Last seen in 1860, it is believed to be no
longer in existence.
The “Saracen’s Head” building finally disappeared in 1904.
The “Black Bull,” second only to the “Saracen’s Head,” was built close
by the West Port, in Argyle Street, in 1758, and took its name from an
old inn on the opposite side of the road, kept at that time by James
Graham, who afterwards acquired the “Saracen’s Head.” The building of
the “Black Bull” was a shrewd speculation of the Highland Society,
which in 1757 purchased the freehold site for £260 11_s._ 6_d._ It
contained twenty-three bedrooms, and six reception rooms, and was
provided with an ample sufficiency of cellars: six in number. For a
number of years the rent appears to have been £100 per annum. By 1788,
it had risen to £140, and under a nineteen-years’ lease from 1789 to
1808 was £245. In 1825, when shops were made on the ground-floor, the
combined rental of shops and hotel had risen to £1,168; by which it
would appear that the Highland Society had secured full measure and
brimming over from its investment of £260 in 1757.
The year 1849 saw the closing of the “Black Bull,” when it was
converted into a drapery establishment. The building stands at the
corner of Virginia Street, and is now occupied by Messrs. Mann, Byars &
Co.
[Sidenote: _THE “TONTINE”_]
Later in date, and more advanced in comforts, was the “Tontine Hotel,”
built originally as the Glasgow Exchange, in 1781-2. With the advantage
of a central position, at the Cross, it eventually became the foremost
hotel in Glasgow. It was leased to one “Mr. Smart” in 1784, as an
hotel; a coffee-house and imposing reading-rooms forming important
adjuncts.
The arrival of the London newspapers at the Tontine Reading Rooms was
in the old days the signal for riotous excitement. Immediately on
receiving the bag of papers from the Post Office, the waiter locked
himself up in the bar. After he had sorted the different papers and had
made them up in a heap, he unlocked the door and, making a sudden rush
into the middle of the room, tossed up the whole heap as high as the
ceiling. Then came an irresistible rush and scramble of subscribers,
every one darting forward to lay hold of a paper. Sometimes a lucky
and agile fellow would secure five or six and run off into a corner,
to select his favourite: always hotly pursued by half a dozen of the
disappointed scramblers, who without ceremony snatched away the first
they could lay hold of, regardless of its being torn in the contest.
On those occasions a heap of gentlemen could often be seen sprawling
on the floor and climbing over one another’s backs, like so many
schoolboys.
The name of the hotel derived from the financial, lottery-like
principle of the tontine, by which the building funds were raised.
One hundred and seven shares of £50 each were subscribed in 1781; the
interest upon the investment being paid at regular intervals, and the
property gradually devolving, as the members of the tontine died,
upon the survivors; the lessening number of the persons to share out
increasing _pro rata_ the value of the survivors’ holding.
The “Tontine Hotel” ceased to be an hotel many years ago, and is now
the warehouse of Messrs. Moore, Taggart & Co.
XXXVI
Here, then, we are come to the end of this long journey, into the
roaring, overcrowded streets of modern Glasgow.
I shall not attempt to describe the Glaswegian: there are so many
varieties of him. Nor his accent, which evades characterisation. The
Londoner, accustomed to think his own city busy and crowded, will
find, on coming to Glasgow, that he has still something to learn about
congested streets. Let him, for example, resort to the Central station
of the Caledonian Railway (the whistles of whose Prussian-blue-painted
engines have an accent of their own) and he shall see a high tide of
life new to him.
[Illustration: TRONGATE.]
As for ancient Glasgow, I know not where to bid you look for it,
unless it be in the Cathedral, and that is ancient indeed. The rest
is very new, yet very grey and gloomy, for the immense commercial
interests of Glasgow have not only compelled the extension of the city,
but also the complete rebuilding of its centre, and have caused it
to be rebuilt exclusively in stone. The chief streets are of stone,
are paved with stone, and have remarkably tall buildings, and so with
the side streets: the sole difference being that while the principal
thoroughfares contain the shops, every side street leading out of
them is a more or less dirty slum, where dirty little bare-legged,
ragged-tailed boys and girls play in the road or spit out of windows
on the passing stranger. I suppose the respectable people do their
business in the city, and live outside it.
There is no colour in Glasgow, which, when once you are out of the
noise and bustle of the business streets, is thus a very depressing
place; and I think the Scotsman’s praise, “Man, ye should live in
Glesca’, there’s such gran’ faceelities for gettin’ oot o’t,” must have
taken unconscious count of this.
In one way, and one only, Glasgow resembles London. This is in the way
in which the Clyde divides it, north and south. North, you have old
Glasgow and its immediate extensions; south are the dependent districts
of Hutchesontown, Laurieston, Gorbals, Govanhill, and a dozen others.
[Sidenote: _SAINT KENTIGERN_]
The Clyde and the neighbourhood of the Lanarkshire coalfield are the
determining factors that have made Glasgow what it is, yet although its
wealth and size are of modern growth, it is no parvenu, upstart place
without a history. St. Kentigern, or St. Mungo, the patron saint of
Glasgow, came here so early as A.D. 543, but early as he was, Glasgow
was already here, in the guise of one hamlet on the Molendinar Burn,
where the Cathedral now stands, and another nearer the Clyde.
And here, with this mention of St. Kentigern, it is necessary
for awhile to divert the stream of historical narrative into the
interesting backwater of saintly biography, and thus learn the story of
how the city came by its singular armorial bearings.
Kentigern, the founder of the see, was born in A.D. 518, or 527, and
was by birth a by no means humble person, having been the son of Ewen
ap Urien, a prince of Strathclyde, and of Thenewth, daughter of Loth,
King of Northumbria. Kentigern was born at Culross, where, as a youth,
he entered the Church, under the guidance and protection of St. Serf,
the old Bishop of Culross, who showed great affection for him, and used
to style him, intimately, “Munchu,” a nickname said to derive from
words signifying “dear, well-mannered little fellow.” Kentigern was
not only urbane, but pious as well, and early of such holiness as to
be able to perform miracles. The first of these was the bringing again
to life a pet robin belonging to his patron, which had been accidently
killed by other lads in the monastery, who laid the blame of the
accident on him. Taking the dead bird in his hand, and making the sign
of the Cross, it revived, and flew off, chirping, to its master.
The next miracle was exhibited to reprove his mischievous young
companions, who, seeing him fall asleep over a consecrated fire which
it was his duty to attend, extinguished it. Kentigern merely, when he
awoke, went outside and found a frozen hazel branch which he breathed
upon, in the name of the Trinity, whereupon it burst into flame.
The precocious sanctity and the amazing miracles of Kentigern so
impressed St. Serf—as well they might—that when the cook attached
to the monastery died suddenly at harvest time and the reapers were
returning to a dinner that had not been prepared, the Bishop merely
gave him the choice of cooking the dinner, or raising the cook from the
dead. Whatever else Kentigern was, he was no _chef_, and so did the
easiest thing for him to perform, and resurrected the cook, who was
doubtless grateful: but probably not so grateful as the reapers, who
narrowly escaped having their dinner spoilt.
But these were not his most celebrated exploits; and were mere
side-shows compared with the famous adventure of the Queen of Cadzow,
which he saved from becoming a tragedy. It seems that the King of
Strathclyde had given his consort a ring of great price and singular
beauty, but she in turn presented it to a knight with whom she was on
terms of peculiar friendship. As ill-fortune would have it, the King
espied it on the knight’s finger, and, indignant that his gift should
have been passed on, snatched it off and flung it into the Clyde. He
then, saying nothing of what had happened, asked her for it. She made
a temporary excuse, and in distress turned to Kentigern, who listened
patiently, and then instructed her to cause a fishing-line to be cast
into the river, when the first fish hooked would be found to have the
missing ring in his stomach.
[Illustration: THE ARMS OF GLASGOW.]
The line was cast, the fish caught, and the ring duly found and
returned to the King, who was thus completely hoodwinked. Our
sympathies are rather with the King, over this business, than with the
Queen, or the saint, who does not seem to have been able to withstand
a woman’s tears or the desire of showing-off; even though it were in a
questionable cause.
But he was equal to any emergency. Preaching once to a great crowd, to
whom he was almost inaudible and invisible, owing to the flatness of
the ground he stood on, he caused a mound to grow up beneath his feet,
and prophesied that Glasgow should rise as the mound had done.
Finally he died in A.D. 603, and was buried on the site where Glasgow
Cathedral stands.
[Sidenote: _THE ARMS OF GLASGOW_]
The arms of Glasgow illustrate many of these stories, but were not
adopted until toward the close of the sixteenth century, the earliest
representation of them being found sculptured over the entrance to
the Tron Kirk, and dated 1592. They were heraldically formulated in
modern times, and, in the language of heralds, are: “Argent, on a mount
in base, an oak-tree proper: the stem and bole thereof surmounted by
a salmon on its back, also proper, with a signet-ring in its mouth,
or; on top of the tree a redbreast, and on the sinister fess point an
ancient bell, both also proper”: the bell referring to one he is said
to have brought from Rome. The crest includes a half-length of the
saint, in the act of benediction, and the supporters are two salmon.
[Illustration: GLASGOW CATHEDRAL, AND THE NECROPOLIS.]
Although the arms are modern, the same, or similar, devices appeared
upon the common seal of Glasgow from an early period: the mound,
however, being a comparatively recent addition, necessitated by the
hazel branch having become, by some unexplained species of evolution,
an oak tree. The earliest representation of the mound is said to be
that shown on the bell of Tron Kirk, which also first exhibits the
famous Glasgow motto, which, in its original and unexpurgated form:
“Lord, let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word and praising
Thy name,” is to be found over the entrance to Blackfriars Church.
The theological and missionary complexion of this aspiration was
completely obscured in 1699, when the abbreviated form was first used
as the city motto: the inference, to satirical minds, now being “Let
Glasgow Flourish—by all means.”
Popular disbelief in these miraculous things is expressed in the lines:
This is the tree that never sprang,
This is the bird that never sang,
This is the bell that never rang,
This is the fish that never swam.
St. Enoch Church, built in 1780, and the St. Enoch terminus both, in
a way, owe their names to Kentigern. St. Enoch is a name you will not
find in the hierarchy of saints. There was never any such person, the
name being merely a corruption of that of Thenewth, the mother of
Kentigern.
The Cathedral itself is dedicated to Kentigern, under the pet name
given him by St. Serf.
[Sidenote: _THE CATHEDRAL_]
St. Mungo’s Cathedral, standing on the site where, by the “Glas-coed,”
or “dark wood” of the original settlement, the saint erected his
wooden mission church some thirteen hundred and fifty years ago, is
the successor of several buildings that have been erected on the spot,
and in its present form dates from what we are accustomed to style
the Early English period of the mid-thirteenth century. It consists
of nave, 155 feet in length, and choir of 97 feet; with aisles, Lady
Chapel, and Chapter House; while the crypt beneath the choir is one of
the most striking features of the building.
Occupying the highest point in Glasgow, the Cathedral was in olden days
in midst of very beautiful scenery, but in these times it is surrounded
by the poorest quarters and although it commands views of some extent,
they are only of roofs and chimneys and of the once pretty hillside
now thickly set with the larger or smaller monuments of the cemetery
called the “Necropolis.” The old Molendinar Burn that ran in the hollow
between the Cathedral and that crowded Golgotha was long ago covered
up and its course converted into a road spanned by the bridge leading
into the cemetery, called the “Bridge of Sighs.” Prominent above all
other monuments on that stricken hill is the tall column crowned by
an effigy of John Knox. The Cathedral Yard itself is a dismal place.
There, forming a close paving, are the memorials of many of Glasgow’s
departed citizens: the stones broken and mangy: merchants jostling
cock-lairds and dunghill squires with their heraldic achievements
weathered in most cases almost beyond recognition; and one of those
ferocious denunciatory Covenanters’ monuments with which every visitor
to Scotland soon becomes familiar.
They’ll know, at Resurrection Day,
To murder Saints was no sweet play.
So runs the savage rhyme.
The Cathedral, in common with other such ecclesiastical buildings in
Scotland, is maintained by the Office of Works, and is opened at ten
o’clock in the morning by an uniformed official. It is black without
and extremely dark within: the crypt, by reason of the darkness and
the maze of pillars, being a place wherein the stranger is reduced to
groping his way about. In short, a building of exquisite beauty, but
dank and dark to a degree. A great deal of this darkness is caused by
the bad, semi-opaque, highly coloured heraldic and other stained glass
inserted half a century ago.
Glasgow has ever been proud of its Cathedral. Sir Walter Scott echoes
this attitude in “Rob Roy,” where he makes Andrew Fairservice say: “A
brave kirk—nane o’ yer whigmaleeries and curliewurlies and opensteek
hems about it—a’ solid, weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as
lang as the warld, keep hands and gunpowther aff it.”
It would have gone ill with this “solid, weel-jointed mason-wark” when
the leaven of the Reformation was working, had not the Glaswegians,
prouder of the building than of the religion for which it stood,
presented a bold front against the fury of the surrounding townships
and their own suburbs, eager to destroy it altogether. Again, in the
words of Andrew Fairservice, “It wasna for love o’ paperie—na, na! nane
could ever say that o’ the trades o’ Glasgow. Sae they sune came to
an agreement to take a’ the idolatrous statues o’ sants (sorrow be on
them) out o’ their neuks. And sae the bits o’ stane idols were broken
in pieces by Scripture warrant, and flung into the Molendinar Burn, and
the auld kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the fleas are kaimed off
her, and a’body was alike pleased.”
[Sidenote: _CROMWELL_]
The Cathedral was then made to fulfil the needs of no fewer than three
congregations: one meeting in the choir, another in the nave, and a
third in the Laigh Kirk, or Low Church (_i.e._ the crypt). The ancient
pile has not been without its dramatic moments, as when, in October
1650, Cromwell himself sat here, unmoved, with Mr. Secretary Thurlow,
while a furious preacher, Dr. Zachary Boyd, emulating a like exploit of
John Knox before Queen Mary, many years before, for two hours preached
at him, as “Sectary and Blasphemer.”
“Shall I have him out by the ears and pistol him?” whispered Thurlow,
his anger gaining the better of his lawyer instincts.
“No,” replied the man of force and arms, unwontedly, but roughly,
diplomatic. “He’s a fool and you’re another: I’ll pay him out in his
own coin.”
He invited Boyd to dinner, and after the meal offered up an
exhausting prayer of three hours’ length. After this “like cures
like” homœopathic treatment, Dr. Boyd crept home, dazed, to bed and
nightmare: but it would surely have been more prettily exasperating had
Cromwell prayed his three hours _before_ dinner.
The Cathedral Square abuts upon one of the most squalid neighbourhoods
in Glasgow, but it is here that the oldest domestic building in the
city stands. The stranger’s attention is first attracted to it by
the legend, “Provand’s Lordship,” painted across the weathered stone
frontage over the hairdresser’s shop that occupies part of the ground
floor. Then, glancing at the high-pitched roof and the corbie-stepped
gables, characteristic of old Scottish architecture, he will perceive
that he is indeed contemplating a very reverend building. It was, in
fact, originally erected during the episcopacy of Bishop Muirhead,
1455-73, as a manse for certain of the clergy of the Cathedral, and
this portion of the building still exhibits a shield of the Bishop’s
arms: three acorns, on a bend. In 1570, shortly after the Reformation
had dispossessed the clergy of their properties, William Baillie, who
had been granted the Provand’s Lordship lands and houses by Queen
Mary in 1565, added the wing that now fronts upon the street. Here,
in 1565, before that addition was made, the Queen stayed on her visit
to Glasgow. The visitor, exploring the ancient and interesting, but
miserably uncomfortable, rooms, will, more than ever, suspect that the
goodness of the “good old days” is a myth.
[Sidenote: _PROVAND’S LORDSHIP_]
But why “Provand’s Lordship”? You might stand all day in the crowded
Cathedral Square, and canvass all who passed; and yet no one would be
able to tell you, unless indeed you happened upon one of the leading
spirits of the “Provand’s Lordship Literary Club,” Dr. Robert B.
Lothian, Messrs. R. H. Arnott, Thos. Lugton, and Jas. Murphy, who have
just purchased the property.
[Illustration: THE OLDEST HOUSE IN GLASGOW.]
According to those, and other, authorities, the house was in the
first instance erected as a residence for the priest in charge of St.
Nicholas’ Hospital, and afterwards became the residence of one of the
Cathedral prebendaries—the Prebendary of Balarnock, whose prebend
included a long strip of land extending from the Cathedral to Cowlairs
and Provanhall, five miles away to the east, where the country-house of
himself and those who succeeded him still stands. He was Lord of the
Manor of Provan, and so were his secular successors. Thus “Provand’s
Lordship,” a title Lord Rosebery, speaking in October 1907 at a dinner
given by the “Provand’s Lordship Literary Club,” professed himself
unable to understand. But what that sorry fugitive figure of political
failure cannot comprehend is not, it will be seen, after all, so
difficult of comprehension.
XXXVII
And now to revert to the secular story of Glasgow, which has been so
long interrupted. The village had by 1136 become important enough for
the site of the first Cathedral, and so through centuries it grew,
retaining the reputation of being “an exceedingly beautiful little
place” until the very dawn of the eighteenth century. It early stood
for law and order, and preferred the Hanoverians to the Stuarts,
both in the ’15 and the ’45: opposing the Old Pretender on the first
occasion with 600 men, and Prince Charlie on the second with double
that number. But the city was made to supply the rebels of 1745 with
£5,000 in gold and £500 worth of munitions. Its population was then
about 50,000. In 1768, when the modern commercial career of Glasgow
may be said to have commenced, in the works for the deepening of the
Clyde then undertaken, the inhabitants numbered about 70,000. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, the figure had risen to 83,769,
in 1851 to 360,000, and is now computed at close upon one million.
[Sidenote: _THE CLYDE_]
The commercial genius and the farsighted energy of the Scottish people
have transformed what was the shallow, muddy estuary of the Clyde into
a busy waterway second to none in the world. As a river, the Clyde
has never counted for much, but as an estuary it has ever been of
importance; an importance, however, sadly neutralised by the shoals
that from the earliest known times obstructed the passage. Even in
remote days Glasgow made attempts to clear the fairway, and in 1565
efforts were devoted to increasing the depth of the channel, and to
correcting its course, “aimless in its wanderings, and dangerous with
banks and quicksands.” But little was done, and in 1651 it was reported
as every day more and more filling up. At that time no considerable
vessel could approach nearer Glasgow than Dumbarton, fourteen miles
distant, and the tonnage of the port was a mere 957 tons. This
condition of affairs remained until 1740, when John Golborne, a Chester
engineer, was employed to dredge and build jetties.
But in 1755, high-water at the Broomielaw still gave a depth of only
five feet, and at low-water there were but eighteen inches. To-day,
on the same spot, there is a twenty-five feet depth of water, and the
largest ocean-going steamers lie off the crowded quays.
But there is no finality here. If there were, Glasgow would be thinking
of shutting up shop. Dredging is still in progress, and the bottomless
Loch Long still receives the resultant harvest of mud. Meanwhile, the
revenue of the River Clyde Trust goes soaring up. One hundred and
fifty years ago it was £1,500 per annum. In 1898 it was £430,000, and
doubtless by now considerably exceeds half a million sterling. The
Broomielaw, once, in a distant past, a wild waterside common where
broom and heather flourished, is now a combination of Thames Street and
Blackfriars, London, the resemblance heightened by the similarity of
Glasgow Bridge and the lattice-girder railway-bridges to those spanning
the Thames.
The beauty of these lower reaches of the Clyde has, therefore,
departed; but although the river at Glasgow may look and smell very
like a sewer, Glaswegians are proud of it, as they have every right to
be, for it is their very own. The story is told of such a proprietary
Glasgow man being assured by a Canadian that a dozen Clydes could
be added to the St. Lawrence, and no difference be observed. “Weel,
mebbe,” the Glaswegian is reported to have said; “the St. Lawrence is
th’ wark o’ th’ Almichty, but we made th’ Clyde oorsels.”
The Clyde shipbuilding yards are to-day the first in the world, and the
riverside, from Glasgow city to Port Glasgow and Greenock, rings with
the clang of the hammers and the noise of the riveters busily adding to
the maritime tonnage of the nation.
North of the Cathedral is the more than usually unlovely district of
Port Dundas, where, beside the two canals that give the neighbourhood
the rather magnificent name of “Port,” are all manner of warehouses and
manufactories. This also is the St. Rollox district. I do not know who
St. Rollox was, but his name suggest as canonised boating champion. The
place is notable for the tall chimney of Townsend’s chemical works:
“St. Rollox’s big stalk,” 489 feet in height, said to be the tallest
chimney in the world. In a furious gale it sways like a flagstaff.
After an existence of fifty years, the lofty chimney was being
repointed in August 1907 when John Goldie, a steeplejack, fell from the
summit and was of course killed, every bone in his body being broken.
[Illustration: DIXON’S BLAZES.]
[Sidenote: “_DIXON’S BLAZES_”]
The south, as well as the north, has its industrial sights. Across
the river in Hutchesontown, is the well-known “Dixon’s Blazes”: great
ironworks that shed an infernal glow by night over the street and
the tramcars that run by. No Glaswegian ever willingly allows the
stranger to depart without seeing “Dixon’s Blazes”: but, after all,
Middlesbrough can show bigger sights in that kind.
After all, the most instructive views are Glasgow on a Saturday night
and the same place (but so changed that you ask yourself, _Can_ it
be the same?) on Sunday. At midnight on Saturday, Glasgow is roaring
drunk and the neighbourhoods of the Trongate and the Central Station
are veritable pandemoniums: but on Sunday those not thoughtful enough
to have laid in a private store of alcoholic liquor must needs go
thirsty, for Scotland is the land of rigorous Sunday closing. The only
way to circumvent this barbarous observance is to arm one’s self with
a prescription from a complaisant medical practitioner, indicating the
following:
Sp. Vini. Gall. oz. i
Aqua Sodæ Effervesc. oz. iv
Misce.
Presented at any chemist’s, this results, strange to say, in a
preparation not to be distinguished from what is sold on week-days
across the public bars as “whiskey and soda.”
It is along the Great Western Road, and in the park at Kelvingrove,
that Sunday finds Glasgow at its best: for there you are in the
residential districts, and the finest feathers are then assumed for
church-parade. It is the picturesque made more picturesque by the
stately group of the University buildings, erected between 1866 and
1870.
[Sidenote: _GEORGE SQUARE_]
Glasgow having the reputation of being the “best-governed city in
Great Britain,” it behoves the stranger, if not to pry into its great
tramways, gas and water and electric-lighting undertakings, and the
like municipal activities, at least to see the civic centre of the
place. This is George Square. A citizen of Glasgow—I think he was a
Lord Provost, or at the very least of it a bailie—has written a history
of George Square, from whose pages you may learn how (like Britain
arising at Heaven’s command from the azure main) George Square came
into being from some pitiful malebolge, at the august will of the city
council. It is a story touched to great issues, and if it does not make
my heart beat to a quicker rate, that is my own insufficiency.
To a Londoner, who cannot help his vice of comparison, George Square is
another, and a smaller, Trafalgar Square. To aid the resemblance and
confirm the smallness of the scale, here is a column in the centre. Sir
Walter Scott, and not Nelson, it is who in effigy occupies the summit.
The thing looks as though, with a little judicious watering and careful
culture, it might some day grow to be a Nelson column. All around are
other statues: equestrian effigies of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert;
and Colin Campbell, Thomas Campbell, Peel, Livingstone, Sir John
Moore, Burns, and others on foot. One side of the Square is occupied by
the “City Chambers”: what in England we would term the Town Hall. This
is a great pile designed by William Young, architect of the new War
Office building in London; and in the same classic renaissance style,
with the same old pepper-castor pavilions at either end: the usual
small ones (for cayenne) in the middle, and the inevitable pediment
and indispensable tower. The cost was £540,000, the building was open
in 1888, and this, the third or fourth Glasgow Town Hall, each one in
succession larger than its forebear, is already too small. So also is
the inconvenient General Post Office building, near by, opened in 1876.
In connection with the bronze Valhalla of heroes in George Square,
it may be noted that Glasgow is, in general, great in statues and
memorials. Probably the most majestic statue of Wellington in existence
is that in front of the Exchange, an equestrian effigy by Marochetti.
Nelson, on the other hand, is commemorated by a tall obelisk on Glasgow
Green.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Meat and hire.
THE END
INDEX
Abington. ii. 289
Adlington, i. 340, 346, 347-49
Alvaston, i. 281
Anglezarke Moor, ii. 85
Annan, River, ii. 269, 270, 272
Ardwick Green, i. 352
Arthuret, ii. 212, 214
Ashbourne, i. 76, 87, 306, 308-23
Askham Hall, ii. 172
Bamber Bridge, ii. 89
Bamford, Samuel, i. 51-111
Barnet, i. 56, 111, 119-21
Barnet Fair, i. 116-119
Barrow-on-Soar, i. 248, 253
Bass family (brewers), i. 311
Beattock, ii. 270, 273, 279, 284
Bedford, Dukes of, i. 157-64; ii. 292
Belgrave, i. 246, 251
Blackford, ii. 211
Blackwood, ii. 291
Blore, i. 329
Bollin, River, i. 345
Bollington, i. 345
Bolton, ii. 68-75
Bolton-le-Sands, ii. 132
Bonshaw Tower, ii. 263
Boothby, Penelope, i. 316-18
Boroughbridge, ii. 153-54
Bosley, i. 337
Bothwell, ii. 295
Bothwell Bridge, Battle of, ii. 294
Boughton, i. 198
Boughton Green, i. 198
Brailsford, i. 42, 308
Brandreth, Jeremiah, rebel, i. 89, 291-97
Bright, John, i. 22, 199; ii. 42-5
Brixworth, i. 200-3
Brougham, ii. 163-71
Broughton, near Newport Pagnell, i. 166
Buckstone, The, ii. 133-35
Bullock Smithy (Hazel Grove), i. 83, 350-52
Burton-in-Kendal, ii. 133-37
Calton Moor, i. 329
Carleton, ii. 188
Carlisle, i. 14, ii. 188-207, 214
Carlyle, Thomas, ii. 264-68
Carnforth, ii. 132
Carriers, i. 24, 311
Cavendish Bridge, i. 266, 279
Charles Edward, Prince (_see_ Rebellion of 1745).
Chorley, ii. 83, 86-88
Church Langton, i. 217-20
Churnet, River, i. 335
Clayton Green, ii. 88
Clayton-le-Woods, ii. 88
Clifton (near Manchester), ii. 68
Clifton (near Penrith), ii. 158-63
Clipston, i. 211
Clyde, River, ii. 272, 288, 289, 294, 307, 320
Coaches:—
Beehive, London and Manchester, i. 41
Carlisle Mail, i. 5-14
Carlisle Post Coach, i. 5
Courier, London and Glasgow, i. 29
Defiance, London and Manchester, i. 32, 34, 37, 41, 42, 308; ii. 65
Derby Dilly, Manchester and Derby, i. 309
Derby Fly, Derby and London, i. 290
Dumfries Coach, ii. 253, 255
Dumfries and Edinburgh Mail, ii. 283
Estafette, London and Manchester, i. 38
Flying Coach (1754), London and Manchester, i. 23
Flying Machine, London and Manchester, i. 24
Glasgow Mail, i. 5-21; ii. 149, 200, 268, 270-79, 286-88
Glasgow and Carlisle Diligence, ii. 271
Glasgow and Edinburgh Stage, i. 3
Handforth, Howe, Glanville & Richardson’s Manchester and London
Coach, i. 24
Independent, London and Manchester, i. 33
London Flying Machine (1770) Manchester and London, i. 24
London New and Elegant Diligence, Manchester and London, i. 25
Manchester Mail, London and Manchester, i. 25, 116; ii. 65
Manchester and Derby Mail, i. 310
Manchester Telegraph, London and Manchester, i. 33, 37-9, 41; ii. 66
New Diligence, Manchester and London, i. 25
Peveril of the Peak, London and Manchester, i. 22, 41, 42
Plummer’s Glasgow and London Coach, i. 5
Prince Cobourg, London and Manchester, i. 32
Red Rover, London and Manchester, i. 41, 43
Regulator, London and Manchester, i. 33
Royal Defiance, London and Manchester, i. 33
Coaching, i. 2-51, 125, 289, 309; ii. 129-32, 137, 147-53, 199-202,
230, 253, 255, 270-72, 274-79, 283-88, 296-98
Coaching accidents, i. 14, 42; ii. 147, 283, 285-88
Coaching and Carrying Notabilities:—
Ainslie, Jack, ii. 245-47
Anderson, James, ii. 165
Barnes, James, ii. 150
Bass, William, i. 311
Baxendale, Joseph, i. 311
Bird, “Parson,” ii. 149
Bryden, John, ii. 149
Byrns, Jim, i. 50; ii. 150
Campbell, Hugh, ii. 287
Chaplin, William, i. 33, 43
Davies, Tom, i. 47
Douglas, Harry, i. 46
Drydens, the, ii. 149
Eade, George, ii. 155
Goodfellow, John, ii. 283
Hoorn, William, i. 3
Horne, Benjamin Worthy, i. 43
Inns, Samuel, i. 47
Jervis, William, i. 48
Johnson, Isaac, ii. 150
Lacy, H. C., i. 25, 29; ii. 65
MacGeorge, James, ii. 283
Meecher, James, i. 47
Nelson, Robert, i. 41
Nightingale, Robert, ii. 148
Parkin, James, ii. 148
Pickford, Matthew, i. 24, 311
Pooley, John, ii. 151
Ramsay of Barnton, ii. 148
Reed, John, ii. 149
Sherman, Edward, i. 34-38, 43
Skaife, Edward, i. 50
Snow, Bob, i. 46
Teather, John, ii. 147, 199
Telfers, the, ii. 150
Venables, the, i. 49
Walker, John, i. 4.
Wall, Joe, i. 46
Waterhouse, William, i. 33, 34
Cockfosters, i. 121
Compton, i. 309
_Convagata_, Stanwix, ii. 205
Cook, Thomas (originator of railway excursions), i. 244
Countess Pillar, ii. 169, 171
Crawford, ii. 270, 288
Crompton, Samuel, inventor, ii. 28, 75-83
Cuckoo Bush, i. 266
Dane, River, i. 336, 337
Denighton Bridge, ii. 290
Derby, i. 75, 89, 281, 285-306
_Derventio_, Derby, i. 285
Derwent, River, i. 285, 304
Devil’s Beef Tub, ii. 272, 282
Dinwoodie Green, ii. 269, 273
Dorfcocker, ii. 84
Douglas Mill, ii. 290
Douglas Water, ii. 290
Dove, River, i. 324, 329
Dunstable, i. 61, 154
Dyrham Park, i. 124
Eakley (or Inckley) Lane, i. 173
Eamont Bridge, ii. 175-79
Eamont River, ii. 171, 175
East Langton, i. 217-20
Ecclefechan, ii. 264-68
Eden, River, ii. 171, 204
Elvanfoot, ii. 269, 272, 273
Elvaston, i. 281-85
End Moor, ii. 137
Ericstane Brae, ii. 269, 271, 273, 284
Esk, River, ii. 210, 214, 217
Evan Water, ii. 273, 284-88
Farleton Knott, ii. 134, 137
Farnworth, ii. 69
Faxton, i. 208-10
Finchley, i. 115
Firwood, ii. 75
Flamstead, i. 153
Flash, i. 342-45
Forton, ii. 107
Foxton Locks, i. 220
Friar’s Wash, i. 152
Galgate, ii. 107
Garstang, ii. 105-7
Gayhurst, i. 170-72
Giant’s Grave, the, ii. 183-85
Glasgow, ii. 296-324
Glen Magna (or Great Glen), i. 222
Gorhambury, i. 151
Goslin Syke, ii. 209
Gotham, i. 262-66
Great Glen (or Glen Magna), i. 222
Gretna Green, i. 14; ii. 210, 218, 222-53
“Gretna Green” Marriages:—
Bourbon, Prince Charles Ferdinand, and Penelope Smyth, ii. 249
Deerhurst, Viscount, ii. 248
Drumlanrig, Viscount, and Caroline Clayton, ii. 249
Dundonald, Earl of, and Katharine Barnes, ii. 248
Erskine, Lord Chief Justice, and Sarah Buck, ii. 247
Ibbetson, Captain, and Lady Adela Villiers, ii. 245
Lovell, Captain Francis, and Lady Rose Somerset, ii. 249
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, and Ellen Turner, ii. 242-44
Westmoreland, Earl of, and Miss Child, ii. 244
Grindley Marsh, i. 352
Gunpowder Plot, i. 171
Hackleton, i. 177
Hackthorpe, ii. 156
Hadley Green, i. 124
Hall-i’-th’-Wood, ii. 28, 76-83
Hamilton, ii. 292-94
Hamps, River, i. 330
Hanging Bridge, i. 324-26, 329
Hardingstone, i. 178
Hassockwell Burn, ii. 272
Hathern, i. 261
Hazel Grove (Bullock Smithy), i. 83, 349-52
Heaton Chapel, near Stockport, i. 352
Heaton Norris, i. 352
Heaviley, i. 352
Helm Wind, the, ii. 146
Heron Syke, ii. 134
Hest Bank, ii. 120, 122, 129, 132
Highgate, i. 55, 115
High Hesket, ii. 187, 244
Hockliffe, i. 3, 61, 155
Hogstye End, i. 165
Hope Green, i. 349
Hopping Hill, i. 210
Horton, i. 174, 176
Horwich, ii. 84
Hucks Brow, ii. 147, 153
Inckley (or Eakley), Lane, i. 173
Inns (mentioned at length):—
Bay Horse, near Lancaster, ii. 107
Beattock Inn, ii. 270, 298
Bedford Arms, Woburn, i. 109-11, 163
Bell, Derby, i. 290
Black Bull, Glasgow, ii. 302
Black Swan, Mountsorrel, i. 251
Bottom Inn, near Leek, i. 331
Bridgewater Arms, Manchester, i. 25, 26, 29, 33; ii. 65
Bull and Mouth, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, i. 19, 34, 37, 44
Bull’s Head, Eakley Lane, i. 174
Bull’s Head, Loughborough, i. 260
Bull’s Head, Manchester, ii. 64
Bull’s Head, Salford, ii. 24
Bush, Carlisle, i. 5; ii. 200, 245, 246
Crewe and Harpur’s Arms, Swarkestone, i. 278
Crook, Tweedshaws, ii. 284
Crown, Eamont Bridge, ii. 174
Cuckoo Bush, Gotham, i. 266
Fleur-de-lis, St. Albans, i. 127, 128
George and Dragon, Eakley Lane, i. 174
Gloucester Arms, Penrith, ii. 181
Green Man (Bottom Inn), i. 331
Green Man and Black’s Head, Ashbourne, i. 322
Gretna Hall, ii. 229, 240-42, 245, 249, 251
Gretna Hotel, ii. 229
Greyhound, Shap, ii. 151, 155
Horton Inn, i. 174
Horwich Moorgate, ii. 84
Kedleston Inn, i. 306
King’s Head (now Queen’s Head), Springfield, ii. 233, 236, 238, 240
Lathbury Inn, i. 169
Maxwell Arms, Springfield, ii. 233, 235
New Inn, Hackleton, i. 177
Old Black Bull, Moffat, ii. 281
Old Man and Scythe, Bolton, ii. 71-73
Old Rover’s Return, Manchester, ii. 64
Old White Lion, Finchley, i. 116
Plough, Shap Fell, ii. 153
Red Lion, Hazel Grove, i. 351
Royal Hotel and New Bridgewater Arms, Manchester, i. 29; ii. 65
Saracen’s Head, Glasgow, ii. 298-302
Sark Bar, ii. 228
Seven Stars, Manchester, ii. 24-64
Sun (Poet’s Corner), ii. 64
Swan with Two Necks, Lad Lane, i. 25, 32, 33
Tempest Arms, Horwich Moor, ii. 84
Tontine, Glasgow, ii. 298, 303
Two Lions, Penrith, ii. 182
Welcome into Cumberland, Eamont Bridge, ii. 152, 176, 179
White Lion, Stockport, i. 357
White Swan, Mountsorrel, i. 252
Irk, River, ii. 5
Irlam-o’-th’-Height, ii. 68
Irwell, River, ii. 5, 67, 68
Islington, i. 112
Johnstone Bridge, ii. 270
Kearsley, ii. 69
Kedleston Hall, i. 307
Kegworth, i. 89, 91, 261
Kelmarsh, i. 210
Kendal, ii. 138-45
Kent River, ii. 122, 125, 139
Kent’s Bank, ii. 122, 124
Kentigern, Saint, ii. 308-12
Kibworth Beauchamp, i. 221
King Arthur’s Drinking Cup, ii. 174
King Arthur’s Round Table, ii. 173
Kingsthorpe, i. 196
Kingston-on-Soar, i. 262
Kingstown, ii. 209
Kirk Langley, i. 306
Kirkpatrick, ii. 263
Kirtlebridge, ii. 264
Kirtle Water, ii. 263, 264
Lamport, i. 203-7
Lancaster, ii. 108-20
Lancaster Sands, ii. 122-32
Langtons, the, i. 217-20
Larkhall, ii. 291
Lathbury, i. 169
Leek, i. 85, 323, 331-35
Leicester, i. 71, 95, 223-46
Lesmahagow, ii. 272, 291
Levenshulme, i. 352
Lockerbie, ii. 269, 279
Lockington, i. 266
London Colney, i. 125
Longsight, i. 352
Longtown, ii. 211, 212, 213, 253
Lonsdale, The “Bad Lord,” ii. 157
Loughborough, i. 73, 84, 91, 94, 259-61
Low Hesket, ii. 188
Lowther Castle, ii. 156-58
Lowther River, ii. 171-73
_Luguvallum_, Carlisle, ii. 189, 205
Lune, River, ii. 108, 118
Lyne, River, ii. 210
Macadam, John Loudon, ii. 280
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, i. 246-48
Macclesfield, i. 84, 323, 326, 337-42
Mackworth, i. 306
Maidwell, i. 210
Manchester, ii. 1-68
_Mancunium_, Manchester, ii. 9
Manifold, River, i. 330
Market Harborough, i. 96, 212-17, 254
Markyate Street, i. 61, 153
Mayfield, i. 326
Meikleholmside, ii. 284
Mein Water, ii. 264
Merkland, ii. 263
Milk, River, ii. 269
Milton Bryant, i. 157
Moffat, ii. 269-71, 273, 274, 279-84
Monken Hadley, i. 120, 122
Moore, Thomas (poet), i. 262, 326-9
Moses Gate, ii. 69
Mountsorrel, i. 73, 95, 248-52
Mungo, Saint, ii. 308-12
Myerscough, ii. 105
Naseby, Battle of, i. 211
Nene, River, i. 185
Nethan, River, ii. 291
Newport Pagnell, i. 61, 109, 166-69
Northampton, i. 66, 96, 175, 184-96
Oadby, i. 223
Old-time Travellers (in general), i. 15-22, 51-111
Bamford, Samuel, i. 51-111
Boswell, James, i. 298, 321-23; ii. 301
Bright, John, i. 22, 199
Brougham, Lord, ii. 164
Eldon, Earl of, ii. 226
Granville, Dr., ii. 154, 164
Gray, Thos., ii. 125, 301
Hawker, Col., i. 9; ii. 235, 274
Hume, David, ii. 201
Johnson, Dr., i. 298; ii. 301
Mandeville, Sir John, i. 148-50
Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick, i. 16-19
Wesley, Rev. John, i. 142, 168
Wilson, Professor John, i. 6
Old-time Travelling, i. 3-51, 125; ii. 222-53, 274, 298
Osmaston Manor, i. 308
Ouse, River, i. 109, 173
Over Sands, ii. 122-32
Oxendon, i. 212
Peel Towers, ii. 159
Pendlebury, ii. 68
Pendleton, ii. 68
Pennersaughs, ii. 264
Penrith, i. 14; ii. 179-87
Penwortham, ii. 92
“Peterloo,” i. 53, 326; ii. 39-41
Petterill, River, ii. 187
Pickford & Co., i. 310
Piddington, i. 176
Poynton, i. 349
Prestbury, i. 345-47
Preston, i. 84, 87; ii. 83, 90-105
Prince Charles Edward (_see_ Rebellion of 1745).
Pytchley Hunt, the, i. 199
Quakers, the (origin of the name), i. 289
Quarndon, i. 306
Queen’s Cross, near Northampton, i. 99, 178-84
Quorn Hunt, the, i. 212, 253-57
Quorndon, or Quorn, i. 95, 252-59, 306
Railways, i. 43; ii. 55, 107, 122, 124, 130, 132, 200, 228, 270,
285, 288, 304
_Ratæ Coritanorum_, Leicester, i. 225-29
Rebellion of 1715, i. 270; ii. 90, 93-97, 104, 112, 196, 319
Rebellion of 1745, i. 169, 270-78, 287, 319, 324, 334; ii. 21, 98,
103, 144, 155, 160-63, 185, 187, 195-98, 260, 319
Redbourne, i. 111, 152
Ribble, River, ii. 90-92
Richard III., i. 238; ii. 180
Ring Cross, i. 112-15
Rivington Pike, ii. 85, 87
Rothley, i. 95, 246
Rothley Temple, i. 246
Rudyard Lake, i. 335
Rushton Marsh, i. 336
Rushton Spencer, i. 336
Russell family, i. 157-64
St. Albans, i. 56-61, 111, 125-50
Salford, ii. 67
Sark River, ii. 214, 217
Sark Bar, ii. 226-29
Scotforth, ii. 107
Shap, ii. 151, 155
Shap Abbey, ii. 156
Shap Fell, i. 54; ii. 146, 150
Shardlow, i. 281
Skerton, ii. 120
“Slash, Captain,” i. 198
Slyne, ii. 120
Soar, River, i. 244, 248, 262
Solway Moss, ii. 214-18
South Mimms, i. 124
Springfield, ii. 210, 214, 218, 226, 227, 234-36
Standish, Miles, ii. 86-88
Stanton-by-Bridge, i. 267
Stanwix, i. 11; ii. 189, 204-9
Stockport, i. 83, 323, 353-58
Stoke Goldington, i. 62, 99
Swarkestone Bridge, i. 267, 270, 273, 276-78
Swinscoe, or Swinecote, i. 329
“Teetotal,” origin of the word, i. 104
Telford, Thomas, i. 2, 10; ii. 263, 268, 271, 277-79
Thiefside, ii. 187, 188
Tolcross, ii. 296
Trent, River, i. 89, 254, 261, 266-70, 278-81
Turnpike Trusts, ii. 273-78
Tyringham, i. 170
Uddingston, ii. 296
_Verulamium_, St. Albans, i. 130, 150
_Voreda_, Old Penrith, ii. 187
Waggons (Manchester and London):—
Bass’s, i. 24
Cooper’s, i. 24
Hulse’s, i. 24
Pickford’s Flying Waggons, i. 24, 311
Washington’s, i. 24
Wood’s, i. 24
Walton-le-Dale, ii. 90
Wamphray, ii. 270, 274
Wanlip, i. 246, 251
Waterfall, i. 330
Waterhouses, i. 330
Wavendon, i. 166
West Linton, ii. 211
Whetstone, i. 56
Whittle-le-Woods, ii. 88
“Wise Men of Gotham,” i. 262-66
Woburn, i. 61, 109, 157, 163-65
Woburn Abbey, i. 157-62
Woburn Sands, i. 165
Wolsey, Cardinal, i. 244
Woodhouse Eaves, i. 253
Yanwath Hall, ii. 170
_Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury_
Transcriber’s Note:
In the paragraph beginning:
Shap is a large village.... (Chapter XX) there is an apparent missing
word which has been added by the transcriber.
You approach it over a sheep [missing word] down and across a narrow
bridge....
You approach it over a sheep track down and across a narrow bridge....
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Manchester and Glasgow Road — Volume II. (of II) - This Way to Gretna Green" ***
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