Charles G. Harper

“ Commerce is typified in the statues that decorate public buildings by a woman of noble proportions, clothed in classic dress, and in her face a majestic calm; but that is an abstraction. Commerce as understood here—and indeed everywhere—is a matter of telegrams and telephones, of bales, packing-cases, and feverish hurry; and I suppose—if you must feminise—the nearest real human beings to that classic convention are the mill-girls and the typists. For the rest, commerce is what you perceive here; a polluted river, darkened by factories, bridges, and railway viaducts ”

“ But it is a magnificent picture, this of Harbro town, that unfolds itself before the traveller as he comes in along the road. There, peaking up grandly, are the exquisite tower and crocketed spire of the ancient church, very lovely and worshipful, with the old timber-framed Grammar School humbly beneath, founded in 1614 by Robert Smyth, an old City of London official, its sides decorated with plaster panels and its stout timbers adorned with pious mottoes: the open space beneath designed for use as the Butter Market. ”

“ A field-path across the pleasant water-meadows of the river Ver leads from Gorhambury to Prae Mill House and so on to the road again, and thence to Redbourne, a sleepy village with a sleepy railway-station, fringed with meadows where donkeys and ponies graze and ducks and geese march and countermarch aimlessly, their inevitable later association with green peas and sage-stuffing happily hidden from them. ”

“ My first endeavour was to discover, if I could, a stable or outhouse of some sort, in which I could take up my lodgings—the last of the sort which I should want on my present journey. I had not hovered about the street long ere I espied a ladder reared against what appeared to be a hay-loft, so I crept up as daintily as if I had been mounting to a curtained bed of down, and found to my great joy that I was on a boarded floor, well-stored with hay. ”

“ The annals of the Hunt are extensive and the gossip endless, ranging through the whole gamut of sentiment: rising to Homeric laughter and sinking to the depths of mysticism, as when the older villagers tell you of the story, elderly when even they were young, of how Dick Burton, the huntsman, died and was buried in Quorndon churchyard, and how the hounds killed a fox on his grave at the close of the next hunting day. ”

“ Travellers who experienced the miseries of long-distance journeys were only too glad to be done with them, and to dismiss the memory of their sufferings. To have passed nearly forty-two hours continuously on the roof of a coach in severe weather, with every hair standing up like a porcupine’s quills, and with rain, dew, and hoar-frost as one’s dreary portion, forbade all that glamour with which that old era is regarded at this convenient distance of time.
Those who could endure such a journey without a break were few ”

“ To the right of the road on to Brixworth rises among a group of trees on the skyline a tall obelisk that piques curiosity. Traversing muddy lanes to the base of it, the explorer afflicted with an inquiring mind discovers, to his disgust, that it bears no inscription, and local inquiries result only in vague rustic talk of its being a monument to the great Duke of Wellington. Research proves it to be to a Duke of Devonshire; but although the rustics are thus proved to be wrong, the attitude of mind that leads them astray is, it will be allowed, entirely in order. ”

“ Wearily, and rather faintly, though with a good heart, I mounted the hills which enclose Buxton on the Lancashire side, and then, with greater ease, I began to descend the long road down to Whaley Bridge, my only refreshment being now and then a draught of water from the small mountain rills which trickled through their rock channels on the moors. After passing Whaley Bridge I began to ascend, slowly enough, the steep old road to Disley. ”

“ Passing Hope Green, the road becomes paved as to half of its width with granite setts, and then approaches Poynton, a cheerful village of modern red-brick country cottages with pleasant gardens and the “Vernon Arms” inn, displaying a heraldic sign boldly declaring Vernon semper viret—“Vernon always flourishes.” A railway bridge, spanning the road at the end of the village, brings us to Hazel Grove, situated where the highway to Chapel-en-le-Frith and Buxton goes off. ”

“ XVIII Whatever the truth of the old saying that the traveller might know, by the smell of the leather and the noise of the lapstones, when he was within a mile of Northampton, it scarcely holds good now, for although bootmaking, the ancient and distinctive trade of the town, is still its great staple industry, and is, as every one knows, infinitely larger and more important than ever before, it is scarcely to be distinguished at this distance. ”

“ Time was when your only drinking fountain was a tankard in one of the inns, and when the silk-mills themselves were the sole technical schools: and yet in those times Macclesfield still contrived to become great. That period of growing greatness, when the factory system first brought wealth to the Roes, the Brocklehursts, and other foremost silk-weavers, is reflected in the long rows of very urban, rather grim, houses as you enter the town from the direction of Leek, and in the great box-like brick front of the old “Macclesfield Hotel” of pre-railway days ”

“ Lord Tennyson sold milk, and that revolted many: an ennobled poet dealing in dairy produce is an anachronism, and the owner of an historic title entering into business and exercising all the arts of the commercial man while clinging to the privileges of his station is a thing that no one can look upon without sorrow.
Elvaston Castle is an odd place. Exploring in these byways, the wayfarer comes suddenly to it, as into a courtyard, where the church, with its tall pinnacled tower, stands to one side and the mansion on the other, with the courtyard itself littered like the approach to a farm. ”

“ Johnson is the great figure at Ashbourne. Here he for many years used to visit Dr. Taylor, at the great brick house, still standing, opposite the old Grammar School. It is named simply, and yet arrogantly, “The Mansion.” Tradition tells that the frontage was designed by an Italian architect: probably the dullest dog in his profession, if the solid, stolid, uninspired elevation is the measure of his capabilities. But how beautiful is the garden front, with its two gabled wings and the odd, but distinguished, pavilion between! ”

“ Leicester is the ultimate place on this road wherein the Londoner finds himself on equal terms with the inhabitants. At Derby he notices a slight change; but on approaching Manchester, he finds himself on the threshold of another order of things. He notices a suppressed energy in even the least active, and an abundant vitality everywhere ”

“ Those coach proprietors with the longest purses would, of course, in time have crushed the smaller men in this war of cheap prices; and already, before the railway came to sweep big men and little into one common limbo, those with slender resources were feeling the pinch of daily expenses, and could sometimes hardly settle their turnpike accounts—especially heavy on this road.
The onerous burden of the tolls payable by stage-coaches can scarcely be realised, save by stating a specific example. The amount incurred on a single journey to Manchester was no less than £5 13s. ”

“ IN THE COURTYARD, THE OLD TOWN HALL.
The modern Town Hall, eminently characteristic of the architecture that came into so extraordinary a vogue in the ’seventies and was completed in 1876, is of course in the style called “Queen Anne,” and largely in red brick. So greatly has the municipal business of Leicester grown that it is already much too small; but it is one of the most tasteful buildings of the kind in the country, and designed more with a view to excellence of detail than of the flamboyant eccentricity that has later prevailed. ”

“ CHOICE OF ROADS Leaving Ashbourne, the traveller has still a choice of routes to Manchester. He may go by the bleak and lofty road across the Derbyshire moorlands, with scarce a house for many miles to keep him company, by Newhaven Inn, and in the solemn companionship of the Roman road and the prehistoric tumuli, on to Buxton and by Whaley Bridge to Stockport; or he may choose the way by Leek and Macclesfield to Stockport, which is the old mail-coach route, and therefore pre-eminently the Manchester Road. ”

“ But to see a less crowded and less noisy Stockport would be a sorry thing, for it is the wealth-producing commerce of the place that makes it what it is, and the times when the railway-lorries cease to crash and rumble along the streets, and when the waggons, laden with mountainous heights of grey shirtings, are no longer seen on their way from the cotton-mills to Manchester warehouses, will be troublous times355 for not only mill-hand and manufacturer, but for every one. ”

“ It was a lovely morning, and my way lay through a tract of country which at every bend and undulation of the road, presented some object, or group, or opening upon scenery, which was continually suggestive of the fact, that this was indeed a land where men and women knew how to live and be happy at their own homes. ”

“ But there are other industries beside bell-founding at Loughborough. The ancient trade of bobbin-net making is still carried on, together with the hosiery and weaving and stocking-knitting that so thoroughly pervade Leicestershire and a good deal of Notts; and there are dye-works and engineering-shops too, a whole basketful of unromantic but useful and mutually dependent trades: the extensive coal-trade of the town ministering to the engineering and other power-using factories, and the big breweries subsisting upon the magnificent thirsts produced by coal-grit and the heat of furnaces. ”

“ It will be guessed from the foregoing that Lovely Loughborough is not a phrase by which the place can rightly be known. Only the narrow main street, where the old “Bull’s Head” inn still exhibits a gallows sign stretching from side to side overhead, is at all removed from commonplace, and the broad market-place is lined with modern buildings in which many of the great number of Loughborough’s flashily rebuilt inns that call themselves “hotels,” and are really nothing but drinking shops, are situated. ”

“ Long stretches of the roads themselves are altered, with the growth of towns, into something new and strange, and where Terror stalked starkly in days of yore and Romance sped, flaunting, by, smug suburbs spread their vistas of red-brick, paved, and kerbed and lighted, and only the doctor, the collectors of rates and taxes, and the cries of the evening newspaper-boys stir the pulses of the inhabitants. ”

“ The ’twenties of the nineteenth century were almost as remarkable for those early horseless vehicles, the steam carriages, as the present era is for petrol-driven and electric motor-cars. Railways, too, began early to threaten stage-and mail-coaching; and long, whirling, and involved controversies on road and rail traffic occupied the columns of the press, and overflowed into innumerable pamphlets.
Few people had sufficient imagination to foresee an era of mechanical locomotion ”

“ At the time when Bamford was growing up, and an eager recipient of ideas, England—and especially the operatives’, the artisans’, and the agricultural labourers’ England—was not the free country it is now. The working-classes had no votes, practically no education, and only too often, as the result of troubles caused by incessant foreign warfare, insufficient food. The country seethed with discontent—not a passing discontent, but a long, wretched era of sullen ill-will that outlasted Bamford’s own active period, and culminated in the Chartist agitation of 1839. ”

“ Several decent-looking farmers, who had left their produce in the market, stood in the cart-road watching the whole proceeding, and when the marines had left, they said, ‘Well, young fellow, you are the first blue-jacket that has slipt through the fingers of yonder scoundrels this long time.’ I entered into friendly conversation with these men, and as they were going my way I had their company on the road as far as Redbourn, where, after partaking with them a glass or two of ale, we parted. ”

“ Apart from the chief group of crumbling walls there stands a poor old battered one-legged and headless statue, said to represent Henry the Eighth, but unrecognisable, scored amazingly with the penknives and the initials of generations of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. The scene of past pomps and vanities is scarcely mournful, as some might find it; the sight of it makes history live again as human experience, not as we read it in the dulled pages of historical exercise. ”

“ A branch line of the London and North-Western Railway was constructed, crossing the road at this point, and with a station at the roadside. Thus brought into touch with the outer world, the simple souls of Hogstye End arose as one man, and demanded a new name for the place: and so the title of Woburn Sands was invented. To-day, the astonished traveller sees a typical twentieth-century township on the site of Hogstye End: a rosy, red-brick place, growing at the expense of Woburn itself ”

“ Albans every twenty-four hours, and it was calculated that the travellers passing through in the same time numbered no fewer than 1,000, of whom the coaches conveyed 600. The rest were those at the extremes of poverty and wealth, who rode in the waggons or walked; or sped by swiftly and luxuriously, in post-chaises or in their own private chariots. How many, one wonders, are the motor-cars that now daily speed, in clouds of dust, up Ridge Hill and so through London Colney and St. Albans to North Wales, or to Manchester and then, across the Border, into Scotland? ”