Charles G. Harper

“ SAILOR-MEN
But the greater number of the travellers along the Portsmouth Road, whether they walked or rode, were sailors; and so salt of the sea are the records of this old turnpike that the romance of old-time travel upon it is chiefly concerned with them that went down to brave the elements on board ship; or with those happy mariners who, having entered port, came speeding up to home and beauty with all the ardour of men tossed and buffeted by winds and waves on a two or three years’ cruise. ”

“ A short mile off the road, two miles below Petersfield, is the charmingly-situated village of Buriton. It is reached by a winding lane turning off the high-road, beside a finger-post and two ugly modern cottages. Hop-fields and maltings border the lane, which suddenly, at one of its turns, discloses the village, tucked away in the sheltered lower slopes of the rolling South Downs, clothed in places with short grass, and in others bald and showing the white chalk; while just above the village are woodlands of tall elm and branching oak, vociferous with rooks. ”

“ Even on a summer’s day one does not find the immediate neighbourhood of the “Seven Thorns” Inn particularly exhilarating or cheerful, for, although the country is open and unspoiled by buildings, yet the scenery lacks the suavity of generous land, prolific of fine timber and graceful foliage. The soil is ungrateful and unproductive; nourishing only the gorse and the hardy grasses that grow upon commons and cover the nakedness of the harsh sand and gravel of the surrounding country-side. ”

“ The old tower is four-square and stern, with only the picturesqueness that romance can find, while the belfried tower and the boldly-projecting clock that impends massively over the pavements of the High Street, and gives the time o’ day to the good folks of the town, are the pride of the eye and the delight of the artistic sense of all them that know how to appreciate at their true æsthetic value those memorials of the old corporate spirit of business and good-fellowship that have long since vanished from municipal practice. ”

“ It was only when the Augustan age of coaching had dawned that travellers began to feel any delight or exhilaration in road-travel; and that age was cut short so untimely by the Railway Era that the young fellows and the middle-aged men whose blood coursed briskly through their veins, and who knew a thing or two about horse-flesh, felt a not unnatural regret in the change, and conceived an altogether natural affection for the old régime. Their regret can be the more readily understood when one inquires into the beginnings of railway travel ”

“ The courtyards and coach-houses of the “Dolphin” are a sight to see and to wonder at. You gaze at them, and presently the old times seem to come crowding back. The eight-and-twenty coaches [Pg 282] (more or less, as you choose your period) that fared either way upon the Portsmouth Road seem more real to you who look upon these capacious stables; and the passengers, the coachmen and guards, the ostlers, and the horsey hangers-on of such places come upon the imagination with a great deal more of reality than is gained from the reading of books, howsoever eloquent. ”

“ I turn with a sigh of relief to a much larger and a great deal more interesting class of travellers who have found beneath the hospitable roof of the “Royal Anchor” both a hearty welcome and the best of good cheer; travellers who, however much we may like or dislike them, were men of character who did not owe everything to the dignities to which they were born; who, for good or ill, carved their own careers and have left a throbbing and enduring personality behind them, while a king or a queen is usually remembered merely by a Christian name and a Roman numeral. ”

“ The other highwayman was, meanwhile, in single combat with the guard, who having, so to speak, entrenched himself behind the half-buried coach, opened fire in answer to a pistol-shot from the enemy.
The blunderbuss of last century was an appalling weapon, with a bore like that of a small cannon, and a bell muzzle which poured forth slugs and small shot in a stream that spread, fan-like, until at the distance of a yard or so it could be confidently relied upon, not only to hit the object aimed at, but anything else within a space of six feet on either side. ”

“ Yet there were many still living who remembered ‘young Sam Carter’ as a dashing whip, who knew a good team when he sat behind them, and had handled the ribbons in a most workmanlike fashion. But the old fire and energy are still unquenched, either by the lapse of years or the pressure of hard times, and the veteran gladly gives the rein to memory and spins a yarn of the old coaching days. ”

“ On the right hand stands an enthusiastic group at the door of the “Jolly Sailor”: the landlord, in apron and shirt-sleeves, about to drink the soldiers’ healths in a bumper of very respectable proportions, his womenkind looking on, while a young hopeful, who has donned a saucepan by way of helmet, is “presenting arms” with a besom. An ancient, with a wooden leg and a crutch, is fiddling away with vigour, and a dog runs forward, barking. The long cavalcade is seen disappearing down the hill, while away in the distance is Portsmouth Harbour with its crowded shipping. ”

“ No surer way of rising to the kingly favour could have been devised. Henry listened to his adviser and took his advice, and Thomas Cromwell rose immediately to the highest pinnacle of power, a lofty altitude which in those times often turned men giddy and lost them their heads, in no figurative sense. None so bitter and implacable towards an old faith than those who, having once held it, have from one reason or another embraced new views; and Cromwell was no exception from this rule. ”

“ What else than a sorry jest is the boast of London’s five millions of people, when by far the greater proportion of those five millions never know what country life means, nor even what is the mitigated rusticity of a provincial town in whose centre you can open your casement of a morning and welcome the sun rising in a clear sky, listen to the morning chorus of the birds, and see, though you be in the very midst of the provincial microcosm, the fields and hedge-rows, the streams and rural lanes of the country-side? ”

“ But a grateful and profitable feature of Hampshire are the water-meadows that border the fishful streams of the Itchen, the Test, and the Avon. They merit all the commendation that Fuller gives them, and more; but, so far as the Portsmouth Road is concerned, Hampshire exhibits its most barren, ill-watered, and flinty aspects; from the point where it enters the county, near Liphook, past the chalky excrescence of Butser Hill, through the bare and barren downs of Chalton, to Portsmouth itself. ”

“ Amid this profusion of wild life, with the dark foliage of the fir trees, the lighter leaves of the beech, and the gaily-flowered hedgerows on either hand, there appeared before me the most incongruous wayfarer: a Jingle-like figure, tall and spare, with a tightly-buttoned frock-coat, and a silk hat of another era than this, set well back upon his head—one who might have wandered here from Piccadilly in the ’50’s and lost his way back. ”

“ The highway, but just now as lonely as most of the old coach-roads are usually become in these days of steam and railways, is alive with wagons and tradesmen’s carts, and neatly-kept footpaths are bordered with lamp-posts, furnished with oil-lamps.
This is the entirely modern neighbourhood of Waterlooville, a settlement nearly a mile in length, bordering the Portsmouth Road, and wearing not so much the appearance of an English village as that of some mushroom township in the hurried clearings of an American forest. ”

“ Poor folk took a shake-down, with what grace they might summon up, in some clean straw on the floor of outhouses and barns, and in this manner slept the sailor-men who were continually tramping up the road or down. Not that sailors were necessarily poor, but the bedrooms that held royalty were judged to be above the tastes and circumstances of poor Jack, to whom, certainly, clean straw in a barn would seem at any rate infinitely better than the gloomy forecastle which he had just left. ”

“ Behind their prosperous-looking fronts are the vast stable-yards, approached from the High Street by yawning archways that “once upon a time” admitted the coaches, and whence issued the carriages and post-chaises of a by-gone day; now echoing with the rumble of the omnibus that plies between the town and the railway-station, laden chiefly with the sample-boxes of enterprising bagmen. But in that “once upon a time,” whose chronology finally determined and came to an end in the ’40’s, there was a superabundance of coach traffic here. ”

“ But if he submits so easily, the women of the crowd have to be reckoned with, and are doing nearly all the fighting. The furious virago in the foreground is pulling at a midshipman’s hair with all the strength of one hand, while with the other she is lugging his ear off, kicking him, at the same time, with her knee. A sailor in the rear, with an animated expression of countenance, has hold of her arm, and appears to be aiming a blow at her head with the butt-end of a pistol; while another woman with a heavy mop is preparing to fell him to the ground. ”

“ Roused from your fitful nocturnal slumber by the horn or bugle; the lashing and cracking of whips; the noisy arrivals at turnpike gates, or by a search for parcels (which, after all, are not there) under your seat: to say nothing of solicitous drivers who pester you with their entirely uncalled-for attentions.
9. Discovering, at a diverging-point in your journey, that the “Tally-ho” coach runs only every other day or so, or that it has been finally stopped. ”

“ The old-time aspect of Portsmouth is gone for ever. An almost complete transformation has taken place in appearance, in thought, and manner in little over a century, and where the body of Jack the Painter hung, high as Haman, from a lofty gallows on Blockhouse Beach, no criminals swing to-day. ”

“ However that may be, certain it is that when our day is done, when Steam shall have been dethroned and natural forces of which we know nothing have revolutionized the lives of our descendants, those heirs of all the ages will look back regretfully upon this Era of ours, and wistfully meditate upon the romantic life we led towards the end of the nineteenth century!
The glamour of old-time travel has appealed to me equally with others of my time, and has led me to explore the old coach-roads and their records. ”

“ We will not turn aside to visit the site of the “Sussex Bell,” or the remains of the Hammer Ponds that tell of the old iron-foundries and furnaces that were wont to make the surrounding hills resound and despoiled the dense woods of their noblest trees for the smelting of iron ore. We have no present business so far from the road in a place that has harboured no notorious evil-doer, nor has ever been the home of any distinguished man. ”

“ Some jolly Jack-a-Dandy stands upon the roof, at the imminent risk of his neck, and scrapes a fiddle to what, considering the pace of the coach, must have been a tune of the most agonizing description; while an amorous fellow hugs his girl behind. The Union Jack is, of course, in a prominent position, and a riotous, devil-me-care figure sits one of the horses backwards. I do not observe any one of this merry company “heaving the lead overboard,” as became the pleasing fashion among sailor-men flush of money who rode outside the day coaches to town. ”

“ And Putney church-tower is altogether dwarfed by the huge public-house that stands opposite: a flaunting insult scarcely less flagrant than the shame put upon the House of God by Cromwell and his fellows who sate in council of war in the chancel, and discussed battles and schemed strife and bloodshed over the table sacred to the Lord’s Communion. Putney has suffered from its nearness to London. ”

“ These “hangers,” as hillside woods are locally termed, are a special feature of this part of Hampshire, and are not to be found in anything like this profusion in any other part of the county. They form the loveliest setting imaginable to an old-world village of this character, and it is difficult to say at what season of the year such a place as Buriton, backed with its woods, is most beautiful. Spring finds the forest trees bare and black, with waving branches [Pg 286] scraping, like wizard fingers, gnarled and crooked, the leaden skies of moist February and windy March ”

“ But memories of coaching days on this old road are rather meagre, for, although sea-faring business sent a great many travellers journeying between London and the dockyard town, the Portsmouth Road was never celebrated for crack coaches or for record times, and when coaching was in full swing, men saw as little romance in being dragged down the highways behind four horses as we can discover in railway travelling. ”

“ Claremont is a house of sad memories, destined, so it might seem to the superstitious, to witness a succession of tragedies and sorrows.
Neither the house nor the estate are of any considerable age; the estate originating in a fancy of Sir John Vanbrugh,—that professional architect and amateur dramatist of Queen Anne’s time,—for a suburban retreat. He purchased some land at Esher, between the village and the common, and, foregoing his usual ponderous style of piling up huge masses of stone and brickwork, put up quite a small and unpretentious brick house upon it. ”

“ Queen Anne, who, after all, seems rather less of a sportswoman than any other of our Queens, came to Liphook and Woolmer for the express purpose of seeing the red deer whom her remote ancestor, the Conqueror, “loved like a father”; and after her time royal personages came thick and fast, like swallows in summer, and we find them conferring a deathless fame upon the old inn by the feasts they ordered, the pretty things they said, and the number of equipages they hired for the conveyance of themselves and their trains towards the sea-coast. ”

“ When November fades away in mists and midnight frosts into Christmastide and the bleak days of January, when days draw out and “the cold begins to strengthen,” as the country folk say, then the hanger is etched black and solemn against the snow-powdered downs, and you can discern every high-perched homestead of the rooks, swinging in the topmost branches of the tallest trees, and looking twice their actual size by this adventitious juxtaposition of black and white. ”

“ No road so wild and lonely as the Portsmouth Road, from the time when mail-coaches first travelled along it, in 1784, until recent years, when houses began to spring up in the wildest spots. From Putney Heath to Portsdown Hill the road runs, for more than three-quarters of its length, past ragged heaths, tumbled commons, and waste lands, chiefly unenclosed; and the sombre fir tree, with its brothers, the larch and pine, is the predominant feature of the copses and woodlands that line the way. ”

“ The last royal personages to stay at the old inn were the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria, who walked in the garden or showed themselves at the windows before the crowds who never failed to obstruct the roads, eager for a glance at their future Queen. ”