CHAPTER XVII.

_THE MODERN WELL WALK._

At the present day all that remains of the original Well Walk are the great elms on the bank above the bench at the Heath end of it, with two houses so facially improved that I do not recognise them, and the celebrated Long Room (Weatherall Place), converted to a private house about a hundred years ago. Gainsborough Mansions on one side of the way, and Gainsborough Gardens on the other, which memorise the name of the donor of the Wells, and the 6 acres of waste land lying about it, afford a striking proof of the growing value of ground for building purposes in the near neighbourhood of town, and the magnificent increase in the value of the Wells property to the poor of Hampstead.

In 1811 Well Walk and thereabouts contained thirty-nine houses. In one of these lived Thomas Park, the engraver, father of the precocious historian of Hampstead. It did not escape Mr. Abrahams that he was occupying a house rated at £24 per annum, which should rightly have been rated at £36. It is a pity that no inhabitant of Hampstead appears to have taken any particular notice, or have kept any record of the remarkable young man—Park junior—who, at an age when other youths are scarcely out of the playground, was eagerly collecting materials, and seeking every fragment of information he could obtain towards the history of this interesting suburb.

Beyond the fact of his valuable work[270] and that he was the son of a respectable inhabitant, we know nothing of the youth whose after-career it would have been interesting to follow.[271]

In 1817, between the publication of his first poems and ‘Endymion,’ Keats was lodging in Well Walk. The house was either the first or second from the tavern,[272] and its proprietor was Bentley, the postman. It was here, feeling the benefit that Hampstead air had been to himself, that he invited his consumptive brother Tom to join him; and here he nursed and tended him till his death, probably hastening by this act of fraternal devotion the development of the germs of the same fatal disease in himself.

His next-door neighbours were two ancient, soft-hearted single gentlewomen, whom Keats, who had a lively sense of humour, informed his sister ‘possessed a dog between them, who had grown so fat,’ ‘a corpulent little beast,’ he calls it, ‘that when taken out for its daily exercise it had to be coaxed along at the end of an ivory-tipped cane.’ The ladies, the Miss Jacksons, continued to reside in Well Walk long after Keats had left it, and the one who lived longest attained a sort of local fame and memory, from the fact of her leaving her dog a legacy, to insure its being taken care of after her death, the legacy taking the form of a life annuity to the animal.

Keats’ visit to Scotland occurred whilst he was Bentley’s tenant, and at a time when his bodily strength was scarcely equal to the fatigue of rough roads and climbing hills, and he writes:

‘I assure you I often long for a seat and a cup of tea at Well Walk.’

After his return, this walk with its seats and shade became his favourite outdoor resort; and here it was, as we have elsewhere said, that Hone saw him for the last time.

In 1830 Well Walk received another memorable tenant in Constable, the painter, who from his first coming to London had known and loved Hampstead. Immediately after leaving the mills and streams of Berghold, we find him passing whole days upon the Heath, and, with all a poet’s ineffable love of Nature, making his fairest transcripts of her at his ‘Sweet Hampstead’—an endless treasury to him for all the purposes of his art. After his marriage he had been in the habit of spending a portion of the summer months here with his wife and children, always with the same result, ‘no illness amongst them.’ But this year (1830), instead of returning to the old lodgings at No. 2, Lower Terrace, he rented a house in Well Walk, from which in the August of the same year I find him writing to his friend Leslie:

‘Will this weather tempt you to walk over the fields to my pretty dwelling in Well Walk?’

In the next year (1831) I think it is quite clear that, for some reason or other, he gave up this house in favour of a larger and better situated one, else why should he write thus to his friend Dean Fisher?—

‘This house is to my wife’s heart’s content.... It is situated on an eminence _at the back of the spot in which you saw us_’ (Well Walk), ‘and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe, from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St. Paul’s in the air seems to realize Michael Angelo’s words on seeing the Pantheon, “I will build such a thing in the sky.”’

‘We see the woods and lofty grounds of the East Saxons to the north-east.’

The Well Walk then extended some distance, but in a straight line and on level ground. Dean Fisher says the house he visited was at the bottom of the walk, and Constable himself that the one he is writing of was on an eminence. I imagine that it must have stood on the same side of the way as the Long Room, but beyond the walk, on the slope of the rising ground about Christchurch, where at that time of open spaces such a view was possible. I remember an old and respected inhabitant of Hampstead High Street telling me in 1859 that thirty years previous you could see from what he called ‘Perrin’s Corner’ Erith Reach, and the ships sailing up and down the Thames, while the back-windows of his house looked over open fields to Pancras. The house we are in quest of was rented at £52 per annum, and £24 taxes—not an unimportant house in those days—yet when William Howitt wrote his ‘Northern Heights of London’ there was no house in Well Walk possessing such a view as Constable had described; nor could he,[273] though not much more than thirty years had passed since the delightful painter of the ‘Cornfield, a View near Hampstead,’ and the ‘Fir-tree Avenue on the Heath,’ had resided in the vicinity, discover his sometime abode.

Here the artist lost his beloved and loving wife, and wrote in his diary under the date of her death, ‘I shall now call Hampstead home.’

Whereabouts, I wonder, stood that elegant group of trees, ashes, elms and oaks, of which he made a study, and that were to be of as much service to him as if he had bought the field in which they grew? But his sketch-books were full of the likenesses of the sylvan beauties of the Heath and its neighbourhood—the beautiful trees that, like the clouds, seemed to ask him to do something like them. Perhaps those in the grounds of Mr. Charles Holford, of which he made a sketch, may still be flourishing.

In 1832 he exhibited ‘Sir Richard Steele’s Cottage, Hampstead,’ and the next year finds him lecturing on art in the Assembly Room on Holly Bush Hill. The date of his last lecture before the Literary and Scientific Institution was July 26, 1836. I was told a little story of Constable, recounted by his son to an old gentleman who resided at Hampstead, which exhibits the painstaking genius of the painter. As a boy, he said, he used to sleep in his father’s studio, and one of his earliest recollections was that of being startled by seeing his father enter the room in the middle of the night, very lightly clad, with a candle in one hand and a brush in the other, for the purpose of adding a suddenly conceived idea or additional touch to a picture, before the suggestion should have faded away. After the death of his wife, Constable retained his Hampstead house as an occasional residence. He died in London in 1837, and rejoined his beloved and two of their little ones in the churchyard at Hampstead.

In the magnificent summer of 1834 the brothers Chalons, as full of charm, brightness and fancy as their pictures, spent six delightful weeks at Hampstead, giving Constable an opportunity he never lost of pointing out his pet views and all the loveliest trees and best bits of his ‘Sweet Hampstead.’

I remember Mr. and Mrs. Valentine Bartholomew, who knew them well, telling me the following story of the pleasant brothers: how a very large, straggling old vine which covered the back of their house, and that of a titled neighbour in a quiet street off a then fashionable square, suddenly appeared _en papilotte_, to the astonishment of the next-door household, whose share of the vine had never developed a single blossom. A few days later a ladder was laid against the wall, and one or other of the brothers ascended it, and appeared deeply interested in examining the vintage, which, looking at the number of paper bags covering the vine, appeared to be quite wonderful. The artists’ old French manservant and the housekeeper next door were on very friendly terms, and she had essayed all her arts to discover the mystery of the one-sided behaviour of the vine; but the secret of its productiveness was his master’s, and Le Brun was impenetrable. At last—for there had been other innocent delusions and merry conceits on the part of the light-hearted brothers—this daughter of Eve fell upon the plan of pretending distress at the fruiterer’s failing to send grapes in time for dessert, conscious that, if there was any reality in appearances, this feint would discover it, and was more than ever confounded when the old Frenchman made his appearance no great while after, with messieurs his masters’ compliments, and a basket of delicious grapes—‘their own fruit.’

Doubtless there have been other residents in Well Walk of ‘mark and likelihood,’ but I am ignorant of them. The most important houses in it in my time were the Pump-House School, the Long Room, and its close neighbour, the gloomy-looking Bergh, then the officers’ quarters of the militia barracks close by. This, I am told, is now a private residence, with handsome grounds and garden, concealed by high walls. The Wells died out slowly, for outsiders still retained their faith in the potency of the waters.

When Dr. Hughson in 1809 published his ‘History of London and its Neighbourhood,’ he states that Hampstead then ranked high for the number and variety of its medicinal waters; that beside the old spa of chalybeate quality, there were two other kinds of mineral water. One of them, a saline spring, was discovered by Mr. John Bliss, an eminent surgeon of Hampstead, 1802. The other owed its disclosure to Dr. Goodwin, another local practitioner; so that it would appear that, though no longer a place of amusement, the Wells continued to be resorted to by invalids.

In my own time it was quite common for working men from Camden and Kentish Towns, and even places much farther off, to make a Sunday morning’s pilgrimage to Hampstead to drink the water, and carry home bottles of it as a specific for hepatic complaints, and as a tonic and eye-water.

We know from modern analysis that only one of the springs contained sufficient iron to be of any medical use, but, on the other hand, we have the practical testimony of Dr. Gibbons, and of the royal physician, Dr. Arbuthnot, to their curative qualities. May not modern building and drainage have interfered with the sources of the springs and deteriorated them?

There has always been an uncertainty in modern times as to the origin of the chapel in Well Walk. Hampstead’s own historian, Park, appears to have had no better foundation for his short notice of it (p. 236, 1818 edition) than surmise and tradition; but there are cases in which Tradition may be trusted as the handmaid of Truth, and this is certainly one of them.

The chapel appears to have served a very useful purpose for more than a hundred years, ninety-three of them as a chapel of ease to the parish church, St. John’s Chapel, on Downshire Hill, not having been built till 1818. For many years after I knew Hampstead these three continued to be the only places of worship connected with the Establishment; now I understand there are, within the fourteen ecclesiastical districts into which the parish is divided, as many churches, besides a number of other places of worship.

The opening of St. John’s Chapel of Ease to St. John’s, Frognal, does not appear to have interfered with the congregation attending the chapel in Well Walk, who continued to worship there till Christ Church was built, when the congregation removed to it, about 1852-53. Then the chapel in Well Walk was let to the Scotch Presbyterians, and it remained their place of worship till about 1861-62, after which (never having been consecrated) it was let to the Hampstead Rifle Volunteers, who were in want of a drill-hall, and it continued to be retained for this purpose till about a dozen years ago, when it was taken down and the site used for building upon.

A gentleman then connected with the Hampstead Rifle Corps, and who was deputed to oversee the alterations in the building, necessary to fit it for its new purpose, has kindly enabled me to follow, and with his help unravel, the story of the origin of the Wells Chapel.

The conversion of this mutable building to military uses involved the taking down of all its former fittings—pews, galleries (of which there were three), etc. The space thus gained resulted in a vast room, 90 feet long by some 36 feet wide, and 24 feet high. A wainscot, about 4 feet high, ran round the wall, and on removing a portion of it at the north-east end of the apartment, a sort of niche or recess in the depth of the wall, which was very thick, disclosed itself, and was clearly, to men acquainted with such appearances, the place where the basin and discharge-pipes of an old fountain had been. It had remained hidden behind the wainscot from the time this had been put up. This was surprise the first; but ‘some time after’ (I will let my correspondent tell the story) ‘the workmen, who were cleaning the walls for recolouring, came to tell me that they had found some old paintings on the walls. On going to look at them, I found that there were just nine life-sized figures representing the Muses. There could be no doubt about this, for the name was painted under each figure—Clio, Euterpe, and so on. These paintings were seen by various people; but they were rather faint and much damaged, and, as the work of redecoration had to go on, they were again coloured over with distemper.’ Now, leaving the region of fact and entering that of speculation, I think that this large apartment, some 90 feet long by 36 feet wide, could not have been the chapel spoken of by various writers.[274] I cannot but think it was the old Pump Room, converted afterwards into a large chapel (with its galleries capable of holding some 1,000 persons). My correspondent adds: ‘Besides its great size, one can hardly imagine that such uncanonical figures as the Muses could ever have been painted on the walls of a chapel, and I am sure that the paintings I saw were as old as the building itself.’

All this mystery was delightful to me, for I felt sure I held the key to it. I remembered the fine Assembly Room, 60 feet long, and elegantly decorated, and felt confident that Park’s belief was vindicated, and that, as he had stated, the chapel in Well Walk was ‘made out of the old Assembly Room.’ This room, however, was stated to have been 60 feet long, and here were 90 feet to be disposed of. But my informant quickly wrote: ‘Thanks to our correspondence, I think I see a way of explaining that which has perplexed you with respect to the chapel mentioned by the authors you quote. Your last letter seems to give the clue to the whole matter. If you will kindly refer to the sketch-plan I sent you, you will see that the size of the building there depicted is given as 90 feet long by 36 feet wide. I have, perhaps, rather mistaken the width. Now, if you take off from this building 60 feet, you will have left an apartment 30 feet long. Was not this smaller room the Pump Room, and the other the Assembly Room? If you look at the view of this old building given in Baines, you will see that it is one as seen from the outside, and I know from my own observation as a surveyor that from its style this building must have been built about the commencement of the last century. I consider,’ adds this gentleman, ‘that the Pump Room and Assembly Room were converted into what was known as Well Walk Chapel in the last century.’[275] The change took place, as we know, in the first quarter of it. Subsequently I learned that the paintings were at the end and sides of the building farthest from the recess, which, of course, appertained to the Pump Room. Baines’ view shows that there were eight windows on the north-west side of the building, next the Well Walk, and my informant thinks the windows on the opposite side were equal in number. The figures of the Muses were painted in the spaces between the windows and at the end. The exterior walls of the building were of red brick, but had been coloured over, and, after the mode of building in those times, were very solid. I think this discovery definitively establishes the origin of the Well Walk Chapel, and proves Park to have been correct.

Until pretty deep in the fifties, the upper part of Well Walk possessed a small but beautiful grove of century-old lime-trees, now very nearly destroyed by the unskilful hands of someone ignorant of the knowledge of forestry. It is perhaps noteworthy that Mr. Gurney Hoare, his brother, wife and children, were members of the Well Walk Chapel congregation, the first part of the family, it is said, to become members of the Church of England.

About fifteen years ago the public basin on the left-hand side of Well Walk as you entered it from the Heath was removed, and a new stone structure, with pipe and basin, was placed by the Wells Charity on the opposite side of the Walk. A memorial tablet attached to this structure bears the following inscription: ‘To the Memory of the Honourable Susannah Noel, who with her son Baptist, third Earl of Gainsborough, gave this Well, with six acres of land, to the use and benefit of the poor of Hampstead, December 20, 1691.’

Under this inscription appear the following lines:

‘Drink, traveller, and with strength renewed Let kindly thoughts be given To her who has thy thirst subdued, Then tender thanks to Heaven.’

G. W. Potter, Esq., a gentleman eminently interested in all that concerns Hampstead and its inhabitants, and to whom I am indebted for much valuable information, tells me that people come in numbers to the fountain of a morning, but the water barely drips, and is only very slightly chalybeate in character. But this circumstance induced him, as one of the trustees of the Wells Charity, to get his fellow-trustees to make a small grant of money to be expended in the endeavour to discover the old chalybeate spring, and in greater volume. The Vestry’s workmen were accordingly employed under his direction, with the result that a source of the true chalybeate waters in abundant quantity was discovered. ‘Unfortunately, the analysis showed that the water contained a small amount of organic matter, and the local officers of health very properly will not allow the water to be used by the public unless it is practically pure.’

‘I have reason for thinking,’ continues my correspondent, ‘that the water was fouled accidentally by the workmen making the trial shaft, and further efforts are to be made.’ With what results to Hampstead who can tell?