Part 3

This fine reckless character lived to dissipate everything in ill-judged speculations, and misfortunes of all kinds visited the family. We are told but little of them in the pages of his son's book, but it was entirely owing to one of these visitations that Thomas Cross found his whole career changed. Destined by his father for the Navy, he was entered as a midshipman, but he had been subject from his birth to fits, and coming home on one occasion and going into the cellars of a wine business his father had in the meanwhile taken, he was seized by one of these attacks, and falling on a number of wine-bottles, was so seriously injured that the profession of the Navy had to be abandoned. We afterwards find him as a farmer in Hampshire, and then, involved in the financial disasters that overtook the family, reduced to seeking an engagement as coachman in the very yard his father had once owned. It is curious that, either intentionally or by accident, he does not mention the name of the coach he drove between London and Lynn, but calls it always "the Lynn coach." There were changes on the road between 1821, when he first drove along it, and 1847, when he was driven off, but he is chiefly to be remembered as the driver of the "Lynn Union." He tells how he came to the box-seat, how miserably he was shuttlecocked from one to the other when in search of employment, and how, when the whip who drove the "Lynn coach" on its stage between Cambridge and London had taken an inn and was about to relinquish his seat, he could obtain no certain information that the post would be vacant. The bookkeeper of the coach-office said it would; the coachman himself told a lie and said he was not going to give up the job. In this condition of affairs Cross did not know what to do, until a kindly acquaintance gave him the date upon which the lying Jehu must take possession of his inn and of necessity give up coaching, and advised him to journey down to Cambridge, meet the up coach there as it drove into the Bull yard, and present himself as the coachman come to take it up to London. Cross scrupulously carried out this suggestion, and when he made his appearance, with whip and in approved coaching costume, at the Bull, and was asked who he was and what he wanted, replied as his friend had indicated. No one offered any objection, and no other coachman had appeared by the time he drove away, punctual to the very second we may be quite sure. An old resident of Lynn, who has written his recollections of bygone times in that town, tells us that Thomas Cross "was not much of a whip," a criticism that seems to be doubly underscored in Cross's own description of this first journey to London, when he drove straight into the double turnpike gates that then stretched across the Kingsland Road, giving everyone a good shaking, and cause, in many bruises, to remember his maiden effort.

Cross had a long and varied experience, extending to twenty-eight years, of this road. At different times he drove between London and Cambridge, on the middle ground between Cambridge and Ely, and for a while took the whole distance between Ely and Lynn. He drove in his time all sorts and conditions of men, and instances some of his experiences. Perhaps the most amusing was that occasion when he drove into Cambridge with a choleric retired Admiral on the box-seat. The old sea-dog was come to Cambridge to inquire into the trouble into which a scapegrace son had managed to place himself. He confided the whole story to the coachman. By this it seemed that the Admiral had two sons. One he had designed to make a sailor; the other was being educated for the Church. It was the embryo parson who had got into trouble: very serious trouble, too, for he had knocked down a Proctor, and was rusticated for that offence. The Admiral, in fact, had made a very grave error of judgment. His sons had very opposite characters: the one was wild and high-spirited, and the other was meek and mild to the last degree of inoffensiveness. Unfortunately it was this good young man whom he had sent to sea, while his devil's cub he had put in the way of reading for Holy Orders.

"I have committed a great mistake, sir," he said. "I ought to have made a sailor of him and a parson of the other, who is a meek, unassuming youth aboard ship, with nothing to say for himself; while this, sir, would knock the devil down, let alone a Proctor, if he offended him."

The Admiral was a study in the mingled moods of offended dignity and of parental pride in this chip of the old block; breathing implacable vengeance one moment and admiration of a "d----d high-spirited fellow" the next. When Thomas Cross set out on his return journey to London, he saw the Admiral and his peccant son together, the best of friends.

Cross was in his prime when railways came and spoiled his career. In 1840, when the Northern and Eastern line was opened to Broxbourne, and thence, shortly after, to Bishop Stortford, he had to give up the London and Cambridge stage and retire before the invading locomotive to the Cambridge and Lynn journey. In 1847, when the Ely to Lynn line was opened, his occupation was wholly gone, and all attempts to find employment on the railway failed. They would not have him, even to ring the bell when the trains were about to start. Then, like many another poor fellow at that time, he presented an engrossed petition to Parliament, setting forth how hardly circumstances had dealt with him, and hoping that "your honourable House" would do something or another. The House, however, was largely composed of members highly interested in railways, and ordered his petition, with many another, to lie on the table: an evasive but well-recognised way of utterly ignoring him and it and all such troublesome and inconvenient things and persons. Alas! poor Thomas! He had better have saved the money he expended on that engrossing.

What became of him? I will tell you. For some years he benefited by the doles of his old patrons on the "Union," sorry both for him and for the old days of the road, gone for ever. He then wrote a history of coaching, a work that disappeared--type, manuscript, proofs and all--in the bankruptcy proceedings in which his printers were presently involved. Then he wrote his _Autobiography_. He was, you must understand, a gentleman by birth and education, and if he had little literary talent, had at least some culture. Therefore the story of his career, as told by himself, although discursive, is interesting. He had some Greek and more Latin, and thought himself a poet. I have, however, read his epic, _The Pauliad_, and find that in this respect he was mistaken. That exercise in blank verse was published in 1863, and was his last work. Two years later he found a place in Huggens' College, a charitable foundation at Northfleet, near Gravesend; and died in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year, after twelve years' residence in that secure retreat. He lies in Northfleet churchyard, far away from that place where he would be,--the little churchyard of Catherington beside the Portsmouth Road, where his father and many of his people rest.

VI

FEW and fragmentary are the recollections of the old coachmen of the Cambridge Road. A coloured etching exists, the work of Dighton, purporting to show the driver of the "Telegraph" in 1809; but whether this represents that Richard Vaughan of the same coach, praised in the book on coaching by Lord William Pitt-Lennox as "scientific in horseflesh, unequalled in driving," is doubtful, for the hero of Dighton's picture seems to belong to an earlier generation. Among drivers of the "Telegraph" were "Old Quaker Will" and George Elliott, just mentioned by Thomas Cross; himself not much given to enlarging upon other coachmen and their professional skill. Poor Tommy necessarily moved in their circle; but although with them, he was not of them, and nursed a pride both of his family and of his own superior education that grew more arrogant as his misfortunes increased. As for Tommy himself, we have already heard much of him and his _Autobiography of a Stage Coachman_. The "Lynn Union," however, the coach he drove down part of the road one day and up the next, was by no means one of the crack "double" coaches, but started from either end only three times a week, and although upset every now and again, was a jogtrot affair that averaged but seven miles an hour, including stops. That the "Lynn Union" commonly carried a consignment of shrimps one way and the returned empty baskets another was long one of Cross's minor martyrdoms. He drove along the road, his head full of poetry and noble thoughts, and yearning for cultured talk, while the shrimp-baskets diffused a penetrating odour around, highly offensive to those cultured folk for whose society his soul longed. People with a nice sense of smell avoided the "Lynn Union" while the shrimp-carrying continued.

Contemporary with Cross was Jo Walton, of the "Safety," and later of the "Star." He was perhaps one of the finest coachmen who ever drove on the Cambridge Road, and it was possibly the knowledge of this skill, and the daring to which it led, that brought so many mishaps to the "Star" while he wielded the reins. He has been described as "a man who swore like a trooper and went regularly to church," with a temper like an emperor and a grip like steel. This fine picturesque character was the very antithesis of the peaceful and dreamy Cross, and thought nothing of double-thonging a nodding waggoner who blocked the road with his sleepy team. Twice at least he upset the "Star" between Royston and Buntingford when attempting to pass another coach. He, at last, was cut short by the railway, and his final journeys were between Broxbourne and Cambridge. "Here," he would say bitterly, as the train came steaming into Broxbourne Station, "here comes old Hell-in-Harness!"

Of James Reynolds, of Pryor, who drove the "Rocket," of many another, their attributes are lost and only their names survive. That William Clark, who drove the "Bee Hive," should have been widely known as "the civil coachman" is at once a testimonial to him and a reproach to the others; and that memories of Briggs at Lynn should be restricted to the facts that he was discontented and quarrelsome is a post-mortem certificate of character that gains in significance when even the name of the coach he drove cannot be recovered.

VII

BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHIN and Without, and Norton Folgate of to-day, would astonish old Hobson, not only with their press of ordinary traffic, but with the vast number of railway lorries rattling and thundering along, to and from the great Bishopsgate Goods Station of the Great Eastern Railway; the railway that has supplanted the coaches and the carriers' waggons along the whole length of this road. That station, once the passenger terminus of Shoreditch, before the present huge one at Liverpool Street was built, remains as a connecting-link between the prosperous and popular "Great Eastern" of to-day and the reviled and bankrupt "Eastern Counties" of fifty years ago. The history of the Great Eastern Railway is a complicated story of amalgamations of many lines with the original Eastern Counties Railway. The line to Cambridge, with which we are principally concerned, was in the first instance the project of an independent company calling itself the Northern and Eastern Railway, opened after many difficulties as far as Broxbourne in 1840, and thence, shortly afterwards, to Bishop Stortford. Having reached that point and the end of its resources simultaneously, it was taken over by the Eastern Counties and completed in 1847, the line going, as the Cambridge expresses do nowadays, _viâ_ Audley End and Great Chesterford.

Having thus purchased and completed the scheme of that unfortunate line, the Eastern Counties' own difficulties became acute. Locomotives and rolling stock were seized for debt, and it fell into bankruptcy and the Receiver's hands. How it emerged at last, a sound and prosperous concern, this is not the place to tell, but many years passed before any passenger whose business took him anywhere along the Eastern Counties' "system" could rely upon being carried to his destination without vexatious delays, not of minutes, but of hours. Often the trains never completed their journeys at all, and came back whence they had started. Little wonder that this was then described as "that scapegoat of companies, that pariah of railways."

"On Wednesday last," said _Punch_ at this time, "a respectably-dressed young man was seen to go to the Shoreditch terminus of the Eastern Counties Railway and deliberately take a ticket for Cambridge. He has not since been heard of. No motive has been assigned for the rash act."

The best among the Great Eastern Cambridge expresses of to-day does the journey of 55¾ miles in 1 hour 13 minutes. Onward to Lynn, 97 miles, the best time made is 2 hours 25 minutes.

VIII

IT is a far cry from Shoreditch Church to the open country. Cobbett, in 1822, journeying from London to Royston, found the suburbs far-reaching even then. "On this road," he says, "the enormous Wen" (a term of contempt by which he indicated the Metropolis) "has swelled out to the distance of above six or seven miles." But from the earliest times London exhibited a tendency to expand more quickly in this direction than in others, and Edmonton, Waltham Cross, and Ware lay within the marches of Cockaigne long before places within a like radius at other points of the compass began to lose their rural look. The reason is not far to seek, and may be found in the fact that this, the great road to the North, was much travelled always.

But where shall we set the limits of the Great Wen in recent times? Even as these lines are written they are being pushed outwards. It is not enough to put a finger on the map at Stamford Hill and to say, "here, at the boundary of the London County Council's territory," or "here at Edmonton, the limit of the 'N' division of the London Postal Districts," or, again, "here, where the Metropolitan Police Area meets the territories of the Hertfordshire and the Essex Constabulary at Cheshunt"; for those are but arbitrary bounds, and, beyond their own individual significances, tell us nothing. Have you ever, as a child, looking, large-eyed and a little frightened it may be, out upon the bigness of London, wondered where the houses ended and Gods own country began, or asked where the last house of the last street looked out upon the meadows, and the final flag-stone led on to the footpath of the King's Highway?

I have asked, and there was none to tell, and if you in turn ask me where the last house of the ultimate street stands on this way out of London--I do not know! There are so many last houses, and they always begin again; so that little romantic mental picture does not exist in plain fact. The ending of London is a gradual and almost insensible process. You may note it when, leaving Stoke Newington's continuous streets behind, you rise Stamford Hill and perceive its detached and semi-detached residences; and, pressing on, see the streets begin again at Tottenham High Cross, continuing to Lower Edmonton. Here at last, in the waste lands that stretch along the road, you think the object of your search is found. As well seek that fabled pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. The pot and the gold may be there, but you will never, never reach the rainbow.

The houses begin again, absurdly enough, at Ponder's End. You will come to an end of them at last, but only gradually, and when, at fifteen and three-quarter miles from Shoreditch Church, Broxbourne and the first glimpse of "real country" are reached, the original quest is forgotten.

Very different was the aspect of these first miles out of London in the days of Izaak Walton, Cowper, and Lamb. Cowper's Johnny Gilpin rode to Edmonton and Ware, and Walton and Lamb--the inspired Fleet Street draper and the thrall of the Leadenhall Street office--are literary co-parceners in the valley of the Lea.

"You are well overtaken, gentlemen," says Piscator, in the _Compleat Angler_, journeying from London; "a good morning to you both. I have stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine, fresh May morning." He meant that suburban eminence known as Stamford Hill, where, in the beginning of May 1603, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London, having ridden out in State for the purpose, met James the First travelling to London to assume the Crown of England.

Stamford Hill still shadows forth a well-established prosperity. It was the favoured suburban resort of City merchants in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is still intensely respectable and well-to-do, even though the merchants have risen with the swelling of their bankers' pass-books to higher ambitions, and though many of their solid, stolid, and prim mansions know them no more, and are converted not infrequently into what we may bluntly call "boys' and girls' schools," termed, however, by their respective Dr. Blimber's and Miss Pinkerton's "scholastic establishments for young ladies and young gentlemen." The old-time City merchant who resided at Stamford Hill when the nineteenth century was young (a period when people began to "reside" in "desirable residences" instead of merely living in houses), used generally, if he were an active man, to go up to his business in the City on horseback, and return in the same way. If not so active, he came and went by the "short stage," a conveyance between London and the adjacent towns, to all intents and purposes an ordinary stage-coach, except that it was a two-horsed, instead of a four-horsed, affair. The last City man who rode to London on horseback has probably long since been gathered to his fathers, for the practice naturally was discontinued when railways came and revolutionised manners and customs.

As you top Stamford Hill, you glimpse the valley of the Lea and its factory-studded marshes, and come presently to Tottenham High Cross. No need to linger nowadays over the scenery of this populous road, lined with shops and villas and crowded with tramways and omnibuses; no need, that is to say, except for association's sake, and to remark that it was here Piscator called a halt to Venator and Auceps, on their way to the Thatched House at Hoddesdon, now going on for two hundred and fifty years ago. "Let us now" (he said) "rest ourselves in this sweet, shady arbour, which Nature herself has woven with her own fine fingers; it is such a contexture of woodbines, sweet briars, jessamine, and myrtle, and so interwoven as will secure us both from the sun's violent heat and from the approaching shower." And so they sat and discussed a bottle of sack, with oranges and milk.

So gracious a "contexture" is far to seek from Tottenham nowadays. If you need shelter from the approaching shower you can, it is true, obtain it more securely in the doorway of a shop than under a hedgerow in May, when Nature has not nearly finished her weaving; but there is something lacking in the exchange.

Tottenham High Cross that stands here by, over against the Green, is a very dubious affair indeed; an impostor that would delude you if possible into the idea that it is one of the Eleanor Crosses; with a will-o'-wisp kind of history, from the time in 1466, when it is found mentioned only as existing, to after ages, when it was new-built of brick and thereafter horribly stuccoed, to the present, when it is become a jibe and a jeer in its would-be Gothic.

Much of old Tottenham is gone. Gone are the "Seven Sisters," the seven elms that stood here in a circle, with a walnut-tree in their midst, marking, as tradition would have you believe, the resting-place of a martyr; but in their stead is the beginning of the Seven Sisters' Road: not a thoroughfare whose romance leaps to the eye. What these then remote suburbs were like in 1816 may be seen in this charming sketch of Rowlandson's, where he is found in his more sober mood. The milestone in the sketch marks four and three-quarter miles from Shoreditch: this is therefore a scene at Tottenham, where the tramway runs nowadays, costermongers' barrows line the gutters, and crowds press, night and day. Little enough traffic in Rowlandson's time, evidently, for the fowls and the pigs are taking their ease in the very middle of the footpath.

Yet there are still a few vestiges of the old and the picturesque here. Bruce Grove, hard by, may be but a name, reminiscent of Robert Bruce and other Scottish monarchs who once owned a manor and a castle where suburban villas now cluster plentifully, and where the modern so-called "Bruce Castle" is a school; but there are dignified old red-brick mansions here still, lying back from the road behind strong walls and grand gates of wrought iron. The builder has his eye on them, an Evil Eye that has already blasted not a few, and with bulging money-bags he tempts the owners of the others: even as I write they go down before the pick and shovel.

Old almshouses there are, too, with dedicatory tablet, complete. The builder and his money-bags cannot prevail here, you think. Can he not? My _good_ sirs, have you never heard of the Charity Commissioners, whose business it is to sit in their snug quarters in Whitehall and to propound "schemes" whereby such old buildings as these are torn down, their sites sold for a mess of pottage, and the old pensioners hustled off to some new settlement? "But look at the value of the land," you say: "to sell it would admit of the scope of the charity being doubled." No doubt; but what of the original testator's wishes? I think, if it were proposed to remove these old almshouses, the shade of Balthazar Sanchez, the founder, somewhere in the Beyond, would be grieved.

One Bedwell, parson of Tottenham High Cross _circa_ 1631, and a most diligent Smelfungus, tells us Balthazar was "a Spanyard born, the first confectioner or comfit-maker, and the grand master of all that professe that trade in this kingdome"; and the tablet before-mentioned, on the front of the old almshouses themselves, tells us something on its own account, as thus--

"1600 Balthazar Sanchez, Borne in Spayne in the Cittie of Sherez in Estremadura, is the Fownder of these Eyght Almeshowses for the Releefe of Eyght poor men and women of the Towne of Tattenham High Crasse."

Long may the queer old houses, with their monumental chimney-stalks and forecourt gardens remain: it were not well to vex the ghost of the good comfit-maker.

"Scotland Green" is the name of an odd and haphazard collection of cottages next these almshouses, looking down into Tottenham Marshes. Its name derives from the far-off days when those Scottish monarchs had their manor-house near by, and though the weather-boarded architecture of the cottages by no means dates back to those times, it is a queer survival of days before Tottenham had become a suburb; each humble dwelling law to itself, facing in a direction different from those of its neighbours, and generally approached by crazy wooden footbridges over what was probably at one time a tributary of the Lea, now an evil-smelling ditch where the children of the neighbourhood enjoy themselves hugely in making mud-pies, and by dint of early and constant familiarity become immune from the typhoid fever that would certainly be the lot of a stranger.

IX