Part 6

The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the hill-top. The Hill is a great outstanding knob of London clay, a substance both difficult and dangerous to pierce; but it was not until the work was nearly completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily before the labours of the day had been begun. The present open cutting of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place of the projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the purpose of carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap. If an unlovely, it was in its way an impressive, structure, even though the impression was, rather of the nightmare sort. It was scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at no time a place of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to cross the Archway Road by a circuitous route. Highgate Archway has now disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure, spanning the road without the support of the cumbrous old piers which, until the summer of 1900, continued to block three-fourths of the way. It has gone because the road-traffic has grown with the suburbs and the way was not wide enough; but its disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town and country met.

The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high. Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill. Sixpence was levied on every laden or draught horse.

It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this direction. In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no less than £13,000. The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving £9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the road was to be declared free. It was accordingly opened free of toll in 1876. And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it was demolished and the roadway widened. The present Archway was opened in 1900.

XI

EAST End, Finchley, to which we now come, is one of the many straggling settlements built upon Finchley Common. Stretches of fields alternate with rows of new shops and tiny old-world cottages. Here stands the “Bald-Faced Stag,” with the effigy of a stag surmounting the appropriately bald elevation of that huge and ugly public-house. The yards of monumental masons jostle it on either hand; a grim and unpleasing conjunction, and a prelude to those vast townships of London’s dead, the St. Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras Cemeteries, which with other properties of the Cemetery Companies render the road dismal and people these northern heights with a vast population of departed citizens. The merry market-gardener has betaken himself and his cabbages to other parts, and the builder builds but sparely.

Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the road at East End stands the “Old White Lion,” in a pretty wooded dip of the road. The house was once known, and marked on the maps as the “Dirt House,” from its having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and manure. The wood was also known as “Dirt House Wood.” It was here also that Horne the coachmaster’s stables were situated.

To this succeeds North Finchley, beginning at the junction of a road from Child’s Hill with the Great North Road, known as Tally Ho Corner. North Finchley, called by the genteel “Torrington Park,” is yet another settlement, filched, like the cemeteries, from Finchley Common by successive iniquitous Acts of Parliament at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Could the gay highwaymen who, a hundred years ago, were gathered to their fathers at the end of a rope down Tyburn way revisit Finchley, the poor fellows would sadly need a guide. Where, alas! is Finchley Common, that wide-spreading expanse of evil omen on which these jovial spirits were so thoroughly at home? Finchley Common, once second only to the far-famed Hounslow Heath, has long since been divided up between the many who, more than a hundred years ago, conspired to cheat the people of their birthright in this once broad expanse of open space. The representatives of the people at Westminster allowed it, and my Lord Bishop of London profited by it, together with lesser folk, each in their several degrees. The Common then extended to considerably over two thousand acres. Of this vast tract only a few acres are left, beyond North Finchley. The rest was sold quietly, and by degrees, for absurdly small sums.

[Picture: The Great Common of Finchley: a parlous place]

Between 1700 and 1800 the great Common of Finchley was a parlous place, and not one of the better-known highwaymen but had tried his hand at “touching the mails” as they went across this waste; or patrolled the darkest side of the road, ready to spring upon the solitary traveller. Indeed, the childlike simplicity of the lonely travellers of those days is absolutely contemptible, considering the well-known dangers of the roads. For instance, on the night of the 28th August, 1720, a horseman might have been observed in the act of crossing Finchley Common. He had fifteen guineas in his pocket, and ambled along as though he had been in Pall Mall instead of on perhaps the most dangerous road in England. At a respectful distance behind him came his servant, and just in front of him, midway of this howling wilderness, stood three figures. “There is an eye that notes our coming,” says the poet, and three pairs of eyes had perceived this wayfarer. They belonged to an enterprising individual named Spiggott and to two other ruffians, whose names have not been handed down to posterity. The weirdly named Spiggott was apparently above disguising himself; his companions, however, might have stood for stage brigands, for one of them had the cape of his coat buttoned over his chin, and the other wore a slouched hat over his eyes. In addition to this, he kept the ends of his long wig in his mouth—which seems rather a comic opera touch. It is to be hoped, rather than expected, that the traveller with the guineas saw the humour of it. In the twinkling of an eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while the others covered him with their pistols. The servant also was secured, the guineas transferred with the dexterity of a practised conjurer, the horses turned loose, and then the three rode away, leaving the traveller and his servant to get on as best they could. Spiggott eventually paid the penalty of his rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with the canons of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career, he was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon at Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller. The end of him was the appointed end of all his kind. The moral of this story seems to be “Wear a mask when engaged in crime.”

In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of his watch, in the most easy way. Some of these highwaymen were, indeed, persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner, and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite unfitted to be in business for himself. Thoroughly business-like men were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the profits of their labours into equal shares. Their industry prospered, and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000. But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount, Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law against him, in 1725. A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and appealed against by the defendant. The court then very properly found the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this discreditable affair. One partner was executed, two years later, at Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.

There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place called Brown’s Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly opposite the “Green Man,” and in the trunk of this last survival of the “good old days” there have been found, from time to time, quite a number of pistol bullets, said to have been fired by passing travellers at the trunk to frighten the highwaymen who might chance to be hiding behind it, under cover of the night. The tree itself has long borne the name of Turpin’s Oak, no less celebrated a person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented it. History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom the Wells were named. I suggest they should be, and were in the first place “Brent Wells”; a source of the river Brent. Nor are those Wells—whatever they may have been—now in existence, while the name itself is only perpetuated by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the road.

[Picture: Turpin’s Oak] Turpin, of course, is the greatest of all the rascals who made the name of the Great North Road a name of dread. Before him, however, the redoubtable Jack Sheppard figured here, but not, it is sad to relate, in an heroic manner. In fact that nimble-fingered youth, after escaping from the Stone Jug (by which piece of classic slang you are to understand Newgate to be meant) had the humiliation to be apprehended on Finchley Common, disguised in drink and a butcher’s blue smock. That was the worst of those roystering blades. The drink was the undoing of them all. If only they had been Good Templars, and had sported the blue ribbon, it is quite certain that they had not been cut off untimely; and might, with reasonable luck, even have retired with a modest competence in early years. It was in 1724 that Jack Sheppard was arrested by Bow Street runners on the Common, and the fact somewhat staggers one’s belief in the wild lawlessness of that place. To capture a highwayman in his own peculiar territory! One might just as soon expect to hear of the Chief Commissioner of Police being kidnapped from Scotland Yard. And yet it is quite certain that Finchley was no safe place for a good young man with five pounds in his pocket and a mere walking-stick in his hand, whether he proposed to cross it by night or day. Even sixty-six years later this evil reputation existed; for, in 1790, the Earl of Minto, travelling to London, wrote to his wife that instead of pushing on to town at night, he would defer his entry until morning, “for I shall not trust my throat on Finchley Common in the dark.” Think of it! And Dick Turpin had been duly executed fifty years before!

Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not possible to say much. There was the courageous and resourceful Captain Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks, and Claud Duval. Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.

The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of Pitt’s Act for Restricting Cash Payments. Before then, travellers carried nothing but gold, and as they required plenty of that commodity on their long and tedious journeys, the booty seized by these gentry was often considerable. Bank notes then came into favour, and were issued for as low a denomination as one pound. These would have been a perilous kind of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the certainty of a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish, until panics came, banks failed, and paper money became for a time a discredited form of currency. By that time the roads were better patrolled, and coin was to be conjured from the pockets of the lieges with less safety than before. From these causes, and from the new law which made it penal to receive stolen goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads.

XII

[Picture: “The Whetstone”] WHETSTONE, coming next after the Finchleys, is held in local legends to have acquired its name from the battered old stone still to be seen embedded in the ground by the signpost of the “Griffin” inn. On it the men-at-arms are said to have whetted their swords and spears before the battle of Barnet. The sceptical smile at this antiquity, and for their benefit there is a rival legend which gives the date as that of 1745, when King George’s army marched down to meet Prince Charles and his Highlanders. Antiquaries have often demolished this derivation of the place-name; but the hoary (and quite unveracious) tale survives, and is doubtless immortal. You may explain it away, but the stone is there, and your local patriot is ever a materialist in such a resort.

It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that, many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while they might. Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested development.

Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first stage out of London on the northern roads. They were placed here, rather than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated down the road, near Greenhill Cross. Whetstone Gate gave travellers going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.

The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these gentry. When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had been a fairly good roadway. Progress was difficult, even in the best circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.

The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of the nineteenth century. This was partly owing to the mistaken local patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point of the pitchfork. Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as good as any in the kingdom. It then became possible, for the first time in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea. The Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town. They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to others, but to no purpose. The Government admitted the excellence of the surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically insisted on its being reduced.

The Trustees were dismayed. Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans, and both foreshadowed heavy expense. Telford’s idea was to slice off the top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a cliff. Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed. It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an entrance even now by no means easily graded. What it must originally have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the site of the inn where Pepys stayed. The end one of a row of ten or twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.

The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not completed until four years later, at a cost of £17,000. A large portion of this heavy sum went in compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land taken. The cost of these improvements came eventually, of course, out of the pockets of travellers along the road. On this Trust they were mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding the existing tolls to be utterly inadequate to their expenses, obtained powers in 1830 to increase them. They considered themselves hardly treated in being obliged to undertake such costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham Railway being constructed—a railway which would have the effect of withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was not yet, and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the tolls by auction for one year at the handsome sum of £7,530. Accordingly they commenced to pay off their debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by the beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of tolls in 1835 and 1841.

It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act, and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching and posting trade. The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.

It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at this gate were let in the old days. Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150. But few vehicles passed then. Forty years later, no fewer than ninety coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!

XIII

BARNET, or Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet, as it is variously called, stands on the summit of a steep and high ridge running east and west. On the east the height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned conspicuously with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the range of hills stretching away to Elstree. Other Barnets, old and new, are plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the modern suburb of New Barnet. Chipping Barnet derives the first part of its name from its ancient chepe, or weekly market, granted by Henry the Second, and its more common prefix of “High,” from its situation on the ridge just mentioned.

Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out of London, and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and posting traffic of those two great thoroughfares—the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road. When the Stamford “Regent,” the York “Highflyer,” and the early morning coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool arrived, the passengers, who had not found time for breakfast before starting, were generally very sharp-set indeed, and the viands already prepared and waiting in the cosy rooms of the old hostelries, disappeared before their onslaught “in less than no time.” The battle of Barnet was fought over again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who contended together, nor was the subject of their contention the Crown of England. They were just famished travellers who struggled to get something to eat and drink before the guard made his appearance at the door, with the fateful cry, “Time’s up, gentlemen; take your seats please.” When the horn sounded in the yard, desperate men would rush forth with hands full of food, and finish their repasts as best they might on the coach.

[Picture: High Street, Barnet]

The two principal inns were the “Red Lion” and the “Green Man.” It was, and is now in some degree, a town of inns, but these were the headquarters of the two great political parties. Neither was a “coaching” inn, for they despised trafficking with ordinary travellers, and devoted themselves wholly to the posting business. The “Red Lion” was originally the “Antelope.” Standing in the most favourable position for intercepting the stream of post-chaises from London, it generally secured the pick of business going that way, unless indeed the political bias of gentlemen going down into the country forbade them to hire post-horses at a Tory house. In that case, they went to the “Green Man,” further on, which was Whig. And perhaps, in sacrificing to politics, they got inferior horses! The “Green Man” placed in midst of the town, was in receipt of the up traffic, and was the largest establishment, keeping twenty-six pairs of horses and eleven postboys, against the eighteen pairs and eight postboys of the “Red Lion”; and it is recorded that between May 9th and 11th, when, on May 10th, 1808, two celebrated prizefighters, Gully and Gregson, fought at Beechwood Park, Sir John Sebright’s place down the road, near Flamstead, no fewer than one hundred and eighty-seven pairs were changed. Those three days formed a record time for the “Green Man,” according to these figures:—

Posting £141 17 10½ Bills in the house 54 19 0 Bills in the yard 14 10 0 £211 6 10½

The “boys” of the “Green Man” wore blue jackets; those of the “Red Lion,” yellow jackets and black hats.

An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters. It may be seen at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off.

Thus the “Red Lion” remains, long after the eclipse of its rival. Its frontage is impressive by size rather than beauty. With a range of fifteen windows in line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing himself at the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is eloquent of the old days. The lion turns his head north, gazing away from the direction in which his chief customers came.