Part 1

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THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN

By CHARLES G. HARPER

Author of “_The Brighton Road_,” “_The Portsmouth Road_,” “_The Dover Road_,” “_The Bath Road_,” “_The Exeter Road_,” “_The Great North Road_,” and “_The Norwich Road_”

_Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures_

_Vol. II. BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD_

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1902

[_All rights reserved_]

PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD. LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SEPARATE PLATES

PAGE

EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY. _Frontispiece_

BULL RING. (_From a Print after David Cox_) 5

OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL. 13

DUDLEY. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 31

HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797. (_After Rowlandson_) 47

HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826. (_From an Old Print_) 51

HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860. (_From a Contemporary Photograph_) 55

SHIFFNAL. 67

THE COUNCIL HOUSE. 141

THE HONOURABLE THOMAS KENYON. (_From an Old Print_) 153

THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN. 177

LLANGOLLEN. 183

LLANGOLLEN. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R. A._) 187

VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 207

CERNIOGE. 227

THE SWALLOW FALLS. (_From an Old Print_) 247

LLYN OGWEN AND TRIFAEN MOUNTAIN. 255

PENMAENMAWR. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 275

THE OLD LANDING-PLACE ON THE ANGLESEY SHORE. 283

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

Vignette: Prince Rupert _Title Page_

List of Illustrations: The Black Country vii

The Holyhead Road 1

The “Hen and Chickens,” 1830 18

The “Old Royal” 24

Wednesbury 37

Old Hill, Tettenhall 59

The Sabbath-breaking Seamstress 60

Snedshill Furnaces 71

Haygate Inn 76

The Wrekin 79

The “Old Wall” 84

Wroxeter Church 85

Atcham Bridge 91

Lord Hill’s Monument 92

The English Bridge 97

Wyle Cop and the “Lion” 107

The “Lion” Yard 132

The Market-Place, Shrewsbury 138

Shelton Oak 144

The Breidden Hills 147

Queen’s Head 156

Offa’s Dyke 176

The Ladies of Llangollen. (_From an Old Print_) 198

Plas Newydd 203

Owain Glyndwr’s Mount 211

Cerrig-y-Druidion 224

The Waterloo Bridge 232

The Old Church, Bettws-y-Coed 234

Sign of the “Royal Oak” 238

Pont-y-Pair 245

Cyfyng Falls 250

Capel Curig 252

The Falls of Ogwen 257

Nant Ffrancon. (_After David Cox_) 258

Nant Ffrancon 260

Penrhyn Castle 263

Lonisaf Toll-House 264

The Penrhyn Arms 266

Penrhyn Castle and Snowdonia, from Beaumaris. (_After David Cox_) 278

Deserted Stables, Menai Village 290

The Menai Bridge and the Isle of Benglas 291

The Anglesey Column 296

The Britannia Bridge 299

Near Mona Inn 303

Llangristiolus 304

Caer Ceiliog 306

The South Stack. (_After T. Creswick, R.A._) 323

Holyhead Mountain 325

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

MILES Birmingham (General Post Office) 109¼ Hockley 110½ Soho 111¼ Handsworth 111¾ West Bromwich 114½ Hilltop 116 Wednesbury 117¼ Moxley 118½ Bilston 119½ Wolverhampton 122¼ Chapel Ash 122¾ Tettenhall 124 The Wergs 125¼ Boningale 129½ Whiston Cross 130¼ Shiffnal 134¼ Prior’s Lee 137½ Ketley 139 Ketley Railway Station 139½ (Junction of Watling Street with Holyhead Road.) Wellington (“Cock”) 140½ Haygate 141½ Burcot Toll-House 143 Norton 146½ Tern Bridge 147½ (Cross River Tern.) Atcham 148¼ (Cross River Severn.) Shrewsbury (Abbey Foregate) 151¼ (Cross River Severn.) Shrewsbury (Market House) 152 Shrewsbury (Welsh Bridge and Frankwell) 152¼ (Cross River Severn.) Shelton Oak 154 Bicton 154½ Montford Bridge 156¾ (Cross River Severn.) Nesscliff 160½ West Felton 165¼ Queen’s Head 166¼ Oswestry 170 Gobowen 172¾ Chirk 175 (Cross River Ceiriog.) Whitehurst Toll-House 177 Vron Cysylltan 179¾ Llangollen 182½ Berwyn Railway Station 184¼ Glyndyfrdwy 188 Carrog 189 Corwen 192½ (Cross River Dee.) Maerdy Post Office 196 Pont-y-Glyn 197¾ Tynant 198¼ Cerrig-y-Druidion 202 Glasfryn 204½ Cernioge 205¾ Pentre Voelas 207¾ Bettws-y-Coed 214½ (Cross River Conway) Swallow Falls 216 Cyfyng Falls 218½ Tan-y-Bwlch 219 Capel Curig 220 Llyn Ogwen 224 Ogwen Falls} 225 Pass of Nant Ffrancon} Tyn-y-Maes 228 Bethesda 229¼ Llandegai 232¾ Bangor (Cathedral) 234½ Upper Bangor 236 Menai Bridge 237 (Cross Menai Straits) Menai Village 237¼ Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch 239¼ Gaerwen 242½ Pentre Berw (Holland Arms) 243 Llangristiolus 245½ Mona 247½ Gwalchmai 249¾ Bryngwran 252½ Caer Ceiliog 255 Valley 256 Stanley Sands 256¼ (Cross Stanley Sands Viaduct to Holy Island) Holyhead (Admiralty Pier) 260½

THE OLD ROAD FROM MENAI VILLAGE TO HOLYHEAD

MILES Menai Village 237¼ Braint 239½ Ceint 242½ Llangefni 244¾ Bodffordd 247 Gwyndû and Glanyrafon 249¾ Llynfaes 250¼ Trefor 251¼ Bodedern 254 Llanyngenedl 255¼ Valley and Four-Mile Bridge 258¼ Trearddur Bay 261½ (Cross Causeway over Straits to Holy Island) Holyhead 263½

BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

I

There are said to be no fewer than a hundred and forty different ways of spelling the name of Birmingham, all duly vouched for by old usage; but it is not proposed in these pages to recount them, or to follow the arguments of those who have contended for its derivation from “Bromwicham.” It is singular that in the first mention we have of the place, in Domesday Book, it is spelt “Bermingham,” almost exactly as it is to-day, and this lends much authority to the view that we get the place-name from an ancient Saxon tribe or family of Beormingas.

When the original Beormingas, the Sons of Beorm (whoever he may have been), settled here, in the dim Saxon past, they founded better than they knew; but they chose a hill-top, a place where no river runs, unless we choose thus to dignify the little stream called the Rea. This lack of watercourses mattered nothing at all to mediæval Birmingham, but when, in spite of all disabilities, the place rose into commercial importance, the want began to be severely felt, and herculean have been the efforts in modern times to effect a proper water-supply.

Little but scattered mention is heard of Birmingham and its smiths before the Civil War, but when that struggle broke out, they were heard of to some purpose. Its 4000 inhabitants in 1643 were Puritans to a man, and warlike. They furnished 15,000 sword-blades for Cromwell’s troops, and at a convenient opportunity waylaid the King’s carriage and seized it, his furniture, and his plate. For these enormities Prince Rupert came later from Daventry and punished them severely in a battle on Camp Hill, overlooking the town. Many Birmingham men were slain that day, and eighty houses burnt; the whole affair piteously related in a tract of that time called “The Bloody Prince; or, a Declaration of the Most Cruell Practises of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers, in fighting against God and the true Ministers of his Church.” A woodcut intended to portray that sanguinary Prince appears on the cover, with Birmingham flaming furiously in the background; Daventry in the rear. The rest of the Cavaliers appear to be manœuvring somewhere else; at any rate, Rupert is alone, on horseback, with a mild expression of countenance and a big pistol.

Twenty-two years later the Plague depopulated the town, but in another twenty-three years it had grown to double its former size, and by 1791 numbered between 70,000 and 80,000. Yet it had no Parliamentary representation until 1832.

That Birmingham is seated on a hill is not so evident to railway travellers, but he who comes to it by road is well advised of the fact at Bull Ring, where the hilly entrance confronts him. Bull Ring is old Birmingham of a hundred years and more ago; the nucleus of the town, and little altered since David Cox drew his picture of the market there. The market remains, but there has come about since his day an extraordinary popular appreciation of the beauty of flowers, so that, instead of the fowls pictured largely in his view, the crowded stalls are radiant with blooms of every sort; cut flowers, and growing plants.

Here stands, as ever, St. Martin’s, the mother-church of Birmingham, where the ancient manorial lords of the place lie; those de Berminghams whose last representative was choused out of his rights in 1545. Here is that statue of Nelson for whose proper cleansing a patriotic tradesman left by will sixpence a week; and here occurred the Wesley riots of 1742 and the Chartist Riot of 1839. When Charles Wesley sought to preach, the people set the church bells a-ringing to drown his voice, and then began to pelt him with dirt and turnips; but the political riot was a much more serious affair, resulting in the pillaging of shops and houses, and immense damage.

II

In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one street, yet that street was full of smiths, making knives and “all manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and a great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.”

Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but it has largely changed its trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a pin’s head, and in the murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is pre-eminent.

“She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the benefactress of the universal man, from the crowned head to the savage of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to the savage, guns warranted to hurt no one but he who uses them. Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion too; for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,” is no longer restricted to those two materials, by reason of Birmingham industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by wholesale, and at extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks of her hundred churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands, and thus help to discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted Mumbo-Jumbos they export.

“Birmingham,” said Burke, a hundred years ago, “is the toyshop of Europe.” Fancy articles in steel and paste; buckles, sword-hilts, buttons, and a thousand other trifles were made, for home or export; among them the sham, or “Brummagem” jewellery, and the base coin that long cast a slur upon the town. Things coming from Birmingham were in those times rightly suspect. One of its industries was the making of “silver” buckles of a villainous kind of cheap white metal, called from its nature “soft tommy.” A tale is told of the owner of the factory where this precious stuff was made up, going through one of the workshops and hearing a workman cursing the man who would chance to wear the pair of buckles he was making.

“Why,” asked the astonished employer, “do you do that?”

“Well,” replied the workman, “whoever wears these buckles is bound to curse the man that made them, and so I thought I would be the first.”

Those were the days when it was said that if you gave a guinea and a copper kettle to a Birmingham manufacturing jeweller he would turn you out a hundred guineas’ worth of jewellery!

Things are very different now. The trades of Birmingham seem almost countless in their number; many of them conducted on a scale large enough for each one to suffice a small township of workers. Brass-founding, tube-making, gun-smithing, pin-making, wire-drawing, screw-turning, gold-smithing, electro-plating, tinplate working, coining (in the legitimate kind), steel pen-making—these are but a few of the countless industries to whose skirts clings for livelihood a population of half a million.

When Mr. Pickwick visited Birmingham, he repaired to the “Old Royal” hotel. Where is the “Old Royal” now? Ask of the winds—nay, consult the histories of Birmingham, and you shall learn. But if the old hotel and many of its fellows be gone, at least the description of the entrance to the town holds good, and “the dingy hue of every object visible, the murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick-dust” are phrases that awake echoes of recollection in the breasts of those who know the town of old: but “the dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around,” is not so descriptive of the Birmingham of to-day. For fully realising that picture, and the added touches of the “deep red glow of furnace fires, the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons laden with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods,” one must journey to Dudley, where such things may be seen and heard in a hellish crescendo: Birmingham has largely put those things in the background. In Mr. Pickwick’s time “the hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirr of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls, and the din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead, heavy clanking of engines was the harsh music that arose from every quarter”; but most of these things are nowadays decently hid in purlieus remote, or masked from the chief streets by the towering modern buildings of hotels, banks, assurance offices, and all the hundred-and-one parasitical things of a limited liability age, that fasten like vermin on the producing body.

Birmingham became a City on January 11th, 1889. It is a City of two fine streets, surrounded by many miles of formless, featureless, dull and commonplace (or, at their worst, hideous and squalid) houses, workshops, and factories of every size and description. New Street was only new at a period over a century ago. Corporation Street was formed in 1871 by boldly cutting through a mass of slums. In those two thoroughfares, and the open space by the Town Hall to which they both lead, is included almost everything of architectural note. In their course are to be found the best and most attractive shops, and the principal banks and commercial offices. The rest is merely of a local and provincial character.

The geographical, municipal, and political centre is, of course, that spot where the Town Hall stands, a grim and massive building in the Corinthian style, with that air of age and permanency about its rusticated basement, as though when the Anglo-Saxons came they had found it here, the relic of an ancient civilisation. But the Town Hall can lay no claim to antiquity, built as it was in 1832. Around it, in an open space of a singularly irregular shape, are the General Post Office, the Art Gallery, the great Free Library, and other municipal buildings proper to a city so rich and prosperous; and, scattered about the pavements, a miscellaneous collection of statues, facing towards New Street Station, as though they formed some kind of deputation assembled there to welcome visitors. It is a very oddly assorted crowd, captained by Queen Victoria, and formed of such varied items as Joseph Priestley (who with his burning glass looks as though he were critically examining a bad coin), Peel, John Skirrow, Wright, George Dawson, James Watt, and Sir Josiah Mason. In the little corner called Chamberlain Square the curious will find a monument to the energy and enterprise (the “pushfulness” as those who love him not might call it) of Joseph Chamberlain, without whose work and initiative Birmingham would not own, as it does to-day, its gas, water, and tramways, and could not show such evidences of progress in new and handsome streets and model government.

It is a far cry from the Red Radical days of Birmingham’s great Mayor in 1874 to those of the Colonial Secretary, a pillar of the Empire and the darling of Duchesses. Perhaps no other man has, politically, travelled so far, estranged so many friends, or made such strangely alien alliances, with the result that his sheaf has been exalted over his brethren these years past. Hence the extreme bitterness of the hatred his name arouses in certain circles.