The Dover Road
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THE DOVER ROAD BY CHARLES G. HARPER The Dover Road I Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history, nor one so crowded in every age with incident and associations. The writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to keep his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to take to his heels at any moment. And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road, and demand attention! Cæsar’s presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp of the legionaries along Watling Street on moonlit nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the record of their doings would occupy; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian. How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarrassing the accumulated wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest justice in this one volume! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the telling of this story; and for the proper presentation of its pageantry, for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon these seventy miles of highway, the rugged-wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of Thomas Hardy’s rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command one might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of the Dover Road; while, with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of their art, Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be fashioned that would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration of all. Without these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compass of these covers the doings of sixty generations? The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters of a mile long. II THE COACHES If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with coach- travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne’s “Foreign Mail,” which left the General Post-Office in Saint Martin’s-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes later at the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road. If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the “Express,” which, starting from the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the journey in nine hours; or else by the “Union” coach, which, travelling at an equal speed, left the “White Bear,” Piccadilly, at 9 a.m. Not that these were the only choice. Coaches in plenty left town for Dover; the “Eagle,” the “Phœnix,” Worthington’s Safety Coaches, the “Telegraph,” the “Defiance,” the “Royal Mail,” and the “Union Night Coach,” starting from all parts of London. The famous “Tally-ho Coach,” too, between London and Canterbury, left town every afternoon, and did the fifty-four miles in the twinkling of an eye—that is to say (with greater particularity and less vague figure of speech) in five hours and a half; while Stanbury and Rutley’s fly-vans and wagons conveyed goods and passengers who could not afford the fares of the swifter coaches between the “George,” Aldermanbury, and Dover at the rate of six miles an hour. Besides these methods of conveyance, numerous coaches, vans, omnibuses and carriers’-carts plied between the Borough and Chatham, Rochester and Strood; or served the villages between London and Gravesend. Indeed, at this period, we find the crack coaches, the long-distance mails, starting from London city, leaving to the historic inns of Southwark only the goods- wagons, the short-stages, and the carriers’-carts. In 1837, also, you could vary the order of your going to Dover by taking boat from London to Gravesend, Whitstable, or Herne Bay, and at any of those places waiting for the coach. The voyage to Herne Bay took six hours, and the coach journey from thence to Dover occupied another four, the whole costing but ten shillings; which, considering that you could get horribly sea-sick in the six hours between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays. The traveller of this time would probably select the “Express” from the “Golden Cross,” because this was a convenient and central starting-point from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was well- aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called at every tavern where the coach stopped—and at a good many where it had no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic hue, and a plum-coloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what Shakespeare would call a “purple- hued malt-worm.” He shaved scrupulously. A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed, and his talk, which consisted of “Gee-hups,” biting repartees administered to passing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely professional. Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the approved fashion. III LONDON BRIDGE And the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty years previously. So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and passing close under the projecting clock of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The view was eminently picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring Monument with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick and shovel. In previous ages there were gates both at the London and the Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen Elizabeth’s time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilised kingdom as that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore’s bloodstained castle. THE “GEORGE.” BRIDGE FOOT “Bridge Foot” was the name of the Southwark end of London Bridge.