The A303
Page 18
In the case of the putative intersection of the Harrow Way and the Great Ridgeway where the A303 crosses the A350, it’s a fair bet that there was an east-west track and a north-south track and that they met somewhere here and that several other tracks went off in various directions. That is how it was. Local people needed to get around and to do so they followed the ways their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers had followed. These were along ridges that led to other ridges, routes that were well-drained and offered vantage points to see the lie of the land. In time they became tracks and the knowledge of where they started and where they went became common.
So it is wholly possible that I, Neolithic Tom Fort, might have been on my way one summer’s day from my humble hutment on Two Mile Down to check on my animals on Charnage Down; and that I would have met an equally grubby, hairy-arsed fellow coming up the slope from the south, perhaps with a bag of pots or tools to trade; and that I would have asked him how life was in his equally humble settlement down the hill at East Knoyle. How the conversation might have developed from there it seems pointless to speculate.
East Knoyle is a very pretty village of stone and brick houses close enough to the A303 for convenience, far enough from it not to be troubled by its noise. Its stone church stands on a grassy knoll nestled among yews. An interesting display inside the door shows how it has been expanded and restored over the centuries since the Norman chancel was built. Dr Christopher Wren, father of Wren of St Paul’s, was Rector of East Knoyle, and left his mark on the walls of the chancel in the unusual form of a series of plaster reliefs showing the Apostles attending the Ascension of Christ. On the north wall is a kneeling figure with hands upraised in prayer which is believed to be Dr Wren himself. An unswerving Royalist throughout those turbulent times, his artwork landed him in trouble when the Roundheads reached the village. They took a dim view of what they regarded as idolatrous image-making, and the soldiers turfed him out. He was accused of heretical practices by a Parliamentary commission and deprived of the living.
The other Wren
There is a modest tablet near the church door in memory of thirteen members of the Foliot family ‘who for upwards of a century occupied Knoyle Down and other farms’ – the last of them Anne Foliot, who died in 1867 at the age of eighty-six. The stained-glass east window recalls another family of the village. Paid for by members of both Houses of Parliament, it honours George Wyndham, ‘Statesman, Orator, Man of Letters and Soldier’. It was dedicated by the Bishop of Salisbury on 9 May 1934, twenty-one years after its subject’s death. The window makes no mention of the circumstances of his passing – understandably so, since Wyndham’s cousin, the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who knew a thing or two about such matters, alleged that it was caused by a heart attack brought on by energetic love-making in a Paris brothel.14
Much of the story of the Wyndhams of East Knoyle is the story of their famous house, Clouds. Widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, it stands a little way out of the village to the north, where today it serves as a treatment centre for alcohol and drug dependency. It was commissioned by George Wyndham’s father, Percy, and designed by Philip Webb, a close friend and colleague of William Morris. Morris himself designed most of the fixtures and furnishings, including carpets, tablecloths, screens, curtains and upholstery. Edward Burne-Jones painted angels in the hall, the furniture was mostly Hepplewhite and Chippendale, the walls were panelled in unstained oak.
Clouds was a perfect period piece, universally admired. One night in the phenomenally cold January of 1891 a dozy maid given the job of cleaning an upstairs fireplace managed to tip live coals into a cupboard. The resulting fire reduced the house to a blackened shell, while the fire engines tried in vain to reach it on the ice-bound roads. Captain Carse of the Wiltshire Fire Brigade directed the futile attempts to contain the flames until he was prised from the ladder to which he had become frozen.
Nothing daunted, Percy Wyndham and his wife Madeline rebuilt Clouds as it had been (although without the Burne-Jones angels). It became the favourite weekend retreat of the artistically inclined and high-principled Tory toffs known as the Souls. Deep in the green Wiltshire countryside the Souls – who included Lord Curzon, Margot Asquith and Arthur Balfour as well as a gaggle of Wyndhams – cycled, played tennis, earnestly disagreed on Irish Home Rule, and conducted discreet love affairs. These, according to Curzon’s later mistress, Elinor Glyn, ‘were never undertaken either for money or out of sheer lust. . . nothing was allowed to appear crude and blatant, and what were essentially ugly facts were made to seem beautiful and even admirable.’15
All the hopes of Percy and Madeline Wyndham and their friends were pinned on their eldest child, George. Seen by them and many others as a Prime Minister in the making, he had literary leanings but subordinated them to a political career that resulted in his appointment in 1900 as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Like many well-meaning Englishmen before and after him, George Wyndham was moved to a passion of pity for Irish misery and as a result became a victim of Irish tribal bitterness. He resigned after being accused by Unionists of betraying their principles. Disillusioned with public life, he retreated to East Knoyle where he adopted with gusto the life of a Tory squire: hunting, coursing hares, attending to his estate and the affairs of the Cheshire Yeomanry. He dabbled with writing, had his bust sculpted by Rodin (‘a very great man . . . we run over the whole universe, lightly but deeply’) and conducted a long love affair with the Countess of Plymouth, apparently with his own wife’s approval.
George was forty-nine when he died. He drank too much and suffered from depression and there was sadness on the part of the many who loved him that so much bright promise had not been fulfilled. His father had died two years before him, and his son – known as Perf – was killed in France a month after the outbreak of the 1914–18 war. Four other grandsons of Percy and Madeline Wyndham died in the conflict.
The last Wyndham to own Clouds was Dick, the oddest of the lot. Cyril Connolly knew him as Whips Wyndham, others as Dirty Dick or The Amateur Flagellant. He achieved a kind of immortality in Wyndham Lewis’s notorious satirical novel The Apes of God in the character of Richard Whittington, a self-proclaimed painter of genius with a cupboard containing ‘a perfect hedge of birches, drovers’ whips, bamboos and martinets’. From the start Wyndham conceived a strong distaste for Clouds – possibly because he lived there during his brief and horribly miserable marriage. During the 1920s he sold as many of the contents as he could find a buyer for, and let the house (according to Wyndham Lewis, to ‘rich Jews’). He painted adequately but not brilliantly, and spent his money on cars, aeroplanes, wine, modern pictures and girls prepared to put up with his keenness for handcuffs and instruments of correction.
Whips Wyndham’s end combined wastefulness and absurdity in appropriate measure. After the war – in which he pottered about for a time as a captain in the Territorial Army before being overcome by alcoholism – he got a job as a foreign correspondent with a news service set up by Ian Fleming. His first assignment was to cover the conflict in Palestine in 1948, where he was shot dead by a Jewish sniper after standing up to photograph a skirmish.16
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Most rich men like to leave a mark. Sometimes – as with Clouds – it is quite discreet, a statement of taste and worth intended for family, friends and neighbours. Others are more public. William Beckford’s vainglorious tower at Fonthill can be seen as a cry for attention, a plea to the society that preferred to ignore him to take him and his obsessions seriously. At Stourhead – across from Whitesheet Hill – is a monument that, on a clear day, is quite unmissable. It can be seen across a vast swathe of country, and was meant to be seen, not as a reflection of the glory of the man who put it there, but of its subject.
‘I have one scheme more which will crown or top all,’ the banker Henry Hoare declared in 1762. The ‘all’ referred to Stourhead, the famous mansion and garden paradise
he and his architects and designers had created along the vale where the Stour is born of six springs. By then the vision of house, lake, vistas of woodland and turf, obelisk, temples, grottoes, bridges and statues all blended into one glorious Classical unity was almost complete. A new king, George III, was on the throne. The messy and hugely costly Seven Years’ War was over. A new age beckoned. How better to mark it, Hoare thought, than by remembering a previous age in which a great king – the greatest of them – had by his courage and wisdom and godly learning confounded England’s enemies, brought peace to a war-sick people, fostered art and literature and the one true religion.
Alfred’s Tower
He instructed his architect, Henry Flitcroft, to design a tower to stand, in Hoare’s words, ‘in that spot where Alfred settled his standard (in this day called Kingsettle Hill) after He came out from His concealment in the Isle of Athelney [near Taunton] and gave Battle and Defeat to the Danes.’ Never mind that no one knows for sure where the standard was raised or where Alfred met the lords of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire and their men to begin the decisive march against the Danes; or, indeed, where exactly the battle took place (long referred to as Ethandune, its likeliest location is at Edington Hill on the northern edge of Salisbury Plain). Henry Hoare, a stout patriot, needed no convincing that the event that shaped the course of history took place on his land.
From a distance King Alfred’s Tower is a dark finger raised from the woods that flow over the ridge above Stourhead. Close up it is a strange construction. Flitcroft apparently believed that its three-sided design, with rounded projections at each corner, would make it less likely to be blown over by the wind in its exposed position (another possible explanation of its shape is that the sides corresponded with the old boundaries of Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset, which certainly come together hereabouts). It stands on a sandstone base and is built of red brick, rising 160 feet to a crenellated top with a bulbous projection at the southern apex. There is a statue of the King in a stone recess above the entrance, standing as if about to address his troops before battle with one arm across his breast and his sword at his side. According to Hoare’s account, it was executed ‘by a young lad of eighteen . . . sent from Bath, working from a model given to him, to the Admiration of all the Spectators’.
By the time the tower was finished in 1772, the bright promise of George III’s first years was fading and the disastrous American War of Independence was looming. But even if Henry Hoare’s hopes of a new Alfredian golden age were disappointed, his tower did not. It chimed in nicely with a new vogue for what connoisseurs weary of the symmetries of Palladianism were calling ‘the sublime’. Height was an important element of sublimity because it excited awe, and few monuments had more of it than King Alfred’s Tower. The association between it and its subject’s lofty character and accomplishments was the cause of much satisfaction to its owner.
Whatever the architectural merits of Hoare’s act of hero worship, the vista it offers is indeed sublime. The tower rises from a grassy terrace lapped by the ash and beech trees of Selwood Forest. To the east, beyond Stourhead, loom the whale-backed bare downs of Salisbury Plain. To the north and north-west spreads a patchwork of green fields, sharply defined by their hedges, dotted with farms and barns, dabbed with woods and copses, fingered by the darker, wandering lines of brooks and ditches. I could clearly make out Hinkley Point power station on the Bristol Channel thirty-five miles away, with the hump of Glastonbury Tor halfway between. Cadbury Castle stood out to the west, while to the south, reaching towards Dorchester, lay the Vale of Blackmore.
This is the heart of Wessex. Under Alfred, of course, it was the Kingdom of the West Saxons, a political entity formed sometime in the sixth century and gradually expanded until it covered much of what we know as Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Berkshire. It had its capital at Winchester and was sufficiently powerful and cohesive to repel a succession of Viking invaders. The Saxons built churches as well as warships and defensive walls, and their language became the language of learning, developing into the Old English of Beowulf and the basis of the English we speak now. Under Alfred’s successors Wessex annexed Mercia and East Anglia, so that by 927 AD there was a single kingdom of England extending from Northumbria to Cornwall. After the Norman invasion, Wessex ceased even to be an earldom, and vanished from the map.
But not the idea, apparently. If you believe today’s Wessex enthusiasts – Wessexians? – this was merely dormant for a remarkably long time. A joint submission in 2002 from the Wessex Constitutional Convention, the Wessex Society, and the Wessex Regionalists stated: ‘It is not possible to say whether during the centuries after the Norman Conquest Wessex remained in the region’s folk memory or not. This is not the kind of information with which records of that time were concerned.’ Quite so. On the other hand one might have thought that, had the Wessex dimension been afloat, it might have got at least a mention from the one or other of the many poets, storytellers, historians, antiquarians and fantasists active in the area over those centuries.
It took a novelist, Thomas Hardy, to put Wessex back on the map. Indeed, a map was included in the later editions of the sequence he called the Wessex Novels. It is pretty clear that Hardy regarded it as a marketing ploy rather than a deep-rooted response to a long-felt regional identity. In a preface to Far from the Madding Crowd he said that because a single county (which would have been his own, Dorset) did not ‘afford a canvas large enough’ to accommodate what he had in mind, he had ‘disinterred’ Wessex. ‘The press and the public,’ he wrote, ‘were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, willingly joining me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen Victoria.’ Subsequently, rather to his irritation, his concept took on a life of its own: ‘The appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons of a partly real, partly dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask all good and gentle readers to forget this . . .’
In vain. The dream-country evolved into a crusade. After Hardy’s death a group of now largely forgotten poets, critics and assorted men and women of letters got together to produce a journal promoting his vision of a University of Wessex. Under the editorship of Vivian de Sola Pinto, it provided a mirror reflecting a sentimental, nostalgic yearning for a lost England. It was full of sonnets by the likes of Samuel Gurney Dixon: ‘I watched a rain-cloud stoop with queenly grace/To greet the solitary sun-scorched hill’ etc., and earnest ponderings on the nature of Wessex, usually referred to at some point as ‘the heart of England’. Hardy himself was well aware that ‘his’ Wessex had been overtaken by the modern, urban industrial society. The rural world in which he grew up depended for its culture and community spirit on its isolation. Once that was broken down, the old ways became anachronistic curiosities clung to because of their sentimental associations.
The Annual Record of the Movement for a University of Wessex did not last long, but the sentiments behind it proved to have more stamina. In the 1970s the media’s favourite eccentric aristocrat, the hirsute, polygamous Marquess of Bath, formed the Wessex Regionalists. Their cause was self-government for a Wessex enlarged to include Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Judged by the severe standard of electoral support, the impact of the Wessex Regionalists has been modest. The highpoint was the near-2000 vote achieved in Westbury in the 1979 election (Lord Bath himself contested Wells and got 155). The party fought seven seats in 1979 and ten in 1983. Since then its fortunes have waned to the extent that in the 2010 election its sole candidate, Colin Bix – a veteran of six campaigns – got a measly 62 votes in Witney, the Prime Minister’s constituency.
You might deduce from this that most people in Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire do not regard themselves as having a great deal in common and are not interested in self-government. I am sure you are right, and the same goes for the rest of E
ngland. But the crusade does not die. The Wessex Society – patrons include the octogenarian clarinettist Acker Bilk and Bishop Kallistis of the Greek Orthodox Church, as well as Lord Bath – flies a bright red flag decorated with a wyvern, and proclaims the vigour of Wessex culture. This embraces the dialect – ‘the purest form of English’ – as well as cider and the melange of dub reggae, hip-hop, punk rock, acid jazz and techno disco music loosely known as the Bristol Sound. The Wessex Regionalists may struggle for votes but the Wessex brand is thriving. Wessex Water feeds the taps, Wessex Connect runs the buses, the Wessex Rivers Trust looks after the streams, Wessex Archaeology strives on behalf of buried heritage all over the country (Wessex Trains, regrettably, was swallowed up by First Great Western). Hardy’s Wessex University never happened but there is a Wessex Institute of Technology in Southampton and several hundred businesses boast the Wessex marque. After a lapse of 900 years we even have an Earl and Countess of Wessex once again.17