The A303

by Tom Fort

  Boy and girl

  See’st thou the limpid current glide

  Beyond yon bridge, my hapless theme,

  Where branches fringe its verdant side

  And willows tremble o’er the stream

  The poet imagines the pair – ‘two smiling infants . . . sweet victims’ – coming to play at ‘the flow’ry margin’; one rolling ‘headlong in the deep . . . beneath the doling tide’; the other stretching forth ‘his little hand’ but in vain; ‘they both descended swift as thought . . . their lives dissolved in one embrace, their mingled souls flew up in air’.

  It is powerful stuff.

  * * *

  The Ilminster bypass is one of the minor oddities of the A303. All the other major upgradings, starting with the Andover and Amesbury bypasses, were dual carriageway as a matter of course. But the Ilminster section, completed in 1988, was restricted to two lanes supposedly wide enough to permit overtaking (subsequently re-marked into three, with the central one reserved for passing). The decision not to dual it was justified at the time by projections of traffic use which, as usual, proved to be hopelessly wide of the mark, but was in fact a matter of cheese-paring economy. The result was the worst of several worlds. The stretch is fast but not fast enough, and the overtaking lane has incited folly, leading to numerous nasty accidents. Furthermore, the use of concrete to form the top layer instead of asphalt causes the passing wheels to make a horrible, high-pitched noise.

  At the time of construction, space was left for widening if and when the comprehensive upgrading of the A303 ever happened. Years later the Highways Agency came up with a route for the new highway from Ilminster to Honiton and beyond. It was to be in part brand new, in part adapted existing road: all of it dual carriageway and all of it through the Blackdown Hills. An alliance of groups – including the National Trust, the Friends of the Earth and the Council for the Protection of Rural England –joined forces to oppose it. They pointed out that the Blackdown Hills was a designated AONB – an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which would be a lot less outstanding if the road went ahead. An alternative was suggested, to forget about the A303 and instead widen the A358, which went north-west from Ilminster to meet the M5 at Taunton. It was less direct, comprising two sides of a triangle rather than one. But it would be much less destructive of cherished views and ancient woodland and hedges, and less disruptive to colonies of bats, communities of newts and dormice, and the wanderings of otters. It would also be a lot cheaper.

  Traffic models were commissioned. Engineers were sent forth to measure and calculate. Exhibitions were staged and consultation exercises organised. Public money was dispersed in every direction save that of building a yard of new road. The Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, scratched his silver thatch, arched his dark eyebrows, furrowed his brow; and in November 2004 plumped for the A358 scheme.

  That was the day the A303 dream finally expired. As it turned out, the A358 widening also bit the dust, because no funding for it could be found. By the time Gordon Brown finally got his nail-bitten fingers on the fag-end of the Labour administration, building roads had receded out of sight in the ‘vision for Britain’ that he strove with such painful lack of success to articulate. It was a sign of the times that the Conservative manifesto for the 2010 election did not mention the subject. How far we had travelled in the twenty years since Roads for Prosperity! The coalition’s Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, said that the primary objective was to manage the existing road network more efficiently. To that end £6 billion would be spent over four years. A mere £2.3 billion was earmarked for new schemes and for completing those in progress.

  An era had ended.

  * * *

  The old and the new A303 diverge again a couple of miles east of Ilminster. The bypass loops around the town to the north, while the old road – now without a number at all – meanders through the Seavingtons, St Michael and St Mary. Before it finally gets to Ilminster, it passes through Whitelackington, an insignificant place with a fine manor house and a handsome hamstone church.

  Whitelackington Church

  From the fifteenth century onwards the foremost family in these parts were the Spekes. The one familiar and famous Speke was John Hanning, discoverer of the source of the Nile, who is buried a mile or two away at Dowlish Wake.21 Earlier Spekes were generally content to attend to their lands and offices and keep the peace. Generally, but not always.

  The 1680s was a troubled time in England. Conspiracies erupted like pustules on the body politic. Spies slipped back and forth between London and the Continent. Catholics and Protestants were once again at each other’s throats, and the most absurd falsehoods about either were readily believed. Charles II was still on the throne, no more the swaggering star of his youth but a querulous, touchy, unpredictable shadow of his former confident self For all his bedroom swordsmanship he had failed in a king’s first duty, to produce a legitimate male heir. The nearest he had come was his eldest bastard, the Duke of Monmouth. Monmouth was a darling; brave, charming, graceful and athletic. Charles loved the lad but saw his faults – lack of brains and even more acute lack of resolute character – and refused to approve him as his heir. Others, determined to prevent Charles’s obstinately and fanatically Papist brother James from succeeding, continued to promote Monmouth’s claims.

  In 1680, five years before Charles II’s death, the dashing young Monmouth embarked upon a quasi-royal tour of the West Country. According to his nineteenth-century biographer, George Roberts, he was ‘caressed with the joyful acclamations of the country people, who came from all parts twenty miles about, the lanes and hedges being everywhere lined with men, women and children who with incessant shouts cried “God Bless King Charles and theProtestantDuke”.’At Whitelackington the crowds were so enormous that several sections of the fencing around the estate had to be removed to let them in. Monmouth’s party were welcomed by the squire, George Speke, and took refreshment beneath the spreading branches of a famously big sweet chestnut.22

  Monmouth’s reception in the West Country was viewed with alarm in London. He was spoken to severely by his father, and following the discovery of the so-called Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles and James, was expelled into exile in France. Five years later he was back, just as handsome and dashing as before, but this time on a mission of deadly seriousness. Charles was dead, finished by a stroke while shaving, and vindictive, bigoted James was in his place. Now was the time, Monmouth convinced himself, to sweep the servant of Rome off the throne and sit on it himself. In June 1685 he sailed into the harbour at Lyme Regis, having sent word ahead to his supporters in Taunton to prepare themselves for rebellion.

  The news reached George Speke at Whitelackington. Although he had fought on the Royalist side in the Civil War (and had been imprisoned and heavily fined by the Parliamentarians), in common with most other Englishmen from both sides of that great divide he viewed the prospect of a Catholic on the throne with righteous horror. Speke and his elder son John were both members of the notorious Green Ribbon Club which met at the King’s Head in Chancery Lane, London. The members drank a great deal, carried a life-preserver known as a Protestant Flail, and for several years organised a procession each November which climaxed in the burning of an effigy of the Pope at the Inner Temple gate – a spectacle said to have been greeted with a shout so prodigious that it could be heard in Catholic Paris, or even Rome itself.

  George Speke declared himself too old to fight again, but sent John with forty men to join the rebellion. From Lyme the Duke, his signature black plume waving above his broad hat, rode to Axminster, then Chard, then Ilminster. The streets of Ilminster were thronged with his men – hardly an army, more a raggle-taggle mob of untrained farm labourers, weavers, shop-keepers and idlers intent on plunder and easy rewards. Each wore a sprig of green in his cap. ‘A Monmouth, a Monmouth and the Protestant religion,’ they cried. The Duke smiled and waved. But one who observed him closely detected a ‘settled melancholy’
on those graceful features. Among those who greeted him in Ilminster that day was George Speke’s younger son, Charles. Unlike his father and elder brother, Charles Speke had no aptitude or inclination for plotting, but he offered his hand to the Duke when the Duke offered his.

  From Ilminster the rebels advanced to Taunton, where Monmouth denounced James as a Popish usurper and declared himself King. A fortnight later the enterprise came to its predictable, ghastly end on the peat-bog of Sedgemoor. Most of Monmouth’s forces were slaughtered. He himself fled, but was found three days later cowering in a ditch near Ringwood in Hampshire with some peas in his pocket, the only food he had been able to find. He was conveyed to the Tower where, on 15 July, he laid his handsome head on the block. The executioner, the infamous Jack Ketch, struck five times at his neck with the axe while the crowd bayed for blood; then resorted to a butcher’s knife to finish the job.

  A dreadful revenge was taken on the rebels who survived Sedgemoor. Twenty were strung up in the market place in Taunton and, while the drums beat, their hearts were cut out and burned and their other remains were boiled in pitch and hung about the gates and walls of the town. Similar scenes were enacted in Exeter, Bridgewater and elsewhere. At the end of August the Lord Chief Justice, Judge George Jeffreys, was appointed to head what became known as the Bloody Assizes. Between the beginning and end of September he conducted a series of show trials at which 300 people were condemned to death and almost a thousand were sentenced to be sold as slaves for transportation to the West Indian plantations.

  The penultimate of these spectacles was held at Wells in Somerset. Among the several hundred prisoners paraded in carts through the streets was Charles Speke. For the crime of having shaken the Duke’s hand he was condemned by Jeffreys to hang in Ilminster market square, together with eleven other sons of the town. When the major of dragoons who had arrested him ventured to suggest that the real culprit was his brother John, and that Charles’s life might be spared, Jeffreys came up with an answer worthy of this legend of judicial infamy:

  ‘No, his family owe a life. He shall die for his namesake.’

  16

  COACHING DAYS

  They were cramped, claustrophobic and filthy. Sleep was possible, comfort not. A seat inside was extremely expensive, and to our way of thinking the journeys would have seemed intolerably slow.

  Yet Georgian England was proud of its stagecoaches. William Cobbett, generally more inclined to carp than to praise, said that next to a foxhunt ‘the finest sight in England is a stagecoach ready to start’. And its arrival was almost as good – ‘the horses all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud, the whole equipage covered in dust and dirt’.

  There was a splendour about them: the burnished maroon body of the coach, the royal cypher picked out in gold, the Cross of St George or Scotch Thistle or Shamrock and Star, the high, thin wheels painted scarlet or Post Office red; the coachman in tall hat and dark cloak, whip in gloved hand; and the horses, usually four but sometimes six of them snorting in their harnesses, their hooves clattering on the stony road. They had romance and dash and colour. But that was not the point of them. The point was that they enabled a social and economic transformation to take place.

  The development of the coaching trade breathed a new life into England’s slumbering market towns. William Chaplin, who saw the potential early, built a business that covered every major route out of London, employed 2000 people, and turned over £500,000 a year. His and other enterprises required support from what we would call service stations, stops where very large numbers of horses could be watered, fed and stabled, and passengers could be dined or breakfasted at speed and at highly unsocial hours. Coaching inns sprang up along all the trunk roads of the time. They were spacious establishments with cobbled yards and rows of stables, where a traveller could get a pint of sherry and a mutton chop at one in the morning and clear his plate and be off within a quarter of an hour. They became features of the landscape, and their landlords and landladies familiar and well-loved figures.

  There was another dimension to the stagecoach revolution. They diminished distance, eroded isolation, and mentally and physically expanded the horizons of those who could afford the fares. Within a generation the well-to-do family that had previously been quite content to rusticate inconspicuously on their country property was taking the waters in Bath, a seaside holiday in Weymouth, and the season in London. The stagecoaches changed the way people thought about life and the world around them. They were crucial to the economic upheaval that was to turn Britain into a nineteenth-century superpower. We talk about the railways, but the coaches came first and led the way.

  First of all, however, came the roads. In the 1720s it took four days for a coach to reach Exeter from London. Long-distance travel was an arduous affair, to be undertaken only if the business was very pressing indeed. In dry weather the roads were rutted and pitted and thick with dust. When it rained they became sluices of mud and water. Even with the appointment in the 1750s of the first turnpike trusts – associations of local businessmen and landowners which undertook to build, improve and maintain roads in return for being able to charge tolls – matters improved only slowly. In 1752 the Gentleman’s Magazine observed of the London–Exeter road (the current A30 via Salisbury) that ‘they do not know how to lay a foundation, nor make the proper slopes and drains; they throw a heavy mass of huge loose stones into a hole . . . which then make the best of their way to the centre of the world.’

  But the Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam knew. Through years of patient experimentation, he learned that if a road was slightly raised and cambered, if it was provided with adequate drains and culverts, and if it was constructed in layers of hard stone broken into small, angular fragments, it would over time become compacted and consolidated into a solid structure that would take any amount of rain and wear. Parliament appointed him General Surveyor of Roads, and the turnpike trusts seized upon the principles he had set out in his two definitive books, A Practical Essay on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Roads and The Present State of Road Making. All over the country old roads were transformed and new ones were cut. While the surveyors measured and the navvies dug, families sat by the roadside beating and bashing the blocks of stone into bite-sized pieces. And the stagecoaches picked up speed.

  Historically the London–Exeter road was one of the small number of indispensable highways radiating out from the capital. It gave access to the important wool centres of the south-west, as well as to the ports of Falmouth and Devonport. The way was via Brentford, Hounslow, Staines, Egham, Bagshot, Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury, Yeovil and Honiton – the route of the A30. During the 1750s it was parcelled out between various turnpike trusts which did their best, given the pre-McAdam technology, to improve and maintain it. But there was an alternative – shorter and potentially quicker – waiting to be exploited. It lay across Salisbury Plain.

  The Andover Trust started the ball rolling by turnpiking what was to become the A303 as far as Thruxton. The Amesbury Trust took it over there, and between 1761 and the late 1770s extended it all the way to Willoughby Hedge, where the Wincanton Trust stepped in. Thereafter the Ilchester Trust, the Ilminster Trust, and Honiton and Ilminster Trust all played their parts, so that by 1809 the new way to Exeter was complete.

  It took some time for its advantages to be recognised. The mail coaches continued to go via Salisbury, and the proto-A303 was used mainly by local traffic. But an Ilminster man, William Hanning, became fired with a vision: to turn the road that ran through his town into the main highway to the west, and thus to knock the A30 Salisbury route off its perch.

  The Hannings were farmers, originally tenants of the Spekes of Whitelackington. They made good, very good indeed, so much so that they took over the bulk of the Dillington estate from the Spekes. It included a fine house previously occupied for a time by one of our less exalted Prime Ministers, Lord North, who married a Speke and is chiefly remembered fo
r having inadvertently provoked the American War of Independence by refusing to lift the hated duty on tea.

  The Dillington estate cost John Hanning £83,000 in 1795 (at least £8 million at today’s prices), and by the turn of the century his son William was in residence at Dillington House. The Hanning fortunes evidently continued to prosper, because in the 1820s William had the place rebuilt and expanded into a very considerable mansion. It is hamstone, with slender mullioned windows and a slate roof bristling with clusters of high, octagonal chimneys. The sombre east front looks out over a formal garden, with the landscaped park beyond. Because of the slope on which the house stands, the west front is much less grand and more welcoming, and very lovely when the lowering sun warms the honeyed stone. The entrance is on the west front, and Hanning had the drive curve away up the slope and off in a southerly direction to meet the road between a matching pair of hexagonal gatehouses.

  Dillington House

  He was the driving force within the Ilminster Turnpike Trust. Out of his own pocket he subsidised the use of what became known as the New Direct Road by the main West Country carrier of goods, Russells of Exeter. A colleague of Hanning said of him that ‘he talked largely of not regarding a few thousands loss if he can make his road (as he calls it) the Great Western Road.’ The Russell Flying Waggons, as they were known despite an average speed of 3 m.p.h., reverted after a while to the alternative route via Yeovil and Salisbury, but soon some of the stagecoaches were trying out the New Direct Road.

  But Hanning had ambitions beyond mere horse-power. He was one of a group of wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs seduced by the visionary enthusiasm of one of the unsung heroes of nineteenth-century technological advance, Goldsworthy Gurney. A Cornishman by birth, a doctor by training, and an inventor by inclination, Gurney had developed a steam-powered version of the stagecoach. In its final version it actually consisted of two vehicles connected by a rod, the front one containing the engine and manned by the crew, and the second carrying the passengers and the coke and water.