Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  The old red-brick houses of Wiltshire are quite unlike these upstarts. There are a number of them, but everywhere they are rare enough to strike the eye. They reward it too. Among the beautiful red-brick houses in Wiltshire are Trafalgar and the Moot in the Downnton district; Biddeston near Ludgershall; St Edmund’s College at Salisbury; the Rectory and the Old Rectory at Wilton; Hyde House at Dinton; Coleshill at Highworth; and Seagry near Malmesbury.

  By good fortune the very kiln which produced the bricks for Seagry is still in existence. It was in active work till the outbreak of war, and it will soon be so again. This Rodbourne brickyard has belonged to the family of its present owner, Mr Tanner, for over a hundred and fifty years, and all the bricks made here are handmade. So a visit to this place makes one realise that it is not only their “ quainte olde worlde appearance” which gives to handmade bricks their value. If that were so, they could never hold their own in a world where the admired word is Reconstruction rather than Beauty. But handmade bricks have a practical value.

  The Romans found out long ago that thin bricks stand the weather better than others; and they used wood as their fuel. Its quick heat burnt a thin brick but it could not penetrate a thick one. These small thin Roman bricks are well known to anyone acquainted with ancient building and they have proved that they can last for two thousand years.

  At Rodbourne the old process is continued. The clay in the fields has streaks of iron in it, and it is this which gives such depth and variety of colour to the finished product. As far as possible the men mix the various strata as they actually dig the clay; they water it to the right consistency, shovel it quickly into a barrow, and hasten with it to the pug-mill. Here can be seen still in use the brick-makers’ traditional source of power which has come down to Rodbourne from the earliest days of the history of bricklaying—a horse walking steadily round and round in a circle. When the material comes out of the mill, it is put on to a table and pressed into moulds. Each brick is then cut off with a wire and smoothed with a water striker; then released by the sand with which the mould has already been sprinkled. Each separate part of the process is carried out by workmen who understand its purpose. The hand-worker in a brickyard is the master of his hands: he can never degenerate into a “ hand” himself.

  The shaped bricks remain drying in the open air for some weeks before they are ready for burning. Each of the Rodbourne ovens holds 25,000 to 40,000 bricks, and is heated by a special kind of coal which as far as possible resembles wood in its habit of giving off flame. In the old days gorse was the best-liked fuel, harvested in winter, and then stored for use in the following summer. When once the bricks have been put into the Kil’, the holes are blocked up so as to give a more intense heat and a greater variety of colour. At Rodbourne they proudly boast that the mechanical pyrometer never approached the high standard reached by a good reliable man who knows how to stoke.

  The object aimed at throughout the whole process of making bricks by hand is to produce a brick which will equal in durability those made by the Romans, and at the same time which will stand the weather and keep out the damp. Its delicately blended variety of colour and the charm of its small elegant form are merely by-products.

  The producers of handmade bricks have no doubt that theirs is a better article than the machine-made one; but the question for the present day is whether or not the world will continue to prefer strength, beauty and durability (the ancient virtues in bricks) to cheapness and speed in output.

  There is indeed much to be learnt about brick-making which cannot be found in the official definition of a brick issued by the Office of Works. Here it is:

  “Bricks are walling units which (a) consist of any hard and durable inorganic substance other than refractory substances employed specifically on account of this property, (b) are suitable for building and bonding, (c) are of such a shape, size and weight that they can be manipulated by one hand.”

  Now we reach the noblest of the Wiltshire building materials, the grand freestone, one variety of which is found throughout a large area in the north-western part of the county, while a second is chiefly known as Chilmark stone. This variety was first worked by the Romans in the cathedral-like quarries at Chilmark and Teffont. Chilmark stone is the empress among building materials. It sometimes seems hardly to be material at all, but a visible expression of the spirit of the building constructed from it.

  Salisbury Cathedral, for instance. Here the Chilmark stone has a cold colourless beauty, as if it had placed itself anonymously at the disposal of that group of architectural canons who were responsible for the grand religious conception which stands before us in Salisbury Cathedral. The stone has made itself into “the servant of the servants of God”, in order to be the vehicle of their high spiritual creation. But as you watch Salisbury Cathedral you find that this unemotional stone responds to the spirit of every hour of the day or night. It has one substance at dawn; another in the full light of day; another at twilight; and another—the most wonderful of all—under the moon. The mists rising from the meadows; the storms sweeping down from the Plain; a blaze of sunshine; or a dreary colourless day of cloud—each of these calls something fresh out of the stones of Salisbury Cathedral. Chilmark stone at Salisbury seems to be like a musical instrument waiting to be played upon.

  Yet a few miles away the Inigo Jones front of Wilton House wears a warm golden patina, contrasting vividly with the watery grey of the Palladian Bridge a few yards off. Would anyone imagine that both were of the same stone? Then at Wardour Castle, Amesbury Abbey, Pythouse, Stockton and Boyton the material seems to have allowed the architect to play with it, and to give to his building something of his own personality. Of all building materials this Portland stone from Chilmark gives the greatest opportunity to the architect.

  The Chilmark quarry has in itself something of the splendour of Imperial Rome. Going into it is an unexpected revelation, for nothing of it can be seen on the surface of the ground. As you pass into it you find that you are suddenly in a great vault, measuring about thirteen acres, the main part of which has a height varying from eighty-five to ninety feet. Standing in the main central cavity, the eye travels down long corridors which seem to spread into infinity, and when I first saw this quarry some fifty years ago these corridors were only dimly lit here and there. In some ways this may have increased their appearance of magnitude; but now the long succession of electric lights hanging from the roof gives an even greater impression of endless length. What adds to the cathedral-like aspect of this quarry is that the roof in the main is not supported by ordinary pitprops but by what appear to be vast Norman or Byzantine pillars. In some cases these are huge monoliths of stone that has been left unhewn; in others lesser stones have been piled one upon another to give the impression of pillars; and finally there are pillars of quite small stones built into a unity. The temperature of Chilmark quarry never varies. It remains at about fifty two degrees, summer and winter.

  If Chilmark can be called the architect’s stone, the Bath and Cotswold stones in the north-west of the county give the builder his chance. That wide piece of country stretching from Bath to Castle Combe, Bradford on Avon, Corsham, Lacock and Chippenham, and so into Berkshire and Gloucestershire, is a land in which the stone seems to have taken possession and done what it will with the churches, houses and the farms. They call it a “stone country”, and so indeed it is, for the buildings belong to the country and the country to the buildings. The houses look as if they had risen out of the soil, compelling human imagination to bend to the will of the stone. The only way to make Bath stone free of another part of the country is the way chosen by Sir John Thynne, in the sixteenth century, when he bought a large area of the Box Quarry and transplanted it bodily to build his palace at Longleat. But even so the stone could only be adapted to fit the architect’s plan by putting into the walls almost as much glass as stone, and now no one would dream of calling Longleat a building in the Cotswold manner.

  Concrete, the most
modern of all building materials, is also a native of Wiltshire; and a concrete building, if designed in sympathy with the local traditions, should not be out of place in the county. Chalk is the foundation of concrete, which is made out of six parts of gravel to one part of cement. Hitherto there have been no cement works actually in Wiltshire, but there is now a trend in this direction, and anyhow the materials of cement are here, chalk and mud burnt together in a kiln. To make the concrete, the gravel is first mixed clean of grit and clay, and then mixed with cement, when it will set. The surface of a concrete building is sometimes covered by pebble-dashing, which means throwing small pebbles upon the concrete to give it a rough surface. Rough-cast is another version of the same method, and in this case the surface is sprinkled with granite chippings mixed with cement and sand.

  Apart from these complete building materials, chalk is used in many subsidiary building processes; in fact it has been said that hardly a house in England could stand up were all the chalk taken out of its composition. Chalk is one of the essential elements in lime (made at Harnham near Salisbury), in plaster and in whitewash. Without chalk there would be no mortar to hold the bricks together in a wall, and no putty to keep the glass in the windows. Breeze-blocks again are made of concrete combined with the small cinder ashes taken from railway engines. Builders use a great many of these breeze-blocks to strengthen their inside walls.

  The wheel has come full circle. The evolution of Wiltshire building materials shows that civilisation in this county has never grown away from chalk in its dwellings. It has only found new and elaborate ways in which to use the material with which our forefathers constructed their prehistoric dwellings at Windmill Hill and other ancient sites. There is a British village on the down between Shrewton and Stonehenge, the only remains of which are the floors and fireplaces of the houses which have been excavated out of the chalk and then protected by low roofs made of boughs or turfs. Another British dwelling which was found at Beckhampton near Avebury consisted of two circular pits connected one with the other and sunk in the chalk. The larger of these is five foot eight inches deep, and the smaller is four foot eight. It looks as if the larger pit were the kitchen and living-room, and the little one is like a seat from which the occupant could watch the cooking going on. Pits of this depth make it more possible to imagine how people could have lived in them. These chalk houses were evidently used after the Romans arrived in the country, for they sometimes contain sherds of Roman pottery. Today we may not be cave-dwellers, as were the aboriginal inhabitants of the downs, but Wiltshire men still know that chalk is essential to the houses which we have learnt to make more comfortable and convenient than were the primitive dwellings of our forefathers. Once again, “ in my end is my beginning”.

  Chapter Six

  DIALECT

  IT is not only rigid conservatives and sentimental old women who love the good old days who deplore the superior attitude towards country dialect adopted by teachers in some elementary schools. University professors of philology also see in the ancient Saxon speech still spoken in villages an important element in that English language the foundations of which were laid by King Alfred. For a thousand years this English was enriched by Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Burke and the forty-six unnamed translators who in 1611 presented to “the most high and mighty Prince King James” what has been called “ the greatest prose work of this or of any other century”—the Authorised Version of the Bible.

  Its skeleton is still in the old dialects, but of all English dialects none is more interesting to historians than that spoken in Wilts, Somerset and Dorset, the counties which have preserved the purest version of the West Saxon speech. This was the language used by King Alfred when he was recognised as the father of English prose.

  Yet, since 1870, village children have been stopped when they used their dialect in the schools. They are told (though, of course, in a clipt and precise lingo) to “ta’ak oop and vurget their mother tongue”. Children end by believing their teachers, and they too think that dialect is an unsuccessful attempt to speak the English of the cheap press. The reverse is the truth. Modern colloquial speech is often merely an ill-pronounced and degenerate dialect. Even today it must be admitted that, in spite of universal education, there are few Wiltshire children who do not know the words of the official song of their County Regiment—“The Vly be on the Turmut”. Probably, however, few of them also know that “turmut” is the right word, beside which “ turnip” is a vulgar cockneyism. The same might be said about “chimbley” and “chimney”. “Chimbley” is full of the solid soot which has been scraped away in cleaning the “ chimney”.

  English people in all parts of the country would gain greatly if they understood, and spoke, the old languages of their own neighbourhoods, which for a thousand years have kept their raciness because, till the middle of the nineteenth century, no one ever told the country people that they ought to know better.

  Two hundred years ago quotations from the Greek and Latin classics were used and recognised by everyone in the House of Commons; yet the members who were educated enough for this all spoke the English of their own counties. By this the hearers knew from which constituency they came.

  A dialect well spoken (or, still more, well sung) uses a number of vowel sounds which have dropped out of “ correct English”, but the old country speech contributes more than this to the language. Dialects often preserve shades of meaning too subtle for a language which must stick as near as possible to its least common denominator, if it is to circulate throughout a Commonwealth of Nations like the British.

  It can, of course, be said that dialects use too small a number of ideas for a many-sided generation like our own. It is true that there is no dialect word for a “pram”, a “ photo” or a “sewing-machine”. We must go outside the Wiltshire dialect to speak of a “gramophone”, a “ wireless” or a “cinema”. But to make up for this, we must remember that there is in the English dialect dictionary a rich vocabulary relating to the everyday things of a simple life. For instance, in the dialects of England you can call a man a fool in thirteen hundred ways, and often one wants them all! You can use thirteen hundred and fifty different words to threaten him with a thrashing, and if you want to describe a slatternly woman there are a thousand and fifty ways to say it. Also there are a hundred and twenty names for the youngest pig of the litter. This word is not now in constant use in every household, though it might sometimes be appropriate to the youngest baby in the family.

  Bilingual people have more than the advantage of being able naturally to converse in more than one language; they have also grown up to possess unconsciously two sets of ideas. For that, more than the vocabulary, is the fundamental difference between languages. I have often marvelled at the flexibility of brain shown in uneducated village women who turn without hesitation from speaking broad Wiltshire with their friends to express themselves with equal ease in a refined speech which they know will be understood by a stranger. It is a great deprivation to force into a single mould the versatile minds of bilingual children. It must make them more limited. Let them of course learn the written language of the day. They must do so. But not at the cost of losing a gift which is the one thing they naturally possess giving them the advantage over their pastors and masters—bilingualism. On the other hand, educationalists of today appear to have no objection to the grafting on to the English language of modern Americanisms. It is true that American slang is one of the living languages of the world today; but it shows considerable ignorance on the part of purists not to see that the boot fits the other foot too. Take the word “swank”, for instance, which during the war of 1914–18 was readily accepted as a trans-Atlantic innovation. But in the nineties of the last century Mr Goddard and Mr Dartnell were including it in their glossary of old Wiltshire words still used in the Salisbury neighbourhood. It seems to have been one of the many dialect words which were limited to a small district. Wiltshire Words defines it thus: “Swank�
��to work in a slow, lazy fashion. Swanky—boisterous, swaggering, strutting.” There are in America several places called after Wiltshire towns and villages, probably originally settled by people from this part of the country. Wilton, New England, kept its bicentenary in 1939. Wilton, Connecticut, was founded in 1701. Salisbury, Maryland, dates back to 1732. At one or other of these dates our local word crossed the ocean, to return some centuries later as a distinguished stranger. If the Wiltshire dialect is flexible enough to welcome this “ Return of the Native”, and to re-absorb the old word into the speech of today, it cannot then be so limited.

  Those of us who remember our schoolroom days will not easily forget that England was once a heptarchy, and we should remember at the same time that the countryman’s speech of today (or rather, of yesterday) is a living reminder of the variety of races which, as long ago as that, were already meeting in this island to found the English nation. Until travelling became more general every county spoke its history in its dialect.

  In his Natural History of Wiltshire Aubrey says, “Danes-blood (Dwarf-elder ebulous) about Slaughtonford is plenty. There was heretofore a great fight with the Danes, which made the inhabitants give it that name.” In the Deverill villages near Warminster, till half a century ago, the children did not tease a red-haired school-fellow by calling him “Ginger” or “ Carrots”. He was a “ Dane” or a “Daner”; and this is one of the best pieces of evidence in favour of Brixton Deverill being the Egbert’s Stone where King Alfred met his newly formed militia before his great victory over the Danes at Ethandune in 878.