It would be unfair both to him and to the theatrical profession to suggest that the stage was my father’s only taboo where his children were concerned. He saw little of them when they were small, but when they grew up, he liked them always about him. Mrs. Morrison called us the Four and Twenty Blackbirds, and said that Papa liked to think that whenever he wanted to open the pie, the birds were all there, ready to begin to sing. It is true that though he always sat alone in the study, he liked us within call. He hated anyone in the house going out to parties. The coming and going worried him. He was truly conservative. As the family party had been yesterday, so he wished it to be to-day, and to-morrow, and so on ad infinitum.
He could not therefore approve of any proposed career for his daughters, and this objection extended to matrimony. He was not actually opposed to the institution in itself, for had he not himself twice married, and entirely happily? But in the case of his children, and more especially of his daughters, his standard was too high. He had an instinctive, sub-conscious prejudice in favour of Archbishops of Good Family as husbands for them, and by ill chance, none of these presented themselves. When my eldest sister fell fatally in love with a young naval officer of blameless character, her engagement was one of those things of which it is not fitting to speak in the family circle; and she only succeeded in marrying the young man at last, by the unfailing courage and determination which persisted through four years of opposition.
I rather shared my father’s fancy for the unattainable in bridegrooms; and the consequence of the various ‘inhibitions’ (as they call them to-day) which he laid upon our youthful ambitions, has been for me a happy life spent, not upon the stage or in any of the other professions which presented themselves, not as a wife, mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother (the fate of most of my friends), but as a lifelong inhabitant of Wiltshire, which is in my eyes, the most beautiful of the English counties. The stage of my early ambitions must have proved but ‘an unworthy scaffold’, a ‘cockpit’, and ‘a wooden O’ compared with the grand spaces of the downs about Wilton; while, in lieu of the many passing acquaintances of a London life, I have my Wiltshire friends.
My father’s early home was at Potterne in the north part of the county. South Wiltshire and North are divided by Salisbury Plain, but there is considerably more than that between them. Even petrol has not succeeded in completely breaking down the strong local patriotism which severs the ‘ chalk’ of the south from the ‘cheese’ of the north, and when my father reached Wilton as a young curate, he was entirely a North Wilts. man. He had not then married my mother, and on his first Sunday in Wilton, when the afternoon service was over, he walked alone on to the hill at the south of the town, and found himself on the old Roman Road which runs from Salisbury to Shaftesbury. He looked over the country. Grovely Forest lay like a long shadow upon the summit of the downs which faced him across the valley. At his feet, the Nadder meandered through water-meadows of a startlingly brilliant green, its course marked by willow copses and by long rows of poplars. He looked eastward, and then the unsophisticated slimness of those delicate trees was shamed by a sudden miracle. Salisbury was out of sight, but before him rose the cathedral spire in all its exquisite artifice. The poplars shook with every fugitive breeze: their faint and fragile grey leaves would change and fall with the passing of the seasons: but the spire stood motionless, and seemingly alone, among the boundless downs, and, far above the trees, it carried eternally towards the sky the superb faith of its builders.
‘This is a place in which to spend a lifetime,’ said my father to himself, for in those minutes his narrower loyalty to one half of his native county had become a larger thing. He never changed his opinion, nor have I, since he once took me to that place and told me how he had first seen it. My brief coquetterie with the unconscious Mr. Walkley fell from me as a little yellow leaf flutters down from a poplar.
Wilton in the old days was a great place for processions, which seemed to spring up spontaneously, as if from some fundamental instinct for pageantry. My earliest childhood seems largely to have consisted of climbing again and again on to a box which stood in one of the nursery windows, to watch processions pass outside.
They were not all of them festive ones. There were those which went by regularly throughout the year, giving to the town an individuality regrettably lost to-day. On Sundays and Saints’ days, when the church bells rang for Matins, there could be heard advancing upon the Rectory from Crow Lane, the hard treble pit-pat of small marching feet. We hopped on to our boxes to see the Free School boys going to church. There were about twenty-five of them, and they marched in perfect step, wearing the enchanting suits which had been the uniform of the school since its founding in 1706. So they were dressed in the fashion of Queen Anne’s day, as if that good queen were not dead, as the moderns say she is. The boys wore smart cut-away coats of fine buff cloth, faced with hyacinth blue, and they had little buff caps with black peaks. The Free School boys added beauty and charm to the Wilton streets, not only when they marched in line, but, still more, when they lounged about at the crossroads, or played marbles on the pavement.
Probably another procession was converging upon the church at the same time. This was composed of the Park School girls. They came from the fantastic Baroque pavilion in the park, which Lady Georgiana Herbert, a daughter of the Russian Lady Pembroke, some time in the eighteen-thirties, had converted into a school for the daughters of workmen on the estate. In winter, these girls wore cloaks made of lovely warm crimson cloth, and in summer they had little grey shoulder capes. They did not stamp their feet as the boys did, though they too walked in step, but very primly, watched from the opposite pavement by the tender but unrelenting eye of their governess, Miss Aikman. She called them her ‘ little duckies’, but she was both pious and particular, and she saw to it that the behaviour of her pupils was, like their sewing, above reproach.
These two schools were very small and practical forerunners of the senior schools of to-day. Attached to the Free School was an Apprentice Fund, and on each boy’s fourteenth birthday, he was ‘bound apprentice’ to a tradesman in Wilton or Salisbury. Apprenticeship is a freer and more lasting kind of Continuation School than those we know now. Those boys of fourteen were out in the world. They had entered upon the trade of their lifetime. They earned a small weekly wage. But their master was still in a way their schoolmaster, and they were under discipline. Even now, many of the leading tradesmen in Wilton and its neighbourhood were once boys in the Wilton Free School.
It was the same with the Park School girls. They all belonged to the upper standards, and with their two teachers for twenty-five girls, they were well taught; but from the time they entered the school they began to be specialists. Needlework was their craft, and the making and marking of the Wilton House linen was their duty. When they left school, and each received her grown-up outfit packed in its own little travelling trunk, they were in demand all over the country as under-nurses and sewing-maids.
I regret the passing of these little schools. They did something which is not done to-day, and which cannot be done while the aim of educationalists is so to collect the children from small scattered country communities, that they can be handled in the same manner as are children in large towns. Individuality has given place to uniformity; and the traveller through Wilton sees no more in its streets the unusual dresses which did indeed imply something unusual in their wearers, and Sundays and Saints days are no longer distinguished by the passing of those striking little processions.
But we had other processions, devised with the conscious purpose of making a show.
On Whit-Monday ‘the Clubs’ came to church, where they heard divine service, sang some tremendously loud hymns, and listened to a sermon from a clergyman imported from a neighbouring parish. Then they marched to the various public houses for their annual dinners.
As these clubs still exist, I imagine that they still eat their dinners, but these must be hole-and-corner affairs compa
red with the flamboyance of the past.
In those old days, the town band led the procession, generally playing ‘The Cock o’ the North’, and behind it marched some five or six clubs, each preceded by its own banner. These were enormous pictures painted on silk and displayed between two poles, while their corners were held taut by ropes. The banner bearers wore the traditional costumes of their clubs. The pictures were highly coloured and very realistic. There were weeping widows being comforted by members of their late husbands’ clubs, or sick men visited by fellow Oddfellows or Foresters who wore medieval dresses of the Waverley Novel date. I seem to remember a corpse laid out on a bed, and surrounded by disconsolate orphans. The more harrowing the picture, the more artistic it seemed to be.
When these processions reached the Rectory, the band turned in through the gates, and as the banner bearers pressed through behind it, they closed ranks for a moment, converting the pictures into confused streaming jumbles of gay colours. When they were all inside, my father came and stood on the steps and made a short speech. Non-club members remained outside, peering through the gates; and upstairs in the nursery, we stood on our boxes looking excitedly down upon the scene.
But the best processions of all seemed to us in those days to be quite unpremeditated. They sprang spontaneously from the Wilton soil, and were the town’s prerogative. To celebrate a jubilee, a royal wedding, a victory or a coronation, we always had a torchlight procession. There was a mystery about it beforehand. A whisper was passed to our nurses, usually by Albert Musselwhite, the parish clerk, that ‘ there’s going to be fa-urty ta-urches’ and then we waited for the dark. Those Wilton torches were wonderful, made at the Felt Mill from bundles of sheep’s wool saturated with tar and other inflammable stuff. They hung on wires from long poles, and as they were carried along, they lurched and bobbed about, sometimes scattering fragments of burning wool among the crowd, which then broke up, and fled screaming. The wild yellow light shone erratically upon the forms and faces of the people in the procession, and they were no ordinary figures which were thus illuminated, for everyone marched in fancy dress. They threw themselves vigorously into their parts—careering like wild beasts, leaping like clowns, hobbling like lame beggars, banging tambourines like gipsies, or dancing like mad. Nearly everyone in Wilton turned out to see the procession, and to follow it as it streamed through the streets. Some people joined arms and marched in line in front of the band: others kept step on the pavement: but everybody caught the free loose rhythm, and swung along amid a continuous chorus of chattering and laughter. It was madly romantic; and although no doubt those processions had been organized by somebody, they seemed at the time to be the most unpremeditated of midnight larks.
The most important processions ended with a march to the top of Grovely Hill, and then the line of torches could be seen from the street, a moving streak of light upon the background of the dark down. At the edge of the wood was the Jubilee Oak, planted to commemorate the Jubilee of Queen Victoria: and here they used to light an enormous bonfire, round which everybody danced in their fantastic dresses, newly illuminated now by the roaring, soaring flames, which lost themselves at last in hanging clouds of bronze-coloured smoke.
And when all was over, and the children had been sent to bed, it was exciting to lie there listening to the people coming home—many voices in the night, and much laughter: distant shouts which grew more and more distant; footsteps passing in the street, in hundreds at first; then, quietly and slowly in twos; and at last, rather unsteadily, in ones. Doors banged. The lamplighter hurried by with his long pole, putting out the gas lamps. Window after window darkened. Silence fell.
Sometimes our processions celebrated a victory at an election, for before the days of universal suffrage, Wilton was passionately political. Except for those who have to count them, votes seem to count less now that everybody has one. When I first remember elections, the suffrage was comparatively small, yet no one appeared to be shut out of politics. The factory girls were not Suffragettes, for that race did not yet exist, but Mrs. Pankhurst herself was not a more fervent politician. The girls wore blue rosettes, and they crowded to political meetings. They ran about the streets, as we all did, cheering and booing the carriages decorated with the rival colours. Women wore dresses made entirely of royal blue or of scarlet; and Jack Gerrish, the leading Wilton drunkard, painted himself blue all over. New words were set to the popular songs of the day, and new catch-words were coined in every street, to be called from every corner. No one said, as voters sometimes say now, that they ‘take no interest in politics’. Everybody clamoured to be in the thick of it—and was.
At the first election which I can remember, our two candidates were Mr. Sidney Herbert (afterwards Lord Pembroke) and Sir Thomas Grove. Till then, Wilton had been a Parliamentary Borough, returning its own member, who at that time was Mr. Herbert, but the new Franchise Act made it part of the southern division of the county. Of course this was galling to the amour-propre of the burgesses, who found themselves outnumbered by the newly enfranchized villagers. Moreover, the Liberal candidate was himself one of these despised outlanders, for Tommy Grove, as we derisively called him, came from Ferne, a country house at least sixteen miles away, and almost in Dorset.
Still, no one in Wilton believed that our own man could possibly be defeated, and we went joyously to heat the poll declared. We were given a good and safe place, with Reggie and Beatrix Herbert, the children of the Conservative candidate, in a first-floor window facing the Town Hall, and overlooking the crowd. The counting went on for hours, but they were most enjoyable ones, spent in watching the ever-moving, ever amusing crowd. Very few Liberals could be seen, and those few were good-humouredly chaffed and jostled by their opponents who, as they looked about them, could have no doubt that they were in a majority. But as time went on, grave faces appeared at the windows of the Town Hall, and secret signs were passed down to friends below. Conservatives who were ‘in the know’ looked glum, but their glumness did not reach the rank-and-file, which included ourselves.
At last the Poll was declared. Sir Thomas Grove was the first member for the southern division of Wiltshire. Surely no successful candidate was ever so received. He seemed not to have a single friend. He came to the window to make the customary speech. A roar of hooting and booing drowned everything he said. Then appeared the beaten candidate. Passionate cheers received him, and every word he spoke was heard with reverent attention—every word indeed, till he asked for a hearing for his opponent. That was too much. Wilton was resolved that Sir Thomas Grove should not speak in its market-place that morning. And more, he dared not set foot among the crowd, for madness had seized the respectable burgesses of the town. Middle-aged pillars of society became crazy. The Town Hall has only one entrance, and round this there now pressed the whole population of the place, thirsting for the blood of the stranger who had presumed to think he would represent them in Parliament. Things looked ugly, and the Chief Constable telegraphed to Salisbury for reinforcements. After a time there appeared a contingent of seventy additional police. From our window we watched while this regiment formed up round the door of the Town Hall, and our new member was passed out from the shelter of the building, to be inserted into the middle of his bodyguard. Then they set off to march him to the railway station, for there were then no motors to carry him quickly out of reach, and horses would have been stopped by the crowd. Even so, it was not too easy. As the procession moved off, everyone in the marketplace followed it with a rush. We ran from our window, and sped along behind. The crowd hurled itself upon the file of policemen, by sheer weight throwing it now this way, now that. The maddest man of all was George Carse, a magnificent figure of over six feet in height, His stately form and greying beard were well known to us all, for he handed the bag in church and appeared on ceremonial occasions in his councillor’s robe, as he was before long to become Mayor of Wilton. Now, with his great strength and reach, he succeeded in breaking through the police cordon. He
seized our unhappy member by the collar and gave him a good shake. For a moment it looked as if Sir Thomas must be throttled. Then the police turned upon Carse, whose huge figure was sent flying over the palings into the gardens of the Pembroke Arms, and the member was then successfully shepherded to the station and put into the train. He never came back to Wilton, preferring those parts of his constituency where interest in politics was less acute.
Yet we did have our torchlight procession that night. The torches were ready, and it would have been a pity to waste them. Moreover, everyone needed cheering, and what could be more cheering than they? So the town marched en masse to Wilton House, the torches crowding together in the courtyard, shining along the walls and glittering upon the windows. Speeches were made. Songs were sung. Like Old Sarum before it, Wilton had ceased to return a member of its own to the parliment of its country, and it had made its protest.
My memories of these early processions might well end with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, when, to my surprise and delight, I found myself for the first time seeing how they did these things in London. Our Mayor went to London to see the Queen keep her Jubilee, so our Wilton festivities were on the day before. That afternoon, as I was proudly presiding at one of the tables at the children’s tea in the market-place, my father unexpectedly appeared, and, as I wrote in my diary, ‘hauled me off to London’. I afterwards learnt that there had been prolonged discussion as to whether or not I was too young to go; and it had at last been decided that the younger the spectator, the longer she was likely to live to remember the occasion. This tipped the scales in my favour.
My father ordered me to write a diary of those days, and I still possess it. It was detailed, but dull, yet its very uninspired narrative still evokes for myself the memory of my reactions to that Jubilee Day. Our seats were on the House of Lords stand, outside St. Margaret’s church, and when we reached them at eight o’clock in the morning, the route which lay before us was still so packed with carriages that I thought the procession would never be able to get through. But by ten o’clock it was clear, and a double row of red-coated soldiers showed plainly where the Queen was to come. Very soon after this, we heard the sound of cheering from Whitehall. It had begun, and sooner than we had expected. We sat eagerly forward to see come round the comer—a jolly old cockney workman driving a water-cart, for London streets were dusty in those days. The whole crowd roared cheers and chaff at this absurd figure, who was not at all embarrassed by the ovation he received. He came down the route, bowing on both sides, and waving his hand. He was immensely enjoying himself. Nothing could have been grander than the spectacle itself, but there was still room on the day for this friendly little episode.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 2