Chapter 9

Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of the Bath Road, for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex. Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for what says Gay?—
Brentford, tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.

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Image unavailable: BRENTFORD.
BRENTFORD.

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‘BRENTFORD, TEDIOUS TOWN’

Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant, inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas, each ‘villa’ as like its neighbour as one new sixpence is to another; or the Cromwell Road at any time or under any conditions. Then you will have known tedium. At Brentford, however, all is life, movement, dirt, and balmy odours from a quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. The bargees and lightermen of this riverside town are swearing picturesquely at one another all day, while the gasmen, the hands at the waterworks, and the railwaymen join in occasionally. Sometimes the profanity so cheerfully bandied about leads to a fight, but not often, because when a bargee addresses his dearest friend by a string of epithets that might make a typical old-time stage-manager blush, it is all taken as a token of friendship. These are the shibboleths of the place.

When, however, Gay alludes to the ‘white-legged chickens,’ for which, he says, Brentford was known, we are at a loss to identify the breed. That kind of chicken must long since have given up the attempt to be white-legged, and have changed, by process of evolution, into some less easily soiled variety. For the dirt of Brentford is always there. It only varies in kind. In times of drought it makes itself obvious in clouds of black dust, composed of powdered coals and clinkers; and when a day of rain has laid this plague, it is forthwith re-incarnated in the shape of{60} seas of oily black mud. The poet Thomson might have written yesterday—
E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;

while Dr. Johnson adds his weighty testimony, for when a contemporary, a native of Glasgow, was praising Glasgow to him, the Doctor cut his eloquence with the query: ‘Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?’ Here was sarcasm indeed! Happily, however, the Glaswegian had not seen Brentford, and so was not in a position to appreciate the retort. But Boswell, who, ubiquitous man, was of course present, knew, and told the Doctor this was shocking. ‘Why, then, sir,’ rejoined Johnson, ‘you have never seen Brentford!’

Then, when we have all this delightful testimony as to Brentford’s dirt, comes Shenstone, the melancholy poet who ‘found his warmest welcome at an inn,’ to testify as to the character of its inhabitants. ‘No persons,’ says he, ‘more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humours of a country christening; and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as “the quality” of Brentford.’
ODD STREET-NAMES

Despite these criticisms, it must be acknowledged that Brentford is a town of high interest. Its filthy gasworks, its waterworks, its docks have not sufficed to sweep away the old-fashioned appearance of the place. It may, in fact, be safely said that no other such truly picturesque town as Brentford exists near London. This will not long remain true of it, for, even now, new buildings are here and there taking{61} the place of the old. For one thing, Brentford has a quite remarkable number of old inns, and the great stableyards and courtyards of other old coaching hostelries which themselves have disappeared. This was, in fact, the end of the first stage out of London in the coaching era, and the beginning of the last stage in; and in consequence, as befitted a town on the great highway to the West, had ample accommodation, both for man and beast. One of these old yards, indeed,—Red Lion Inn Yard—is historic, for it is traditionally the spot where Edmund Ironside, the king, was murdered by the Danes in 1016, after he had defeated them here. The most famous, however, of all the Brentford inns, the Three Pigeons, was brutally demolished many years ago, although it had associations with Shakespeare and ‘rare’ Ben Jonson. The ‘Tumbledown Dick,’ another vanished hostelry, whose sign was a satire on the nerveless rule and swift overthrow of the Protector’s son, Richard Cromwell, was a well-known house; while the names of some of the old yards—Green Dragon Yard and Catherine Wheel Yard—are reminiscent of once-popular signs.

Then Brentford has the queerest of street names. What think you of ‘Half Acre’ for the style and title of a thoroughfare? or ‘Town Meadow,’ which is less a meadow than a slum? Then there are ‘The Butts,’ with some fine, dignified Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick houses, situated in a quiet spot behind the High Street; and ‘The Hollows,’ a thoroughfare hollow no longer, if ever it was.

Fronting on to the High Street is the broad and{62} massive old stone tower of St. Lawrence’s Church, the parish church of the so-called ‘New’ Brentford, itself old beyond compute. The tower dates back four hundred years or so, but the body of the church was rebuilt in Georgian days and is very like, and only a little less hideous than, the gasworks up the street.
SION

An extraordinary story is told by Cyrus Redding, in his Fifty Years’ Recollections, of a countryman’s adventures in London just before the introduction of railways. The adventures began at Brentford: ‘I had a relative,’ he says, ‘who, on stating his intention to come up to town, was solicited to accept as his fellow-traveller a man of property, a neighbour, who had never been thirty miles from home in his life. They travelled by coach. All went well till they reached Brentford, where the countryman supposed he was nearly come to his journey’s end. On seeing the lamps mile after mile, he expressed more and more impatience, exclaiming, “Are we not yet in London, and so many miles of lamps?” At length, on reaching Hyde Park Corner, he was told they had arrived. His impatience increased from thence to Lad Lane. He became overwhelmed with astonishment, They entered the “Swan with Two Necks,” and my relative bade his companion remain in the coffee-room until he returned. On returning, he found the bird flown, and for six long weeks there were no tidings of him. At length it was discovered that he was in the custody of the constables at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, his mind alienated. He was conveyed home, came partially to his reason for a{63} short time, and died. It was gathered from him that he had become more and more confused at the lights and the long distances he was carried among them; it seemed as if they could have no end. The idea that he could never be extricated from such a labyrinth superseded every other. He could not bear the thought. He went into the street, inquired his way westward, and seemed to have got into Hyde Park, and then out again into the Great Western Road, walking until he could walk no longer. He could relate nothing more that occurred until he was secured. Neither his watch nor money had been taken from him.’

The country-folks who now journey up to town do not behave in this extraordinary fashion on coming to the infinitely greater and more distracting London of to-day.

At the western end of Brentford, just removed from its muddy streets, is Sion, the Duke of Northumberland’s suburban residence. The great square embattled stone house stands in the midst of the park, screened from observation from the road by great clusters of forest trees. Through the ornamental classic stone screen and iron gateway, erected in the well-known ‘Adam style’ by John Adam about 1780, the green sward may be glimpsed; the fresher and more beautiful by contrast with the dusty highroad. Above the arched stone entrance stands the Percy Lion, statant, as heralds would say, with tail extended.

Sion is well named, for no fairer scene can be imagined than this in the long days of summer, when the lovely gardens are at their best and the Thames{64} flows by the park with glittering golden ripples. The Daughters of Sion, whose religious retreat this was, belonged to the Order of St. Bridget. Their abbey, with its lands and great revenues, was suppressed and confiscated by Henry the Eighth in 1532. Nine years later his Queen, Katherine Howard, was imprisoned within the desecrated walls before being handed over to the headsman, and in another seven years the body of the King himself lay here a night on its journey to Windsor. There is a horrid story that tells how the unwieldy corpse of the bloated royal monster burst, and how the dogs drank his blood.

In the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, Sion enjoyed a few years’ restitution of its rights and property, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne, the ‘Daughters’ were finally dispossessed. They wandered to Flanders, and thence, by devious ways, and with many hardships, eventually to Lisbon. The Abbey of Sion yet exists there, and the sisters are still solely Englishwomen. It is on record that they still cherish the hope of returning to their lost home by the banks of the Thames, and have to this day the keys of that abbey. Seventy years or so since, the then Duke of Northumberland, travelling in Portugal, called upon them, and was told of this fond belief. They even showed him the keys. But he was equal to the occasion, and cynically remarked that the locks had been altered since those days!