The A303

by Tom Fort

  The thicket is usually guarded by a barrier of brambles and nettles, which share the edgeland with the usual gang of floral chancers and trimmers: purple self-heal, rosebay willowherb, white dead-nettle, yellow wort, bindweed, cow parsley, mallow, thistles, clover, poppies. The grass is coarse and straggles in unsightly tresses across the stones and thin soil.

  Apart from a once-a-year weedkiller treatment and the occasional foray with a chainsaw when a tree topples over or a branch is deemed to infringe on a sightline, no one interferes with these bands of wildwood. Their principal function, from the road’s point of view, is to trap the rubbish thrown or blown from the passing traffic. Carrier bags, plastic wrappers, straps, bits of sheeting, the odd woolly hat – they fly from a window or a sloppily covered lorry load to be apprehended in the spiky brush where they flap and wave in the breezes until shredded or decomposed sufficiently to descend in stages to the ground.

  Little effort is made by the authorities to keep the A303’s edges tidy. The most it gets is a weekly or fortnightly visit from waste disposal operatives to empty the bins standing next to the ‘Take Your Litter Home’ signs in the lay-bys. And why should they do more? It would require an army of workers to clear the bags, coffee cups, chocolate wrappers, crisp packets, drinks cans, newspapers, tin foil, banana skins and the rest discarded by the don’t-give-a-shit minority of litter louts among the road’s users. And who would notice?

  Apart from the litter, which is everywhere, I came across a wide variety of useless objects in the course of my wanderings, including trousers, gloves, empty purses (I checked) and a miscellany of windscreen wipers, hubcaps, petrol caps, mudguards and other vehicle bits. It was easy to imagine body parts being scattered into the undergrowth from some horrendous high-speed smash and abandoned to decomposition. The fringes of the A303 would be excellent for hiding human corpses or the proceeds of crime. No one ever comes.

  The body count among resident and passing wildlife along the fast dual-carriageway stretches is high. It’s a well-known fact that more than a million mammals, chiefly rabbits, and ten times as many birds – the majority of them tame pheasants – perish on our roads each year. Society’s view seems to be that the price is worth paying – an annual sub to the RSPB eases the guilt. In a random survey along four miles of the A303 either side of the Barton Stacey turnoff in Hampshire I identified one dead barn owl, one bat of unknown species, two badgers, a hedgehog, two rabbits, two pigeons and what I think was a greater spotted woodpecker. They were distributed along the verge. In addition there were numerous blotches on the surface of the road formed by tissue flattened so thoroughly into the texture of the asphalt that it was impossible to tell if it had once been bird, rodent, mammal or reptile.

  Watch out – deer about

  I am pretty sure, however, that there were no deer among them. The patches of tissue were not big enough. In fact in all my journeys up and down the 92 miles of the road, I came upon only two deer corpses – one a muntjac and the other a juvenile fallow. Yet the deer seems the one creature that the Highways Agency cares about. Along the A303, as well as motorways and main roads across southern England, the Agency has placed signs showing an abundantly antlered running stag. Frequently these signs also advise a specified length of road on which – presumably – the motorist may expect to encounter one of these animals. There is one on the westbound M4 which gives a distance of 37-and-a-half miles. Curiously the sign placed on the eastbound side at the far end has 33 miles on it – suggesting that there are four-and-a-half miles where a deer may appear on one side of the motorway but not on the other.

  I am well aware that a large mammal, with or without antlers, capable of moving at 30 m.p.h. can pose a significant danger on the roads (although I do wonder if those Highways Agency signs actually serve much purpose in inducing heightened awareness of the threat). But it does seem slightly unfair that other species do not warrant any warning or protection. What about badgers, for instance? Judging from the number of dead badgers I saw, the casualty rate along the A303 must be enormous.4 Does the Highways Agency not care about badgers? Or barn owls, bats, snakes, lizards, rabbits, foxes, hedgehogs, and domestic pets for that matter? Apart from anything else a variety of signs displaying other creatures at risk would alleviate the monotony of travel and provide interest for children.

  * * *

  Weyhill is a mile or so north of Monxton on the northern side of the A303, but has nothing of its neighbour’s charm. It is a straggly, nondescript place which looks as if it lives with the fear of waking up one morning and finding that it has been swallowed by Andover. But there was a time when Andover counted for very little and the name of Weyhill was known across the land.

  As so often, it was an accident of geography. Weyhill stood at the junction between two old, long-distance routes: the Harrow Way, and a north–south path extending to Christchurch on the Channel and known locally as the Gold Road, supposedly because it was used to transport gold from Ireland and Wales to the south coast for export to Europe. Weyhill occupied a prominent upland position accessible from several chalk ridges along which ran well-used tracks, and it had extensive grazing available on all sides. In short, it was an ideal location for the trading of livestock. In time, drovers’ paths converged on it from most points of the compass, including Farnham, Winchester, Salisbury, Marlborough, Amesbury, Hungerford and Newbury.

  Old path lives on

  The fame of the Weyhill Fair spread and it found its way into the late-fourteenth-century epic, Piers Plowman:

  To Wy and Wynchestre I went to the fayre

  With many manere merchandise as my maistre me hiyte

  Ne had the grace of guile ygo among my ware

  It had be unsolde this seven yere, so me God helpe!5

  Old map of Weyhill Fayre

  By the time Daniel Defoe visited early in the eighteenth century it was ‘the greatest fair for sheep that this nation can show’. Defoe says he was told by a local grazier that half a million sheep changed hands over the seven days of the fair in October. Even making allowances for local inflation, the numbers were enormous, and many of the animals were driven great distances, from as far away as Wales and Devon. The Welsh and West Country drovers tended to gather first at East Woodhay, on the Berkshire Downs near Newbury, where their sheep were fitted with little iron shoes to cope with the gravelled road to Weyhill itself.

  Sheep was the main business of the fair, but by no means the only one. Horses, cattle, pigs and geese were also traded. Great stacks of Surrey hops, particularly from Farnham, were sold. The cheese fair was prodigious, and a regular excursion for the rector of the neighbouring parish of Kimpton, the Reverend Henry White, brother of Gilbert White of Selborne. Like his brother, Henry was an inveterate diarist, and he recorded all his cheese deals – among them the purchase of fifty-four on 10 October 1781 which cost him a total of thirty-three shillings and lasted for an average of four days each.

  Other parts of the fair were reserved for general retailing. ‘The booths,’ wrote Defoe, ‘were filled with the wares of goldsmiths and turners, of milliners, haberdashers and mercers, of pewterers and drapers and clothiers, with toys and books and medicines, and with the tables, benches, jugs and cups of the keepers of taverns, brandy-shops and cooks’ shops, coffee-houses and eating rooms. Vast quantities of goods were sold and all the villages and small towns around were crowded and even barns and stables were turned into inns.’

  One day was devoted to the Mop Fair, where labourers sought work for the coming year. They stood in line, advertising their specialities – a shepherd holding his crook or sporting a tuft of wool over his ear, the thresher with a flail or ear of corn, the carter with a knot of whipcord. Once a deal was done, the worker was given a coin to buy a ribbon which he would tie in his hat to show he was no longer for hire.

  Business was amply spiced with fun. The pleasure fair was famous for its curious attractions. Henry White inspected ‘an Oethiopian savage . . . a very wonderful but fr
ightful resemblance of ye Human Form . . . by no means as gentle, docile or intelligent as monkeys of the smaller kind.’ Colonel Hawker of Longparish, whose diaries were chiefly filled with records of his slaughter of tremendous numbers of trout from the Test and game birds from all over, was intrigued by ‘a creature shown under the name of a Mermaid that was caught and brought alive from the Southampton Water’. A travelling circus advertised a lion and lioness from the zoo at the Tower of London, a laughing hyena (‘disposition extremely ferocious’), a Hunting Tyger from Bengal (‘the most beautiful of quadrupeds’), and a porcupine from Algiers (‘not to be tamed by the most subtle art or courteous treatment of mankind’).

  Boozing, thieving, whoring and gambling were woven into the fabric of the Weyhill Fair, causing periodic outbursts of pious outrage from the local clergy. A hard day’s buying and selling followed by a hard evening’s drinking made for easy prey for the pickpockets and cutpurses who abounded. First-timers at the fair were expected to undergo an initiation ritual known as the Horning of the Colts. The initiate was fitted with a set of ram’s horns on his head with a receptacle for a beer tankard on top, in which he capered around while the company roared out a song with the chorus:

  Horns, boys, horns, horns, boys, horns

  And drink to his daddy with a large pair of horns

  For each drop of beer spilled, the lad or his daddy had to buy a gallon of beer. You get the picture.

  The last Horning of the Colts was recorded in 1890, by which time the Weyhill Fair was on the slide. For many years a set of horns was on show at the Star public house (now an Indian restaurant called the Pink Olive, which does not have the same ring to it). They were lost – or possibly burned – but subsequently they or another set turned up, and may now be viewed in the Andover Museum.

  The other Weyhill pub was the Sun, later renamed the Weyhill Fair, which is still a pub and apparently doing decent business. One wall of its upstairs room is covered by a striking mural illustrating scenes from the fair, which was executed by a previous landlord’s brother. One of these scenes depicts the opening chapter of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, describing how Henchard (later the Mayor) sold his wife at the ‘Weydon Priors’ Fair to a sailor for five guineas.

  Old days in Weyhill

  By the late nineteenth century, farming ways had changed and droving had fallen out of fashion. The part of the fairground south of the Amesbury road was auctioned in 1919, and by 1930 fewer than 5000 sheep were offered for sale. The introduction of tests for TB soon after the Second World War was the final blow, and the auctions were abandoned in the 1950s. For a time, the site was used as a lorry depot, until the firm went bust. Later, the inevitable business park sprang up, although the quadrangle of booths by the road has survived, and has been turned into a craft and design centre where you can buy hand-made chocolates, stained-glass objects and bespoke pens, or even take tea and a bun at the café, deplorably named Ewe and I.

  * * *

  In 1973 I bought a bottle-green Saab 96 for £500 from a cousin who was leaving England for Australia. In my mind, it remains the only car I ever had that was more to me than a means of transport. At that time most of my friends drove Minis or 1300s or Triumph Heralds; or – if they had some money – a Capri or an MG. The Saab 96, with its snub-nosed front and weirdly distended sloping rear, was very different and very unBritish.6 To own one, I discovered, was to join a club; other 96s used to flash their lights as they passed, as if to say, ‘well done, nice motor, isn’t she?’

  The gears were on the steering column and there was a strange device on the floor, which when pushed down put the car into freewheel. But the most novel feature of the 96 was its reliability. Unlike all the cars I had owned before, reliable only in the frequency of malfunction, it was famously robust. The Saab 96 was the rally car of the time. You could drive it across Africa or the Arctic, and on my regular journey from Windsor, where I lived, to Slough, where I worked as a reporter on the Slough Observer, I stopped worrying about imminent breakdown.

  I clearly remember being rather proud of my 96’s distinctiveness, and the relief that came with the confidence of being able to complete journeys. But I do not remember driving itself being particularly enjoyable, nor feeling liberated, let alone exhilarated, by the experience. By then, traffic was increasing rapidly. Already road building could not keep pace: the first motorways were cracking up under the weight of wheels, and traffic jams, roadworks and lines of cones had become regular features of the automotive life. I did not give the matter any thought at the time, but I had missed the best years of motoring by a wide margin.

  Whether you follow Lionel Rolt in sighing for the golden age of the 1920s, or Mackenzie of the Telegraph in pining for the ’30s, it is clear that by the 1950s a combination of increased traffic and inadequate roads was making driving a lot less fun than it used to be. However, the notion that buying your first car secured admission to a fellowship was still just about alive, and was energetically promoted by the AA. In 1955 it published a history of its first fifty years entitled Golden Milestone, which it dedicated to its members ‘past and present, who by their support have enabled the Association to exceed the hopes and ambitions of its founders in the creation of an ideal of service’.

  The patrolman was a crucial component of the AA’s self-image. Much was made of the rigour of his training. Like the police, they were ranked: the superintendent’s uniform had gold bands on black at the sleeve, one wide and two narrow, whereas a mere chief inspector had one band fewer. Ten years’ service was marked by a gold chevron on the collar, twenty by a gold badge. The patrolman protected the weak (meaning women drivers), advised the strong when their map-reading proved defective, and gave succour to the desperate in the form of a spark plug or puncture repair patch. At all times he lived up to and embodied the ideal of the fellowship of the road. The journalist and broadcaster Howard Marshall saw him as ‘a man sure of himself, with an awareness of discipline . . . a conscientious man who never closes his eyes to an incident which can only mean more work for him.’

  It’s difficult to know if the chivalric code promoted by the AA ever really existed; and if it did, when it began to fall from favour. Certainly by the time I got my Saab 96 the innocent pleasure activity of ‘going for a drive’ had curdled into a much more troubled relationship between us and our vehicles, most notoriously depicted in the fantasies of death, violence and sexual obsession woven around the motorways and flyovers of London by J. G. Ballard in his novels Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974).

  The German environmentalist and sociologist Wolfgang Sachs dated the souring of the love affair with the car to the 1970s, when ‘the passions and utopias embodied in the automobile lost their buoyancy’. People were discovering that the more cars there were, the less joy there was in driving them. Other drivers’ desires were getting in the way of their desires. Each additional car meant every minute was worth less in terms of distance travelled. The democratisation of car ownership was destroying its supreme advantage. Once, it had offered the ideal of travel guided by individual choice rather than by a man with a whistle. Now that everyone had access to the dream, it was revealed as an illusion.

  But governments could not afford to grapple with this deep fissure within the relationship. The car industry was vital to all the developed economies; therefore the wisdom of encouraging mass ownership was not open to question. The only remedy was to build more roads.

  6

  MUTINY AND FLOWER POWER

  A dreadful event took place on the night of 24 April 1920 on a stretch of the A303 west of Thruxton. It was sufficiently shocking to warrant headlines across the front pages of the national popular press, and to have Fleet Street’s finest shouting for train timetables and maps of Hampshire. For the journalists on the local papers, the Hampshire Chronicle and the Hampshire Observer, it must have been the sensation of the decade. Their regular fare was strictly parochial: fluctuations in farm prices, the activities of women’s
institutes and the Andover Choral Society, an announcement of plans to tarmac roads, a heartening speech from the local MP about improving employment prospects. Crime was generally petty, and coverage was concentrated on the magistrates’ courts which dealt with the thefts and drunken assaults committed by farm workers and soldiers from the several military camps in the area. They were not used to murder.

  The headline in the Hampshire Observer read: ‘Tragic Discovery Near Andover’. The Chronicle reported that: ‘An amazing “hold-up” tragedy in which the driver of a motor car was shot dead occurred on Saturday night near Andover.’ A labourer identified tersely as ‘Burridge’ had discovered a body in a hedge on Thruxton Down ‘which appeared to have been dragged a considerable distance across a field’. There was a bullet wound two inches from the victim’s left ear.

  The body had been identified as that of Sidney Spicer, a taxi driver from Salisbury. It seemed that Spicer had been engaged to take two men from Amesbury to the Bulford army camp a few miles away, and that while the hire was being arranged a soldier had intervened to try and secure Spicer’s services. According to the Hampshire Observer, Spicer had returned from Bulford to Amesbury to pick up the soldier, who had subsequently shot him on a lonely stretch of the road where it rose over Thruxton Down. The taxi, a 12 HP Darracq, had been stolen, together with Spicer’s money.

  The man wanted by the police for the murder was named as Percy Toplis. The Hampshire Observer said he had posed as an RAF officer, while the Chronicle reported that he was a deserter from the Royal Army Service Corps and was wearing a blue serge suit and carrying a six-chamber revolver. One interesting detail was that he wore a monocle – blue, according to the Chronicle, gold-rimmed according to the Observer.