Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  ‘Who then should mourn this passing of bright day,

  Or fear to follow you to Lethean shades?

  Night shrouded splendour of lost summer’s noon,

  Where you are gone, there shall I seek you soon.’

  These closing lines of Bernard’s sonnet could well stand as an epitaph to the poet himself and to that great house of which he was the last representative. After his mother’s death, Bernard closed Winterstoke Park. It was not that he lacked the means to keep it up but that he could no longer tolerate its melancholy, and who should blame him? For melancholy indeed it was; as elegaic as its owner’s valediction. A pervasive atmosphere of slow but certain decay and dissolution everywhere emphasized mortality. What could be more likely than that Bernard should have conceived his poem when, after seeing his mother’s coffin borne into that monstrous marble catafalque in St. Cenodoc’s, he wandered alone upon the moss-covered terraces. For no churchyard could be so evocative a symbol of transience as Winterstoke Park in its decline.

  The corrosive fumes of Darley Bank and Great Ketton had not only stained Wyatt’s façade and Brown’s temples, pavilions and balustrades a uniform, funereal black, but had begun to eat away the smoothly chiselled surface of their stone. Though lawns were still shaven and unused walks trimmed, the conceits of Brown had long ago been abandoned to this slow insidious rot. Stone urns had burst asunder; goddess and nymph had fallen from their pedestals in dripping shrubberies to cover their nakedness in a years-old blanket of leaf-mould; over the unswept paving of the Temple of Theseus rusty drifts of dry leaves whispered as a raw air stirred them. The fountain had not played since Bernard’s father died. Sprouting weeds had split the parched floor of its stone basin, and its blackened figures had grown hoary headed from the droppings of bedraggled sparrows: Neptune grasping a broken shafted trident; his attendant Mermans with distended cheeks sounding continually upon empty air what forlorn and unimaginable fanfare? The surface of the lake was now so flawed with reeds and water weeds that it could no longer mirror the symmetry of the Palladian bridge, and autumn gales had taken toll in the long avenues. But it was not only wind-torn gaps which betrayed the imminence of the town. In the middle distance the railway, the black tips of Camp Colliery and the brick and slate terraces of the mining community had trespassed impudently upon that Grand Vista which stretched to the obelisk on High Hanger Down.

  Upon this desolation the great house, looking more like a mausoleum than ever in its funeral scarf of grime, stared down with blank and witless incomprehension from rows of shuttered windows whose whiteness contrasted as sharply with the stone as the teeth of a grinning blackamoor. It entombed the treasures of an age that had become as dead and as remote as that of the Pharaohs: cavernous rooms where candelabra which once flashed prismatic fire from their lustres now hung like stalactites in the darkness; where riches of inlay, ormolu and gilt lay shrouded in ghostly sheets. So the house remained in the silence of death until the early spring of 1916 when it was re-peopled by the maimed and blinded, the shell-shocked and gas-poisoned victims of the first war of science and machines. For Bernard bought Ambling Park in 1915, moved most of the family treasures thither, and reopened Winterstoke as an Emergency Hospital. Had it not been for this precautionary move the Hanmer portraits would not be in the Winterstoke Art Gallery to-day. In 1920, when the last patient had been discharged but the hospital equipment had not yet been removed, fire broke out one night in the room which had been used as an operating theatre. The cause of the outbreak was never established, for exploding bottles of ether soon created a raging inferno which spread rapidly through the adjoining wards and burst into the pillared hall. Old Bedlam furnace never flared so fiercely as did Winterstoke House when the glass in Wyatt’s dome melted and through this great circular flue long tongues of flame and flying sparks roared into the sky. Although they practically pumped the lake dry, all that the combined forces of Winterstoke, Westerport and Church Ambling fire brigades could do was to prevent the blaze from spreading to the two octagonal pavilions at the end of the long colonnades. The central block was completely gutted. Just as dawn broke there were urgent warning shouts from the firemen, followed first by ominous cracking and rending sounds and then by a tremendous crash as amid a fountain of sparks the entire roof collapsed. By noon, all that was left of Wyatt’s work, apart from the pavilions, was a ruined shell of calcined stone and a black tangle of smouldering beams and rafters. So perished Winterstoke House.

  Shortly before he died, unmarried, in 1923, Bernard presented the Park to the town, and to-day all traces of the fire have vanished. On any fine Saturday afternoon you may, provided you can grab yourself a seat at one of the crowded tables, enjoy your ice cream sundae, or a cup of municipally brewed tea, in the terrace tea gardens where the house once stood. From the park below float the strains of the scarlet-coated Ketton Colliery Band, a colourful centrepiece to a cloth of deck-chairs. The band is only one of several pleasures which you may indulge when you have finished your tea. You may hire a hand-operated paddle boat on the lake or travel by miniature railway to Virgil’s Grove and pay your sixpence to see the Grotto which the Council have embellished for your edification. Signposts point the way to further delights: ‘To Clock Golf’, ‘To the Lido’, ‘To Kiddies’ Paddling Pool’. Even if the weather is unkind you can still enjoy your tea in the East Pavilion where pottery masks of women’s faces decorate the walls and where you can enjoy a continuous programme of swing music by putting your pennies in a chromium plated radio gramophone with coloured lights inside. And on any Saturday night throughout the year you can dance in the other Pavilion to the music of Joe Luke and his Jive Jugglers. But we cannot yet indulge in these truly democratic pleasures for we have not journeyed so far. England is still in the throes of the First World War. The time is 1917, the scene Emberley Old Hall.

  There was no new Hall at Emberley. The word ‘old’ had simply attached itself to the original Hall as naturally as to an ageing man. For this house which had outlived all the vicissitudes of its proud neighbour had indeed grown very old. It was a retiring house. In summer when the tall elms were in heavy leaf it was quite hidden from the casual gaze of a passer-by in the village street. Even in winter, all that could be seen through the trellis work of bare branches hung with ruined rooks’ nests was a vague grey shape from which protruded a confusion of gables and tall chimney stacks. It was as though the belt of elm trees and the inner ring of the moat together formed some charmed circle which had sheltered and protected the Hall from the tempest which had swept through the Wendle valley. The gables of the old house had pondered their reflections in the still surface of the moat for so many centuries that they appeared to lean, Narcissus-like, over the water, and only to be prevented from falling by massive buttresses which propped its ancient bulk as poles support the branches of an overladen apple tree. Dark panelling and undulating floors of elm planking made the interior seem twilit even in high summer, as if the rooms had grown too old to tolerate bright light. Moreover the personality of the house seemed to have become so strong that it was able to impress itself upon anything that was brought into it, imposing upon refectory table, eighteenth-century wine-cooler or Victorian arm-chair the same patina of age. Round the panelled walls of the dining-room (which was only used on state occasions) hung the Winter portraits: Sir Guy, the staunch Plantagenet whose funeral helm and gauntlets hung over his tomb in Emberley Church, Tudor Sir John with his proud, sad face; Sir Hugh the Cavalier who died at Worcester fight, with his lace and lovelocks. His son Sir Stephen was the last of the gallery, for later generations of Winters could spare neither the time nor the money to sit for their portraits.

  To this beleaguered fortress and its lands generations of Winters had remained faithful through every change of fortune. Wars continued to take their toll of them. The reigning representative of the family, Thomas Winter, had lost a brother at Spion Kop and two of his three sons in Flanders. There was not much incentive, one could say, to go
on fighting and farming for a country that had turned its back on its own soil, but tradition ran strong in the Winters.

  It was in this year of 1917 that Thomas Winter and his fellow farmers suddenly found themselves blinking in an unaccustomed limelight, hailed by Government and Press as the hope and pride of the nation. The reason for this sudden volte-face was the success of Germany’s submarine blockade. Confronted with this danger, England realized how fatally vulnerable she had become. Belatedly the word went out to speed the plough.

  A country which had once led the world in agriculture had become so completely divorced from the soil by its fatal industrial obsession that few if any of those who issued the order to plough realized the practical difficulties involved for farmers who, for a generation or more, had been compelled to become stock breeders and cow keepers and were in no way equipped for arable farming. Had they asked a builder of locomotives suddenly to produce cotton cloth, or a maker of buttons to build aeroplanes, they would have appreciated the difficulty. Nevertheless, Thomas Winter and his fellows responded nobly to the call. But in return for their efforts to change the whole economy of their agriculture almost overnight they asked for that security which they had lost when the Corn Laws had been repealed—a guaranteed ‘just price’ for their grain. With the spectre of famine knocking at their door, the Government agreed and sealed their pact with the farmers, first in the Corn Production Act of 1917 and later in the Agriculture Act of 1920. It marked a return to the old medieval economics—for a time. So the pressure of necessity drove man back to the neglected fields and to the eternal and inescapable natural rhythms, so richly symbolic, of ploughing and sowing, reaping and harvesting. In the rich brown corduroy of new ploughed land, in the green mist of springing corn, in wind-dappled fields of wheat ripening to harvest, in standing stook and golden stubble, an ever-changing beauty returned to the fields on the slopes of the Wendle valley wherever the touch of Winterstoke had not irrevocably destroyed them. Thomas Winter even ploughed up the rough on the golf links at Emberley Hill; land which he had been reluctantly compelled to sell to the Winterstoke Golf Club a few years previously.

  The springing corn might reaffirm the timeless triune partnership of God, man and nature which man in his wisdom had foresworn as ‘primitive’, but it represented no acknowledgment of error but only of the hour’s necessity. Moreover, with men dying by the thousand in the fields of France there were all too few available who could return to till the neglected fields of England. So to remedy the deficiency the power of the internal combustion engine was brought into the fields to aid the power of horses and of steam cable tackle. Tractors imported from America, ‘Titans’ and ‘Overtimes’, made their appearance for the first time in the local fields. Cumbersome and unwieldy chain-driven machines looking not unlike miniature traction engines, they wheezed and panted laboriously along the furrows, their heavy horizontal engines in a perpetual paroxysm of vibration. But they were presently joined by the neater and far more compact Fordsons from Dearborne which were the shape of things to come.

  After the Armistice of 1918 war-exhausted Europe began the task of setting its house in order and of picking up the threads of life which four years of the most destructive and costly war in history had broken. It soon became obvious that a bitter lesson had not been learnt and that the ruling slogan was to be ‘business as usual’. It might have been otherwise had not the task of reconstruction fallen upon men of middle age who could only think in terms of the world of 1914 which had seemed to them so secure. For the younger generation who might have avoided at least some of their parents’ mistakes had been virtually wiped out in the slaughter of the trenches. But if the people of England had been sorely weakened by the war her industrial machine certainly had not. Quite the reverse. As a result of an insatiable and assured market for the weapons of the new industrial warfare, factories such as the Darley Bank Forge and the Great Ketton Steelworks emerged from the conflict larger and far more formidable than they had been before. So there was only a temporary lull while these great machines adapted their enhanced energies to different purposes and then the old ferocious economic struggle broke out again with more than the old fury. Now that ‘the war to end war’ was over and there were no longer any U-boats on the high seas to threaten starvation, England listened again to the siren voice of the industrial economist and thought of herself once more as ‘the workshop of the world’ despite all the growing evidence to the contrary. The result was inevitable. In 1922 when a bumper harvest on the American continent slumped the price of corn to 49s. a quarter, the Government of England betrayed the pledge they had given in time of peril by repealing that part of the Agriculture Act which regulated the price to the English farmer. History repeated itself. Thomas Winter passes once again into a neglected obscurity, returning to his moated Hall a sad and disillusioned man prepared to withstand another long and bitter economic siege. Once again the farmlands of the Wendle valley tumbled down to neglected ruin, to a worse state, as it proved, than they had been before. What matter? In the Winterstoke shops food was becoming cheaper and more plentiful. Great Ketton and Darley Bank flamed and thundered as of yore. Wages were higher and working hours shorter. What matter? Business was looking up. Perhaps that new world lay just round the corner after all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  BY THE TIME the Foster brothers returned from their war service in the R.A.S.C., Bob to his garage and Peter to his beloved buses, they had become men of middle age, but the years had done nothing to damp their enthusiasm and they were full of plans for the future. Old George Foster had managed to keep the family business ticking over through the war years, but no more, and he was glad to hand it over to his sons. To outward appearances the war had called a halt to the impetuous forward march of the internal combustion engine and such little evidence of progress as Winterstoke had seen had been in the fields or in the air. Car manufacturers had turned over their factories to war production. Petrol had been scarce and dear. Doctor Harald’s Rolls-Royce had appeared with a billowing gas-bag mounted on its roof which did not enhance the dignity of the equipage and had to be frequently reinflated by the good offices of the Winterstoke Gas Light & Coke Company. As a result, there were fewer cars to be seen in the streets of Winterstoke at the end of the war than there had been at the beginning. But the prices at which cars changed hands was a sufficient indication of the demand which existed, and not only the pre-war builders with reputations already established, but a host of newcomers hastened to supply it. As the new models began to appear it soon became evident that the engineers had not in fact been marking time since 1914. The demands of the wartime aircraft industry for engines of greater power and less weight had brought about improvements in engine design and efficiency and, more important still, the development of new alloys of steel and aluminium capable of withstanding greatly increased stresses. These new metals were the vital sinews which enabled new engines of puny size, but running at revolutions per minute hitherto unheard of, to produce more power than a steam engine of many times their weight.

  Bob Foster did not return from the war with the mere intention of running the Winterstoke Motor Company (as the old ‘Autocarists Depot’ was now called) for the rest of his life, profitable though the taxi and garage business promised to be. He had greater ambitions. He had dreamed of designing and building a car of his own when peace returned, a ‘light car’, for, in England at all events, he believed that the future lay with the smaller machine owing to the high cost of petrol and the punitive horse-power tax. He was not alone in thinking this and he was right.

  The first Foster ‘Light Four’ was built at the back of the garage in the High Street using a four cylinder side-valve engine of proprietary manufacture. With spindly artillery wheels and a box-like open four-seater body of extreme simplicity, it was scarcely a thing of beauty but it proved both reliable and economical. At £450 plus various ‘extras’ including even the headlamps, the horn and the driving mirror, it was a good sel
ling proposition when it first took the road in 1920. So much so that the column in Bob Foster’s order book very soon became far too long for his small assembly shop where there was not room to build more than two cars at a time. The advertisements of the Foster Car Company assured potential customers that each car was guaranteed and ‘fully tested before leaving our works’. Had they realized that ‘our works’ consisted simply of a converted stable, the hopes of aspiring owners would have fallen somewhat. A remedy had to be found before they gave up in despair and cancelled their orders, so in 1921 the Foster Car Company purchased the premises of the Atlas Pressworks in Institute Road from its retiring owner. Here there was not only room to assemble more cars but to install new machinery and produce many of the component parts which the Company had hitherto been forced to purchase from others. It was an inspired stroke on Bob’s part to retain the name of the old works. ‘The Foster Car Company, Limited, Atlas Works, Winterstoke’ had a fine, impressive ring about it. It inspired confidence. Instead of a huddle of dingy brick buildings in a back street it suggested that each car was sustained by the strength of a mighty organization of fuming chimneys and titanic machines. Nevertheless there was a lot more elbow room in the Atlas works and it became remarkably efficient for its size. So much so that by 1925 the characteristic Foster radiator had become quite familiar on the English roads. Bob Foster placed his son in charge of the garage business of Winterstoke Motors so that he could devote his whole attention to car manufacture.

  Meanwhile the increasing number of buses to be seen in the streets of Winterstoke showed that brother Peter had been no less enterprising. So as not to be confused with Bob’s business, the name of the bus venture was changed from Foster Bros. to that of Midshire Motor Services. The buses bore the name in large gold letters emblazoned on their green side-panels. The original pre-war route between the railway station and Emberley Cross soon became a mere insignificant shuttle service lost in a continuously expanding network. Buses ran to Church Ambling, to Westerport, to Lobstock, to Summersend and Coltisham. Constantly thrusting out from its original nucleus at Winterstoke and buying out less powerful local concerns, the Midshire Motor Services spread over the roads of the county after the fashion of creeping buttercup. The long tentacle of some new service would take root in the form of a branch garage in the town at its extremity and from this root a fresh crop of flourishing offshoots would grow. In twelve years Peter could number his buses in hundreds and the name on their panels was shortened to the single word ‘Midshire’ as though to boast that they enjoyed a monopoly of the county’s public road transport as, indeed, with but few stubborn exceptions, they did.