Everyman's England

by Victor Canning

  ‘Coopering,’ said the man of Dursley, ‘is one of our oldest existing crafts. There was a rope-walk in the town at one time, but that has gone.’

  ‘And what,’ I said, ‘of the teasels and –’

  ‘Follow me.’

  And I was whisked off again; this time to a woollen mill lower down the valley. Yes, a woollen mill in the west of England. Have you never heard of west of England cloth? Have you never worn flannel trousers made from such cloth or a tailor-made coat and skirt? Perhaps you have and never realised it. I was surprised when I was told that the flannel suit I was wearing came from the west of England. Until then I had regarded Yorkshire as the mother of all cloth.

  In the mill I found the answer to my cryptic friend’s enigma. What is the connection between teasel heads, billiard cloths and lawn mowers?

  Unlike most mills this one does its own spinning, weaving and dyeing and, as well as grey flannel and white flannel, it produces some of the best billiard cloths in the world. Yet without teasel heads the cloth would be poor stuff, for that fine dress which billiard cloth has which makes it smooth to the hand as you rub in one direction and rough in another, can only be obtained in one way – by the use of teasel heads.

  I saw huge stalls of teasel heads waiting to be used. These are fitted up in racks which, as the cloth runs over rollers, are lowered on to it. The tiny teeth of the heads catch at the cloth and bring up a knap which lies in one direction. Once the knap has been brought up it is impossible to get rid of it, and there is no mechanical device for raising the knap which is more efficient than teasel heads. Surrounded by every other conceivable invention of genius to facilitate industry the teasels retain their place. Nature’s tool which man cannot satisfactorily duplicate or substitute with one of his own making. Somewhere teasel-picking must be a lucrative employment in order to supply the mills, but just where they are picked or cultivated the man of Dursley could not tell me. It was his one deficiency and I believe he felt it.

  Without the teasel where would the billiard cloth be? And the lawn mower? When the knap has been raised by the teasels it is not, of course, of a uniform height and it has to be cut to the fineness which you can see on your own billiard table. Literally the cloth is mowed to take off the excess length of knap and it was the cutting-machine through which the cloth passes in these mills that gave a Dursley man, many years ago, a brilliant idea. Maybe he was one of those gardeners by uxorial insistence rather than from his own free will, and hated having to get upon his knees and shear the front lawn with clippers that brought callouses to his hands and wicked thoughts to his mind. If cloth, he must have argued to himself, can be sheared of its knap, why can’t a lawn be sheared of its excess growth of grass in the same way. He did not dream about it. He did something – that was to invent the first lawn mower. He took out a patent in 1832 and today you and I cut the lawn by virtue of his genius and in the same way, intrinsically, as the Dursley mills shear their billiard cloths of excess knap.

  By the time I had seen all there was to see in Dursley, and it would need a book to do full justice to it (especially if one ventured upon an exposition of the apotheosis so vigorously maintained by many of the inhabitants that Shakespeare was a Dursley man), I understood the Dursley man’s intolerance of people who have never heard of it or regard it as a sleepy Cotswold town.

  Just why all these industries should have congregated about the town is not clear. Perhaps it was the pure water of the river that brought them, perhaps a score of other reasons. Anyway there it is, one of the most interesting towns in England; alive, working and happy, and its difficulties are not the usual ones of slums and unemployment. In Dursley the difficulty is to find a place to live. Homes are being built to house the workers so that they shall have no need to make fatiguing journeys before they begin work. When the seven thousand have become a resident as well as a working population there need be no fear that the new houses will have crowded the valley, for there is plenty of room for building and the inhabitants have enough love of their hills and heaths not to spoil them.

  CHAPTER 13

  BATH

  Towns may be divided, if you care for that peculiar pleasure, into certain types. There are, of course, the towns we are born in, the towns we visit and leave as soon as possible never to return again, the towns we visit and return to as often as we can, the towns we work in, and the towns in which we would like to have been born.

  Apart from Bath I know of no town which, for myself, I can promote to the last class. Had I any say in the circumstances of my birth, and had I been granted a prenatal knowledge of this country, I should have said politely, yet firmly: ‘If it is all the same to everybody concerned I should like to be born in Bath.’ But children are singularly at the mercy of their parent in these matters, and there must be many a noble town which has lost loyal citizens through the carelessness of parents.

  When the time comes for me to sit irritably by the fireside and dream of long-past youth, my brightest memories will be of Bath. Not that exciting things have happened to me there, but that exciting things might have happened to me there. There is a jingle which occasionally finds a home in public gardens and ends ‘One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.’ And in Bath one is nearer the eighteenth century than anywhere else on earth. The whole town is crowded with the ghosts of the eighteenth century, a time when there were more men of distinction in science, literature and the arts alive than ever there has been before or since. Sir William Herschel, who, before he was knighted and became famous as an astronomer, was the conductor of the band in the Bath Assembly Rooms, and he gave private lessons in music to supplement a meagre income. His rooms, one of his pupils has observed, even then resembled an astronomer’s much more than a musician’s, being heaped up with globes, maps, telescopes, reflectors, etc, under which his piano was hid, and the violoncello, like a discarded favourite, skulked away in one corner. Addison tells in one of his Tatlers how he was awakened in his lodgings there one morning by the shaking of the house and, on being implored by the landlady of the house next door, went up to interview a supposed madman in one of her rooms who was causing the commotion. He found a well-made man of ‘great civility and good mien’ practising ballet steps. Johnson and Boswell who stopped at the Pelican Inn, Horace Walpole, who was not very fond of the city, Ralph Allen and John Wood, Gainsborough, and Beau Nash, and a host of others whose spirits haunt the streets and crescents, they have all added to Bath’s glories, but to Beau Nash more than any other does Bath owe so much.

  To tell what Nash did for Bath would demand more space than I can command, and has already been told better than I could tell it. About Nash there have been many books written, some good and many bad. Oliver Goldsmith wrote his life, and Bath in every street and house commemorates it. Beau Nash raised Bath from a dirty, inconsiderable town to be the most fashionable resort in England and the haunt of beauty, genius and vice. Finally he instilled into the townspeople a public spirit and, because he was a man with an eye to business, did away with as much vice as was compatible with discretion.

  The Beau was a gambler, a man of ability and invariably generous beyond his means. Bath is proud of him, yet Bath has need to be ashamed of the way she treated Nash in his old age when, reduced to comparative poverty, largely through his uncontrollable generosity, the corporation magnanimously granted him a pension of ten pounds a month! Ten pounds a month to the man who was primarily responsible for bringing thousands each year to the city and had, through his own personal energy and solicitation of funds, established the Royal Mineral Water Hospital, which receives poor persons from all parts of the country who might otherwise be denied the virtues of the city’s waters.

  Today his statue looks down upon the company in the Pump Room, who read their papers and sip their water. They are an interesting collection of human beings. If you like to fashion stories of a man’s life from the way he shakes his paper out and from his dress, if the sight of old ladies
decorously knitting and missing nothing that happens about them sets you wondering about their girlhood and romance – then the Pump Room will provide you with a happy hunting-ground for your Sherlock Holmes exercises.

  The waters of spas are, I think, always disappointing. The first time I ever drank mineral waters at a spa was in Buxton. I had imagined a concoction of thick, sulphurous, acrid taste. In fact, I believed that it was largely the unpleasantness of a mineral water which accounted for its medicinal virtues. Medicine, my experience had taught, generally had to be unpleasant to do any good. Buxton disappointed me. The water was clear and tasted almost like any other water, yet with a faint difference that was hard to define. I liked it, but I was disappointed.

  And I was disappointed with my first taste of Bath water. Buxton had failed me but I had a great confidence in Bath. I took the tumbler of water from a fresh-faced serving-girl – dressed like an Abigail of the eighteenth century – and, lifting it to my mouth, wrinkled my face into a wry expression in anticipation of its revolting taste. Again I was disappointed. It was to my untrained palate slightly brackish, but far from being unpleasant. The ‘slightly brackish’ taste I discovered later is grandiloquently referred to in official quarters as ‘an almost imperceptible saline chalybeate taste.’

  Bath, although you might not think so, from the conduct of the citizens in the streets and the assured, comfortable attitude of the town, is actually sitting on a volcano, and it says a great deal for the town that it not only continues to sit with great complacency where other towns might rock and tumble, but that it actually derives most of its affluence from the volcano. The volcano has not yet spouted ashes and lava, nor is there any crater where you can lean over and watch the labyrinthine bubblings of molten rock. A casual walk through Bath will not disclose its presence. I went as near to the volcano as it is possible to go. I was taken by a guide down the stairs from the Pump Room to the great Roman Bath and there, almost hidden by pieces of masonry and carvings, were two wooden doors which my guide opened with great reverence.

  As the doors swung back a gust of hot steam broke forth and swept about me. I felt the guide’s hand on my arm and I was led into a dark little cavern at the end of which was a steel rail. I stood with one hand on the rail and looked about. Below came a mysterious bubbling and spouting of steam and I could see jets and gouts of hot water shooting into sight from a crevice in the rocks which were stained a yellowy brown colour with the waters.

  ‘This,’ said the guide, ‘is the nearest it is possible to get to the actual source of the spring from which Bath gets her famous water.’

  ‘I don’t know that I should want to get much nearer,’ I said. ‘I’m not used to taking a Turkish Bath with all my clothes on.’

  ‘That’s not so bad as wearing glasses,’ the guide replied. ‘I get people like that sometimes and the steam mists their glasses and they can’t see anything, so they takes their glasses off and then they still can’t see anything because of their bad sight. So I just let ’em stand there by the rail and get properly warm and listen to the bubbling, and they come away quite satisfied.’

  I wondered if they would stand so happily by the rail if they realised actually what lay beneath their feet.

  The spring which you see, or do not see, as you stand at the rail, comes up from a depth of more than five thousand feet, more than a mile below the surface, and the water is quite unlike the surface waters which come from ordinary springs. The water in ordinary springs comes from accumulations that have drained off the surface and, flowing underground into reservoirs or geological faults, eventually come to the surface as a spring. Such, for instance, are the springs which give birth to the Thames, and those at Cheddar. The waters at Bath come direct and virginal from the volcanic regions which everywhere lie beneath the earth’s crust. In the depths the water does not exist as water, but in the form of oxygen and hydrogen which fuse into water as they ascend to the surface, and as they ascend there is dissolved into them all sorts of minerals and health-giving properties. Before these waters can rise to the surface there must exist a fracture in the earth’s crust which communicates with the gasses in the volcanic inferno at the earth’s core, and it is on the top of such a fracture that Bath contentedly sits.

  It is a morbid thought to contemplate whether someday the volcano below Bath may change its mind about sending up water and deliver a charge of explosive gases and lava. It has behaved itself for centuries so I suppose there is no good reason why it should not go on behaving itself. Volcanoes have, no doubt, their own code of behaviour.

  There are various myths to account for the discovery of the medicinal virtues of the Bath springs. The stories are picturesque and mostly untrue; that they are all concerned with the same person points to something more than a mere myth. This person was Bladud, the son of King Hudibras of Britain, and the father of King Lear. Bladud’s son, Lear, has a greater posthumous fame than his father. I doubt, however, if Lear ever caused so much stir as Bladud did with his crazy notions about flying. Bladud and his leprosy and his cure at the springs in which his diseased swine had bathed and been cleaned, is a story every child knows. The swine of Bladud and those of Gadarene have an equal popularity amongst schoolteachers. Bladud was a man of restless invention. Bath he had made, but that was not enough. Not content with imitating his swine he wanted to imitate the birds and fly – and fly he did, not heeding the tragic fate of Icarus. He made himself a pair of wings and, trusting to them, with that true pioneer spirit and faith in their own invention, which characterised all the earlier aviators, he jumped from the top of the temple of Minerva at Bath and very naturally broke his neck and was mourned for by a sorrowing people who probably whispered to one another at the funeral: ‘I told you so. I knew he’d break his neck. If we’d ever been intended to fly then Minerva would have given us wings at birth!’ Bladud, Leonardo da Vinci, the Wright brothers… men of different ages, and all possessed of the same desire.

  Whenever I go to Bath I always make my pilgrimage to the tip of Beechen Cliff. There is no greater joy than to look down upon the city through the still air of a bright morning. The last time I saw it was on a morning when there was just enough haze to enhance its beauty without blurring its outlines. Framed in the firs and beeches of the cliff-top it lay quietly in the valley-bottom surrounded by guardian hills, its grey-brown houses and streets spreading up the sides of a natural bowl, a city of incomparable grace and precision, the creation of orderly and beauty-loving minds. Over the city was a spirit of peace and dignity and, although I knew that down in the streets trams were passing to and fro, errand-boys were shouting, and there was all the busy stir of a weekday, where I stood there was little hint of the bustle. I saw only a city, washed with a pale gold tint, lying like the dream of some immortal architect in a forgotten hollow of the hills. Against the grey walls of the abbey the dark shadows of its flying buttresses struck a quiet note in the golden light, and even the railway in the foreground, and a bulking gasometer away to the left, shared the glory that hung in a bright halo over the city. Its beauty was heightened by the black and grey tree masses of the hills, the green of the curving river and the open spaces of the town. It had all the mystery of a dream city, a mystery of delight not terror.

  And Bath has some mysteries. Everyone knows about its mineral waters and their healing powers; not everyone knows of the mystery of the Roman Bath, that great open pool, so closely surrounded by modern houses and streets, where noble Romans lounged and bathed.

  In the great bath there lives, happy enough in their splendid isolation, a school of goldfish. They swim serenely through the yellow-green waters, uncaring of history or the tourists who tread the worn flags at the side of the pool. Yet once a year terror harries the goldfish, for flying over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings comes a pair of kingfishers. For two days they frequent the baths, taking their toll of the fish and turning the quiet cloisters and pool into a shambles. The grey stones and the green waters make a
background for the flash of their bright plumage and the fish are stirred into unusual activity. When the two days are up the birds disappear and leave the fish in peace until another year brings the same, or another, pair of kingfishers.

  That the kingfishers come from the nearby river is certain, but why do they come only for a few days each November, and why, having found a happy hunting-ground, do the birds not exhaust its riches? A heron would stay until there was not a fish left… are the kingfishers more prudent, or are they perhaps the reincarnation of two Romans, visiting the scene of their former pleasure once a year?

  There are other mysteries in Bath. What is the secret of a Bath bun? Bath buns are made in other towns. Go into any Lyons’ cafe and you will be served with quite a respectable imitation, but the real Bath bun, with the flavour which marks it from a hundred counterfeits, is found only in Bath. And why are Bath Olivers so popular in South Africa? I do not know the answer to these questions. In a way I am glad I do not, for there is nothing so fascinating as a mystery which obstinately remains a mystery.